by Will Durant
The three years that he spent there were as happy as any that he could now know. Probably the lectures that he gave to those eager students are preserved and reshaped in two books, one called Theologia Christiana, the other simply Theologia. Their doctrine was orthodox, but an age still a stranger to most of Greek philosophy was a bit shocked to find in them so many laudatory references to pagan thinkers, and a suggestion that Plato too had in some degree enjoyed divine inspiration.30 He could not believe that all these wonderful pre-Christian minds had missed salvation;31 God, he insisted, gives His love to all peoples, Jews and heathen included.32 Abélard impenitently returned to the defense of reason in theology, and argued that heretics should be restrained by reason rather than by force.33 Those who recommend faith without understanding are in many cases seeking to cover up their inability to teach the faith intelligibly:34 here was a barb that must have pierced some skins! In attempting a rationale of Christianity Abélard might seem to have dared no more than what Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas would essay after him; but whereas even the brave Thomas would leave the Trinity, and the creation in time, to a faith beyond or above reason, Abélard sought to embrace the most mystic doctrines of the Church within the grasp of reason.
The audacity of the enterprise, and the sharpness of his reviving wit, brought him new enemies. Probably referring to Bernard of Clairvaux, and Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensian Order, he writes:
Certain new apostles in whom the world put great faith ran hither and yon… shamelessly slandering me in every way they could, so that in time they succeeded in drawing down upon my head the scorn of many having authority…. God is my witness that whensoever I learned that a new assemblage of the clergy was convened, I believed that it was done for the express purpose of my condemnation.35
Perhaps to silence such criticism he abandoned his teaching, and accepted an invitation to be the abbot of the monastery of St. Gildas in Brittany (1125?); more likely the politic Suger had arranged the transfer in the hope of quieting the storm. It was at once a promotion and an imprisonment. The philosopher found himself amid a “barbarous” and “unintelligible” population, among monks “vile and untamable,” who openly lived with concubines.36 Resenting his reforms, the monks put poison in the chalice from which he drank at Mass; this failing, they bribed his servant to poison his food; another monk ate the food and “straightway fell dead”;37 but Abélard is our sole authority here. He fought this battle bravely enough, for, with some interruptions, he remained in this lonely post for eleven years.
IV. THE LETTERS OF HELOÏSE
He had an interlude of moderate happiness when Suger decided to use for other purposes than a nunnery the house at Argenteuil. Since her separation from Abélard Héloïse had so devoted herself there to her duties as a nun that she had been made prioress, and had won “such favor in the eyes of all… that the bishops loved her as a daughter, the abbots as a sister, and the laity as a mother.” Learning that Héloïse and her nuns were looking for new quarters, Abélard offered them the oratory and buildings of “the Paraclete.” He went in person to help establish them there, and frequently visited them to preach to them and the villagers who had settled near by. Gossip murmured “that I, who of old could scarcely endure to be parted from her whom I loved, was still swayed by the delights of earthly lust.”38
It was during his troubled abbacy at St. Gildas that he composed his autobiography—Historia calamitatum mearum (1133?). We do not know its motive; it assumed the guise of an essay in consolation offered to a plaintive friend, “so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth naught”; but apparently it was intended for the world, as both a moral confession and a theological defense. An old but unverifiable tradition says that a copy of it came to Héloïse, and that she wrote this astonishing reply:
To her master, nay father, to her husband, nay brother: his handmaid, nay daughter, his spouse, nay sister: to Abélard, Héloïse. Your letter written to a friend for his comfort, beloved, was lately brought to me by chance…. Which things I deem that no one can read or hear with dry eyes, for they renewed in fuller measure my griefs…. In His name Who still protects thee… in the name of Christ, as His handmaids and thine, we beseech thee to deign to inform us by frequent letters of those shipwrecks in which thou still art tossed, that thou mayest have us, at least, who alone have remained to thee as partners in thy grief or joy….
