Short-memoried lust and long-remembering love.
With an utter unconsciousness of his own baseness, Abelard recalls the arguments employed by Eloisa to dissuade him from the marriage insisted on by him solely from dread of the anger of Fulbert and the reproaches of the world. She invoked, he tells us, the name of every writer, Pagan and Christian, in whose pages are portrayed the drawbacks and disadvantages domestic life presents to a man of genius and ambition. Cicero, Theophrastus, St. Paul, St. Jerome, all are pressed into the service to prove that a man cannot attend both to a wife and to philosophy. “Where is he,” she asks, “that, wishing to dedicate himself to meditations upon the Scriptures or upon philosophy, can put up with the cries of the nursery, the songs of the nurse that lulls a babe to sleep, the perpetual coming and going of domestics?” Rich men can sometimes avoid these interruptions and inconveniences; but philosophers are never rich, and she cites Seneca to convince him that she would be a chain round his neck, a tether to his feet. The title of lover would be more honorable and more safe for him; and as for her, she cares not what she is called, so long as he loves her. Her sole ambition is to retain his affection by tenderness, and not by worldly ties. Finding him unconvinced—for Abelard well knew that such arguments would have no weight with Fulbert—she declared, with sobs and tears, that it was the one step to be taken if they wanted to destroy their happiness and to prepare for themselves a sorrow as profound and lasting as their love. After recalling this outburst of tender desperation, he observes, with the fine tranquillity of a truly critical spirit, that Eloisa thereby demonstrated, as the whole world has since acknowledged, that she was endowed with the gift of prophecy!
In order to understand and appreciate what some persons will perhaps consider the perverse and even unfeminine expostulations of Eloisa, it must be remembered that, in the twelfth century, marriage was supposed to disqualify a man for a career of distinction. The celibacy of the clergy, for which Hildebrand had battled so unremittingly, was now definitively established, and all who aspired to employment in or about the precincts of the Church had to sanction, by their practice, the slur thus passed upon women. When Abelard first met Eloisa he was not an ecclesiastic. But he was saturated with ecclesiastic ideas; and if he was to pursue his study and exposition of Theology, he could do so only under episcopal protection, which would never have entrusted the defence of spiritual truths to one who had openly contracted a carnal union. It is easy to perceive what immense value Abelard attached to the recognition of his powers, and to the establishment of his fame; nor is there any difficulty in surmising that he often expatiated to Eloisa on a theme so interesting to them both. It has been said—
Man dreams of fame, but woman wakes to love.
But, waking or dreaming, Eloisa thought only of Abelard’s glory, Abelard’s advancement. Her secret, unacknowleged love was to feed his fame, as the hidden root and unnoticed tendrils feed the swelling trunk, impelling it into blossom and leaf and fruit. Well might Mr. Cousin declare, when a discussion was once raised as to who is the greatest woman that ever lived, that Eloisa towers above all competitors. But for the self-obliterating tenderness of her heart, the self-asserting strength of Abelard’s intellect would long since have been forgotten. Fancy a man worrying himself to death in order to establish that he is not heterodox in his views concerning the reality of Universals, while such a woman offers him, in her own particular person, the sum and abstract of all that is worth having in the world!
Yet, in some sort, Abelard expiated his faults. I fail to see in him the passionate champion of free thought, which De Rémusat and others sometimes appear disposed to represent him, or it would be more easy to extend to him the indulgence which, for that reason, has to be yielded to a tortuous egotist like Voltaire, or to a cold-hearted sentimentalist like Rousseau. As far as I can see, he entertained certain metaphysical opinions, which, whether sound or otherwise, are not of the smallest practical importance, and upon which the dignity and happiness of mankind in no degree turn. Accused of heresy, he was condemned; and the condemnation was peculiarly wounding to his vanity. But he made his peace with the Church, and in one of the latest of his letters to Eloisa is particularly anxious to convince her that he has done so. No doubt it was not easy to battle with the strongly-organized Theology of the times; but if anyone should ask what Abelard was to do when accused of heresy, the answer might be that of the mother of Horatius, who, when asked, “Que voulez vous qu’il fasse contre trois?” replied: “Qu’il mourût!” Eloisa had died a thousand times over for his sake. Could he not die once for his precious Universals and his tenets on the Trinity, if he really thought them true, and so very important!
No; the only hold he has upon our indulgence is that time and suffering at length awakened in his heart a tardy tenderness for Eloisa, and inspired him with something like an appreciation of her unrivalled goodness. He handed over to her his refuge of the Paraclete; and when she wrote to him for comfort, for counsel, for spiritual explanations, he did not withhold them. He could not be so blind, or so unmindful of the past, as not to read between the lines, and not to perceive that under the exposition of the difficulties she was experiencing in directing the community of which she had become the head, there still palpitated the recollection of the earliest instruction she had received at his hands. Then he expounded Ovid. Now he comments on the Scriptures. But the master was the same, and the same the pupil; and over and over again the Abbess of the Paraclete recalls the niece of Fulbert. We feel that she almost invents doubts, that she multiplies scruples, and that she entangles herself in perplexities, in order that he may solve them. In a word, she is as unchangeably in love with him as ever. He is measured and circumspect in his replies; but a certain vein of spiritual tenderness underlies them, and we feel that his nature has grown nobler, and his heart is, at last, less pre-occupied with self. Perhaps he had discerned now, when it was too late, the value of a woman’s love, and the worthlessness of worldly notoriety. Before he died, he begged that his body might be carried to the Paraclete. Thither, accordingly, it was secretly transported and lovingly interred by her who, as the Chronicle of Tours says, “était veritablement son amie.”
For twenty years more, Eloisa lived on, a model of sanctity and wisdom. Even Villon, in one of his ballads, speaks of her as “la très sage Heloïse.” When she died, her sole request was that she might be laid by the side of Abelard. Her injunction was obeyed; and as her body was being lowered into the grave, that of Abelard was for an instant reanimated, so tradition affirms, and he opened his arms to receive her.—National Review.