Ch. 14 - Abelard - Page 2

continens," He is the only possible energy, and leaves no place for
human will to act. A force which is "one and the same and wholly
everywhere" is more Spinozist than Spinoza, and is likely to be
mistaken for frank pantheism by the large majority of religious
minds who must try to understand it without a theological course in
a Jesuit college. In the year 1100 Jesuit colleges did not exist,
and even the great Dominican and Franciscan schools were far from
sight in the future; but the School of Notre Dame at Paris existed,
and taught the existence of God much as Archbishop Hildebert
described it. The most successful lecturer was William of Champeaux,
and to any one who ever heard of William at all, the name instantly
calls up the figure of Abelard, in flesh and blood, as he sang to
Heloise the songs which he says resounded through Europe. The
twelfth century, with all its sparkle, would be dull without Abelard
and Heloise. With infinite regret, Heloise must be left out of the
story, because she was not a philosopher or a poet or an artist, but
only a Frenchwoman to the last millimetre of her shadow. Even though
one may suspect that her famous letters to Abelard are, for the most
part, by no means above scepticism, she was, by French standards,
worth at least a dozen Abelards, if only because she called Saint
Bernard a false apostle.

Unfortunately, French standards, by which she must be judged in our
ignorance, take for granted that she philosophized only for the sake
of Abelard, while Abelard taught philosophy to her not so much
because he believed in philosophy or in her as because he believed
in himself. To this day, Abelard remains a problem as perplexing as
he must have been to Heloise, and almost as fascinating. As the west
portal of Chartres is the door through which one must of necessity
enter the Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century, so Abelard
is the portal of approach to the Gothic thought and philosophy
within. Neither art nor thought has a modern equivalent; only
Heloise, like Isolde, unites the ages.

The first crusade seems, in perspective, to have rilled the whole
field of vision in France at the time; but, in fact, France seethed
with other emotions, and while the crusaders set out to scale heaven
by force at Jerusalem, the monks, who remained at home, undertook to
scale heaven by prayer and by absorption of body and soul in God;
the Cistercian Order was founded in 1098, and was joined in 1112 by
young Bernard, born in 1090 at Fontaines-les-Dijon, drawing with him
or after him so many thousands of young men into the self-immolation
of the monastery as carried dismay into the hearts of half the women
of France. At the same time--that is, about 1098 or 1100--Abelard