The History of the Renaissance World (11 page)

None of this was intended to destroy the faith. Like Anselm, Peter Abelard believed that truth would withstand Aristotle’s methods. But this alarmed his more traditionally minded brethren. When they accused him of endangering the doctrines of the Church, he offered to explain why his conclusions were true: “We take no account of rational explanation,” one opponent retorted, “nor of your interpretation in such matters; we recognize only the words of authority.”
⁵

7.1 Peter Abelard’s France

In 1121, a church council at Soissons, attended by a papal legate, ordered Abelard to throw his
Theologia
into the fire. He obeyed, but he did not change his views on the value of reason and logic. For the next twenty years, Abelard wrote and taught, defending his orthodoxy even while he criticized the church’s reliance on too-simple truth. He revised the
Theologia
twice, coming up with its final form in 1135; he assembled a whole collection of quotations from the church fathers that contradicted each other into a work called
Sic et Non
(Yes and No); he wrote a series of dialogues about ethics between a Christian, a Jew, and a character called the Ancient Philosopher; the
Collationes
, in which the Ancient Philosopher shows a clear understanding of the Highest Good—despite having only natural law to guide him.
⁶

He was often accused of heterodoxy, potentially dangerous departures from orthodox, accepted understandings of the Christian faith. At least once, he was briefly imprisoned. But the help of powerful patrons, and the enthusiasm of his many students, kept him from out-and-out condemnation by the Church—until 1141, when the revision of the
Theologia
drew the attention of none other than Bernard of Clairvaux: venerable in character, conspicuous for learning, evangelist for the Second Crusade.

The two men were polar opposites: Abelard determined to bring faith and logic together, Bernard holding the authority of the Church above all. “He had an abhorrence of teachers who put their trust in worldly wisdom and clung too much to human argument,” Otto of Freising explains. When, in 1140, a local monk sent Bernard a letter highlighting Abelard’s most recent doctrinal explorations, Bernard agreed that the matter required investigation.
⁷

He asked Abelard to come and explain himself; Abelard instead appealed to the Bishop of Sens, and then to the pope. Probably he believed that his own skill in argumentation would help him to triumph. But it was exactly this skill that frightened his traditionalist opponents: “Peter Abelard,” wrote Bernard, in his own appeal to the pope, “believes he can comprehend by human reason all that is God.”
⁸

To give Abelard a pass was to accept the categories of Aristotle; and accepting Aristotelian thought might well throw into doubt the entire authority structure of the Christian church. In 1141, the papal court agreed with Bernard. Abelard was to be imprisoned and condemned to perpetual silence. The sentence doomed him to pass the rest of his life without words: confined in a monastery, forbidden to speak, making his wants known only with signs.

In the eyes of his followers, the silencing of Abelard was a tacit acknowledgement that Aristotelian thought was both powerful and true. “The high priests and Pharisees convened an assembly,” wrote his student Berengar of Poitiers, using a New Testament metaphor for Bernard and the papal court, “and said: What should we do, since this man speaks of many wonderful things? If we let him go on like this, all will believe him.” But for Bernard of Clairvaux, authority had been properly reasserted; the old truths preserved, the old verities reaffirmed.
⁹

The penalty was never actually enforced. Abelard, who had been suffering already from the illness that would kill him, took shelter at the monastery of Cluny and was in the middle of writing a lengthy self-defense when he died. The abbot of Cluny, known as Peter the Venerable, exercised the authority given to him “in virtue of [his] office” and declared Abelard absolved of all his sins. He sent Abelard’s coffin to Heloise, now abbess of the Paraclete convent.

She buried him there; and when she also died, some twenty years later, she was buried beside him.
¹⁰

B
ERNARD OF
C
LAIRVAUX
had no idea that he was fighting a rearguard action.

Already, at the cathedral school of Chartres, the accomplished master Bernard of Chartres was at the height of his teaching career, making his students thoroughly familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle as foundation for their ongoing education in Christian doctrine. “Bernard would bend every effort to bring his students to imitate [the poets and orators] they were hearing,” writes John of Salisbury, who studied at Chartres. “In some cases he would rely on exhortation, in others . . . flogging. . . . [He] used to compare us to puny dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”
¹¹

In Italy, a legal scholar named Gratian was already applying logic to the Church’s own proceeedings. He was creating a vast collection of Church law, putting together ecclesiastical pronouncements that contradicted each other, and then using dialectic to resolve the inconsistencies. His masterwork, the
Concordance of Discordant Canons
, became a core text of the Catholic church tradition (and remained part of Church law until 1918). But it was a triumph for ancient philosophy; useful though it was, the
Concordance
was a rationalization of spiritual decisions. It brought order by treating Church authority as a simple human system.
¹²

