Edward A. Allen

PIERRE ABELARD (1079-1142)

Abelard’s reputation for oratory and for scholarship was so great that he attracted hearers and disciples from all quarters.  They encamped around him like an army and listened to him with such eagerness that the jealousy of some and the honest apprehension of others were excited by the boldness with which he handled religious subjects.  He has been called the originator of modern rationalism, and though he was apparently worsted in his contest with his great rival, St. Bernard, he remains the most real and living personality among the great pulpit orators of the Middle Ages.  This is due in large part, no doubt, to his connection with the unfortunate Heloise.  That story, one of the most romantic, as it is one of the saddest of human history, must be passed over with a mere mention of the fact that it gave occasion for a number of the sermons of Abelard which have come down to us.  Several of those were preached in the convent of the Paraclete of which Heloise became abbess,—­ where, in his old age, her former lover, broken with the load of a life of most extraordinary sorrows, went to die.  These sermons do not suggest the fire and force with which young Abelard appealed to France, compelling its admiration even in exciting its alarm, but they prevent him from being a mere name as an orator.

He was born near Nantes, A. D. 1079.  At his death in 1142, he was buried in the convent of the Paraclete, where the body of Heloise was afterwards buried at his side.

The extracts from his sermons here given were translated by Rev. J. M. Neale, of Sackville College, from the first collected edition of the works of Abelard, published at Paris in 1616.  There are thirty-two such sermons extant.  They were preached in Latin, or, at least, they have come down to us in that language.

THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS

The Lord performed that miracle once for all in the body which much more blessedly he performs every day in the souls of penitents.  He restored life to Lazarus, but it was a temporal life, one that would die again.  He bestows life on the penitent; life, but it is life that will remain, world without end.  The one is wonderful in the eyes of men; the other is far more wonderful in the judgment of the faithful; and in that it is so much the greater, by so much the more is it to be sought.  This is written of Lazarus, not for Lazarus himself, but for us and to us.  “Whatsoever things,” saith the Apostle, “were written of old, were written for our learning.”  The Lord called Lazarus once, and he was raised from temporal death.  He calls us often, that we may rise from the death of the soul.  He said to him once, “Come forth!” and immediately he came forth at one command of the Lord.  The Lord every day invites us by Scripture to confession, exhorts us to amendment,