Peter Abelard

by Helen Waddell

  “I am glad,” said Gilles, “that one man in Paris has got some common sense.”

  Thibault looked up at him. “I don’t let anybody in but what he says,” said he. “And if they make too much noise out here, I throw them out.”

  Gilles looked at the young man. Those eyes were haunted by something beyond grief. Thibault felt some warmth of human kindness reach him, the first time for three days.

  “Is there anyone in with him now?”

  “Just Foulques. He’s asleep. But he said you were to see him, any time you came.”

  “It was you that found him,” said Gilles, stating a fact.

  “And Foulques,” amended Thibault. He got up. “Will you hold your noise,” said he to the room at large, “till I open the door?”

  Then fell a silence. Gilles steeled his coward’s heart. He went through the door that the young man opened for him, swung back the arras, and stood looking towards the bed.

  He knew that Abelard was not asleep, but so long as he chose to pretend he was, Gilles was content to wait. A thin peter dark lad sitting by the bed rose. The two looked at one another, and at the silent command in Gilles’ eye, the boy nodded and went out.

  “I counted on you doing that,” said a cool voice from the bed.

  Gilles grunted. He walked over to it, and sat down on the chest from which Foulques had risen. He was still scowling as his eye met Abelard’s, and the other frowned back.

  “I suppose they’ve told you that I’m going to live?” the cool light voice went on.

  Gilles nodded.

  “Have they begun to joke yet, Gilles?”

  “Not yet,” said Gilles. “So far, it has been more like the Weeping Wall of Jerusalem.”

  “Three days is a long time,” said Abelard thoughtfully. “I doubt if I should have had the decency to keep off it so long, if—if it had been friend Alberic of Rheims, for instance, instead of me.” His voice cracked on the name, but he finished well enough. “By the way,” he went on, “this must be a high day for Alberic. It’s the first of October, St. Rémy, isn’t it? Do you know how they keep the feast at Rheims, Gilles? You go to a church with a herring behind you on a string, and the point is to step on the herring of the man in front, and keep your herring from the advances of the man behind. I’d give a good deal to see Alberic take part in that procession. Or have I muddled it? Is it some day in Lent?”

  The brittle voice was very near being intolerable. Gilles sat silent.

  “You are hard to amuse to-day, Gilles.”

  “Stop that,” said Gilles.

  The bright eyes from the bed watched him inimically, then suddenly darkened.

  Gilles dropped his head on the hand that lay on the coverlet. “Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.”

  It was a long time before either spoke. At last Abelard heaved a great sigh, as though he had dropped a heavy load.

  “I was lost for you, Gilles. I have lied, and lied, and lied.”

  “I could come no sooner, Peter. I could not get out of my bed: and you know I am ill to carry.”

  Abelard’s eyes caressed him. “They told me. There’s nothing they have not told me, these last three days. Being a sick man is like being a log caught in a stream, Gilles. All the straws gather round it.”

  “Please God, you won’t be a sick man long,” said Gilles.

  Abelard’s mouth tightened. “I shan’t be it here, anyhow. As soon as they can move me, I am going to St. Denis.”

  “St. Denis? You might have chosen a quieter place,” said Gilles. “If you want monks’ nursing, and they’re good nurses enough, you’d be as well looked after, and a deal quieter, at St. Germain.”

  “You see, I am taking the vows at St. Denis,” said Abelard. “Abbot Adam says that in my case it will be only a nominal novitiate.”

  There came from Gilles no sound but a kind of strangled crow. Wrath and stupefaction were choking him. He dropped Abelard’s hand, and heaved himself to his feet. Abelard lay with half-closed eyes, watching him. At last Gilles spoke.

  “If I had the power, Peter,” he said, “I should have you kidnapped and kept prisoner till God was pleased to restore you to your reason.”

  “I knew you would say that,” said Abelard. He closed his eyes and frowned a little, as if trying to marshal his arguments.

  “Sit down, Gilles. I want to tell you the truth. I do not want to be a monk. I have not any vocation. I want to go on fighting and teaching the way I have always done. But that is ended.”

  “It is not ended,” Gilles broke out. “You say this because you are a sick man, but when your strength comes back and you are your own man again——”

  Abelard’s eyes looked at him through narrowed lids.

  “I am not a man now,” he said. “I am a kind of monster. You go home and read the Attis again, Gilles, and some of Martial: and then read the passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, about the kind of thing I am now. And how, with that knowledge in me, do you suppose I am to rule the Schools? I’d shrivel in my chair and stammer at the first snigger.”

