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HISTORIA CALAMITATUM

THE STORY OF MY MISFORTUNES

An Autobiography by Peter Abelard

Translated by Henry Adams Bellows

Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram



INTRODUCTION

The "Historia Calamitatum" of Peter Abelard is one of those human
documents, out of the very heart of the Middle Ages, that
illuminates by the glow of its ardour a shadowy period that has
been made even more dusky and incomprehensible by unsympathetic
commentators and the ill-digested matter of "source-books." Like
the "Confessions" of St. Augustine it is an authentic revelation of
personality and, like the latter, it seems to show how unchangeable
is man, how consistent unto himself whether he is of the sixth
century or the twelfth--or indeed of the twentieth century.
"Evolution" may change the flora and fauna of the world, or modify
its physical forms, but man is always the same and the unrolling of
the centuries affects him not at all. If we can assume the vivid
personality, the enormous intellectual power and the clear, keen
mentality of Abelard and his contemporaries and immediate
successors, there is no reason why "The Story of My Misfortunes"
should not have been written within the last decade.

They are large assumptions, for this is not a period in world
history when the informing energy of life expresses itself through
such qualities, whereas the twelfth century was of precisely this
nature. The antecedent hundred years had seen the recovery from the
barbarism that engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and
the generation of those vital forces that for two centuries were to
infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and
in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that
describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of
"chaos and old night" and Abelard and his opponent, St. Bernard,
rode high on the mounting force in its swift and almost violent
ascent.

Pierre du Pallet, yclept Abelard, was born in 1079 and died in
1142, and his life precisely covers the period of the birth,
development and perfecting of that Gothic style of architecture
which is one of the great exemplars of the period. Actually, the
Norman development occupied the years from 1050 to 1125 while the
initiating and determining of Gothic consumed only fifteen years,
from Bury, begun in 1125, to Saint-Denis, the work of Abbot Suger,
the friend and partisan of Abelard, in 1140. It was the time of the
Crusades, of the founding and development of schools and
universities, of the invention or recovery of great arts, of the
growth of music, poetry and romance. It was the age of great kings
and knights and leaders of all kinds, but above all it was the
epoch of a new philosophy, refounded on the newly revealed corner
stones of Plato and Aristotle, but with a new content, a new
impulse and a new method inspired by Christianity.

All these things, philosophy, art, personality, character, were the
product of the time, which, in its definiteness and consistency,
stands apart from all other epochs in history. The social system
was that of feudalism, a scheme of reciprocal duties, privileges
and obligations as between man and man that has never been excelled
by any other system that society has developed as its own method of
operation. As Dr. De Wulf has said in his illuminating book
"Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages" (a volume that
should be read by any one who wishes rightly to understand the
spirit and quality of Mediaevalism), "the feudal sentiment _par
excellence_ ... is the sentiment of the value and dignity of the
individual man. The feudal man lived as a free man; he was master
in his own house; he sought his end in himself; he was--and this is
a scholastic expression,--_propter seipsum existens_: all feudal
obligations were founded upon respect for personality and the given
word."

Of course this admirable scheme of society with its guild system of
industry, its absence of usury in any form and its just sense of
comparative values, was shot through and through with religion both
in faith and practice. Catholicism was universally and implicitly
accepted. Monasticism had redeemed Europe from barbarism and Cluny
had freed the Church from the yoke of German imperialism. This
unity and immanence of religion gave a consistency to society
otherwise unobtainable, and poured its vitality into every form of
human thought and action.

It was Catholicism and the spirit of feudalism that preserved men
from the dangers inherent in the immense individualism of the time.
With this powerful and penetrating cooerdinating force men were safe
to go about as far as they liked in the line of individuality,
whereas today, for example, the unifying force of a common and
vital religion being absent and nothing having been offered to take
its place, the result of a similar tendency is egotism and anarchy.
These things happened in the end in the case of Mediaevalism when
the power and the influence of religion once began to weaken, and
the Renaissance and Reformation dissolved the fabric of a unified
society. Thereafter it became necessary to bring some order out of
the spiritual, intellectual and physical chaos through the
application of arbitrary force, and so came absolutism in
government, the tyranny of the new intellectualism, the Catholic
Inquisition and the Puritan Theocracy.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the balance is
justly preserved, though it was but an unstable equilibrium, and
therefore during the time of Abelard we find the widest diversity
of speculation and freedom of thought which continue unhampered for
more than a hundred years. The mystical school of the Abbey of St.
Victor in Paris follows one line (perhaps the most nearly right of
all though it was submerged by the intellectual force and vivacity
of the Scholastics) with Hugh of St. Victor as its greatest
exponent. The Franciscans and Dominicans each possessed great
schools of philosophy and dogmatic theology, and in addition there
were a dozen individual line of speculation, each vitalized by some
one personality, daring, original, enthusiastic. This prodigious
mental and spiritual activity was largely fostered by the schools,
colleges and universities that had suddenly appeared all over
Europe. Never was such activity along educational lines. Almost
every cathedral had its school, and many of the abbeys as well, as
for example, in France alone, Cluny, Citeaux and Bec, St. Martin of
Tours, Laon, Chartres, Rheims and Paris. To these schools students
poured in from all over the world in numbers mounting to many
thousands for such as Paris for example, and the mutual rivalries
were intense and sometimes disorderly. Groups of students would
choose their own masters and follow them from place to place, even
subjecting them to discipline if in their opinion they did not live
up to the intellectual mark they had set as their standard. As
there was not only one religion and one social system, but one
universal language as well, this gathering from all the four
quarters of Europe was perfectly possible, and had much to do with
the maintenance of that unity which marked society for three centuries.

At the time of Abelard the schools of Chartres and Paris were at
the height of their fame and power. Fulbert, Bernard and Thierry,
all of Chartres, had fixed its fame for a long period, and at Paris
Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and William of Champeaux were names
to conjure with, while Anselm of Laon, Adelard of Bath, Alan of
Lille, John of Salisbury, Peter Lombard, were all from time to time
students or teachers in one of the schools of the Cathedral, the
Abbey of St. Victor or Ste. Genevieve.

Earlier in the Middle Ages the identity of theology and philosophy
had been proclaimed, following the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian
theory, and the latter (cf. Peter Damien and Duns Scotus Eriugena)
was even reduced to a position that made it no more than the
obedient handmaid of theology. In the eleventh century however, St.
Anselm had drawn a clear distinction between faith and reason, and
thereafter theology and philosophy were generally accepted as
individual but allied sciences, both serving as lines of approach
to truth but differing in their method. Truth was one and therefore
there could be no conflict between the conclusions reached after
different fashions. In the twelfth century Peter of Blois led a
certain group called "rigourists" who still looked askance at
philosophy, or rather at the intellectual methods by which it
proceeded, and they were inclined to condemn it as "the devil's
art," but they were on the losing side and John of Salisbury, Alan
of Lille, Gilbert de la Porree and Hugh of St. Victor prevailed in
their contention that philosophers were "_humanae videlicet
sapientiae amatores_," while theologians were "_divinae scripturae
doctores."

Cardinal Mercier, himself the greatest contemporary exponent of
Scholastic philosophy, defines philosophy as "the science of the
totality of things." The twelfth century was a time when men were
striving to see phenomena in this sense and established a great
rational synthesis that should yet be in full conformity with the
dogmatic theology of revealed religion. Abelard was one of the most
enthusiastic and daring of these Mediaeval thinkers, and it is not
surprising that he should have found himself at issue not only with
the duller type of theologians but with his philosophical peers
themselves. He was an intellectual force of the first magnitude and
a master of dialectic; he was also an egotist through and through,
and a man of strong passions. He would and did use his logical
faculty and his mastery of dialectic to justify his own desires,
whether these were for carnal satisfaction or the maintenance of an
original intellectual concept. It was precisely this danger that
aroused the fears of the "rigourists" and in the light of
succeeding events in the domain of intellectualism it is impossible
to deny that there was some justification for their gloomy
apprehensions. In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process
marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety.
He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this
limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit
was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance
began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization
of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism of
Descartes, Kant and the entire modern school of materialistic
philosophy. It was the clear prevision of this inevitable issue
that made of St. Bernard not only an implacable opponent of Abelard
but of the whole system of Scholasticism as well. For a time he was
victorious. Abelard was silenced and the mysticism of the
Victorines triumphed, only to be superseded fifty years later when
the two great orders, Dominican and Franciscan, produced their
triumphant protagonists of intellectualism, Alelander Halesand
Albertus Magnus, and finally the greatest pure intellect of all
time, St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Bernard, St. Francis of Assisi, the
Victorines, maintained that after all, as Henri Bergson was to say,
seven hundred years later, "the mind of man by its very nature is
incapable of apprehending reality," and that therefore faith is
better than reason. Lord Bacon came to the same conclusion when he
wrote "Let men please themselves as they will in admiring and
almost adoring the human kind, this is certain; that, as an uneven
mirrour distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure
and section, so the mind ... cannot be trusted." And Hugh of St.
Victor himself, had written, even in the days of Abelard: "There
was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the
true wisdom. The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking
itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom it became
presumptuous and boasted it would attain the highest wisdom. And it
made itself a ladder of the face of creation. ... Then those things
which were seen were known and there were other things which were
not known; and through those which were manifest they expected to
reach those that were hidden. And they stumbled and fell into the
falsehoods of their own imagining ... So God made foolish the
wisdom of this world, and He pointed out another wisdom, which
seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ crucified,
in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the world
despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had
made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He
had set for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease,
seeking medicine in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave
itself over with vain curiosity to the study of alien things."

These considerations troubled Abelard not at all. He was conscious
of a mind of singular acuteness and a tongue of parts, both of
which would do whatever he willed. Beneath all the tumultuous talk
of Paris, when he first arrived there, lay the great and unsolved
problem of Universals and this he promptly made his own, rushing in
where others feared to tread. William of Champeaux had rested on a
Platonic basis, Abelard assumed that of Aristotle, and the clash
began. It is not a lucid subject, but the best abstract may be
found in Chapter XIV of Henry Adams' "Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres" while this and the two succeeding chapters give the most
luminous and vivacious account of the principles at issue in
this most vital of intellectual feuds.

"According to the latest authorities, the doctrine of universals
which convulsed the schools of the twelfth century has never
received an adequate answer. What is a species: what is a genus or
a family or an order? More or less convenient terms of classification,
about which the twelfth century cared very little, while it cared
deeply about the essence of classes! Science has become too complex
to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for
nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits,
almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field
of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers
of substance, universals, and particulars. Little has changed except
the vocabulary and the method. The schools knew that their society
hung for life on the demonstration that God, the ultimate universal,
was a reality, out of which all other universal truths or realities
sprang. Truth was a real thing, outside of human experience. The
schools of Paris talked and thought of nothing else. John of Salisbury,
who attended Abelard's lectures about 1136, and became Bishop of
Chartres in 1176, seems to have been more surprised than we need be at
the intensity of the emotion. 'One never gets away from this question,'
he said. 'From whatever point a discussion starts, it is always led
back and attached to that. It is the madness of Rufus about Naevia;
"He thinks of nothing else; talks of nothing else, and if Naevia did
not exist, Rufus would be dumb."'

... "In these scholastic tournaments the two champions started from
opposite points:--one from the ultimate substance, God,--the
universal, the ideal, the type;--the other from the individual,
Socrates, the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object
of sensual perception. The first champion--William in this instance--
assumed that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he
was called a realist. His opponent--Abelard--held that the
universal was only nominally real; and on that account he was
called a nominalist. Truth, virtue, humanity, exist as units and
realities, said William. Truth, replied Abelard, is only the sum of
all possible facts that are true, as humanity is the sum of all
actual human beings. The ideal bed is a form, made by God, said
Plato. The ideal bed is a name, imagined by ourselves, said
Aristotle. 'I start from the universe,' said William. 'I start from
the atom,' said Abelard; and, once having started, they necessarily
came into collision at some point between the two."

In this "Story of My Misfortunes" Abelard gives his own account of
the triumphant manner in which he confounded his master, William,
but as Henry Adams says, "We should be more credulous than
twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abelard's word in 1135,
that in 1110 he had driven out of the schools the most accomplished
dialectician of the age by an objection so familiar that no other
dialectician was ever silenced by it--whatever may have been the
case with theologians-and so obvious that it could not have troubled
a scholar of fifteen. William stated a selected doctrine as old as
Plato; Abelard interposed an objection as old as Aristotle. Probably
Plato and Aristotle had received the question and answer from
philosophers ten thousand years older than themselves. Certainly
the whole of philosophy has always been involved in this dispute."

So began the battle of the schools with all its more than military
strategy and tactics, and in the end it was a drawn battle, in
spite of its marvels of intellectual heroism and dialectical
sublety. Says Henry Adams again:--

"In every age man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side
to side, beating against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has
sunk into indifference or scepticism. Religious minds prefer
scepticism. The true saint is a profound sceptic; a total
disbeliever in human reason, who has more than once joined hands on
this ground with some who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total
disbeliever in Scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the
society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the
society no other intellectual amusement to relieve its restlessness.
His crusade failed; his ascetic enthusiasm faded; God came no nearer.
If there was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical
Englishman of the future Church of England type than John of
Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote a description of
his time which makes a picturesque contrast with the picture
painted by Abelard, his old master, of the century at its beginning.
John weighed Abelard and the schools against Bernard and the
cloister, and coolly concluded that the way to truth led rather
through Citeaux, which brought him to Chartres as Bishop in 1176,
and to a mild scepticism in faith. 'I prefer to doubt' he said,
'rather than rashly define what is hidden.' The battle with the
schools had then resulted only in creating three kinds of sceptics:--
the disbelievers in human reason; the passive agnostics; and the
sceptics proper, who would have been atheists had they dared. The
first class was represented by the School of St. Victor; the second
by John of Salisbury himself; the third, by a class of schoolmen
whom he called Cornificii, as though they made a practice of
inventing horns of dilemma on which to fix their opponents; as, for
example, they asked whether a pig which was led to market was led
by the man or the cord. One asks instantly: What cord?--Whether
Grace, for instance, or Free Will?

"Bishop John used the science he had learned in the school only to
reach the conclusion that, if philosophy were a science at all, its
best practical use was to teach charity--love. Even the early,
superficial debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted
the subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be
gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth
century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century
stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid,
philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated '_Cogito, ergo sum_.'
Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes
revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as
old and familiar as St. Augustine to the twelfth century, and as
little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego.
The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to
multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted
was to connect the two. They tried realism and found that it led to
pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it ended in
materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which
begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted. In the
seventeenth century--the same violent struggle broke out again, and
wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French
language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the
twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century
of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of
Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical
abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous
conceptual proof of God: 'I am conscious of myself, and must exist;
I am conscious of God and He must exist.' Pascal wearily replied
that it was not God he doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the
impossibility of rejecting man's reason by reason; unconsciously
sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than
admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed:
'The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (_eloignees_) from the
reasoning of men, and so contradictory (_impliquees_, far fetched)
that they made little impression; and even if they served to
convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they
see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they fear to have
deceived themselves.'"

Abelard was always, as he has been called, a scholastic adventurer,
a philosophical and theological freelance, and it was after the
Calamity that he followed those courses that resulted finally in
his silencing and his obscure death. It is almost impossible for us
of modern times to understand the violence of partisanship aroused
by his actions and published words that centre apparently around
the placing of the hermitage he had made for himself under the
patronage of the third Person of the Trinity, the Paraclete, the
Spirit of love and compassion and consolation, and the consequent
arguments by which he justified himself. To us it seems that he was
only trying to exalt the power of the Holy Spirit, a pious action
at the least but to the episcopal and monastic conservators of the
faith he seems to have been guilty of trying to rationalize an
unsolvable mystery, to find an intellectual solution forbidden to
man. In some obscure way the question seems to be involved in that
other of the function of the Blessed Virgin as the fount of mercy
and compassion, and at this time when the cult of the Mother of God
had reached its highest point of potency and poignancy anything of
the sort seemed intolerable.

For a time the affairs of Abelard prospered: Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis
was his defender, and he enjoyed the favor of the Pope and the
King. He was made an abbot and his influence spread in every
direction. In 1137 the King died and conditions at Rome changed so
that St. Bernard became almost Pope and King in his own person.
Within a year he proceeded against Abelard; his "Theology" was
condemned at a council of Sens, this judgment was confirmed by the
Pope, and the penalty of silence was imposed on the author--
probably the most severe punishment he could be called upon to
endure. As a matter of fact it was fatal to him. He started
forthwith for Rome but stopped at the Abbey of Cluny in the company
of its Abbot, Peter the Venerable, "the most amiable figure of the
twelfth century," and no very devoted admirer of St. Bernard, to
whom, as a matter of fact, he had once written, "You perform all
the difficult religious duties; you fast, you watch, you suffer;
but you will not endure the easy ones-you do not love." Here he
found two years of peace after his troubled life, dying in the full
communion of the Church on 21 April, 1142.

The problems of philosophy and theology that were so vital in the
Middle Ages interest us no more, even when they are less obscure
than those so rife in the twelfth century, but the problem of human
love is always near and so it is not perhaps surprising that the
abiding interest concerns itself with Abelard's relationship with
Heloise. So far as he is concerned it is not a very savoury matter.
He deliberately seduced a pupil, a beautiful girl entrusted to him
by her uncle, a simpleminded old canon of the Cathedral of Paris,
under whose roof he ensconced himself by false pretences and with
the full intention of gaining the niece for himself. Abelard seems
to have exercised an irresistible fascination for men and women
alike, and his plot succeeded to admiration. Stricken by a belated
remorse, he finally married Heloise against her unselfish protests
and partly to legitimatize his unborn child, and shortly after he
was surprised and overpowered by emissaries of Canon Fulbert and
subjected to irreparable mutilation. He tells the story with
perfect frankness and with hardly more than formal expressions of
compunction, and thereafter follows the narrative of their
separation, he to a monastery, she to a convent, and of his care
for her during her conventual life, or at least for that part of it
that had passed before the "History" was written. Through the whole
story it is Heloise who shines brightly as a curiously beautiful
personality, unselfish, self sacrificing, and almost virginal in
her purity in spite of her fault. One has for her only sympathy and
affection whereas it is difficult to feel either for Abelard in
spite of his belated efforts at rectifying his own sin and his
life-long devotion to his solitary wife in her hidden cloister.

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