‘It is by God’s laws that the whole scheme of things is governed.’36 So Augustine, contemplating the immensity of the cosmos, had declared. Although theology, unsurprisingly, reigned in Paris and Oxford as the queen of sciences, there was no lack of other fields of study in which God’s laws were also to be distinguished. The workings of nature – of the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and of the elements, and of the distribution of matter, and of wild animals, and of the human body – all bore witness to their existence. It was no offence against God, then, to argue, as Abelard did, ‘that the constitution or development of everything that originates without miracles can be adequately accounted for’.37 Quite the contrary. To identify the laws that governed the universe was to honour the Lord God who had formulated them. This conviction, far from perturbing the gatekeepers of the new universities, was precisely what animated them. Philosophy, which to many of Abelard’s opponents had been a dirty word, came to lie at the heart of the curriculum. Investigation into the workings of nature provided its particular foundation. The study of animals and plants, of astronomy, even of mathematics: all came to be categorised as natural philosophy. The truest miracle was not the miraculous, but the opposite: the ordered running of heaven and earth.
To believe this was not to doubt God’s absolute power. Anything was possible to him, and his will was unfathomable. On this, the record of scripture was clear. He had divided seas, and halted the passage of the sun across the sky, and might readily do so again. Yet scripture was clear as well that even the Almighty God might submit himself to a legal obligation. So it was, after flooding the world, that he had set a rainbow in the clouds, as the sign of a compact, that never again would he send waters ‘to destroy all life’;38 so it was, in conversation with Abraham, that he had sworn a covenant, and with Moses decreed its terms. Yet the profoundest submission, the most shocking, was neither of these. ‘He freed us from our sins, and from his own wrath, and from hell, and from the power of the Devil, whom he came to vanquish for us, because we were unable to do it, and he purchased for us the kingdom of heaven; and by doing all these things, he manifested the greatness of his love for us.’39 Thus Anselm, writing as Abelard was coming of age, had described the crucifixion. Humanity, lost to sin, had been redeemed by Christ. But how? The question was one that had haunted Abelard and his generation. Various answers had been attempted. Some had cast Christ’s death as a ransom paid to Satan; others as the resolution of a lawsuit between heaven and hell. Abelard, following in Anselm’s wake, had been more subtle. Christ had submitted to torture on the Cross, not to satisfy the demands of the Devil, but to awaken humanity to love. ‘This it is to free us from slavery to sin, to gain for us the true liberty of the sons of God.’40 The demands of justice had been met; and by meeting them, Christ had affirmed to all humanity that heaven and earth were indeed structured by laws. Yet he had done more as well. Abelard, writing to Héloïse, had urged her to contemplate Christ’s sufferings, and to learn from them the true nature of love. To press this argument on his anguished and abandoned wife was not to torment her, nor to abandon his lifelong commitment to reason. Abelard had seen no contradiction between his career as a logician and his passionate commitment to the tortured Christ. The road to wisdom led from the Cross.
Mystery and reason: Christianity embraced them both. God, who had summoned light and darkness into being by the power of his voice, and separated the seas from the land, had ordained as well that the whole of his creation be a monument to harmony. ‘It is upon distinctions of number that the underlying principles of everything depend.’41 So Abelard had written. A century on from his death, monuments to the cosmic order created by God, to its fusion of the miraculous and the geometric, were starting to rise above towns across Christendom. To enter Saint-Denis, where Abelard had first lived as a monk, was to behold an abbey utterly transformed. The rays of the sun, filtered through windows patterned with exquisitely coloured glass, illumined the interior with an unprecedented light, radiant as, at the end of days, the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven would be radiant, with a brilliance ‘like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as silver’.42 Yet if Saint-Denis, in the play of coloured rays across its interior, offered its visitors a glimpse of revelation, so also, in the soaring of its flying buttresses, in the elongation of its vaulted arches, did it proclaim its architect’s mastery of proportion and geometry. Dedicated in 1144, in the presence of the French king himself, the abbey had provided a model for a spectacular new style of cathedral. ‘The dull mind rises to the truth through material things.’43 So it was written on the doors of Saint-Denis. The cathedrals built in the abbey’s wake provided a physical expression, on a scale never before attempted, of the distinctive order that had emerged in the Latin West. Modernitas, its enthusiasts called it: the final age of time. They were spokesmen for revolution: a revolution that had triumphed.
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* Priscillian, a Spanish bishop executed in 385, is sometimes cited as the earliest – but he was convicted on a charge of sorcery, not heresy.
X
PERSECUTION
1229: M
ARBURG
Count Paviam was shocked by the gruelling nature of the work in the hospital. Every day, dressed in coarse grey tunics, women would attend the sick: bathing them, changing their linen, cleaning their sores. One, anxious for a paralysed boy who suffered from dysentery, went so far as to put him in her own bed, and carry him outside whenever his stomach began to cramp. Since this would happen upwards of six times each night, her sleep was repeatedly disturbed; but the demands on her time were far too relentless for her to have any hope of catching up with it by day. When she was not working in the hospital, she was obliged to toil in the kitchen, preparing vegetables, washing dishes, being barked at by a deaf and exacting housekeeper. If there was no work to be done in the scullery, then she would sit at a wheel and spin wooclass="underline" her only source of income. Even when ill herself, and confined to bed, she would still wind thread with her bare hands. The Count, entering her quarters, could only bless himself in admiration. ‘Never before,’ he exclaimed, ‘has the daughter of a king been seen spinning wool.’1