In a few months the famed philosopher appeared in a new character, as ‘the first of the troubadours,’ to use the words of Ampère. ‘À mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit les passions sont plus grandes,’ said Pascal. Of all false epigrams that is surely the falsest, but it would be easily inspired by the transformation of Pierre Abélard. The sober-living man of forty, whom all had thought either never to have known or long since to have passed the fever of youth, was mastered by a deep, tyrannical passion. The problems of dialectics were forgotten, the alluring difficulties of Ezechiel unheeded. Day after day the murmuring throng was dismissed untaught from the cloistral school; whilst passers-by heard songs that were ardent with deep love from the windows of the canon’s house. All Paris, even all France, caught the echo, says Heloise, and ‘every street, every house, resounded with my name.’ The strange ‘Story of love and learning,’ as an old ballad expressed it, was borne through the kingdom in Abélard’s own impassioned words.[16]
Months ran on, and the purblind priest remained wholly unconscious of what all Paris sang nightly in its taverns. At length the truth was forced upon his mind, and he at once interrupted the love-story. He drove Abélard from the house, and raised the usual futile barriers to the torrent of passion. Whether the canon was really more earnest than the majority of his order, and therefore sincerely shocked at the thought of the liaison, or whether it had disturbed some other project he had formed, it is impossible to say. Heloise herself, in her sober maturity, affirms that any woman in France would have thought her position more honourable than any marriage. However that may be, Fulbert angrily forbade a continuance of the relation. Once more Abélard must have felt the true alternative that honour placed before him: either to crush his passion and return to the school, or to marry Heloise and sacrifice the desire of further advancement in ecclesiastical dignity.
Abélard was not a priest at that time. He was probably a canon of Notre Dame, but there are very satisfactory reasons for holding that he did not receive the priesthood until a much later date. In the ‘Story’ he makes Heloise address him, about this time, as ‘a cleric and canon,’ but he is nowhere spoken of as a priest. Had he been a priest, the circumstance would have afforded Heloise one of the most powerful objections to a marriage; in the curious and lengthy catalogue of such objections which we shall find her raising presently she does not mention the priesthood. But even if he were a priest, it is not at all clear that he would have considered this in itself an impediment to marriage. From the acts of the Council of London (1102), the Council of Troyes (1107), the Council of Rheims (1119), and others, we find that the decree of the Church against the marriage of priests, and even bishops, was far from being universally accepted. Indeed, we have specific reason for thinking that Abélard did not recognise an impediment of that character. In a work which bears the title Sententiae Abaelardi, we find the thesis, more or less clearly stated, that the priest may marry. The work is certainly not Abélard’s own composition, but the experts regard it as a careful summary of his views by some master of the period.
Apart from the laxer view of love-relation which Abélard probably shared, we can only find firm ground to interpret his reluctance to marry in the fear of injuring his further ambition. Marriage was fast becoming a fatal obstacle to advancement in the ecclesiastical world; a lover—with wealth—was not a serious difficulty. Even this point, however, cannot be pressed; it looks as though his ambition had become as limp and powerless as all other feelings in the new tyranny of love. Historians have been so eager to quarrel with the man that they have, perhaps, not paid a just regard to the fact that Heloise herself was violently opposed to marriage, and conscientiously thought their earlier union more honourable. This will appear presently.
Whatever struggle may have distracted Abélard after their separation, he was soon forced to take practical measures. Heloise found means to inform him—not with the conventional tears, but, he says, ‘with the keenest joy’—that she was about to become a mother. Fate had cut the ethical knot. He at once removed her from Fulbert’s house during the night, and had her conveyed, in the disguise of a nun,[17] to his home at Pallet. It is not clearly stated that Abélard accompanied her, but, beside the intrinsic probability, there is a local tradition that Abélard and Heloise spent many happy months together at Pallet, and there is a phrase in the ‘Story’ which seems to confirm it. However that may be, we find him in Paris again, after a time, seeking a reconciliation with Fulbert.
Fulbert was by no means the quiet, passive recluse that one would imagine from his earlier action, or inaction. The discovery of Abélard’s treachery and the removal of his niece had enkindled thoughts of wild and dark revenge. He feared, however, to attack Abélard whilst Heloise remained at Pallet; it is a fearful commentary on the times that Abélard should coolly remark that a retaliation on the part of his own relatives was apprehended. Revenge was considered a legitimate daughter of justice in those days. A compromise was at length imagined by Abélard. He proposed to marry Heloise, if Fulbert and his friends would agree to keep the marriage secret. In this we have a still clearer revelation of the one serious flaw in Abélard’s character—weakness. No doubt, if we had had an autobiography from an unmaimed Abélard—an Abélard who identified himself with, and endeavoured proudly to excuse, the lover of Heloise—we should be reminded of many extenuating elements; the repugnance of Heloise, the stupid anti-matrimonialism of the hierarchy, the current estimate of an unconsecrated liaison, and so forth. Even as it is, Abélard perceives no selfishness, no want of resolution, in his action. ‘Out of compassion for his great anxiety,’ he says, he approached Fulbert on the question of a private marriage. The canon consented, though secretly retaining his intention of taking a bloody revenge, Abélard thinks; and the master hastened once more to Brittany for his bride.
Abélard probably flattered himself that he had found an admirable outlet from his narrow circumstances. Fulbert’s conscience would be salved by the Church’s blessing on their love; the hierarchy would have no matrimonial impediment to oppose to his advancement; Paris would give an indulgent eye to what it would regard as an amiable frailty, if not a grace of character. Unfortunately for his peace, Heloise energetically repulsed the idea of marriage. The long passage in which Abélard gives us her objections is not the least interesting in the ‘Story.’
‘She asked,’ he writes, ‘what glory she would win from me, when she had rendered me inglorious, and had humbled both me and her. How great a punishment the world would inflict on her if she deprived it of so resplendent a light: what curses, what loss to the Church, what philosophic tears, would follow such a marriage. How outrageous, how pitiful it was, that he whom nature had created for the common blessing should be devoted to one woman, and plunged in so deep a disgrace. Profoundly did she hate the thought of a marriage which would prove so humiliating and so burdensome to me in every respect.’
Then follows an elaborate, rhetorical discourse on the disadvantages of matrimony, with careful division and subdivision, arguments from reason, from experience, from authority, and all the artifices of rhetoric and dialectics. That the learned Heloise did urge many of its curious points will scarcely be doubted, but as a careful and ordered piece of pleading against matrimony it has an obvious ulterior purpose. St. Paul is the first authority quoted; then follow St. Jerome, Theophrastus, and Cicero. She (or he) then draws an animated picture of the domestic felicity of a philosopher, reminding him of servants and cradles, infant music and the chatter of nurses, the pressing throng of the family and the helplessness of the little ones. The example of monks, of Nazarites, and of philosophers is impressively urged; and if he will not hesitate, as ‘a cleric and a canon,’ to commit himself ‘irrevocably to domestic joy,’ at least let him remember his dignity as a philosopher. The sad fate of the married Socrates is adduced, together with the thunder and rain incident. Finally, she is represented as saying that it is ‘sweeter to her and more honourable to him that she should be his mistress rather than his wife,’ and that she prefers to be united to him ‘by love alone, not by the compulsion of the marriage vow.’
When the letter containing this curious passage reached Heloise, nearly twenty years after the event, she, an abbess of high repute for holiness, admitted its correctness, with the exception that ‘a few arguments had been omitted in which she set love before matrimony and freedom before compulsion.’ Holy abbess writing to holy abbot, she calls God to witness that ‘if the name of wife is holier, the name of friend, or, if he likes, mistress or concubine, is sweeter,’ and that she ‘would rather be his mistress than the queen of a Cæsar.’ They who disregard these things in sitting in judgment on that famous liaison are foredoomed to error.