Chapter XXIV (18)

It is unnecessary to pursue the rivalries of the two professors through all their windings; in 1113 William was raised to the see of Châlons, a circumstance which seems to have first induced Abelard to study theology, with the hope of attaining similar honours. Accordingly, we next find him at Laon, attending the school of Anselm, now dean of that church, whom, however, he very soon declared to be altogether unworthy of his great renown. “His learning was,” he said, “nothing but foliage without fruit; long custom, rather than any real merit, had acquired him a name. If you consulted him on any difficulty, you came away just as wise as you went. There was nothing but abundance of fine words, without a grain of sense or reason.” So, in despair of finding a master wise enough to teach one of his genius, he resolved to do without one, and, with the help of a commentary, began to give lectures on the prophet Ezechiel. His wit, his fluency, and his singular charms of voice and manner, veiled the real shallowness of his theological attainments, and, on returning to Paris, he succeeded in gaining what had been for so many years the great object of his ambition, the direction of the cathedral school. Then began the period of his extraordinary popularity; disciples flocked to him from all parts of France and Germany, as well as from Rome and England. His vanity easily persuaded him that he was not merely the greatest, but the only philosopher of his time; all the world hung on his eloquence, but amid the long catologue of his admirers, none was to be found so bewitched with his merits as he was himself.

Abelard’s teaching bore the character of his own restless and impatient genius. Disdainful of anything which did not promise quick results, he aimed at presenting his disciples with a philosophy which professed to lead them to the possession of wisdom by a royal road. The trivium and quadrivium were to be consigned to oblivion; the classics and the Fathers might alike grow dusty on the shelves, logic was to be all in all, and the philosopher and the theologian might abandon every other study, provided they perfected themselves in the art which St. Bernard characterised with caustic wit, as “that of ever studying, and never reaching the truth.” Abelard’s condemnation of the classics is worth noticing, as showing the similarity of mind which existed between him and Berengarius, whom Guitmond describes as “making no account of the opinions of his masters, and despising the liberal arts.” In neither of them did this condemnation arise from a preponderance of the Christian sense; but from their repugnance to objective realities.[162] Their philosophy was in short that of which the apostle speaks, when he condemns the “vain babblings” of those who “desire to be teachers of the law,” which differed little from the “foolish questionings” of the sophists. The effect of these new doctrines was to inaugurate a scholastic revolution. One by one the fair branches of the tree of science were severed from the trunk, till at last nothing remained but the exercise of subtle and captious argumentation, wherein logic came to be used not as a means but an end, and the scholar was no longer led to seek for truth as his object, but to rest content with the search after it.

Thus passed several years, during which Abelard had earned a fame, brilliant indeed beyond that of any of his contemporaries, but unhappily one which left his moral reputation far from stainless. In 1117 we find him in the abbey of St. Denis, where he had taken refuge from the disgrace entailed on him by his connection with Heloïsa. Even here his insupportable vanity was not long before it betrayed itself in the criticisms he passed on his abbot and his brother monks, among whom he seems to have aspired to act as the reformer. The abbot longed to get rid of so troublesome a subject, and the opportunity of doing so soon presented itself. Crowds of students began to clamour at the gates of St. Denis for their old master, and to implore him to reopen his school. He therefore resumed his lectures, but unable to rest contented with teaching only what had been taught before him, he began to introduce logical subtleties into his theological views, and put forth certain explanations on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which raised a storm of opposition. His chief opponents were Alberic and Lotulf, two former disciples of Anselm of Laon, and William of Champeaux. They not only attacked his opinions as heterodox, but complained that he had no right to teach at all. His position as a professor was, they said, altogether irregular, for, contrary to the established usages of the Paris schools, he taught _sine magistro_.

