Abelard

Although he was a goliard, Peter Abelard, the glory of the Parisian milieu, meant and contributed much more. He was the first great modern intellectual figure — within the limits of the term “modernity” in the twelfth century. Abelard was the first professor.

To begin, Abelard’s career, like the man, was remarkable. This Breton from the outskirts of Nantes, born in Le Pallet in 1079, belonged to the petty nobility, for whom life was becoming difficult with the advent of a monetary economy. Abelard gladly abandoned a military career to his brothers and devoted himself to his studies.

If Abelard gave up the weapons of a warrior, it was to engage in another type of battle. Always the fighter, he was to become, in the words of Paul Vignaux, “the knight of dialectics.” Always in motion, he went wherever there was a battle to be waged. Always awakening new ideas, he brought enthralling discussions to life wherever he went.

Abelard’s intellectual crusade inevitably led him to Paris. There he revealed another trait of his character: the need to destroy idols. His admitted self-confidence — de me presumens, he willingly said, which does not mean “to be too presuming,” but rather, “being aware of my worth” — led him to attack the most illustrious of the Parisian masters, William of Champeaux. He provoked him, pushed him into a corner, won the students over to his own side. William forced him to leave. But it was too late to stifle that young talent. Abelard became a master. Students followed him to Melun, then to Corbeil, where he ran a school. But his body suddenly failed him, this man who lived only for knowledge; ill, he had to retire for a few years to Brittany.

Having recuperated he went to Paris to look for his old enemy William of Champeaux. There were new jousts; a shaken William modified his doctrine by taking the criticism of his young detractor into account. Abelard, far from being satisfied, intensified his attacks and went so far that he again had to retreat to Melun. But Williams’s victory was in fact a defeat. All his students abandoned him. The defeated old master gave up teaching. Abelard triumphantly returned to Paris and settled in the very place where his old adversary had retreated: on Mount Ste Genevieve. The die was cast. Parisian intellectual culture would no longer have the Ile de la Cité as its center, but would forever have Mount Ste Genevieve on the left bank: this time a man had established the destiny of a quarter.

But Abelard suffered in not having an adversary at his level. As a logician, he was irritated, moreover, at seeing theologians placed above everyone else. He made an oath: he, too, would be a theologian. He returned to his studies and hurried off to Laon to work with Anselm, the most illustrious theologian of the time. The glory of Anselm did not last long in the presence of the iconoclastic passion of the impetuous antitraditionalist:

I therefore approached the old man who owed his reputation more to his advanced age than to his talent or his culture. All those who approached him to have his advice on a subject about which they were uncertain left him even more uncertain. He was admirable in the eyes of his hearers, but of no account in the sight of questioners. His fluency of words was admirable, but in a sense they were contemptible and devoid of reason. When he kindled a fire he filled his house with smoke, rather than lighted it with a blaze. His tree, in full life, was conspicuous from afar to all beholders, but by those who stood near and diligently examined the same it was found to be barren. To this tree therefore, when I had come that I might gather fruit from it, I understood that it was the fig-tree which the Lord cursed, or that old oak to which Lucan compares Pompey, saying–

There stands the shadow of mighty name,
Like to a tall oak in a fruitful field.!”

Edified, I did not waste my time at his school.

Abelard was challenged to make good his promise. He took up the gauntlet. He was told that even if he had great knowledge of philosophy, he knew little of theology. Abelard’s reply was that the same method could be used for both. His inexperience was pointed out. “I replied that it was not my custom to have recourse to tradition to teach, but rather to the resources of my mind.” He then improvised a commentary on the prophesies of Ezekiel which delighted his listeners. People scurried for the notes taken at this lecture to have them copied. A growing audience implored him to continue his commentary. He returned to Paris to do so.

Abelard continued his rise to glory — which was abruptly interrupted in 1118 by his adventures with Heloise. We know the details of this adventure from Abelard’s extraordinary autobiography Historia Calamitatum—“The History of My Troubles” — those premature Confessions.

It all began like Cholderlos de Laclos’ novel, Dangerous Liaisons. Abelard was not a rake. But middle-aged lust attacked this intellectual who, at the age of thirty-nine, knew love only through the books of Ovid and the songs he had composed — in true goliard spirit, but not through experience. He was at the height of his glory and pride. He confessed as much: “I believed there was only myself, the only philosopher in the world.” Heloise was a conquest to add to those of his intelligence. And it was at first an affair of the head as much as of the flesh. He learned of the niece of a colleague, the Canon Fulbert; she was seventeen, pretty, and so cultivated that her scholarship was already famous throughout France. She was the woman he was meant to have. He would not have tolerated an idiot, but he was pleased that Heloise was also very pretty. It was a question of taste and prestige. He coolly devised a plan which succeeded beyond his greatest hopes. The canon entrusted the young Heloise to Abelard’s care as a pupil, proud to be able to give her such a master. When they discussed his salary Abelard easily convinced the thrifty Fulbert to accept payment in kind: room and board. The devil was keeping watch. There were fireworks between the master and the pupil: first, intellectual exchanges, then, soon after, carnal exchanges. Abelard abandoned his teaching, his work — he was possessed. The affair continued and deepened. A love was born which would never end. It would resist all difficulties, then tragedy.

