That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’.
Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
In 1140, half a century after Urban II’s visit to Cluny, the most famous man in Christendom arrived in the abbey. Peter Abelard’s celebrity was founded, not on feats of arms, but on the vocation of learning which, as a young man, he had exuberantly embraced in preference to knighthood. Renowned for his ‘inestimable cleverness, unsurpassed memory and superhuman capacity’,30 Abelard had made his name on the great stage of the most glamorous city in the Latin world: Paris. Home to the court of the French king, it was also a powerhouse of scholarship. Nowhere else, not even Bologna, could rival the sheer brilliance, self-conceit and daring of its intellectuals. Abelard’s star had shone with a particular intensity. Thousands, it was said, had flocked to his lectures. Necks would crane when he walked down the street. Girls would swoon. No one had contributed more to the lustre of the schools in Paris, and to their international reputation, than the master who, with typical modesty, liked to think of himself as ‘the only philosopher in the world’.31
Abelard’s fame, though, had long since shaded into notoriety. Combative as well as vain, his ability to bounce back from crises was rivalled only by his genius for precipitating them in the first place. His status as the leading light of the Paris schools had been secured on the back of repeated quarrels with his own teachers. Then, in 1115, he had embarked on the most scandalous of all his adventures: a secret affair with a brilliantly precocious student, ‘supreme in the abundance of her learning, and not at all bad-looking’,32 named Héloïse. Shortly after a clandestine marriage, Abelard had been cornered by thugs hired by his new wife’s uncle, pinned down in his bed and castrated. The humiliated victim had retired to a monastery; Héloïse, on his insistence, to a convent. Yet even as a monk, Abelard had found it impossible to stay out of trouble. It was a measure of his prestige that Saint-Denis, the monastery six miles north of Paris where he had been offered sanctuary, was the mother house of the very kingdom of France; and yet Abelard, investigating its early history, had delighted in demonstrating that the traditional account of its origins was almost certainly bogus. Naturally, this had not gone down well with his fellow monks; and so Abelard, defying the rule that required religiones never to leave a monastery without express permission, had returned to the road. Variously, he had lived as a hermit, as an abbot on the wild Atlantic coast, and as a teacher once again in Paris. His charisma, despite the passing of the years, remained undimmed. So too his capacity for attracting mingled hostility and adulation. Finally, in his seventh decade, there came the gravest crisis of alclass="underline" his formal condemnation as a heretic. The terms of his punishment were expressed in two letters sent from Rome in the summer of 1140. Christendom’s most brilliant scholar was sentenced to have his books burned ‘wherever they may be found’;33 its most brilliant orator to submit to perpetual silence.
Abelard had skirted such a fate once before. Back in 1121, he had been convicted of heretical teachings on the Trinity, and ordered to burn one of his own books: a sentence that had caused him more agony, he subsequently declared, than the loss of his testicles. His judge then, as in 1140, had been a papal legate. The papacy, in its determination to provide justice for the whole of Christendom, was determined as well to patrol the acceptable frontiers of belief. This was hardly surprising. Without the sanction provided by the great framework of Christian teaching, the right of the Roman Church to sit in judgement over king and peasant alike would be as nothing. A scholar such as Abelard, whose entire career had been a restless buffeting against the claims to authority of bishops and abbots, was bound to cause them alarm. By 1140, when he was brought to his second trial, the capacity of papal lawyers to define the bounds of orthodoxy was set on firmer foundations than it had been even two decades previously. The king of France himself attended Abelard’s second summons to court. Abelard, rather than answer his accusers, appealed directly to the pope. When news of his sentence arrived, he promptly headed for Rome, on the grounds that – in the long run – its justice ‘never failed anyone’. His trial, as public a topic of gossip as any ever administered by papal lawyers, appeared decisively to have affirmed their grip on what Christians might and might not believe.
And yet there was, for all that, no consensus that Abelard deserved to be silenced. The charges of heresy were furiously disputed – not least by Abelard himself. Even though it had taken him over a decade to recover from his first conviction and return to teaching in Paris, he had never once doubted that it was his critics who were in the wrong. Abelard’s devotion to God was as unstinting as his conceit. When Héloïse, writing to him from her convent, confessed that she dreamed of him even while participating in the eucharist, and that she would rather renounce heaven than her passion for him, his reply was only seemingly severe. By urging her to devote herself, not to memories of their love, but to her duties as a nun, his hope was to set his wife back on the road to salvation. Abelard himself had embarked in a very similar spirit on a great study of the Church Fathers. Discovering in their writings repeated contradictions, repeated challenges to the tenets of Christian belief, he had compiled entire lists of them, carefully catalogued and ordered – but not out of any ambition to challenge the Church’s teachings. Quite the contrary. Abelard no more aimed at rending the great fabric of Christian orthodoxy than did the compilers of canon law. His goal, like that of Gratian, was to bring harmony where there was discord. He too believed in progress. ‘By doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we perceive the truth.’34 Here was the maxim that defined Abelard’s entire theology – and enabled him to promise his students an understanding more profound than that of the Church Fathers themselves. By applying the standards of reason to their writings, so he taught, a scholar could aspire to behold Christian truth in its proper perspective: clear, and whole, and logically ordered. Not even Abelard was so immodest as to claim a stature equivalent to that of Origen or Augustine; but he did aspire, by standing on their shoulders, to see further than they had done. This, to his accusers, was the expression of a monstrous arrogance, one that, ‘by assuming the entire nature of God to lie within the grasp of human reason, threatens the good name of the Christian faith’.35 But to his admirers, it was thrilling. And there were, among these admirers, some who stood very high in the Church indeed.
This was why, in the summer of 1140, when Abelard stopped at Cluny on his way to Rome, he was treated as an honoured guest. No one could provide a surer sanctuary than its abbot. Peter the Venerable was, as his sobriquet implied, a man of unimpeachable sanctity, and the greatness of his monastery bestowed upon him a standing that was, perhaps, second only to that of the pope himself. Although Peter could not redeem Abelard’s heresies from condemnation, he was able, by virtue of his office and his connections, to secure a personal absolution for the embattled fugitive. When, two years after his arrival at Cluny, Abelard finally succumbed to exhaustion and old age, the respect shown his memory was startling. Not only did Peter, against all convention, send the body to Héloïse for burial, he escorted the coffin himself. In an epitaph intended to be widely read, the abbot described the dead philosopher as ‘the Aristotle of our age’. The attempt by Abelard’s enemies to damn his reputation, and to cast as heretical his insistence that the mysteries of the divine word might be deciphered by means of logic, was denied a decisive victory. His mystique survived his death. When, some two decades after burying her husband, Héloïse followed him into the grave, he is said to have reached out to hold her as she was laid beside him. Generations of students likewise folded themselves into Abelard’s posthumous embrace. By 1200, Paris could boast a university as vibrant as Bologna’s. The conviction Abelard had devoted his life to promoting – that God’s order was rational, and governed by rules that mortals could aspire to comprehend – had become, less than a century after his death, an orthodoxy upheld by papal legates. Those who taught it, far from being seen as a menace, were now allies to be defended. In 1215, a statute was promulgated in the name of the pope, legally affirming the independence of Paris’ university from the bishop. A year earlier, a similar measure had established the legal status of the colleges that, over the preceding decades, had begun to appear in the English town of Oxford. Universities were soon mush-rooming across Christendom. Not merely tolerated, the methods of enquiry pioneered by Abelard had been institutionalised.