In the increasing bitterness of life at St. Gildas Abélard now naturally sought consolation in the new abbey of the Paraclete. His relation to Heloise personally remained marked by a reserve which hurt her, but his visits to the abbey became more frequent and prolonged. It appears that this loosened the tongues of some foolish people, and Abélard took up the accusation, or insinuation, with his usual gravity. His apology is often described as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘painful’; and one certainly cannot take very seriously his dissertation on Origen’s misdeed and the Oriental custom of eunuch-guardians. More interesting is the second part, in which he urges many precedents of the familiarity of saintly men with women. His favourite saint, Jerome, afforded a conspicuous illustration; and others were not wanting. It is too early in the history of theology to find the example of Christ adduced. A modern apologist could greatly extend the list, beginning with Francis of Assisi (and Clare) and ending with Francis de Sales (and Madame de Chantal). Perhaps Abélard’s own case is the clearest proof that even masked sexual feeling may be entirely absent from such attachments. Those who care to analyse them will probably find the greater refinement, gentleness, sympathy, and admiration of women to be quite adequate to explain such saintly intimacies, without any subtle research into the psychology of sex. However, the complaint seems to have moderated the abbot’s fervour for a time; and indeed events soon became absorbingly interesting at St. Gildas.
The frequent journeys to Champagne increased the bitterness of his monks. Then he had a serious accident, nearly breaking his neck in a fall from his horse. When he recovered, he found that his monks had entered upon a most dangerous stage of conspiracy. The accident seems to have suggested an idea to them, and they determined to rid themselves of an abbot who was worse than useless. They even put poison in the wine which he was to use in the Mass one morning, but he discovered the fact in time. On another occasion he had an adventure which may have suggested an important incident in M. Zola’s Rome. He had gone to Nantes to visit the count in an illness, and was staying with his brother Dagobert, who was a canon in the cathedral. When the time came for the abbot and his monastic companion to sup, Abélard had, providentially, lost his appetite—or suspected something. The monk supped—and died. As Abélard’s servant disappeared after the meal, it was natural to suppose that he had been paid by the ferocious monks to poison their abbot. ‘How many times did they try to do away with me by poison!’ he exclaimed. But he lived apart from them, and succeeded in frustrating the attempt. Then they hired robbers to apply their professional skill to the task. Whenever the monks heard that he was going anywhere, they planted a few cut-throats on the route.
Abélard had no great love for this Dionysiac existence, and he resolved to make a bold effort at reform. He summoned the monks in solemn chapter, and hurled the sentence of excommunication at the leaders of the revolt. It sat more lightly on their shoulders than the abbot anticipated, and he proceeded to call in the help of a papal legate. The Duke of Brittany and several neighbouring bishops were invited to the function, and the sentence of excommunication and expulsion from the abbey was repeated with impressive ceremony. The chief rebels were thus restricted to following the abbot’s movements without—in company, apparently, of the hired assassins of the monks and the equally dangerous servants of the lord of the manor—and Abélard devoted his attention to reforming the remainder of the community. But the old abbey was past redemption. ‘The remaining monks began to talk, not of poison, but of cutting my throat,’ he says. The circle of knives was drawing closer upon him, within and without, and he saw that it would be impossible to guard his life much longer. He gave up the struggle, and fled from the abbey. There is a local tradition which tells of a secret flight by night through a subterranean passage leading down to the sea. Abélard at least intimates there was little dignity in his retirement, when he says: ‘under the guidance of a certain noble of the district I succeeded, with great difficulty, in escaping from the abbey.’
Where Abélard found refuge from his murderous ‘sons,’ and where he spent the next three or four years, it is difficult to say. He probably moved from place to place, generally remaining in the neighbourhood of Rhuys, but occasionally journeying to Champagne or accepting an invitation to preach at some special festival. The ‘certain noble’—an uncertain one, as the phrase usually implies—would be likely to give him immediate hospitality; and the Count of Nantes was friendly, and would find Abélard a graceful addition at his board. Then there was the family château at Pallet, and the house of his brother Dagobert at Nantes. We seem to find Abélard’s boy, Astrolabe, under the care of this brother later on. Abélard would at all events see much of him, and assist in educating him, either at Pallet or Nantes. The son had, apparently, not inherited the gifts of his parents. An obscure mention of his death in a later necrologium merely indicates the close of a correct but ordinary ecclesiastical career.
