“Thou askest, only one, that, in the event of thy death when absent from us, we should have thy body brought to our cemetery, in order that, being always in our memory, thou shouldst obtain greater benefit from our prayers. Did you think that your memory could slip from us? How could we pray, with distracted minds? What use of tongue or reason would be left to us? When the mind is crazed against God it will not placate Him with prayer so much as irritate Him with complaints. We could only weep, pressing to follow rather than bury you. How could we live after we had lost our life in you? The thought of your death is death to us; what would be the actuality? God grant we shall not have to pay those rites to one from whom we look for them; may we go before and not follow! A heart crushed with grief is not calm, nor is a mind tossed by troubles open to God. Do not, I beg, hinder the divine service to which we are dedicated.
“What remains of hope for me when thou art gone? Or what reason to continue in this pilgrimage, where I have no solace save thee? and of thee I have but the bare knowledge that thou dost live, since thy restoring presence is not granted me. Oh!—if it is right to say it—how cruel has God been to me! Inclement Clemency! Fortune has emptied her quiver against me, so that others have nothing to fear! If indeed a single dart were left, no place could be found in me for a new wound. Fortune fears only lest I escape her tortures by death. Wretched and unhappy! in thee I was lifted above all women; in thee am I the more fatally thrown down. What glory did I have in thee! what ruin have I now! Fortune made me the happiest of women that she might make me the most miserable. The injury was the more outrageous in that all ways of right were broken. While we were abandoned to love’s delights, the divine severity spared us. When we made the forbidden lawful and by marriage wiped out fornication’s stains, the Lord’s wrath broke on us, impatient of an unsullied bed when it long had borne with one defiled. A man taken in adultery would have been amply punished by what came to you. What others deserved for adultery, that you got from the marriage which you thought had made amends for everything. Adulteresses bring their paramours what your own wife brought you. Not when we lived for pleasure, but when, separated, we lived in chastity, you presiding at the Paris schools, I at thy command dwelling with the nuns at Argenteuil; you devoted to study, I to prayer and holy reading; it was then that you alone paid the penalty for what we had done together. Alone you bore the punishment, which you deserved less than I. When you had humiliated yourself and elevated me and all my kin, you little merited that punishment either from God or from those traitors. Miserable me, begotten to cause such a crime! O womankind ever the ruin of the noblest men![4]
“Well the Tempter knows how easy is man’s overthrow through a wife. He cast his malice over us, and the man whom he could not throw down through fornication, he tried with marriage, using a good to bring about an evil where evil means had failed. I thank God at least for this, that the Tempter did not draw me to assent to that which became the cause of the evil deed. Yet, although in this my mind absolves me, too many sins had gone before to leave me guiltless of that crime. For long a servant of forbidden joys, I earned the punishment which I now suffer of past sins. Let the evil end be attributed to ill beginnings! May my penitence be meet for what I have done, and may long remorse in some way compensate for the penalty you suffered! What once you suffered in the body, may I through contrition bear to the end of life, that so I may make satisfaction to thee if not to God. To confess the infirmities of my most wretched soul, I can find no penitence to offer God, whom I never cease to accuse of utter cruelty towards you. Rebellious to His rule, I offend Him with indignation more than I placate Him with penitence. For that cannot be called the sinner’s penitence where, whatever be the body’s suffering, the mind retains the will to sin and still burns with the same desires. It is easy in confession to accuse oneself of sins, and also to do penance with the body; but hard indeed to turn the heart from the desire of its greatest joys![5] Love’s pleasures, which we knew together, cannot be made displeasing to me nor driven from my memory. Wherever I turn, they press upon me, nor do they spare my dreams. Even in the solemn moments of the Mass, when prayer should be the purest, their phantoms catch my soul. When I should groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost. Not only our acts, but times and places stick fast in my mind, and my body quivers. O truly wretched me, fit only to utter this cry of the soul: ‘Wretched that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ Would I could add with truth what follows:—‘I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ Such thanksgiving, dearest, may be thine, by one bodily ill cured of many tortures of the soul, and God may have been merciful where He seemed against you; like a good physician who does not spare the pain needed to save life. But I am tortured with passion and the fires of memory. They call me chaste, who do not know me for a hypocrite. They look upon purity of the flesh as virtue—which is of the soul, not of the body. Having some praise from men, I merit none from God, who knows the heart. I am called religious at a time when most religion is hypocrisy, and when whoever keeps from offence against human law is praised. Perhaps it seems praiseworthy and acceptable to God, through decent conduct,—whatever the intent—to avoid scandalizing the Church or causing the Lord’s name to be blasphemed or the religious Order discredited. Perhaps it may be of grace just to abstain from evil. But the Scripture says, ‘Refrain from evil and do good’; and vainly he attempts either who does not act from love of God. God knows that I have always feared to offend thee more than I feared to offend Him; and have desired to please thee rather than Him. Thy command, not the divine love, put on me this garb of religion. What a wretched life I lead if I vainly endure all this here and am to have no reward hereafter. My hypocrisy has long deceived you, as it has others, and therefore you desire my prayers. Have no such confidence; I need your prayers; do not withdraw their aid. Do not take away the medicine, thinking me whole. Do not cease to think me needy; do not think me strong; do not delay your help. Cease from praising me, I beg. No one versed in medicine will judge of inner disease from outward view. Thy praise is the more perilous because I love it, and desire to please thee always. Be fearful rather than confident regarding me, so that I may have the help of your care. Do not seek to spur me on, by quoting, ‘For strength is made perfect in weakness,’ or ‘He is not crowned unless he have contended lawfully.’ I am not looking for the crown of victory; enough for me to escape peril;—safer to shun peril than to wage war! In whatever little corner of heaven God puts me, that will satisfy me. Hear what Saint Jerome says: ‘I confess my weakness; I do not wish to fight for the hope of victory, lest I lose.’ Why give up certainties to follow the uncertain?”
This letter gives a view of Heloïse’s mind, its strong grasp and its capacity for reasoning, though its reasoning is here distraught with passion. Scathingly, half-blinded by her pain, she declares the perversities of Providence, as they glared upon her. Such a disclosure of the woman’s mind suggests how broadly based in thought and largely reared was that great love into which her whole soul had been poured, the mind as well as heart. Her love was great, unique, not only from its force of feeling, but from the power and scope of thought by which passion and feeling were carried out so far and fully to the last conclusions of devotion. The letter also shows a woman driven by stress of misery to utter cries and clutch at remedies that her calmer self would have put by. It is not hypocrisy to conceal the desires or imaginings which one would never act upon. To tell these is not true disclosure of oneself, but slander. Torn by pain, Heloïse makes herself more vile and needy than in other moments she knew herself to be. Yet the letter also uncovers her, and in nakedness there is some truth. Doubtless her nun’s garb did clothe a hypocrite. Whatever she felt—and here we see the worst she felt—before the world she had to act the nun. We shall soon see how she forced herself to act, or be, the nun toward Abaelard.
Abaelard replied in a letter filled with religious argument and consolation. It was self-controlled, firm, authoritative, and strong in those arguments regarding God’s mercy which have stood the test of time. If they sometimes fail to satisfy the embittered soul, at least they are the best that man has known. And withal, the letter is calmly and nobly affectionate—what place was there for love’s protestations? They would have increased the evil, adding fuel to Heloïse’s passionate misery.
The master-note is struck in the address: “To the spouse of Christ, His servant.” The letter seeks to turn Heloïse’s thoughts to her nun’s calling and her soul’s salvation. It divides her expressions of complaint under four heads. First, he had put her name first, because she had become his superior from the moment of her bridal with his master Christ. Jerome writing to Eustochium called her Lady, when she had become the spouse of Jerome’s Lord. Abaelard shows, with citations from the Song of Songs, the glory of the spouse, and how her prayers should be sought by one who was the servant of her Husband. Second, as to the terrors roused in her by his mention of his peril and possible death, he points out that in her first letter she had bidden him write of those perils; if they brought him death, she should deem that a kind release. She should not wish to see his miseries drawn out, even for her sake. Third, he shows that his praise of her was justified even by her disclaimer of merit—as it is written, Who humbles himself shall be exalted. He warns her against false modesty which may be vanity.
He turns at last to the old and ceaseless plaint which she makes against God for cruelty, when she should rather glorify Him; he had thought that that bitterness had departed, so dangerous for her, so painful to him. If she wished to please him, let her lay it aside; retaining it, she could not please him or advance with him to blessedness; let her have this much religion, not to separate herself from him hastening to God; let her take comfort in their journeying to the same goal. He then shows her that his punishment was just as well as merciful; he had deserved it from God and also from Fulbert. If she will consider, she will see in it God’s justice and His mercy; God had saved them from shipwreck; had raised a barrier against shame and lust. For himself the punishment was purification, not privation; will not she, as his inseparable comrade, participate in the workings of this grace, even as she shared the guilt and its pardon? Once he had thought of binding her to him in wedlock; but God found a means to turn them both to Him; and the Lord was continuing His mercy towards her, causing her to bring forth spiritual daughters, when otherwise she would only have borne children in the flesh; in her the curse of Eve is turned to the blessing of Mary. God had purified them both; whom God loveth He correcteth. Oh! let her thoughts dwell with the Son of God, seized, dragged, beaten, spit upon, crowned with thorns, hung on a vile cross. Let her think of Him as her spouse, and for Him let her make lament; He bought her with himself, He loved her. In comparison with His love, his own (Abaelard’s) was lust, seeking the pleasure it could get from her. If he, Abaelard, had suffered for her, it was not willingly nor for her sake, as Christ had suffered, and for her salvation. Let her weep for Him who made her whole, not for her corrupter; for her Redeemer, not for her defiler; for the Lord who died for her, not for the living servant, himself just freed from the death. Let his sister accept with patience what came to her in mercy from Him who wounded the body to save the soul.
“We are one in Christ, as through marriage we were one flesh. Whatever is thine is not alien to me. Christ is thine, because thou art His spouse. And now thou hast me for a servant, who formerly was thy master—a servant united to thee by spiritual love. I trust in thy pleading with Him for such defence as my own prayers may not obtain. That nothing may hinder this petition I have composed this prayer, which I send thee: ‘O God, who formed woman from the side of man and didst sanction the sacrament of marriage; who didst bestow upon my frailty a cure for its incontinence; do not despise the prayers of thy handmaid, and the prayers which I pour out for my sins and those of my dear one. Pardon our great crimes, and may the enormity of our faults find the greatness of thy ineffable mercy. Punish the culprits in the present; spare, in the future. Thou hast joined us, Lord, and hast divided us, as it pleased thee. Now complete most mercifully what thou hast begun in mercy; and those whom thou hast divided in this world, join eternally in heaven, thou who art our hope, our portion, our expectation, our consolation, Lord blessed forever. Amen.’
“Farewell in Christ, spouse of Christ; in Christ farewell and in Christ live. Amen.”
In her next letter Heloïse obeys, and turns her pen if not her thoughts to the topics suggested by Abaelard’s admonitions. The short scholastically phrased address cannot be rendered in any modern fashion: “Domino specialiter sua singulariter.”