Joseph McCabe
Peter Abélard
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066136987
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
THE QUEST OF MINERVA
Peter Abélard was born towards the close of the eleventh century. No other personality that we may choose to study leads to so clear and true an insight into those strange days as does that of the luckless Breton philosopher. It was the time of transition from the darkest hour of mediæval Europe to a period of both moral and intellectual brilliance. The gloom of the ‘century of iron’ still lay on the land, but it was already touched with the faint, spreading dawn of a new idealism. There is, amongst historians, a speculation to the effect that the year 1000 of the Christian era marked a real and very definite stage in the history of thought. Usually we do violence to events by our chronological demarcations; but it is said that Christendom confidently expected the threatened rolling-up of the heavens and the earth to take place in the year 1000. Slowly, very slowly, the sun crept over the dial of the heavens before the eyes of idle men. But no Christ rode on the clouds, and no Anti-Christ came into the cities. And the heaviness was lifted from the breasts of men, and the blood danced merrily in their veins once more. They began again ‘to feel the joy of existence,’ as an old writer has it, and to build up their towers afresh in the sun-light.
It was a strangely chequered period, this that changed the darkness of the tenth into the comparative radiance of the thirteenth century. All life was overcast by densest ignorance and grossest lust and fiercest violence, the scarcely altered features of the ‘converted’ northern barbarians; yet the light of an ideal was breaking through, in the pure atmosphere of reformed monasteries, in the lives of saintly prelates and women refined beyond their age, and in the intellectual gospel of a small band of thinkers and teachers. Amid the general degradation of the Church and the cloister strong souls had arisen, ardent with a contagious fire of purity. High-minded prelates had somehow attained power, in spite of the net of simony and corruption. The sons of St. Benedict, rising and falling too often with the common tide, had, nevertheless, guarded some treasures of the earlier wisdom, and shared them lovingly at their gates with the wandering scholar. Thousands there were who could close heart and home at the fiery word of a preacher, and go to starve their souls in the living tomb of a monastery. Thousands could cast down their spades and their wine-cups, and rush to meet death in the trail of a frenzied hermit.[1] They were the days of the travail of the spirit; and they rise before us in arresting vision when we look into the life of Peter Abélard.
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 infant lips of poets and philosophers, did not fail to appear at Pallet. In point of sober fact, we rely almost exclusively on Abélard’s autobiography for the details of his earlier career, and he tells us nothing of his childhood, and not much of his youth. It matters little. The life of a soul begins when it looks beyond the thoughts of parents and teachers—if it ever do—out into the defiant world, and frames a view and a purpose.
The home from which Abélard issued, somewhere about the year 1095, was an ancient castle at Pallet, in Brittany, about eleven miles to the south-east of Nantes. At the end of the village, which was threaded on the high road from Nantes to Poitiers, a steep eminence dominated the narrow flood of the Sanguèze. The castle was built on this: overlooking the village more, as it chanced, in a spirit of friendly care than of haughty menace. The spot is still visited by many a pilgrim—not with a priestly benediction; but the castle is now the mere relic of a ruin. In the most penetrating movements of his prophetic genius, Abélard never foresaw the revolt of the serfs, or indeed any economic development. In this one respect he failed to detect and outstrip what little advance was made in his day. His father’s castle has disappeared with the age it belonged to, and the sons of his vassals now lay the bones of their dead to rest on his desolated hearth.
Bérenger, the father, was a noble of a rare type. He had fortunately received a little culture before setting out in the service of Hoel IV., Duke of Brittany and Count of Nantes, and he in turn communicated his taste and his knowledge to his children. From the fact, too, that he and his wife Lucia adopted the monastic life a few years after Abélard’s departure, we may gather that they were also above the moral level of their class. It is not idle to note that Abélard’s mind encountered no evil or irreligious influences when it first opened. All the circumstances that are known to us suggest a gentle, uplifting, and reverential education. He was the eldest of the sons of Bérenger; and, partly, no doubt, because greater care had been taken with his education, partly in the necessary consciousness of mental power, he early determined to leave home, and wander over the land in search of learning. His words give one the impression that he shouldered a wallet, and sallied forth alone, after the adventurous fashion of the day. However that may be, he says that he resolved to leave the chances of the favour of Mars to his brothers, and set out to woo the gentler Minerva. Abandoning the rights of primogeniture and the possible grace of kings, he passed away from the great castle, and turned eagerly in the direction of the nearest school.
It was not uncommon in those ‘Dark Ages’ for a young noble to resign the comfort of the