This term requires a little explanation; and shows us the germ of what soon afterwards developed into the system of university graduation. According to established custom, no scholar could be licensed to _teach_ publicly who had not previously gone through a regular course of study under some approved doctor. But Abelard had had no master in theology, except himself; for, as we have seen, he gave up his attendance in Anselm’s school through contempt for his inferiority, and had at once begun to teach a science which in reality he had never studied. At a Council assembled at Soissons, his Treatise on the Holy Trinity was condemned, and he himself required to cast it into the fire, and to make public profession of the faith by reciting the creed of St. Athanasius, which he did with many tears and sighs, after which he was sent back to the monastery of St. Denys. He had not been there long, however, when a controversy which he thought fit to raise on the question of the identity of St. Denys, the Areopagite, with the patron of the abbey, got him into fresh trouble, and he fled from the monastery to the territory of the Count of Champagne, where he fixed his residence in a beautiful solitude near Nogent, which was soon found out by his disciples. “They came crowding to me,” he writes, “from all parts, and leaving the towns and cities, were content to dwell in the wilderness. Instead of spacious houses, they set up for themselves little tents, and put up gladly with wild herbs instead of delicate viands. People said one to another, ‘Behold the world is gone after him.’ At last, as my little oratory would not hold them, they enlarged it, building it of wood and stone.” To this new building he gave the name of the _Paraclete_, and it might truly have been his consolation could he have learnt wisdom from the past, and bowed his erratic genius under the yoke of faith. But the school of the Paraclete soon resounded with new errors; to the former opinions put forth regarding the Holy Trinity, were now added equally heterodox views on the subject of grace and original sin, which were at once discerned and denounced by two saints who then illuminated the church with their doctrine and their virtue--St. Norbert, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Abelard, whose natural cowardice shrank from the prospect of new dangers, endeavoured to escape the consequences of his own imprudence by abandoning the Paraclete, and accepting the government of St. Gildas’ abbey; but the uncouth manners and language of the monks filled him with repugnance, or perhaps it would be truer to say, the monastic routine proved insufferable to one who had nothing of the real monk about him. In 1126, therefore, we find him once more teaching in the schools of St. Geneviève. He was never really at home save in the Professor’s chair, but unhappily he never filled it without betraying himself into some of the audacities of unorthodox philosophy. Soon his old errors were reproduced, and called forth the zeal of St. Bernard, who protested with all the force of his nervous eloquence against the strange assemblage of heresies to be found united in the teaching of a single man. “When he speaks of the Holy Trinity,” he says, “it is in the style of Arius; he is a Pelagian when he treats of grace, and a second Nestorius when he speaks of the Person of Jesus Christ. His vanity,” continues the saint, “is such that he brags as if there were nothing in heaven and earth he did not know; and in truth he knows a little of everything except himself.” In his 190th Epistle, addressed to Pope Innocent II., St. Bernard sums up all the errors of Abelard, who had ventured to deny, and even to ridicule, the doctrine of Redemption, which he presumptuously declared illogical, declaring that our Lord came only to instruct us by His Word and Example. His final condemnation took place at the Council of Sens, which imposed silence on him for ever, a sentence confirmed by the authority of Pope Innocent II. This condemnation might possibly have had no better result than that of Soissons, had it not been for the charity of the Venerable Peter of Cluny, at whose monastery Abelard stopped on his way to Rome, where he purposed to appeal against his sentence. The holy abbot succeeded in drawing from him a recantation of his errors; he induced him to renounce the scholastic career, which had been the source of so many temptations, and frankly to submit to the judgment of the Council and the Pope. More than this, he exerted himself to effect a personal reconciliation between Abelard and St. Bernard, and lastly, he offered to the wounded spirit of the unhappy scholar a secure and sheltered retreat in his own community, where, under the habit of religion, the Professor of St. Geneviève spent the last years of his life in the exercise of piety and penance.

There then, let us leave him, in his poor cell with its wooden candlestick and its crucifix, with the Holy Scriptures and a few treatises of the Fathers for his only library; defeated, as some might say, put to silence, and extinguished--but with his heart, at last, at peace. Well might he have exclaimed with the Psalmist, “It is good for me that Thou hast humbled me!” A change was wrought in him so great, that, as we read the words in which his good abbot describes it, we can scarcely recognise the old Abelard of former years. “Never did I see a man more humble,” writes Peter the Venerable, “whether in gesture, habit, or countenance. He read continually, prayed often, and kept silence at all times, unless when forced to speak; and after his reconciliation with the Holy See, offered the Holy Sacrifice almost daily, and occupied himself only with meditating or teaching me truths of religion or philosophy.” A marvellous change indeed; and happy were it if all who incurred the same censures could follow in the same course.

