Joseph McCabe

PROGRESS OF THE ACADEMIC WAR

When AbÉlard and his admirers returned from Melun to Paris, they found William’s new successor sitting resolutely in the chair of Notre Dame. From some manuscripts of the ‘Story of my Calamities’ it appears that he had won repute by his lectures on Priscian, the Latin grammarian. He had thus been able to augment the little band who remained faithful to William and to orthodoxy with a certain number of personal admirers. Clearly, the episcopal school must be taken by storm. And so, says AbÉlard, his pen leaping forward more quickly at the recollection, twenty years afterwards, ‘we pitched our camp on the hill of St. Genevieve.’

During the century that preceded the coalescence of the schools into a university, St. Genevieve was the natural home of rebellion. Roscelin had taught there. Joscelin the Red, another famous nominalist, was teaching there. The ‘feminists’ had raised their tabernacle there; the Jews their synagogue. From its physical advantages the hill naturally presented itself to the mind of every master who had designs on the episcopal school or the episcopal philosophy. Its gentle, sunny flanks offered ideal situations for schools, and the students were breaking away more and more from the vicinity of the cloister and the subordination it expressed. A new town was rapidly forming at its foot, by the river, and on the northern slope; a picturesque confusion of schools, chapels, brothels, taverns, and hospices. It was the cradle of the famed Latin Quarter—very Latin in those days, when the taverns swung out their Latin signs, ‘taverna de grangia,’ ‘ad turbotum,’ ‘apud duos cygnos,’ and so forth, and the songs that came from the latticed, vine-clothed arbours were half French, half Celtic-Latin.

AbÉlard did not open a private school on ‘the hill.’ He delivered his assault on ‘the island’ from the abbey of St. Genevieve at the summit, the site now occupied by the Pantheon. There is nothing in the least remarkable in the abbey opening its gates to one who was obviously bent on assailing the great ecclesiastical school, and who was already regarded as the parent of a new and freer generation of students. The secular canons had little deference for authority and little love of asceticism at that period. St. Norbert had fruitlessly tried to reform them, and had been forced to embody his ideal in a new order. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, the classical censor of the twelfth century, makes bitter comment on their hawks and horses, their jesters and singing-girls, and their warmer than spiritual affection for their sisters in religion, the ‘canonesses.’ It was natural enough that an abbey of secular canons should welcome the witty and brilliant young noble—and the wealth that accompanied him.

We have little information about the abbey at that precise date, but history has much to say of its affairs some thirty or forty years afterwards, and thus affords a retrospective light. In the year 1146 Innocent the Second paid a visit to Paris. The relics of St. Genevieve were one of the treasures of the city, and thither his holiness went with his retinue, and King Louis and his followers. In the crush that was caused in the abbey church, the servants of the canons quarrelled with those of the court, and one of them was unlucky enough to bring his staff down with some force on the royal pate. That was a death-blow to the gay life of the abbey. Paris, through the abbot of St. Denis, who was also the first royal councillor, quickly obtained royal and papal assent to the eviction of the canons, and they were soon summarily turned out on the high road. They did not yield without a struggle, it is true. Many a night afterwards, when the canons regular who replaced them were in the midst of their solemn midnight chant, the evicted broke in the doors of the church, and made such turmoil inside, that the chanters could not hear each other across the choir. And when they did eventually depart for less rigorous surroundings, they thoughtfully took with them a good deal of the gold from Genevieve’s tomb and other ecclesiastical treasures, which were not reclaimed until after many adventures.

To this abbey of St. Genevieve, then, the militant master led his followers, and he began at once to withdraw the students from Notre Dame, as he candidly tells us. If Bishop Galo and his chapter found their cloistral school deserted, they might be induced to consider AbÉlard’s gifts and influence. So the war went on merrily between the two camps. The masters fulminated against each other; the students ran from school to school, and argued it out on the bridge and in the taverns, and brought questions to their logical conclusion in the PrÉ-aux-clercs.[9] There was certainly, as we saw previously, ample room for litigation in the problems of mediÆval dialectics. John of Salisbury studied dialectics under AbÉlard at St. Genevieve (though not in the abbey) at a later date, and he tells us that when he returned to Paris twelve years afterwards he found his dialectical friends just where he had left them. ‘They had not added the smallest proposition,’ he says contemptuously. Little John preferred ‘philology,’ as they called classical studies in his day.

