Joseph McCabe

BACK TO CHAMPAGNE

The scene of the next act in AbÉlard’s dramatic career is a bright, restful valley in the heart of Champagne. It is the summer of 1122, and the limpid Arduzon rolls through enchantingly in its course towards the Seine. In the meadow beside it are two huts and a small oratory, rudely fashioned from the branches of trees and reeds from the river, and daubed over with mud. No other sign of human presence can be seen. AbÉlard and one companion are the only human beings to be found for miles. And even all thought of the cities of men and the sordid passions they shelter is arrested by the great forests of oak and beech which hem in the narrow horizon and guard the restfulness of the valley.

By the terms of Suger’s decision AbÉlard could neither lodge with secular friends nor enter any cell, priory, or abbey. Probably this coercion into leading an eremitical life was unnecessary. The experience of the last three years had made a hermitage of his heart; nothing would be more welcome to him than this quiet valley. It was a spot he had noticed in earlier years. In his ancient chronicle Robert of Auxerre says that AbÉlard had lived there before; Mr. Poole thinks it was to the same part of Champagne that he resorted on the three occasions of his going to the province of Count Theobald. That would at least have to be understood in a very loose sense. On the two former occasions he had found a home prepared, a cell and a priory, respectively; he had now to build a hut with his own hands. It was a deserted spot he had chosen, he tells us; and Heloise adds, in one of her letters, that before AbÉlard’s coming it had been the haunt of robbers and the home of foxes and wild boars, like the neighbouring forest of Fontainebleau.

AbÉlard must have seen this quiet side-valley in passing along the Seine on the road to Paris. It was some twelve miles from Troyes, where he had a number of friends; and when he expressed a desire to retire to it with his companion, they obtained for him the gift of the meadow through which the Arduzon ran. Bishop Hatton gave them permission to build an oratory, and they put together a kind of mud hut—‘in honour of the Blessed Trinity’! Here the heavy heart began once more to dream of peace. Men had tortured him with a caricature of the divine justice when his aim and purpose had been of the purest. He had left their ignorant meddlesomeness and their ugly passions far away beyond the forests. Alone with God and with nature in her fairest mood, he seemed to have escaped securely from an age that could not, or would not, understand his high ideal.

So for some time no sound was heard in the valley but the song of the birds and the grave talk of the two hermits and the frequent chant in the frail temple of the Trinity. But AbÉlard’s evil genius was never far from him; it almost seems as if it only retired just frequently enough and long enough to let his heart regain its full power of suffering. The unpractical scholar had overlooked a material point, the question of sustenance. Beech-nuts and beech-leaves and roots and the water of the river become monotonous. AbÉlard began to cast about for some source of revenue. ‘To dig I was not able, to beg I was ashamed,’ he says, in the familiar words. There was only one thing he could do—teach.

Probably he began by giving quiet lessons to the sons of his neighbours. He had only to let his intention be known in Troyes, and he would have as many pupils as he desired. But he soon found that, as was inevitable, he had released a torrent. The words in which he describes this third confluence of his streams of ‘barbarians’ do not give us the impression that he struggled against his fate. With all his genius he remained a Breton—short of memory and light of heart. The gladdening climate of mid-France and the brightness and beauty of the valley of the Seine quickened his old hopes and powers. The word ran through the kingdoms of Gaul, and across the sea and over the southern hills, that AbÉlard was lecturing once more. And many hundreds, probably thousands, of youths gathered their scant treasures, and turned their faces towards the distant solitude of Nogent-sur-Seine.

Then was witnessed a scene that is quite unique in the annals of education. Many centuries before, the deserts of Egypt had seen a vast crowd of men pour out from the cities, and rush eagerly into their thankless solitude. That was under the fresh-born influence of a new religious story, the only force thought competent to inspire so great an abdication. The twelfth century saw another great stream of men pouring eagerly into a solitude where there was no luxury but the rude beauty of nature. Week by week the paths that led into the valley by the Arduzon discharged their hundreds of pilgrims. The rough justice of nature offered no advantage to wealth. Rich and poor, noble and peasant, young and old, they raised their mud-cabins or their moss-covered earth-works, each with his own hand. Hundreds of these rude dwellings dotted the meadow and sheltered in the wood. A bundle of straw was the only bed to be found in them. Their tables were primitive mounds of fresh turf; the only food a kind of coarse peasant-bread, with roots and herbs and a draught of sweet water from the river. The meats and wines and pretty maids and soft beds of the cities were left far away over the hills. For the great magician had extended his wand once more, and the fascination of his lectures was as irresistible as ever.

They had built a new oratory, in wood and stone, for the loved master; and each morning, as the full blaze of the sun fell upon the strangely scarred face of the valley, they arose from the hay and straw, splashed or dipped in the running river, and trooped to the spot where AbÉlard fished for their souls with the charming bait of his philosophy. Then when the master tired of reading Scripture, and of his pathetic task of finding analogies of the infinite in the finite, they relaxed to such games and merriment as youth never leaves behind.

Discipline, however, was strict. There is a song, composed at the time by one of the pupils, which affords an instructive glimpse of the life of the strange colony. Some one seems to have informed AbÉlard of a group of students who were addicted to the familiar vice. He at once banished them from the colony, threatening to abandon the lectures unless they retired to Quincey. The poet of the group was an English youth, named Hilary, who had come to France a little before. Amongst his Versus et ludi, edited by Champollion, we find his poetic complaint of the falseness of the charge and the cruelty of their expulsion. It is a simple, vigorous, rhymed verse in Latin, with a French refrain. It is obviously intended to be sung in chorus, and it thus indirectly illustrates one of the probable recreations of the youths who were thus thrown upon their own resources. Many another of Hilary’s rough songs must have rung through the valley at nightfall. Perhaps AbÉlard recovered his old gift, and contributed to the harmless gaiety of the colony. Seared and scarred as he was, there was nothing sombre or sour about his piety, save in the moments of actual persecution. With all his keen and living faith and his sense of remorse, he remains a Breton, a child of the sun-light, sensitive to the gladdening force of the world. Not until his last year did he accept the ascetic view of pleasures which were non-ethical. Watchful over the faith and morals of the colony, he would make no effort to moderate the loud song with which they responded to the warm breath of nature.

The happiness of his little world surged in the heart of the master for a time, but nature gave him a capacity for, and a taste of, manifold happiness, only that he might suffer the more. ‘I had one enemy—echo,’ he says in his autobiography. He was soon made uneasily conscious that the echo of his teaching and the echo of the glad life of the colony had reached Clairvaux.

The first definite complaint that reached his ears referred to the dedication of his oratory. Though formally dedicated to the Trinity, it was especially devoted to the Holy Spirit, in the character of Paraclete (Comforter); indeed both it and the later nunnery were known familiarly as ‘the Paraclete.’ Some captious critics had, it appears, raised a question whether it was lawful to dedicate a chapel to one isolated member of the Trinity. The question was absurd, for the Church frequently offers worship to the Holy Spirit, without mentioning the Father and the Son. The cautious AbÉlard, however, defends his dedication at great length. A second attack was made under the pretext of questioning the propriety of an image of the Trinity which was found in the oratory. Some sculptor in the colony had endeavoured to give an ingenious representation of the Trinity in stone. He had carved three equal figures from one block of stone, and had cut on them inscriptions appropriate to each Person of the Trinity.[20] Such devices were common in the Church, common in all Trinitarian religions, in fact. But AbÉlard was credited with intentions and interpretations in everything he did. Neither of these incidents proved serious, however. It was not until AbÉlard heard that Alberic and Lotulphe were inciting ‘the new apostles’ to assail him that he became seriously alarmed. The new apostles were Bernard of Clairvaux and Norbert of PrÉmontrÉ.

Not many leagues from the merry valley on the Arduzon was another vale that had been peopled by men from the cities. It was a dark, depressing valley, into which the sun rarely struggled. The Valley of Wormwood men called it, for it was in the heart of a wild, sombre, chilly forest. The men who buried themselves in it were fugitives, not merely from the hot breath of the cities and the ugly deeds of their fellows, but even from the gentler inspiration of nature, even from its purest thrills. They had had a vision of a golden city, and believed it was to be entered by the path of self-torture. The narrow windows of their monastery let in but little of the scanty light of the valley. With coarse bread and herbs, and a few hours’ sleep on boxes of dried leaves, they made a grudging concession to the law of living. But a joke was a sacrilege in the Valley of Wormwood, and a song a piece of supreme folly. The only sound that told the ravens and the owls of the presence of man was the weird, minor chant for hours together, that did not even seem to break the silence of the sombre spot. By day, the white-robed, solemn shades went about their work in silence. The Great Father had made the pilgrimage to heaven so arduous a task that they dare not talk by the wayside.

Foremost among them was a frail, tense, absorbed, dominant little man. The face was white and worn with suffering, the form enfeebled with disease and exacting nervous exaltation; but there was a light of supreme strength and of joy in the penetrating eyes. He was a man who saw the golden city with so near, so living a vision, that he was wholly impatient of the trivial pleasures of earth: a man formed in the mould of world-conquerors and world-politicians, in whose mind accident had substituted a supernatural for a natural ideal: a man of such intensity and absorption of thought that he was almost incapable of admitting a doubt as to the correctness of his own judgment and purpose and the folly of all that was opposed to it: a man in whom an altruistic ethic might transform, or disguise, but could never suppress, the demand of the entire nature for self-assertion. This was Bernard of Clairvaux, who had founded the monastery in the deepest poverty ten years before. He was soon to be the most powerful man in Christendom. And he held that, if the instinct of reasoning and the impulse of love did indeed come from God and not from the devil, they were of those whimsical gifts, such as the deity of the Middle Ages often gave, which were given with a trust they would be rejected.

The other new apostle was St. Norbert, the founder of the Premonstratensian canons. He had fruitlessly endeavoured to reform the existing order of canons, and had then withdrawn to form a kind of monastery of canons at PrÉmontrÉ, not far from Laon, where he occasionally visited Anselm. His disciples entered zealously into the task of policeing the country. No disorder in faith or morals escaped their notice; and although Norbert was far behind Bernard in political ability, the man who incurred his pious wrath was in an unenviable position. He had influence with the prelates of the Church, on account of his reforms and the sanctity of his life; he had a profound influence over the common people, not only through his stirring sermons, but also through the miracles he wrought. AbÉlard frequently bases his rationalistic work on the fact, which he always assumes to be uncontroverted, that the age of miracles is over. Norbert, on the contrary, let it be distinctly understood that he was a thaumaturgus of large practice. AbÉlard ridiculed his pretensions, and the stories told of him. Even in his later sermons we find him scornfully ‘exposing’ the miracles of Norbert and his companions. They used to slip medicaments unobserved into the food of the sick, he says, and accept the glory of the miracle if the fever was cured. They even attempted to raise the dead to life; and when the corpse retained its hideous rigidity after they had lain long hours in prayer in the sanctuary, they would turn round on the simple folk in the church and upbraid them for the littleness of their faith. This poor trickery was the chief source of the power of the Premonstratensian canons over the people. AbÉlard could not repose and ridicule it with impunity.

These were the new apostles—‘pseudo-apostles’ Heloise calls them—whom Alberic and Lotulphe now incited to take up the task which they themselves dared pursue no longer. And so, says AbÉlard, ‘they heaped shameless calumnies on me at every opportunity, and for some time brought much discredit upon me in the eyes of certain ecclesiastical as well as secular dignitaries.’ We shall find that, when AbÉlard stands before the ecclesiastical tribunal a second time, many of his earlier friends have deserted him, and have fallen under the wide-reaching influence of St. Bernard.

But it is strenuously denied by prejudiced admirers of St. Bernard that he had anything to do with AbÉlard at this period. Father Hefele, for instance, thinks that AbÉlard is guilty of some chronological confusion in the passage quoted above; looking back on the events of his life, he has unconsciously transferred the later activity of Bernard to the earlier date, not clearly separating it in time from the work of Alberic and Norbert. Unfortunately, the ‘Story of my Calamities’ was written before Bernard commenced his open campaign against AbÉlard. We shall see later that this is beyond dispute. There is, then, no question of confusion.

Mr. Cotter Morison says it is ‘not far short of impossible’ that Bernard showed any active hostility to AbÉlard at that time, and he thinks the charge springs merely from an over-excited imagination. Mr. Morison is scarcely happier here than in his earlier passage. It must be understood that this reluctance to admit the correctness of AbÉlard’s complaint is inspired by a passage in one of Bernard’s letters. In writing to William of St. Thierry (ep. cccxxvii. in Migne), fifteen years afterwards, he excuses his inaction with regard to AbÉlard (whose heresies William has put before him) on the ground that he ‘was ignorant of most, indeed nearly all, of these things.’ This is interpreted to mean that he knew little or nothing about AbÉlard until 1141, and the AbÉlardists generally give a more or less polite intimation that it is—what Mr. Poole explicitly calls another statement of Bernard’s—a lie. Cotter Morison, however, interprets ‘these things’ to mean ‘the special details of AbÉlard’s heresy,’ and it is therefore the more strange that he should join the Bernardists in straining the historical evidence. Yet he is probably nearer to the truth than the others in his interpretation of Bernard’s words. Even modern writers are too apt at times to follow the practice of the Church, in judging a statement or an action, and put it into one or other of their rigid objective categories. In such cases as this we need a very careful psychological analysis, and are prone to be misled by the Church’s objective moral boxes or classifications. Most probably Bernard wrote in that convenient vagueness of mind which sometimes helps even a saint out of a difficulty, especially where the honour of the Church is involved, and which is accompanied by just a suspicion of ethical discomfort.

In reality, we may, with all sobriety, reverse Mr. Morison’s statement, and say it is ‘not far short of impossible’ that Bernard was ignorant of, or indifferent to, AbÉlard’s activity at that time. Ten years previously, when Bernard led his little band of white-robed monks to their wretched barn in the Vale of Bitterness, he went to ChÂlons to be consecrated by William of Champeaux. William conceived a very strong affection for the young abbot, and he shortly after nursed him through a long and severe illness. So great was their intimacy and so frequent their intercourse that people said ChÂlons and Clairvaux had changed places. This began only twelve months after William had been driven from Paris, in intense anger, by the heretical upstart, Peter AbÉlard. Again, Alberic was another of Bernard’s intimate friends. A year or two before AbÉlard founded the Paraclete—that is to say, about the time of the Council of Soissons—we find Bernard ‘imploring’ (so even Duchesne puts it) the Pope to appoint Alberic to the vacant see of ChÂlons after the death of William. He failed to obtain it, but afterwards secured for him the archbishopric of Bourges. Anselm of Laon was also a friend of Bernard’s. Moreover, Clairvaux was only about forty miles from Troyes, where AbÉlard’s latest feat was the supreme topic.

It is thus quite impossible for any but a prejudiced apologist to question Bernard’s interest in the life of the Paraclete and its founder. Even were he not the heresy-hunter and universal reformer that he notoriously was, we should be compelled to think that he had heard all the worst charges against AbÉlard over and over again before 1124. To conceive Bernard as entombed in his abbey, indifferent to everything in this world except the grave, is the reverse of the truth. Bernard had a very profound belief in what some theologians call ‘the law of secondary causes’—God does not do directly what he may accomplish by means of human instruments. Prayer was necessary; but so were vigilance, diplomacy, much running to and fro, and a vast correspondence. He watched the Church of God with the fiery zeal of a St. Paul. He knew everything and everybody: smote archbishops and kings as freely as his own monks: hunted down every heretic that appeared in France in his day: played even a large part in the politics of Rome. And we are to suppose that such a man was ignorant of the presence of the gay, rationalistic colony a few leagues away from his abbey, and of the unique character and profound importance to the Church of that vast concourse of youths; or that he refrained from examining the teaching of this man who had an unprecedented influence over the youth of France, or from using the fulness of his power against him when he found that his teaching was the reverse of all he held sacred and salutary.

We may take AbÉlard’s statement literally. Bernard and Norbert were doing the work of his rivals, and were doing it effectively. They who had supported him at Soissons or afterwards were being poisoned against him. Count Theobald and Geoffrey of Chartres are probably two whom he had in mind. He feels that the net is being drawn close about him through the calumnies of these ubiquitous monks and canons. The peace of the valley is broken; he becomes morbidly sensitive and timorous. Whenever he hears that some synod or conventicle has been summoned he trembles with anxiety and expectation of another Soissons. The awful torture of that hour before the council comes back to him, and mingles with the thought of the power of his new enemies. He must fly from France.

Away to the south, over the Pyrenees, was a land where the poor monk would have found peace, justice, and honour. Spain was just then affording ‘glory to God in heaven, and peace to men of good-will on earth’: it had been snatched from the dominion of Christianity for a century or two. So tolerant and beneficent was the reign of the Moors that even the Jews, crushed, as they were, by seven centuries of persecution, developed their finest powers under it. They were found in the front rank of every art and science; in every field where, not cunning and astuteness, but talent of the highest order and industry, were needed to command success. The Moors had happily degenerated from the fierce proselytism of their religious prophet—whilst the Christians had proportionately enlarged on that of theirs—and their human character was asserting the high natural ideal which it always does when it breaks away from the confining bonds of a narrow dogma.

It was towards this land that AbÉlard turned his thoughts. It seemed useless for him to exchange one Christian land for another. A few years before, a small group of French monks had created a centre of education in a humble barn on the banks of the Cam; but was England more tolerant than France? He remembered Roscelin’s experience. There were famous schools in Italy; but some of his most brilliant pupils at the Paraclete, such as Arnold of Brescia, had little good to say of Italy. The evil lay in Christianity itself—in that intolerance which its high claim naturally engendered.

One does not like to accept too easily this romantic proposal to find refuge under the protection of the crescent, yet AbÉlard’s words compel us to do so. ‘God knows,’ he says, ‘that at times I fell into so deep a despair that I proposed to go forth from Christendom and betake me to the heathens ... to live a Christian life amid the enemies of Christ.’ Possibly he would have done so, if he had had a better knowledge of Spain at that time. The Arabs of Spain were no enemies of Christ. Only a most perverse idea of their state could make an able thinker and teacher thus regard a life amongst them as a matter of ultimate and desperate resort. Had they but conquered Europe, materially or morally, half the problems that still harass it—or ought to do—would have been solved long ago. It is pathetic to find AbÉlard speculating whether the hatred of the Christians for him will not make his path easier to the favour of the Arabs, by producing in them an impression that he had been unfaithful to Christian dogma. The caliphs could keep a watchful eye on the thoughts of professed Mohammedan philosophers, but they cared little about the theories of others. AbÉlard, with his pronounced tendency to concentrate on natural-religious and ethical truths, would have found an honoured place in Spain; and he would quickly have buried his dogmas there.

AbÉlard was spared the trial of so desperate and dreadful a secession. Far away on the coast of Brittany an abbot died in 1125, and AbÉlard’s evil genius put it into the hearts of the monks to offer the vacant dignity to the famous teacher. They sent some of their number to see him at the Paraclete. It seemed a providential outlet from his intolerable position. There were abbeys and abbeys, it was true, but his Breton optimism and trust in fate closed that avenue of speculation. Conon, Duke of Brittany, had agreed to his installation. Suger made no opposition; he probably saw the net that was being drawn about him in France. AbÉlard turned sadly away from the vale of the Paraclete and the devoted colony, and faced the mists of the west and of the future. ‘I came not to bring peace into the world but the sword.’