And in Paris, the cleric Peter Lombard was already hard at work, lecturing and writing, developing a system of theology that would become his most famous book: the
Sentences
. Lombard, twenty years younger than Abelard, had come to the cathedral school of Reims in 1136, bearing a fulsome letter of recommendation from none other than Bernard of Clairvaux. By 1145, Peter Lombard was teaching at the school of Notre Dame in Paris; fifteen years later, the
Sentences
were being read in every cathedral school of note.
¹³

“A most excellent work,” wrote Lombard’s contemporary Alberic of Trois Fontaines; “sane doctrine, commended by all,” commented the historian William of Tyre, who studied with Lombard for six years. The
Sentences
were the first major attempt by a Western theologian to link every Christian doctrine together into a coherent, logical whole. Using scripture and the Church fathers side by side, applying logic and dialectic to resolve contrary opinions, Peter Lombard created theological categories: Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, eschatology (the study of Christ, of salvation, of the Church, of the Last Things). The
Sentences
provided not just a scheme for organizing theology but also a methodology: discussion, debate, systematization.

This was undoubtedly not what Bernard of Clairvaux had intended for his protégé. “The faith of the pious believes,” Bernard had written, in his condemnation of Abelard. “It does not discuss.” But Lombard’s work had given birth to the new discipline of systematic theology. In the next century, the
Sentences
would become the classic text for students of divine matters, shaping an entire generation of the Church with the exact tools that Bernard had feared.
¹⁴

Chapter Eight

The New Song

Between 1141 and 1165,
the Song adjust to exile,
while the Jin struggle to rule an empire

I
N THE TWENTY YEARS
since the Shaoxing Treaty, Emperor Gaozong of the Song had gained little power: no additional lands, no towns recaptured from the Jin, no treaties made with other countries. His court, now established at Lin’an, was vexed by problems that could not be solved.
*

For one, his older brother Song Qinzong, taken captive in 1127 and deported to the north, was still alive and in Jin hands. His existence meant that Song Gaozong’s authority could easily be emptied of power; the Jin could always play their trump card, send Song Qinzong back home and fatally disrupt the Song chain of command.

In addition, the court was divided about what to do next. Many of Song Gaozong’s advisors agitated for an all-out assault on the north; others recommended peace and prudence; most were heavily critical of the actions taken by the Song emperors, Gaozong’s own predecessors, just before the loss of Kaifeng.

Song Gaozong found a path through this complicated landscape by prioritizing one thing above all else: the security and stability of the imperial court. He refused to provoke the Jin. He was conservative, and he was conciliatory, and he was careful; and as a result, he lived to the unlikely age of eighty.

But his policies changed the Song. The new world of the Southern Song was one in which they did not fight, but philosophized; painted and wrote poetry, rather than agitating; traded, rather than fought; looked inward, rather than outward towards the rest of the world. The Southern Song flourished without victory.
¹

The inward focus produced a boom inside the Song borders. Markets and fairs grew up in the countryside. Paper money, used for the first time a century before, circulated widely. Satin weave, with its smooth surface, was manufactured in cities to the south; in fact, the name
satin
is a French corruption of the word
zaituni
, used by merchants from Baghdad as the name of Quanzhou, the Southern Song city where satin manufacturing was centered. Farming grew more systematic, as Song intellectuals bent their attention to ways of increasing crops; Chen Fu’s
Agricultural Treatise
, completed around 1149, laid out astonishingly effective rules for land utilization, crop rotation, and systematic fertilization. The Emperor Gaozong rebuilt a series of official kilns for firing the lovely celadon porcelain of the Song, on the outskirts of Lin’an; they were duplicates of the official kilns at Kaifeng, now lost.
²

Painting and poetry flourished at the court of Gaozong, in part because Gaozong banned, in 1144, the writing of any private, non-state-sponsored histories of the past. This was intended to cut off criticism over the way his dynasty had handled the Jin invasion, but it halted only criticism written in prose. Painting and poetry soon became the safest, and clearest, way to dissent.
³

“The good sword under the recluse’s pillow / Clangs faintly all night long,” wrote Lu Yu, who hoped to see the Song invade and reclaim the north:

It longs to serve in distant expeditions,

I fetch wine and pour a libation to the sword:

A great treasure should remain obscure;

There are those who know your worth,

When the time comes they will use you.

You have have ample scope in your scabbard,

Why voice your complaints?
⁴

Landscapes were safe to paint. And so blossoming plums, once the symbol of spring and new hopes, came to symbolize the southern willingness to go into exile, the misfortune and melancholy of the displaced.