We get a curious insight into the school-life of the period in the Life of Saint Goswin. Goswin of Douai—whom we shall meet again once or twice—was studying in the school of Master Joscelin the Red, down the hill. He was a youthful saint of the regulation pattern: had borne the aureole from his cradle. About this time he is described as brimming over with precocious zeal for righteousness, and astounded at the impunity with which AbÉlard poured out his novelties. Why did not some one silence ‘this dog who barked at the truth’? Already, the authors of the saint’s life—two monks of the twelfth century—say, ‘AbÉlard’s hand was against every man, and every man’s hand against him,’ yet no one seemed inclined ‘to thrash him with the stick of truth.’ The young saint could not understand it. He went to Master Joscelin at length, and declared that he was going to do the work of the Lord himself. Joscelin is reported to have endeavoured to dissuade him with a feeling description of AbÉlard’s rhetorical power; we do not know, however, that Joscelin was void of all sense of humour. In any case the saintly youngster of ‘modest stature’ with the ‘blue-grey eyes and light air’ had a good measure of courage. It will be interesting, perhaps, to read the issue in the serio-comic language of the times.

‘With a few companions he ascended the hill of St. Genevieve, prepared, like David, to wage single conflict with the Goliath who sat there thundering forth strange novelties of opinion to his followers and ridiculing the sound doctrine of the wise.

‘When he arrived at the battlefield—that is, when he entered the school—he found the master giving his lecture and instilling his novelties into his hearers. But as soon as he began to speak, the master cast an angry look at him; knowing himself to be a warrior from his youth, and noticing that the scholar was beginning to feel nervous, he despised him in his heart. The youth was, indeed, fair and handsome of appearance, but slender of body and short of stature. And when the proud one was urged to reply, he said: “Hold thy peace, and disturb not the course of my lecture.”’

The story runs, however, that AbÉlard’s students represented to him that the youth was of greater importance than he seemed to be, and persuaded him to take up the glove. ‘Very well,’ said AbÉlard, and it is not improbable, ‘let him say what he has to say.’ It was, of course, unfortunate for Goliath, as the young champion of orthodoxy, aided by the Holy Spirit, completely crushed him in the midst of his own pupils.

‘The strong man thus bound by him who had entered his house, the victor, who had secured the Protean-changing monster with the unfailing cord of truth, descended the hill. When they had come to the spot where their companions awaited them in the distant schools [i.e. when they had got to a safe distance from AbÉlard’s pupils], they burst forth in pÆans of joy and triumph: humbled was the tower of pride, downcast was the wall of contumacy, fallen was he that had scoffed at Israel, broken was the anvil of the smiter,’ etc. etc.

The course of events does not seem to have been much influenced by this breaking of the ‘anvil.’ Joscelin was soon compelled to seek fresh pastures; he also found ultimate consolation in a bishopric, and a share in the condemnation of AbÉlard. The commentator of Priscian must then have received the full force of AbÉlard’s keen dialectical skill and mordant satire. His students began to fall away to the rival camp in large numbers. William was informed in his distant solitude, and he returned (‘impudenter,’ says AbÉlard) in haste to St. Victor’s. He opened his old school in the priory, and for a time Paris rang more loudly than ever with the dialectical battle. But William’s intervention proved fatal to his cause. The substitute had kept a handful of students about him, AbÉlard says, but even they disappeared when William returned. The poor Priscianist could think of nothing better than to develop ‘a call to the monastic life,’ and he obeyed it with admirable alacrity. However, just as AbÉlard was about to enter on the last stage of the conflict, he was recalled to Pallet by his mother.

