Peter Abélard

by Joseph McCabe

She wishes she could make satisfaction to God for her sin, but, ‘if I must confess the true infirmity of my wretched soul, how can I appease Him, when I am always accusing Him of the deepest cruelty for this affliction?’ There is yet a further depth that she must lay bare to her father confessor and her spouse. How can there be question of penance ‘when the mind still retains the thought of sinning, and is inflamed again with the old longing? So sweet did I find the pleasures of our loving days, that I cannot bring myself to reject them, nor banish them from my memory. Wheresoever I go they thrust themselves upon my vision, and enkindle the old desire. Even when I sleep they torment me with their fancied joy. Even during the Mass, when our prayer should be purest, the dreadful vision of those pleasures so haunts my soul that I am rather taken up with them than with prayer. I ought to be lamenting what I have done; I am rather lamenting what I miss. Not only our actions, but the places and the times are so bound up with the thought of thee in my mind, that night and day I am repeating all with thee in spirit. The movement of body reveals my thoughts at times; they are betrayed in unguarded speech. Oh, woe is me!... Not knowing my hypocrisy, people call me “chaste.” They deem bodily integrity a virtue, whereas virtue resides in the mind, not the body.’ Moreover, virtue should be practised out of love for God, whereas ‘God knows that in every part of my life I have more dread of offending thee than Him; I have a greater desire to please thee than Him.’ Let him not deceive himself with trust in her prayers, but rather help her to overcome herself. And the poor woman, the nobility of her soul hidden from her and crushed under the appalling ethical ignorance and perverse ordering of her times, ends with a plaintive hope that she may yet, in spite of all, find some corner in heaven that will save her from the abyss.

We have here the passages which have made Heloise an heroine in erotic circles for so many centuries. On these words, isolated from their context of religious horror and self-accusation, have Bussy-Rabutin, and Pope, and the rest, erected their gaudy structures; on them is grounded the parallel with Marianne Alcoforado, and Rousseau’s Julie, and so many other women who have meditated sin. Bayle has carried his Pyrrhonism so far as to doubt that ‘bodily integrity’ which she claims for herself with so little boasting; Chateaubriand, with broader and truer judgment, finds in the letter the mirroring of the soul of a good woman.

There can be little doubt that the optimism of Chateaubriand has for once come nearer to the truth than the cynicism of Bayle. The decadent admirers of Heloise forget three circumstances which should have diminished their equivocal adoration: the letter is from a wife to her husband, from a penitent to her spiritual guide—women say such things every day in the confessional, even in this very sensitive age—from a thoughtful woman to a man whom she knew to be dead to every breath of sensual love. There is no parallel to such a situation.

Further, it is now obvious that the romancists have done injustice to the soul of Heloise in their isolation of her impassioned phrases. She objectifies her love: she is not wholly merged in it. She never loses sight of its true position in her actual life. It is an evil, a temptation, a torment—she would be free from it. Yet she is too rational a thinker to turn to the easy theory of an outward tempter. It is part of herself, a true outgrowth of the nature God has given her; and between the voice of nature and the voice of conscience, complicated by the influence of conventual tradition and written law, her soul is rent with a terrific struggle. A modern confessor with a knowledge of physiology—there are a few such—could have led her into paths of peace without difficulty. There was no sin in her.

It is impossible to say that Abélard sails faultlessly through these troubled waters, but his answer to her on this point is true and sound in substance. ‘God grant that it be so in thy soul as thou hast written,’ he says in his next letter. It is true that he is chiefly regarding her humility, and that he does not shed the kindly light of human wisdom on her soul which an earlier Abélard would have done; yet we can imagine what St. Bernard or Robert d’Arbrissel would have answered to such an outpouring. However, apart from the happy moderation of this reply, Abélard’s third letter only increases our sympathy with this woman who wanders in the desert of the twelfth century of the Christian era. The wild cry of the suffering heart has startled him. He becomes painfully ingenious in defending Providence and the monastic or Buddhistic view of life. As to his death, why should she be moved so strongly? ‘If thou hadst any trust in the divine mercy towards me, the more grievous the afflictions of this life seem to thee the more wouldst thou desire to see me freed from them! Thou knowest of a certainty that whoever will deliver me from this life will deliver me from a heavy penalty. What I may incur hereafter I know not, but there is no uncertainty as to that which I escape.’ And again, when he comes to her accusations of Providence: if she would follow him to ‘the home of Vulcan,’ why cannot she follow him quietly to heaven? As to her saying that God spared them in their guilt and smote them in their wedded innocence, he denies the latter point. They were not innocent. Did they not have conjugal relations in the holy nunnery of the Virgin at Argenteuil?[23] Did he not profanely dress her in the habit of a nun when he took her secretly to Pallet? Flushed with the success of his apology for Providence, the unlucky abbot goes from bathos to bathos. There was not merely justice but love in the divine ruling. They had merited punishment, but had, ‘on the contrary,’ been rescued from the ‘vile and obscene pleasures’ of matrimony, from the ‘mud and mire,’ and so forth. His mutilation was a skilful operation on the part of Providence ‘to remove the root of all vice and sordidness from him, and make him fitter for the service of the altar.’ ‘I had deserved death, and I have received life. Do thou, then, unite with me in thanksgiving, my inseparable companion, who hast shared both my sin and my reward.’ How fortunate it was that they married! ‘For if thou hadst not been joined to me in matrimony, it might easily have happened that thou wouldst have remained in the world’—the one thing that would have saved her from utter desolation. ‘Oh, how dread a loss, how lamentable an evil it had been, if in the seeking of carnal pleasure thou hadst borne a few children in pain to the world, whereas thou now bearest so great a progeny with joy to heaven.’ Again the ‘mud and mire,’ and the thanksgiving. He even lends his pen, in his spiritual ecstasy, to the writing of this fearful calumny against himself: ‘Christ is thy true lover, not I; all that I sought in thee was the satisfaction of my miserable pleasure.’ Her passions are, like the artificially stimulated ones of the deacons in Gibbon and of Robert d’Arbrissel, a means of martyrdom. He had been spared all this, she had plaintively written; on the contrary, he urges, she will win more merit and reward than he.

I have given a full summary of the long epistle, because its psychological interest is great. We have seen the gradual transformation of Abélard—the steps in his ‘conversion’—from chapter to chapter. This letter marks the deepest stage of his lapse into Bernardism.[24] It offers an almost unprecedented contrast to the Abélard of 1115. And this is the man, I may be pardoned for repeating, who is held up by ecclesiastical writers (even such as Newman) to the blushes of the ages. Perhaps the age is not far off that will sincerely blush over him—not for his personal defects.

Heloise was silenced. Whether the pious dissertation had really influenced her, or the proud utterance of her plaint had relieved her, or she closed in upon her heart after such a reply, it would be difficult to say. Her next letter is calm, erudite, dialectical. ‘To her lord as to species, her beloved in person’ is the quaint heading of the epistle. She will try to keep her pen within due bounds in future, but he knows the saying about ‘the fulness of the heart.’ Nevertheless, ‘just as a nail is driven out by a new one, so it is with thoughts.’ He must help her to dwell on other things. She and her nuns beg him to write a new rule for them and a history of the monastic life. There are points in the Rule of St. Benedict which are peculiarly masculine; she discusses them in early mediæval style. She would like her nuns to be permitted to eat meat and drink wine. There is less danger in giving wine to women; and she naïvely quotes (from Macrobius) Aristotle’s crude speculation on the subject. Then follows a long dissertation on wine, temperance, and intemperance, bristling with proofs and weighty authorities. Briefly, she quarrels with the ascetic view of life. She happily avoids the hard sayings in which Christ urges it on every page of the Gospels, and voices the eternal compromise of human nature. Who may become Abélard’s successor as their spiritual guide, she does not know. Let him appoint a rule of life for them, which will guard them from unwise interference, and let it concede a little in the way of soft clothing, meat, wine, and other suspected commodities.

Abélard complies willingly, quite entering into the spirit of the nail theory. ‘I will make a brief and succinct reply to thy affectionate request, dear sister,’ he begins, at the head of a very long and very curious sketch of the history of monasticism. It is a brilliant proof of Abélard’s erudition, relatively to his opportunities, but at the same time an illustration of the power of constructing most adequate ‘explanations’ without any reference to the real agencies at work.

In a later letter Abélard drew up the rule of life which had been asked. It follows the usual principles and tendencies of such documents. It offers, however, no little psychological interest in connection with the modifications which the abbess has desired. The dialectician feels a logical reluctance to compromise, and the fervent monk cannot willingly write down half measures. Yet the human element in him has a sneaking sympathy with the plea of the abbess, and, with much explanation and a fond acceptance of Aristotelic theories, the compromise is effected. To the manuscript of this letter a later hand has added a smaller and more practical rule. This is generally attributed to Heloise herself, and is certainly the work of some early abbess of the Paraclete. It supplements Abélard’s scheme of principles and general directions by a table of regulations—as to beds, food, dress, visitors, scandals, etc.—of a more detailed character.

The closing letter of the famous series is one addressed by Abélard to ‘the virgins of the Paraclete’ on the subject of ‘the study of letters.’ It is from this epistle that we learn—as we do also from a letter of Venerable Peter of Cluny—of Heloise’s linguistic acquirements. The nuns are urged to undertake the study of the Scriptural tongues, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and are reminded that they have ‘a mother who is versed in these three languages.’ There is reason to think that neither master nor pupil knew much Greek or Hebrew.