Peter Abelard

by Helen Waddell

  “Chapter CXLVI. Quod idem peccatum non puniat Deus hic et in futuro; that God doth not punish the same sin here and hereafter.” The Q, he thought, was always a good initial for illumination: he laid down his pen and took a pencil to draw the great ellipse, lest he should forget and leave no place for Simon’s gold-leaf: then to please himself added the tail-piece like the tongue of a belt that turned the O into a Q, and as he drew, the tail-piece became the branch of a peartree with flowers on it, and suddenly there sat on it a long-tailed bird. The branch had curved along the line of script, and the bird thrust a jaunty tail between the hic and the futuro, this world and the next. That curve, thought Abelard, suddenly aware of what he drew, ought to be the tongue of a dragon with little flames leaping upon it, instead of peartree blossom and an impudent fowl, making light of the judgments of God. But perhaps it was the truth of his own mood that came out in what his hand unwittingly drew, and he began to ponder on the law of the human heart, that two years ago, when he made these notes which he was now copying, he had been more intimately concerned as to the nature and judgment of sin than now when for eighteen months he had been living in it, and that sin, moreover, the sin of fornication. He thrust the word at himself deliberately, but his mind took it indifferently: it fell away from him like a hailstone from armour. Fornication was the goblin mask they put on the sweetest sin of the seven. And his sin was not fornication. It was Heloise.

  He took up his pen again and turned to his rough draft. His notes had only the reference this time, and he reached for his Origen and began turning the pages. “The twenty-fourth chapter of Leviticus and the fifteenth verse. If a man curse his God, he shall bear his iniquity. But if he name the name of God, he shall die the death. What? Shall he who has cursed God escape the penalty of death, while he who has but named Him dies? Surely it is a graver fault to curse God than to name Him, even though to name Him in jest? Rather should he that has cursed the name of God be punished straightway: enough for him who names His name in wantonness and vanity to bear his sin. Now, that it is a graver sin to curse God than to name Him, we cannot doubt. It remains for us to show that it is a far graver thing to bear one’s sin, to have it about with one, than to pay the fine of death. For this death which is the penalty of sin, is the payment of that sin for which it is ordered to be inflicted. The sin is absolved by the pain of death, nor is there aught left for the finding of the Day of Judgment and the pain of the everlasting fire. But he who receives his sin, who has it about with him and companies with it and is purged by no penalty or pain: it passes over with him after death, and he who paid no debt in time shall pay the torments of eternity. You see, therefore, how much graver it is to bear a sin than to atone by death: for this death is given as an expiation or manumission; and before the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall no man, saith the prophet, be judged twice. Where there is no expiation, the sin remaineth, to be dealt with in the everlasting fires. I can summon you witnesses from the divine books, Reuben and Judah, speaking to their father Jacob, when they would have Benjamin with them to Egypt. For Reuben said to his father, ‘Slay my two sons if I bring not Benjamin back to thee.’ But Judah said, ‘If I bring him not unto thee, then let me bear the blame for ever.’ And Jacob, knowing that what Judah had promised was a far graver thing, did not entrust his son to Reuben, who had chosen the lighter penalty, but handed him to Judah, knowing how grave was his choice. Men are wont to complain against God and say: Why do the unrighteous suffer no ill in this life, and all distresses fall upon the lovers of God? They know not that the judgments of God are an abyss.”

  It was a strange and subtle and colourless world, thought Abelard, sprinkling sand upon his page, this world that Origen lived in: to read him after Augustine was like passing over from that warm bar of light into the grey north light of intellectual vision, and though Origen had his own high eloquence, it was a vibration like the vibration of stars on a night of frost. “And some have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” What high exaltation had driven him to it, or what torment of the hungry senses?

  “Procul a mea—Far from my house be thy frenzy, O goddess!”

  Gilles de Vannes had quoted it, when he first spoke of Origen, and had read him the Attis; but then had put Catullus from him, saying it was almost a blasphemy to speak of the mad priest of Cybele in the same breath with Origen, the noblest of all the Fathers; and that beside him Augustine ranted like a declaiming schoolboy, and Jerome droned like a cloister beehive.

