Moleme founded the order of Citeaux; St. Norbert that of Premontre; St. Bernard detached Clairvaux from Meaux, which he considered too worldly; St. Bruno built Chartreuse; St. Hugo, St. Gerard, and others besides gave the Abbey of Cluni its renown; and ecclesiastical reform extended everywhere. Hereupon rich and powerful laymen, filled with ardor for their faith or fear for their eternal welfare, went seeking after solitude, and devoted themselves to prayer in the monasteries they had founded or enriched with their wealth; whole families were dispersed amongst various religious houses; and all the severities of penance hardly sufficed to quiet imaginations scared at the perils of living in the world or at the vices of their age. And, at the same time, in addition to this outburst of piety, ignorance was decried and stigmatized as the source of the prevailing evils; the function of teaching was included amongst the duties of the religious estate; and every newly-founded or reformed monastery became a school in which pupils of all conditions were gratuitously instructed in the sciences known by the name of liberal arts. Bold spirits began to use the rights of individual thought in opposition to the authority of established doctrines; and others, without dreaming of opposing, strove at any rate to understand, which is the way to produce discussion. Activity and freedom of thought were receiving development at the same time that fervent faith and fervent piety were.
This great moral movement of humanity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries arose from events very different in different parts of the beautiful country which was not yet, but was from that time forward tending to become, France. Amongst these events, which cannot be here recounted in detail, we will fix upon two, which were the most striking, and the most productive of important consequences in the whole history of the epoch, the quarrel of Abelard with St. Bernard and the crusade against the Albigensians. We shall there see how Northern France and Southern France differed one from the other before the bloody crisis which was to unite them in one single name and one common destiny.
In France properly so called at that time, north of the Rhone and the Loire, the church had herself accomplished the chief part of the reforms which had become necessary. It was there that the most active and most eloquent of the reforming monks had appeared, had preached, and had founded or regenerated a great number of monasteries. It was there that, at first amongst the clergy, and then, through their example, amongst the laity, Christian discipline and morals had resumed some sway. There, too, the Christian faith and church were, amongst the mass of the population, but little or not at all assailed; heretics, when any appeared, obtained support neither from princes nor people; they were proceeded against, condemned, and burned, without their exciting public sympathy by their presence, or public commiseration by their punishment. It was in the very midst of the clergy themselves, amongst literates and teachers, that, in Northern France, the intellectual and innovating movement of the period was manifested and concentrated. The movement was vigorous and earnest, and it was a really studious host which thronged to the lessons of Abelard at Paris, on Mount St. Genevieve, at Melun, at Corbeil, and at the Paraclete; but this host contained but few of the people; the greater part of those who formed it were either already in the church, or soon, in various capacities, about to be. And the discussions raised at the meetings corresponded with the persons attending them; there was the disputation of the schools; there was no founding of sects; the lessons of Abelard and the questions he handled were scientifico-religious; it was to expound and propagate what they regarded as the philosophy of Christianity, that masters and pupils made bold use of the freedom of thought; they made but slight war upon the existing practical abuses of the church; they differed from her in the interpretation and comments contained in some of her dogmas; and they considered themselves in a position to explain and confirm faith by reason. The chiefs of the church, with St. Bernard at their head, were not slow to descry, in these interpretations and comments based upon science, danger to the simple and pure faith of the Christian; they saw the apparition of dawning rationalism confronting orthodoxy. They were, as all their contemporaries were, wholly strangers to the bare notion of freedom of thought and conscience, and they began a zealous struggle against the new teachers; but they did not push it to the last cruel extremities. They had many a handle against Abelard: his private life, the scandal of his connection with Heloise, the restless and haughty fickleness of his character, laid him open to severe strictures; but his stern adversaries did not take so much advantage of them as they might have taken. They had his doctrines condemned at the councils of Soissons and Sens; they prohibited him from public lecturing; and they imposed upon him the seclusion of the cloister; but they did not even harbor the notion of having him burned as a heretic, and science and glory were respected in his person, even when his ideas were proscribed. Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluni, one of the most highly considered and honored prelates of the church, received him amongst his own monks, and treated him with paternal kindness, taking care of his health, as well as of his eternal welfare; and he who was the adversary of St. Bernard and the teacher condemned by the councils of Soissons and Sens, died peacefully, on the 21st of April, 1142, in the abbey of St. Marcellus, near Chalon-sur-Saone, after having received the sacraments with much piety, and in presence of all the brethren of the monastery. “Thus,” wrote Peter the Venerable to Heloise, abbess for eleven years past of the Paraclete, “the man who, by his singular authority in science, was known to nearly all the world, and was illustrious wherever he was known, learned, in the school of Him who said, ‘Know that I am meek and lowly of heart,’ to remain meek and lowly; and, as it is but right to believe, he has thus returned to Him.”
The struggle of Abelard with the Church of Northern France and the crusade against the Albigensians in Southern France are divided by much more than diversity and contrast; there is an abyss between them. In their religious condition, and in the nature as well as degree of their civilization, the populations of the two regions were radically different. In the north-east, between the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Loire, Christianity had been obliged to deal with little more than the barbarism and ignorance of the German conquerors. In the south, on the two banks of the Rhone and the Garonne, along the Mediterranean, and by the Pyrenees, it had encountered all manner of institutions, traditions, religions, and disbeliefs, Greek, Roman, African, Oriental, Pagan, and Mussulman; the frequent invasions and long stay of the Saracens in those countries had mingled Arab blood with the Gallic, Roman, Asiatic, and Visigothic, and this mixture of so many different races, tongues, creeds, and ideas had resulted in a civilization more developed, more elegant, more humane, and more liberal, but far less coherent, simple, and strong, morally as well as politically, than the warlike, feudal civilization of Germanic France. In the religious order especially, the dissimilarity was profound. In Northern France, in spite of internal disorder, and through the influence of its bishops, missionaries, and monastic reformers, the orthodox Church had obtained a decided superiority and full dominion; but in Southern France, on the contrary, all the controversies, all the sects, and all the mystical or philosophical heresies which had disturbed Christendom from the second century to the ninth, had crept in and spread abroad. In it there were Arians, Manicheans, Gnostics, Paulicians, Cathars (the pure), and other sects of more local or more recent origin and name, Albigensians, Vaudians, Good People and Poor of Lyons, some piously possessed with the desire of returning to the pure faith and fraternal organization of the primitive evangelical Church, others given over to the extravagances of imagination or asceticism. The princes and the great laic lords of the country, the Counts of Toulouse, Foix, and Comminges, the Viscount of Beziers, and many others had not remained unaffected by this condition of the people: the majority were accused of tolerating and even protecting the heretics; and some were suspected of allowing their ideas to penetrate within their own households. The bold sallies of the critical and jeering spirit, and the abandonment of established creeds and discipline, bring about, before long, a relaxation of morals; and liberty requires long time and many trials before it learns to disavow and rise superior to license. In many of the feudal courts and castles of Languedoc, Provence, and Aquitaine, imaginations, words, and lives were licentious; and the charming poetry of the troubadours and the gallant adventures of knights caused it to be too easily forgotten that morality was but little more regarded than the faith. Dating from the latter half of the eleventh century, not only the popes, but the whole orthodox Church of France and its spiritual heads, were seriously disquieted at the state of mind of Southern France, and the dangers it threatened to the whole of Christendom. In 1145 St. Bernard, in all the lustre of his name and influence, undertook, in concert with Cardinal Alberic, legate of the Pope Eugenius III., to go and preach against the heretics in the countship of Toulouse.