by Will Durant
Abélard remained with William, he tells us, “for some time.” Then he himself began to teach, first at Melun, later at Corbeil, the one forty, the other twenty-five, miles from Paris. Some criticized him for setting up his own shop after too brief an apprenticeship, but a goodly number of students followed him, relishing his quick mind and tongue. Meanwhile William became a monk at St. Victor, and “by request” continued his lectures there. To him, after a “grievous illness,” Abélard returned as a pupil; apparently there was more meat on the bones of William’s philosophy than a hasty reading of Abélard’s brief autobiography suggests. But soon their old debates were resumed; Abélard (in Abélard’s report) forced William to modify his realism, and William’s prestige waned. His successor and appointee at Notre Dame now (1109?) offered to yield his place to Abélard; William refused consent. Abélard resumed lecturing at Melun, then on Mont Ste.-Geneviève, just outside Paris. Between him and William, and between their students, a war of logic ran its wordy course for years; and Abélard, despite his rejection of nominalism, became the leader and hero of the moderni, the ardent young rebels of the “modern” school.
While he was so embattled, his father and mother entered religious orders, presumably as a viaticum, and Abélard had to return to Le Pallet to bid them Godspeed, and perhaps to settle some problems of property. In 1115, after a term of studying theology at Laon, Abélard returned to Paris, and, apparently without opposition, established his school, or lecture course, in those very cloisters of Notre Dame where he had squatted as a student some twelve years before. He became a canon of the cathedral,8 though not yet a priest, and might look forward to ecclesiastical dignities if he could hold his tongue. But it was a hard condition. He had studied literature as well as philosophy, and was a master of lucid and graceful exposition; like any Frenchman he acknowledged a moral obligation to be clear; and he was not afraid to let some humor lighten the burden of his speech. Students came from a dozen countries to hear him; his classes were so large that they brought him considerable money as well as international fame.9 A letter written to him a few years later by the Abbé Foulques bears witness:
Rome sent you her children to instruct…. Neither distance nor mountains nor valleys nor roads infested with brigands prevented the youth of the world from coming to you. Young Englishmen crowded to your classes across a dangerous sea; all quarters of Spain, Flanders, Germany sent you pupils; and they were never tired of praising the power of your mind. I say nothing of all the inhabitants of Paris, and the most distant parts of France, which were also thirsty for your teaching, almost as if no science existed which could not be learned from you.10
From that height and splendor of success and renown why should he not move on to a bishopric (as William had done), then to an archbishopric? Why not to the papacy?
II. HÉLOÏSE
Up to this time (1117?), he doth protest, he had maintained “the utmost continence,” and “had diligently refrained from all excesses.”11 But in the maiden Héloïse, niece of the cathedral canon Fulbert, there was a comeliness of person, and a flair for learning, which aroused the sensitivity of his manhood and the admiration of his mind. During those hectic years when Abélard and William fought the universal war, Héloïse had grown from infancy to girlhood as an orphan of whose parentage no certain trace remains. Her uncle sent her for many years to a convent at Argenteuil; there, falling in love with the books in the little library, she became the brightest pupil the nuns had ever had. When Fulbert learned that she could converse in Latin as readily as in French, and was even studying Hebrew,12 he took new pride in her, and brought her to live with him in his home near the cathedral.
She was sixteen when Abélard came into her life (1117). Presumably she had heard of him long since; she must have seen the hundreds of students who crowded the cloisters and lecture rooms to hear him; perhaps, so intellectually eager, she had gone openly or furtively to see and hear the idol and paragon of the scholars of Paris. We can imagine her modest trepidation when Fulbert told her that Abélard was to live with them and be her tutor. The philosopher himself gives the frankest explanation of how it had come about:
It was this young girl whom I… determined to unite with myself in the bonds of love. And indeed the thing seemed to me very easy to be done. So distinguished was my name, and I possessed such advantages of youth and comeliness, that no matter what woman I might favor with my love, I dreaded rejection of none…. Thus, utterly aflame with passion for this maiden, I sought to discover means whereby I might have daily and familiar speech with her, thereby the more easily to win her consent. For this purpose I persuaded the girl’s uncle… to take me into his household… in return for the payment of a small sum…. He was a man keen in avarice, and… believed that his niece would vastly benefit from my teaching…. The man’s simplicity was nothing short of astounding; I should not have been more surprised if he had entrusted a tender lamb to the care of a ravenous wolf….
Why should I say more? We were united, first in the dwelling that sheltered our love, and then in the hearts that burned within us. Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love…. Our kisses outnumbered our reasoned words; our hands sought less the book than each other’s bosoms; love drew our eyes together.13
What had begun with his simple physical desire graduated through Héloïse’s delicacy into “a tenderness surpassing in sweetness the most fragrant balm.” It was a new experience for him, and wooed him quite from philosophy; he borrowed passion from his lectures for his love, and left them anomalously dull. His students mourned the dialectician, but welcomed the lover; they were delighted to learn that even Socrates could sin; they consoled themselves for lost jousts of argument by singing the love songs that he now composed; and Héloïse from her windows could hear on their lips the boisterous echo of his enchantment.14
Not long afterward she announced to him that she was with child. Secretly by night he stole her from her uncle’s house, and sent her to his sister’s home in Brittany.15 Half from fear and half from pity, he offered to the infuriated uncle to marry Héloïse provided Fulbert would let him keep the marriage secret. The canon agreed, and after his classes had adjourned Abélard went to Brittany to fetch a tender but unwilling bride. Their son, Astrolabe, was three days old when he arrived. Héloïse long refused to marry him. The reforms of Leo IX and Gregory VII, a generation back, had barred married men from the priesthood unless the wife became a nun; she was not ready to contemplate such a surrender of her mate and her child; she proposed to remain his mistress, on the ground that such a relationship, kept judiciously secret, would not, like marriage, close his road to advancement in the Church.16 A long passage in Abélard’s History of My Calamities (vii) ascribes to Héloïse at this point a learned array of authorities and instances against the marriage of philosophers, and an eloquent plea against “robbing the Church of so shining a light”: “Remember that Socrates was wedded, and with how sordid a case he first purged that stain on philosophy, that thereafter other men might be more prudent.” “It would be far sweeter for her,” he reports her as saying, “to be called my mistress than to be known as my wife; nay, this would be more honorable for me as well.”17 He persuaded her by promising that the marriage would be known only to an intimate few.
They left Astrolabe with the sister, returned to Paris, and were married in the presence of Fulbert. To keep the marriage secret Abélard went back to his bachelor lodgings, and Héloïse lived again with her uncle; the lovers saw each other now only rarely and clandestinely. But Fulbert, anxious to redeem his prestige, and overruling his promise to Abélard, divulged the marriage. Héloïse denied it, and Fulbert “visited her repeatedly with punishments.” Abélard again stole her away; this time he sent her, much against her will, to the convent at Argenteuil, and bade her don the garb of a nun, but not to take the vows or the veil. When Fulbert and his kinsmen heard of this, says Abélard, they were convinced that now I had completely played them false, a
nd had rid myself forever of Héloïse by forcing her to become a nun. Violently incensed, they laid a plot against me; and one night, while… I was asleep in a secret room in my lodgings, they broke in with the help of one of my servants whom they had bribed. There they had vengeance upon me with a most cruel and shameful punishment… for they cut off those parts of my body whereby I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow. This done, they fled; but two of them were captured, and suffered the loss of their eyes and their genitals.18
His enemies could not have chosen a subtler revenge. It did not immediately disgrace him; all Paris, including the clergy, sympathized with him;19 his students flocked to comfort him. Fulbert shrank into hiding and oblivion, and the bishop confiscated his property. But Abélard realized that he was ruined, and that “the tale of this amazing outrage would spread to the very ends of the earth.” He could no longer think of ecclesiastical preferment. He felt that his fair fame had been “utterly blotted out,” and that he would be a butt of jokes for generations to come. He felt a certain unpoetic justice in his fall: he had been maimed in the flesh that had sinned, and had been betrayed by the man whom he had betrayed. He bade Héloïse take the veil, and he himself, at St. Denis, took the vows of a monk.
III. THE RATIONALIST
A year later (1120), at the urging of his students and his abbot, he resumed his lecturing, in a “cell” of the Benedictine priory of Maisoncelle. Presumably we have the substance of his lecture courses in his books. These, however, were composed in hectic installments, and hardly allow dating; they were revised in his final years, when his spirit was quite broken, and there is no telling how much youthful fire was quenched by the flow of time. Four minor logical works circle about the problem of universals; we need not disturb their rest. The Dialectica, however, is a 375-page treatise on logic in the Aristotelian sense: a rational analysis of the parts of speech, the categories of thought (substance, quantity, place, position, time, relation, quality, possession, action, “passion”), the forms of propositions, and the rules of reasoning; the renascent mind of Western Europe had to clarify these basic ideas for itself like a child learning to read. Dialectic was the major interest of philosophy in Abélard’s time, partly because the new philosophy stemmed from Aristotle through Boethius and Porphyry, and only the logical treatises of Aristotle (and not all of these) were known to this first generation of Scholastic philosophy. So the Dialectica is not a fascinating book; yet even in its formal pages we hear a shot or two in the first skirmishes of a Two Hundred Years’ War between faith and reason. How can we, in an age already doubtful of the intellect, recapture the glow of a time that was just discovering “this great mystery of knowledge”?20 Truth cannot be contrary to truth, Abélard pleads; the truths of Scripture must agree with the findings of reason, else the God who gave us both would be deluding us with one or the other.21
Perhaps in his early period—before his tragedy—he wrote his Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian. “In a vision of the night,” he says, three men came to him as a famous teacher, and asked his judgment on their dispute. All three believe in one God; two accept the Hebrew Scriptures; the philosopher rejects these, and proposes to base life and morality on reason and natural law. How absurd, argues the philosopher, to cling to the beliefs of our childhood, to share the superstitions of the crowd, and to condemn to hell those who do not accept these puerilities!22 He ends unphilosophically by calling Jews fools, and Christians lunatics. The Jew replies that men could not live without laws; that God, like a good king, gave man a code of conduct; and that the precepts of the Pentateuch sustained the courage and morality of the Jews through centuries of dispersion and tragedy. The philosopher asks, How, then, did your patriarchs live so nobly, long before Moses and his laws?—and how can you believe in a revelation that promised you earthly prosperity, and yet has allowed you to suffer such poverty and desolation? The Christian accepts much that the philosopher and the Jew have said, but he argues that Christianity developed and perfected the natural law of the one and the Mosaic law of the other; Christianity raised higher than ever before the moral ideals of mankind. Neither philosophy nor scriptural Judaism offered man eternal happiness; Christianity gives harassed man such a hope, and is therefore infinitely precious. This unfinished dialogue is an amazing product for a cathedral canon in the Paris of 1120.
A like freedom of discussion found another medium in Abélard’s most famous work, Sic et non—Yes and No (1120?). The earliest known mention of it is in a letter from William of St. Thierry to St. Bernard (1140), describing it as a suspicious book secretly circulating among the pupils and partisans of Abélard.23 Thereafter it disappeared from history until 1836, when the manuscript was discovered by Victor Cousin in a library at Avranches. Its very form must have made the mitered grieve. After a pious introduction it divided into 157 questions, including the most basic dogmas of the faith; under each question two sets of quotations were ranged in opposite columns; one set supported the affirmative, the other the negative; and each set quoted from the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, the pagan classics, even from Ovid’s Art of Loving (Ars amandi). The book may have been intended as an armory of references for scholastic disputation; but the introduction, purposely or not, impugned the authority of the Fathers by showing them in contradiction of one another, even of themselves. Abélard did not question the authority of the Bible; but he argued that its language was meant for unlettered people, and must be interpreted by reason; that the sacred text had sometimes been corrupted by interpolation or careless copying; and that where scriptural or patristic passages contradicted one another, reason must attempt their reconciliation. Anticipating the “Cartesian doubt” by 400 years, he wrote in the same prologue: “The first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning…. For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.”24 He points out that Jesus Himself, facing the doctors in the Temple, plied them with questions. The first debate in the book is almost a declaration of independence for philosophy: “That faith should be founded in human reason, and the contrary.” He quotes Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory I as defending faith, and cites Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine to the effect that it is good to be able to prove one’s faith by reason. While repeatedly affirming his orthodoxy, Abélard opens up for debate such problems as Divine Providence vs. free will, the existence of sin and evil in a world created by a good and omnipotent God, and the possibility that God is not omnipotent. His free reasoning about such questions must have shaken the faith of youthful students enamored of debate. Nevertheless this method of education by the freest discussion became, probably through Abélard’s example,25 the regular procedure at French universities and in philosophical or theological writing; we shall find St. Thomas adopting it without fear and without reproach. In the very birth of Scholasticism rationalism found a place.
If the Sic et non offended only a few because its circulation was limited, Abélard’s attempt to apply reason to the mystery of the Trinity could not so narrowly confine its influence and alarm, for it was the subject of his lectures in 1120, and of his book On the Divine Unity and Trinity. He wrote this, he says,
for my students, because they were always seeking for rational and philosophical explanations, asking rather for reasons they could understand than for mere words, saying that it was futile to utter words which the intellect could not possibly follow, that nothing could be believed unless it could first be understood, and that it was absurd for anyone to preach to others a thing which neither he himself, nor those whom he sought to teach, could comprehend.26
This book, he tells us, “became exceedingly popular,” and people marveled at his subtlety. He pointed out that the unity of God was the one point agreed upon by the greatest religions and the greatest philosophers. In the one God we may view His power as the First Person, His wisdom as the Second, His grace, charity, and love as the Third; these are phases or modalities of the Divine Essence; but all the works of God s
uppose and unite at once His power, His wisdom, and His love.27 Many theologians felt that this was a permissible analogy; the bishop of Paris rejected the appeal of the now aged and orthodox Roscelin to indict Abélard for heresy; and Bishop Geoffroy of Chartres defended Abélard through all the fury that now fell upon the reckless philosopher. But in Reims two teachers—Alberic and Lotulphe—who had quarreled with Abélard at Laon in 1113, stirred up the archbishop to summon him to come to Soissons with his book on the Trinity, and defend himself against charges of heresy. When Abélard appeared at Soissons (1121) he found that the populace had been roused against him, and “came near to stoning me… in the belief that I had preached the existence of three gods.”28 The Bishop of Chartres demanded that Abélard be heard by the council in his own defense; Alberic and others objected, on the ground that Abélard was irresistible in persuasion and argument. The council condemned him unheard, compelled him to cast his book into a fire, and bade the abbot of St. Médard to confine him in that monastery for a year. But shortly thereafter a papal legate freed him, and sent him back to St. Denis.
After a turbulent year with the unruly monks there, Abélard secured permission from the new abbot, the great Suger, to build himself a hermitage in a lonely spot halfway between Fontainebleau and Troyes (1122). There, with a companion in minor orders, he raised with reeds and stalks a little oratory or place of prayer, which he called by the name of the Holy Trinity. When students heard that he was free to teach again they came to him and made themselves into an impromptu school; they built huts in the wilderness, slept on rushes and straw, and lived on “coarse bread and the herbs of the field.”29 Here was a thirst for knowledge that would soon make and crowd universities; now, indeed, the Dark Ages were a nightmare almost forgotten. In return for his lectures the students tilled the field, raised buildings, and built him a new oratory of timber and stone, which he called the Paraclete, as if to say that the affection of his disciples had come like a holy spirit into his life just when he had fled from human society to solitude and despair.