Thou knowest, dearest—all men know—what I have lost in thee…. Obeying thy command, I changed both my habit and my heart, that I might show thee to be the possessor of both my body and my mind…. Not for the pledge of matrimony, nor for any dowry, did I look…. And if the name of wife appears more sacred and valid, sweeter to me is ever the word friend, or, if thou be not ashamed, concubine or whore…. I call God to witness, if Augustus, ruling over the whole world, were to deem me worthy of the honor of marriage, and to confirm the whole world to me, to be ruled by me forever, dearer to me and of greater dignity would it seem to be called thy strumpet than his empress….
For who among kings or philosophers could equal thee in fame? What kingdom or city or village did not burn to see thee? Who, I ask, did not hasten to gaze upon thee when thou appearedst in public?… What wife, what maiden did not yearn for thee in thine absence, nor burn in thy presence? What queen or powerful lady did not envy me my joys and my bed?…
Tell me one thing only if thou canst: why, after our conversion [to the religious life], which thou alone didst decree, I am fallen into such neglect and oblivion with thee that I am neither refreshed by thy speech and presence, nor comforted by a letter in thine absence. Tell me one thing only, if thou canst, or let me tell thee what I feel, nay, what all suspect: concupiscence joined thee to me rather than affection…. When, therefore, what thou hadst desired ceased, all that thou hadst exhibited at the same time failed. This, most beloved, is not mine only but the conjecture of all…. Would that it seemed thus to me only, and thy love found others to excuse it, by whom my grief might be a little quieted.
Attend, I beseech thee, to what I ask…. While I am cheated of thy presence, at least by written words—whereof thou hast abundance-present the sweetness of thine image…. I deserved more from thee, having done all things for thee… I, who as a girl was allured to the asperity of monastic conversion… not by religious devotion, but by thy command alone…. No reward for this may I expect from God, for the love of Whom it is well known that I did not anything….
And so in His name to Whom thou hast offered thyself, before God I beseech thee that in whatsoever way thou canst thou restore to me thy presence by writing to me some word of comfort…. Farewell, my all.39
Abélard was physiologically incapacitated from responding to such passion in kind. The reply that tradition assigns to him is a reminder of religious vows: “To Héloïse his dearly beloved sister in Christ, Abélard her brother in the same.” He counsels her to accept their misfortunes humbly, as a cleansing and saving punishment from God. He asks for her prayers, bids her assuage her grief with the hope of their reunion in heaven, and begs her to bury him, when he is dead, in the grounds of the Paraclete. Her second letter repeats her fond impieties: “I have ever feared to offend thee rather than God, I seek to please thee more than Him…. See how unhappy a life I must lead, if I endure all these things in vain, having no hope of reward in the future. For a long time thou, like many others, hast been deceived by my simulation, so as to mistake hypocrisy for religion.”40 He answers that Christ, not he, truly loved her: “My love was concupiscence, not love; I satisfied my wretched desires in thee, and this was all that I loved…. Weep for thy Saviour, not for thy seducer; for thy Redeemer, not for thy defiler.”41 And he composes a touching prayer which he asks her to recite for him. Her third letter shows her resigned to the earthly death of his love; she asked him now only for a new rule by which she and her nuns might live properly the religious life. He complied, and drew up for them a kind
ly moderate code. He wrote sermons for their edification, and sent these compositions to Héloïse over a tender signature: “Farewell in the Lord to His servant, once dear to me in the world, now most dear in Christ.” In his own broken heart he still loved her.
