Joseph McCabe

A BRILLIANT VICTORY

If you desire to see the Paris of those early days, imagine yourself beside the spot where the modern Pantheon stands. It is the summit of what Paris called ‘the hill’ for many a century—the hill of St. Genevieve. Save for the large monastery of secular canons beside you, the abbey of St. Genevieve, there is yet little sign of the flood of grimy masonry that will creep up slowly from the river valley, as the ages advance, and foul the sweet country for miles beyond. Paris lies down in the valley below, a toy city. The larger island in the Seine bears almost the whole weight of the capital of France. It has, it is true, eaten a little way into the northern bank of the river, to which it is joined by the Great Bridge. That is the Lombard Quarter, and Lutetian commerce is increasing rapidly. Numbers of curious ships sail up the broad, silver bosom of the Seine, and make for the port of St. Landry. The commercial quarter is already spreading in the direction of Montmartre, with the public butchery and bakery at its outskirt; but it is a mere fringe. The broad valleys and the gentle hills that are one day to support Paris are now clothed with vineyards and orchards and cornfields, and crowned with groves of olive[4] and oak. On the nearer side, too, the city has already overflowed the narrow limits of the island. There are houses on the fine stone bridge, the Little Bridge, and there is a pretty confusion of houses, chapels, schools, and taverns gradually stealing up the slope of St. Genevieve. But, here also, most of the hill is covered with gardens and vineyards, from which a chapel or a relic of old Roman Lutetia peeps out here and there—the ruins of the famous old thermÆ lie half-way down the hill below us—; and along the valley of the

(to quote a poet of the time), to east and west, are broad lakes of fresh green colour, broken only in their sweet monotony by an occasional island of masonry, an abbey with a cluster of cottages about it.

It is down straight below us, on the long, narrow island, that we see the heart of France, the centre of its political, intellectual, and ecclesiastical life. A broad, unpaved road, running from Great Bridge to Little Bridge, cuts it into two. Church occupies most of the eastern half, State most of the western; their grateful subjects pack themselves as comfortably as they can in the narrow fringe that is left between the royal and ecclesiastical domains and the bed of the river. Each generation in turn has wondered why it was so scourged by ‘the burning fire’ (the plague), and resolved to be more generous to the Church. From the summit of St. Genevieve we see the front of the huge, grey, Roman cathedral, that goes back to the days of Childebert, and the residences of its prelates and canons bordering the cloister. Over against it, to the west, is the spacious royal garden, which is graciously thrown open to the people two or three times a week, with the palace of King Philip at the extremity of the island. That is Paris in the year of grace 1100; and all outside those narrow limits is a very dream of undulating scenery, with the vesture of the vine, the fir, the cypress, the oak, the olive, and the fig; and the colour of the rose, the almond, the lily, and the violet; and the broad, sweet Seine meandering through it; and the purest air that mortal could desire.

To our young philosopher Paris probably presented itself first in the character of ‘the city of philosophers.’ Each of the great abbeys had its school. That of the abbey of St. Genevieve will soon be familiar to us. The abbey of St. Germain of Auxerre, to the north, and the abbey of St. Germain of the Meadow, to the west, had schools at their gates for all comers. St. Martin in the Fields had its school, and the little priory of St. Victor, to the east, was soon to have one of the most famous of all schools of theology. The royal abbey of St. Denis, a few miles away, had a school in which Prince Louis was then being trained, together with the illustrious Abbot Suger. A number of private schools were scattered about the foot of St. Genevieve. The Jews had a school, and—mark the liberality of the time—there was, or had been until a very few years before, a school for women; it was conducted by the wife and daughters of famous Master Manegold, of Alsace, women who were well versed in Scripture, and ‘most distinguished in philosophy,’ says Muratori.

But AbÉlard went straight to the centre of Paris, to the cloistral enclosure under the shadow of old Notre Dame,[5] where was the first episcopal school in the kingdom, and one of the first masters in Christendom. William of Champeaux was a comparatively young master, who had forced his way into high places by sheer ability. He was held to be the first dialectician in France, and ‘almost the first royal councillor.’ In the great philosophic controversy of the period he was the leader of the orthodox school. The Bishop of Paris had brought him to the island-city, and vested him with the dignity of archdeacon of the cathedral and scholasticus (chancellor or rector) and master of the episcopal school. So high was the repute of his ability and his doctrine that, so Fleury says, he was called ‘the pillar of doctors.’ From an obscure local centre of instruction he had lifted the Parisian school into a commanding position, and had attracted scholars from many lands. And he was then in the prime of life. Within a few months AbÉlard made his authority totter, and set his reputation on the wane. In six or seven years he drove him, in shame and humiliation, from his chair, after a contest that filled Christendom with its echoes.

