Add an extensive acquaintance with Scripture and the fathers, and the inventory is complete. Not difficult to be erudite in those days, most people will reflect. Well, a phonogram may be erudite. The gifts of Abélard were of a higher order than industry and memory, though he possessed both. He takes his place in history, apart from the ever-interesting drama and the deep pathos of his life, in virtue of two distinctions. They are, firstly, an extraordinary ability in imparting such knowledge as the poverty of the age afforded—the facts of his career reveal it; and secondly, a mind of such marvellous penetration that it conceived great truths which it has taken humanity seven or eight centuries to see—this will appear as we proceed. It was the former of these gifts that made him, in literal truth, the centre of learned and learning Christendom, the idol of several thousand eager scholars. Nor, finally, were these thousands the ‘horde of barbarians’ that jealous Master Roscelin called them. It has been estimated that a pope, nineteen cardinals, and more than fifty bishops and archbishops, were at one time among his pupils.
We are now at, or near, the year 1118. In the thirty-ninth year of his age, the twenty-third year of his scholastic activity, Abélard has reached the highest academic position in Christendom. He who loved so well, and so naturally, to be admired, found himself the centre of a life that had not been seen since Greek sages poured out wisdom in the painted colonnade, and the marble baths, and the shady groves of Athens. His self-esteem was flattered; his love of rule and of eminence was gratified. Poor as many of his pupils were, their number brought him great wealth. His refinement had ample means of solacing its desires. The petty vexations of the struggle were nobly compensated. Before him lay a world of fairest promise into which he, seemingly, had but to enter. Then there arose one of the forces that shattered his life, beginning its embodiment in an idyll, ending quickly in a lurid tragedy. It is the most difficult stage in the story of Abélard. I approach it only in the spirit of the artist, purposing neither to excuse nor to accuse, but only to trace, if I may, the development of a soul.
Abélard’s life had until now been purely spiritual, almost wholly intellectual. His defects were spiritual—conceit and ambition; if, as men assure us, it is a defect to recognise that you have a supra-normal talent, and to strive for the pre-eminence it entitles you to. The idealist spirit in which he had turned away from the comfort and quiet of the château had remained thus far the one fire that consumed his energy. In the pretty theory of Plato, his highest soul had silenced the lower, and reduced the lowest to the barest requisite play of vegetative life. There are men who go through life thus. The scientist would crudely—it is the fashion to say ‘crudely’—explain that the supra-normal activity of the upper part of the nervous system made the action of the lower part infra-normal; but let us keep on the spiritual plane. There are men whose soul is so absorbed in study or in contemplation that love never reaches their consciousness; or if it does, its appeal is faint, and quickly rejected. The condition of such a life, highly prized as it is by many, is constant intellectual strain.
Abélard had now arrived at a point when the mental strain began instinctively to relax. Wealth would inevitably bring more sensuous pleasure into his life. He was not one of the ‘purely intellectual’; he had a warm imagination and artistic power. No immediate purpose called for mental concentration. Sensuous enjoyment crept over the area of his conscious life. During a large proportion of his time, too, he was following with sympathy the quickening life of the passionate creations of Ovid and Vergil and Lucan. The inner judge, the sterner I, is indisposed to analyse, unless education, or faith, or circumstance, has laid a duty of severer watchfulness upon it. Blending with other and not alarming sensuous feelings, veiling itself, and gently, subtly passing its sweet fire into the veins, the coming of love is unperceived until it is already strong to exert a numbing influence on the mind. Abélard awoke one day to a consciousness that a large part of the new sweetness that pervaded his life was due to the birth of a new power in his soul—a power as elusive to recognition as it is imperious in its demands. Then is the trial of the soul.
Before quoting Abélard’s confession, with respect to this transformation of his character, it is necessary, out of justice to him, to anticipate a little, in indicating the circumstances of the making of the confession. The long letter which Abélard entitled the ‘Story of my Calamities’ was written twelve or thirteen years after these events. By that time he had not only endured a succession of cruel persecutions, but his outlook on life and on self had been entirely changed. Not only had the memory of the events faded somewhat, but he had become colour-blind in an important sense. A frightful mutilation had distorted his physical and psychic nature. Partly from this cause, and partly under the stress of other circumstances, he had become a Puritan of the Puritans, an ascetical hermit. As is the wont of such, he manifests a tendency to exaggerate the shadows cast by actions of his which he can no longer understand; for nature has withdrawn her inspiration. On the point we are considering he does not evince the smallest desire of concealment or palliation, but rather the reverse. And, finally, the letter, though written ostensibly for the solace of a friend in distress, was clearly written for circulation, and for the conciliation of the gentler of the Puritans, who knew his life well.
After speaking of the wealth and fame he had attained, he says: ‘But since prosperity ever puffs up the fool, and worldly ease dissolves the vigour of the mind, and quickly enervates it by carnal allurements; now that I thought myself to be the only philosopher in the world, and feared no further menace to my position, whereas I had hitherto lived most continently, I began to loose the rein to passion. And the further I had advanced in philosophy and in reading Holy Writ, so much the wider did I depart from philosophers and divines by the uncleanness of my life. It is well known to thee that philosophers and divines have ever been distinguished for this virtue of continence. But, whilst I was thus wholly taken up with pride and lust, the grace of God brought me a remedy, unwilling as I was, for both maladies; for lust first, and then for pride. For lust, by depriving me of its instrument; for pride—the pride which was chiefly born of my knowledge of letters, according to the word of the Apostle, ‘knowledge puffeth up’—by humbling me in the burning of the book by which I set such store. And now I would have thee learn the truth of both these stories, from the events themselves rather than from rumour, in the order in which they befell. Since then I had ever abhorred the uncleanness of harlots, and I had been withheld from the company and intercourse of noble dames by the exactions of study, nor had I more than a slight acquaintance with other women, evil fortune, smiling on me, found an easier way to cast me down from the summit of my prosperity; proud, as I was, and unmindful of divine favour, the goodness of God humbled me, and won me to itself.’ And the penitent passes on immediately to give the story of his relation to Heloise.
It is quite clear that all the vehement language with which he scourges himself before humanity refers exclusively to his liaison with Heloise. Searching about, as he does, for charges to heap upon his dead self, he yet denies that he had intercourse with women of any description before he knew the one woman whom he loved sincerely throughout life. In a later letter to Heloise, not intended to circulate abroad, he repeats the statement; recalling their embraces, he says they were the more treasured ‘since we had never known the like (ista gaudia) before.’ Moreover, he says a little later in the ‘Story’ that up to the time of his liaison with Heloise he had a ‘repute for chastity’ in the city; the events we have to follow prove this to have been the case. Finally, let us carefully remember that there would be no advantage in concealing any earlier disorder, and that there is clear indication, even in the short passage I have quoted, of a disposition rather to magnify faults than to attenuate.
I labour the point, because a writer who has introduced Abélard to many of the present generation, and for whom and whose thoughts I have otherwise a high regard, has somehow been led to lay here a very damning indictment of Abélard. Mr. Cotter Morison was a follower of the religion that worships the departed great, and should have a special care to set in light the character of those whom the Church has bruised in life, and slandered after death, under a false view of the interest of humanity. Yet, in his Life of St. Bernard, he has grossly added to the charge against Abélard, with the slenderest of historical bases. It were almost an injustice to Kingsley to say that Cotter Morison’s Abélard recalls the great novelist’s pitiful Hypatia. The Positivist writer thus interprets this stage in Abélard’s career. After saying that his passion broke out like a volcano, and that he felt ‘a fierce, fiery thirst for pleasure, sensual and animal,’ he goes on in this remarkable strain: ‘He drank deeply, wildly. He then grew fastidious and particular. He required some delicacy of romance, some flavour of emotion, to remove the crudity of his lust. He seduced Heloise.’
Was ever a graver perversion in the historical construction of character by an impartial writer? Stranger still, Mr. Cotter Morison has already warned his readers that the ‘Story of my Calamities’ must be shorn of some penitential exaggeration, if we are to give it historical credence. But Mr. Morison has witnesses. Prior Fulques, in a letter to Abélard, reminded him that he squandered a fortune on harlots. The assertion of this monk of Deuil, based, professedly, on the reports of Abélard’s bitter enemies, the monks of St. Denis, and made in a letter which is wholly politic, is held by Mr. Morison to ‘more than counterbalance’ the solemn public affirmation of a morbidly humble, self-accusing penitent. And this, after warning us not to take Abélard’s self-accusation too literally! I shall examine this letter of Prior Fulques’ more closely later. Not only does the letter itself belong to, but the charge refers to, a later period, and will be weighed then. There is nothing at this stage to oppose to the quiet and indirect claim of Abélard, allowed by the action of Fulbert, that his character was unsullied up to the date of his liaison with Heloise.
Let us return to the accredited historical facts. Somewhere about the year 1118 Abélard first felt the claims of love. He was wealthy and prosperous, and living in comparative luxury. He had those gifts of imagination which usually reveal an ardent temperament. Whether it was Heloise who unwittingly kindled the preparing passion, or whether Abélard yielded first to a vague, imperious craving, and sought one whom he might love, we do not know. But we have his trustworthy declaration that he detested the rampant harlotry, and knew no woman until he felt the sweet caress of Heloise.