  “You would do nothing of the sort,” said Gilles fiercely. “And there’d be plenty—like your giant at the door there—to put the snigger, along with a good many teeth, down the sniggerer’s throat.”

  “It’s a good ox,” said Abelard indifferently. “Nephew to your old friend, Thibault of Champagne. But fists are a poor reply to a gibe. And I’ve never yet heard the joke that turned the tables on that particular jest.”

  Gilles drew in his underlip and scowled at the figure on the bed. The man lying there was not fit for argument: but once he had made up his mind, there would be no turning him. Gilles knew it of old. He made his last brutal throw.

  “I did not know you were a coward.”

  “No more did I,” said Abelard tranquilly. “But I do now. It is supposed, I believe, to be the inevitable consequence. But see here, Gilles,” he spoke with a shade more vehemence, “I have laughed at too many people myself to stand being laughed at now. I don’t say I haven’t been gibed at—but so far I had the sharper tongue of the two.”

  Gilles was silent. He knew the Schools: and he knew there was no quarter.

  “Suppose,” he began, “that you do not make up your mind now; that you go for a while to Brittany——”

  “For God’s sake,” said Abelard. His arm was across his eyes and he was shuddering with the sobbing that he would not let break out. And with a moment of clairvoyance, Gilles saw the place that he had never seen: a cart-track to the river and coming down it the figure of a girl. He groaned and dropped his head in his hands.

  It was Abelard who spoke first.

  “I want to tell you, Gilles. It has to be. I think I have always known it would be. That queer terror——” he broke off. “I knew it once, riding down to Brittany with——” He stopped again. “And here, reading Ezekiel, before I went to Fulbert and said I would marry her. And before that, long before that. Do you remember when I came back from Brittany, after my mother took the veil, and though they offered me the Schools here, I went to sit under old Anselm at Laon, and read theology? You teased me then, do you remember?”—he creased his eyes at Gilles, affectionately. “Philosophy is my washpot: over theology also will I cast out my shoe.” I suppose there was something of that in it too. But it was a kind of bargain. I thought if I went one mile I—I would not be asked to go twain.”

  Gilles listened. With his mind he accepted, but he had nothing in his experience to give him understanding.

  “I suppose it’s like Saul on the road to Damascus,” Abelard went on. “And I’ve been kicking long enough against the pricks. Long enough to be lamed for life, anyhow.” He laughed a little. “Only . . . he saw a great light before he went blind. I haven’t seen much yet. Barring Fulbert’s face when they wakened me.”

  Gilles sat s
unken, his head in his hands.

  “Origen was no monk,” he said at last.

  Abelard nodded. “But I’m no Origen.” In a little while—“All the same, they’re making me very welcome at St. Denis. I have never had so many civil things said to me in my life.”

  “They know they’ll be the talk of Christendom,” said Gilles bitterly. “What’s the tombs of the kings to putting their cowl on Peter Abelard?”

  “And they are taking me with no patrimony,” Abelard went on. “I told Abbot Adam I must make whatever provision I had for—for my wife.”

  Gilles looked up startled. “What is to become of her?”

  “She is taking the veil at Argenteuil.”

  Gilles again rose to his feet.

  “Listen to me, Peter Abelard. This is no way to speak to a sick man, but I must do it. Bury yourself alive, if you must. But must you bury her alive too?”

  Abelard’s face had become a fine-drawn mask.

  “She is willing,” he said quietly.

  “Of course she is willing. She would go through hell if you bade her. But had you any right to bid her?”

  “What could she do?” said Abelard defiantly. “What kind of world is this for a woman that has no kin of her own, and a husband, if you call him a husband, in the cloister?”

  “What is to hinder her going to your sister, with her boy?”

  Abelard winced, and was silent. Suddenly he turned on Gilles, eyes that looked up from such a pit of pain, that Gilles’ heart turned over.

  “Because, if you want the truth, I could not stand it. Because I am jealous of every man that looks at her. Because I could not endure to see her kiss even Hugh the Stranger. And that was when I was a man. Now——” He had broken at last. The sobs were tearing out of him.

  Gilles stood over him, grasping his shoulders, his anger turned to an agony of compassion.

  “Peter, forgive me,” he said. “I was blind. O my son, as if she would not have given her body to the wolves rather than you should suffer one tithe of what I have made you suffer now.”