Let us repeat that William of Champeaux was then in the prime of life, or only ten years older than AbÉlard. There are those who talk of the ‘venerable teacher’ and the audacious, irreverent stripling. This picture of the conflict is historically ridiculous. Rousselot and Michaud, two of the most careful students of Champeaux’s life, give the date of his birth as 1068 and 1070, respectively. He had fought his way with early success into the first chair in Christendom; he cannot have been much older than AbÉlard when he secured it. AbÉlard had an immeasurably greater ability; he was frankly conscious of the fact; and he seems promptly to have formed the perfectly legitimate design of ousting William—whose philosophy certainly seemed absurd to him—and mounting the great chair of Notre Dame.

Such a thought would naturally take shape during the course of the following twelve months. The only indication that AbÉlard gives us is to the effect that William was well disposed towards him at first, though there is no foundation in recorded fact for the assertion that William invited the youth to his house, but they were gradually involved in a warm dialectical encounter. AbÉlard was not only a handsome and talented youth (which facts he candidly tells us himself), but he was a practised dialectician. The lectures of those untiring days lasted for hours, and might be interrupted at any moment by a question from a scholar. Moreover, William was principally occupied with dialectics, and it would be quite impossible—if it were desired—to instruct youths in the art of disputing, without letting them exercise their powers on the hosts of problems which served the purpose of illustration. Hence the young Breton must have quickly brought his keen rapier into play. The consciousness of power and the adolescent vanity of exhibiting it, both generously developed in AbÉlard, would prepare the way for ambition. Question and answer soon led on to a personal contest.

But there was a stronger source of provocation, and here it will be necessary to cast a hurried glance at the great controversy of the hour. Cousin has said that the scholastic philosophy was born of a phrase that Boetius translated out of Porphyry. It is a good epigram; but it has the disadvantage of most epigrams—it is false. The controversy about genera and species is by no means of vital importance to the scholastic philosophy, as AbÉlard himself has said. However, there is much truth in the assertion that this celebrated controversy, as a specific question, may be traced entirely to Porphyry.

Boetius was the chief author read in the early mediÆval schools. Amongst other works they had his Latin translation of Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle, and in one corner of this volume some roving scholastic had been arrested by the allusion to the old Greek controversy about genera and species. To put it shortly: we have mental pictures of individual men, and we have also the idea of man in general, an idea which may be applied to each and all of the individual men we know. The grave problem that agitated the centuries was, whether not only the individual human beings who live and move about us, but also this ‘general man’ or species, had an existence outside the mind. The modern photographer has succeeded in taking composite photographs. A number of human likenesses are super-imposed on the same plate, so that at length individual features are blended, and there emerges only the vague portrait of ‘a man.’ The question that vexed the mediÆval soul was, whether this human type, as distinct from the individual mortals we see in the flesh, had a real existence.

In whatever terms the problem be stated, it is sure to appear almost childish to the non-philosophical reader; as, indeed, it appeared to certain scholars even of that time. John of Salisbury, with his British common sense and impatience of dialectical subtlety, petulantly spoke of it as ‘the ancient question, in the solution of which the world has grown grey, and more time has been consumed than the CÆsars gave to the conquest and dominion of the globe, more money wasted than Croesus counted in all his wealth.’ But listen to another Briton, and one with the fulness of modern life outspread before him. Archbishop Roger Vaughan, defending the attitude of the enthusiasts in his Thomas of Aquin, says: ‘Kill ideas, blast theories, explode the archetypes of things, and the age of brute force is not far distant.’ And Rousselot declares, in his Philosophie du Moyen Age, that the problem of universals is ‘the most exalted and the most difficult question in the whole of philosophy.’ Poor philosophy! will be the average layman’s comment. However, though neither ancient Greeks nor mediÆval formalists were guilty of the confusion of ideas and ideals which Dom Vaughan betrays, the schoolmen had contrived to connect the question in a curious fashion with the mystery of the Trinity.

