Peter Abelard was charged in 1121 with expressing heretical ideas on the nature of the Trinity in his Theologia summi boni, a published collection of his lectures, and was tried at a Council in Soissons. Abelard’s own account of this event in his Historia calamitatum, where we find the history of his famous castration alongside his smug verdict on the brilliance of his own teaching, presents an academic show-trial where the prosecuting council have barely read the text in question. Phrases they pick out, devoid of context, carry the danger of heretical possibility, and offers to explain what were undoubtedly difficult theological concepts are rejected, with the reasoning that the man on trial is clever, and could thus argue in such a way as to confuse less intelligent men.
We read in the Historia calamitatum that a sympathetic bishop at the Council, Geoffrey of Chartres, advised that they could not pass judgement unless Abelard were permitted to explain himself, and that when this suggestion was shot down, proposed they postpone judgement until more men of learned reputation were able to join the Council. This too didn’t appeal to those who wished to see the book suppressed. They approached the president of the Council, Ralph, Archbishop of Reims, and insinuated that his reputation would be damaged if the trial were postponed or sent elsewhere. Abelard then writes:
Et statim ad legatum concurrentes, eius immutaverunt sententiam, et ad hoc invitum pertraxerunt, ut librum sine ulla inquisitione dampnaret atque in conspectu omnium statim combureret, et me in alieno monasterio perhenni clausura cohiberet. […] Quia autem legatus ille minus quam necesse esset litteratus fuerat, plurimum archiepiscopi consilio nitebatur, sicut et archiepiscopus illorum. [They rushed at once to the papal legate, got him to reverse his verdict, and persuaded him, against his judgement, to condemn the book without any inquiry, and to burn it at once in full view, and to confine me in perpetual confinement to a different monastery. And because that legate was less scholarly than he ought to have been, he relied mostly on the advice of the archbishop, just as the archbishop relied on the advice (of these men).]
The bishops of the council then start quoting the Bible at each other, but the general outcome is that Abelard is humiliated, forced to profess his faith without permission to defend his book, and is then packed of to the Abbey of St Médard in tears. The book was burned, although he is supposed to have started rewriting it soon afterwards.
That Abelard was a self-aggrandizer is without doubt, and thus his account – especially the parts that relate to the ‘envy’ of his rivals – must be taken with a pinch of salt. That he was a target of the concerted anti-philosophical, specifically anti-dialectical, campaign of some of the most influential churchmen of the day, including Abbots Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St-Thierry, is also without doubt. The revised and expanded version of the Theologia was read by William almost two decades later; he was so disgusted with a variety of points on which he disagreed that he contacted both the papal legate in France (now Geoffrey, the formerly sympathetic bishop of Chartres) and his friend Bernard.
Bernard informed the Pope. A disputation between the two rivals was set to take place in Sens, where Abelard refused to speak – some scholars now attribute this to an illness that would shortly kill him – and Bernard in effect read a list of grievances against him. The council agreed that some of the statements attributed to Abelard by Bernard were indeed heretical, and after the Abbot wrote to the Pope, Abelard was condemned as a heretic, his followers were excommunicated, and his books were ordered to be burned.
The history of papal book-suppression in medieval Europe is long and varied but it was not always as one-sided as the case of the unfortunate, ailing Abelard. A century later, Pope Gregory IX was forced to revoke his ban on the philosophical books of Plato and Aristotle, after the University of Paris sustained a two-year strike. Further attempts at censorship of pagan books at Paris, whereby their ‘suitability’ had to be ascertained by a panel, generally did not materialise. Aristotle and Plato, recently translated into Latin from Greek and Arabic, were widely read in the European universities, and their non-Christian aspects were either overlooked or were used to better inform the shaping of Christian theology.
The men who successfully sued for the suppression of Abelard’s books were not themselves anti-intellectual or obsolete. They were rather men of great reputation and insight, who happened to disagree with both the method and the outcome of their rival’s studies. Did Bernard and Thierry, with the support of Innocent II, really succeed in rooting out ‘heresy’? Or did they just block the writings of a great philosopher and innovator from following generations?
noon auctoritee 