  And yet, argued Abelard, intellectual eminence aside, had not Augustine chosen the better way, like St. Paul, to fight his body rather than disarm it? And was it not the heat and passion of the whole man, rather than the effortless austerity of the sterile man, that gave his prose its kindling power of fire? To which Gilles had gravely answered that it was natural for the northern races to prefer heat to light; and had then turned upon himself and declared that Abelard was right, that so long as men were in the body they must have the sacraments of bread and wine, and the Logos must become flesh: and then in that husky, disturbing voice of his had begun quoting the passage from the Tenth Book of the Confessions. “Late, late have I loved Thee, O Beauty most old and yet most new. . . Thou didst call and very loud and didst break through my deafness. Thou didst shine and my darkness was scattered. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace.”

  Abelard rose, and was restlessly ordering the litter of books and parchments on the table. He could not escape it. That word peace was the most dangerous to his tranquil indifference, his living satisfaction, the heaven of body and spirit that he had found in Heloise. He had described it to her once, recklessly adapting St. Peter Damian’s Paradise.

  “What they have they still desire, eager and yet satisfied.”

  —Avidi et semper pleni, quod habent desiderant.

  He had sung it to her one night before they slept, riding down to Brittany last June. They had halted for the night in open country on the Landes de Vion—he had of set purpose avoided the guesthouse of the abbey at Solesmes—and she had fallen asleep with little movements of her head against him, huddled in the hollow under his arm. But he had lain awake. The thing that he had rashly invoked was stronger than he: he could no more halt the inexorable procession of those tremendous verses than he could halt a procession carrying the Host. And lying there, the ancient marching rhythm of the legions tramping in his brain, he saw them go by, the goodly fellowship whose beginning no man knows, whose ranks no man can number.

  O Christ, when I at last my arms lay down,

  Bring me, Thy soldier, to Thy blessed town,

  O Thou that art the soldiers’ palm and crown.

  The battle knows no end; give me Thy power.

  Deny me not Thy peace, when comes my hour.

  Deny me not Thyself, the eternal dower.”

  It was long before he slept, and when he wakened with the coldness of rain upon his face, it was barely dawn. He had risen gently, so as not to wake Heloise, arranged his cloak so that the hood covered her face, and moved out of the copse of trees. Guibert lay beside the horses, a thin shank protruding under his cloak: pitiful, thought Abelard, the squalor of the human body asleep. But the whole world was squalid, under this ominous light. The river below was a dead snake, the hills and the clouds alike huddled and shapeless and deformed, misshapen abortions. He stood for a while, oppressed and sunken within himself. So, he thought, the world must have looked to Adam, when he first wakened outside Paradise. Squalet et ipse dies—

  “Daylight grew squalid: underneath his feet

  He saw a narrower earth; above his head

  Hung a remoter heaven, with moaning stars.”

  He had been looking east towards Malicorne, where the sky seemed heaviest; but the wind was blowing from the west, and he turned to gauge what promise there might be for the day. Even as he turned, the clouds broke, only a hand’s breadth: and he looked straight into blue heave
n. Something stung in his eyes to see it there, so radiant, so tender, so unaware. “Peace in Thy heaven”—the words rang in his head, coming from he knew not where. He stood dumb, a slow fear mounting in him like the uprising of a cold spring. It was as though he had seen his destiny: and having Thee, to have naught else beside. He was shaking now; he caught himself praying, broken snatches of prayer, that God would save him from Himself: and when a great black, low-drifting cloud swept up from beyond the Sarthe and covered his eternity, he sighed with relief. A soft muzzle thrust itself over his shoulder: he felt the warm breath through those velvet nostrils on his cheek. “O brother horse, most excellent of God’s creatures!” He looked about, to tether her where the grass was sweeter than the edge of the burnt heath, and Guibert woke, and they made a fire as they used to do when they were small boys fishing in the Sanguèze. Guibert had caught trout last night, with his hands, he said, under a great stone, and he speared them on sticks and grilled them above the hot wood-ashes, a deal more handily than ever he managed grid or saucepan in Paris. And by the time Heloise had wakened, the sun was shining, and the shadows of the clouds moving over the fields as quiet as sheep, and the terror and vision of the morning seemed only a bad dream.

