# Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning/Chapter V

CHAPTER V.
PETER ABAILARD.
With Abailard we turn again to the schools of dialectic, but Abailard is much more than a dialectician. He is the commanding figure in the intellectual history of his age,
Cui soli patuit scibile quidquid erat.
It is his general attitude towards the study of philosophy and of theology that demands our examination, far rather than those technical points in which he was suspected of departing from catholic Christianity. If he was, as he consistently maintained, the devoted son of the church, he was none the less a herald of free thought by virtue of his bold assertion of the duty of private judgement and his contempt of those who take everything on trust. By doubting we are led to enquire; by enquiry we perceive the truth: this is the method which Abailard professes. It is not that he doubts that the two roads, of reason and authority, must ultimately converge: only he will not start from any but the direct questionings of his own mind. Self-reliance is his special characteristic. It shews itself in his personal history even more than in his writings, so that his entire life is an exemplification of the force of a Titanic personality in revolt against the spirit of his time.
Abailard, like so many of the great men in the earlier ​middle ages who have been given the highest place in the
literary history of France, was not a Frenchman. He was
born in Brittany, at Palais, or Le Pallet, in the neighbourhood of Nantes. Although the eldest son of a good house, he early abandoned his birthright to his brothers and resolved to make himself a name in learning. He became a pupil, discipulorum minimus, of Roscelin, the daring nominalist whose doctrine was condemned in its theological issues by the council of Soissons in 1092, but who appears to have submitted to the sentence and to have been allowed to hold a scholastic post at the church of Saint Mary of Loches in Touraine. Roscelin, if we are to give credit to an old legend, soon excited a spirit ​of resistance in his pupil, and in a year Abailard left the school. After spending perhaps a short time at Chartres, where he attempted in vain to acquire the rudiments of mathematics,—though this experience may belong to a later period in his career,—he made his way to Paris, to the cathedral school, where his master was the representative realist, William of Champeaux.
The abruptness of the transition from Roscelin to William, the extreme views held by the two masters, may explain how it was that Abailard set himself in turn to combat the logical position of both; but his subsequent career sufficiently shews how little inclined he was under any circumstances to subject his intellect to the authority of a teacher. The nominalistic principles which he had learned from Roscelin, he took with him to Paris and used with signal effect against the hierophant of realism. He at once aspired to the rank and influence of an acknowledged master, but the not unnatural hostility of William seems to have prevented his opening a school in Paris itself. The history of the relations of the two rivals is like John Scot's account of logic; it was a flight and a chase, quaedam fuga et insecutio. The same city was not large enough to hold them both. Abailard therefore began by teaching at some distance from Paris, in the royal fortress of Melun; he soon ventured a little higher up the Seine, to Corbeil. But the severity of his studies had told upon his health, and he was forced to take rest. For a few years he lived in seclusion, possibly with his family in Brittany; but so soon as his strength was recovered he hastened again to Paris.
By this time William of Champeaux also had withdrawn from the active work of the cathedral school and had retired to the priory of Saint Victor. But the pressure of his friends had not left him long in his religious leisure: he was now lecturing at Saint Victor on the old subjects, and Abailard was once more found among his auditory, less a pupil than a critic. Abailard pressed the master with objections: he boasts that the com​pelled him to seek a new formula for his logical theory, and the success of this feat made the adventurous disputant for the time the hero of the schools. He set up a school for himself; he was even invited by William's successor at Notre Dame to take his place. But William, though at Saint Victor, was not out of hearing of what went on in the city. He did not risk a personal encounter with Abailard, but attacked him through the master who had offered him a post of so dangerous an authority. The too compliant master was disgraced, and Abailard judged it prudent to transfer his school to his old quarters at Melun. Soon, however, William for other reasons also quitted Paris. Abailard was at once on the spot. He established himself upon the hill of Saint Geneviève within a short distance of the city, and determined to brave the consequences. When William once more returned, it was too late. His old fame as a teacher was almost forgotten, while Abailard's position was secured by a crowd of pupils whom the novelty and brilliancy of his discourses had fascinated into the sturdiest of partisans. Such at least is Abailard's account, which, coloured as it undoubtedly is by prejudice and avowed animosity, we have no means of contradicting from other sources. William indeed seems to have given up the long contest: after a while he was glad to subside into the quiet of a bishoprick.
The qualities by which Abailard won his unequalled popularity were not only a native gift for exposition, not only a singular lucidity and plainness of statement so different from the obscure formalism usually inseparable from the handling of logic; but also an originality of thought which enabled him to make a serious revolution ​in the philosophical theory of the 'art.' Traces of conceptualism there certainly are long before Abailard's time. We may find them in the ninth century in the glosses of Heric of Auxerre, if not in Rabanus Maurus: in the eleventh the doctrine reappears in Berengar of Tours. But Abailard, though not the creator, was not the less the principal organiser and, for his own age, the founder of the school which lies intermediate between those of his two first masters. The system which he produced, if it was eclectic, was certainly nearer nominalism than realism: he conceded in fact the affirmations of both sides while denying the correctness of their negations. The main tenet of the nominalists, the absolute existence of the individual, he accepted; but he did not rigidly limit existence to that which is open to the senses. Genera and species, the categories and predicables, he refused indeed to endow with essence as things; they had no actual existence apart from the individual: nor was the universal, as William of Champeaux held, contained in its entirety within the particular. The process was the other way; it was from the particular that we arrived at the general by an effort of thought. On the other hand if the universals, if abstractions of all sorts, were the creations of the intellect, they were also its necessary creations; they were therefore so far real that the human mind could not do without them. In the same way Abailard found no difficulty in the universalia ante rem, the universals considered as anterior to the sensible world; since universals might equally be conceived in relation to the mind of God as to our own. The Platonic world of ideas was thus to be understood as existing in God's creative thought.
Abailard's conceptualism was probably the most reason​able among the many proposals of his day which sought to frame a logical theory free from the revolutionary tendencies of Roscelin's nominalism, and yet better adapted than the elder realism to the more subtil and critical habits of thought to which men were now training themselves. This was virtually a return to the position of Aristotle, and in Abailard's case it is all the more remarkable because his direct acquaintance with the master was limited to the earlier treatises of the Organon; he had therefore to discover, to divine, for himself the issues to which Aristotle tended. From Abailard's time, probably through his immediate influence, the authority of the Greek logician grew uninterruptedly until the decline of the middle ages, and there is a strong presumption that it was to the active encouragement of his pupil John of Salisbury that western Europe was indebted for a translation of the rest of the Organon. Within a century it possessed almost the whole of Aristotle in a Latin shape. Accordingly it is not surprising that Abailard's permanent reputation was founded upon his dialectical eminence. The title of Peripatetic, by which he is regularly styled in John of Salisbury's writings, indicates this distinction, for the name had by this time acquired the same special meaning as sophist had two or three centuries before, though was already being superseded by the more accurate term dialectician.
But Abailard was not contented with his reputation; he would not have his faculties circumscribed in a single field. He had an immense energy of mind, a restless ambition to dominate other minds; and in his age supremacy was only attainable by adding a mastery of theology ​ as a key-stone to unite and perfect the structure, in itself incomplete, of human knowledge. Nor would it be just to deny the natural significance of the connexion in which Abailard himself relates this passage in his life. He left his school on Saint Genevieve in order to visit his home in Brittany and to Hake leave of his mother who was about to withdraw into a nunnery. I came back to France, he says, principally that I might cultivate divine learning,—maxime ut de divinitate addiscerem. He found his way clear before him: William of Champeaux was now bishop of Chalons, and Abailard might look with hopefulness to a career of influence in the future undisturbed by the evil eye, as he deemed it, of his enemy; rivals he had long ceased to fear. Nevertheless the impression made upon him by that last interview with his mother—we cannot misread the words, although the inference appears to have escaped the notice of his biographers—had taken so fast a hold of his mind that, even in the auspicious situation of affairs ready prepared, one would say, for him in Paris, he could not bring himself to break a solemn resolve. He passed through the capital and presented himself, this mature philosopher of four and thirty, as a disciple of the illustrious Anselm of Laon.
Abailard has so much faith in himself that he describes every incident in his life as the result of careful planning; he leaves no room for emotion or sudden inspiration: and yet it is these very rapid transitions in his mind that determined the crucial events which give his history so marked an individuality. His self-confidence, if we will, his vanity,—was opposed by an irresolution, an infirmity of purpose, which was no less characteristic an element in him. He surrendered his prospects in obedience to a religious impulse: doubtless he may have foreseen a wider potentiality of sway in the new field to which he betook himself; still for the moment he sank from the dignity of a famous teacher to the level of his own pupils, ​ some of whom he perhaps might meet as fellow-scholars
in the lecture-room at Laon. But it was one thing to form a resolution, another to have the courage or the humility to carry it out; and as a matter of fact Abailard's impatience of authority soon reasserted itself. He sat at the feet of a master whom he felt to be his inferior, and he despised him. Anselm's language, he says, was
wonderful, but its sense was contemptible and void of reason. He kindled a fire not to give light but to fill the house with smoke. Truly the genius of the two men lay in exactly opposite directions. Anselm was an erudite theologian, great in the case-law of the fathers, believing what was written and daring not to add to it. Reason, which to Abailard was the highest gift of man and there fore of the widest applicability, Anselm could treat as impotent in theology, just because it was a human faculty; as such, the things of God were beyond its competence. It is evident that the spirit in which Abailard approached the study was precisely the spirit which would be likely to lead to suspicion and danger in the twelfth century.
His disgust with the barren fig-tree whose delusive
attraction had enticed him into visiting Laon, very soon sq. became too strong for him to be able to continue his studies there. He ridiculed the notion that one could not teach theology without a master, that is, without having gone through a course of instruction under a master; and he provoked a challenge to put forth a specimen of his own skill. His fellow-students warned him against the temerity, but he would not be restrained. He gave an exposition of Ezekiel which, he tells us, so delighted his hearers that those who first came only from curiosity were joined in the subsequent lectures by a press of diligent students. Anselm was very wroth: his disciples Alberic of Rheims and Lotulf the Lombard, urged upon him the duty of ​interdicting a course of procedure which from being un authorised was viewed almost in the light of rebellion. To the indignation of the rest of the scholars who had been glad enough to exchange the formal, if weighty, instruction of their old master for lectures into which Abailard threw all the energy and fresh vigour of his intellect, the course was suppressed; the interloper judged it wise to return to Paris. His stay at Laon had only proved to him in his own mind, that no learning, no eminence, was beyond his power: envy, he said, expelled him; rivalry was now out of the question.
Abailard's reception at Paris confirmed his self-conceit. The former enmity there had vanished; only his reputation was remembered. He seems to have been at once made a canon of Notre Dame: he resumed his lectures and became again the most popular teacher of his day. While he was thus in the zenith of his career fate suddenly turned against him: he quitted the cathedral and entered the religious life in the abbey of Saint Denis; for the future he would be dead to the world. The circumstances of this crisis are familiar to all readers, whether of history or romance; and a good deal of mischief has been done by the solemn reproofs of the one, and the sentimentalities of the other, class of writers. Abailard himself, our sole informant of the particulars of his love for Heloïssa, was a man whose self-reliance, as we have said, required that every act of his should seem to be a skilfully devised link ​in a consistent chain of policy; he almost writes as if to persuade us that from the outset he deliberately planned his mistress's ruin. To those who read his words with a deeper perception of his character, and much more to those who go on to the long correspondence and the life long interdependence of Abailard and Heloïssa, such an explanation will appear not merely inadequate but incredible. Abailard's account, written moreover under the oppression of enduring remorse, is too highly coloured by these mixed feelings to be taken as it stands: his interpretation of his error, or his guilt, is misleading. In the words of his wisest biographer, 'he deceives himself; a noble and secret instinct bade him love her who had no equal:' and the same instinct kept the two in spiritual union, however far apart their lives might run, until the end.
Abailard privately married Heloïssa; but this step, a concession to the wishes of her family, was powerless to avert their vengeance. Here we must carefully observe that the marriage was in no wise thought of as an act unbecoming or forbidden to a clergyman. From Abailard's own writings we learn that he would be ready with arguments for such a case. The lower clergy, he held, ​ were free to take wives so long as they were not in charge of a parish. He appealed to the established usage of the Greek church, to the exceptional privileges granted the newly converted English by Gregory the Great, in proof that celibacy was a law of expediency (and thus less or more restricted at different times and places), not one of universal obligation. Accordingly we do not find that either he or any one else objected to his marriage on this ground: it is certain that he was in orders, because he was a canon; but it does not appear that he was as yet even a subdeacon. When Heloïssa argued against the proposal and urged the examples of gentile philosophers who remained unmarried in the interest of their labours, unbound as they were by any profession of religion, and concluded, What does it become thee to do who art clerk and canon?—the reasoning is simply that if marriage be an impediment to a philosopher's labours, how much more must it affect one with a religious obligation; but there is no hint of any further obstacle. Doubtless Abailard injured his position by his action; possibly he might be conceived to be thereby disqualified from the functions of a theological teacher: but more it would be improper to assert. If there was any prejudice raised against him on this account it was quickly silenced when Fulbert, his wife's uncle, revenged himself with savage violence upon the invader of his home. Fulbert, the ​ champion of virtue, had to flee: his victim was supported not only by the sympathy of his disciples and the clergy at large, but even by that of the canons and of the bishop of Paris himself. It was not then Abailard's marriage that set a period to his career as a teacher in Paris; it was the shock of the personal outrage to which he had been subjected and which it was a heavy task to survive. His honour in the city was in fact unimpaired, perhaps augmented: but the thread of his life was broken, He had no longer heart to continue his lessons: he withdrew in bitterness to Saint Denis; his wife found shelter in the convent of Argenteuil.
But Abailard found no rest in the abbey. The disorder, the loose manners, of his fellow-monks turned the religious quiet of the place into an uproar more jarring than the noise of the outer world. Abailard raised his voice in vain against these misdoings; at length he was permitted to remove to a cell in the country of Champagne. He had now rallied from his misery. The pressure of his former scholars roused in him again his old energy. He was once more a teacher, thronged by students of the arts whom it was his ambition to educate to the pursuit of true philosophy, in other words, of theology. He would be another Origen. Theology, however, as he had learned at Laon was a dangerous profession unless the teacher had well authenticated credentials. To established masters, to Alberic of Rheims and Lotulf of Novara, Abailard was an adventurer, all the more sternly to be suppressed because his popularity was draining their schools. They strained every nerve to effect his overthrow. But, to do them justice, it was not mere envy that prompted their opposition. Abailard's was a perilously exciting personality. His nature (this is a principal charge which Otto of Freising makes against him) was too restless to endure subjection to any master. He committed himself to controversy with each in succession, and such was the defiant and contemptuous tenour of his argument that he made enemies of them all. The very qualities which delighted ​his pupils, his dogmatism, his brave assurance, were just those which irritated his elders and contemporaries. In earlier years William of Champeaux had done everything in his power to keep his rival away from Paris: now it was Abailard's oldest master, the nominalist Roscelin, just closing his troubled career as a canon of Saint Martin's at Tours, who renewed the attack.
Abailard had indeed taken no pains to conceal his opinions. He had but recently published a work On the divine Unity and Trinity, which appeared to his critics to contain grave errors with respect to the cardinal doctrine: for this he was to be called to account. Roscelin, eager no doubt to demonstrate his own innocence of a heresy for which he had suffered nearly a generation previously, and which he may have recognised as the object of certain pointed references in the new book, came forward as the champion of the faith. He disseminated a rumour against Abailard's orthodoxy. The latter reported the calumny to the bishop of Paris in a letter couched in language of indecent violence against his assailant. He reminded the bishop of Roscelin's past history and of the notorious contumely with which it had been attended. He also wrote, but the letter has not been preserved, in ​ similar terms to Roscelin. Roscelin had his answer; in vituperation he was a match for his scholar: but possibly the taint attaching to his name prevented the affair from being carried further. The actual blow came from Rheims, where those same masters, Alberic and Lotulf, who had long before procured the discontinuance of Abailard's informal lectures at Laon, now presided over the cathedral school. In the seven or eight years that had passed since then they had risen to an influential position. They aspired to be the successors of Anselm and William of Champeaux. and their authority stood high in the counsels of Rodulph the archbishop of Rheims. The latter they prevailed upon to arrange with the papal legate, Conan, bishop of Palestrina, the assembly of a council to enquire into Abailard's errors: and so it came about. Abailard was tried before the council of Soissons in 1121, and he was condemned.
Of the details of this affair it is difficult to judge. ​ Our principal witness is Abailard himself, and it would be too much to expect impartiality from one who suffered as he felt unjustly. The charge against him was that he had imported his nominalism into the domain of theology. Since the time when Roscelin first opened the discussion, the mystery of the Trinity had offered dangerous attractions to the students of logic. Abailard tells us that the accusation was the same as an earlier council at Soissons had brought home to Roscelin: namely that he taught the existence of three Gods. If such were the charge it were easy enough for Abailard to answer it. Roscelin had but now reproached him with precisely the opposite view; and no language can be clearer or more precise than that of his extant works (and a there is nothing to lead us to suppose that he changed his opinions in any material point), in which he declares the substantial unity, the singleness, of the divine nature: where, he says, there is only a substance entirely one and individual, there is no plurality of things. His real difficulty was to reconcile this absolute being with the tripersonal nature of God: and Otto of Freising is probably right in asserting that the charge against him was that, nimis attenuans, Abailard effaced the discrimination of the three Persons, which the church held to be not mere names but distinct things with separate properties; in other words that he held, as Roscelin had already insinuated, the proscribed tenet of Sabellianism, that the three Persons are the three aspects by which God reveals himself to us, Power, Wisdom, and Love (or Goodness).
There is no doubt that the description is- partially just. Abailard confesses that the attempt to prove the diversity coexistent with the unity, is one that baffles human reasoning. Philosophical terms are not merely inadequate to the expression of the supreme truth; they are inapplicable to it. We are forced to use words in a ​ special sense, to resort to metaphors and similitudes in order to bring it home to our understanding. It is true that the z illustrations and analogies which Abailard brought forward, to give, as it were, a glimpse of that which transcends thought, were liable to be perverted as though he intended them to be accurate representations of the truth itself : but setting aside this mistake, for which a there is little justification in his books, if we read
them as a whole and do not pick out single sentences, (especially there is no doubt that the main thesis may be, and has 381 sq. often been, held by orthodox Christians, who make a dis tinction between the essential nature of God and the forms by which we perceive it : and it has generally been held that, if imperfect, the doctrine is not necessarily heretical. Nor can it be doubted that it was not really Abailard’s conclusions that formed the strength of the indictment against him, but the method by which he reached them.
It is, however, needless to speculate upon the right or wrong of the case, since Abailard was by all accounts condemned unheard; there was no attempt, certainly no serious attempt, made at the trial to understand or confute him. If any step in this direction was taken, his superior knowledge and dialectical skill immediately drove his opponents back upon their material defences, the strong arm of the archbishop of Rheims and of his docile chief, the papal legate : Abailard mercilessly exposed their vaunted championship of orthodoxy as involving commonplaces of heresy long ago exploded by the arguments of the fathers. Accordingly, although he had submitted hjs book to the jurisdiction of the council, with a promise that if there were anything in it that departed from the catholic faith, he would correct it and offer satisfaction, no one ventured to examine it. Bishop Geoffrey of Chartres therefore, the most respected among the prelates of Gaul, seeing that there was no chance of a candid enquiry at Soissons, proposed an adjournment to a more learned tribunal to be assembled at a future ​ date at Saint Denis. The motion was agreed to, and for an instant Abailard had hope. But the legate was soon persuaded that a postponement would be a virtual admission of weakness. It was represented to him that Abailard's book was condemned by the very fact of his having presumed publicly to lecture upon it without its having been authorised by the Roman pontiff or by the church; it must therefore be officially consigned to the flames as a warning to others. Bishop Geoffrey made stand no longer. He sorrowfully advised Abailard to yield : this violence, he said, could only recoil on the heads of its authors and assist the cause which it was intended to destroy. The book was burnt and its author was committed to the custody of the abbat of Saint Medard.
Abailard was not long held in confinement. His sentence had become, he says, a public scandal; and his restoration to Saint Denis was less an act of grace than a device for burying the consequences of the trial. But Abailard's second stay in his own monastery was as distasteful to him as the first. His unlucky discovery in the pages of the Venerable Bede that saint Denis, the Areopagite, the patron of the foundation, was bishop of Corinth and not of Athens, as maintained by the tradition of the abbey, brought matters to a crisis. The brethren assembled in chapter, denounced the audacious statement, and threatened its perpetrator with further proceedings before the king. Abailard deemed it wise to flee; he made his way by night into the country of Champagne. But he could not always be a fugitive; he desired in no ​ way to release himself from the obligation of his monastic vow, only to be free to exercise his own choice as to where he should live. To obtain such permission it was necessary to propitiate his religious superiors, whose irritation was hard to avert. He explained in vain that he had discovered that the statement of Bede was outweighed by the superior authority of Eusebius and others. At length the appointment of a new abbat of Saint Denis, the famous Suger, made matters easier, and Abailard was dispensed from residence in the house. He withdrew to a solitude in the neighbourhood of Troyes, possibly the same retreat whither he had gone on the occasion of his previous departures from Saint Denis. There with a single companion he set up a hut of wattles arid thatch, an oratory in the name of the holy Trinity. But it would certainly be a mistake to think that he now purposed to lead the tranquil life of a hermit. Need, he says, forced him to teach; but it was not merely to supply his physical sustenance: his active brain must else have succumbed in the wild monotony of his new abode. No doubt he ​ published the seat of his future lessons before he set out for it. At all events it was no sooner known where the master was than the story of his former sojourn in the same locality repeated itself. A concourse of students followed him, and the solitude was turned into an encampment. Abailard regained his old spirits. A school grew up about him, and the little oratory became the centre of a huddled mass of cabins and tents. Abailard rebuilt and enlarged it, and consecrated it afresh to the Paraclete, the Comforter of his hard-pressed life. He had the same learned ardour as ever; but more and more his secular teaching is becoming a necessity, not a chosen task; more and more he is growing absorbed in the study of spiritual things.
Was it this very fact, was it his presumed intrusion upon a field where only those who have not lifted up their mind unto vanity may dare to tread, that made this change in Abailard's life a signal for a renewal of suspicion against him? From this time, Abailard says, he had to fear the slanders, the machinations, of the two men who boasted themselves the reformers of the religious life; saint Norbert the new apostle of the regular canons, saint Bernard, of the monks;—the one the founder of the Premonstratensian order, the other of the abbey of Clairvaux. Abailard's fear is the only evidence of its cause. At the time when he dwelt upon it he had not to our knowledge come into personal conflict with either: the day when Bernard should vanquish him at the council of Sens was yet far distant; in 1131 indeed he is found in friendly association with the abbat on the occasion of a high solemnity, in the presence of pope Innocent the Second at Morigny near ​ Etampes. Still the presentiment of evil was so strong that Abailard meditated escaping altogether from the lands of Christendom and living alone, a blameless outcast. Soon, however, a middle path opened to him. About the year 1125 the abbacy of Saint Gildas de Rhuys in Brittany became vacant: doubtless through his connexion with that country, he was called to assume the office. The invitation furnished the release he was seeking; and he gladly betook himself to the desolate coast, preferring to live among people of barbarous manners and strange speech, rather than to encounter daily suspicion of his beliefs on subjects which were now to him most sacred of all.
For a course of years then, probably six or eight, ​ Abailard dwelt at Saint Gildas, though it is difficult to understand how he could have lived there at all. Never before had he suffered such hardship, such unrelieved misery. He had now no longer any teaching to take his thoughts away from external cares. He was in the hands of violent men, unlettered, unruly, of unbridled passions and degraded lusts, robbers, would-be murderers : such were the monks of Saint Gildas. Abailard had no command over them ; it was enough if he could preserve his personal safety. A single incident consoled him in this terrible period of his career. The convent of Argenteuil, where Heloissa lived as prioress, had ceased to exist. The abbat of Saint Denis had asserted on behalf of his house a legal claim upon it : he established his suit, and in 1128 the nuns were dispersed. The news no sooner reached Abailard than he resolved to place his wife in possession of the deserted buildings of his oratory of the Paraclete. The grant was approved by the bishop of Troyes and i confirmed by pope Innocent the Second in 1131. From that day Abailard had a new interest to assuage his gloom. He visited the Paraclete frequently; he helped to remove the difficulties, even of the means of sustenance, that encompassed the infant nunnery; became the counsellor, the father, of the house. Each return to Saint Gildas made the tyranny of his own sons more unendurable : m he sought every means of escape but was arrested by bandits hired by them. He engaged the aid of superior powers and had a number of the brethren expelled ; but the act only exasperated the rest, flight became a necessity. At length he made good his escape ; but not yet to security : n he long trembled lest his refuge should be discovered, and he fall a victim to the vengeance of the monks he had deserted.
It is in this pitiable situation that the History of his Misfortunes, which has been our principal guide in the preceding narrative, was written : we do not know how long the crisis was protracted, but in the end he appears to have received permission to live free of the monastery ​ while retaining his rank as abbat. The following years are filled only with his correspondence with Heloïssa. He is now the director of the fortunes of the Paraclete : he resolves the various problems that arose in respect of ritual and discipline ; his thoughts are absorbed in the details, in the routine of practical religious life ; he seems to have forgotten that he had ever been a master of worldly lore and a teacher to whom all men listened. Yet in fact this period was probably one of great intellectual activity. It seems that he was now engaged in collecting and putting in order his former works, in expanding and digesting the notes and glosses that had once stood him in such good stead at Saint Geneviève or at the Paraclete. It was now, unless the indications deceive us, that he mainly wrote, or at least brought into the form in which we now have it, the treatise on Dialectic, which holds a most important place in the history of learning, as well as that Theologia, distinguished by editors as the Introduction to Theology, which furnished his enemies with a weapon for his final overthrow. Abailard had indeed lost neither the desire nor the power of subduing an audience, and twice again he was found on Saint Genevieve ; twice again he became the centre of the dialectical world. How it was that he recovered his popularity we have no means of knowing, but it is a plausible conjecture that the History of his Misfortunes was written not only with a view to publication, but also with the object of reminding the world of the position which he had once held among teachers, and which he was resolved to hold again. In 1136, when q John of Salisbury began his logical studies, it was to Abailard that he addressed himself; and if we may argue from the description of a keen young student, the master had lost nothing of his hold upon his hearers.
He appeared as a meteor, but soon vanished : his enemies had troubled themselves little about him, so long as he remained in obscurity. For fifteen years they had made no sign; but the mere dread of attack had driven him long ​ago into the exile of Saint Gildas. His return to public work, and that in the immediate neighbourhood of Paris, aroused all the slumbering forces of jealousy, of personal dislike, of orthodox alarm. His former rivals indeed were either dead or had retired from the schools: of such opposition there was no longer any risk. But a new generation had arisen, and was now in full strength, of which the chieftain was Bernard of Clairvaux, a force which maintained permanent, implacable hostility against Abailard. Bernard stood for traditional authority; he held that to discuss the mysteries of religion was to destroy the merit of faith, and Abailard's whole method of analysis and exposition appeared to him fraught with the gravest peril. It was this, rather than any specific statements that might be quoted from Abailard's writings, which aroused Bernard's suspicion and enmity.
Abailard had considered the problem of the relation between human knowledge and revelation, between reason and faith, in three successive theological treatises; in the work de Trinitate condemned at Soissons in 1121, in the revised edition of that work known as the Theologia Christiana, and in the Introductio ad Theologiam. In the first of these he speaks of the impossibility of comprehending or explaining the Godhead; he cites Plato and saint Augustine on his side, and repeats the famous saying of saint Gregory the Great, There is no merit in a faith whereof human reason furnishes the proof–Fides non habet meritum, cui humana ratio praebet experimentum. He supports it by the words of saint Ambrose, We are commanded to believe; we are forbidden to discuss. Nevertheless, adds Abailard, since we cannot by the authority of saints or philosophers refute the urgency of the arguments which are wont to be used by the logicians, to whom in the context he has repeatedly addressed his reproofs, unless, by human reasons we oppose them who rely on human reasons, we ​have resolved to answer fools according to their folly, and to destroy their attacks by the same arts with which they attack us. And on this ground alone Abailard declares that he will venture to expound the diversity of the Persons in one, individual, single Divine substance, and the incarnation of the Word, and the procession of the Spirit. But, he says, I do not promise to teach the truth, which neither I nor any man can know; I shall only set forth something probable (verisimile) and nigh to human reason, at the same time not contrary to Holy Scripture, against those who boast themselves to attack the faith by human reasons, and find many easily to agree with them, since almost all men be sensual, and very few spiritual. It is enough for us to undermine in whatever way we can the strength of the chief enemies of the holy faith, especially since we can in no other way succeed, except we satisfy them by human reasons. Nothing can be more evident than that Abailard adopts in this treatise the strictly orthodox, traditional view of the relation of reason and faith. Revelation is to be believed, not discussed; discussion is only permissible to refute the arguments of adversaries; we may use their own weapons against themselves. The whole passage is repeated substantially without change in the Theologia Christiana; all that Abailard has done is to add some fresh illustrations and arguments, which bring out still more clearly the firmness of his reliance upon authority. In one of these additions he says, Where reason is hidden, let authority satisfy us, and let that well-known and principal rule touching the strength of authority be upheld ... 'Quod ab omnibus,' what is approved by all, or by most, or by the learned, is not to be contradicted.
There is a perceptible difference between Abailard's view in these earlier treatises and that maintained in the Introductio ad Theologiam. One passage indeed has been cited from the latter in a directly opposite sense to those which we have found in the De Trinitate and the Theologia Christiana; but this interpretation rests first ​upon a corruption in the text, and secondly upon a mistake in punctuation. Still a difference there is in Abailard's discussion of the matter which it seems to me can be most naturally explained on psychological grounds. Abailard was first and foremost a critic; the love of opposition was his normal stimulus to production; and the fact that the object of his attack held one view, led him inevitably to emphasise the contrary. We find him the hostile critic of both his masters in dialectics, Roscelin and William of Champeaux. When he became a monk of Saint Denis he was not long in discovering the accredited legend of that house to be unhistorical. And so in his theological writings, when in the earlier treatises he was addressing himself to the rationalism of Roscelin, he took pains to exalt the dignity of authority; but when many years later he found himself confronted by the rising forces of mysticism, as represented by saint Bernard and his school, Abailard took up the challenge and fought the battle of reason. Yet the difference between the earlier and the later works is more a difference of tone than of substance. In the one he attacks those who make reason the standard of faith, in the other he attacks those who rely exclusively upon authority. Consequently, in ​the former he insists with greater emphasis upon the importance to be attached to authority than he does in the latter. Only in one point does his later treatment appear to differ seriously from his earlier; and that is where he depreciates the virtue of belief before understanding. The change of opinion connects itself here also naturally with the change in his opponents: he had now to deal with theologians who accepted in the most literal sense the dictum of saint Anselm, Credo ut intelligam.
We can however only surmise the reason which prompted Abailard, probably in 1137, to give up his lectures on Saint Geneviève. Perhaps he exaggerated the danger, it is even possible that some purely private consideration decided the step; at all events he soon returned. In 1139 he was again there, no doubt actively engaged in his old employment, when Arnold of Brescia, formerly, it is said, his scholar, now a fugitive from Italy, attached himself to him as his staunch ally and companion. After Abailard for the last time quitted the place under the circumstances to which we shall immediately turn, Arnold remained his successor on the hill until he too was forced to leave France and take refuge at Zurich. Arnold's adhesion, however loyal, perhaps did harm rather than good. Abailard had no doubt given offence by exposing the morals of the clergy and attacking certain abuses of ecclesiastical discipline which subserved the interests of the order rather than of society at large: but his disciple went infinitely ​ further in denouncing all holding of property by the church and proclaiming a visionary revival of 'evangelical poverty.' The attachment of such an advocate was plainly not in Abailard's favour.
It seems that in 1139 William, once abbat of Saint Thierry near Rheims, now a humble monk at Signy, proclaimed, in a letter of passionate excitement, the horrible doctrines which he had detected in the theological works, and particularly in the new Theologia, of Abailard: Petrus enim Abaëlardus iterum nova docet, nova scribit. The letter was addressed jointly to his friend Bernard and to Geoffrey of Chartres, whose influence had nearly succeeded in rescuing Abailard at the council of Soissons, and who was now papal legate. Geoffrey perhaps had no wish to take the matter up, and Bernard delayed. After a while, however, the latter desiring with his wonted qoodness and benignity that the error should be corrected and not its author confounded, resolved to seek an interview with Abailard: so says Bernard's devoted biographer, afterwards his successor at Clairvaux, Geoffrey of Auxerre, who adds that Abailard was so much moved by the saint's temperate expostulations that he promised to amend his errors according as he should prescribe. The submission, however, if it was ever made, was shortlived. Abailard appealed to the archbishop of Sens, under whose metropolitical jurisdiction the diocese of Paris fell, and demanded an opportunity of defending his position. Geoffrey's account indeed cannot be true, for had Abailard been guilty of this tergiversation it would, as Rémusat observes, not have escaped comment when the council was actually held: but there can be little doubt that the interview decided Abailard to a resolute assertion of his integrity. The opportunity he sought was conveniently chosen, for at Whitsuntide in 1140 the French king ​ was about to visit Sens, and his presence would bring together a concourse of prelates to whose numbers and eminence the appellant could look with a greater probability of impartial judgement than it had been his lot to meet with at his trial at Soissons. Then too he had been the accused; now he was the challenger. The difference, it seems, truly characterises the change that Abailard's mind had undergone through his long years of suffering and disappointment. His confidence in his absolute orthodoxy had never failed him; but now for the first time was it a pressing need to him to bring it into clear publicity.
Fifteen years earlier Abailard had seen in Norbert and Bernard the two principal troublers of his peace: a monk himself, he had enough reason to distrust and rebel against the narrow and professional tendencies of his order. Now, Norbert was dead; but Bernard was still there, and all-powerful with a large section of the religious community. It was evident in Abailard's mind that the meeting at Sens was to be a duel, but Bernard was not equally eager to engage in it. Such contests, he said, he disdained; it was not to their decision that the verities of faith were to be subjected: Abailard's writings were by themselves sufficient to convict him. None the less did he circulate an inflammatory letter among the prelates who were about to take part in the council. At length he yielded to the representations of his followers and made his appearance at Sens. Abailard was also present; but hardly had the council opened, hardly was the recital of his heresies begun, when, by
​a sudden revulsion of feeling, a failure of courage or a flash of certainty that the votes of the council were already secured, perhaps that the excited populace would rise against him,—he appealed from that tribunal to the sovereign judgement of the Roman pontiff, and quitted the assembly.
Thus at the close of his life as at every juncture in its progress, Abailard's fortunes turned upon the alternations of his inner mood. He believed his actions to be under the mechanical control of his mind; yet he was really the creature of impulse. At the critical moment, that lofty self-confidence of which he boasted would suddenly desert him and change by a swift transition into the extreme of despondency, of incapacity for action. He fled from the council, which proceeded to condemn his doctrines with as little scruple and as little examination as the council of Soissons, but he never reached Rome. He rested on ​the road at Cluny; old age had suddenly come upon him, and he had no more strength to continue the journey. In the famous abbey he stayed, resigned and softened,—anxiously making his peace with Bernard, wearily repeating his protestation of innocence to the pope, who had lost no time in ratifying the sentence of Sens,—until increasing weakness made it necessary to remove him to the more salubrious climate of Chalons on the Saône. There in the spring of 1142 his troubles ended. The violence of Bernard had rid the church of a spirit too high-minded and too sensitive to outlive the injury. Whether the saint was satisfied with his success we hardly know: but this at least is certain that, except to zealots of the circle of Clairvaux, the impression of the sentence of Sens was entirely effaced by the renown of Abailard's transcendent learning and of his pious merit as the founder of the Paraclete, now erected into an abbey and, under the rule of Heloiissa, preeminent in honour among the convents of France. To one who watched by him in his decline, to Peter the Venerable, abbat of Cluny, himself n no friend to new methods in learning, the memory of Abailard retained a sweet savour, pure from any stain of malice: he was ever to be named with honour, the servant of Christ and verily Christ's philosopher.
* ↑ With reference to the name, it is hardly necessary to say that from the first its spelling fluctuates. In the editions it is commonly normalised as Abaëlardus; the diphthong is altogether a modern invention, disproved by every instance in which it occurs in verse. On the whole it seems that Abaielardus is the earliest form. This appears, e.g., in the facsimile of the Munich manuscript of the Sic et non given at the end of Henke's edition, as well as in Otto of Freising (ed. Pertz) and John of Salisbury (in his Historia pontificalis), although the former alternates with Abaiolardus. Of the Paris manuscripts of the thirteenth century, edited by Cousin in the Ouvrages inédits d'Abélard, one gives Abailardus (intr. p. viii.), the other two Abaelardus (see the facsimile facing p. 4.34). Other rare forms need not be quoted, some of them are uncouth enough; but the fact that the initial a was frequently dropped (see an instance below, Appendix viii.) may be taken as evidence of where the accent lay. It was natural that the word should become softened in common use; and Abailardus and Abalaërdus were no doubt practically undistinguishable in pronunciation. I adopt the former, partly because it approaches nearest to the original (though it needs no apology even to the French, since it is accepted in Firmin-Didot's Nouvelle Biographie générale), partly because it avoids those associations with eighteenth-century sentimentalism which surround the name of Abélard and obscure the philosopher's true significance. The popularity of this last spelling seems to date from, its selection by Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique, s. v.
* ↑ For the biography my principal guide has been Abailard's own correspondence, though this has necessarily to be taken with reserve. Besides the contemporary literature, I have derived very great help from the biography of Charles de Rémusat, the first piece of genuine scholarly work ever devoted to Abailard. Still it should be observed that Bayle, in the article above referred to, has the credit of introducing order into the narrative of Abailard's life; in which respect Milman, for instance, History of Latin Christianity 4. 342-365, is not seldom far less trustworthy. From all the authorities – Cousin, Ritter, Hauréau, and Prantl should be added – I have ventured to differ seriously in my general estimate of Abailard's character. While preparing this and the following chapters for the press I have had the advantage of reading Dr. S. M. Deutsch's Peter Abälard, ein kritischer Theolog des zwölften Jahrhunderts; 1883.
* ↑ Dr. von Prantl identifies this ecclesia Locensis with Locmenach, now Locminé, near Vannes, in Brittany: Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande 2, 77 [78] n. 314.
* ↑ The exact nature of this change is doubtful on account of a various reading in the manuscripts of the Historia calamitatum, in respect to which Cousin, Fragments philosophiques 2. 115 sqq., and Rémusat, vol. 1. 20, adopt a different judgement from that generally received, e. g., by Ritter, Geschichte der christlichen Philosophie 3. 358, by M. Hauréau, Histoire de la Philosophie scolastique 1. 337 sqq., and by Dr. von Prantl, vol. 2. 129 sq. [130 sqq.] Dr. Deutsch, p. 103 n. 2, supports the opinion of Cousin and Rémusat.
* ↑ See generally Rémusat 2. 119 sqq., Hauréau 1. 380 sqq., Schaarschmidt, Johannes Saresberiensis 319 sqq. The exposition of the two former writers, as well as that of Cousin, vol. 2 160-197, is partly vitiated by the stress they lay on the treatise De generibus et speciebus, the authorship of which is more than doubtful. [See Prantl, 2. 114 n. 49, 144 n. 148.]
* ↑ How many of them is disputed. Schaarschmidt, pp. 70, 120 (cf. p. 305), says nothing beyond the Categories and the De interpretatione, with the Isagoge of Porphyry: Dr. von Prantl however, vol. 2. 100-104, shows that Abailard's knowledge extended to the Prior Analytics. [Cf. A. Hofmeister, Studien über Otto von Freising, in the Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere Deutsche Geschichtskunde, 37. 656-664; 1912.]
* ↑ Peripateticis, quos nunc dialecticos appellamus: Abael. Theol. Christ, iii. 1, Opp. 2. 448.
* ↑ Remusat, vol. 1. 49, has made a similar remark in connexion with another incident in Abailard’s life, on which see below, pp. 124 sq.
* ↑ [See Denifle, Die Universitäten des Mittelalters, 1. 765 n. 31.] magister Luitolfus in Cerhoh 10
* ↑ Otto of Freising gives the name as Letald or Leutald of Novara: De gestis Friderici i. 47, Pertz 20. 377. No doubt of Reichersperg, ep. xxi Migne 193. 576 c, is the same person.
* ↑ This is a surmise; Abailard is never actually spoken of as a canon of Paris, while different records seem to give him this title at Tours, Chartres, and Sens. See Remusat 1. 39 n., and compare below p. 171 and n. 30.
* ↑ It was at this time, I am persuaded, with Cousin, vol. 2. 208 sqq., that Abailard wrote the Sic et non. A collection such as this, of discrepant opinions from the fathers on the principal points of theology, is just what an ambitious lecturer on the subject would prepare for his own use. My view of the date is not incompatible with the presumption raised by Dr. Deutsch, pp. 462 sq., that the prologue to it, naturally the last part of the cornposition, was written about the year 1121. [M. G. Robert, Les Ecoles et l’Enseignement de la Theologie pendant la premiere Moitie de la xii$^e$ Siecle (1909) pp. 166-211, assigns the Sic et non to 1120-1122, the Dialectica to about 1121, the Theologia Christiana to about 1123-1124, the Introductio ad Theologiam to 125, and the Letters to 1133-1136.]
* ↑ A recent biographer of saint Bernard has supposed that Abailard began this stage in his career by a course of indiscriminate debauchery, and afterwards paid court to Heloïssa in obedience to a craving for a more select form of gratification: J. Cotter Morison, Life and Times of saint Bernard, 296; 1863. The single basis for the former part of this hypothesis, which is contradicted by Abailard's express statement, Hist. calam. v. p. 9, is a letter by Fulk, prior of Deuil (Abael. Opp. 1. 703-707), whose rhetorical flattery, and whose professed aim of consoling Abailard, cannot conceal the brutality of his satire: he is in fact merely retailing and magnifying whatever idle calumnies were current about Abailard among his enemies, besides adding not a few from his own gross imagination. [Not long before he died Mr. Morison assured me he was convinced that the view which he had expressed was without foundation.]
* ↑ The passage is in the Sententiae, cap. xxxi, published under the misleading title of Epitome theologiae Christianae by F. H. Rheinwald, Berlin 1835, p. 91 (or in Cousin's edition of the Opera 2. 582). The work is based upon the Introductio ad Theologiam, but unfortunately the particular chapter represents a portion of the Introductio which is now lost. It has been supposed that the Sententiae, although almost certainly not the production of Abailard himself, are notes taken by a disciple from his lectures, and that they may be used with comparative confidence: see Rheinwald's preface, pp. xxvi-xxviii; Rémusat 2. 188, 243 sq.; Hefele, Concilien-geschichte 5. 410 n., 419 (1863); Deutsch 453-456. [This opinion has been decisively overthrown by Denifle, who has for the first time elicited the real meaning of Sententiae from a comparison of four contemporaneous collections: see the Archiv für Litteratur-und Kirchen-Geschichte des Mittelalters, 1. 402-469, 584-624; Berlin 1885.] In the passage referred to in the text it is evident that the manuscript, which is all through a very bad one, is seriously corrupt. The words are, 'Utrum clerici matrimonium contrahere possint, quaeri solet. Sacerdotes qui non fecerunt, possunt. Rémusat, vol. 2. 249 n. 2, is disposed to understand vota with fecerunt; but the passage goes on to forbid marriage to any order above that of acolyte. Should we read fiunt instead of fecerunt?—Those who do not become priests, may marry.
* ↑ That this Tractatus de unitate et trinitate divina is the work that remains to us under the title of Theologia Christiana, was argued by H. Goldhorn, in the Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie 36 (30, of the new series) 161-229, Gotha 1866. Dr. Deutsch, however, pref., p. v. maintains, I think with good reason, that the Theologia is not identical with, but a new edition of, the Tractatus. [This is made certain by the discovery of the work in a manuscript at Erlangen by R. Stölzle, who published it under the title of Tractatus de Unitate et Trinitate divina, Freiburg 1891. I drew attention to the importance of the discovery in an article on Abailard as a theological Teacher, which appeared in the Church Quarterly Review, 41. 132-145; 1895.] Formerly the work had been considered to be identical with the Introductio ad Theologiam: see Rémusat, 1. 75 (cf. pp. 81 n., 88 n.), Cousin, Abacl. Opp. 2. 1 sq., and Hefele, 5. 321 n. 1.
* ↑ At least such expressions are plainly given in the Theologia Christiana and in the Introductio ad Theologiam, which are on all accounts enlargements of the earlier work and in all probability follow its lines pretty closely in the part where they deal with the same subject. [These references are in fact found in the Tractatus de Trinitate, e.g., pp. 48, 54: see also Stölzle's preface, pp.xxvi-xxxii, and my article, pp. 137 seq.]
* ↑ This is evident from the fact that while Roscelin's rejoinder keeps pretty closely to the lines of Abailard's extant letter, it also animadverts in set terms upon some expressions not to be found in that letter. Everything more over contradicts Cousin's notion, Abael. Opp. 2. 792, that Roscelin's letter drew forth that of Abailard to the bishop: for the latter, as appears from its be ginning, is an answer not to a specific letter but to a report which Roscelin had circulated; while Abailard's countercharges are all presupposed in the letter of Roscelin. The discovery of this letter, it may be added, has finally settled an old controversy with reference to the authenticity and motive of Abailard's, and remarkably confirmed the prior arguments of Andre Duchesne, Abael. Opp. 1. 50 sq., and Remusat, vol. 1. 81 n. 2. Hitherto it had naturally been questioned whether Roscelin could be alive at so late a date. The new fact has been skilfully applied to fill in the detail of his biography by M. Haureau. Singularites historiques et litteraires 222-230, who had already discovered Roscelin's name (Roscelino do Compendio) among the signatories to a deed at Saint Martin's, Tours, about the year 1111, Gallia Christiana 14, instrum. 80 d; 1856.
* ↑ See the verses commemorating Alberic in the Life of Adelbert the Second, archbishop of Mentz, by one Anselm, vcr. 599-606, Jaffe, Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum, 3. 586. Part of it describes the master as follows: Qui nova pandendo, set non antiqua silendo, Littcra quae celat vetus aut nova scripta, rcvelat, Dogmatis immensi dux primus in urbe Remensi, Testamentorum pandens recretaduorum, ver. 603-6 6. For another sign of the regard in which Alberic was held, see the extract given above, p. 68 n. 30.
* ↑ [The incriminated passages were probably those in pp. 61-08 of the Tractatus, which do not reappear in the Theologia Christiana.]
* ↑ [The text as printed is corrupt. The. true reading is cited by Denifle, Universitaten, i. 765 n.31, from two French manuscripts, which are supported by the Bodleian MS. Add. C. 271 f. 92 A.]
* ↑ Saint Denis was no doubt bishop neither of the one place nor of the other, but of Paris; but this Denis was not the Areopagite. Abailard’s critical saga- city led him to discredit the popular story, and he gladly accepted the first alternative he found. Still that the question arising with regard to the various persons who bore the name of Dionysius, can by no means be considered as settled may be gathered from the different articles in Smith and Waco's Dictionary of Christian Biography 1. 841 b, 842 a, 848 b, 849.
* ↑ Dr. Deutsch, pp. 38 sq., satisfactorily excuses Abailard from the charge of sacrificing his own opinions to expediency; but it is possible that he had concealed the evidence of Eusebius in order to irritate the monks of Saint Denis.
* ↑ The first time 'ad cellam quandam recessi,' cap. viii. p. 17; the second ad terrain comitis Theobaldi proximam, ubi antea in cella moratus fucram, abcessi. 1 cap. x. p. 24. These two are therefore the same; and the latter notice is brought into connexion with Privignum (Provins). Abailard's third visit was 'ad solitudinem quamdam in Trecensi pago mihi antea cognitam,' ib., p. 25. It seems natural to infer that the places were in the same neighbourhood, and this is certainly the old tradition. William Godell, who wrote as early as about 1173, expressly says that Abailard established the Paraclete on a spot 'ubi legere solitus erat,' Chron., Bouquet 13. 675 b, c; and the statement was evidently widely circulated, be cause it occurs in substantially the same words in the Chrono- logia of Robert of Auxerre, Bou quet 12. 293 e, 294 a, and in the Chronicle of Saint Martin's at Tours, ibid., p. 472 c. Bayle's objection to this record, Dict., s. v. Paraclet, n. a, vol. 3. 592, that Abailard did not teach there until after he had built the oratory, is therefore removed by the identification with the seat of his previous teaching. I notice that William of Nangy in repeat ing the story, Chr., sub ann. 1141, changed legere into degere. So at least the text runs in the received edition, Bouquet 20. 731 d, 1840: André Duchesne however read legere here as well, note xlv. to the Hist, calam., Abael. Opp. 1. 63
* ↑ Bishop Hefele, vol. 5. 401, thinks that Abailard's reference to Bernard is an error of memory, but the critic forgets that Abailard had, so far as we know, no more reason for thinking of him when he wrote the Historia calamitatum than at the time of which he speaks. At least there is no evidence of the date of the composition of Abailard's letter to saint Bernard, Opp. 1. 618-624, or of the latter's treatise De baptismo aliisque quaestionibus, of which Dr. Deutsch, pp. 466-472, seems to have proved that Abailard was the object.
* ↑ The names actually follow one another in the list of the notable persons present: Bernardus abbas Clararum Vallium qui tum temporis in Gallia divini verbi famosissimus praedicator erat; Petrus Abailardus, monachus et abbas, et ipse vir religiosus, excellentissimarum rector scholarum, ad quas pene de tota Latinitate viri litterati confluebant: Chronicum Mauriniacense, sub anno, Bouquet, 12. 80 c; 1781.
* ↑ I incline to the shorter period. Rémusat, vol. 1. 163 n., says that Abailard's departure from Saint Gildas 'fut antérieure àa 1136 et probablecment de plusieurs années.' Elsewhere, p. 139 n., he is disposed to place his removal from Brittany (some time after the final rupture with the monks) in 1134. But it must be borne in mind that the entire correspondence between Abailard and Heloïssa belongs to this interval. The latter first wrote when she had by chance had a sight of Abailard's Historia calamitatum, composed in his retirement after, probably just after, he had quitted Saint Gildas; and we must allow some time for the news to have reached her. Moreover a correspondence of eight letters such as we possess supposes a considerable length of time. The last dates given in the Historia calamitatum are (1) the confirmation of the charter of the Paraclete by Innocent the Second, cap. xiii. p. 31; and this was on the 28th November 1131 (see the instrument, Opp. 1. 719 sq.): and (2) a legation from the pope to enquire at Abailard's request into the abuses at Saint Gildas, which we may reasonably conjecture was arranged during Innocent's visit to Gaul, October 1130-March 1132, and probably at the time, January 1131, when Abailard was in the pope's company at Morigny. Either we must be content to leave a blank interval of four or five years before Abailard reappears on Saint Geneviève, or else suppose him to have endured the intolerable life of Saint Gildas for as many as eight. I think it is more natural to abridge the latter. Let it be noticed that it is only the accident of the existence of the Historia calamitatum that makes the earlier part of his life so full of events, and only the incidental notice of John of Salisbury that commemorates his continued activity in 1136. But for this single mention Abailard's history from the termination of his own narrative to the council of Sens, remains a shadow.
* ↑ [The substance of the two following paragraphs is reprinted, by the kind permission of the editor, from my article in the Church Quarterly Review, 41. 138-140.]
* ↑ The manuscript at Balliol College, Oxford, ccxcvi. f. 29 a, from which Cousin printed his text, ii. 78, runs as follow: Novimus quippe ipsum beatum Gregorium saepius in scriptis suis eos qui de resurrectione dubitant, congruis rerum exemplis vel similitudinibus ratiocinando ipsam astruere, pro qua tamen superius dixit, fidem non habere meritum cui humana ratio praebet experimentum. Numquid [a later hand has altered this into Nam quid; Cousin prints Nunquam] hi quos rationibus suis in fide resurrectionis aedificare volebat, has eius rationes, secundum ipsius sententiam, refellere poterant, secundum quam scilicet astruere dicitur, nequaquam de fide humanis rationibus disserendum esse, qui nec hoc astruere dictis, ipse proprie exhibuit factis? Qui nec etiam dixit, non esse ratiocinandum de fide, nec humana ratione ipsam discuti vel investigari debere, set non ipsam [these words in italics are omitted by Cousin] apud Deum habere meritum, ad quam non tam divinae auctoritatis inducit testimonium, quam humanae rationis cogit argumentum; nec quia Deus id dixerat creditur, sed quia hoc sic esse convincitur, recipitur. Dr. Deutsch (p. 120) has acutely proposed an emendation bringing out substantially the meaning of what is in fact found in the manuscript. [M. G. Robert still quotes Cousin's misleading text: see Les Écoles et l'Enseignement de Théologie, p. 184 n. 2.]
* ↑ Ob quam causam a domino Innocentio papa depositus et extrusus ab Italia, descendit in Franciam et adhesit Petro Abaielardo, partesque eius . . adversus abbatem Clarevallensem studiosus fovit. Postquam vero magister Petrus Cluniacum profectus est, Parisius manens in monte sancte Genovefe, divinas litteras scolaribus exponebat apud sanctum Hylarium, ubi iam dictus Petrus fuerat hospitatus: Historia pontificalis xxxi. p. 537. John of Salisbury thus does not state that Abailard was teaching at this time; it is however a natural inference, and is accepted by Dr. von Giesebrecht in the Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und historischen Classe der königlichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 3. 131; 1873. Otto of Freising, De gest. Frid. i. 48 p. 377, is ignorant of this visit of Arnold's to Paris; and it is probable that his mention of him, lib. ii. 20 p. 403, as in his youth a scholar of Abailard, is due to a confusion of dates.
* ↑ [Whether the council was held in 1140 or 1141 has been disputed since the time of Baronius and Henschen. Deutsch, in Die Synode von Sens, pp. 50-54, Berlin 1880, argued in favour of 1141; while E. Vacandard in the Revue des Questions historiques, 50. 235-243 (1891) supported the earlier date. The words of Peter the Venerable, Magistrum Petrum in ultimis vitae suae annis eadem divina dispositio Cluniacum transmisit (Epist. ad Heloissam, in Abael. Opp. 1. 713), seem to imply an interval of more than eleven months between Abailard's condemnation and his death.]
* ↑ In the dramatic account given by Rémusat, vol. 1. 204, of the mien of the two combatants, the biographer has taken the rhetoric of Bernard, ep. clxxxix. 3, col. 182 F, 183 A, too literally.
* ↑ The order of the proceedings is somewhat obscure. [See the different explanations given by Deutsch, Die Synode von Sens, pp. 31-40, and by Dr. Wilhelm Meyer, of Spires, in the Nachrichten von der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Philol.-hist. Klasse), 1898, pp. 404-412.] In this particular I follow Bernard's letter just cited, 4, col. 183 c: according to another, however, ep. cccxxxvii. 3, 4, col. 309 F sq., Abailard's opinions had been already condemned the day before he appealed. All the letters printed among Bernard's works which relate to this affair, I cite as his, although a certain number bear the names of the collective prelates assembled at Sens, or of some of them. Bishop Hefele considers, vol. 5. 405 sqq., that they are all of Bernard's composition, though authorised by the persons to whom they are ascribed. [Dr. Deutsch, however, thinks that ep. cccxxxvii is certainly not Bernard's, but probably the production of a clerk of the archbishop of Sens.]
* ↑ This last alternative is given by Otto, i. 48 p. 377. 'De iusticia veritus,' say two continuators of Sigebert, the Continuatio Praemonstratensis (Pertz 6. 452), one of the earliest of all our witnesses, and the Appendix 'alterius Roberti' (Bouquet 13. 331 A). Geoffrey tells us however that Abailard 'nec volens resipiscere, nec valens resistere sapientiae et spiritui qui loquebatur' (this too is the version which we find in some of Bernard's letters), had nothing for it but to appeal. He repeats a story that Abailard confessed that for the moment he lost his head: Vit. Bern. v. 14 col. 1122 D.
* ↑ Of neither council are the acts preserved in an official shape. Those of Sens we know from the letters of saint Bernard and from his biographers (Alan repeats from Geoffrey) who make little pretence to impartiality. On the other side we have the Apologetic of Peter Berengar, which is simply the invective of a passionate follower of Abailard: Abael. opp. 2. 771-786, especially pp. 772-776. Otto of Freising's is the account of a disinterested reporter acquainted only with the issue of the affair. I have preferred therefore to relate only the facts common to all our authorities. It is worth noticing that modern Roman catholics are unanimous in condemning the proceedings at Soissons and materially qualify their approval of the acts at Sens: see Rémusat, 1. 96 n., 218 n. 1. Dom Mabillon wrote, 'Nolumus Abaëlardum haereticum: sufficit pro Bernardi causa eum fuisse in quibusdam errantem, quod Abaëlardus ipse non diffitetur;' Praef. in Bern. Opp. 1. § 5. p. lv: while Bernhard Pez, the pious librarian of Moelk, judged Mabillon too severe; Thes. Anecd. noviss. 3. dissert. isag. p. xxi; 1721.
* ↑ The confirmation is printed among Bernard's epistles, nr. cxciv, vol. 1. 186 sq.; compare the postscript in Appendix, note 152 p. lxvi. How hard Bernard worked for this result and what scurrilities he thought proper to the occasion, may be learned from a budget of letters which he addressed to Rome, all written, I am persuaded, though Rémusat differs about some of them, after the council of Sens: Epistt. clxxxviii, cxcii (pace Mabillon's title), cxciii, cccxxxi-cccxxxvi (the 'abbat' addressed in this last epistle is surely a Roman), cccxxxviii. I am glad to find my view supported by Bishop Hefele, vol. 5. 404 sq., 409; with whom also I omit Ep. cccxxx (col. 304 E-305 E), accepting his hypothesis that it is a draught, of which Ep. clxxxix presents the final revision.