Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (51 page)

Instead, Peter Abelard was condemned at a Church council, eliminating him as an influence on mainstream Catholic theology. Abelard's romantic tragedy as the doomed lover of Héloïse (c. 1100–1163) is well known, but because of the related failure of his effort to humanize Anselm's contractridden idea of atonement and, therefore, to deemphasize the place of the cross in God's plan of salvation, his is as much a theological tragedy as a personal one. And it would have lasting implications for the ever-darker story of Christian attitudes toward Jews.

The city is Paris. The year is 1118 or so. A school has been established at the Frankish cathedral on the island in the Seine. There are perhaps as many as five thousand students in Paris, centered here.
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Combining skills of logic, disputation, mathematics, philosophy, and the study of Scripture, the scholars of Paris are, in effect, inventing the modern university. Their monument is the cathedral that is being erected, the Gothic masterpiece of Notre-Dame.

Preeminent in this community of geniuses is Peter Abelard, known throughout Europe as a charismatic teacher. He is "a fair and handsome man, slim and not tall."
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He had been schooled in the thought of Anselm of Canterbury, and was an unlikely candidate to challenge Anselm's primary affirmation. Abelard's
Sic et Non (Yes and No)
developed Anselm's dialogical method, applying the faculty of reason to faith. But Abelard did so with an unprecedented boldness. "By doubting," he said, "we come to questioning, and by questioning we learn truth."
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The thrill of this free play of the mind drew students to his chair, established his prominence, and made him wealthy. His renown put him in touch with other intellectual centers. Most important, Abelard seems to have been influenced by the intellectually vital centers of Spanish Jewry, and through them, by newly translated works of ancient Greek thinkers.
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This contact would make Abelard aware of Judaism as a living tradition, not simply an Old Testament caricature, and it would prompt him to respond to it. Eventually he would portray the Jew in his writing in a unique way: respectfully. But neither his intellectual openness nor the breadth of his knowledge can account for what set him apart so starkly from Anselm on the question of atonement.

In his
Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans,
written around 1130, about three decades after
Cur Deus Homo,
Abelard roundly rejected the idea that "the death of the innocent Son was so pleasing to God the Father that through it he would be reconciled to us."
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Why did God become a man? In Romans, Paul says that "both Jews and Greeks" are justified "through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood."
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But how? Abelard's answer, given in one of the "
quaestiones
" of his
Exposition,
is that Christ came to show us how to live, not to die in submission to the brutal power of the Father. "We are made more righteous by Christ's death than we were before, because of the example Christ set us, kindling in us by his grace and generosity a zeal to imitate him."
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The death is exemplary, Abelard insists, and not expiatory. This is not exactly a new idea, but it strikes a note rarely sounded before.

In order to grasp the full context of Augustine's innovations, we found it necessary to consider the influence of his mother. In order to understand how Abelard arrived at a position of hostility toward a rigid theology of the crucifixion as debt satisfaction, we must do something similar. "As the west portal of Chartres is the door through which one must of necessity enter the Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century"—this is the assessment of the American historian Henry Adams—"so Abelard is the portal of approach to the Gothic thought and philosophy within. Neither art nor thought has a modern equivalent; only Heloise, like Isolde, unites the ages."
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Heloise is a brilliant young woman who, at eighteen, is less than half Abelard's age. She is the niece of Fulbert, the powerful canon of Notre-Dame. That the great Abelard should have taken her as his pupil testifies to her uncle's prominence, but also to her gifts. "She was a lady of no mean appearance," Abelard himself tells us, "while in literary excellence she was the first."
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To be a teacher in Abelard's position was to be a cleric, although not necessarily a priest with the vows of ordination. Still, it is a grave violation when Abelard and Heloise fall passionately in love. "Under the pretext of work we made ourselves entirely free for love and the pursuit of her studies provided the secret privacy which love desired ... There was more kissing than teaching; my hands found themselves at her breasts more often than on the book ... And the more such delights were new to us, the more ardently we indulged in them."
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"Whatever you wished," Heloise would write, "I blindly carried out." The two exchange a lifelong correspondence to which Abelard would refer in his
Historia Calamitatum (The Story of a Calamity).
The love affair takes its tragic turn when Heloise becomes pregnant. Secretly they marry, but her uncle learns what has happened and takes mortal offense. Fulbert becomes, in point of fact, very much the offended liege lord, and his response perfectly embodies the rigid feudal notion of expiation that undergirds Anselm's atonement theology, but that Abelard rejects.

Abelard was punished, he writes of himself, "in a cruel and shameful manner and one which the world with great astonishment abhorred." Fulbert orders an attack on him, dispatching thugs to settle the score—"namely, they cut off the organs by which I had committed the deed which they deplored ... How just was the betrayal by which he whom I had first betrayed paid me back; now my rivals would extol such a fair retribution."
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Abelard suffers a grievous punishment under a system of justice that defines itself as "paying back in kind." The physical offense is punished physically, and Fulbert's dishonor is compensated for by Abelard's disgrace. He is banished, and so is Heloise. They enter separate exiles, he to become a monk, she to become a nun. But now, in an unprecedented way, their love proves itself. "We are one in Christ," he writes to her. "We are one flesh by the law of marriage. Whatever you have, I regard as mine. Now Christ is yours because you have become His spouse ... It is in your strength at His side that I place my hope, so as to obtain through your prayer what I cannot obtain through my own."
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With prodding from Héloïse, Abelard reenters the fray of philosophical and theological disputation, only now his views are shaped by experience. His writing from here on displays a consistent skepticism about an idea of God whose justice leaves no room for mercy. For example, Abelard now denies that the person outside the Church could for that reason be condemned because of "an invincible ignorance [that] makes him similar to those for whom the Lord in his Passion ... prayed."
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The Lord in his Passion is, for Abelard, a figure of love, pure and simple. But in this crusading age, the Lord in his Passion has too many other meanings as well, and was bound to become a point of dispute. Abelard rejects the idea of the crucifixion as an act aimed at transforming God's attitude toward the sin-ridden descendants of Adam from one of hateful damnation to one of loving mercy. In Abelard's view, God's loving mercy is constant. The attitude in need of change is not God's but the self-hating human's. As Jaroslav Pelikan explains it, "Christ did not die on the cross to change the mind of God (which, like everything about God, was unchangeable) ... but 'to reveal the love [of God] to us."'
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To Abelard, the crucifixion, as J. Ramsay McCallum explains it, was "an explanatory gesture of the Second Person, the Wisdom or Word which has already been known under the name of 'Logos' or 'Word,' or as the creative impulse of God by Jews and Gentiles alike."
¹⁵
The crucifixion, therefore, is a word spoken not to heaven, as Anselm has it, but to earth.

Abelard is asking not How are we yet to be saved? but How do we know that we are already saved? The ancient Scriptures tell us, and so does the life of Jesus. The story Jesus himself told that has direct relevance to this question, that of the Prodigal Son, describes a father whose attitude toward his incorrigible son is one of constant love. The climax of that story is not the father's change, but the son's. The son's return home is the occasion not for his redemption, but for his recognition that, in his father's eyes, he was never
not
redeemed. Faithful to this aspect of the message of Jesus, Abelard succeeds, as Pelikan puts it, in "shifting the question from the topic of salvation to the topic of revelation."
¹⁶
Here the cross is not the
cause
of the love of God—the monster God who needs, like Fulbert, to be paid back in blood, the blood sacrifice of an only Son. Rather, the cross is an epiphany of the permanent and preexisting love of God that needs nothing from the beloved except existence. Even in their fallen state, the very existence of human beings remains the measure of God's love for them.

In all of this, Abelard manifests a unique—one could say revolutionary— positive regard for human beings
as they are.
By contrast, the prevailing theological assessment of the human condition is represented by Anselm's hopeless characterization of sinful man as "condemned to eternal torments, and having no power to redeem himself from them."
¹⁷
The robustly human Abelard is a figure of suspicion among a body of theologians who "affirmed an original guilt transmitted by Adam to the human race." Abelard's work, McCallum says, is "an acute revision of this point of view...[showing] that man is not by heredity guilty ... that there are human weaknesses, but that these are not sinful in themselves."
¹⁸
Humans in themselves are not, by definition, forlorn.

So for Abelard the state of fallenness is no obstacle to salvation, even for pagans, Jews, or other "infidels"—all those routinely pronounced as damned by Abelard's contemporaries, although not yet by solemn pronouncement of the Church.
¹⁹
Things seem simpler to the rational Abelard, as he applies the criteria of human logic even to the divine. The God of whom Abelard speaks is a God whose mercy trumps justice every time. God's mercy is as unlimited as God is. Thus Abelard, in Pelikan's summary, "found it 'consonant with piety as well as with reason' to believe that those who strove to please God according to their best lights on the basis of the natural law would not be damned for their efforts."
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Therefore God's people are defined not yet by membership in the Church but by existence on the earth. All of God's people are already saved, which is to say infinitely loved, just by virtue of God's having created them. All this takes place "in Christ," Abelard would say, keeping him orthodox, because God's creative action occurs primordially and perennially through the Word, the Second Person, the one whom we call Christ.

It remains for the human only to accept that love, which, in our fallen—self-rejecting—state, may not be easy, but it is never impossible. And the outcome by which that acceptance is measured is not only self-acceptance but acceptance of the neighbor, too. The mark of this religion, spanning cause and effect, offer and response, is not "satisfaction" but love, a position consonant with the religion of Israel, which always emphasizes right action in behalf of the neighbor as the content of faith. The historian of theology Karen Armstrong summed it up this way: Abelard "developed a sophisticated and moving rationale for the mystery of the atonement: Christ had been crucified to awaken compassion in us and by doing so he became our Savior."
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Abelard was convinced, therefore, that the "Hebrew saints," and all those who, by living compassionately and using their reason, responded to the Word through which God had created the world, were offered salvation.
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It should be no surprise, then, to find in Abelard a rare manifestation of empathy not just for "Hebrew saints" but for the besieged Jews of his own day. In his
Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian,
he puts these words in the mouth of the Jew:

To believe that the fortitude of the Jews in suffering would be unrewarded was to declare that God was cruel. No nation has ever suffered so much for God. Dispersed among all nations, without king or secular ruler, the Jews are oppressed with heavy taxes as if they had to repurchase their very lives every day. To mistreat the Jews is considered a deed pleasing to God. Such imprisonment as is endured by the Jews can be conceived by the Christians only as a sign of God's utter wrath. The life of the Jews is in the hands of their worst enemies. Even in their sleep they are plagued by nightmares. Heaven is their only place of refuge. If they want to travel to the nearest town, they have to buy protection with high sums of money from the Christian rulers who actually wish for their death so that they can confiscate their possessions. The Jews cannot own land or vineyards because there is nobody to vouch for their safekeeping. Thus, all that is left them as a means of livelihood is the business of moneylending, and this in turn brings the hatred of Christians upon them.
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