interdicting a course of procedure which from being un authorised was viewed almost in the light of rebellion. To the indignation of the rest of the scholars who had been glad enough to exchange the formal, if weighty, instruction of their old master for lectures into which Abailard threw all the energy and fresh vigour of his intellect, the course was suppressed; the interloper judged it wise to return to Paris. His stay at Laon had only proved to him in his own mind, that no learning, no eminence, was beyond his power: envy, he said, expelled him; rivalry was now out of the question.
Abailard's reception at Paris confirmed his self-conceit. The former enmity there had vanished; only his reputation was remembered. He seems to have been at once made a canon of Notre Dame:[1] he resumed his lectures and became again the most popular teacher of his day.[2] While he was thus in the zenith of his career fate suddenly turned against him: he quitted the cathedral and entered the religious life in the abbey of Saint Denis; for the future he would be dead to the world. The circumstances of this crisis are familiar to all readers, whether of history or romance; and a good deal of mischief has been done by the solemn reproofs of the one, and the sentimentalities of the other, class of writers. Abailard himself, our sole informant of the particulars of his love for Heloïssa, was a man whose self-reliance, as we have said, required that every act of his should seem to be a skilfully devised link
- ↑ This is a surmise; Abailard is never actually spoken of as a canon of Paris, while different records seem to give him this title at Tours, Chartres, and Sens. See Remusat 1. 39 n., and compare below p. 171 and n. 30.
- ↑ It was at this time, I am persuaded, with Cousin, vol. 2. 208 sqq., that Abailard wrote the Sic et non. A collection such as this, of discrepant opinions from the fathers on the principal points of theology, is just what an ambitious lecturer on the subject would prepare for his own use. My view of the date is not incompatible with the presumption raised by Dr. Deutsch, pp. 462 sq., that the prologue to it, naturally the last part of the cornposition, was written about the year 1121. [M. G. Robert, Les Ecoles et l’Enseignement de la Theologie pendant la premiere Moitie de la xiie Siecle (1909) pp. 166-211, assigns the Sic et non to 1120-1122, the Dialectica to about 1121, the Theologia Christiana to about 1123-1124, the Introductio ad Theologiam to 125, and the Letters to 1133-1136.]