We have seen that the rationalistic errors of Abelard found their ablest opponent in St. Bernard, who had conceived a distrust of the new philosophy when studying as a mere boy in the canon’s school at Chatillon, where the fashionable scholasticism was just then beginning to be introduced. He seems to have felt an instinctive dread of its ultimate tendencies, and to have preserved during his whole life the sentiments resulting from his early experience of what his biographer Geoffery of Igny designates as the “wisdom of the world.” Closely united to him in their theological views, were the great scholars of St. Victor’s, Hugh, Richard, and Adam. Hugh of St. Victor, the third prior in succession from William de Champeaux, was styled the second Augustine, from his devoted admiration of that Father. Brought up in a house of canons regular in Saxony, he bore testimony in after life to the care they bestowed on his education. “I do not fear to certify,” he says, “that they neglected no means of perfecting me in the sciences, and even instructed me in many things which might be thought trifling and extraordinary.” These words occur in his _Didascalion_, or Treatise on Studies, which he drew up with the view of remedying the disorderly and unmethodical manner in which most scholars then pursued their academic labours. In it he gives an interesting account of his own early life as a scholar. “I never despised anything that belonged to erudition,” he says; “when I was a scholar I studied the names of everything I saw. I committed to memory all the sentences, questions, replies, and solutions I had heard and learnt during the day; and I used to describe the figures of geometry on the floor with charcoal. I do not say this to boast of my knowledge, which is nothing, but to show that he proceeds best who proceeds with order. You will find many things in histories and other books, which taken in themselves seem of little profit, but which nevertheless are useful and necessary when taken in connection with other things.” Hugh, like all the disciples of this school, advocated the old system, according to which all the parts of knowledge stood in mutual relation to one another, and theology dominated over the whole. In his Treatise _De Vanitate Mundi_, he describes an imaginary school, in which is no doubt depicted that of his own monastery. The students are described divided into groups, according to the different subjects on which they are engaged. All the liberal arts are cultivated in turn, and while the fingers of some are employed in designing or colouring an illuminated page, others are studying the nature of herbs, or the constitution of the human frame. As a spiritual writer, Hugh of St. Victor is considered to be surpassed by his disciple Richard of St. Victor, a Scotchman by birth, and one of the greatest mystic theologians of the Church. The special doctrines insisted on by this school were those which put forth faith, and not reason, as the ground of certainty, and maintained that reason was to be exercised only to demonstrate the truths that were held by faith. Abelard, in his extravagant exaltation of the claims of reason, had gone so far in his “Introduction to Theology,” as to define faith as an opinion, and to depreciate a too ready belief, praising that cautious philosophy which does not yield its faith till it has subjected all things to the test of reason. To believe without doubting, according to this view of things, was the religion of women and children; to doubt all things before we believe them was alone worthy of the dignity of man. The scholars of St. Victor not only vindicated the true claims of faith, but they sought to prove that faith itself must rest on the foundation stone of charity. They loved to remind their disciples of those words of Our Lord, “If any man will do the will of God he shall know of the doctrine.” Charity, they said, is then the foundation, and Humility the key, to all true science, and we can understand the Truth of God only in proportion as we obey it. They did not seek to set aside the just use of the reason, but to assign it limits, and to prohibit the search after things confessedly above the grasp of human intellect. “What is it to be wise,” asks Hugo of St. Victor, “but to love God? for love is wisdom.” He complains of the cavilling spirit of the dialecticians who would fain turn the simplest precepts of the Gospel into matter of dispute. If they read that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves, they begin to argue, saying, “If I love one man as myself, then I must love three or four men more than myself;” and this they style seeking truth. Again, he blames the conceit of those who, ignorant of the very first elements, will condescend to study nothing but the sublimest matters, forgetting that the beginning of all discipline is humility. Neither would he endure that presumptuous spirit which gloried in the subtlety of its own powers, but, like a true disciple of St. Augustine, desired that reliance on Divine Grace should be the foundation of the whole spiritual and intellectual edifice.

Perfectly in accordance with this teaching was that of John of Salisbury, who exposed the vain pretensions of those who ought to make philosophy consist in a barren exercise of the reasoning powers. “Philosophy,” he says, “is nothing else but the love of God, and if that love be extinguished philosophy vanishes away. All studies worthy of that end must tend to the increase of charity, and he who acquires or increases charity has gained the highest object of philosophy. This, therefore, is the true rule of philosophy, that all learning and all reading should be made conducive to truth and charity, and then the choir of virtues will enter into the soul as into a temple of God. They most impudently err who think that philosophy consists in mere words, who multiply phrases and propose a thousand ridiculous little questions, endeavouring to perplex their hearers that they may seem more learned than Dædalus. But though eloquence is a useful and noble study, this loquacity of vain disputation is a most hateful thing.” Truth, as all agreed, was the only object of science; but whilst Abelard and his followers sought this truth in the subjective reasonings of their own minds, the mystics of St. Victor’s school declared that it was not to be sought by the understanding alone, but by the heart and will. For what is Truth, they asked, but God Himself? Who is to be sought by love rather than by science. He therefore who seeks God, seeks the highest truth, and embraces it when it finds Him. It knows all things in proportion as it knows more of God, Whom not to know is darkness. And it knows all things in Him, for, in the words of St. Gregory, “what does not he see, who sees Him Who sees all things?”

Such was the sublime teaching which St. Bernard and the contemplatives of his time opposed to the growing spirit of philosophic rationalism. The Cistercian cloisters and the disciples of the school of St. Victor everywhere propagated the same spiritual maxims, and thus provided a wholesome antidote to the baneful spirit of the age. But the very existence of the antidote bears witness how wide-spread was the poison which it sought to nullify, how greatly the mind of Christendom had broken away from the old landmarks of thought, and how rapidly it was sweeping onward to what threatened to cause the wreck of faith and philosophy together.