Are these famous letters genuine? The difficulties leap to the eye. The first letter of Héloïse purports to follow upon his Historia calamitatum, which records several visits of Abélard to Héloïse at the Paraclete; yet she complains that he has ignored her. Possibly the Historia was issued in installments, and only the earlier parts preceded the letter. The bold carnality of certain passages seems incredible in a woman whose religious devotion through fourteen years had already earned her the high and general regard which we find attested by Peter the Venerable as well as by Abélard. There are artifices of rhetoric in these letters, and pedantic quotations from the classics and the Fathers, which would hardly occur to a mind sincerely feeling love or piety or remorse. The oldest manuscripts of the letters date from the thirteenth century. Jean de Meung appears to have translated them from Latin into French in 1285.42 We may provisionally conclude that they are among the most brilliant forgeries in history, unreliable in fact, but an imperishable part of the romantic literature of France.43
V. THE CONDEMNED
We do not know when or how Abélard escaped from the dignities and trials of his abbacy. We find John of Salisbury reporting that in 1136 he had attended Abélard’s lectures on Mont Ste.-Geneviève. Nor do we know by what license he had resumed his teaching; perhaps he had asked none. It may be that some flouting of Church discipline set ecclesiastics against him, and by a devious route led to his final fall.
If emasculation had unmanned him there is no sign of it in the works that have transmitted to us the substance of his teaching. It is difficult to find explicit heresy in them, but easy to discover passages that must have made churchmen fret. In a book of moral philosophy entitled Scito te ipsum (Know Thyself) he argued that sin lies not in the act but in the intention; no act—not even killing—is sinful in itself. So a mother, having too little clothing to warm her babe, pressed it against her bosom and unwittingly suffocated it; she killed the thing she loved, and was properly punished by the law to make other women more careful; but in the eyes of God she was sinless. Furthermore, that there should be sin, the agent must violate his own moral conscience, not merely that of others. Hence the killing of Christian martyrs was not a sin in Romans who felt such persecution necessary to the preservation of their state or of a religion which seemed to them true. Nay, “those even who persecuted Christ or His followers, whom they considered it their duty to persecute, are said to have sinned in action; but they would have committed a graver fault if, contrary to their conscience, they had spared them.”44 All this might be logical as well as irritating; but on such a theory the whole doctrine of sin as a violation of God’s law threatened to go up in a haze of casuistry about intentions; who but a few Pauls would admit that he had acted against his own conscience? Of the sixteen excerpts for which Abélard was condemned in 1141, six were taken from this book.
What disturbed the Church more than any specific heresy in Abélard was his assumption that there were no mysteries in the faith, that all dogmas should be capable of rational explanation. Was he not so drunk with the lees of logic that he had dared to connect it with the Logos, the Word of God, as a science almost divine?45 Granted that this seductive teacher arrived by unorthodox methods at orthodox conclusions; how many immature minds, infected by him with the logic-chopping germ, must have been, by his specious pros and cons, unsettled on the way! If he had been the only one of his kind he might have been left untouched, in the hope that he would not take too long to die. But he had hundreds of eager followers; and there were other teachers—William of Conches, Gilbert de la Porrée, Bérenger of Tours —who were also summoning the faith to trial by reason. How long, on this procedure, could the Church maintain that unity and fervor of religious belief on which the moral and social order of Europe seemed to rest? Already one of Abélard’s pupils, Arnold of Brescia, was fomenting revolution in Italy.
