Introduction
The "Historia Calamitatum" of Peter Abélard is one of those human
documents, out of the very heart of the Middle Ages, that
illuminates by the glow of its ardour a shadowy period that has
been made even more dusky and incomprehensible by unsympathetic
commentators and the ill-digested matter of "source-books." Like
the "Confessions" of St. Augustine it is an authentic revelation of
personality and, like the latter, it seems to show how unchangeable
is man, how consistent unto himself whether he is of the sixth
century or the twelfth--or indeed of the twentieth century. "Evolution" may change the flora and fauna of the world, or modify its physical forms, but man is always the same and the unrolling of the centuries affects him not at all. If we can assume the vivid personality, the enormous intellectual power and the clear, keen mentality of Abélard and his contemporaries and immediate successors, there is no reason why "The Story of My Misfortunes" should not have been written within the last decade.
They are large assumptions, for this is not a period in world
history when the informing energy of life expresses itself through
such qualities, whereas the twelfth century was of precisely this
nature. The antecedent hundred years had seen the recovery from the
barbarism that engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and
the generation of those vital forces that for two centuries were to
infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and
in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that
describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of
"chaos and old night" and Abélard and his opponent, St. Bernard, rode high on the mounting force in its swift and almost violent ascent.
Pierre du Pallet, yclept Abélard, was born in 1079 and died in
1142, and his life precisely covers the period of the birth, development and perfecting of that Gothic style of architecture which is one of the great exemplars of the period. Actually, the Norman development occupied the years from 1050 to 1125 while the initiating and determining of Gothic consumed only fifteen years, from Bury, begun in 1125, to Saint-Denis, the work of Abbot Suger, the friend and partisan of Abélard, in 1140. It was the time of the Crusades, of the founding and development of schools and universities, of the invention or recovery of great arts, of the growth of music, poetry and romance. It was the age of great kings and knights and leaders of all kinds, but above all it was the epoch of a new philosophy, refounded on the newly revealed corner stones of Plato and Aristotle, but with a new content, a new impulse and a new method inspired by Christianity.
All these things, philosophy, art, personality, character, were the
product of the time, which, in its definiteness and consistency, stands apart from all other epochs in history. The social system was that of feudalism, a scheme of reciprocal duties, privileges and obligations as between man and man that has never been excelled by any other system that society has developed as its own method of operation. As Dr. De Wulf has said in his illuminating book "Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages" (a volume that should be read by any one who wishes rightly to understand the spirit and quality of Mediaevalism), "the feudal sentiment _par excellence_ ... is the sentiment of the value and dignity of the individual man. The feudal man lived as a free man; he was master in his own house; he sought his end in himself; he was--and this is a scholastic expression,--_propter seipsum existens_: all feudal obligations were founded upon respect for personality and the given word."
Of course this admirable scheme of society with its guild system of
industry, its absence of usury in any form and its just sense of
comparative values, was shot through and through with religion both
in faith and practice. Catholicism was universally and implicitly
accepted. Monasticism had redeemed Europe from barbarism and Cluny
had freed the Church from the yoke of German imperialism. This
unity and immanence of religion gave a consistency to society
otherwise unobtainable, and poured its vitality into every form of
human thought and action.