A new age began for Paris and for learning, when Peter AbÉlard accepted the chair of the episcopal school. It would be a difficult task to measure the influence he had in hastening the foundation of the university—as difficult as to estimate the enduring effect of his teaching on Catholic theology. There were other streams flowing into the life of the period, and they would have expanded and deepened it, independently of the activity of the one brilliant teacher. The work of a group of less gifted, though highly gifted, teachers had started a current of mental life which would have continued and broadened without the aid of AbÉlard. Life was entering upon a swifter course in all its reaches. Moreover, the slender rill of Greek thought, which formed the inspiration of the eleventh century, was beginning to increase. Through Alexandria, through Arabia, through Spain, the broad stream of the wisdom of the Greeks had been slowly travelling with the centuries. In the twelfth century it was crossing the Pyrenees, and stealing into the jealous schools of Europe. The homeless Jew was bringing the strong, swift, noble spirit of the ‘infidel Moor’ into a hideous world, that was blind with self-complacency. The higher works of Aristotle (the early Middle Ages had only his logic), the words of Plato, and so many others, were drifting into France. Christian scholars were even beginning to think of going to see with their own eyes this boasted civilisation of the infidel.
Yet it is clear that AbÉlard stands for a mighty force in the story of development. At the end of the eleventh century Paris was an island; at the end of the twelfth century it was a city of two hundred thousand souls, walled, paved, with several fine buildings and a fair organisation. At the end of the eleventh century the schools of Paris, scattered here and there, counted a few hundred pupils, chiefly French; at the end of the twelfth century the University of Paris must have numbered not far short of ten thousand scholars. Let us see how much of this was effected by AbÉlard.
The pupil who had left Paris when both William and AbÉlard disappeared in 1113 would find a marvellous change on returning to it about 1116 or 1117. He would find the lecture hall and the cloister and the quadrangle, under the shadow of the great cathedral, filled with as motley a crowd of youths and men as any scene in France could show. Little groups of French and Norman and Breton nobles chattered together in their bright silks and fur-tipped mantles, and with slender swords dangling from embroidered belts; ‘shaven in front like thieves, and growing luxuriant, curly tresses at the back like harlots,’ growls Jacques de Vitry, who saw them, vying with each other in the length and crookedness of their turned-up shoes.[14] Anglo-Saxons looked on, in long fur-lined cloaks, tight breeches, and leathern hose swathed with bands of many coloured cloth. Stern-faced northerners, Poles, and Germans, in fur caps and coloured girdles and clumsy shoes, or with feet roughly tied up in the bark of trees, waited impatiently for the announcement of ‘Li Mestre.’ Pale-faced southerners had braved the Alps and the Pyrenees under the fascination of ‘the wizard.’ Shaven and sandalled monks, black-habited clerics, black canons, secular and regular, black in face too, some of them, heresy-hunters from the neighbouring abbey of St. Victor, mingled with the crowd of young and old, grave and gay, beggars and nobles, sleek citizens and bronzed peasants.
Crevier and other writers say that AbÉlard had attracted five thousand students to Paris. Sceptics smile, and talk of Chinese genealogies. Mr. Rashdall, however, has made a careful study of the point, and he concludes that there were certainly five thousand, and possibly seven thousand, students at Paris in the early scholastic age, before the multiplication of important centres. He points out that the fabulous figures which are sometimes given—Wycliffe says that at one time there were sixty thousand students at Oxford, Juvenal de Ursinis gives twenty thousand at Paris in the fifteenth century, Italian historians speak of fifteen thousand at Bologna—always refer to a date beyond the writer’s experience, and frequently betray a touch of the laudator temporis acti. It is, at all events, safe to affirm that AbÉlard’s students were counted by thousands, if they had not ‘come to surpass the number of the laity’ [ordinary citizens], as an old writer declares. Philippe Auguste had to direct a huge expansion of the city before the close of the century. There is nothing in the commercial or political development of Paris to explain the magnitude of this expansion. It was a consequence of a vast influx of students from all quarters of the globe, and the fame of Master AbÉlard had determined the course of the stream.