Probably it was considerations like these that finally brought St. Bernard into open war with Abélard. The eager watchdog of the faith scented the wolf at the flock, and led the pack to the hunt. He had long looked with distrust upon the prowling, invading, audacious intellect; to seek knowledge except as ministering to sanctity seemed to him plain paganism; to attempt to explain the sacred mysteries by reason was impiety and folly; and the same rationalism that began by explaining those mysteries would end by desecrating them. The saint was not truculent; when (1139) William of St. Thierry, a monk of Reims, called his attention to the dangers in Abélard’s teaching, and begged him to denounce the philosopher, he put the monk off and did nothing. Abélard himself precipitated matters by writing to the archbishop of Sens, asking that at the coming church council there he should be given an opportunity to defend himself against the charges of heresy that were being circulated about him. The archbishop agreed, not unwilling to have his see become the cynosure of the Christian world; and to ensure a good fight he invited Bernard to attend. Bernard refused, saying that in the dialectical game he would be “a mere child” against an Abélard trained in logic through forty years. But he wrote to several bishops, urging them to attend and defend the faith:
Peter Abélard is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether. He ascends to the heavens and descends even to the abyss; nothing may hide from him!… Not content to see things through a glass darkly, he must behold all things face to face…. He savors of Arius when he speaks of the Trinity, of Pelagius when he speaks of grace, of Nestorius when he speaks of the person of Christ.‘ … The faith of the righteous believes, it does not dispute. But this man has no mind to believe what his reason has not previously argued.46
Bernard’s allies, pleading their own weakness, prevailed upon him to attend. When Abélard arrived at Sens (June, 1140) he found the public mood, as at Soissons nineteen years before, so set against him by the mere presence and hostility of Bernard that he hardly dared appear in the streets. The archbishop realized his dream; for a week Sens seemed the center of the world; the king of France was present with his ceremonious court; scores of church dignitaries were on hand; and Bernard, crippled with rheumatism and stern with sanctity, overawed all. Some of these prelates had felt the sting, in person or collectively, of Abélard’s attacks upon the shortcomings of the clergy, the immorality of priests and monks, the sale of indulgences, the invention of bogus miracles. Convinced that the judgment of the council would condemn him, Abélard appeared at its first session, announced that he would accept none but the Pope as his judge, and left the assembly and the town. The council was not sure, after this appeal from it, that it could legally try Abélard; Bernard reassured it; and it proceeded to condemn sixteen propositions from Abélard’s books, including his definition of sin, and his theory of the Trinity as the power, wisdom, and love of the one God.
Almost penniless, Abélard set out for Rome to lay his case before the Pope. Age and infirmity retarded him. Reaching the monastery of Cluny in Burgundy, he was received with compassion and solicitude by Peter the Venerable, and rested there a few days. Meanwhile Innocent II issued a decree confirming the sentence of the council, imposing perpetual silence upon Abélard, and ordering his confinement in a monastery. Abélard wished nevertheless to continue his pilgrimage; Peter dissuaded him, saying that the Pope would never decide against Bernard. Weary to physical and spiritual exhaustion, Abélard yielded. He became a monk at Cluny, and hid himself in the obscurity of its walls and its ritual. He edified his fellow monks by his piety, his silence, and his prayers. He wrote to Héloïse—whom he never saw again—a touching profession of faith in the teachings of the Church. He composed, probably for her, some of the most beautiful hymns in medieval literature. One “Plaint” ascribed to him is formally a Lament of David for
Jonathan, but any reader will catch tender overtones in it:
Vel confossus pariter
morerer feliciter
cum, quid amor faciat,
maius hoc non habeat,
et me post te vivere
mori sit assidue;
nec ad vitam anima
satis sit dimidia….
Do quietem fidibus;
vellem ut et planctibus
sic possum et fletibus
Laesis pulsu manibus,
raucis planctu vocibus,
deficit et spiritus.47
If I might lie in one same grave with thee,
Happily would I die,
Since of all gifts that earthly love can give
No greater boon know I.
That I should live when thou art cold and dead
Would be unceasing death;
Nor in my wraith would half a soul suffice
To life, or half a breath.
I let the harp lie still.
Would that I might
So still my tears and plaints!
My hands are sore with striking,
Sore my throat
With grief. My spirit faints.
Soon thereafter he fell ill, and his kindly Abbot sent him to the priory of St. Marcel near Châlons for a change of air. There, on April 21, 1142, he died, aged sixty-three. He was buried in the priory chapel; but Héloïse reminded Peter the Venerable that Abélard had asked to be interred at the Paraclete. The good Abbot brought the body to her himself, tried to comfort her by speaking of her dead lover as the Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle of his time, and left with her a letter rich in Christian tenderness:
