Eleanor Of Aquitaine (3 page)

It is noteworthy as suggesting the young queen's influence in Paris, that Louis's first essays in his kingly role were in vindication of the titles he had assumed as Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou. In these matters he seems to have swung surprisingly free from those clerical controls that kept him generally in the straight and narrow way, and to have acted with a kind of Poitevin simplicity of purpose. There appeared no question of his valor. The stripling king in person led an army to the County of Toulouse, which Eleanor never ceased to claim as heir of her grandmother, Philippa of Toulouse, and he brought back a temporary settlement of her claims; he quenched an uprising to establish a commune in her capital of Poitiers; and with his own arm he hacked off the hands of some of Eleanor's recreant vassals in the Talmont.

The affair in Poitiers developed such fury under Louis's unchecked initiative that Abbé Suger himself was forced to post from Saint Denis in all haste to mitigate the king's severity. Before he reached the outskirts of the city, the abbé was met by delegations from the populace, who prostrated themselves before him with groans and supplications. In the square before the ducal palace, Louis had obliged the burghers to assemble their heirs, each with a cartload of baggage, for exile from Poitou. Their lamentations, which rose to heaven day and night, seemed not to reach the chamber of the obdurate king. It was as if Louis and Eleanor, in the course of their studies in Paris, had lifted ideas from the dreadful story of the Minotaur. Only with difficulty the abbé persuaded his ward to renounce his desperate scheme.

In all these enterprises the king displayed the stubborn and reckless valor that sometimes masks profound indecision. But these secular acts, though straws in the wind, failed at first to arouse the custodians of the Ile. Paris was shaken by larger issues, and it was only when the young sovereigns emerged upon their theater that the guardians of authority took alarm. But at last the king and queen broke upon the spiritual stillness of the Abbé of Clairvaux.

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AbbéBernard was hot in burning love, humble in conversation, a well of flowing doctrine, a pit in deepness of science, and well smelling in sweetness of fame.

Golden Legend

On the threshold of his theology he [Abélard] defines faith as private judgment, as though in these mysteries, everyone is allowed to think and speak as he pleases, as though the mysteries of our faith were to hang uncertainly in the midst of shifting and varying opinion Is not our hope baseless if our faith is subject to inquiry?

Abbé Bernard to Pope Innocent

In the diocese of Sens, of which Paris was a part, the most exciting diversions of the mid-century were the tournaments in dialectic in which the masters of disputation met each other in public combat over some proposition bequeathed to posterity by a Greek philosopher or a father of the church. If the proposition involved a possible heresy challenged by some famous doctor of the schools, not even the cathedrals could contain the crowds of every sort that drew to the arena. The triumph of champions spread to the verge of the Continent, and even dabblers in logic sharpened their wits on the minor syllogisms that flew off the main argument like sparks from the forge. The issues of public debate were discussed in Chartres and Laon and Bologna, and wherever the seven liberal arts and the canon law held sway. The occasions, moreover, drew the feudal orders to places of common resort, enabled boors to stare without hindrance upon bishops and nobles, and these to survey the motley objects of their ministries. Even if the syllogism flew above the ceiling of some men's intellect, the stress of combat could be felt by anyone with eyes and ears as plainly as if the disputants wielded the weapons of tournament.

It was in 1136 that the church was mortally assailed by the heresies of Master Peter Abélard, who had suddenly returned to his old haunts in Paris from his exile in Brittany and the obscure wanderings to which his calamities had condemned him. Abélard's
Discourse on the Trinity
, which had been burned fifteen years before by the authority of the church in Soissons, had risen from its ashes revamped but not amended, and Abélard himself, without metropolitan authority, was preaching his false doctrine. When he was rebuked by the bishops for not planting his discourse on authority, he answered defiantly that reason, as well as faith, was the gift of God, and that a text itself was sufficient for its own explanation with reason for a guide.
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He marshaled scores of instances in which the apostles and the fathers of the church contradicted each other in stating the very foundations of our faith, and he held that these contradictions ought to be examined and resolved in the light of reason. His bringing of the disturbing passages into juxtaposition where they could readily be compared proclaimed that even beginners in dialectic could, by selecting the right passages from the doctrinists, bolster either side of fundamental arguments. His display was as good as a boast that he could, by merely citing authorities, prove that God was one or that God was three; that God is the author of evil or contrariwise; that God has free will or contrariwise.
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He did thus subject, as Abbé Bernard declared, the mysteries of our faith to private judgment.