  In a little while, Abelard lay quiet.

  “I’m glad you got the truth out of me, Gilles,” he said. “I was lying, even to myself, before.”

  Moving clumsily, but with amazing efficiency, Gilles got a basin of water and bathed his flushed face.

  “Could you sleep, if I sat here for a while and kept the rest out?”

  Abelard nodded. At that moment, the door opened and Foulques’ diffident head came round it.

  “Sir, it’s the Abbot Adam of St. Denis.”

  Abelard lay for a moment with closed eyes.

  “Ask him to come in.” He opened them and looked up at Gilles.

  “God bless you, Gilles. But I must go my own way.”

  ebreak

  BOOK IV

  THE PARACELETE

  August 1121—November 1122

  CHAPTER I

  “Have you read the De Trinitate, Gilles?”

  Gilles nodded. “It is more than his accusers have, I’ll be bound.”

  “And is it heretical?”

  “Of course it is heretical. Every book that ever was written about the Trinity is heretical, barring the Athanasian Creed. And even that only saves itself by contradicting everything it says as fast as it says it.”

  Pierre de Montboissier flung back his head and laughed delightedly. It was four years since he had heard anyone talk like this.

  “Not but what Abelard does the same,” went on Gilles thoughtfully. “But there is too wide a space between the assertion and the contradiction for a porker like Alberic to carry it in his head. He gets his nose under one gate, and squeals there. Friend Alberic and t’other animal that’s coupled with him had it spread all over Soissons that Abelard taught there were three Gods. And the last news of the trial is that he is going to be charged with saying there is only one, but three ways of looking at Him.”

  “Sabellianism?” said Pierre.

  Gilles nodded approvingly. “Good lad,” said he. He chuckled. “I’d give one of my few remaining years to be at the council, and watch old Palestrina dodging when the great words go flying about, for fear one hits him and he’d have to explain it. It wasn’t his theology that made him Papal Legate: and he must be cursing the luck that set him to judge a trial for heresy. He has as good a head for politics as any man I know, and near as good a palate as myself, and he and King Louis have the same tastes in jokes: but as for judging Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity, he must be wishing himself back in Italy.”

  “But tell me, Gilles, how does it come that Master Peter is being tried in Soissons, and before the Archbishop of Rheims, as well as Conon of Palestrina? Surely Abelard as a monk of St. Denis should come under the jurisdiction of Paris, and therefore of Sens? If anyone were going to summon him, it should have been his own archbishop, and not Ralph of Rheims?”

  Gilles looked at him mournfully. “They’ve got you, Pierre,” he said whimsically. “The mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but to every man his own diocesan, and let no bishop trespass on his neighbour’s see.”

  Pierre flushed.

  “There, I was only teasing you,” said Gilles. “And the man who will be the next abbot of Cluny—you need not shake your head, for I know it—will have less need of Virgil than of canon law.

  “‘A boy I can remember used to sing

  All the long summer days: but now the songs,

  The very songs he sang are all forgotten.

  The voice has fled the singer: all are fled.’

  But don’t forget them altogether, Pierre. ‘O Lord, by these things men live.’”

  The young man sat silent. “Life is easier if one forgets, Gilles.”

  “May God forgive you,” said Gilles. “But there,” he caught himself up, “the man who has found that out is the man who will never forget. Repent, if you like, Pierre. But never forget.”

  Pierre got up and walked over to the hearth. He stood there, his arm on the chimney, and his head resting on it. Something in his attitude brought back to Gilles too many memories.

  “Bring me that litter from the window, Pierre,” he said abruptly. “There are some letters that I want to show you.” And as the young man roused, gladly enough, and crossed the room, “Teasing aside, you raised a very interesting point about Sens, and only that Abelard was pawing the ground for a fight, I believe the whole business could have been quashed. But you see, he has been teaching in Champagne: and though it was in a priory of St. Denis, part of Champagne comes under the jurisdiction of Rheims.”

  “When did he leave St. Denis?”

  “Just as soon as St. Denis could get decently quit of him,” said Gilles grimly. “They had made one vast mistake. They thought our Peter was a man of easy morals. Which at no time of his life was true of him.” Gilles’ eyes slid momentarily sideways. “And they counted on harnessing a great reputation for their cloister, and, barring certain disabilities, a good boon companion in their pleasures. And behold, said Abbot Adam, I’d as soon have housed Bernard himself.”

  Pierre laughed in spite of himself. “What possessed him to go there, