The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Abelard was forty. Héloïse was seventeen. She was attractive, extremely well-read (she seems to have memorized more Latin poetry, including Virgil and Ovid, than Abelard had), and vivacious. He was tall, well dressed (since Abelard held no church office, he was free to dress in the latest male fashions), charismatic, and famous. It’s not clear who seduced whom. But it is clear from Abelard’s own description that the private “classes” soon became nonstop steamy sex sessions. “Under the cloak of study, we freely practiced love,” he wrote in The History of My Calamities. “My hands more eagerly sought her breasts than the books before us.” Things even took an S/M turn. “I sometimes beat her in love rather than in anger, not for wrath but for pleasure that surpassed all ointments in sweetness.”32

  The secret affair did not remain a secret for long. One day, Héloïse announced she was pregnant. When her uncle found out what had been going on in his upstairs study while he was at church, his rage was understandable. However, when Abelard offered to marry the girl, Fulbert accepted. The thought of having the famous Abelard as a son-in-law helped to ease Fulbert’s humiliation.

  But after a son was born in 1121 (named Astrolabe after the astronomical device) and the pair were secretly married at his parents’ house, Abelard insisted that Héloïse enter a nunnery. He was still afraid that if the story of their affair and marriage came out, it would ruin his career not as a Catholic cleric (many in 1122 still had mistresses or even wives), but as France’s most glamorous philosopher.

  Héloïse agreed and went to a monastery at Argenteuil, close to Paris. Unable to help himself, Abelard began paying her secret meetings. Soon they were having sex again.

  That was when Fulbert snapped. He hired a band of thugs to visit Abelard in his chambers in the rue St. André des Arts. They bribed one of Abelard’s servants to let them enter his room while he slept. The men seized him, tied him down, and then with a knife “cut off those parts of my body with which I had done the deed they deplored.” Hearing Abelard’s screams, another servant ran out into the street to call for help. His assailants were caught and tried; with a kind of rough justice, two of them were sentenced to be castrated as well. That meant little to Abelard. Not only had he been robbed of his genitals, he had also been robbed of his reputation and his fame.33

  Things went quickly downhill for Abelard. Over the next several years, he would show a series of failures of judgment almost equal to his decision to seduce the teenager Héloïse. All the while his many enemies, sensing his sudden vulnerability, gathered for the kill.

  “Feeling the embarrassment more keenly than the injury,” as he tells it, “more afflicted by the shame than by the pain,” Abelard decided to shut himself away in the monastery at Saint Denis. It was a cry for help as well as an act of penance. Peter Abelard was temperamentally unsuited to the cloistered life. Soon he was up to his old dialectical tricks again and after a couple of years had to flee the wrath of his fellow monks.e He then tried heading his own monastery in Brittany. That proved to be a disaster. It was only when he returned to teaching in Paris fifteen years after his terrible castration that Abelard came back into his own. He drew the usual hordes of students (one was John of Salisbury) and published his theological treatises, including Sic et Non.

  This time his enemies were ready for him. Back in 1121, they had forced him to publicly burn his treatise on the Trinity for daring to imply that Plato and Plotinus had a clearer understanding of the idea than Moses thanks to their reason alone. Now twenty years later, at a church synod in the new cathedral at Sens, he was summoned to defend his views once again in public, this time under the disapproving eye of the great theologian and monastic reformer Bernard of Clairvaux.

  Bernard was nearly ten years younger than Abelard. In the old days, Abelard would have treated him with magisterial condescension. Instead, the once invincible dialectical knight-errant lost his nerve and, in effect, forfeited the match. His condemnation at Sens was the final humiliation. He died worn out but still defiant two years later in 1142 under the protection of the monastery at Cluny and its prior, Peter the Venerable. Venerable Peter sent the news to Héloïse, who was still a nun at Argenteuil, with comforting words: “He was renowned the world over for the weight of his learning, and his fame was universal.” The Cluny prior promised her that one day she and Abelard would be reunited, “one day beyond these voices where there is peace.”34 The Middle Ages’ most restless intellect was gone.