The first difficulty came when they were caught in the act. Abelard had to leave the home of his deceived host. The lovers met elsewhere. At first hidden, their relationship was soon flaunted. They believed they were above all scandal.

Next, Heloise became pregnant. Abelard took advantage of Fulbert’s absence to take his lover, disguised as a nun, to his sister's home in Brittany. There Heloise gave birth to a son whom they called Astralabe (the danger of being the child of a couple of intellectuals . . .).

The third difficulty was the issue of marriage. Abelard, with a heavy heart, would have made amends to Fulbert for his actions by offering to marry Heloise. In his admirable study on the famous couple, Etienne Gilson has shown that Abelard’s repugnance was not due to his being a clerk. As an unordained priest he was canonically allowed to have a wife. But Abelard feared that as a married man he would see his academic career hindered, and would become the laughing stock of the scholarly world.

WOMEN AND MARRIAGE IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

In the twelfth century, there was in fact a very strong antimarriage current. At the same time that women were being liberated, were no longer considered the property of men or as baby-making machines, when the question of whether women had souls was no longer being asked — this was the age of Marian expansion in the West — marriage was the object of disdain, both in noble circles — courtly love, carnal or spiritual, existed only outside marriage; it was embodied in Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere — as well as in scholarly circles, where a complete theory of natural love, later found in the Roman de la Rose in the following century, was being developed.

There was a strong female presence, therefore. And Heloise’s appearance beside Abelard, while it accompanied the movement supported by the goliards, which demanded the pleasures of the flesh for clerks as well as priests, strongly highlighted an aspect of the new face of the intellectual in the twelfth century. His humanism demanded that he be fully a man. He rejected anything that might appear to be a diminution of his self. He needed a woman by his side to be complete. With the freedom of their vocabulary, the goliards stressed, with the support of citations from the two Testaments, that men and women were endowed with organs whose use should not be made light of.

Disregarding the memory of so many lewd and dubious jokes, we should think of that climate and psychology, to better grasp the significance of the tragedy which was to occur, and to better understand the feelings of Abelard.

Heloise was the first to express her feelings. In a surprising letter she begs Abelard to reject the notion of marriage. She evokes the image of the couple of poor intellectuals which they would form:

You could not give your attention at the same time to a wife and to philosophy. What concord is there between pupils and serving-maids, desks and cradles, books or tablets and distaves, styles or pens and spindles? Who, either, intent upon sacred or philosophic meditations can endure the wailing of children, the lullabies of the nurses soothing them, the tumultuous mob of the house- hold, male as well as female? Who, moreover, will have strength to tolerate the foul and incessant squalor of babes? The rich, you will say, can, whose palaces or ample abodes contain retreats, of which their opulence does not feel the cost nor is it tormented by daily worries. But the condition of philosophers is not, I say, as that of the rich, nor do those who seek wealth or involve themselves in secular cares devote themselves to divine or philosophic duties.

Moreover, there were authorities to support this position and condemn the marriage of the sage. One might cite Theophrastus or rather St Jerome, who repeated his arguments in Adversus Jovinianum, which was so popular in the twelfth century. And, joining the Ancient to the Church Father, there was Cicero who, after rejecting Terentia, refused the sister of his friend Hirtius. And yet Abelard rejected Heloise’s sacrifice. The wedding was decided, but remained a secret. Fulbert, whom they wished to appease, was notified, and even attended the nuptial benediction.

But the intentions of the various actors in this drama were not the same. Abelard, with his conscience at peace, wanted to resume his work with Heloise remaining in the shadows. And Fulbert wanted to announce the marriage, make public the satisfaction he had obtained, and undoubtedly weaken the credibility of Abelard, whom he had never pardoned.

Abelard, in distress, conceived of a strategy. Heloise would go into retreat in the convent of Argenteuil, where he had her wear a novice’s habit. That would put an end to the stories. In that disguise, Heloise, who had no other will than that of Abelard, waited for the rumors to cease. They had not counted on Fulbert, for he thought he had been tricked. He believed that Abelard had gotten rid of Heloise by having her enter a convent, and that the marriage had been dissolved. One night he led an angry mob to Abelard’s house where a crowd gathered, Abelard was mutilated, and the next morning there was a huge scandal.

Abelard went to hide his shame at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis. Remembering what was said above, one can understand the extent of his despair. Could a eunuch still be a man?

We will abandon Heloise here, as she no longer plays a role in the present work. Yet we know how the two lovers, from one cloister to another, continued to exchange the essence of their souls until death did them part.

NEW BATTLES

His intellectual passion cured Abelard. With his wounds bandaged he once again found his fighting spirit. The ignorant and slovenly monks weighed heavily on him. With his arrogant attitude Abelard weighed equally heavily on the monks, whose solitude was all the more troubled by the many disciples who came to implore the master to resume his teaching again. He wrote his first treatise on theology for them. Its success did not make everyone happy. In 1112 a conventicle in the guise of a council assembled in Soissons to judge it. In a tumultuous atmosphere — to impress the council his enemies had stirred up the mob who threatened to lynch Abelard — in spite of the efforts of the bishop of Chartres who demanded additional information, the book was burned and Abelard was sentenced to end his days in a monastery.

He returned to Saint-Denis, where his quarrels with the monks became increasingly heated. He inflamed them by showing that the famous pages by Hilduin on the founder of the abbey were only so much nonsense, and that the first bishop of Paris had nothing to do with Denis of Athens [a.k.a. Dionysius the Areopagite], the Areopagite whom St Paul had converted. The following year he fled the monastery and finally found refuge with the bishop of Troyes. He was given some land, near Nogent-sur-Seine, settled there as a recluse, and built a little oratory to the Trinity. He had forgotten nothing; the condemned book was dedicated to the Trinity.

But his disciples soon discovered his refuge and there was a stampede toward solitude. A scholarly village of tents and huts rose up. The oratory, enlarged and rebuilt out of stone, was dedicated to the Paraclete, which was a provocative innovation. Only Abelard’s teachings could make these ersatz country folk forget the satisfactions of the city. They sadly recalled that “in the city students enjoy all the conveniences they need.”

Abelard’s peace did not last long. Two “new apostles,” he said, were organizing a conspiracy against him. They were St Norbert, the founder of the Prémontré, and St Bernard, the reformer of Citeaux. He was persecuted so harshly that he dreamt of fleeing to the East:

God knows, I fell into such a state of despair that I thought of quitting the realm of Christendom and going over to the heathen [to go to the Saracens, as is specified in Jean de Meung’s translation], there to live a quiet Christian life amongst the enemies of Christ at the cost of what tribute was asked. I told myself they would receive me more kindly for having no suspicion that I was a Christian on account of the charges against me.”

He was spared that extreme solution — the first temptation of the Western intellectual who despairs of the world in which he lives.

He was elected abbot of a Breton monastery, but there were new confrontations. Abelard felt he was living among barbarians. Only Low Breton [the language of Lower Brittany] was spoken there. The monks were unimaginably vulgar. He attempted to refine them. They tried to poison him. He fled from there ins 1132.

Abelard appeared once again on Mount Ste Geneviéve in 1136. He resumed teaching with more students than ever before. Arnold of Brescia, banished from Italy for fomenting unrest in the towns, took refuge in Paris, joined up with Abelard, and brought his poor disciples, who begged for a living to listen to his teaching. Ever since his book was burned in Soissons, Abelard never ceased to write. It was only in 1140, however, that his enemies again began attacking his works. His ties with the Roman proscript must have been the greatest incitement to their hostility. It is understandable that the alliance of town dialectics and the democratic communal movement would appear signifi- cant to his adversaries.

ST BERNARD AND ABELARD

Leading the movement against Abelard was St Bernard. According to the apt expression of Pere Chenu, the abbot of Citeaux “was in another realm of Christendom.” That rural man, who remained a medieval and foremost a soldier, was ill-suited to understand the town intelligentsia. He saw only one course of action against the heretic or the infidel: brute force. The champion of the armed Crusade, he did not believe in an intellectual crusade. When Peter the Venerable asked him to read the translation of the Koran in order to reply to Mohammed in writing, Bernard did not respond. In the solitude of the cloisters he delved into mystical meditation— which he raised to the greatest heights — to find what he needed to return to the world as an administrator of justice. That apostle of the reclusive life was always prepared to fight against innovations he deemed dangerous. During the last years of his life he essentially governed western Christian Europe, dictating his orders to the pope, approving military orders, dreaming of creating a Western cavalry, the militia of Christ; he was a great inquisitor before his time.

A clash with Abelard was inevitable. It was St Bernard’s second in command, William of Saint-Thierry, who led the attack. In a letter to St Bernard, William denounced the “new theologian,” and encouraged his illustrious friend to pursue him. St Bernard went to Paris, tried to lure Abelard’s students away (with the little success so far as we know), and became convinced of the seriousness of the evil Abelard was spreading. A meeting between the two men resolved nothing. One of Abelard’s disciples suggested they debate in Sens before an assembly of theologians and bishops. The master undertook once again to uproot Abelard’s followers. In secret St Bernard entirely changed the character of the gathering. He transformed the audience into a council, and his adversary into the accused. The night before the opening debate St Bernard assembled the bishops and gave them a complete file showing Abelard as a dangerous heretic. The next day Abelard could only impugn the competence of the assembly and make an appeal to the pope.
The bishops communicated a very mitigated condemnation to Rome. Alarmed, St Bernard quickly regrouped. His secretary gave the cardinals, who showed him complete devotion, letters which extracted a condemnation of Abelard out of the pope, and Abelard’s books were burned at St Peter’s. Abelard learned of this en route, and took refuge at Cluny. This time he was broken. 

Peter the Venerable, who welcomed him with infinite charity, arranged his reconciliation with St Bernard, persuaded Rome to lift his excommunication, and sent him to the monastery of St-Marcel, in Chalon-sur-Sa6éne, where he died on April 21, 1142. The great abbot of Cluny had sent him written absolution, and in a final gesture of exquisite delicacy, had it sent to Heloise, who was then the abbess of the Paraclete.

Abelard’s was a typical existence, while his destiny was extraordinary. From the considerable body of Abelard’s works we unfortunately have space to discern only a few remarkable aspects of it here.

THE LOGICIAN

Abelard was foremost a logician, and like all great philosophers he primarily contributed a method. He was the great champion of dialectics. With his Logica Ingredientibus, and especially with his Sic et Non of 1122, he gave Western thought its first Discours de la Méthode. In it he proves with shocking simplicity the necessity of having recourse to reason. The Church Fathers could agree on no issue; where one of them said white, the other said black — Sic et Non.
Whence the necessity of a science of language. Words are made to signify — nominalism—but they are based on reality.

They correspond to the things they signify. The whole effort of logic must consist of making feasible the signifying appropriateness of language to the reality expressed by it. For this demanding mind, language was not the veil of reality, but rather its expression. This professor believed in the ontological value of his instrument, the word.

THE MORALIST

The logician was also a moralist. In his Ethica seu Scito te ipsum this Christian, nourished on ancient philosophy, grants introspection as much importance as monastic mystics such as St Bernard or William of Saint-Thierry did. But as de Gandillac has said, “whereas for the Cistercians ‘Christian Socratism’ was above all a meditation on the impotence of man-the-sinner,  self-knowledge appears in the Ethics as an analysis of free will through which it is up to us to accept or reject the contempt for God which constitutes sin.”

To St Bernard’s cries: “Born of sin, of sinners, we give birth to sinners; born of debtors, we give birth to debtors; born corrupt, we give birth to the corrupt; born slaves, we give birth to slaves. We are wounded as soon as we come into this world, while we live in it, and when we leave it; from the soles of our feet to the top of our heads, nothing is healthy in us,” Abelard replied that sin is only an omission:

To sin is to despise the Creator; that is, not to do for Him what we believe we should do for Him, or, not to renounce what we think should be renounced on His behalf. We have defined sin nega- tively by saying that it means not doing or not renouncing what we ought to do or renounce. Clearly, then, we have shown that sin has no reality. It exists rather in not deing than in being.
Similarly, we could define shadows by saying: The absence of light where light usually is.

And he insisted that man has that power to consent, that assent or refusal given to the uprightness which is the center of moral life.

Thus Abelard contributed strongly to questioning the conditions of one of the essential sacraments of the Christian Church: penance. Confronted with a radically evil man, the Church in the barbarous age had made lists of sins and the appropriate punishments, copied from barbarian laws. These penitentials attested that, for man of the High Middle Ages, what was essential in penitence was sin, and consequently, punishment. Abelard expressed and strengthened the tendency to inverse that attitude. Henceforth the sinner was most important, that is, his intention, and the primary act of penitence would be contrition. “Sin does not persist,” wrote Abelard, “along with this heartfelt contrition which we call true penitence. Sin is contempt of God or consent to evil; and the love of God which calls forth our grief, allows no vice. ”The many confessors who appeared at the end of the century had incorporated this reversal in the psychology —if not the theology —of penitence. Thus in the towns and town schools, psychological analysis gained increasing importance and the sacraments were humanized in the fullest sense of the term. What enrichment for the mind of Western man!

THE HUMANIST

Let us stress only one trait of Abelard the theologian. No one ever proclaimed more than he the alliance of reason and faith. In this realm, while awaiting St Thomas, he surpassed the great initiator of new theology, St Anselm, who in the preceding century had set forth his rich formula: faith itself seeking understanding (fides quarens intellectum).

In this he satisfied the needs of the scholarly milieux which in theology “demanded human and philosophic reasoning and sought more what could be understood rather than what could be said: of what use, they asked, were words devoid of intelligibility? One cannot believe in what one does not understand, and it is ridiculous to teach others what neither oneself nor one’s listeners cannot understand through thought.”

During the last months of his life at Cluny, this humanist undertook to write, in great serenity, his Dialogus inter philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum [“Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian”]. In it he wanted to show that neither original sin nor the Incarnation had caused an absolute break in the history of humanity. He sought to illustrate what the three religions, which for him represented the sum total of human thought, had in common. He aimed to discover the natural laws which, beyond religions, would enable one to recognize the son of God in all men. His humanism culminated in tolerance and, unlike those who were uncompromising, he sought that which connected men, remembering there are “many mansions in the Father’s house.” If Abelard was the highest expression of the Parisian milieu, we must go to Chartres to discover other traits of the emerging intellectual.

Intellectuals in the Middle Ages
Jacques Le Goff

"Historia Calamitatum" of Peter Abélard - introduction

 The "Historia Calamitatum" of Peter Abélard is one of those human documents, out of the very heart of the Middle Ages, that illuminates by the glow of its ardour a shadowy period that has been made even more dusky and incomprehensible by unsympathetic commentators and the ill-digested matter of "source-books." Like the "Confessions" of St. Augustine it is an authentic revelation of personality and, like the latter, it seems to show how unchangeable is man, how consistent unto himself whether he is of the sixth century or the twelfth—or indeed of the twentieth century. "Evolution" may change the flora and fauna of the world, or modify its physical forms, but man is always the same and the unrolling of the centuries affects him not at all. If we can assume the vivid personality, the enormous intellectual power and the clear, keen mentality of Abélard and his contemporaries and immediate successors, there is no reason why "The Story of My Misfortunes" should not have been written within the last decade.

They are large assumptions, for this is not a period in world history when the informing energy of life expresses itself through such qualities, whereas the twelfth century was of precisely this nature. The antecedent hundred years had seen the recovery from the barbarism that engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and the generation of those vital forces that for two centuries were to infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of "chaos and old night" and Abélard and his opponent, St. Bernard, rode high on the mounting force in its swift and almost violent ascent.

Pierre du Pallet, yclept Abélard, was born in 1079 and died in 1142, and his life precisely covers the period of the birth, development and perfecting of that Gothic style of architecture which is one of the great exemplars of the period. Actually, the Norman development occupied the years from 1050 to 1125 while the initiating and determining of Gothic consumed only fifteen years, from Bury, begun in 1125, to Saint-Denis, the work of Abbot Suger, the friend and partisan of Abélard, in 1140. It was the time of the Crusades, of the founding and development of schools and universities, of the invention or recovery of great arts, of the growth of music, poetry and romance. It was the age of great kings and knights and leaders of all kinds, but above all it was the epoch of a new philosophy, refounded on the newly revealed corner stones of Plato and Aristotle, but with a new content, a new impulse and a new method inspired by Christianity.

All these things, philosophy, art, personality, character, were the product of the time, which, in its definiteness and consistency, stands apart from all other epochs in history. The social system was that of feudalism, a scheme of reciprocal duties, privileges and obligations as between man and man that has never been excelled by any other system that society has developed as its own method of operation. As Dr. De Wulf has said in his illuminating book "Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages" (a volume that should be read by any one who wishes rightly to understand the spirit and quality of Mediaevalism), "the feudal sentiment par excellence … is the sentiment of the value and dignity of the individual man. The feudal man lived as a free man; he was master in his own house; he sought his end in himself; he was—and this is a scholastic expression,—propter seipsum existens: all feudal obligations were founded upon respect for personality and the given word."

Of course this admirable scheme of society with its guild system of industry, its absence of usury in any form and its just sense of comparative values, was shot through and through with religion both in faith and practice. Catholicism was universally and implicitly accepted. Monasticism had redeemed Europe from barbarism and Cluny had freed the Church from the yoke of German imperialism. This unity and immanence of religion gave a consistency to society otherwise unobtainable, and poured its vitality into every form of human thought and action.

It was Catholicism and the spirit of feudalism that preserved men from the dangers inherent in the immense individualism of the time. With this powerful and penetrating coördinating force men were safe to go about as far as they liked in the line of individuality, whereas today, for example, the unifying force of a common and vital religion being absent and nothing having been offered to take its place, the result of a similar tendency is egotism and anarchy. These things happened in the end in the case of Mediaevalism when the power and the influence of religion once began to weaken, and the Renaissance and Reformation dissolved the fabric of a unified society. Thereafter it became necessary to bring some order out of the spiritual, intellectual and physical chaos through the application of arbitrary force, and so came absolutism in government, the tyranny of the new intellectualism, the Catholic Inquisition and the Puritan Theocracy.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the balance is justly preserved, though it was but an unstable equilibrium, and therefore during the time of Abélard we find the widest diversity of speculation and freedom of thought which continue unhampered for more than a hundred years. The mystical school of the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris follows one line (perhaps the most nearly right of all though it was submerged by the intellectual force and vivacity of the Scholastics) with Hugh of St. Victor as its greatest exponent. The Franciscans and Dominicans each possessed great schools of philosophy and dogmatic theology, and in addition there were a dozen individual line of speculation, each vitalized by some one personality, daring, original, enthusiastic. This prodigious mental and spiritual activity was largely fostered by the schools, colleges and universities that had suddenly appeared all over Europe. Never was such activity along educational lines. Almost every cathedral had its school, and many of the abbeys as well, as for example, in France alone, Cluny, Citeaux and Bec, St. Martin of Tours, Laon, Chartres, Rheims and Paris. To these schools students poured in from all over the world in numbers mounting to many thousands for such as Paris for example, and the mutual rivalries were intense and sometimes disorderly. Groups of students would choose their own masters and follow them from place to place, even subjecting them to discipline if in their opinion they did not live up to the intellectual mark they had set as their standard. As there was not only one religion and one social system, but one universal language as well, this gathering from all the four quarters of Europe was perfectly possible, and had much to do with the maintenance of that unity which marked society for three centuries.

At the time of Abélard the schools of Chartres and Paris were at the height of their fame and power. Fulbert, Bernard and Thierry, all of Chartres, had fixed its fame for a long period, and at Paris Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and William of Champeaux were names to conjure with, while Anselm of Laon, Adelard of Bath, Alan of Lille, John of Salisbury, Peter Lombard, were all from time to time students or teachers in one of the schools of the Cathedral, the Abbey of St. Victor or Ste. Geneviève.

Earlier in the Middle Ages the identity of theology and philosophy had been proclaimed, following the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian theory, and the latter (cf. Peter Damien and Duns Scotus Eriugena) was even reduced to a position that made it no more than the obedient handmaid of theology. In the eleventh century however, St. Anselm had drawn a clear distinction between faith and reason, and thereafter theology and philosophy were generally accepted as individual but allied sciences, both serving as lines of approach to truth but differing in their method. Truth was one and therefore there could be no conflict between the conclusions reached after different fashions. In the twelfth century Peter of Blois led a certain group called "rigourists" who still looked askance at philosophy, or rather at the intellectual methods by which it proceeded, and they were inclined to condemn it as "the devil's art," but they were on the losing side and John of Salisbury, Alan of Lille, Gilbert de la Porrée and Hugh of St. Victor prevailed in their contention that philosophers were "humanae videlicet sapientiae amatores," while theologians were "_divinae scripturae doctores."

Cardinal Mercier, himself the greatest contemporary exponent of Scholastic philosophy, defines philosophy as "the science of the totality of things." The twelfth century was a time when men were striving to see phenomena in this sense and established a great rational synthesis that should yet be in full conformity with the dogmatic theology of revealed religion. Abélard was one of the most enthusiastic and daring of these Mediaeval thinkers, and it is not surprising that he should have found himself at issue not only with the duller type of theologians but with his philosophical peers themselves. He was an intellectual force of the first magnitude and a master of dialectic; he was also an egotist through and through, and a man of strong passions. He would and did use his logical faculty and his mastery of dialectic to justify his own desires, whether these were for carnal satisfaction or the maintenance of an original intellectual concept. It was precisely this danger that aroused the fears of the "rigourists" and in the light of succeeding events in the domain of intellectualism it is impossible to deny that there was some justification for their gloomy apprehensions. In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety. He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism of Descartes, Kant and the entire modern school of materialistic philosophy. It was the clear prevision of this inevitable issue that made of St. Bernard not only an implacable opponent of Abélard but of the whole system of Scholasticism as well. For a time he was victorious. Abélard was silenced and the mysticism of the Victorines triumphed, only to be superseded fifty years later when the two great orders, Dominican and Franciscan, produced their triumphant protagonists of intellectualism, Alelander Halesand Albertus Magnus, and finally the greatest pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Bernard, St. Francis of Assisi, the Victorines, maintained that after all, as Henri Bergson was to say, seven hundred years later, "the mind of man by its very nature is incapable of apprehending reality," and that therefore faith is better than reason. Lord Bacon came to the same conclusion when he wrote "Let men please themselves as they will in admiring and almost adoring the human kind, this is certain; that, as an uneven mirrour distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind … cannot be trusted." And Hugh of St. Victor himself, had written, even in the days of Abélard: "There was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the true wisdom. The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom it became presumptuous and boasted it would attain the highest wisdom. And it made itself a ladder of the face of creation. … Then those things which were seen were known and there were other things which were not known; and through those which were manifest they expected to reach those that were hidden. And they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imagining … So God made foolish the wisdom of this world, and He pointed out another wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain curiosity to the study of alien things."

These considerations troubled Abélard not at all. He was conscious of a mind of singular acuteness and a tongue of parts, both of which would do whatever he willed. Beneath all the tumultuous talk of Paris, when he first arrived there, lay the great and unsolved problem of Universals and this he promptly made his own, rushing in where others feared to tread. William of Champeaux had rested on a Platonic basis, Abélard assumed that of Aristotle, and the clash began. It is not a lucid subject, but the best abstract may be found in Chapter XIV of Henry Adams' "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres" while this and the two succeeding chapters give the most luminous and vivacious account of the principles at issue in this most vital of intellectual feuds.

"According to the latest authorities, the doctrine of universals which convulsed the schools of the twelfth century has never received an adequate answer. What is a species: what is a genus or a family or an order? More or less convenient terms of classification, about which the twelfth century cared very little, while it cared deeply about the essence of classes! Science has become too complex to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits, almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers of substance, universals, and particulars. Little has changed except the vocabulary and the method. The schools knew that their society hung for life on the demonstration that God, the ultimate universal, was a reality, out of which all other universal truths or realities sprang. Truth was a real thing, outside of human experience. The schools of Paris talked and thought of nothing else. John of Salisbury, who attended Abélard's lectures about 1136, and became Bishop of Chartres in 1176, seems to have been more surprised than we need be at the intensity of the emotion. 'One never gets away from this question,' he said. 'From whatever point a discussion starts, it is always led back and attached to that. It is the madness of Rufus about Naevia; "He thinks of nothing else; talks of nothing else, and if Naevia did not exist, Rufus would be dumb."'

… "In these scholastic tournaments the two champions started from opposite points:—one from the ultimate substance, God,—the universal, the ideal, the type;—the other from the individual, Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object of sensual perception. The first champion—William in this instance— assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he was called a realist. His opponent—Abélard—held that the universal was only nominally real; and on that account he was called a nominalist. Truth, virtue, humanity, exist as units and realities, said William. Truth, replied Abélard, is only the sum of all possible facts that are true, as humanity is the sum of all actual human beings. The ideal bed is a form, made by God, said Plato. The ideal bed is a name, imagined by ourselves, said Aristotle. 'I start from the universe,' said William. 'I start from the atom,' said Abélard; and, once having started, they necessarily came into collision at some point between the two."