One condition reacted on another. A notable gathering of students attracted Jews and merchants in greater numbers. They, in turn, created innumerable ‘wants’ amongst the ‘undisciplined horde.’ The luxuries and entertainments of youth began to multiply. The schools of Paris began to look fair in the eyes of a second world—a world of youths and men who had not felt disposed to walk hundreds of miles and endure a rude life out of academic affection. The ‘dancers of Orleans,’ the ‘tennis-players of Poitiers,’ the ‘lovers of Turin,’ came to fraternise with the ‘dirty fellows of Paris.’ Over mountains and over seas the mingled reputation of the city and the school was carried, and a remarkable stream set in from Germany, Switzerland, Italy (even from proud Rome), Spain, and England; even ‘distant Brittany sent you its animals to be instructed,’ wrote Prior Fulques to AbÉlard (a Breton) a year or two afterwards.
At five or six o’clock each morning the great cathedral bell would ring out the summons to work. From the neighbouring houses of the canons, from the cottages of the townsfolk, from the taverns, and hospices, and boarding-houses, the stream of the industrious would pour into the enclosure beside the cathedral. The master’s beadle, who levied a precarious tax on the mob, would strew the floor of the lecture-hall with hay or straw, according to the season, bring the Master’s text-book, with the notes of the lecture between lines or on the margin, to the solitary desk, and then retire to secure silence in the adjoining street. Sitting on their haunches in the hay, the right knee raised to serve as a desk for the waxed tablets, the scholars would take notes during the long hours of lecture (about six or seven), then hurry home—if they were industrious—to commit them to parchment while the light lasted.
The lectures over, the stream would flow back over the Little Bridge, filling the taverns and hospices, and pouring out over the great playing meadow, that stretched from the island to the present Champ de Mars. All the games of Europe were exhibited on that international playground: running, jumping, wrestling, hurling, fishing and swimming in the Seine, tossing and thumping the inflated ball—a game on which some minor poet of the day has left us an enthusiastic lyric—and especially the great game of war, in its earlier and less civilised form. The nations were not yet systematically grouped, and long and frequent were the dangerous conflicts. The undergraduate mind, though degrees had not yet been invented, had drawn up an estimate, pithy, pointed, and not flattering, of each nationality. The English were, it is sad to find, ‘cowardly and drunken,’—to the ‘Anglophobes’; the French were ‘proud and effeminate’; the Normans ‘charlatans and boasters,’ the Burgundians ‘brutal and stupid’; the Bretons ‘fickle and extravagant’; the Flemings ‘blood-thirsty, thievish, and incendiary’; the Germans ‘choleric, gluttonous, and dirty’; the Lombards ‘covetous, malicious, and no fighters’; the Romans ‘seditious, violent, and slanderous.’ Once those war-cries were raised, peaceable folk hied them to their homes and hovels, and the governor summoned his guards and archers.
The centre of this huge and novel concourse was the master of the cathedral school. After long years of conventual life Heloise draws a remarkable picture of the attitude of Paris towards its idol. Women ran to their doors and windows to gaze at him, as he passed from his house on St. Genevieve to the school. ‘Who was there that did not hasten to observe when you went abroad, and did not follow you with strained neck and staring eyes as you passed along? What wife, what virgin, did not burn? What queen or noble dame did not envy my fortune?’ And we shall presently read of a wonderful outburst of grief when the news of the outrage done to AbÉlard flies through the city. ‘No man was ever more loved—and more hated,’ says the sober Hausrath.