The actual state of the schools at the middle of the twelfth century may best be gathered from the description given by our own country man, John of Salisbury, of his own course of studies. He appears to have come to Paris for the first time in 1136, being then a youth of sixteen, and, like thousands of the same age, was launched into the world of the great capital, to complete his education under the many wise professors who were contending for popular favour. Here we catch a glimpse of the new system which was gradually establishing itself. Education was no longer given exclusively in cloistered schools, but in great cities, where the young aspirant after science, instead of being sheltered under law and discipline, was cast abroad to shift for himself, and only required to attend the lectures of some licensed master. No doubt it was an excellent way of teaching him a knowledge of the world, but this had not hitherto been included in the branches of a noble youth’s early education. However, at sixteen John had to take care of himself in the great world of Paris, which exercised over him the fascination of which all were conscious who passed from the semi-barbarous isle of Britain to the brilliant capital, and beheld the gay vivacity of its citizens, the gravity of its religious ceremonials, the splendour and majesty of its many churches, and the busy life of its schools.[163] “Happy banishment,” wrote the young scholar, “that is permitted here to find a home!” His first care was to choose what Professor he would attend. It was just the time when Abelard’s fame was at its greatest height, and the English youth was naturally enough led to join the crowds that thronged the school of St. Geneviève. His first impression was one of delight, but soon his English good sense revolted at the shallowness which he detected under the showy outside, while the contemptuous neglect with which Abelard was wont to treat the ancient learning, was unendurable in the eyes of one who, young as he was, already had a thoroughly-formed taste for the classics. So bidding adieu to St. Geneviève, he placed himself under the two English masters, Robert de Mélun and William de Conches; by the first of whom he was initiated into the art of logic. He praises the disinterestedness shown by Robert, who, in his conduct as Professor, despised worldly gain and sought only the benefit of his scholars. Robert afterwards became Bishop of Hereford, and in that capacity acquired a very unenviable notoriety as one of the chief opponents of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Under William de Conches, John next passed three years with very great profit, studying grammar, which was then understood to include the explanation of good authors. He never regretted the time he devoted to this study. William was a disciple of the old school, a stout champion of the liberal arts, and warmly opposed to the new system introduced by Abelard. He liked to exercise his pupils in prose and verse, and required not only good prosody, but also good sense from his scholars. It was doubtless a fine thing to hear the warm-hearted, testy Englishman speak of the schools in which he had been brought up half a century ago, when boys were taught to behave like boys, and to listen to their masters in silence. Things were much altered now; and it was no longer the custom to follow the wholesome rule which Pythagoras taught his disciples, namely, to listen in silence for seven years, and only begin to ask questions in the eighth. On the contrary, these new scholars would come into your school with a supercilious air, and propose you their doubts and quibbles before they were well seated. They seemed to fancy that they knew everything when they had followed the schools for a year, and as if their business was to instruct their masters by their amazingly clever questions. On all these abuses Master William was wont to expend his honest indignation, but he certainly could not complain that John of Salisbury exhibited any of these marks of reprobation. Far from seeming to think he knew everything after a year’s study, John, after spending twelve years in the schools, regarded himself as still a learner. After his three years of grammar, he spent seven years more in successive courses of rhetoric, mathematics, and theology. Among the masters whose lectures he attended were Robert Pullus, or Pulleyne, and Gilbert de la Poiree. The latter afterwards became Bishop of Poitiers, in which dignity he was accused of teaching certain heterodox opinions on the Holy Trinity, which were condemned at the Council of Rheims, in 1148. His errors, like those of Abelard, appear to have arisen out of an abuse of that scholastic method of argumentation so popular among the professors of the time, and which too often proved dangerous weapons in the hands of men whose theological studies by no means kept pace with the cultivation of dialectics. Robert Pullus, the English master of theology, and restorer of sacred studies at Oxford, was a man of far more solid learning. “He knew,” says his great disciple, “how to be wise with sobriety.” The soundness of his doctrine was evinced by his “Sum of Theology,” and his disinterestedness, by his refusal of a bishopric offered him by Henry I. Robert declined abandoning a life of study for the precarious honours of a dignity which exposed its owner to the almost certain contingency of a struggle with the crown. He desired nothing more honourable than the life of a master; nevertheless, he was unable to avoid the dignities thrust on him by Celestine II., who created him cardinal and chancellor of the Roman Church.

During the whole time of his residence at Paris, John of Salisbury enjoyed a scholar’s honourable state of poverty, and supported himself by giving lessons to younger students, much after the fashion of a modern college tutor. His tutorship was, however, by no means a very profitable post, and supplied him with little beyond the bare necessaries of life. Happily, however, the threadbare gown of the poor scholar was still regarded with respect, and his humble circumstances did not prevent him from forming many valuable friendships. Among his friends he numbered the two great masters Adam du Petit Pont, and Richard l’Évêque, the former of whom he describes as a man of undoubted learning, but so vain that he wrapped up his knowledge in a cloud of obscurity, and made himself unintelligible for the sake of appearing profound, saying to those who reproached him with this weakness, that were he only to teach in the common way, he should get no one to attend his lectures. Richard was a man of a very different temper; his pride lay rather in concealing what he knew, than in displaying it; he cared nothing at all for worldly applause, and was deemed as holy in life as he was erudite. At first he followed the excellent method of Bernard of Chartres, but by degrees he yielded to the fashion of the times, and giving up the teaching of grammar and rhetoric, confined himself entirely to lecturing on dialectics.

