It is a pious theory of the autobiographist himself that this mutilation led indirectly to his ‘conversion.’ There is undoubtedly much truth in this notion of an indirect occasioning of better thoughts and of an indirect influence being cast on his mind for life. Yet we of the later date, holding a truer view of the unity of human nature, and of the place that sex-influence occupies in its life, can see that the ‘conversion’ was largely a direct, physical process. We have, in a very literal sense, another man to deal with henceforward.
As Abélard lay on the bed of sickness, the conversion gradually worked onwards towards a critical decision. It is not clear that the mutilation would prove of itself an impediment to scholastic honour or ecclesiastical office, but the old life could not be faced again by one with so little strength and so keen a sensibility. ‘I pondered on the glory I had won and on the swift chance blow that had obscured it, nay, wholly extinguished it: on the just judgment of God by which I had been punished in the member that had sinned: on the justice of treachery coming from him whom I had myself betrayed: on the joy of my rivals at such a humiliation: on the endless sorrow this wound would inflict on my family and my friends: on the speed with which this deep disgrace would travel through the world. What path was open to me now? How could I ever walk abroad again, to be pointed at by every finger, ridiculed by every tongue, a monstrous spectacle to all?... In such sorry plight as I was, the confusion of shame rather than a devout conversion impelled me to seek refuge in the monastery.’
To this natural ‘confusion of shame’ we must look for an explanation of, not merely the folly, but the cruelty and selfishness, of Abélard’s proposal. It involved the burial of Heloise in a nunnery. No one could shrink more feelingly from the unnatural shade of the cloister than did Heloise, as Abélard must have known, but in his pain and despair he forgot the elementary dictates of love or of honour. In any other circumstances the act would be deemed brutal. Indeed, he wantonly increased the suffering of his young wife by ordering her to take the vows first. Twenty years afterwards she plaintively tells him the sorrow he gave her by such a command. ‘God knows,’ she says, ‘I should not have hesitated, at your command, to precede or to follow you to hell itself.’ She was ‘profoundly grieved and ashamed’ at the distrust which seemed to be implied in his direction. But hers was the love that ‘is stronger than death,’ and she complied without a murmur, making of her sunny nature one more victim on the altar of masculine selfishness.
Abélard has left us a dramatic picture of her taking the vows. It shows clearly that the love which impelled her to such a sacrifice was not the blind, child-like affection that is wholly merged in the stronger loved one, but the deep, true love that sees the full extent of the sacrifice demanded, and accepts it with wide-opened eyes. At the last moment a little group of friends surrounded her in the convent-chapel. The veil, blessed by the bishop, lay on the altar before them, and they were endeavouring to dissuade her from going forward to take it. She waved them aside—waved aside for the last time the thought of her child and the vision of a sun-lit earth—and took the fateful step towards the altar. Then, standing on the spot where the young nun generally knelt for the final thanksgiving to God, she recited with the tense fervour of a human prayer the words of Cornelia in Lucan:
‘O spouse most great,
O thou whose bed my merit could not share!
How hath an evil fortune worked this wrong
On thy dear head? Why hapless did I wed,
If this the fruit that my affection bore?
Behold the penalty I now embrace