Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (52 page)

Abelard's assertions set off a great debate. Many support him, and many others condemn him. Always, the gossipy cluck of disapproval curls the tongues of his critics. No one has forgotten Heloise, least of all Abelard. She is his constant ally, although always at a distance. She has by now become one of the great abbesses of Europe. Yet their letters have never stopped.

Abelard's fiercest opponent turns out to be Bernard of Clairvaux, the crusader monk whom we saw earlier, warning the Rhineland against anti-Jewish violence. Bernard is the author of
Against the Errors of Abelard,
a long treatise that, among other things, defends Anselm's core idea. Bernard affirms the necessity of restoring the honor of God by means of the crucifixion, in order to bring the universe into its right order.
²⁴
He sends this treatise to the pope, jelling the opposition to Abelard. "Bernard heartily distrusted ... Abelard..." Karen Armstrong writes, "and vowed to silence him. He accused Abelard of 'attempting to bring the merit of the Christian faith to naught because he supposes that by human reason he can comprehend all that is God.'"
²⁵
And if Abelard could so comprehend God, so could Jews and "other peoples and nations." What would the coming of Christ have been for then?

"His books have wings," Bernard complained of Abelard. "His writings have passed from country to country, and from one kingdom to another. A new gospel is being forged for peoples and for nations, a new faith is being propounded, and a new foundation is being laid besides that which has been laid."
²⁶
And in another place, Bernard griped, "He is a man who does not know his limitations, making void the virtue of the cross by the cleverness of his words."
²⁷

For Abelard, through all the controversy, the thing remains clear: God is not a cruel overlord to be appeased with the death of his only begotten Son, but a Father who has sent that Son to reveal his constant love—his love for all. But at last, in this harshly feudal age, Abelard's view is formally rejected. The indomitable Heloise denounces Bernard as a false apostle,
²⁸
but he is still, in Armstrong's words, "arguably the most powerful man in Europe."
²⁹
In 1141, he commands Abelard to come to the Council of Sens, before the king and all the bishops of France. The once robust Abelard is now ill, apparently suffering from Parkinson's disease, but he complies. He is badgered even in the streets outside the council meeting place.
³⁰
Inside, Bernard leads the attack himself. In anticipating this confrontation, Bernard had called Abelard "Goliath,"
³¹
yet now, as the medievalist Étienne Gilson describes it, Abelard is "no more than a beaten giant, wounded to death but struggling violently to raise himself."
³²
To no avail. In a climax of fierce rigidity, Bernard's supporters condemn Abelard as a heretic, destroying him.

Shortly thereafter, not long before his death, Abelard writes a final letter to Heloise. In the words of Gilson, this farewell "recites for her the profession of faith which Bernard of Clairvaux was unable to wring from him." Abelard writes, "Heloise, my sister, once so dear in the world, today still more dear in Jesus Christ, logic has won for me the hatred of men ... I adore Christ, who reigns at the right hand of the Father ... And to banish all restless solicitude, all doubt from the heart that beats in your breast, I want you to have this from my pen: I have established my conscience on that rock on which Christ built his Church. Here, briefly, is the inscription it bears."

Then Abelard recites on the page a creed of his own composition, a lucid assertion of his orthodox faith as a Christian, despite the condemnation of Sens. And, of course, he is right. His theology of salvation and revelation, of God's limitless mercy, will remain a minority report, but one vindicated again and again, down to the formal proclamations of Vatican II in our own time. For the purposes of this inquiry, it is important to see what Abelard's creed says—in contrast to Nicaea, as amended after Helena—about the death of Jesus. Abelard affirms "that the same Son of God satisfied all the exigencies of the human condition which He assumed, even death itself."
³³
Thus Jesus did not come to die, but to live as a human being, to embrace the human condition, which includes death. Death here is a moment, not a purpose; a part of the life story, not the meaning of it. The implications of these distinctions for every part of our concern—from crusader violence based on death as salvific, to vengeful assaults on Jews who are unjustly tied to the death of Jesus, to the accusation (which first appears within three years of Sens) that Jews crucify Christian boys—can hardly be overemphasized. In Abelard, the Church is offered the antidote to the poison of ambivalence toward Jews that had found its highest expression in Anselm, for in Abelard's view the "deicide Jew" will be unnecessary, and the "witness Jew" will be released. The Jew's difference from the Christian will be a measure of human tolerance. Alas, none of this is to be. Given all that is going on around Abelard in the name of the cross he would deemphasize, his being condemned for a theology that, in Bernard's indictment, makes "void the virtue of the cross by the cleverness of his words" can be no surprise.
³⁴

That does not, however, make Abelard's defeat less tragic, either for him or for the history that now unfolds. "The consequence of his condemnation for heresy," the historian John Benton writes, "was that by the thirteenth century his works were little studied, and his fame as a philosopher was eclipsed by his reputation as a lover until his rediscovery as a philosopher in the nineteenth century."
³⁵
What the Church lost in those intervening centuries was the influence of a humanist at home with dialectic and at home with doubt, a believer who wanted only to shift the emphasis from one side of the Catholic paradox to the other. What Jews lost was a rare Christian interpreter prepared to see them on their own terms. The clouds of an unleashed violence were gathering in Christendom, violence that would change everything. That Abelard's would have been a tempering voice is apparent even in the words of a prayer he offered: "Come as a Redeemer not as an Avenger, as a God of clemency rather than of justice, as a merciful Father not as a stern Lord."
³⁶
Not, that is, as a feudal master.

One of the reasons Anselm's atonement theology prevailed over Abelard's more humane understanding must be that it reinforced the political structure of monarchy just as the papacy was solidifying its hold on that kind of power. The reputation of
Cur Deus Homo
still stands as a measure of the Church's true attitude toward democracy. The fact that a medieval schema of atonement survives as the default of Catholic soteriology, or theology of salvation, says everything about the link between theology and politics. If God can be seen as a feudal lord—here is the thousand-year-old question—why can't the pope be? But all those years ago, Abelard knew what was wrong with this perception. From the prostration of Henry IV, which inspired Anselm, to his own castration, Abelard saw the limits of such acts as analogies for God's own. Two of the men who had castrated Abelard were themselves seized and castrated by men of Abelard's faction, in perfect counterpoint.
³⁷

Yet Abelard's brush with a ferociously applied feudal justice is less full of implication, finally, than his lifelong bond of love with Héloïse. She wrote to him late in life:

God knows I would not have hesitated to follow you or to precede you into hell itself if you had given the order. My heart was not my own, but yours. Even now, more than ever before, if it is not with you it is nowhere, for you are its very existence. So, I pray you, let my poor heart be happy with you ... Remember, I beg you, everything I have done; and weigh out all that you owe me. When I delighted with you in carnal pleasures, many wondered why I did it, whether it was for concupiscence or for love. But now my last state shows my true beginning, and I now forgo all pleasures only to obey your will. Truly, I reserved nothing for myself but to be yours before everything, and such I am to this very moment.
³⁸

Peter Abelard died in 1142, at age sixty-three, disgraced but apparently reconciled even to Bernard, which is a last proof of what Abelard believed.
³⁹
Héloïse, at the peak of her power as an abbess, arranged to have him buried at her own monastery, sixty miles southwest of Paris. When she died twenty years later—apparently she too was sixty-three—she was buried beside him. Legend has it that, in death, they embraced. In their letters, they had prayed, "Those whom Thou has parted for a time in this world, unite forever in the next, O Thou our hope, our inheritance, our expectation, our consolation, our Lord who art blest forever. Amen."
⁴⁰
In 1817, the remains of Abelard and Héloïse were brought home to Paris, from which, as lovers, they had been banished. They were interred in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where lovers, believers, and thinkers still come to pay them homage.

Bernard, of course, became a saint. He was canonized only twenty-one years after his death in 1153. He was sometimes referred to as "the secret emperor of Europe,"
⁴¹
and his fame was tied above all to the Crusade launched not long after Abelard died, and of which he, Bernard, was the prime inspiration. Since the question at the heart of this inquiry concerns the relationship between the crusading impulse and a violent theology of the cross—remember that Anselm and Urban II shared a bond of friendship just before the First Crusade—Bernard's role in the Second Crusade seems emblematic because of his defense, against Abelard, of Anselm's brutal God. Theology and political history go hand in hand. The lasting implication of Bernard's triumph over Abelard was not that the latter was disgraced, but that the former was then even more powerful. "Bernard of Clairvaux was the first Christian theoretician of the holy war," Hans Küng has written, "and provided theological justification for the killing of unbelievers."
⁴²

But we have also seen how the Hebrew chronicles revered Bernard for preaching in behalf of Jews the Augustinian mantra, "Do not slay them!" Bernard's intervention in the Rhineland prevented a repeat of the massacres of 1096. We also saw that there was a lit fuse attached to Bernard's intervention. Perhaps now we can understand where it came from. What Bernard preferred to the death of Jews was, in Robert Chazan's phrase, "their endless degradation." In this way, "the great Christian protector of twelfth-century Jewry," David Berger concluded, "sowed seeds which would claim the life of many a Jewish martyr."
⁴³

Bernard's first reputation rested on a lyrical celebration of the Song of Songs. At the other end of his life, not long before he died, he made a more fateful—and calamitous—contribution to relations between Christians and Jews. By then he was an embittered man who had seen his precious Crusade woefully defeated. The current pope, Eugene III (1145–1153), was formerly one of Bernard's monks, and a protégé of his.
⁴⁴
Bernard was determined to use what levers of power remained to him, and he addressed to this pope a lengthy instruction on the proper exercise of papal power. It comes to us as
Five Books on Consideration to Eugene III,
or more simply as
De Consideration.
It is in this work that Bernard advances what Hans Küng calls "the pernicious theory"
⁴⁵
that God has given to the Church two swords. Bernard writes, "Both swords, that is, the spiritual and the material, belong to the Church; however the latter is to be drawn for the Church and the former by the Church. The spiritual sword should be drawn by the hand of the priest; the material sword by the hand of the knight, but clearly at the bidding of the priest and at the command of the emperor ... Now, take the sword which has been entrusted to you [the pope] to strike with, and for their salvation wound if not everyone, if not even many, at least whomever you can."
⁴⁶

Constantine had changed history, and the very meaning of Jesus Christ, by turning his cross into a sword. Following the crusader monk, vanquisher of Abelard, popes would soon enough change history and the meaning of Jesus Christ again. The violence of the rabble would become the violence of the Church itself. The one sword of Constantine would become the two swords of the Inquisition.

30. Thomas Aquinas: Reason Against the Jews

R
ATIONAL THEOLOGY CAME
into its own in the twelfth century. What Anselm and Abelard began—explanation of Christian mystery by systematic intellectual effort—would be carried to new levels in the thirteenth century, especially by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Since so much of the virulent Christian hatred of Jews, as manifested by the outbreak of the Blood Libel and well-poisoning conspiracy fears, was patently irrational, one might have hoped that the new emphasis on rational method would prompt a positive turn in the Christian-Jewish story. The opposite is the case.

Innovations in philosophical theology, stimulated in large part by the northern European rediscovery of Aristotle, were facilitated, ironically, by Jewish translators, working in Iberia to render Greek and Arabic texts into Latin. We have seen how post-antiquity Jewish culture flourished in the area around present-day Baghdad, especially with the consolidation of the Babylonian Talmud and with the work of such scholars as Saadyah ben Joseph (882–946), who affirmed the compatibility of philosophy and religion. But Jewish communities influenced each other across continents. Building on the Talmudic tradition and the affirmation of rational philosophy, there followed the formulations of the great Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040–1105), the "Prince of Bible Commentators,"
¹
whose commonsense distillations of esoteric and complicated Talmudic writings made them available to a broad population of Jews who came after him.