To these friends of John of Salisbury we must add the name of a third, an Englishman like himself, and one of Anglo-Saxon blood. He was a young law-student, who, if inferior to many of his companions in scholastic acquirements, made up for the deficiency by the brilliancy of his native gifts, and those personal graces which add so largely to the power of wit or eloquence. The large grey eyes, thin aquiline nose, and beautiful countenance, so calm, yet with a glance so full of fire, are all known to us; for if the features of St. Thomas à Becket have not been preserved chiselled in marble, they have yet been made familiar to us by the description of those who laid up in their hearts the memory of that beloved countenance. It bore the unmistakable impress of genius, and of that sensitive organisation with which genius is so frequently accompanied. But his great natural gifts had received very imperfect culture in the schools of Merton and those of the English metropolis. At Paris his studies were almost exclusively confined to law, and he afterwards regretted that he had not devoted more time during his academic career to sacred learning. The intimacy which sprang up between him and John of Salisbury was not, therefore, based on any similarity in their literary tastes. The letters of both evince a striking difference in their intellectual training; those of St. Thomas, powerful in matter, are yet abrupt, harsh, and technical in style--those of his friend, on the other hand, are conveyed in classic phraseology, and betray the careful polish, not always free from affectation, of one who has laboriously formed himself on ancient models. In fact, John of Salisbury was, beyond dispute, the first scholar of his day, and naturally enough bewailed the revolution which he witnessed taking place in the schools. The science of reasoning was now affirmed by its advocates to contain the pith of all philosophy. Rhetoric was regarded by them as altogether unnecessary, because eloquence being a gift of nature, could not be acquired by art. Those who possessed the gift needed no study of ancient authors to infuse it into them; and those who did not possess it, would study them to no purpose. The art of logic to such men was all in all, and such was the eagerness with which they indulged their taste for disputation, that some spent their whole days in argument, and carried on their tiresome wrangling in the very streets. And what arguments they were! They examined seriously and at alarming length the weighty question, whether a pig who is driven by a man to be sold at the market, is held by the man, or by the cord fastened round his leg; and whether one who buys a cloak can be held to have purchased also the hood fastened to the cloak. As two negatives are equal to one affirmative, professors were accustomed to introduce into their arguments such a number of negatives, that in order to reckon them up, and see in what sense their propositions were to be understood, the hearers had recourse to the device of dropping a bean at each negative, and reckoning up the sum total at the end of the lecture. John, in his writings, complains of all these extravagancies, and of the tiresome way in which these choppers of logic would dispute over a tuft of wool, and instantly contradict any man who opened his lips in their presence. Nor did he cease lamenting over the neglect of good literature, which was resulting from the predominance given in the schools to logical disputation. He specially attacks one of the leading scholastics whom he does not name, but speaks of him under the sobriquet of “_Cornificius_;”[164] and those who showed themselves hostile to the claims of grammar and rhetoric are denominated by him “_Cornificians_.” In spite of all his wit and eloquence, the Cornificians won the day. The study of polite literature fell into neglect, and the intellectual power of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was turned into another channel--a channel which no doubt gave rise to a good deal of barbarous Latinity, but whence was to issue, in process of time, something more precious than mere literary elegance, the scholastic philosophy of the Church.

The caustic strictures of John of Salisbury were not directed against that system of philosophy, which as yet had no existence,[165] but against the error which put forth the exercise of sophistical argumentation as itself the sum of all philosophy, and the danger which he saw too well must arise from the deification of human reason. For the scholastic method, to which the theology of the Church stands so deeply indebted, is not to be confounded with the scholasticism which was rampant in the days of Abelard. The errors and sophistries of the professors of his day, arising as they did out of an extravagant adherence to the uncorrected teaching of Aristotle, were from the first discerned and condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities; and by none were they more firmly opposed than by St. Bernard, who saw to what fatal results the unrestrained culture of human reason, under the guidance of a pagan master, must necessarily lead. We shall see further on how jealously the Church continued to regard the study of Aristotle, and in what way she sought to check the evils flowing from it to the schools, up to the time when his philosophy was finally adapted to the service of the faith by the labours of St. Thomas.

In the midst of his studies, his tutorships, and his passages of arms with the Cornificians, twelve years slipped away, at the end of which time John of Salisbury found himself possessed of a vast fund of erudition[166] and an empty purse. The latter circumstance was not one which greatly disquieted him, for his theory was that the keys which opened the door of philosophy were not of gold, but consisted of poverty, humility, silence, and a quiet life, together with that detachment from family and worldly ties which is best found in a foreign land.[167] So little had he of the spirit of worldly ambition, that when in 1148 Peter des Celles, abbot of Moutier des Celles, offered him a chaplaincy in his monastery, he gladly accepted a post, which, however humble, gave him at least the leisure and the means to study. He remained in this retreat for the space of three years. Peter des Celles was one of the most remarkable men of his time, and has made himself best known by his epistles; for, like most of the literary personages of the twelfth century, he was a great letter writer. He had received his education in the monastic school of St. Martin des Champs, and does not seem to have been one whit behind the more fashionable students of Paris. “I had,” he writes, “an insatiable appetite for learning; my eyes were never tired of beholding books, or my ears of listening to them; yet with all my ardour, God was always the beginning, centre, and end of all my studies. They had but Him for their object, though indeed I studied everything, even law, without prejudice, however, to the duties of my state, attendance on the Divine Office, and my accustomed prayers.” This worthy inheritor of the genuine monastic spirit acted the part of a true father to our English scholar, who at last, through the favour of St. Bernard, obtained the post of secretary to Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, in whose household he renewed his acquaintance with two of his former fellow-students, Peter de Blois, and Thomas à Becket. Peter de Blois had been one of his pupils; a man of versatile talent, who had studied first at Tours, then at Paris, and lastly at Bologna, and had seen something of half the courts of Europe. He was equally skilled in law, medicine, and theology, but it is by his epistles that he is chiefly known, and his ready and somewhat gossiping pen has left us graphic sketches of the manners and customs of his time. He was, in fact, the Horace Walpole of the twelfth century, curious, fluent, and volatile. Henry II. made him archdeacon, first of Bath, and then of London, and often employed him as secretary, so that he had excellent opportunities for studying the court of our first Plantagenet sovereign, which he describes in a sufficiently amusing manner. He assures us that Henry’s court, from the conversation of learned men and the discussion of questions, was a daily school. The king, he says, is deeply versed in literature, and has more gifts of mind and body than he can so much as enumerate; nevertheless, he lets out the ugly fact that it is best not to go too near him when he is out of humour, as he is then more of a lion than a lamb, and is quite as likely as not to tear out your eyes. How any man of letters can ever attach himself to a court life is more than he can understand; and how any man, lettered or unlettered, could be brought to endure the daily miseries he describes, such as the eating of “mouldy bread and stale fish, wine that can only be drunk with the eyes shut, lodgings for which pigs would be ashamed to quarrel,” and days spent “without order, plan, or moderation of any kind,” must seem equally incomprehensible to his readers. But he has something more cheering to say of the household of Archbishop Theobald. It is crowded with learned men, who spend their time between prayers and dinner in lecturing, disputing, and examining causes. All the knotty questions of the kingdom are referred to them, and discussed in the common hall; and there is no sort of jealousy or contention, but the youngest present is listened to with courtesy and attention. In these letters Peter de Blois has a good deal to say On the subject of education. He tells us that in his youth he was trained, not in idle fables, but solid literature, and names Livy, Quintius Curtius, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus among the books then most commonly used in schools. He regards the new scholasticism with undisguised contempt: it is good, he says, neither at home nor abroad, neither in the church, the cloister, the camp, the court, or the bar. In fact, in his literary tastes he showed himself a worthy disciple of John of Salisbury.

Meanwhile the latter attached himself to the rising fortunes of St. Thomas, and dedicated to him, when chancellor, his two great works, the _Polycraticon_ and the _Metalogicon_, the last of which is a formal apology for humane letters, and is considered to display an amount of learning and literary elegance far exceeding anything which had been produced since the days of Boëthius. When St. Thomas became primate, his friend continued to retain the office he had held under his predecessor, and never spared the archbishop the benefit of his frank and fearless advice. Among other things, he took on him to give him some directions with regard to his studies which are worth quoting, as showing the view taken at that time by spiritual men, of the danger resulting from an excessive application to law and logic. “My counsel is,” he says, “that you put off some of your other occupations, in order to give your whole mind to prayer. Laws and canons are all very well, but believe me, they nourish curiosity more than devotion.... Who ever rose from the study of law with a sentiment of compunction in his heart? Nay, I will say more, the exercises of the schools often increase knowledge till a man is puffed up with it, but they rarely inflame devotion. I would far rather that you meditated on the Psalms or read the ‘Morals of St. Gregory,’ than that you were learned in philosophy, after the fashion of the scholastics.” St. Thomas was not slow in taking his friend’s advice, and both at Canterbury and Pontigny often spent whole nights in the study of the Scriptures, and was wont always to carry a few pages in the loose sleeve of his tunic, that he might have them at hand whenever he found a leisure moment for reading.