The eleventh century had witnessed a strong revival of the monastic spirit. When men came at length to feel the breath of an ideal in their souls, the sight of the fearful disorder of the age stimulated them to the sternest sacrifices. They believed that he who said, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,’ was God, that he meant what he said, and that he spoke the message to all the ages. So there uprose a number of fervent preachers, whose voices thrilled with a strange passion, and they burned the Christ-message into the souls of men and women. In Brittany and Normandy Robert of Arbrissel and two or three others had been at work years before St. Bernard began his apostolate. They had broken up thousands of homes—usually those which were helping most to sweeten the life of the world—and sent husband and wife to spend their days apart in monasteries and nunneries. The modern world speaks of the harshness of it; in their thoughts it was only a salutary separation for a time, making wholly certain their speedy reunion in a not too ethereal heaven. In the great abbey of Fontevraud, founded by Robert of Arbrissel in the year 1100, there were nearly four thousand nuns, a large proportion of whom were married women. Even in their own day the monastic orators were strongly opposed on account of their appalling dissolution of domestic ties. Roscelin attacked Robert of Arbrissel very warmly on the ground that he received wives into his monasteries against the will of their husbands, and in defiance of the command of the Bishop of Angers to release them: he boldly repeats the charge in a letter to the Bishop of Paris in 1121. Not only sober thinkers and honest husbands would resent the zeal of the Apostle of Brittany; the courtly, and the ecclesiastical and monastic, gallants of the time would be equally angry with him. We have another curious objection in some of the writers of the period. Answering the question why men were called to the monastic life so many centuries before women, they crudely affirm that the greater frailty of the women had made them less competent to meet the moral dangers of the cenobitic life. Thus from one cause or other a number of calumnies, still found in the chronicles, were in circulation about Robert of Arbrissel.[10] It would be interesting to know what half-truths there were at the root of these charges; there may have been such, in those days, quite consistently with perfect religious sincerity. In the martyrologies of some of the monastic orders, there are women mentioned with high praise who disguised themselves as men, and lived for years in monasteries. It is noteworthy that mediÆval folk worked none of those miracles at the tomb of Robert of Arbrissel that they wrought at the tombs of St. Bernard and St. Norbert. He is not a canonised saint.

However, in spite of both responsible and irresponsible opposition, Robert of Arbrissel, Vitalis the Norman, and other nervous orators, had caused an extensive movement from the hearth to the cloister throughout Brittany and Normandy, such as St. Bernard inaugurated in France later on. Home after home—chÂteau or chaumiÈre—was left to the children, and they who had sworn companionship in life and death cheerfully parted in the pathetic trust of a reunion. AbÉlard’s father was touched by the sacred fire, and entered a monastery. His wife had to follow his example. Whatever truth there was in the words of Roscelin, the Church certainly commanded that the arrangement should be mutual, unless the lady were of an age or a piety beyond suspicion, as St. Francis puts it in his ‘Rule.’ Lucia had agreed to take the veil after her husband’s departure. This was the news that withheld the hand of ‘the smiter’ on the point of dealing a decisive blow, and he hastened down to Brittany to bid farewell to his ‘most dear mother.’ Not only in this expression, but in the fact of his making the journey at all in the circumstances, we have evidence of a profound affection. Since he had long ago abdicated his rights of primogeniture, there cannot have been an element of business in the visit to Pallet.

He was not long absent from Paris. The news reached him in Brittany that the prior had at length discovered a dignified retreat from the field. Soon after AbÉlard’s departure the bishopric of ChÂlons-sur-Marne became vacant, and William was nominated for the see. He bade a fond farewell to Paris and to dialectics. From that date his ability was devoted to the safe extravagances of mystic theology, under the safe tutorship of St. Bernard.[11] He had left his pupil Gilduin to replace him at St. Victor, and the school quickly assumed a purely theological character; but the luckless chair of Notre Dame he entrusted to the care of Providence.

AbÉlard now formed a resolution which has given rise to much speculation. Instead of stepping at once into the chair of the cloistral school, which he admits was offered to him, he goes off to some distance from Paris for the purpose of studying theology. It is the general opinion of students of his life that his main object in doing so was to make more secure his progress towards the higher ecclesiastical dignities. That he had such ambition, and was not content with the mere chair and chancellorship of the cloistral school, is quite clear. In his clouded and embittered age he is said, on the high authority of Peter of Cluny, to have discovered even that final virtue of humility. There are those who prefer him in the days of his frank, buoyant pride and ambition. If he had been otherwise in the days of the integrity of his nature, he would have been an intolerable prig. He was the ablest thinker and speaker in France. He was observant enough to perceive it, and so little artificial as to acknowledge it, and act in accordance. Yet there was probably more than the counsel of ambition in his resolution. From the episode of Goswin’s visit to St. Genevieve it is clear that whispers of faith, theology, and heresy were already breaking upon the freedom of his dialectical speculations. He must have recalled the fate of Scotus Erigena, of BÉrenger, of Roscelin, and other philosophic thinkers. Philosophic thought was subtly linked with ecclesiastical dogma. He who contemplated a life of speculation and teaching could not afford to be ignorant of the ecclesiastical claims on and limitations of his sphere. Such thoughts can scarcely have been unknown to him during the preceding year or two, and it seems just and reasonable to trace the issue of them in his resolution. He himself merely says: ‘I returned chiefly for the purpose of studying divinity.’ Hausrath quotes a passage from his Introductio ad theologiam with the intention of making AbÉlard ascribe his resolution to the suggestion of his admirers. On careful examination the passage seems to refer to his purpose of writing on theology, not to his initial purpose of studying it.

AbÉlard would naturally look about for the first theological teacher in France. There were, in point of fact, few theological chairs at that time, but there was at least one French theologian who had a high reputation throughout Christendom. Pupil of St. Anselm of Canterbury at Bec, canon and dean of the town where he taught, Anselm of Laon counted so many brilliant scholars amongst his followers that he has been entitled the ‘doctor of doctors.’ William of Champeaux, William of Canterbury, and a large number of distinguished masters, sat at his feet. His scholia to the Vulgate were in use in the schools for centuries. He and his brother Raoul had made Laon a most important focus of theological activity for more countries than France. England was well represented there. John of Salisbury frequently has occasion to illustrate the fame and magnitude of the cathedral school.

Anselm had been teaching for forty years when AbÉlard, aetat. thirty-four, appeared amidst the crowd of his hearers. We can well conceive the fluttering of wings that must have occurred, but Laon was not Paris, and Anselm was not the man to enter upon an argumentative conflict with the shrewd-tongued adventurer. Two incidents of contemporary life at Laon, in which Anselm figured, will be the best means of illustrating the character of the theologian. Abbot Guibertus, of that period, has left us a delightful work ‘De vita sua,’ from which we learn much about Laon and Anselm. The treasure of the cathedral was entrusted, it seems, to seven guardians—four clerics and three laymen. One of these guardians, a Canon Anselm, was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He purloined a good deal of the treasure; and when the goldsmith, his accomplice, was detected, and turned king’s evidence, Anselm denied the story, challenged the goldsmith to the usual duel, and won.[12] The canon was encouraged, and shortly set up as an expert burglar. One dark, stormy night he went with his ‘ladders and machines’ to a tower in which much treasure was kept, and ‘cracked’ it. There was dreadful ado in the city next day; most horrible of all, the burglar had stolen a golden dove which contained some of the hair and some of the milk of the Virgin Mary. In the uncertainty the sapient Master Anselm (no relation, apparently, of Canon Anselm Beessus, the burglar and cathedral treasurer) was invited to speak. His advice largely reveals the man. Those were the days, it must be remembered, when the defects of the detective service were compensated by a willingness and activity of the higher powers which are denied to this sceptical age. When their slender police resources were exhausted, the accused was handed over to a priest, to be prepared, by prayer and a sober diet of bread, herbs, salt, and water, for the public ordeal. On the fourth day priests and people repaired to the church, and when the mass was over, and the vested priests had prostrated themselves in the sanctuary, the accused purged himself of the charge or proved his guilt by carrying or walking on a nine foot bar of heated iron, plunging his arms ‘for an ell and a half’ into boiling water, or being bodily immersed in a huge tank, cold, and carefully blessed and consecrated.