When, therefore, Jean Roscelin began to probe the question with his dialectical weapons, the ears of the orthodox were opened wide. The only position which was thought compatible with the faith was realism—the notion that the species or the genus was a reality, distinct from the individuals that belonged to it, and outside the mind that conceived it. By and by it was whispered in the schools, and wandering scholars bore the rumour to distant monasteries and bishoprics, that Roscelin denied the real existence of these universals. Indeed, in his scorn of the orthodox position, he contemptuously declared them to be ‘mere words’; neither in the world of reality, nor in the mind itself, was there anything corresponding to them; they were nothing but an artifice of human speech. Europe was ablaze at once. St. Anselm assailed the heretic from the theological side; William of Champeaux stoutly led the opposition, and the defence of realism, from the side of philosophy. Such was the question of the hour, such the condition of the world of thought, when Pierre AbÉlard reached the cloistral school at Paris.

If you stated the problem clearly to a hundred men and women who were unacquainted with philosophic speculations, ninety-nine of them would probably answer that these universals were neither mere words nor external realities, but general or generalised ideas—composite photographs, to use the interesting comparison of Mr. Galton, in the camera of the mind. That was the profound discovery with which AbÉlard shattered the authority of his master, revolutionised the thought of his age, and sent his fame to the ends of the earth. He had introduced a new instrument into the dialectical world, common sense, like the little girl in the fairy tale, who was brought to see the prince in his imaginary clothes.[6] This, at least, AbÉlard achieved, and it was a brilliant triumph for the unknown youth: he swept for ever out of the world of thought, in spite of almost all the scholars of Christendom, that way of thinking and of speaking which is known as realism. I am familiar with the opinion of scholastic thinkers in this question, from the thirteenth century to the present day. It differs verbally, but not substantially, from the conceptualism of AbÉlard. The stripling of twenty or twenty-one had enunciated the opinion which the world of thought was to adopt.

We still have some of the arguments with which AbÉlard assailed his chief—but enough of philosophy, let us proceed with the story. Once more the swift and animated years are condensed into a brief phrase by the gloomy autobiographist; though there is a momentary flash of the old spirit when he says of the earlier stage that he ‘seemed at times to have the victory in the dispute,’ and when he describes the final issue in the words of Ovid,

He soon found the weak points in William’s armour, and proceeded to attack him with the uncalculating passion of youth. It was not long before the friendly master was converted into a bitter, life-long enemy; and that, he wearily writes, ‘was the beginning of my calamities.’ Possibly: but it is not unlikely that he had had a similar experience at Locmenach. However that may be, it was a fatal victory. Ten years afterwards we find William in closest intimacy and daily intercourse with Bernard of Clairvaux.

Most of the scholars at Notre Dame were incensed at the success of AbÉlard. In those earlier days the gathering was predominantly clerical; the more so, on account of William’s championship of orthodoxy. But as the controversy proceeded, and rumour bore its echo to the distant schools, the number and the diversity of the scholars increased. Many of the youths took the side of the handsome, brilliant young noble, and encouraged him to resist. He decided to open a school.

There was little organisation in the schools at that period—the university not taking shape until fully sixty years afterwards (CompayrÉ)—and AbÉlard would hardly need a ‘license’ for the purpose, outside the immediate precincts of the cloister. But William was angry and powerful. It were more discreet, at least, not to create a direct and flagrant opposition to him. The little group of scholars moved to Melun, and raised a chair for their new master in that royal town. It was thirty miles away, down the valley of the Seine; but a thirty mile walk was a trifle in the days when railways were unknown, and William soon noticed a leakage in his class. Moreover, Melun was an important town, the king spending several months there every year. William made strenuous efforts to have the new academy suppressed, but he seems to have quarrelled with some of the courtiers, and these took up the cause of the new master of noble rank.

