CHAPTER VI

Abelard and St. Bernard

ST. ANSELM SOLVED SATISFACTORILY, IF TEMPORARILY,

the dichotomy of faith and reason. John Scotus Erigena had relied on reason alone. Anselm related and reverenced both faith and reason, both of which, he thought, provided circumstantial evidence of God's existence. The problem of Universals that Boethius had posited, flared into controversy with Roscelin of Compiégne (died after 1120).

For St. Anselm, as he showed in his book on the Incarnation, called Cur Deus Homo (why God became man), the rational and the real were one. For Roscelin real things were all individuals. The persons of the Trinity alone were real, the idea of the Trinity was unreal. Universals, whiteness, the Trinity, were but words, but breaths of air blown from mouths, as Boethius had said all words were. Anselm

_ disagreed violently with Roscelin and said logicians holding such views should be blown out from discussions.

Roscelin was primarily a semanticist. According to Victor | Cousin "he bequeathed to modern philosophy two great principles: first, that abstractions must not be reified, and second that the power of the human soul and the secret of its development are largely in language."

Peter Abelard, born in 1079 near Nantes, was a knight, but gave up his inheritance in order to study. A pupil of William of Champeaux, in Paris, he was so much more brilliant than his master that he soon set up a rival school at Melun, twenty-five miles away. Later he was able to make his old master admit that the essence theory he had

| been teaching was false, and William's students deserted him for Abelard. Abelard then set up his school in Paris | itself, in what is now the Latin Quarter, and there he |

ANNE FREMANTLE

criticized the nature of genera and species as universals.

Are Universals words or are they things? Abelard's theory, called Sententia Nominum from the first two words of his thesis, caused his disciples to be called nominalists. His adversaries called themselves realists. Abelard insisted that Socrates and Plato agree in both being men, but the fact of being a man is not a thing. A thing can't be universal in the sense of being predicated of many. The thing called

Socrates remains Socrates and not Plato, nor do all their sharing of being man make that being man a third thing or a third man. Abelard avoided both nominalist and realist extremes "by maintaining that the universal is neither a thing nor a concept but a logical term which is related to both things and concepts." The astonishing genius of Abelard was that before the translations of Aristotle made by the Arabs had become available in the West, and with only what had filtered down through Porphyry, he concluded that universals exist not before the thing nor after the thing, but in the thing: non ante rem, nec post rem, sed in re. They have a real existence, but only in particulars.

St. Bernard wrote angrily of Abelard that "he sees nothing through a glass darkly but stares at everything face to face," and Abelard got into trouble when he practiced his theories on the dogma of the Trinity. His affair with Héloise, the brilliant niece of Canon Fulbert of Chartres, made Abelard more famous than did his philosoyhy; like Augustine, his autobiography and his letters have brought him to us whole, so that he is more alive for us and touches us more nearly than many greater philosophers. Abelard, beyond even Héloise and the gelding her uncle's friends performed on him, beyond Héloise's greater love, that moved even saints like Peter the Venerable, remains in himself one of the greatest of medieval philosophers, because of his status theory (as Dr. Burch has suggested it might be called), though it "is radically opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine that the specific form is objectively the most essential and subjectively the most intelligent aspect of things." Abelard succeeded in combining reason and faith; as he said to Héloise, "I do not wish to be a philosopher to the point of resisting Paul; I will

THE AGE OF BELIEF |

not be an Aristotelian to the point of rejecting Christ."

Abelard retired into a monastery after the friends and | servants of Héloise's uncle, Canon Fulbert, had mutilated

| him, and he obliged Héloise to enter a convent. He continued to attract pupils, and to make enemies, wherever he

But his lack of judgment, that antagonized more people than even his brilliantly logical mind convinced, twice brought about the condemnation of his ideas, once at a Council at Soissons in 1121, and again at another at Sens in 1141. After the latter he took refuge with his loyal friend

Peter the Venerable and soon after died piously in 1142.

Peter the Venerable's letter to Héloise on Abelard's death, besides being, with Abelard's and Héloise's own correspondence and Abelard's autobiography, among the most pathetic documents that have come down to us from medieval times, also gives us some idea of how much Abelard impressed his contemporaries.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was the most famous of Abelard's opponents, and he has had a bad press in the last few centuries. Since Jean Jacques Rousseau made sexual appetite not merely physically, sentimentally and emotionally but also intellectually and psychologically a criterion of human value, Abelard has enjoyed a great vogue because of his famous, or infamous, seduction of Canon

Fulbert's niece. St. Bernard, who, for quite other reasons, very much objected to Abelard, has been regarded as lacking both in intelligence and in charity. Actually St. Bernard was both more of a thinker and more of a warm human being than is currently supposed. Born of good family in 1091, he entered the Benedictine Order in 1112, at Citeaux, where his prior was an Englishman, St. Stephen

