Peter Abélard

by Joseph McCabe

For if there is a seeming peace about the few months of life that still remained to the great teacher, it is the peace of the grave—the heavy peace that shrouds a dead ambition and a broken spirit, not the glad peace that adorns requited labour and successful love. Abélard enters upon a third stage of his existence, and the shadow of the tomb is on it. He becomes a monk; he centres all his thought on the religious exercises that, like the turns of the prayer wheel, write the long catalogue of merit in heaven.

In the abbey of Cluny, under the administration of Peter the Venerable, he found all that his soul desired in its final stage. The vast monastery had a community of four hundred and sixty monks. Older than its rival, Cîteaux, possessed of great wealth and one of the finest churches in France, it was eagerly sought by monastic aspirants. When Innocent II. came to France for support, Cluny sent sixty horses and mules to meet him, and entertained him and all his followers for eleven days. At an earlier date it had lodged pope, king, and emperor, with all their followers, without displacing a single monk. Yet with all its wealth and magnitude the abbey maintained a strict observance of the rule of St. Benedict. Peter was too cultured and humanistic[37] for the Cistercians, who often criticised the half-heartedness of his community. In point of fact a strict order and discipline were maintained in the abbey, and Abélard entered fervently into its life. From their beds of straw the monks would rise at midnight and proceed to the church, where they would chant their long, dirge-like matins, and remain in meditation until dawn. Work, study, and prayer filled up the long hours; and at night they would cast themselves down, just as they were, on the bags of straw, to rise again on the morrow for the same task. Such monks—they are rare now, though far from extinct—must be men of one idea—heaven. To that stage had Abélard sunk.

Years afterwards the brothers used to point out to visitors—for Abélard had left a repute for sanctity behind him—a great lime-tree under which he used to sit and read between exercises. Peter had gone so far as to make him prior of the studies of the brethren, so lightly did he hold the charge of heresy. The abbot has given us, in a later letter to Heloise, an enthusiastic picture, drawn from the purely Buddhist point of view, of Abélard’s closing days. With a vague allusion to this letter certain ecclesiastical writers represent Abélard as a sinner up to the time of the Council of Sens, and a convert and penitent in the brief subsequent period. In point of fact there was little change in the soul of the fallen man, beyond a weary resignation of his hope of cleansing the Church, involving, as this did, a more constant preoccupation with the world to come. The abbot says, in support of his declaration, that Abélard had cast a radiance on their abbey, that ‘not a moment passed but he was either praying or reading or writing or composing’; and again: ‘If I mistake not I never saw his equal in lowliness of habit and conduct, so much so that Germain did not seem more humble nor Martin poorer than he to those who were of good discernment.’ The ‘good discernment’ reminds us that we must not take at too literal a value this letter of comfort to the widowed abbess. Abélard had been an ascetic and a devout man since his frightful experience at Paris twenty-five years previously. With the fading of his interest in the things of earth, and in his sure consciousness of approaching death, his prayers would assuredly be longer and his indifference to comfort and honour more pronounced.

But we have a clear indication that there was no change in his thoughts, even in that last year, with regard to the great work of his life and the temper of his opponents. During the quiet months of teaching at Cluny, a certain ‘Dagobert and his nephew’ asked him for a copy of his dialectical treatise, one of his earliest writings. It is impossible to say whether this Dagobert was his brother at Nantes (where Astrolabe also seems to have lived) or a monastic ‘Brother Dagobert.’ Most probably it was the former, because he speaks of the effort it costs him, ill and weary of writing as he is, to respond to their ‘affection.’ He does not copy, but rewrites his dialectics, so that we have in the work his last attitude on his studies and his struggles. It is entirely unchanged. Jealousy, hatred, and ignorance are the sole sources of the hostility to his work. They say he should have confined himself to dialectics (as Otto von Freising said later); but he points out that his enemies quarrelled even with his exclusive attention to dialectics, firstly because it had no direct relation to faith, and secondly because it was indirectly destructive of faith. He has still the old enthusiasm for reason and for the deepening and widening of our natural knowledge. Both knowledge and faith come from God, and cannot contradict each other. It was the last gleam of the dying light, but it was wholly unchanged in its purity.

With the approach of spring the abbot sent the doomed man to a more friendly and familiar climate. Cluny had a priory outside the town of Chalon-sur-Saône, not far from the bank of the river. It was one of the most pleasant situations in Burgundy, in the mild valley of the Seine, which Abélard had learned to love. But the last struggle had exhausted his strength, and the disease, variously described as a fever and a disease of the skin, met with little resistance. He died on the 21st of April 1142, in the sixty-third year of his age.

How deeply he had impressed the monks of St. Marcellus during his brief stay with them becomes apparent in the later history, which recalls the last chapter in the lives of some of the most popular saints. It will be remembered that Abélard had, in one of his letters to Heloise, asked that his body might be buried at the Paraclete, ‘for he knew no place that was safer or more salutary for a sorrowing soul.’ Heloise informed the abbot of Cluny of the request, and he promised to see it fulfilled. But he found that the monks of St. Marcellus were violently opposed to the idea of robbing them of the poor body that had been hunted from end to end of France whilst the great mind yet dwelt in it. There have often been such quarrels, sometimes leading to bloodshed, over the bodies of the saints. However, the abbot found a means to steal the body from the monastery chapel in the month of November, and had it conveyed secretly, under his personal conduct, to the Paraclete.

We have a letter which was written by the abbot about this time to Heloise. I have already quoted the portion in which he consoles her with a picture of the edifying life and death of her husband. The first part of the letter is even more interesting in its testimony to the gifts and character of the abbess herself. Peter the Venerable was, it will be remembered, a noble of high origin, an abbot of great and honourable repute, a man of culture and sober judgment.

‘For in truth,’ he says, after an allusion to some gifts—probably altar-work—that she had sent him, ‘my affection for thee is not of recent growth, but of long standing. I had hardly passed the bounds of youth, hardly come to man’s estate, when the repute, if not yet of thy religious fervour, at least of thy becoming and praiseworthy studies, reached my ears. I remember hearing at that time of a woman who, though still involved in the toils of the world, devoted herself to letters and to the pursuit of wisdom, which is a rare occurrence.... In that pursuit thou hast not only excelled amongst women, but there are few men whom thou hast not surpassed.’ He passes to the consideration of her religious ‘vocation,’ in which, of course, he discovers a rich blessing. ‘These things, dearest sister in the Lord,’ he concludes, ‘I say by way of exhortation, not of flattery.’ Then, after much theological and spiritual discussion, he says: ‘It would be grateful to me to hold long converse with thee on these matters, because I not only take pleasure in thy renowned erudition, but I am even more attracted by that piety of which so many speak to me. Would that thou didst dwell at Cluny!’

This is the one woman (and wife, to boot) to whom Bernard could have referred in justification of his equivocal remark to a stranger that Abélard ‘busied himself with women.’ We have, however, little further record of the life of the unfortunate Heloise. Shortly after the body of her husband has been buried in the crypt of their convent-chapel, we find her applying to Peter of Cluny for a written copy of the absolution of Abélard. The abbot sent it; and for long years the ashes of the great master were guarded from profanation by this pitiful certificate of his orthodoxy. In the same letter Heloise thanks the abbot for a promise that the abbey of Cluny will chant the most solemn rites of the Church when her own death is announced to them; she also asks Peter’s favourable influence on behalf of Astrolabe, her son, who has entered the service of the Church.

Heloise survived her husband by twenty-one years. There is a pretty legend in the Chronicle of the Church of Tours that the tomb of Abélard was opened at her death and her remains laid in it, and that the arms of the dead man opened wide to receive her whose embrace the hard world had denied him in life. It seems to have been at a later date that their ashes were really commingled. At the Revolution the Paraclete was secularised, and the remains of husband and wife began a series of removals in their great sarcophagus. In 1817 they found a fitting rest in Père Lachaise.