Thus the historical imagination can readily picture all that is contained in the brief phrase with which Abélard dismisses the five or six years of his studies. ‘There was no regular curriculum in those days,’ Mr. Rashdall says, in his study of the ‘Universities of Europe’; but the seven liberal arts were taught, and were gradually arranging themselves in a series under the pressure of circumstances. Music Abélard certainly studied; before many years his songs were sung through the length and breadth of France. None of his contemporaries made a more eager and profitable study of what was called grammar—that is, not merely an exercise in the rules of Donatus and Priscian, but a close acquaintance with the great Latin poets and historians. Rhetoric and dialectics he revelled in—‘I went wherever dialectics flourished.’ To so good purpose did he advance in this work of loosening the tongue and sharpening the wit, that throughout his life the proudest orators and thinkers of Christendom shrank in dismay from the thought of a verbal encounter with him. ‘I am a child beside him,’ pleaded Bernard of Clairvaux, at a time when France, and even Rome, trembled at the sound of his own voice. But we must defer for a few pages the consideration of mediæval dialectics.
‘Illi soli patuit quicquid scibile erat,’
said an ancient epitaph; and, though the historian handles epigrams with discretion, it must be admitted that Abélard surpassed his contemporaries, not only in ability and in utterance, but also in erudition. There is the one exception of mathematics, but it seems probable that he despised what passed under that name in the twelfth century. ‘Mathematics,’ he says somewhere, in a sarcastic parenthesis, ‘the exercise of which is nefarious.’ But in the thrust and parry of dialectics he found a keen delight; and so he wandered from place to place, edging his logical weapons on fellow-pupils and provincial masters, until one day, about the opening year of the twelfth century, he directed his steps towards far-famed Paris—beautiful, naughty, brilliant, seductive Paris, even in those distant days.
But the Paris of the first decade of the twelfth century was wholly different, not only from the Paris of to-day, but even from the Paris of Victor Hugo’s famous picture.
CHAPTER II
A BRILLIANT VICTORY
If you desire to see the Paris of those early days, imagine yourself beside the spot where the modern Pantheon stands. It is the summit of what Paris called ‘the hill’ for many a century—the hill of St. Genevieve. Save for the large monastery of secular canons beside you, the abbey of St. Genevieve, there is yet little sign of the flood of grimy masonry that will creep up slowly from the river valley, as the ages advance, and foul the sweet country for miles beyond. Paris lies down in the valley below, a toy city. The larger island in the Seine bears almost the whole weight of the capital of France. It has, it is true, eaten a little way into the northern bank of the river, to which it is joined by the Great Bridge. That is the Lombard Quarter, and Lutetian commerce is increasing rapidly. Numbers of curious ships sail up the broad, silver bosom of the Seine, and make for the port of St. Landry. The commercial quarter is already spreading in the direction of Montmartre, with the public butchery and bakery at its outskirt; but it is a mere fringe. The broad valleys and the gentle hills that are one day to support Paris are now clothed with vineyards and orchards and cornfields, and crowned with groves of olive[4] and oak. On the nearer side, too, the city has already overflowed the narrow limits of the island. There are houses on the fine stone bridge, the Little Bridge, and there is a pretty confusion of houses, chapels, schools, and taverns gradually stealing up the slope of St. Genevieve. But, here also, most of the hill is covered with gardens and vineyards, from which a chapel or a relic of old Roman Lutetia peeps out here and there—the ruins of the famous old thermæ lie half-way down the hill below us—; and along the valley of the
‘… florentibus ripis amnis’
(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 most of the western; their grateful subjects pack themselves as comfortably as they can in the narrow fringe that is left between the royal and ecclesiastical domains and the bed of the river. Each generation in turn has wondered why it was so scourged by ‘the burning fire’ (the plague), and resolved to be more generous to the Church. From the summit of St. Genevieve we see the front of the huge, grey, Roman cathedral, that goes back to the days of Childebert, and the residences of its prelates and canons bordering the cloister. Over against it, to the west, is the spacious royal garden, which is graciously thrown open to the people two or three times a week, with the palace of King Philip at the extremity of the island. That is Paris in the year of grace 1100; and all outside those narrow limits is a very dream of undulating scenery, with the vesture of the vine, the fir, the cypress, the oak, the olive, and the fig; and the colour of the rose, the almond, the lily, and the violet; and the broad, sweet Seine meandering through it; and the purest air that mortal could desire.
To our young philosopher Paris probably presented itself first in the character of ‘the city of philosophers.’ Each of the great abbeys had its school. That of the abbey of St. Genevieve will soon be familiar to us. The abbey of St. Germain of Auxerre, to the north, and the abbey of St. Germain of the Meadow, to the west, had schools at their gates for all comers. St. Martin in the Fields had its school, and the little priory of St. Victor, to the east, was soon to have one of the most famous of all schools of theology. The royal abbey of St. Denis, a few miles away, had a school in which Prince Louis was then being trained, together with the illustrious Abbot Suger. A number of private schools were scattered about the foot of St. Genevieve. The Jews had a school, and—mark the liberality of the time—there was, or had been until a very few years before, a school for women; it was conducted by the wife and daughters of famous Master Manegold, of Alsace, women who were well versed in Scripture, and ‘most distinguished in philosophy,’ says Muratori.
But Abélard went straight to the centre of Paris, to the cloistral enclosure under the shadow of old Notre Dame,[5] where was the first episcopal school in the kingdom, and one of the first masters in Christendom. William of Champeaux was a comparatively young master, who had forced his way into high places by sheer ability. He was held to be the first dialectician in France, and ‘almost the first royal councillor.’ In the great philosophic controversy of the period he was the leader of the orthodox school. The Bishop of Paris had brought him to the island-city, and vested him with the dignity of archdeacon of the cathedral and scholasticus (chancellor or rector) and master of the episcopal school. So high was the repute of his ability and his doctrine that, so Fleury says, he was called ‘the pillar of doctors.’ From an obscure local centre of instruction he had lifted the Parisian school into a commanding position, and had attracted scholars from many lands. And he was then in the prime of life. Within a few months Abélard made his authority totter, and set his reputation on the wane. In six or seven years he drove him, in shame and humiliation, from his chair, after a contest that filled Christendom with its echoes.
Let us repeat that William of Champeaux was then in the prime of life, or only