  More than ever, in the days that came after. Sometimes in the night Abelard remembered his vision, and knew that experience had already proved it a lie. For he knew peace. Each day the quiet flood of it rose and filled the hours, from his first waking with the slow creak of the well-rope in the court, to the evenings when he would go down at sunset to meet Heloise bringing up the ducks from the river. Sometimes they would have gone far afield, but at sight of her they would come, marshalling themselves in a little fleet, moving stilly through the quiet reflections on the water, their soft intermittent gabble so remote from their morning quackings and scutterings, and one by one would land and lurch a little and shake their tails and paddle up the cart-track to the dark, ill-smelling little house in which they spent their nights. Sometimes a young one would walk affectedly past the open door and look hopefully about the yard, but would suddenly lose courage and scuttle undignified for home. Heloise would wait till the last adventurous straggler had gone in, and then slide the wooden bolt. She had explained to Abelard that they had to be brought in at night, or they would lay their eggs out in the marshland where they might never be found, or be hatched out into wild things again; and Abelard listened gravely and asked questions that she might tell him what he had known since he was five. He was never weary of watching her. Convent and city-bred, for the first time she had come to her own place, and her own people. It was a little fief. Hugh the Stranger went out with his men in the hay harvest, and Denise was her own dairy-woman. She would not let Heloise help her there, the pans were too heavy, but the girl had a lucky hand with living things, and soon the chickens ran to meet her as shrilly as they did to Denise. Agnes and Agatha, two of the bright-headed creatures that Abelard remembered tumbling like puppies in the orchard, now leggy little girls, followed her about like the shadows of fawns. And in the long September twilights, before he left for Paris, she would sit and help Hugh the Stranger with his tallies, as she used to help Godric at Argenteuil: the two baskets of crab-apples that Helvis paid for her cottage, the cartload of turf that Hucbald owed for his cutting in the bogland where the Sanguèze rose, the four perches of autumn ploughing that Nicholas was to be forgiven, because of the lameness of his mare. He had left Paris to come back to her on the Vigil of St. Thomas the Apostle: when he reached her on Christmas Eve, his son was already three days old.

  They christened him Peter Astrolabe on Epiphany. Hugh the Stranger privately thought it an outlandish name; but he had ridden into Nantes and sold his silver chain with wolf’s-head clasps, to buy him a silver cup. He had never forgotten how Abelard stood by him when Berengar found Denise was with child to a landless man. It was Heloise who chose the name: Abelard knew it was because of the nights that she lay solitary in his high turret room and watched through the arrow slits the quiet movements of the stars. Abelard reached again for the calendar he had made, and counted, as he had already counted a hundred times, the days remaining before he gave his last lecture on the Vigil of St. Peter and St. Paul. He would leave Paris that very night, the 28th of June. Indeed, what with the number of Saints’ days between, he might as well make it June 23rd, the Vigil of St. John the Baptist. Hard riding would do it; and so, ten days before she would be looking for him, he would be waiting on horseback at the ford, as the first stars came out, and see her coming down the cart-track in the dusk.

  “For this, for this the envious gods deny us immortality.”

  But meantime—he straightened his shoulders with a quick sigh, and reached for his notes. Jerome on Nahum the Prophet. Chapter I. Verse 9. “There shall arise no second tribulation: thus saith the Lord, I have stricken once, and I shall not strike again.” Once again there was no extract, but the reference only. Abelard turned over the pile of books on the table: Origen on the Epistle to the Romans, Boethius De Trinitate, Ambrose De Sacramentis, Isidore De summo bono, Chrysostom on the Epistle to the Hebrews; Jerome Ad Rufinum, Jerome on the Epistle to the Corinthians. But Jerome on the Prophets was gone. He sat scowling, wondering if Guibert had had the effrontery to sell it, like the Hilarius De Trinitate that he had found being copied at Simon’s a month ago. Hardly. He had had enough of the fear of God put in him to keep him from that, surely. Then his eye lightened: he had left it with Heloise in Brittany. Yet his memory still teased him: he could swear that he had copied out the passage somewhere. There was something about Sodom and Gomorrah. Something too about Ezekiel. That was it. He must have copied it for his unfinished commentary on Ezekiel, two years ago.