Harding. Bernard arrived with thirty companions, and the troop of young men must have taken the newly reformed monastery (from which Cistercians, or Trappists, as we call them today, take their name) rather by storm. Within two years Bernard was sent out to found the abbey of Clairvaux. He had, at one time, 700 novices; one of his disciples

ST. BERNARD

became Pope, six became cardinals, and thirty became bishops. From 1131 to 1138 he spent his time healing schisms in the Church; in 1120 at Soissons, and again in 1140 at Sens, he confounded Abelard and obtained his condemnation by the Church; in 1146 Bernard preached a crusade, and died in 1153. All this gives a totalitarian impression, of a sledge-hammer personality, ruthless and tycoonishly successful. Bernard was far from being thus, as can be seen from what he wrote to the monk, Adam, whom he accused of too much obedience to an unworthy superior:

{ Was it willingly or unwillingly you went forth? If it was willingly, then it was not from obedience. If unwillingly, you would seem to have had some suspicion of the order which you carried out with reluctance. But where there is suspicion there consideration is necessary. But you, to display your obedience or to exercise it, obeyed without discussion and suffered yourself to be taken away, not only without your volition, but even against your conscience.

O patience, worthy of all impatience! I cannot, I confess, help being angry with this most questionable patience.

You saw that he was scattered, yet you followed him, you heard him directing what was scandalous, yet you obeyed him. } IN HIS Treatise Concerning Grace and Free Will, WRITTEN around 1128, when he was thirty-eight, which was addressed to William, Abbot of St. Thierry, near Reims,

Bernard set forth clearly and categorically the absolute and complete freedom and responsibility of every individual soul. From the omnipotent state and the omnipotence of fate the Christian is by Christ set free. And the revolutionary nature of that freedom is described by Bernard in terms that are philosophical but also social and psychological.

{ It happened once [he wrote] that, when I was publicly commending the grace of God toward me .

. one of the bystanders demanded, "what is then thine own work in

THE AGE OF BELIEF

the matter, or what recompense or reward dost thou hope for, if so be that God doeth it all? Give," saith he, "the glory to God." "Thou counsellest well," say I, "provided only that thy counsel can be followed." "Where then, sayest thou, are our merits? Or where is our hope? What, therefore, thou askest, doth free-will do?" I answered in a word: "It is saved.

Take away free-will and there remaineth nothing to be saved, take away grace and there is no means whereby it can be saved. This work of salvation cannot be wrought without two factors: the one, that by which it is wrought, and the other that for which or in which it is wrought. Salvation is given by God alone, and it is given only to the free-will: even as it cannot be wrought without the consent of the receiver it cannot be wrought without the grace of the giver. Accordingly free-will is said to cooperate with the grace which worketh salvation, when the free-will consenteth, that is to say, is saved, for to consent is to be saved. It followeth that the spirit of a brute can in no wise receive such salvation, for it lacketh the faculty of free consent whereby it may submissively obey the God that saveth it. But consent of the will is one thing, natural appetite is another. The latter is common to us with the irrational animals, nor hath it the power of giving consent to the spirit, being ensnared by the attractions of the flesh.

Having this appetite in common with the brutes, it is voluntary consent which distinguisheth us from the same. It is a habit of the mind, self-determining. Voluntary consent is not under compulsion, nor can it be extorted. It is an act of the will, it is not subject to necessity, it neither denieth itself nor yieldeth itself to any, save only willingly. Otherwise, if it can be compelled to act where when it would not, it is subject to force and not voluntary. But where there is not an act of will, there is not consent, for consent cannot be other than an act of will. Where, therefore, there is consent, there is an act of will. Moreover, where there is an act of will, there is freedom. In this sense it is that I understand free-will

. consent is spontaneous assent of the will, or indeed (as I remember that I have already said) it is a habit of the mind, self-determining. Further, will is a movement of reason, and rules over both sense

ST. BERNARD

perception and appetite. In fact will, by whatever direction it determine itself, always has reason as its companion, we may say, as its follower.

. For no creature can be intelligent, even in wrongdoing, save only by the aid of reason.

But reason has been given to the will in order to instruct it, not to destroy it. It would, however, destroy it, were it to impose upon it such necessity that it could not freely of its own choice determine itself, whether by wrongly consenting either to the appetite or to some evil spirit.

If, I say, the will were unable, owing to the prohibition of reason, to take either of these courses, then it would cease to be the will. For where necessity is, there is not free-will.

We possess, therefore, on the one hand, life in common with the plants, and, on the other hand, as well as life, sense perception and appetite in common with the beasts, while that which distinguisheth us from both is what-is called will. And it is consent of the will, free, not necessitated, which, seeing that in it consisteth our righteousness or unrighteousness, maketh us deservedly blessed or the reverse. Such consent, then, on account both of the inalienable freedom of the will, and of the inevitable judgment which reason everywhere and at all times exerciseth when to be the will. For where necessity is, there is not free-will. and self-judging on account of the reason. And rightly doth judgment accompany freedom, seeing that he that is free to determine himself, when he sinneth, judgeth himself.

Therefore, save only the will, all that belongeth to man, seeing that it is incapable of self-determination, is a matter neither for the award of merit nor for judgment. Life, sense perception, appetite, memory, thought and anything else there may be are subject to necessity, except in so far as they are subject to the will.

. The will can no more be deprived of its freedom than it can be deprived of itself;

- . were a man able to will anything unwillingly, then and then only would the will be able to be deprived of its freedom. Hence it is that to the insane, to infants, and also to persons asleep, nothing which they may do, whether it be good or bad, is imputed because, plainly, just as they are not in possession of reason, so they do not possess

THE AGE OF BELIEF

the use of their own wills, and therefore their freedom is not subject to judgment. Seeing, then, that the will hath nothing free save itself, it is only rightly judged as it is in itself. Indeed, neither slowness of intellect, nor lapse of memory, nor restlessness of appetite, nor obtuseness of sense of perception, nor feebleness of vitality, of themselves bring a man into condemnation, even as their contraries do not make him innocent, because these conditions are caused necessarily, and independently of the will.* }

ST. BERNARD DISTINGUISHES BETWEEN THREE ASPECTS OF

freedom: freedom from sin, freedom from misery, and freedom from necessity. The first two cannot be complete here, they will exist fully only in patria, in the fatherland of heaven. But from fate, or necessity, the Christian must believe that every human being is free here and now. The fourth Christian freedom, from the state if it command evil, was asserted confidently by all the Church's representatives throughout the Middle Ages—and, indeed, from the time the letters A.U.C. (ab urbe condita—from the beginning of the city—the letters by which the Romans dated their era) were succeeded by the letters A.D.—Anno

Domini, the year of our Lord. Opposition to the Church's concept of man's final freedom even from the State was challenged first by the pagans, for whom the State included all the Church was for Christians, and later by the inheritors of the idea of the Roman State—the advocates and partisans of the Holy Roman Empire. The Church itself, primed by the great Gospel command "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," believed in and taught the supremacy of the State over the "things that are Caesar's," but insisted that over and above the area the State controlled was an inviolable area, over which individual man alone was master. The State accepted this position, at first because it could not do otherwise, for it was the Church that hallowed and protected Charlemagne and his successors, who desperately needed the Church's help; later, because it was frankly beaten by the Church—at Canossa

* St. Bernard, Treatise Concerning Grace and Free Will, trans.

Watkin Williams (SPCK, 1920).

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in the person of the Emperor kneeling in the snow to apologize to the Pope for trespassing on the forbidden area; at Canterbury, in the person of Henry II doing penance for the murder of St. Thomas a4 Becket.

These collective freedoms, from necessity and from the ruler, if he command what be against God's will and law, belong indifferently to every creature, whether he be good or bad, Christian or pagan. So St. Bernard insisted; so the Church still insists. But, as Lord Acton pointed out, when

Jesus Christ said "Render unto Caesar," He both gave the State an authority that was from God, and gave the individual a liberty that was no less from God. With the spread of Christianity the defense of that liberty ceased to be left to "a few ineffectual philosophers

. and became the perpetual charge of the universal Church."

Freedom from necessity, St. Bernard insisted, is not lost either by our sin or our misery. For it is created in us, it is the divine image, which nothing and no one can destroy.

But the freedoms lost by Adam in the Fall—the freedoms from sin and from misery—are the resemblance to God that man then forfeited.

This contrast, of man's grandeur and his misery, that was later to wring from Shakespeare's Hamlet his great cry

"What a piece of work is a man... yet .

. what is this quintessence of dust?" and from Blaise Pascal (16231662) and Jacques Bossuet (1627-1704) their most splendid passages, brought St. Bernard to his knees before the mystery of Christ's incarnation, which provides the paradox of man restored and made whole by the passion of God.

Here St. Bernard ceased philosophizing, and, as Henry Thoreau (1817-1862) says we all should, sang his love.

"Love seeks no cause nor end but itself. Its fruit is its activity. I love because I love, I love that I may love. Love is a mighty thing, if so it return to its own principle and origin, if it flows back to its source and ever draws anew whence it may flow again. Love is the only one of all the sense movements and affections of the soul by which the creature can answer to its Creator and repay like with like."

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