Peter Abélard. Joseph McCabe

countries than France. England was well represented there. John of Salisbury frequently has occasion to illustrate the fame and magnitude of the cathedral school.

      

      Anselm had been teaching for forty years when Abélard, aetat. thirty-four, appeared amidst the crowd of his hearers. We can well conceive the fluttering of wings that must have occurred, but Laon was not Paris, and Anselm was not the man to enter upon an argumentative conflict with the shrewd-tongued adventurer. Two incidents of contemporary life at Laon, in which Anselm figured, will be the best means of illustrating the character of the theologian. Abbot Guibertus, of that period, has left us a delightful work ‘De vita sua,’ from which we learn much about Laon and Anselm. The treasure of the cathedral was entrusted, it seems, to seven guardians—four clerics and three laymen. One of these guardians, a Canon Anselm, was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He purloined a good deal of the treasure; and when the goldsmith, his accomplice, was detected, and turned king’s evidence, Anselm denied the story, challenged the goldsmith to the usual duel, and won.[12] The canon was encouraged, and shortly set up as an expert burglar. One dark, stormy night he went with his ‘ladders and machines’ to a tower in which much treasure was kept, and ‘cracked’ it. There was dreadful ado in the city next day; most horrible of all, the burglar had stolen a golden dove which contained some of the hair and some of the milk of the Virgin Mary. In the uncertainty the sapient Master Anselm (no relation, apparently, of Canon Anselm Beessus, the burglar and cathedral treasurer) was invited to speak. His advice largely reveals the man. Those were the days, it must be remembered, when the defects of the detective service were compensated by a willingness and activity of the higher powers which are denied to this sceptical age. When their slender police resources were exhausted, the accused was handed over to a priest, to be prepared, by prayer and a sober diet of bread, herbs, salt, and water, for the public ordeal. On the fourth day priests and people repaired to the church, and when the mass was over, and the vested priests had prostrated themselves in the sanctuary, the accused purged himself of the charge or proved his guilt by carrying or walking on a nine foot bar of heated iron, plunging his arms ‘for an ell and a half’ into boiling water, or being bodily immersed in a huge tank, cold, and carefully blessed and consecrated.

      These are familiar facts. The difficulty at Laon was that there was no accused to operate on. The Solomon Laudunensis was therefore called into judgment, and his proposal certainly smacks of the thoroughness of the systematic theologian. A baby was to be taken from each parish of the town, and tried by the ordeal of immersion. When the guilty parish had been thus discovered, each family in it was to purge itself by sending an infant representative to the tank. When the guilt had been thus fastened on a certain house, all its inmates were to be put to the ordeal.[13]

      We see Anselm in a very different light in an incident that occurred a year or two before Abélard’s arrival. Through the influence of the King of England and the perennial power of gold a wholly unworthy bishop had been thrust upon the people of Laon. Illiterate, worldly, and much addicted to military society, he was extremely distasteful to Anselm and the theologians. The crisis came when the English king, Henry I., tried to levy a tax on the people of Laon. The bishop supported his patron; Anselm and others sternly opposed the tax in the name of the people. Feeling ran so high that the bishop was at length brutally murdered by some of the townsfolk, and the cathedral was burned to the ground. Anselm immediately, and almost alone, went forth to denounce the frenzied mob, and had the unfortunate prelate—left for the dogs to devour before his house—quietly buried.

      Such was the man whom Abélard chose as his next, and last, ‘teacher.’ In the circumstances revealed in the above anecdotes it would have been decidedly dangerous to attack Anselm in the manner that had succeeded so well at Notre Dame. There is, however, no just reason for thinking that Abélard had formed an intention of that kind. No doubt, it is impossible to conceive Abélard in the attitude of one who seriously expected instruction from a master. Yet it would be unjust to assume that he approached the class-room of the venerable, authoritative theologian in the same spirit in which he had approached William of Champeaux’s lectures on rhetoric. We do not find it recorded that he made any attempt to assail directly the high position of the old man. It was sufficient for the purpose we may ascribe to him that he should be able to state in later years that he had frequented the lectures of Anselm of Laon.

      With whatever frame of mind the critic came to Laon, he was not long in discovering the defects of Anselm’s teaching. Anselm had one gift, a good memory, and its fruit, patristic erudition. The fame that was borne over seas and mountains was founded mainly on the marvellous wealth of patristic opinion which he applied to every text of Scripture. There was no individuality, no life, in his work. To Abélard the mnemonic feat was a mechanical matter; and indeed, he probably cared little at that time how St. Ambrose or St. Cyril may have interpreted this or that text. Little as he would be disposed to trust the fame of masters after his experience, he tells us that he was disappointed. He found the ‘fig-tree to be without fruit,’ fair and promising as it had seemed. The lamp, that was said to illumine theological Christendom, ‘merely filled the house with smoke, not light.’ He found, in the words of his favourite Lucan,

      ‘magni nominis umbra,

      Qualis frugifero quercus sublimis in agro’:

      and he determined ‘not to remain in this idleness under its shade very long.’ With his usual heedlessness he frankly expressed his estimate of the master to his fellow pupils.

      One day when they were joking together at the end of the lecture, and the students were twitting him with his neglect of the class, he quietly dropped a bomb to the effect that he thought masters of theology were superfluous. With the text and the ordinary glosses any man of fair intelligence could study theology for himself. He was contemptuously invited to give a practical illustration of his theory. Abélard took the sneer seriously, and promised to lecture on any book of Scripture they cared to choose. Continuing the joke, they chose the curious piece of Oriental work that has the title of Ezechiel. Once more Abélard took them seriously, asked for the text and gloss, and invited them to attend his first lecture, on the most abstruse of the prophets, on the following day. Most of them persisted in treating the matter as a joke, but a few appeared at the appointed spot (in Anselm’s own territory) on the following day. They listened in deep surprise to a profound lecture on the prophet from the new and self-consecrated ‘theologus.’ The next day there was a larger audience; the lecture was equally astonishing. In fine, Abélard was soon in full sail as a theological lector of the first rank, and a leakage was noticed in Anselm’s lecture hall.

      Abélard’s theological success at Laon was brief, if brilliant. Two of the leading scholars, Alberic of Rheims and Lotulphe of Novare, urged Anselm to suppress the new movement at once. Seven years later we shall meet Alberic and Lotulphe playing an important part in the tragedy of Abélard’s life; later still Alberic is found in intimacy with St. Bernard. The episode of Laon must not be forgotten. Probably Anselm needed little urging, with the fate of William of Champeaux fresh in his ears. At all events he gave willing audience to the suggestion that a young master, without due theological training, might at any moment bring the disgrace of heresy on the famous school. He ‘had the impudence to suppress me,’ Abélard has the impudence to say. The students are said to have been much angered by Anselm’s interference, but there was no St. Genevieve at Laon—happily, perhaps—and Abélard presently departed for Paris, leaving the field to the inglorious ‘Pompey the Great.’