  The manuscript, not yet bound, was in a cedar-wood chest at the other end of the room. Abelard leant the lid back against the wall, and burrowed among the furs and parchments for a while, smelling its dark fragrance, then, straightening himself, stood beside it, turning over the pages, his mouth sardonic over the callow sententiousness of the man who had written them. As ignorant of life, he thought, as a half-feathered jackdaw. “And one put up a wall, and lo, another daubed it with untempered mortar.” Untempered mortar, indeed. “And lo the wall is no more, neither they that daubed it.”

  “What is the vine more than any other tree? Will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon?” He smiled as he remembered Gilles’ ribald comment on that—could the man find nothing better to do with a vine than hang mugs on it? “Thus saith the Lord concerning the Ammonites . . . Aholah and Aholibah . . . Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.” He turned over the pages impatiently, uncertain where to find the paragraph he sought. And though in a little while he stood quiet, looking down at one page, it was not the passage that he was seeking. It was a long time before he came to look for it again.

  “And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of Man, behold I shall take away the desire of thine eyes at a stroke, and thou shalt not mourn nor weep . . . And in the morning I spoke unto the people, and in the evening my wife died.”

  The bell of Notre Dame had begun ringing for Compline, but he did not hear it; and when it ceased, and the air no longer hummed with its great bourdon, he was still unaware. The Nunc Dimittis and the Te lucis ante terminum were sung: the prayer for a quiet night and a perfect end breathed through the cathedral: God’s mercy was sought for those that waked, His peace for those that slept: Paris was commended for another night to the keeping of God almighty and merciful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and still he had not stirred. When he did come to himself he was recalled by no outward sound or sight: it was as though the tide on which he had been carried out to a spiritual desolation beyond anything he had ever dreamed, turned of its own volition, and brought him back to a familiar shore. He stooped to put the manuscript back into the chest and closed the lid, very carefully; then, with the same dazed, gentle movements, he came slowly down the room to the west window. Dimly
he knew that he must have light. He pulled a stool over to it and sat down close by it, his hands spread out on the warm sill, breathing slow breaths, as a man might who knows the knife still in his side, and dares not move lest he feel again the searing agony. The fear that had maddened him that night in Holy Week was certainty now. Somehow, some day, they would take her from him. And he would live, live years, live his long life, without her.

  A sparrow came on the window-sill and turned his head from side to side, looked hard at a piece of mortar, pecked at it, and flew away with a brisk whirring of wings. Someone was frying fish in oil: the warm smell of it came up to him through the cool remoteness of the peartree blossom, and he blessed it. People were standing about their doors in the Rue du Sablon: Pigeon the cartwright had a yard where one could hire handcarts, and an old man was trundling one back over the cobblestones, and shouting cheerful greetings as he came. Abelard looked down into the little street: for the first time he noticed how bowed most of the shoulders were, how lined the women’s faces. Did life break every man, he wondered: and was there no one over thirty-five who had not some secret agony, some white-faced fear? Half one’s life one walked carelessly, certain that some day one would have one’s heart’s desire: and for the rest of it, one either goes empty, or walks carrying a full cup, afraid of every step. None but he who has seen the light knoweth what that night is. The poor roofs on which he looked were suddenly transparent to him, transparent as the wrinkled faces: and he saw nothing anywhere but hunger for love or for bread.

  A small figure turned the corner from the river, and came slowly down the street, making for the Parvis. It was a shabby figure, like a moulting sparrow, and as if aware of its own shabbiness, it walked with bent head, its shoulders hunched, and looking for no salutation. The men on their doorsteps looked curiously after it as it went by. Abelard watched, deliberately allowing every detail of its ignominy to sink into his heart. This was his doing: the work of our hands establish Thou it. Deliberately he called to mind the exquisite china skin, the silken silver hair, the neat bantam strut that so delighted Gilles, the small important gossip about the Chapter, the wide baby’s smile when he spoke of Heloise. That was Fulbert once, who now slunk along the street, his unkempt locks straggling below a greasy skullcap, the stains of food on his cassock. Abelard had never yet seen him face to face, for Fulbert avoided every encounter, would turn into a strange house rather than meet him on the street. And Gilles was oddly reluctant to speak of him. Once when Abelard, conscience-struck, had begun to ask if nothing could be done to look after him, Gilles shook his head. “You had better face it,” he said briefly, “the man is mad. Look to yourself, for he would do you a mischief if he could. But that apart, you will be happier if you do not let your mind run upon him.”