Consternation invaded the cloisters when Abélard said that no one ought to teach what he did not himself rightly understand, and that to challenge doctors with questions was a method of uncovering truth — or error. At the same time that he uttered these impious audacities, he professed to adore God and to cherish the scheme of salvation. The custodians of the Ile were deeply perturbed, and, as always, youth found it beautiful to see them in confusion before the onset of new modes of thought and usage. Students leaving the safety of Notre Dame swarmed to the left bank of the Seine and drank his poison.

It was with the utmost reluctance that Bernard, the Abbé of Clairvaux, took up Abélard's challenge to authority. He was no master of disputation; and he knew it was not his business to keep discipline in the schools of Paris. He had long since withdrawn from the tumult of the world to the cloisters of his y, whence only some threat to the fabric of the church could lure him. He had attained such inwardness that the world of sense no longer intruded upon his calm or penetrated the depths of his meditations. He had once, it was said, ridden away from his chapter, not on his own gaunt little donkey, but upon the nicely caparisoned horse of a relative, and had never known the difference.
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He skirted the shores of Lake Geneva without lifting his eyes to the waters or the mountains. He drank any sop with indifference as wine.

But when he learned that pernicious doctrines ran like sparks among the stubble on the left bank where the students gathered, and that the Metropolitan of Paris, the doctrinaires of Reims, the masters of Laon all forbore to meet in public disputation the, "Goliath of heretics,"; that the young men of the schools, scarcely weaned from dialectic, were being enticed from the security of Notre Dame to their perdition, he issued from the blessed seclusion of Clairvaux. He had asked himself where were the pastors whose flocks had gone so astray, the Archbishop of Sens and his suffragans, the Archbishop of Reims and his? Where were the abbés and priors of the Ile dé France ? How had they allowed learning in one generation to wander thus from the cloister into the street? He saw that Satan in the deceptive guise of reason had again seduced mankind. Through Lent in 1140 the fiery evangel of AbbéBernard in the slums and schools of Paris recovered scores of young souls floundering in dialectic into the safety of the cloister.

The abbé never prepared public discourse, propped with citations after the fashion of the schools, for he suspected the guile of the devil in the slipperiness of logic.
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His methods were more intuitive. He waited to see what words of divine inspiration would be found in his mouth when occasion called upon him to speak. But when he rode out of Paris after each day's work, he led off to some rural solitude the remnant he had that morning rescued from the dangers of damnation. His predications at length aroused the supine masters of the schools and drove Abélard to appeal for a competent examination of the charges that his doctrines were really heretical. It became known that the, "Socrates of Gaul," whose dialectic all men feared, would defend an inquiry into his, "heresies," before an ecclesiastical consistory in the metropolitan city of Sens; and that Abbé Bernard, "the hawk of Rome," would sit with the doctors of the church in judgment of the case.

Spring was the time for universal pilgrimage. Winter was the hated season, not merely because of the dullness of the world under gray skies, with the uncivil wind and rain prying at latches and casements, but even more because of the cramped inactivity of men in the narrow solars of their houses; the crowding of burghers' famlies about the hearth where the pot seethed over the glow of turf; the shivering of students in dim garrets overhead, cupping tapers with their frozen fingers; the living under the eye, ear, and tongue of household shrews, too many at the hearth, too many at the trestle. The palmers who set out from the Tabard Inn for Canterbury were not the first pilgrims that spring set loose from their winter's imprisonment. The road from Paris to Sens, hardly longer than that to Canterbury from Southwark, thronged in May of 1140 with multitudes, and Thomas Becket may have been of their number, for he was in those days a poor student in Paris, his august destiny still unguessed. The crowd went down to Sens to witness a great display of relics, to have a look at the rising metropolitan cathedral with its novelties of structure, and to get a place if possible in the enclosure of nave or choir where Abbé Bernard and the bishops and the papal legate were going to argue with Master Abélard on the essence of the Trinity. It was good to leave the stench of Paris behind and be abroad where the roadsides bloomed with wild hyacinths and yellow cuckooflowers.

On the octave of Pentecost, after the mass, Abbé Bernard preached a sermon to the crowds on the foundations of faith, and offered a prayer for a nameless unbeliever. On the next day the cathedral filled to the last cranny for the trial. On one side of the choir was ranged the tribunal of ten bishops in gorgeous panoply, encompassed by a cloud of abbés in their jeweled miters, in their midst the Bishop of Chartres, who was the papal legate, and AbbéBernard in his white Cistercian wool, his eyes cast down to shut out the glitter of the world. On the opposite side, in unrestrained spring finery, gathered the barons temporal, King Louis in the center, embellished by the presence of Thibault of Champagne, the Count of Nevers, and other magnates. A little lower down sat certain black-robed Benedictines, some of whom were to pay dearly for their heresies — Arnold of Brescia, Gilbert de la Porree, Berenger of Poitiers, and the young Roman, Hyacinthus Bobo, who would one day be cardinal and Pope.

The inquiry began briskly with AbbéBernard in charge, and all bent to hear what he who put no trust in dialectic would do with the beautiful rhetoric of Master Abélard. The abbé simply did nothing with beautiful rhetoric. He read off straightly the damnable passages in the works of Master Abélard, one after another, without pausing anywhere to call for the great logician's defensive eloquence. Those who had ears to hear, let them hear.

When Master Peter saw that there would be no disputation, that the trial would be over in no time, and that he was already condemned by his tribunal, he stood forth and the voice that had enthralled the schools filled the choir. "I refuse to be thus judged like a guilty clerk," he cried. "I appeal to Rome." A confusion as of a sudden commotion of leaves in a forest passed through the enclosure. A rumor flew about that the affair had been rehearsed in the chapter house the night before, and that Master Abélard had been prejudged by the bishops. In the midst of murmurings and expostulations, the defendant beckoned a few of his followers and strode down the aisle, leaving the judges to whom he had appealed gaping at a sea of astonished faces Abbé Bernard of all that hierarchy stood unperturbed. There had been no need of dialectic. Holy church had uttered her efficacious words and error had fled from the sanctuary.

But the occasion marked as well as any the turn from the dead end of Romanesque certainties to the new Gothic spirit of inquiry that marked the mid-century; for the eclipse of Abélard stirred the schools from the bishop's palace to the dingiest pothouse where any student found his, "garlic and his dice,"; and the defeat of the great master, like many other triumphs, furnished the fuel for new fires of controversy.

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It was at about this time, when his fame was at its height, that Abbé Bernard came in contact with Queen Eleanor. Since he avoided palaces and the gaudy spectacles that royalty present, he must have encountered her at some public event, very possibly at Sens. Louis was there, and it is not likely that Eleanor, stirred always by the movement and color of life, denied herself that pilgrimage, or that she was unconcerned over the fate of Abélard, whose lectures had made learning so delightsome for women in Paris. She would not easily have foregone a tribune seat on the edge of that arena. But wherever she and the abbé met in the early days of the new regime, there must have been for both a sudden leap back in memory. The spectral figure of the queen's father, Count Guillaume X, rose between them, and his huge shadow beckoned them back to one of the early miracles of the abbé's ministrations in the west. For the house of Poitou was not unknown to Bernard of Clairvaux. In one of his letters he speaks of himself as kinsman of the ducal family.

It is a matter of record that the forebears of the queen were seldom at peace with their clergy. It was not in the nature of the Counts of Poitou to tolerate in their provinces prelates who seemed likely to wander from their diocesan concerns into secular affairs, or offer correction to the ducal house Count Guillaume, whose talent for broilsomeness was unsurpassed by that of any of his predecessors, had opposed with violence the election of certain bishops in his domains whom he suspected of obstructing his own freehearted enterprise. When even excommunication failed to make him yield and church bells had been silenced in important sees, the clergy in extremity had summoned Bernard from Clairvaux to bring the culprit to submission. For a time Guillaume thought he could defend himself from the abbé by keeping wanly out of the reach of direct admonition. But Bernard, circling about him like a hawk, at length closed in upon him; and finally Guillaume, worn down by the inconveniences of excommunication, determined, since he was afraid of no one, to himself accost the man of God boldly with threats of reprisal.