When AbÉlard saw the powerlessness of the chancellor of Notre Dame, he decided to come a little nearer. There was another fortified and royal town, Corbeil by name, about half-way to Paris, and thither he transferred his chair and his followers. The move was made, he tells us, for the convenience of his students. His reputation was already higher than William’s, and the duel of the masters had led to a noisy conflict between their respective followers. Corbeil being a comfortable day’s walk from Paris, there was a constant stream of rival pupils flowing between the two. In the schools and the taverns, on the roads and the bridges, nothing was heard but the increasing jargon of the junior realists and conceptualists. Besides the great problem, dialectics had countless lesser ones that would furnish argumentative material for an eternity. ‘Whether the pig that is being driven to market is held by the man or the rope’; ‘whether a shield that is white on one side and black on the other may be called either black or white,’ and problems of that kind, are not to be compared in point of depth and fecundity with such mere matters of fact as the origin of species. But the long and severe strain had gravely impaired AbÉlard’s health; he was compelled to close his school, and return to Brittany. William was not the only one who rejoiced. The Church was beginning to view with some alarm the spread of the new doctrine and the new spirit. Cynical rivals were complaining that ‘the magician’ had brought ‘a plague of frogs’ on the land.

AbÉlard tells us that he remained ‘for several years almost cut off from France.’ RÉmusat thinks it was probably during this period that he studied under Roscelin, but there is now little room for doubt that his intercourse with the famous nominalist falls in the earlier years. Much more probable is it that we should assign his relations to Tirric of Chartres to the later date. The substance of the anecdote that was found on the margin of the Ratisbon manuscript seems to accord admirably with AbÉlard’s circumstances in the period we have now reached. The question, however, will interest few, beyond the narrow circle of historical specialists. He himself is silent about the few years of rest in the Breton castle, merely stating that he returned to Paris when he had recovered his health. We have to remember that the autobiography he has left us was entitled by him the ‘Story of my Calamities.’ It is not the full presentment of the swiftly moving drama of the life of AbÉlard. He speaks of joy only when it is the prelude to sorrow, or when some faint spark of the old ardour leaps into life once more.

When AbÉlard at length returned to the arena, he found a significant change. William had deserted the cloistral school. In a solitary spot down the river, beyond the foot of the eastern slope of St. Genevieve, was a small priory that had belonged to the monks of St. Victor of Marseilles. Thither, says Franklin, William had retired ‘to hide his despair and the shame of his defeat.’ The controversy had by no means been decided against him yet. Indeed, William’s biographers loyally contend that he was sincerely touched by the religious spirit of the age, and adopted the monastic life from the purest of motives. AbÉlard, on the other hand, declares that the inspiration came from a hope of exchanging the chair of Notre Dame for that of an episcopal see. AbÉlard is scarcely an ideal witness, though the passage was written nearly thirty years afterwards, yet his interpretation is probably correct; at least, if we take it as a partial explanation. William was shrewd enough to see that his supremacy in the scholastic world was doomed, and that the best alternative was a bishopric. He was still young (about thirty-eight, apparently) and ambitious; in his character of archdeacon, he was already only one step removed from the episcopate; and he had influence and qualifications above the average. It is scarcely correct to say, as Gervaise does, that at that time ‘the monastery was the recognised path to the episcopacy,’ on account of the wide degradation of the secular clergy. Their degradation was assuredly deep and widespread, but so were simony and electoral corruption. We generally find, in the old chronicles, one or other of the deceased bishop’s archdeacons ascending the vacant throne. However, William of Champeaux was a religious man; for the pious the surest path to the episcopate passed through the monastery.

Whatever be the correct analysis of the motive—and it was probably a complex feeling, including all the impulses suggested, which William himself scarcely cared to examine too narrowly—the fact is that in the year 1108 he donned the black cassock of the canon regular, and settled with a few companions in the priory of St. Victor. The life of the canons regular was a compromise between that of the sterner monks and the unascetic life of the secular canons and secular clergy. They followed, on the whole, the well-known rule of St. Augustine. They arose at midnight to chant their matins, but, unlike the Cistercians, they returned to bed as soon as the ‘office’ was over. They ate meat three times a week, and were not restricted in the taking of fish and eggs. They had linen underclothing, and much friendly intercourse with each other, and they were less rigidly separated from the world. Altogether, not too rough a path to higher dignities—or to heaven—and (a not unimportant point) one that did not lead far from Paris.

Such was the foundation of one of the most famous schools of mystic theology. The abbey that William instituted, before he was removed to the coveted dignity in 1113, has attained an immortality in the world of thought through such inmates as Richard and Hugh of St. Victor.