It is not difficult to understand the charm of AbÉlard’s teaching. Three qualities are assigned to it by the writers of the period, some of whom studied at his feet: clearness, richness in imagery, and lightness of touch are said to have been the chief characteristics of his teaching. Clearness is, indeed, a quality of his written works, though they do not, naturally, convey an impression of his oral power. His splendid gifts and versatility, supported by a rich voice, a charming personality, a ready and sympathetic use of human literature, and a freedom from excessive piety, gave him an immeasurable advantage over all the teachers of the day. Beside most of them, he was as a butterfly to an elephant. A most industrious study of the few works of Aristotle and of the Roman classics that were available, a retentive memory, an ease in manipulating his knowledge, a clear, penetrating mind, with a corresponding clearness of expression, a ready and productive fancy, a great knowledge of men, a warmer interest in things human than in things divine, a laughing contempt for authority, a handsome presence, and a musical delivery—these were his gifts. His only defects were defects of character, and the circumstances of his life had not yet revealed them even to himself.
Even the monkish writers of the Life of St. Goswin, whose attitude towards his person is clear, grant him ‘a sublime eloquence.’ The epitaphs that men raised over him, the judgments of episcopal Otto von Freising and John of Salisbury, the diplomatic letter of Prior Fulques, the references of all the chroniclers of the time, I refrain from quoting. We learn his power best from his open enemies. ‘Wizard,’ ‘rhinoceros,’ ‘smiter,’ ‘friend of the devil,’ ‘giant,’ ‘Titan,’ ‘Prometheus,’ and ‘Proteus,’ are a few of their compliments to his ability: the mellifluous St. Bernard alone would provide a rich vocabulary of flattering encomiums of that character: ‘Goliath,’ ‘Herod,’ ‘Leviathan,’ ‘bee,’ ‘serpent,’ ‘dragon,’ ‘hydra,’ ‘Absalom,’ are some of his epithets. When, later, we find St. Bernard, the first orator and firmest power in France, shrink nervously from an oral encounter with him, and resort to measures which would be branded as dishonourable in any other man, we shall more faithfully conceive the charm of AbÉlard’s person and the fascination of his lectures.
Yet no careful student of his genius will accept the mediÆval estimate which made him the ‘Socrates of Gaul,’ the peer of Plato and of Aristotle. He had wonderful penetration and a rare felicity of oral expression, but he was far removed from the altitude of Socrates and Plato and the breadth of Aristotle. He had no ‘system’ of thought, philosophical or theological; and into the physical and social world he never entered. His ideas—and some of them were leagues beyond his intellectual surroundings—came to him piecemeal. Yet we shall see that in some of those which were most abhorrent to Bernard—who was the Church for the time being—he did but anticipate the judgment of mature humanity on certain ethical and intellectual features of traditional lore. The thesis cannot be satisfactorily established until a later stage.
When we proceed to examine the erudition which gave occasion to the epitaph, ‘to him alone was made clear all that is knowable,’ we must bear in mind the limitations of his world. When Aristotle lent his mind to the construction of a world system, he had the speculations of two centuries of Greek thinkers before him; when Thomas of Aquin began to write, he had read the thoughts of three generations of schoolmen after AbÉlard, and all the Arabic translations and incorporations of Greek thought. At the beginning of the twelfth century there was little to read beside the fathers. If we take ‘all that was knowable’ in this concrete and relative sense, the high-sounding epitaph is not far above the truth.
His Latin is much better than that of the great majority of his contemporaries. Judged by a perfect classical standard it is defective; it admits some of the erroneous forms that are characteristic of the age. But it is not without elegance, and it excels in clearness and elasticity. It could not well be otherwise, seeing his wide and familiar acquaintance with Latin literature. He frequently quotes Lucan, Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Cicero; students of his writings usually add an acquaintance with Juvenal, Persius, Statius, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Quintilian, and Priscian. It was a frequent charge in the mouths of his enemies that he quoted the lewdest books of Ovid in the course of his interpretation of Scripture. The constant glance aside at the literature of human passion and the happy flash of wit were not small elements in his success. Those who came to him from other schools had heard little but the wearisome iteration of Boetius, Cassiodorus, and Martianus Capella. They found the new atmosphere refreshing and stimulating.
His command of Greek and Hebrew is a subject of endless dispute. His pupil Heloise certainly had a knowledge of the two tongues, as we shall see presently. She must have received her instruction from AbÉlard. But it is clear that AbÉlard likes to approach a controversy which turns on the interpretation of the original text of Scripture through a third person, such as St. Jerome. He rarely approaches even the easy Greek text of the New Testament directly, and he has no immediate acquaintance with any Greek author. Aristotle he has read in the Latin translation of Boetius, through whose mediation he has also read Porphyry’s Isagoge. He was certainly familiar with the De Interpretatione and the Categories; Cousin grants him also an acquaintance with the Prior Analytics; and Brucker and others would add the Sophistici Elenchi and the Topics. The physical and metaphysical works of Aristotle were proscribed at Paris long after the Jewish and Arabian translations had found a way into other schools of France. The golden thoughts of Plato came to him through the writings of the fathers; though there is said to have been a translation of the TimÆus in France early in the twelfth century.
His knowledge of Hebrew must have been equally, or even more, elementary. Only once does he clearly approach the Hebrew text without patristic guidance; it is when, in answering one (the thirty-sixth) of the famous ‘Problems of Heloise,’ he adduces the authority of ‘a certain Hebrew,’ whom he ‘heard discussing the point.’ In this we have a clear clue to the source of his Hebrew. The Jews were very numerous in Paris in the twelfth century. When Innocent the Second visited Paris in 1131, the Jews met him at St. Denis, and offered him a valuable roll of the law. By the time of Philippe Auguste they are said to have owned two-thirds of the city: perceiving which, Philippe recollected, or was reminded, that they were the murderers of Christ, and so he banished them and retained their goods. AbÉlard indicates that they took part in the intellectual life of Paris in his day; in Spain they were distinguished in every branch of higher thought; and thus the opportunity of learning Hebrew lay close at hand. One does not see why RÉmusat and others should deny him any acquaintance with it. His knowledge, however, must have been elementary. He does not make an impressive, though a novel, use of it in deriving the name of Heloise (Helwide, or Helwise, or Louise) from Elohim, which he does, years afterwards, in the sober solitude of his abbey and the coldness of his mutilation.
Add an extensive acquaintance with Scripture and the fathers, and the inventory is complete. Not difficult to be erudite in those days, most people will reflect. Well, a phonogram may be erudite. The gifts of AbÉlard were of a higher order than industry and memory, though he possessed both. He takes his place in history, apart from the ever-interesting drama and the deep pathos of his life, in virtue of two distinctions. They are, firstly, an extraordinary ability in imparting such knowledge as the poverty of the age afforded—the facts of his career reveal it; and secondly, a mind of such marvellous penetration that it conceived great truths which it has taken humanity seven or eight centuries to see—this will appear as we proceed. It was the former of these gifts that made him, in literal truth, the centre of learned and learning Christendom, the idol of several thousand eager scholars. Nor, finally, were these thousands the ‘horde of barbarians’ that jealous Master Roscelin called them. It has been estimated that a pope, nineteen cardinals, and more than fifty bishops and archbishops, were at one time among his pupils.
We are now at, or near, the year 1118. In the thirty-ninth year of his age, the twenty-third year of his scholastic activity, AbÉlard has reached the highest academic position in Christendom. He who loved so well, and so naturally, to be admired, found himself the centre of a life that had not been seen since Greek sages poured out wisdom in the painted colonnade, and the marble baths, and the shady groves of Athens. His self-esteem was flattered; his love of rule and of eminence was gratified. Poor as many of his pupils were, their number brought him great wealth. His refinement had ample means of solacing its desires. The petty vexations of the struggle were nobly compensated. Before him lay a world of fairest promise into which he, seemingly, had but to enter. Then there arose one of the forces that shattered his life, beginning its embodiment in an idyll, ending quickly in a lurid tragedy. It is the most difficult stage in the story of AbÉlard. I approach it only in the spirit of the artist, purposing neither to excuse nor to accuse, but only to trace, if I may, the development of a soul.