In this "Story of My Misfortunes" Abélard gives his own account of the triumphant manner in which he confounded his master, William, but as Henry Adams says, "We should be more credulous than twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abélard's word in 1135, that in 1110 he had driven out of the schools the most accomplished dialectician of the age by an objection so familiar that no other dialectician was ever silenced by it—whatever may have been the case with theologians-and so obvious that it could not have troubled a scholar of fifteen. William stated a selected doctrine as old as Plato; Abélard interposed an objection as old as Aristotle. Probably Plato and Aristotle had received the question and answer from philosophers ten thousand years older than themselves. Certainly the whole of philosophy has always been involved in this dispute."

So began the battle of the schools with all its more than military strategy and tactics, and in the end it was a drawn battle, in spite of its marvels of intellectual heroism and dialectical sublety. Says Henry Adams again:—

"In every age man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side to side, beating against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has sunk into indifference or scepticism. Religious minds prefer scepticism. The true saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human reason, who has more than once joined hands on this ground with some who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in Scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the society no other intellectual amusement to relieve its restlessness. His crusade failed; his ascetic enthusiasm faded; God came no nearer. If there was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical Englishman of the future Church of England type than John of Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote a description of his time which makes a picturesque contrast with the picture painted by Abélard, his old master, of the century at its beginning. John weighed Abélard and the schools against Bernard and the cloister, and coolly concluded that the way to truth led rather through Citeaux, which brought him to Chartres as Bishop in 1176, and to a mild scepticism in faith. 'I prefer to doubt' he said, 'rather than rashly define what is hidden.' The battle with the schools had then resulted only in creating three kinds of sceptics:— the disbelievers in human reason; the passive agnostics; and the sceptics proper, who would have been atheists had they dared. The first class was represented by the School of St. Victor; the second by John of Salisbury himself; the third, by a class of schoolmen whom he called Cornificii, as though they made a practice of inventing horns of dilemma on which to fix their opponents; as, for example, they asked whether a pig which was led to market was led by the man or the cord. One asks instantly: What cord?—Whether Grace, for instance, or Free Will?

"Bishop John used the science he had learned in the school only to reach the conclusion that, if philosophy were a science at all, its best practical use was to teach charity—love. Even the early, superficial debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted the subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid, philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated 'Cogito, ergo sum.' Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as old and familiar as St. Augustine to the twelfth century, and as little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego. The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted was to connect the two. They tried realism and found that it led to pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it ended in materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted. In the seventeenth century—the same violent struggle broke out again, and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous conceptual proof of God: 'I am conscious of myself, and must exist; I am conscious of God and He must exist.' Pascal wearily replied that it was not God he doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the impossibility of rejecting man's reason by reason; unconsciously sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed: 'The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (éloignées) from the reasoning of men, and so contradictory (impliquées, far fetched) that they made little impression; and even if they served to convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they fear to have deceived themselves.'"

Abélard was always, as he has been called, a scholastic adventurer, a philosophical and theological freelance, and it was after the Calamity that he followed those courses that resulted finally in his silencing and his obscure death. It is almost impossible for us of modern times to understand the violence of partisanship aroused by his actions and published words that centre apparently around the placing of the hermitage he had made for himself under the patronage of the third Person of the Trinity, the Paraclete, the Spirit of love and compassion and consolation, and the consequent arguments by which he justified himself. To us it seems that he was only trying to exalt the power of the Holy Spirit, a pious action at the least but to the episcopal and monastic conservators of the faith he seems to have been guilty of trying to rationalize an unsolvable mystery, to find an intellectual solution forbidden to man. In some obscure way the question seems to be involved in that other of the function of the Blessed Virgin as the fount of mercy and compassion, and at this time when the cult of the Mother of God had reached its highest point of potency and poignancy anything of the sort seemed intolerable.

For a time the affairs of Abélard prospered: Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis was his defender, and he enjoyed the favor of the Pope and the King. He was made an abbot and his influence spread in every direction. In 1137 the King died and conditions at Rome changed so that St. Bernard became almost Pope and King in his own person. Within a year he proceeded against Abélard; his "Theology" was condemned at a council of Sens, this judgment was confirmed by the Pope, and the penalty of silence was imposed on the author— probably the most severe punishment he could be called upon to endure. As a matter of fact it was fatal to him. He started forthwith for Rome but stopped at the Abbey of Cluny in the company of its Abbot, Peter the Venerable, "the most amiable figure of the twelfth century," and no very devoted admirer of St. Bernard, to whom, as a matter of fact, he had once written, "You perform all the difficult religious duties; you fast, you watch, you suffer; but you will not endure the easy ones-you do not love." Here he found two years of peace after his troubled life, dying in the full communion of the Church on 21 April, 1142.

The problems of philosophy and theology that were so vital in the Middle Ages interest us no more, even when they are less obscure than those so rife in the twelfth century, but the problem of human love is always near and so it is not perhaps surprising that the abiding interest concerns itself with Abélard's relationship with Héloïse. So far as he is concerned it is not a very savoury matter. He deliberately seduced a pupil, a beautiful girl entrusted to him by her uncle, a simpleminded old canon of the Cathedral of Paris, under whose roof he ensconced himself by false pretences and with the full intention of gaining the niece for himself. Abélard seems to have exercised an irresistible fascination for men and women alike, and his plot succeeded to admiration. Stricken by a belated remorse, he finally married Héloïse against her unselfish protests and partly to legitimatize his unborn child, and shortly after he was surprised and overpowered by emissaries of Canon Fulbert and subjected to irreparable mutilation. He tells the story with perfect frankness and with hardly more than formal expressions of compunction, and thereafter follows the narrative of their separation, he to a monastery, she to a convent, and of his care for her during her conventual life, or at least for that part of it that had passed before the "History" was written. Through the whole story it is Héloise who shines brightly as a curiously beautiful personality, unselfish, self sacrificing, and almost virginal in her purity in spite of her fault. One has for her only sympathy and affection whereas it is difficult to feel either for Abélard in spite of his belated efforts at rectifying his own sin and his life-long devotion to his solitary wife in her hidden cloister.