  What was his legacy? As another brilliant logician, Bertrand Russell, pointed out, Abelard tended to overrate the value of Aristotelian logic and of deduction as the only path to truth. Abelard had no interest in the one sphere where inductive reasoning is most important to yielding new knowledge, namely science.35 Aristotle’s writings on that subject were still unavailable to him. Reason for Abelard and his followers was a tool for understanding what was already known, especially about God and the Bible, not opening new vistas for human investigation.

  Nor did Abelard’s skepticism and rationalism ever lead him to doubt the truth of Christianity. “I will never be a philosopher,” he wrote after his condemnation, “if this is to speak against Saint Paul; I would not be an Aristotle, if this were to separate me from Christ.”36 He saw logic as the buttress of theology and his faith, not a substitute for them. If this earns him impatience from later skeptics and freethinkers, it does fit him into his own time and place. Peter Abelard’s Aristotle points down the road to Thomas Aquinas, not the Enlightenment.

  All the same, Abelard opened the mind of the Middle Ages in new and startling ways. He gave the name of Aristotle and Aristotle’s logic an edgy glamour it never entirely lost. Aristotle had said: All men desire to know. Abelard now added: All men need to question and doubt in order to know. These were important signposts for the future. For now, medieval civilization was about to swing down another path, one emblazoned by the Neoplatonist imagination.

  * * *

  * The Ostrogoths, like other Germanic tribes, were converted to Christianity by a disciple of a priest from Lybia named Arius (256–336), who preached the existence but not the divinity of Jesus Christ. Arianism was denounced as a heresy several times, most famously at the Council of Nicaea in 325. The fact that the German tribes (except the Franks) remained loyal to this heretical brand of Christianity did more to sour relations between Roman and barbarian than any other issue.

  † The letters stand for the distinction Aristotle made between “practical” philosophy, like ethics and political science, and the “theoretical” or speculative philosophy, like metaphysics, natural science, and theology. In Greek, pragmatika begins with a pi and theoretika with a theta.

  ‡ With Cicero coming in a respectable fourth. As he makes clear in the Consolation, Boethius considered the Stoics and Epicureans as lightweights, essentially derivative figures.

  § For many medieval scholars, Boethius’s summary was all the Plato they ever knew. The Timaeus did survive in two late Latin translations, but they were garbled and missing important passages. Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (a fragment of his lost De Re Publica) also borrowed heavily from Plato’s Timaeus, but it, too, was only a summary. It would not be until 1464 that Plato’s own writings once again became part of the Western cultural arsenal. See chapter 17.

  ‖ Boethius did translations of the Categories, On Interpretation, the Topics, and the Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics, plus “On Sophistical Refutations” (in Latin, De Sophisitici Elenchi). In addition, he wrote five independent treatises on logic. What was available on a regular basis to medieval scholars, and in readable form, is another matter. The Boethius version of the Posterior Analytics was so garbled by multiple miscopyings as to be almost unusable. It wasn’t until the twelfth century and Gerard of Cremona’s translation of 1187 that this crucial text on inductive logic finally entered the mainstream. See chapter 14.

  a That is, either Des Moines is in Iowa, or it’s not in Iowa; either Edith is pregnant, or she’s not pregnant. There is no t
hird, or middle, possibility.

  b For example, “No puckatoos eat sudsy snacks; all puckatoos are flibberdegibbets; therefore no flibberdegibbets eat sudsy snacks” is pure nonsense but a valid deductive syllogism. On the other hand, later logicians would point out that not every valid deduction fits the syllogism form. Mathematical deductive truths, like 2 + 2 = 4, very rarely do.

  c The seven were grammar, rhetoric, and logic; astronomy, music, geometry, and arithmetic.

  d “If that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.”

  e For the reasons why, see chapter 13.

  Rose window, Chartres Cathedral, south transept

  Thirteen

  CELESTIAL HARMONIES: PLATO IN THE MIDDLE AGES

  Man may rise to the contemplation of the divine through the senses.