AbÉlard’s life had until now been purely spiritual, almost wholly intellectual. His defects were spiritual—conceit and ambition; if, as men assure us, it is a defect to recognise that you have a supra-normal talent, and to strive for the pre-eminence it entitles you to. The idealist spirit in which he had turned away from the comfort and quiet of the chÂteau had remained thus far the one fire that consumed his energy. In the pretty theory of Plato, his highest soul had silenced the lower, and reduced the lowest to the barest requisite play of vegetative life. There are men who go through life thus. The scientist would crudely—it is the fashion to say ‘crudely’—explain that the supra-normal activity of the upper part of the nervous system made the action of the lower part infra-normal; but let us keep on the spiritual plane. There are men whose soul is so absorbed in study or in contemplation that love never reaches their consciousness; or if it does, its appeal is faint, and quickly rejected. The condition of such a life, highly prized as it is by many, is constant intellectual strain.
AbÉlard had now arrived at a point when the mental strain began instinctively to relax. Wealth would inevitably bring more sensuous pleasure into his life. He was not one of the ‘purely intellectual’; he had a warm imagination and artistic power. No immediate purpose called for mental concentration. Sensuous enjoyment crept over the area of his conscious life. During a large proportion of his time, too, he was following with sympathy the quickening life of the passionate creations of Ovid and Vergil and Lucan. The inner judge, the sterner I, is indisposed to analyse, unless education, or faith, or circumstance, has laid a duty of severer watchfulness upon it. Blending with other and not alarming sensuous feelings, veiling itself, and gently, subtly passing its sweet fire into the veins, the coming of love is unperceived until it is already strong to exert a numbing influence on the mind. AbÉlard awoke one day to a consciousness that a large part of the new sweetness that pervaded his life was due to the birth of a new power in his soul—a power as elusive to recognition as it is imperious in its demands. Then is the trial of the soul.
Before quoting AbÉlard’s confession, with respect to this transformation of his character, it is necessary, out of justice to him, to anticipate a little, in indicating the circumstances of the making of the confession. The long letter which AbÉlard entitled the ‘Story of my Calamities’ was written twelve or thirteen years after these events. By that time he had not only endured a succession of cruel persecutions, but his outlook on life and on self had been entirely changed. Not only had the memory of the events faded somewhat, but he had become colour-blind in an important sense. A frightful mutilation had distorted his physical and psychic nature. Partly from this cause, and partly under the stress of other circumstances, he had become a Puritan of the Puritans, an ascetical hermit. As is the wont of such, he manifests a tendency to exaggerate the shadows cast by actions of his which he can no longer understand; for nature has withdrawn her inspiration. On the point we are considering he does not evince the smallest desire of concealment or palliation, but rather the reverse. And, finally, the letter, though written ostensibly for the solace of a friend in distress, was clearly written for circulation, and for the conciliation of the gentler of the Puritans, who knew his life well.
After speaking of the wealth and fame he had attained, he says: ‘But since prosperity ever puffs up the fool, and worldly ease dissolves the vigour of the mind, and quickly enervates it by carnal allurements; now that I thought myself to be the only philosopher in the world, and feared no further menace to my position, whereas I had hitherto lived most continently, I began to loose the rein to passion. And the further I had advanced in philosophy and in reading Holy Writ, so much the wider did I depart from philosophers and divines by the uncleanness of my life. It is well known to thee that philosophers and divines have ever been distinguished for this virtue of continence. But, whilst I was thus wholly taken up with pride and lust, the grace of God brought me a remedy, unwilling as I was, for both maladies; for lust first, and then for pride. For lust, by depriving me of its instrument; for pride—the pride which was chiefly born of my knowledge of letters, according to the word of the Apostle, ‘knowledge puffeth up’—by humbling me in the burning of the book by which I set such store. And now I would have thee learn the truth of both these stories, from the events themselves rather than from rumour, in the order in which they befell. Since then I had ever abhorred the uncleanness of harlots, and I had been withheld from the company and intercourse of noble dames by the exactions of study, nor had I more than a slight acquaintance with other women, evil fortune, smiling on me, found an easier way to cast me down from the summit of my prosperity; proud, as I was, and unmindful of divine favour, the goodness of God humbled me, and won me to itself.’ And the penitent passes on immediately to give the story of his relation to Heloise.