The whole story was instantly known, Abélard's assailants were punished in kind, .and he himself shortly resumed his work of lecturing on philosophy and, a little later, on theology. Apparently his reputation did not suffer in the least, nor did hers; in fact her piety became almost a by-word and his name as a great teacher increased by leaps and bounds: neither his offence nor its punishment seemed to bring lasting discredit. This fact, which seems strange to us, does not imply a lack of moral sense in the community but rather the prevalence of standards alien to our own. It is only since the advent of Puritanism that sexual sins have been placed at the head of the whole category. During the Middle Ages, as always under Christianity, the most deadly sins were pride, covetousness, slander and anger. These implied inherent moral depravity, but "illicit" love was love outside the law of man, and did not of necessity and always involve moral guilt. Christ was Himself very gentle and compassionate with the sins of the flesh but relentless in the case of the greater sins of the spirit. Puritanism overturned the balance of things, and by concentrating its condemnation on sexual derelictions became blind to the greater sins of pride, avarice and anger. We have inherited the prejudice without acquiring the abstention, but the Middle Ages had a clearer sense of comparative values and they could forgive, or even ignore, the sin of Abélard and Héloïse when they could less easily excuse the sin of spiritual pride or deliberate cruelty. Moreover, these same Middle Ages believed very earnestly in the Divine forgiveness of sins for which there had been real repentance and honest effort at amendment. Abélard and Héloise had been grievously punished, he himself had made every reparation that was possible, his penitence was charitably assumed, and therefore it was not for society to condemn what God would mercifully forgive.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not an age of moral laxity; ideals and standards and conduct were immeasurably higher than they had been for five hundred years, higher than they were to be in the centuries that followed the crest of Mediaevalism. It was however a time of enormous vitality, of throbbing energy that was constantly bursting its bounds, and as well a time of personal liberty and freedom of action that would seem strange indeed to us in these days of endless legal restraint and inhibitions mitigated by revolt. There were few formal laws but there was Custom which was a sovereign law in itself, and above all there was the moral law of the Church, establishing its great fundamental principles but leaving details to the working out of life itself. Behind the sin of Abélard lay his intolerable spiritual pride, his selfishness and his egotism, qualities that society at large did not recognize because of their devotion to his engaging personality and their admiration for his dazzling intellectual gifts. Their idol had sinned, he had been savagely punished, he had repented; that was all there was about it and the question was at an end.

In reading the Historia Calamitatum there is one consideration that suggests itself that is subject for serious thought. Written as it was some years after the great tragedy of his life, it was a portrait that somehow seems out of focus. We know that during his early years in Paris Abélard was a bold and daring champion in the lists of dialectic; brilliant, persuasive, masculine to a degree; yet this self-portrait is of a man timid, suspicious, frightened of realities, shadows, possibilities. He is in abject terror of councils, hidden enemies, even of his life. The tone is querulous, even peevish at times, and always the egotism and the pride persist, while he seems driven by the whip of desire for intellectual adventure into places where he shrinks from defending himself, or is unable to do so. The antithesis is complete and one is driven to believe that the terrible mutilation to which he had been subjected had broken down his personality and left him in all things less than man. His narrative is full of accusations against all manner of people, but it is not necessary to take all these literally, for it is evident that his natural egotism, overlaid by the circumstances of his calamity, produced an almost pathological condition wherein suspicions became to him realities and terrors established facts.

It is doubtful if Abélard should be ranked very high in the list of Mediaeval philosophers. He was more a dialectician than a creative force, and until the development of the episode with Héloïse he seems to have cared primarily for the excitement of debate, with small regard for the value or the subjects under discussion. As an intellectualist he had much to do with the subsequent abandonment of Plato in favour of Aristotle that was a mark of pure scholasticism, while the brilliancy of his dialectical method became a model for future generations. Afer the Calamity he turned from philosophy to theology and ethics and here he reveals qualities of nobility not evident before. Particularly does he insist upon the fact that it is the subjective intention that determines the moral value of human actions even if it does not change their essential character.

The story of this philosophical soldier of fortune is a romance from beginning to end, a poignant human drama shot through with passion, adventure, pathos and tragedy. In a sense it is an epitome of the earlier Middle Ages and through it shines the bright light of an era of fervid living, of exciting adventure, of phenomenal intellectual force and of large and comprehensive liberty. As a single episode of passion it is not particularly distinguished except for the appealing personality of Héloïse; as a phase in the development of Christian philosophy it is of only secondary value. United in one, the two factors achieve a brilliant dramatic unity that has made the story of Abélard and Héloïse immortal.

Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram