Samuel Willoughby Duffield

From the foreground of the waving banners and the flashing arms of the Crusaders, of the dark throng of the chanting monks, and of feudal pageantry and glitter—and from that background of dead uniformity which equally characterized those mediaeval times—emerges a figure unique and notable. It is that of a man in the prime and pride of life—lofty in stature, handsome in face, captivating in address. He is already a tried debater and an unsurpassed logician. He has Aristotle at the tip of his tongue; he has read much and thought a little, and his ambition is great.

Such a man came one day into the lecture hall of William of Champeaux at Paris. It was in the early part of the twelfth century, and William was the most celebrated teacher of the period, his “doctrine of universals” being accepted almost as though it were inspired. But this morning, while the master lectured and the disciples drank in his words without criticism or debate, the visitor stirred uneasily in his place. When the lecture closed he availed himself of the usual freedom to ask some questions. To William’s dogmatic answers the stranger in his turn proposed shrewd difficulties. It was no longer the harmony of teacher and taught, but the clash of two rival minds maintaining opposite systems of logic. And in that short struggle William the Archdeacon went down before the free lance of Peter Abelard, the rustic challenger from Palais (Le Pallet) in Brittany. And from that agitation went out the widening circles whose story we are now to note, and whose latest ripples break faintly on a tomb in PÈre-la-Chaise visited by thousands of modern tourists. Few tales are sadder or more suggestive.

The name of Abelard is variously spelled. It appears in divers authorities as Abelard, Abaelard, Abaielardus, Abailard, Abaillard, Abelhardus, and Abeillard. The true name (on the authority of Ch. de RÉmusat) was, however, not Abelard, but Beranger or Berenger; and the future controversialist was christened Pierre or Peter. His birthplace is near Nantes, the house being represented a few years ago by a square brier-grown ruin back of the church. The date of his birth is given as 1079—a period when the world was feudal and military. But this lad was born for debate and not for battle. It may even be seriously doubted if he ever possessed much physical courage of a sort to stand the rough shock of actual warfare. He preferred the method of those who intermeddle among metaphysical subtleties to those who must keep sword edges sharp and armor furbished. His delight was to dispute, to be engaged in undertakings

“Whose chief devotion lies

In odd perverse antipathies;

In falling out with that or this

And finding somewhat still amiss.”

In those days not to be a warrior was to be—almost of compulsion—a monk. But Abelard’s independence forbade the second as his disputatious spirit had forbidden the first. He would neither risk his neck in the wars nor his opinions in the cloister. Instead of these he preferred the irregular combats of the scholar, and Bayle—with a touch of poetry—beholds him as he comes shining out of Brittany “darting syllogisms on every side.” Such was Peter Abelard—vain, handsome, opinionated, bound to swear by no master, a mighty voice crying in the desert of the Dark Ages for “free speech and free thought.”

The expedition to Paris hurt neither his reputation nor his purse. He arrived at perihelion as quickly as a comet. William of Champeaux—having first pushed him off and forced him to lecture on his own account at Melun and Corbeil—found that he returned like a cork thrust under water. The man’s buoyant, aggressive self-reliance, not to say self-conceit, was never contented with an inferior place. And while Alberic and Littulf and some of the older and more staid of his pupils held with William, it was plain that the popular favor inclined to the other side. The younger men were all for Abelard. The “doctrine of universals” was exploded as if with some of Friar Bacon’s “villainous saltpetre,” and doubtless the loss was small enough to mankind. His principal fort being taken, there was nothing left for the opposing general but a masterly retreat. Hence, by a convenient arrangement, combining several advantages, Guillaume des Champeaux became Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne. And it was, of course, beneath the dignity of a bishop to hold lectures or to engage in logical controversies!

But, as generally happens, a sand-bag substitute was put in the bishop’s place; and Abelard came back to open a school on Mt. St. Genevieve and to bombard this professor. The battle was short and decisive, for the next we learn of this nameless champion of a defeated cause, he is absolutely enrolled as a humble follower of the great logician. This is but a fair sample of the general success which attended the new ideas. Everywhere they gained currency, attracting inquiry, arousing envy, awaking ecclesiastical suspicion, and inflaming the hatred of his defeated opponents.

About this time of inception and premonition, say 1113, Abelard undertook to examine the instruction given by William’s teacher, Anselm of Laon, who there vegetated as dean of the cathedral church. We must not confuse his name with that of the great Archbishop of Canterbury, whose method and science have outlasted the most of his contemporaries, and whom Neander styles “the Augustine of the twelfth century.” Had he been the teacher and Abelard the pupil, history might have made a different record. A profounder and a more reverent line of thought might have affected the acute and daring mind of the rising dialectician. And, above every other consideration, the new philosophy might have contained those elements of religion whose absence neutralized for centuries that wholesome independence which held mere dogmatism cheap as compared to the sacred light of truth. It would, indeed, have been well if such an Anselm had been at Laon, but the dean was a weak and futile person. And so it was inevitable that Abelard should again be in trouble and almost in disgrace, but even in his pathetic Historia Calamitatum the pupil did not forget to satirize his master. “He was that sort of a man,” he says, “that if any went to him being uncertain he returned more uncertain still.... When he lit a fire he filled his house with smoke, but he did not brighten it with light.” He adds, sarcastically, that Anselm’s philosophy always suggested to his mind the story of the fig-tree that our Lord cursed because it bore plenty of leaves and no fruit.

Abelard himself, however, was a genuine educator, and many bishops and other ecclesiastics, with nineteen cardinals and two popes, came from the ranks of his pupils. He loved liberty, although he loved it to that extent to which his own will—and no other authority, human or divine—restricted it. In this he differed from Anselm of Canterbury, who loved liberty, not according to license but according to law. Mere freedom to inquire, to complain, or to theorize, does not invariably carry with it profitable results. And Abelard—whose very freedom was in itself a noble revelation to the shackled intellects of his age—committed the grave error of supposing that the sweep of a free hand would certainly give lines of beauty and forms of grace. Something deeper than the mere distaste of false opinions is needful for this. Art, meditation, truth—all must lie beneath the O of Giotto or the masterly strokes of Apelles. And our rhetorician would have done well to have confined himself to the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. When he undertook theology he first quarrelled with Anselm of Laon, and next he encountered all Christendom and Bernard of Clairvaux. His was the fatal blunder of every “free inquirer” who forgets reverence, and who, in his pride of intellect, may likely fall as the angels fell. Surely no Lucifer ever plunged more swiftly down from heaven’s battlements than did poor Peter Abelard from the dizzy height of his sudden success.

This is no place to criticise his “system,” if system it can be properly called. The Sic et Non—“Yes and No”—his most famous work, is really a mere challenge. He quotes the Bible against the Fathers and the Fathers against the Bible, touching on deep tideways and bogs and quicksands which he never attempts to ford, fathom, or bridge. The Arians, Sabellians, Nestorians and Pelagians are resuscitated in these pages. He flings their doubts before us like a gauntlet cast into the arena of debate. One may choose which side he will take. Such a man, arising in the nineteenth century and claiming sympathy with Christianity, would be by some suspected as a secret enemy and his vanity would loosen his armor for the entrance of many a venomed shaft. His genuine ardor would be misunderstood and his opinions would be heavily attacked before they could deploy at their full strength. If this be true to-day how infinitely more true must it have been of an age narrower, more illiterate, and with an arm which wielded not in vain the sword of excision against heretics!

This, then, was the man who in the prime of manhood and at the topmost peak of prosperity found himself with money in his pocket, in Paris, and his own master. He had not yet said of the dogmas of Mother Church as Luther said of Tetzel, “By God’s help I will go down and beat a hole in your drum.” Hitherto he had safely kept to Aristotle—at once the blessing and the bane of Middle-Age reasoners—and he had the vainglorious sense that five thousand students hung breathless on his words. He considered himself upon the firmest footing that one could desire, and behold, he fell!

The “damned spot” of Abelard’s character is that which, after all, has insured his fame. And, since it is indispensable, a few sentences must exhibit it in its repulsive ugliness. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we do not need the help of any other biographer than his own bitter soul. His Historia Calamitatum is the sufficient history. In this he tells us that his life had been previously irreproachable and of the strictest moral correctness. Now, however, he began to “let himself go”—how far, or how fast, it is of no use for us to investigate. But Fulbert, the Canon of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, had a perfect Hypatia for a niece, and to this lady Abelard’s gaze was turned.

She was eighteen, and there was an irresistible charm about her, as of some fragrant white lily. She was a woman fit to lend grace and beauty to prosaic surroundings. And Abelard has the unspeakable audacity to declare that he, a man of thirty-eight, deliberately selected this pure and perfect flower and meant to take it for himself. Not to marry; for the truth demands that we should perceive his own thorough appreciation of the fact that marriage would sink him out of the ranks of scholars into those of tradesmen and would be the death-blow to his ambition. Not to marry; for it was a bad age, and sin sometimes clothed itself in the cowl of the monk and the robe of the prelate, and such a sin was better forgiven than such a blunder. Let all contemporaneous history bear witness! For every account of the lives of Heloise and Abelard reveals the impossibility of passing these unpleasant facts without notice or comment. On this pivot turns the golden world of that deathless love.

So the avaricious Fulbert took Abelard to dwell in his own house, and gave his niece’s education entirely into his care, and, as her teacher himself expresses it, delivered her “like a lamb to a hungry wolf.”

Heloise was probably the better educated of the two. She was the child of unknown parents. Bayle asserts that she was the daughter of a priest, and his facilities and laboriousness respecting such abstruse particulars no one will question. The authority from which he is possibly quoting, says that this priest was John “Somebody” (nescio cujus) and a canon of the same cathedral with Fulbert at Paris. Doubtless the trace of her ancestry is utterly lost to us beyond these meagre items. Even Fulbert’s alleged relationship has been questioned. But the scholarship of Heloise speaks for itself in a terse, sparkling Latin style, which is as pleasant beside Abelard’s lumbering sentences as a bright mountain brook beside a turbid and turbulent stream. Count de Bussy-Rabutin—no mean critic—has put on record that he never read more elegant Latin. She also understood Greek and Hebrew, with neither of which, strange to say, was Abelard acquainted. And at first blush it would seem that the teacher should have been the pupil.

Absolute justice requires that the ugly and disgraceful slurs in the Historia Calamitatum, and even in the correspondence, should not be overlooked. Here is what will serve for a fair example. He says of her, Quae cum per faciem non esset infima, per abundantiam litterarum erat suprema—while she was not exactly the worst-looking of them, she was the best educated; and therefore he selected her! The spretae injuria formae never went further than this. But this is by no means the solitary instance of that low snarl in which the currish nature of the Breton rustic now and then indulged.

What, then, could have been the spell by which this charming woman drew Christendom after her? Popes and bishops called her “beloved daughter,” priests entitled her “sister,” and all laymen laid claim to her as “mother.” If she were not so beautiful as some authorities positively state, she must certainly have been marvellously captivating. But chiefest of her many graces was her crowning loyalty and love. It showed itself in perfect sympathy, in entire self-devotion. Michelet, indeed, has observed that the legend of Abelard and Heloise is all that has survived in France out of the story of the Middle Ages.

Nor has the unanimity of literary judgment upon these lovers been less remarkable than the interest which they have inspired. With one voice Abelard is condemned and with one voice Heloise is extolled. “She was,” says a brilliant writer, “a great, heroic woman, one of those formed out of the finest clay of humanity.” “With the Grecian fire,” says another, “she had the Roman firmness.” And even the rude picture which the mechanical touch of Alexander Pope has painted, leaves to us in the “Epistle of Heloise” a trace of the same beauty, and affords one line—

“And graft my love immortal on thy fame”—

which only needs to be reversed in order to be prophetic. Morison’s tribute is both nobler and more acute, for he testifies, “She walked through life with ever-reverted glances on the glory of her girlish love.” It was the same thought which Dante—after Boethius—puts into the lips of Francesca—

Nay, it is even the very cameo out of Tennyson:

This is the heart which Abelard won. Winning it he won, and forever held, the woman whose it was. From that moment she merged her whole existence in his with a complete and utter abandonment of self, to the perfectness of which let her epistles from the Paraclete bear testimony. Across this story of undeviating devotion Abelard’s vanity, pride, and coarseness are written with smears and stains, like an illiterate monk who blots his comments upon a precious missal full of saints and angels. For, first of his offences, he revealed this love of his by really becoming a troubadour. He composed verses in the Romance tongue, recounting their loves, and set them to such stirring tunes that all the world was soon singing them. Hence grew the legend that the “Romance of the Rose” (Roman de la Rose) was his composition. It undoubtedly contains their story, but it was not his work; it belongs to William de Loris and Jean de Meung. But, as for Heloise, she was delighted. What would have been a crown of sorrow to other women was to her a crown of joy. She even announced to Abelard “with the utmost exultation” the advent of that unhappy being christened Astrolabe and destined to pass his forsaken and lonely existence shut up in a cloister. That people sang of this love; that it went to the ends of the earth; that nothing could prevent its being known—these were the happinesses of Heloise. Of the merit of the songs we cannot ourselves decide. They were originally anonymous, and only those familiar with the crabbed French of that period may hope to find them again.

Meanwhile, though the lectures suffered, and the students saw, and all Paris smiled, Fulbert was totally in the dark. This condition of affairs was predestined to come to an end, and it came in storm and anger. Abelard saw himself forced, against his will, to marry secretly. It was a sting to his egotism that ever rankled. It served, though, to pacify Fulbert and the rest of the relations; and being too glad and too loose-tongued to keep this handsome alliance from the public they presently told everybody. Heloise, thereupon, fearing for Abelard’s ambitious schemes, did not shrink from a point-blank falsehood. She denied the marriage. She had been in Brittany and was now at Argenteuil, of which she was by and by to become the abbess. And she added to her denial the self-abnegating sentiment that Abelard, who was created for all mankind, ought not to be sacrificed by “bondage to a woman.” It was worthy of her who so admired the “philosophic Aspasia,” and whose tutor and lover had done what he could to make her as “free from superstition” as himself. Her moral ideas were what he taught her, and he could not unteach them.

Among the complaisant and agreeable nuns of Argenteuil she now resided. It was but a few miles from Paris. Her husband frequently went thither, and in a short time thereafter she was enrolled as a novice. The fact aroused her relatives, and their mutterings became ominous; Fulbert, especially, taking this act in high dudgeon, as though it meant the premeditated repudiation of his niece. Their anger did not stop at words, but, knowing Abelard’s popularity, and fearing to attack him during the day, they bribed his valet and assaulted him by night in his own apartment.

It was this blow which flung Abelard from heaven to hell. His hitherto impregnable attitude; his fierce zeal for his opinions; his hopes of a new philosophy which should make his name immortal, all vanished before it as spider-webs break before a sword. And when, conscious that he was no more a god and a hero, but an insulted and defeated man, he rose from his bed of pain, the prospect was not improved. The outpoured indignation of bishops and canons and clergy—the lamentations of the women and the students—did not appease him. A whisper was in his soul like that of Haman’s wife. Mordecai, the despised, was coming to the kingdom and the Agagite was doomed.

There were reasons which led him to think of seeking aid from the Pope against his enemies. But Fulk of Deuil, his good friend, advised him not to try it. “You have no money,” said honest, plain spoken Fulk, “and what can you do at Rome without money?” It was bitter truth. Yet the AbbÉ Migne, forgetting the much worse things Bernard had said of the Roman Curia in the treatise De Consideratione, exscinds the passage from Fulk’s letter on the ground that it would cause “scandal to Catholic ears.” Edification first, truth afterward, if at all!

Therefore, with a poisoned soul, he sought the Abbey of St. Denis to hide himself from the gaze of the world. To a man so proud a life without imperial power was a living death. Yet from those walls he issues his edict that Heloise shall take the veil. His vanity led him to carry out the original cause of hostility even to its unalterable result. But Heloise, whatever she might have thought or felt, marched with lofty resignation to her fate. Quoting aloud—as his confession pitifully recalls—the words of Cornelia to Pompey from the “Pharsalia” of Lucan, she takes the vows. Never was there less of religion in such a ceremony! Henceforth she walks like the moon in distant brightness, coming to meet us down the ages as comes the Queen Louise of Gustav Richter’s superb picture. She is transfigured by her self-forgetting love, and “all that is left of her,” in the best and truest sense, is now “pure womanly.”

For Abelard at St. Denis the case was different. He found the monks worldly and dissolute and he reproved them. The effect was similar to the case of Lot—the reformer departed with all his belongings. He then renewed his old lectures. His scholars followed him to Maisoncelle, where, in their avidity of knowledge, they overcrowded every resource of shelter and food. He offered them that fascinating combination, dialectics and divinity. Like the saltpetre and the charcoal these were harmless when apart and explosive when together, particularly if you add the sulphurous heart which now smoked in his bosom. A harsh and vindictive tone was given to his disposition, and it was natural that he should be, at least tentatively, a heretic. These moral bruises are worse than any or all physical injuries; the man who has felt them can never be again what he was before. And now Anselm and William and Fulbert and everybody that he had bullied or taunted or threatened turned upon him. The gates to the black cavern of the winds were open and the blasts of fate were icy cold.

The papal legate Conan held a council at Soissons in 1121. The opinions of Abelard were received with disfavor. They humiliated the poor wretch among them and made him burn his own book, and then mumble through a credo amid his “sobs and sighs and tears.” These words are his own, and his is also the statement that he was put into the custody of the Abbot of St. Medard and there he was lectured, and even lashed by the convent whip, until he exhibited proper submission. Poetical justice had befallen him. For he confesses, to his shame, that he had coerced and even struck Heloise. Now he, too, was coerced, and he, too, was struck.

Then back again to St. Denis, with more hatred and hard speeches than ever. But Suger, the new abbot, an easy-going lover of bric-À-brac and good living, set him free, a “masterless man” past forty years of age, with Heloise out of reach and the spears of exultant enemies bristling in every hedge. Is it a wonder that he took to the banks of the Ardusson near Troyes, wattled himself a rude hut and resolved to be a hermit? But even there in the desert the people thronged him and built a village of huts about his own. His misfortunes became a portion of his strength. And there they erected for him a church and a cloister which he dedicated to the Paraclete, a daring innovation, since it was then considered highly heterodox thus to distinguish one person of the Trinity from the other two.

Under such storms and heat the nature of the man had been seriously warped. He became suspicious, gloomy, and weakly unstable. His correspondence with Heloise had been completely broken off. He went into the monotonous Champagne, then out into the bleak Brittany, and finally (1125) he received the abbacy of St. Gildas. His friends, perhaps, desired to save him from homelessness and so from the dangers which the relentless malice of his old enemies was constantly piling up. But their choice of a refuge reveals how little their ecclesiastical influence was worth. The monks of St. Gildas lived in open sin, and the people around the cloister were semi-barbarians. It may be that they were ready to welcome Abelard because they supposed he would be charitable to their peccadilloes, but if they fancied this, their mistake was great. He really measured himself against their vices and suffered a predestined defeat. At St. Gildas he touched the nadir of his fate as at Paris he had reached its zenith. The monks conspired against him. They sought to poison him, contaminating with their drugs even the cup of the Eucharist. When his life was not fear it was horror, and when it was not horror it was despair.

At this time, too, for calamity never comes singly, Suger had succeeded in routing from Argenteuil the Abbess Heloise with all her nuns. He had complained to Rome that the lands of Argenteuil were the chartered right of St. Denis and that the nuns were very scandalous. So Abelard roused himself sufficiently to hand the deserted abbey of the Paraclete over to his wife; to confirm it by every possible act and deed against invasion; and to secure, in the despite of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was his presumptive enemy, a special bull of Innocent II. to make all this permanent. To these walls Heloise therefore removed. They were doubly dear to her for Abelard’s sake. She had no true “vocation” for her office, but the Pope called her and her sisterhood his “dear daughters,” and it was the best that they could do. Abelard prepared their forms of service for them, and thus again, after all these years, communication existed and letters passed between them.

These forms brought on a controversy with Bernard, who did not like them. The letters also are still extant, often translated, but never in anything except the original Latin, speaking out the real nature of the writers. On the part of Heloise they reveal the depth of an unending love. On the part of Abelard they are as cold and occasionally as cruel as anything to which a translator can turn his pen. After a careful survey of their contents the conclusion is irresistible that Heloise is a woman whose lofty love carries with it unhesitatingly the mind, the will, the senses—everything. Her faults are the faults of her time and of her teaching, not of her soul. But, by the survival of its most forcible elements, Abelard’s character has been developed into a selfish coldness both unnatural and ungrateful. As a man, at this stage of his career, one abhors and pities him.

Presently upon the dead colorlessness of this “burned-out crater healed with snow,” the red light of a new controversy is cast. In this final struggle the redoubtable force of the splendid debater flashed up once more. But he was defeated by Bernard at Sens (1140), and whether this defeat was by fair logic or by the hostile spirit of the age it does not matter. Defeated he was, and he rushed out declaring that he would appeal to Rome. Happily his way led him through Cluny, and there good, large-hearted, and large-bodied Peter the Venerable took him in. For the first time, perhaps, in all his life he came into close relations with a man genuinely great. And Peter of Cluny himself wrote to the Pope; detaining Abelard meanwhile by kind assiduities, in that genial cloister whose humanity cherished neither bigotry nor license. Later he even reconciled the two disputants, and the broken and weary debater died at last (April 21st, 1142) at St. Marcel, whither he had been sent for change of climate by the care of his hospitable friend.

There is a painting—a true artist’s conception, but a mere daub in fact—which hangs in a New York village and which represents a dead knight stretched upon the ground. He lies upon his back on the sodden earth in the melting snow. The sky above him is of a dull and awful gray, and the carrion birds are flying in a long, hurrying line to join those already at the feast. A broken sword is strained in his right hand, his armor is hacked and darkly spotted with mire and blood, and his feet have fallen into a little stream. So would have fallen Abelard but for the charity and mercy of Peter the Venerable. Remembering all that he had been it is somewhat comforting to read of his last days. For certain letters passed between Peter of Cluny and Heloise, and these, too, are extant and accessible.

The abbot says to her, after describing the daily life of Abelard, “How holily, how devoutly, in what a catholic spirit he made confession, first of his faith and then of his sins! ... Thus Master Peter finished his days, and he who for his knowledge was famed throughout the world, in the discipleship of Him who said, ‘Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart,’ persevered, in meekness and humility, and, as we may believe, passed to the Lord.” It is in such language that this benevolent man addresses his “venerable and very dear sister,” concerning, as he tenderly puts it, her “first husband in the Lord.” And doubtless this same Abelard became, at the last, a little child, who through much tribulation had unlearned his haughty and selfish temper, and had gone back from subtleties and logic to say in all simplicity, Abba, Father! And it is not less interesting for us to discover in the second epistle of Heloise to Peter of Cluny, that the mother’s heart yearns over her boy, and that she commends Astrolabe to the care and protection of his father’s benefactor, a trust which, in his next letter, Peter accepts and promises to discharge.

Of the poetry of Abelard much has unquestionably been lost. His troubadour ballads may have been conveniently suppressed; it is often the fate of wise men’s lighter productions. And his hymns were for long years untraced, except in the instance of the Mittit ad virginem and of another upon the Trinity, which was ascribed to him, but is now accredited to Hildebert. A very pretty poem, Ornarunt terram germina, preserved by Du Meril (Poesies Populaires Lat., p. 444) is given in the collection of Archbishop Trench and again in that of Professor March. Even in English its grace and daintiness do not entirely escape us, and they show how possible it was for him to have written the love-songs which celebrated Heloise.