It is quite clear that all the vehement language with which he scourges himself before humanity refers exclusively to his liaison with Heloise. Searching about, as he does, for charges to heap upon his dead self, he yet denies that he had intercourse with women of any description before he knew the one woman whom he loved sincerely throughout life. In a later letter to Heloise, not intended to circulate abroad, he repeats the statement; recalling their embraces, he says they were the more treasured ‘since we had never known the like (ista gaudia) before.’ Moreover, he says a little later in the ‘Story’ that up to the time of his liaison with Heloise he had a ‘repute for chastity’ in the city; the events we have to follow prove this to have been the case. Finally, let us carefully remember that there would be no advantage in concealing any earlier disorder, and that there is clear indication, even in the short passage I have quoted, of a disposition rather to magnify faults than to attenuate.
I labour the point, because a writer who has introduced AbÉlard to many of the present generation, and for whom and whose thoughts I have otherwise a high regard, has somehow been led to lay here a very damning indictment of AbÉlard. Mr. Cotter Morison was a follower of the religion that worships the departed great, and should have a special care to set in light the character of those whom the Church has bruised in life, and slandered after death, under a false view of the interest of humanity. Yet, in his Life of St. Bernard, he has grossly added to the charge against AbÉlard, with the slenderest of historical bases. It were almost an injustice to Kingsley to say that Cotter Morison’s AbÉlard recalls the great novelist’s pitiful Hypatia. The Positivist writer thus interprets this stage in AbÉlard’s career. After saying that his passion broke out like a volcano, and that he felt ‘a fierce, fiery thirst for pleasure, sensual and animal,’ he goes on in this remarkable strain: ‘He drank deeply, wildly. He then grew fastidious and particular. He required some delicacy of romance, some flavour of emotion, to remove the crudity of his lust. He seduced Heloise.’
Was ever a graver perversion in the historical construction of character by an impartial writer? Stranger still, Mr. Cotter Morison has already warned his readers that the ‘Story of my Calamities’ must be shorn of some penitential exaggeration, if we are to give it historical credence. But Mr. Morison has witnesses. Prior Fulques, in a letter to AbÉlard, reminded him that he squandered a fortune on harlots. The assertion of this monk of Deuil, based, professedly, on the reports of AbÉlard’s bitter enemies, the monks of St. Denis, and made in a letter which is wholly politic, is held by Mr. Morison to ‘more than counterbalance’ the solemn public affirmation of a morbidly humble, self-accusing penitent. And this, after warning us not to take AbÉlard’s self-accusation too literally! I shall examine this letter of Prior Fulques’ more closely later. Not only does the letter itself belong to, but the charge refers to, a later period, and will be weighed then. There is nothing at this stage to oppose to the quiet and indirect claim of AbÉlard, allowed by the action of Fulbert, that his character was unsullied up to the date of his liaison with Heloise.
Let us return to the accredited historical facts. Somewhere about the year 1118 AbÉlard first felt the claims of love. He was wealthy and prosperous, and living in comparative luxury. He had those gifts of imagination which usually reveal an ardent temperament. Whether it was Heloise who unwittingly kindled the preparing passion, or whether AbÉlard yielded first to a vague, imperious craving, and sought one whom he might love, we do not know. But we have his trustworthy declaration that he detested the rampant harlotry, and knew no woman until he felt the sweet caress of Heloise.
I have now to set out with care the story of that immortal love. But nine readers out of ten are minded to pass judgment on the acts and lives of those we recall from the dead. My function is to reconstruct the story as faithfully as the recorded facts allow. Yet I would make one more digression before doing so.