We need not pursue further the history of John of Salisbury. The fidelity with which he adhered to the cause of St. Thomas exposed him to no small loss and personal danger, and after the martyrdom of the saint he had to fly from England, and taking refuge in France, became Bishop of Chartres in 1176, his election being entirely due to his personal merits, and the honour with which the French clergy regarded one who had been the companion of the Blessed Martyr. But before concluding our notice of the Parisian masters, it remains for us to name the three Peters, as they are called, who all illustrated the schools about the same period. The first was Peter Comestor, or the Eater--so called from his habit of devouring books--a very famous personage in his day, who became chancellor of Paris in 1164, but resigned all his dignities to put on the habit of the canons of St. Victor’s. His _Historia Scholastica_, or Epitome of Sacred History, was so much esteemed in the twelfth century, that portions of it were read in the churches. A namesake of his, called Peter the Chanter, was almost of equal fame. He too, after filling the eye of the public for several years, withdrew from their applause, and became a simple religious in the Abbey of Long-Pont, where he died in 1197.

Both were men of tried virtue, and showed themselves hostile to the sophists of the day, whose wranglings they declared to be opposed to the simplicity of the Gospel. But more renowned than either was the Italian scholar, Peter Lombard, the Master of the Sentences, as he was called, and the real Father and founder of scholastic theology. He commenced his study of civil law at Bologna, and thence passed on to Paris, where he was admitted among the canons of St. Victor’s, and afterwards taught for some years in the cathedral school. In 1159 he became bishop of Paris, through the influence of his royal pupil, prince Philip, brother to the reigning king, Louis the Young. The king offered the bishopric to his brother, who was educated for the ecclesiastical state, but he nobly refused it in favour of his master. Peter Lombard’s great work was the celebrated Book of Sentences, consisting of a number of passages selected from the works of the fathers, and commented on in such a manner as to present the student with a body of theological doctrines systematically arranged. The convenience of finding every point of theology treated of in a precise and methodical order, and within the compass of a single volume, was speedily recognised, and the Book of the Sentences soon became the favourite text-book used in the schools, both for the lectures of the masters and the private study of their disciples. Hence the title of _Sententiarus_, which came to be applied to those who taught or studied the Sentences. Notwithstanding the immense popularity obtained by this work, it is said to contain several important omissions, and even some theological errors, one of which was formerly condemned by Pope Alexander III. Its importance is derived from the circumstance of its being the first attempt to reduce theology to a compact and orderly scientific system; and from this period we date the real rise of the science of scholastic theology.

It will have been observed that in what has been said up to this time of the schools of Paris, they have not been designated by the title of a university. For, in fact, as yet these schools had no claim to be regarded as a corporate body; they were accidents rather than an institution, and it was only gradually that they acquired a corporate character, and became possessed of a government, a head, and a body of laws and privileges. This change was effected by no sudden act of royal or ecclesiastical legislation; it developed itself insensibly but of the very necessity of the case. The immense number of masters and pupils who flocked to the capital, gave rise to disorders, which obliged the superiors of the different schools to unite together and agree to certain rules of common discipline.

Thus in 1195 we find a certain John, abbot of St. Albans, associated to the “body of elect masters.” Some years before, in the very thick of the quarrel between Henry II. and St. Thomas, occurs the first notice of that division of the scholars into _nations_ or provinces, which formed one of the peculiarities of the university. Henry offered to choose as arbiters either the peers of France, the French clergy, or the heads of the different _provinces_ in the school of Paris. We find also certain laws, or at least established customs having the force of laws, respecting the method to be observed in granting licenses for the opening of a school. It was the rule in all dioceses that no one could open a school without permission from the cathedral scholasticus, or chancellor of the diocese, who was bound to grant such licenses to all who were capable. Pope Alexander III., who showed a lively interest in everything that concerned the encouragement of education, ordered that such licenses should be granted gratuitously, but he afterwards permitted the Chancellor of Paris, who was at that time Peter Comestor, to exact a certain fine. It appears, also, that in Paris the chancellor or scholasticus of St. Geneviève shared this right with the chancellor of Notre Dame. There were also other laws, such as those which prohibited religious from teaching or studying in the schools of law or medicine. The two faculties, as they were called, of arts and theology, which formed the basis of the university, appear to have been already distinguished. Certain privileges, too, were already enjoyed by the students. They were beginning to claim the right of being tried only by the ecclesiastical tribunals, and this right was granted to them in 1194 by a decree of Celestine III. Alexander III. permitted clerics to retain their benefices whilst teaching or studying at Paris. Finally, in the year 1200, we find the existence of the university as a corporate body, governed by a head, acknowledged in the diploma of Philip Augustus, wherein, having confirmed the exemption of the scholars from the secular courts, he decreed that the head of the studies should, in particular, be incapable of arrest or punishment from the secular judge, and obliged every provost of the city on his entrance into office to swear to the observance of this decree.

From this time, therefore, we may properly date the formal recognition of the university of Paris, and passing over the obscurities in which its earlier commencements are involved, shall proceed to present our readers with a sketch of that institution as it existed in the palmy days of the thirteenth century.

_CHAPTER XIII._

PARIS AND THE FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES.