  —Abbot Suger

  “As the third year that followed the year one thousand drew near,” wrote medieval chronicler Raoul Glauber, “there was to be seen over almost all the earth, but especially Italy and France, a great renewal of church buildings. It was as if the world had shaken itself, and, casting off the old garments, had dressed itself again in every part in a white robe of churches.”1

  One of those white-robed churches was in Sens, a town southeast of Paris on the river Yvonne, which had grown rich with the revival of the wool trade in the former Roman province of Gaul, or France. In 1130, its archbishop laid the foundations for a new cathedral, something larger and more splendid than its Romanesque predecessor. Ten years later, construction was still under way. When bishops, abbots, prelates, and other church officials arrived in the spring of 1140, they had to step over piles of masonry and dodge ropes from cranes as they assembled in the cathedral’s new choir. They were there for a church council, the most important in France ever. In terms of the history of Western civilization, perhaps the most important of all.

  The Sens council had been summoned to hear Peter Abelard defend his strange new doctrines. His judges included a monk in his early fifties who was a particular friend of Sens’s archbishop and the acknowledged leader of Europe’s most dynamic new monastic order, the Cistercians. He was Bernard of Clairvaux, later to be canonized as Saint Bernard.

  Under his leadership, the Cistercians had grown from a handful of monasteries to more than 350 houses by 1140. Although he was ten years younger than Abelard, Bernard was already the single most influential churchman of the age. He was an intimate adviser and friend to one pope, Innocent II, and the mentor and teacher of another, Eugenius III. Bernard was determined to cleanse from the Church all forms of corruption, including intellectual corruption. That meant a return to first principles, especially those of Saint Augustine, that “from this hell on earth there is no escape except through the grace of the Savior Christ, our Lord and God.”2 Bernard had heard a great deal about Abelard’s teachings. He didn’t like what he had heard.

  “[Abelard] casts what is holy before dogs,” was how Saint Bernard put it in a letter, “and pearls before swine.”3 Sic et Non and Abelard’s other works “run riot with a whole crop of sacrileges.” Bernard was especially offended by how Abelard had held the Church’s great authorities up to logical scrutiny, criticizing their conflicting views on the Trinity and the Incarnation as if they had been ignorant students instead of divinely inspired Fathers and Doctors of the Church.

  “The garments of Christ are being divided,” Bernard raged, “the sacraments of the Church torn to shreds.” Abelard “corrupts the integrity of the faith … and oversteps the landmarks placed by our Fathers” in the name of reason. A new gospel was being forged and a new faith being founded, the great Cistercian argued: a faith based on Aristotle. “Outwardly, [Abelard] dresses as a monk but inwardly he is a heretic.”4

  Thus far, Abelard had been allowed to get away with his defiance, Bernard told Pope Innocent, “there being no David to defy him.” That is, until that summer of 1140, when at the church council at Sens they would finally meet. “Where all have fled before him,” Bernard wrote with a wry smile, “he calls me out … to single intellectual combat.” However, Bernard would be ready. “With the Lord to aid me, I have no fear of the worst man can do.”5

  The square outside Sens’s cathedral was jammed.6 People had come to see the twin combatants clash like jousting knights in a tournament. The carnival-like atmosphere continued inside, where dozens of churchmen and dignitaries gathered under the soaring ribbed stone vaults and arches. Even King Louis VII was present. Everyone wanted to witness the headline bout between Aristotle’s most outspoken champion and the stern warrior for the faith of Saint Augustine.

  Abelard was on his feet almost at once, ready for battle. The archbishop, however, insisted that the charges against him be read first. Disgruntled, Abelard sat down while Bernard, in a low, clear voice, began reading aloud the nineteen heretical propositions that authorities said were in Abelard’s writings.

  “Number 3: That the Holy Spirit is the World-Soul. Number 4: That Christ did not assume flesh to liberate us from the devil.” As Bernard read, Abelard became more and more agitated. When Bernard got to the fifth accusation, that he had denied the Trinity, Abelard had reached his limit.

  “He refused to listen and walked out,” Bernard remembered later. Abelard said he would appeal any decision by the Sens council, even though he himself had chosen his judges, “which,” Bernard noted with some asperity, “I did not think was permissible.”7 The much publicized match was over before it began. The crowd, including the king, was disappointed. Bernard, however, could be satisfied. He had faced his most dangerous adversary, and his adversary had retreated without a fight. The Sens council duly denounced Sic et Non and Abelard’s other works, and a furious but defeated Abelard was forced to throw his own books in the fire. Now it was up to Bernard to consolidate his victory not just over Abelard, but over the entire Aristotelian worldview.

  What had offended Bernard most was how Abelard had tried to use the ancient pagan philosopher to pry open the most delicate divine mysteries. “He trie[d] to explore with his reason what the devout mind grasps at once with a vigorous faith.” The prophet Jeremiah had said, Unless you believe, you shall not understand. But Abelard, “apparently holding God suspect, will not believe anything until he has first examined it with his reason.” Philosophy had no business trying to lift the veil from mysteries beyond human understanding. The way to get to those, Bernard affirmed, was not through the mind but through the heart.8

  From the point of view of Plato—not to mention Socrates—this was a shocking downgrading of reason. But Bernard was only following Plato’s hierarchy of knowledge as adopted and adapted by Saint Augustine. Just as reason is superior to opinion (doxa), so Saint Augustine taught that faith is superior to reason because it rests on the highest wisdom of all, the truth of God’s revelation.9 Faith of this potent kind is more than belief. When we say, “I believe the Pittsburgh Steelers will win the Super Bowl,” or, “I believe the person who stole my car will get caught,” we are talking about probabilities—or indulging in wishful thinking. Real faith is a matter of an unqualified emotional commitment, what Saint Augustine called love, or caritas: a fierce spiritual force that binds man to God and (as proved by the sacrifice of the Crucifixion) vice versa. “Faith avails not,” Bernard wrote, “unless it is actuated by love.” Love for Bernard was the gift of the Holy Spirit. It was the heartfelt token of salvation.10

  To modern scholars, Saint Bernard does not strike a very sympathetic figure. They have tagged him as a puritan bigot who mercilessly hounded Abelard (“perpetual silence should be imposed on that man,” he urged one of the cardinals in Rome, “whose mouth overflows with curses, calumny, and deceit”) in the name of a narrow-minded
Catholic orthodoxy.11 He fought hard to keep women out of the Cistercian order; he believed females to be sexual temptresses by their nature. It was one of the few battles he lost.12

  All the same, it was Saint Bernard who put the image of the Virgin Mary, the nurturing Mother of God, at the center of the Catholic faith and who made the loving human heart the key to exploring religious truth—even the key to discovering God.13 Even more than Augustine, he is the first great religious psychologist—therapist, almost. Bernard’s goal was to lay bare the deepest recesses of the soul and bring man to a spiritual simplicity and humility. Looking forward, his theology prefigures the teachings of the most tenderhearted of medieval saints, Saint Francis of Assisi. Looking backward, Bernard’s goal was that of Augustine and, at one remove, Plotinus: the self-sacrificing, unwavering love that raises knowledge of ourselves to a mystical union with God.

  This, Bernard decided, had been Abelard’s problem. He knew all about his rival’s dealings with Héloïse and deeply disapproved. But he also sensed that they sprang from the same pride that Abelard took in his own reason. Abelard’s love for Héloïse was actually a form of self-love, even self-obsession. “He is a man who does not know his limitations,” Bernard confided to a friend. “Nothing in heaven or on earth is hidden from him, except himself.”

  It was a shrewd observation. For Saint Bernard, self-love is the root of all evil, and the Achilles’ heel of the Aristotelian mind. Not only does it block us from grasping the true nature of love, and hence of God. It also prevents us from realizing the relative unimportance of human reason.14

  Without faith, Bernard affirmed, intellectual inquiry is doomed to run off the track. Worldly wisdom, he liked to point out, teaches only vanity.15 By contrast, by making God the center of our lives instead of ourselves, we are spiritually transformed. Through love of God, “he who by his former life and conscience was doomed as a true son of perdition to the eternal flames,” he wrote, “draws new life and hope beyond all expectation.” He is “rescued from a most deep and dark pit of horrible ignorance, and plunged into a pleasant region bright with eternal light.”16