But though Abélard lacked neither wealth, nor honour, nor home, he speaks of his condition as a very pitiable one. Deutsch has hazarded the conjecture that the monks of St. Gildas really desired an abbot who would be generally absent. It seems rather that they wanted an abbot who would share their comfortable theory of life and at the same time have influence to enrich the abbey, discontinue the paying of tribute, and induce a higher authority to restrain their tyrannical neighbours. They were therefore naturally inflamed when Abélard deserted the immediate concerns of the abbey, yet remained near enough to secure his revenue out of its income. He retained his title (we find no successor appointed until after his death), and as he speaks of wealth, we must suppose that he somehow continued to obtain his income. The Count of Nantes would probably support his cause as long as he remained in Brittany. But, at the same time, this detained him in the constant danger of assassination. Wherever he went, he apprehended bribery and corruption, poison and poniards. ‘My misery grew with my wealth,’ he says, and ‘I find no place where I may rest or live.’ His classical reading promptly suggests the parallel of Damocles.
It was in these circumstances that Abélard wrote the famous letter which he entitled the ‘Story of my Calamities.’ The passage I have just quoted occurs in its closing paragraph. It is an invaluable document for the purpose of the great master’s biography. Without it, the life of Abélard would occupy only a score of pages. His contemporaries had numbers of monastic followers and admirers who were eager to write their deeds in letters of gold. The little band of friends who stood around Abélard in his final struggle were scattered, cowed, or murdered, by triumphant Bernardism. At the mention of Bernard’s name Christendom crossed itself and raised its eyes to the clouds: at the mention of the ‘Peripatetic of Pallet’ it closed its pious lips, forgetful, or ignorant, of the twenty years of profound sorrow for the one grave delinquency of his life. If the sins of youth are to leave an indelible stain, one is forced to recall that Augustine had been a greater sinner, and that the Canon of the Church contains the names of converted prostitutes, such as Mary of Magdala and Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. It may be thought by some Catholics that, in the uncertainty of human judgment, there is a providential criterion given in the working of miracles; but, once more, even the fifth century only credited St. Augustine with two miracles. And if intention to serve the Church be all-important, Abélard has won high merit; or if effective service to the Church, then is his merit the greater, for the thirteenth century, in its construction of that theology and philosophy which the Church even now deems sufficient for the needs of the world, utterly rejected Bernardism, and borrowed its foundation from Pierre Abélard.
As a piece of literature the ‘Story’ lies under the disadvantage of being written in degenerate Latin. With all his classical reading, Abélard has not escaped the use of forms which gravely offend the classical taste. Perhaps John of Salisbury is superior to him in this respect; there have certainly been later theologians, such as Petavius, who have far surpassed him. But, apart from this limitation in form, it is as high above the many biographies and autobiographies of his contemporaries as he himself was above most of their writers. Abbot Suger’s autobiography is a piece of vulgar and crude self-advertisement beside it. It has not the mere chance immortality which honours such works as that of Suger, and which is wholly due to the zeal of the modern collector of ancient documents; it has the germ of immortality within it—the same soul that lives in the Confessions of Augustine: those who understand that soul will not add the Confession of Rousseau. And the confession of Abélard has this singular feature: it is written by a man to whom the former sinful self is dead in a way which was impossible to Augustine. That feature implies both advantages and disadvantages, but it at least gives a unique value and interest to the document.
We have throughout relied on and quoted this autobiography, so that an analysis of its contents would be superfluous. There remains, however, the interesting question of Abélard’s motive for writing it. It is ostensibly written as a letter, addressed to a friend who is in trouble, and merely intended to give him some consolation by a comparison of the sorrows of Abélard. No one will seriously question that this is only a rhetorical artifice. Probably it reached such a friend, but it was obviously written for ‘publication.’ In its sincere acknowledgment of whatever fault lay on his conscience, only striving to excuse where the intention was clearly good, that is, in the matter of his theological opinions, the letter must be regarded as a conciliatory document. Not only its elaborate construction, but its care in explaining how guiltless he was in the making of most of his enemies—Anselm, Alberic, Norbert, Bernard, and the monks of St. Denis and St. Gildas—impel us to think that it was intended for circulation in France. In a few years we shall find him in Paris once more. Deutsch believes that the ‘Story’ was written and circulated to prepare the way for his return, and this seems very probable. From ‘the ends of the earth’ his thoughts and hopes were being redirected towards Paris; it had availed him nothing to fly from it. But there were calumnious versions abroad of every step in his eventful life, and even Bernard sneered at his experience at St. Gildas. He would make an effort to regain the affection of some of his old friends, or to create new admirers.
Whatever may have been the aim of Abélard in writing his ‘Story,’ it had one immediate consequence of the first literary importance. Great of itself, it evoked a correspondence which is unique in the literature of the world. It fell into the hands of Abbess Heloise, and led to the writing of her famous Letters.