What standard of conduct shall be used in judging AbÉlard? There are a thousand moral codes—that of the Hindu and that of the Christian, that of the twelfth century and that of the twentieth. In the twelfth century even the St. Bernards thought it just that a man who could not see the truth of the Church’s claims should be burned alive, and his soul tortured for all eternity; that a Being was just and adorable who tortured a twelfth century babe for Adam’s sin; that twelfth century Jews might be robbed because their remote ancestors had put Christ to death; that the sanctity of justice demanded, literally, an eye for an eye; and so forth. One may, of course, choose whatever standard of conduct one likes to measure AbÉlard’s, or anybody else’s, actions: Cardinal Newman, and such writers, have a fancy for judging him by the perfected code of the nineteenth. We cannot quarrel with them; though it is well to point out that they are not measuring AbÉlard’s subjective guilt, nor portraying his character, in so doing. And if any do elect to judge AbÉlard by the moral code of the twelfth century, it must be noted that this varied much, even on the point of sexual morality. St. Bernard and his like saw an inherent moral evil in sexual union; they thought the sanctity of the priestly character was incompatible with it, and that virginity was, in itself, and by the mere abstinence from sexual commerce, something holier than marriage. Apart from this, no doubt—if it can be set apart in the question—good men were agreed. But, as will appear presently, there were large bodies of men, even clerks, who not only differed from them in practice, but also in their deliberate moral judgment. We must approach closer still. When we have to determine an individual conception of the law, for the purpose of measuring real and personal guilt, we must have a regard to the surrounding influences, the current thoughts and prevailing habits, which may have impaired or obscured the feeling of its validity in any respect. It is well, then, first to glance at the morals of the time when one feels eager to measure AbÉlard’s guilt.
It was a period when the dark triumph of what is called materialism, or animalism, was as yet relieved only by a sporadic gleam of idealism. There was purity in places, but over the broad face of the land passion knew little law. If the unlettered Greek had immoral gods to encourage him, the mediÆval had immoral pastors. The Church was just endeavouring to enforce its unfortunate law of celibacy on them. With a stroke of the pen it had converted thousands of honest wives into concubines. The result was utter and sad demoralisation. In thus converting the moral into the deeply immoral, the Church could appeal to no element in the consciences of its servants; nor even to its basic Scriptures. Writers of the time use hyperbolic language in speaking of the prevalent vice, and the facts given in the chronicles, and embodied in the modern collections of ancient documents, fully sustain it. Speaking of the close of the eleventh century, Dubois, in his Historia EcclesiÆ Parisiensis, says: ‘The condition of the Church [in general] at that time was unhappy and wretched ... nearly all the clergy were infected with the vice of simony ... lust and shameful pleasure were openly rampant.’ It is true that he excepts his ‘Church of Paris,’ but his own facts show that it is only a piece of foolish loyalty. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, who studied at Paris towards the close of the century (it must have been worse in AbÉlard’s time), gives a clearly overdrawn, yet instructive, picture of its life in his Historia Occidentalis. ‘The clergy,’ he says, probably meaning the scholars in general, of whom the majority were clerics, ‘saw no sin in simple fornication. Common harlots were to be seen dragging off clerics as they passed along to their brothels. If they refused to go, opprobrious names were called after them. School and brothel were under the same roof—the school above, the brothel below.... And the more freely they spent their money in vice, the more were they commended, and regarded by almost everybody as fine, liberal fellows.’ The vice that has ever haunted educational centres and institutes was flagrant and general. It is a fact that the authorities had at length to prohibit the canons to lodge students in their houses on the island. In the country and in the other towns the same conditions were found. In Father Denifle’s Chartularium there is a document (No. V.) which throws a curious light on the habits of the clergy. A priest of Rheims was dancing in a tavern one Sunday, when some of the scholars laughed at him. He pursued them to their school, took the place by storm, half-murdered, and then (presumably recalling his sacerdotal character) excommunicated them. At another time, Cardinal Jacques tells us, the lady of a certain manor warned the priest of the village to dismiss his concubine. He refused; whereupon the noble dame had the woman brought to her, and ordained her ‘priestess,’ turning her out before the admiring villagers with a gaudy crown. Another poor priest told his bishop, with many tears, that, if it were a question of choosing between his church and his concubine, he should have to abandon the church; the story runs that, finding his income gone, the lady also departed. There is an equally dark lament in Ordericus Vitalis, the Norman, who lived in AbÉlard’s day. The letters and sermons of AbÉlard—AbÉlard the monk, of St. Bernard, and of so many others, confirm the darkest features of the picture. Only a few years previously the king had lived with the wife of one of his nobles, in defiance of them all; and when a council, composed of one hundred and twenty prelates, including two cardinals and a number of bishops, met at Poitiers to censure him, the Duke of Aquitaine broke in with his soldiers, and scattered them with the flat of his sword. Indeed, an ancient writer, Hugo Flaviniacensis, declares there was a feeling that Pope Paschal did not, for financial reasons, approve the censure passed by his legates.