A.D. 1150 TO 1250.

The modern visitor to Paris who finds his way to that portion of the city lying on the southern bank of the river, which still bears the name of the _Quartier de l’Université_, sees himself surrounded by buildings, many of which bear unmistakably the character of their original destination. He stands, in fact, amid the _débris_ of the old university of Paris, the schools and colleges of which were clustered for the most part about the Mont St. Geneviève, and occupied an entire suburb, which was first enclosed within the city walls by Philip Augustus. That monarch, passionately desirous to increase the splendour of his capital, and at the same time to afford larger space for the accommodation of the crowds of students, whose numbers are said to have exceeded those of the citizens themselves, added a large district, which in the year 1200 presented a fair expanse of fields and vineyards, interspersed with churches, houses, and farms, but in which you would vainly have sought for any of those magnificent and semi-monastic structures which we are accustomed to associate with the idea of a university. Colleges, in fact, had as yet no existence at Paris, and the university consisted of an assemblage, not of stately buildings, but of masters and scholars gathered out of every European land.

It is no easy matter to convey an idea of the enthusiasm with which the Paris schools were regarded at the beginning of the thirteenth century. No one, whatever might be his country, could pretend to any consideration who had not studied there in his youth; if you met a priest or doctor, whose skill in letters you desired to praise, it was enough to say, “one would think he had passed his whole life in Paris.” It was, to use the expression of Gregory IX., the _Cariath-sepher_, or city of letters,[168] which drew to itself the intellectual wealth of Christendom. “Whatever a nation has that is most precious,” writes William of Brittany, the chaplain of Philip Augustus, in his poem of the _Philipide_, “whatever a people has most famous, all the treasures of science and all the riches of the earth; lessons of wisdom, the glory of letters, nobility of thought, refinement of manners, all this is to be found in Paris.” Others declared, in yet more pompous language, that neither Egypt nor Athens could be compared to the modern capital, which was, they said, the very fountain-head of wisdom, the tree of life in the midst of the terrestrial paradise, the torch of the house of the Lord. The exile who had once tasted of its delights no longer regretted his banishment from his own land; and, in truth, the beauty of the city, its light elastic atmosphere, the grace and gaiety of its inhabitants, and the society of all that was most choice in wit and learning, rendered it no less fascinating a residence in the thirteenth century as the capital of learning than it has since become as the metropolis of fashion.

To these attractions were added the advantages which the Parisian students enjoyed in virtue of their privileges. I have already spoken of the diploma granted by Philip Augustus, and its provisions were greatly enlarged by subsequent monarchs. Philip le Bel ordered that the goods of students should never be seized for debt, and they were also exempt from taxes. If a French scholar travelled, all farmers were obliged to supply him with horses at a reasonable rate of hire. Artisans were not allowed to annoy him with unpleasant odours or noises, and on complaint being made of such nuisances, they had to remove themselves out of his neighbourhood. The rights of citizenship were likewise enjoyed by the members of all the French universities, and in those days this involved many important exemptions. Scholarship was, in short, regarded as an honourable profession, something which almost conferred on its possessor a patent of nobility; the new master of arts had lighted flambeaux carried before him in the public streets, and the conferring of a doctor’s degree was an event which caused as much stir as the dubbing of a knight. Nay, in those days, so permeated with the romantic spirit of chivalry, scholars were not unfrequently spoken of as “the knights of science,” and the disputation at which some youthful aspirant contended for the doctor’s cap was regarded as the intellectual tournament.

Yet, there was another side to this brilliant picture, and one plainly discerned by those whose calmer judgment would not suffer itself to be deceived as to the perils which awaited so many young and ardent minds, exposed without restraint or guidance to the manifold temptations, both moral and intellectual, that awaited them in that busy throng. “O Paris!” exclaims Peter of the Cells, in a letter to one of his monks who had been sent thither to study, “resort of every vice, source of every disorder, thou dart of hell; how dost thou pierce the heart of the unwary!” John, the young monk whom he addresses, had, it would seem, deplored the new scenes amid which he found himself as painfully out of harmony with his monastic training. “Who but yourself,” replies the abbot, “would not reckon this Paris to be a very Eden, a land of first-fruits and flowers? Yet you have spoken truly, though in jest, for the place which is richest in bodily pleasures miserably enslaves the soul. So, at least, thinks my John, and rightly therefore does he call it a place of exile. May you always so esteem it, and hasten home to your true country, where in the book of life you will find, not figures and elements, but Divinity and Truth itself. O happy school of Christ! where He teaches our heart with the word of power, where the book is not purchased nor the Master paid. There life avails more than learning, and simplicity than science. There none are refuted save those who are for ever rejected; and one word of final judgment, _Ite_ or _Venite_, decides all questions and all cavils for ever. Would that men would apply themselves to these studies rather than to so many vain discourses; they would find more abundant fruit and more availing honour.”