AbÉlard’s first impulse on hearing the news was to repair at once to the cloistral school. He found the chair occupied. William had not, in fact, resigned his title of scholastic, and he had placed a substitute in the chair. It was a poor ruse, for there was now no master in Christendom who could long endure the swift, keen shafts of the ambitious Breton. AbÉlard would quickly make the chair of Notre Dame uncomfortable for the most pachydermatous substitute; and he seems to have commenced the edifying task at once, when he heard that the unfortunate William had set up a chair of rhetoric at St. Victor. Like a hawk, Master Peter descended on the ill-fated canon. The Bishop of Mans had, it appears, stimulated William into a renewal of activity, and he had chosen that apparently safe section of the trivium, the art of rhetoric.

With what must have been a mock humility, AbÉlard went down the river each day with the crowd of monks and clerks to receive instruction in rhetoric from the new Prior of St. Victor’s. Deutsch remarks, with Teutonic gravity, that we do not read of a reconciliation between the two. Nor do we find that AbÉlard had been ‘converted’ to the spirit of Robert of Arbrissel or Bernard of Clairvaux during his retirement at Pallet. AbÉlard, now nearly thirty years of age, could have taught William the art of rhetoric with more profit than he himself was likely to derive from William’s prÆlectiones. His obvious aim was to break William’s connection with Paris and with Notre Dame. The high and gentle spirit of these latter days, that studies the feelings of an antagonist, and casts aside an ambition that would lead over the fallen fame of a fellow-man, did not commend itself to the mediÆval mind.

And so the contest ran on, until at length a new rumour was borne over the roads and into the schools of Europe. The ‘pillar of doctors’ was broken—had fallen beyond restoration. Guillaume de Champeaux had changed his doctrine on the question of universals. Swiftly the story ran over hill and dale—they were days when the words of masters outstripped the deeds of kings and the fall of dynasties: the champion of realism had so far yielded to AbÉlard’s pressure as to modify his thesis materially. For long years he had held that the universal was essentially one and the same in all its individuals; now he admitted that it was only indifferently, or individually, identical.[7] The death of King Philip was a matter of minor interest to a world that brooded night and day over the question of genera and species.

AbÉlard felt that he need strive no longer in the hall of the poor canon regular, and he turned his attention to the actual occupant of the chair of Notre Dame. We need not delay in determining the name of the luckless master, whether it was Robert of Melun, as some think, or Adam of the Little Bridge, or Peter the Eater—poor man! a sad name to come down the ages with; it was merely an allusion to his voracious reading. He had the saving grace of common-sense, whatever other gifts he was burdened with. As soon as he saw the collapse of William’s authority and the dispersal of his pupils, he resolved to decline a contest with the irresistible Breton. He voluntarily yielded the chair to AbÉlard, and took his place on the hay-strewn floor amongst the new worshippers. Such a consummation, however, was not to the taste of the angered scholastic. A substitute had, it seems, the power to subdelegate his license, so that the installation of AbÉlard in the cathedral school was correct and canonical. But William was still scholastic of the place, and he had an obvious remedy. Robert, or Peter, or whoever it may have been, depended on him, and he at once set to work to recall the delegation. AbÉlard says that he trumped up a false and most obnoxious charge against the intermediary. He did, at all events, succeed in changing the appointment, and thus rendering AbÉlard’s subdelegated license null. The new-comer was a man of different temper, so that AbÉlard only occupied the great chair ‘for a few days.’ He could not teach in or about the episcopal school without a ‘respondent,’ and he therefore once more transferred his chair to Melun.[8]

The Prior of St. Victor’s had won a pyrrhic victory. Whether or no AbÉlard had learned a lesson from him, and began in his turn to practise the subtle art of diplomacy, we cannot say, but Paris was soon too warm for the prior. The lawless students respected his authority no longer, and clamoured for AbÉlard. The king was dead: long live the king! They discovered that William’s conversion was peculiarly incomplete. For a man who had felt an inner call to leave the world, he still evinced a fairly keen interest in its concerns. William found their ‘ceaseless raillery’ intolerable. He fled, says Archbishop Roger Vaughan, ‘to hide his shame in a distant monastery.’ AbÉlard merely records that ‘he transferred his community to a certain town at some distance from the city.’ The path to Paris lay open once more.