Considering the enormous prevalence of simony, one could hardly expect to find the Church in a better condition. The writers of the time make it clear that there was an appalling traffic in bishoprics, abbeys, prebends, and all kinds of ecclesiastical goods and dignities. We have already seen one tragic illustration of the evil, and we shall meet many more. A few years previously the king had nominated one of his favourites, Étienne de Garlande, for the vacant bishopric of Beauvais; and this youth, ‘of no letters and of unchaste life,’ at once took even major orders, and talked of going to Rome ‘to buy the curia.’ But, as with regard to the previous point, it is useless to give instances. Corruption was very prevalent; and one cannot wonder at it in view of the reputation which the papacy itself had, in spite of its occasional quashing of a corrupt election. This point will be treated more fully in the sixth chapter.
The question of the deep and widespread corruption of the regular clergy must also be deferred. In his fourth letter to Heloise, AbÉlard complains that ‘almost all the monasteries of our day’ are corrupt; Jacques de Vitry affirms that no nunneries, save those of the Cistercians, were fit abodes for an honest woman in his day.[15] It is not a little instructive to find Abbot AbÉlard, in his latest and most ascetic period, telling his son (a monk), in the course of a number of admirable moral maxims, that: ‘A humble harlot is better than she who is chaste and proud,’ and that ‘Far worse is the shrewd-tongued woman than a harlot.’
Finally, mention must be made of the extreme violence of the age. Several illustrations have been given in the course of the narrative, and it will bring many more before the reader. They were still the days of the lex talionis, the judicial duel, the ordeal, and the truce of God. Murder was common in town and country. We have seen the brutal murder of the Bishop of Laon in 1112; we find the Bishop of Paris threatened by the relatives of his archdeacon, and the Prior of St. Victor’s murdered by them, in 1133. But the story will contain violence enough. As for ‘the undisciplined student-hordes of the Middle Ages,’ see the appalling picture of their life in Rashdall’s Universities of Europe. Our period is pre-university—and worse: with the founding of the university came some degree of control. Yet even then the documentary evidence discloses a fearful condition of violence and lawlessness. In the year 1197 we find the Bishop of Paris abolishing the ‘Feast of Fools.’ On January 1st (and also on the feast of St. Stephen), it seems, a carnival was held, during which the masquers had free run of the cathedral and the churches, making them echo with ribald songs, and profaning them with bloodshed and all kinds of excess. In 1218, says Crevier, we find the ecclesiastical judges of Paris complaining that the students break into the houses of the citizens, and carry off their womenfolk. In 1200 we find a pitched battle between the students of Paris and the governor and his guards, in which several are killed; and the king condemns the unfortunate governor to be tried by ordeal; to be hanged forthwith if it proves his guilt, and to be imprisoned for life (in case Providence has made a mistake) if it absolves him. After another of these battles, when the governor has hanged several students, the king forces him and his council to go in their shirts to the scaffold and kiss the bodies. In another case, in 1228, the king sides with the governor, and the masters close the university in disgust until the students are avenged.
But of story-telling there would be no end. And, indeed, there is the danger of giving a false impression of scantiness of evidence when one follows up a large assertion with a few incidents. It is, however, clear from the quoted words of accredited historians, and will be made clearer in the progress of the narrative, that simony, unchastity, violence, cruelty, and usury were real and broad features of the age of AbÉlard. The reader will not forget them, when he is seeking to enter into the conscience of the famous master.