These are familiar facts. The difficulty at Laon was that there was no accused to operate on. The Solomon Laudunensis was therefore called into judgment, and his proposal certainly smacks of the thoroughness of the systematic theologian. A baby was to be taken from each parish of the town, and tried by the ordeal of immersion. When the guilty parish had been thus discovered, each family in it was to purge itself by sending an infant representative to the tank. When the guilt had been thus fastened on a certain house, all its inmates were to be put to the ordeal.[13]

We see Anselm in a very different light in an incident that occurred a year or two before AbÉlard’s arrival. Through the influence of the King of England and the perennial power of gold a wholly unworthy bishop had been thrust upon the people of Laon. Illiterate, worldly, and much addicted to military society, he was extremely distasteful to Anselm and the theologians. The crisis came when the English king, Henry I., tried to levy a tax on the people of Laon. The bishop supported his patron; Anselm and others sternly opposed the tax in the name of the people. Feeling ran so high that the bishop was at length brutally murdered by some of the townsfolk, and the cathedral was burned to the ground. Anselm immediately, and almost alone, went forth to denounce the frenzied mob, and had the unfortunate prelate—left for the dogs to devour before his house—quietly buried.

Such was the man whom AbÉlard chose as his next, and last, ‘teacher.’ In the circumstances revealed in the above anecdotes it would have been decidedly dangerous to attack Anselm in the manner that had succeeded so well at Notre Dame. There is, however, no just reason for thinking that AbÉlard had formed an intention of that kind. No doubt, it is impossible to conceive AbÉlard in the attitude of one who seriously expected instruction from a master. Yet it would be unjust to assume that he approached the class-room of the venerable, authoritative theologian in the same spirit in which he had approached William of Champeaux’s lectures on rhetoric. We do not find it recorded that he made any attempt to assail directly the high position of the old man. It was sufficient for the purpose we may ascribe to him that he should be able to state in later years that he had frequented the lectures of Anselm of Laon.

With whatever frame of mind the critic came to Laon, he was not long in discovering the defects of Anselm’s teaching. Anselm had one gift, a good memory, and its fruit, patristic erudition. The fame that was borne over seas and mountains was founded mainly on the marvellous wealth of patristic opinion which he applied to every text of Scripture. There was no individuality, no life, in his work. To AbÉlard the mnemonic feat was a mechanical matter; and indeed, he probably cared little at that time how St. Ambrose or St. Cyril may have interpreted this or that text. Little as he would be disposed to trust the fame of masters after his experience, he tells us that he was disappointed. He found the ‘fig-tree to be without fruit,’ fair and promising as it had seemed. The lamp, that was said to illumine theological Christendom, ‘merely filled the house with smoke, not light.’ He found, in the words of his favourite Lucan,

and he determined ‘not to remain in this idleness under its shade very long.’ With his usual heedlessness he frankly expressed his estimate of the master to his fellow pupils.

One day when they were joking together at the end of the lecture, and the students were twitting him with his neglect of the class, he quietly dropped a bomb to the effect that he thought masters of theology were superfluous. With the text and the ordinary glosses any man of fair intelligence could study theology for himself. He was contemptuously invited to give a practical illustration of his theory. AbÉlard took the sneer seriously, and promised to lecture on any book of Scripture they cared to choose. Continuing the joke, they chose the curious piece of Oriental work that has the title of Ezechiel. Once more AbÉlard took them seriously, asked for the text and gloss, and invited them to attend his first lecture, on the most abstruse of the prophets, on the following day. Most of them persisted in treating the matter as a joke, but a few appeared at the appointed spot (in Anselm’s own territory) on the following day. They listened in deep surprise to a profound lecture on the prophet from the new and self-consecrated ‘theologus.’ The next day there was a larger audience; the lecture was equally astonishing. In fine, AbÉlard was soon in full sail as a theological lector of the first rank, and a leakage was noticed in Anselm’s lecture hall.

AbÉlard’s theological success at Laon was brief, if brilliant. Two of the leading scholars, Alberic of Rheims and Lotulphe of Novare, urged Anselm to suppress the new movement at once. Seven years later we shall meet Alberic and Lotulphe playing an important part in the tragedy of AbÉlard’s life; later still Alberic is found in intimacy with St. Bernard. The episode of Laon must not be forgotten. Probably Anselm needed little urging, with the fate of William of Champeaux fresh in his ears. At all events he gave willing audience to the suggestion that a young master, without due theological training, might at any moment bring the disgrace of heresy on the famous school. He ‘had the impudence to suppress me,’ AbÉlard has the impudence to say. The students are said to have been much angered by Anselm’s interference, but there was no St. Genevieve at Laon—happily, perhaps,—and AbÉlard presently departed for Paris, leaving the field to the inglorious ‘Pompey the Great.’