All rights reserved Copyrighted in America PETER ABÉLARD BY JOSEPH M c CABE AUTHOR OF ‘TWELVE YEARS IN A MONASTERY,’ ETC. LONDON DUCKWORTH and CO. 3 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C. 1901 Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable , (late) Printers to Her Majesty The author does not think it necessary to offer any apology for having written a life of Abélard. The intense dramatic interest of his life is known from a number of brief notices and sketches, but English readers have no complete presentation of the facts of

Chief amongst the later French historians is Du Boulai with his Historia Universitatis Parisiensis —‘the most stupid man who ever wrote a valuable book,’ says Mr. R. L. Poole. Amongst other French chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we may mention: De Launoy ( De scholis celebrioribus ), Dubois ( Historia Ecclesiæ Parisiensis ), Lobineau ( Histoire de Bretagne ), Félibien ( Histoire de l’abbaye de Saint Denys and Histoire de la ville de Paris ), Longueval ( Histoire de l’Églis

That life begins some day in the last decade of the eleventh century, when the young Breton, then in his fifteenth or sixteenth year, went out from his father’s castle into the bright world on the quest of Minerva. Of his earlier years we know nothing. Later fancy has brooded over them to some purpose, it is true, if there are any whom such things interest. The usual unusual events were observed before and after his birth, and the immortal swarm of bees that has come down the ages, kissing the i

(to quote a poet of the time), to east and west, are broad lakes of fresh green colour, broken only in their sweet monotony by an occasional island of masonry, an abbey with a cluster of cottages about it. It is down straight below us, on the long, narrow island, that we see the heart of France, the centre of its political, intellectual, and ecclesiastical life. A broad, unpaved road, running from Great Bridge to Little Bridge, cuts it into two. Church occupies most of the eastern half, State mo

We have little information about the abbey at that precise date, but history has much to say of its affairs some thirty or forty years afterwards, and thus affords a retrospective light. In the year 1146 Innocent the Second paid a visit to Paris. The relics of St. Genevieve were one of the treasures of the city, and thither his holiness went with his retinue, and King Louis and his followers. In the crush that was caused in the abbey church, the servants of the canons quarrelled with those of th

Crevier and other writers say that Abélard had attracted five thousand students to Paris. Sceptics smile, and talk of Chinese genealogies. Mr. Rashdall, however, has made a careful study of the point, and he concludes that there were certainly five thousand, and possibly seven thousand, students at Paris in the early scholastic age, before the multiplication of important centres. He points out that the fabulous figures which are sometimes given—Wycliffe says that at one time there were sixty tho

It was also natural that tradition should endow her with a singular beauty: an endowment which sober history is unable to confirm. She must, it is true, have had a singular grace and charm of person. It is impossible to think that her mental gifts alone attracted Abélard. Moreover, in the course of the story, we shall meet several instances of the exercise of such personal power. But we cannot claim for her more than a moderate degree of beauty. ‘Not the least in beauty of countenance,’ says Abé

The abbey had not been reformed since 994, so that human nature had had a considerable period in which to assert itself. The preceding abbot, Ives I. , was accused at Rome of having bought his dignity in a flagrant manner. The actual abbot, Adam, is said by Abélard to have been ‘as much worse in manner of life and more notorious than the rest as he preceded them in dignity.’ It is certainly significant that the Benedictine historian of the abbey, Dom Félibien, can find nothing to put to the cred

Roscelin replied directly to Abélard, besides writing to Girbert. The letter is no less characteristic of the time, though probably an equally unsafe indication of the character of the writer. ‘If,’ it begins, in the gentle manner of the time, ‘you had tasted a little of that sweetness of the Christian religion which you profess by your habit, you would not, unmindful of your order and your profession, and forgetful of the countless benefits you received from my teaching from your childhood to y

Fortunately, the boorish saint had a cultured abbot, one at least who did not hold genius to be a diabolical gift, and whose judgment of character was not wholly vitiated by the crude mystic and monastic ideal of the good people of the period. The abbot seems to have saved Abélard from the zeal of the prior, and possibly he found companionable souls amongst the four hundred monks of the great abbey, some of whom were nobles by birth. We know, at all events, that in the later period he looked bac

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 riv

Abélard’s horror on discovering this state of things was equalled by the surprise of the monks when they discovered his Quixotic ideas of monastic life. They only knew Abélard as the amorous troubadour, the teacher who attracted crowds of gay and wealthy scholars wherever he went, the object of the bitter hostility of the monastic reformers whom they detested. It was the Bernardist or Norbertian Abélard whom they had chosen for their abbot. Surprise quickly turned to disgust when the new abbot l

The charge must also be laid, though with less insistence, against the parallels which some writers have discovered, or invented, for Heloise. The most famous are the Portuguese Letters , a series of singularly ardent love-letters from a Portuguese nun to a French noble. The correspondents are said to have been Marianne Alcoforado and M. de Chamilly—to look at whom, said St. Simon, you would never have thought him the soul of the Portuguese Letters . He was neither talented nor handsome, and his

However, we have no information of a definite character until five years afterwards. In fact John of Salisbury complicates the situation by stating that Abélard withdrew shortly after 1136. Deutsch thinks that Abélard left Paris for a few years; Hausrath, on the contrary, conjectures that he merely changed the locality of his school. John of Salisbury would, in that case, have followed his lectures in the cloistral school in 1136, and would have remained faithful to the abbey, following Abélard’

‘It is thy affair when thy neighbour’s house is on fire.’ With Abélard were the impetuous young master, Bérenger of Poitiers; the stern, ascetic, scornful young Italian, Arnold of Brescia, flashing into the eyes of the prelates the defiance that brought him to the stake fourteen years afterwards; and the young Roman noble, Hyacinth, who afterwards became cardinal. Beside these, and a host of admiring nonentities, Abélard almost looked in vain for a friendly face amidst the pressing throng. The t

Abélard himself seems to have taken matters with a fatal coolness, whilst his adversary was moving heaven and earth to destroy him. He allowed a month or two to elapse before he turned in the direction of Rome. [36] Secure in the consciousness of the integrity of his cause and his own power of pleading, and presuming too much of Rome’s proud boast that it ‘condemned no man unheard,’ he saw no occasion for hurry. Late in the summer he set out upon his long journey. It was his purpose to travel th

Turn then from the pontificate of Innocent II. to that of Pius IX. and of Leo XIII. Towards the close of the last century, Huet, Bishop of Avranches, began to meet rationalistic attacks with a belittlement of human reason. The idea found favour with a class of apologists. De Bonald, Bonetty, Bautain, and others in France, and the Louvain theologians in Belgium, came entirely to repudiate the interference of reason with regard to higher truths, saying that their acceptance was solely a matter of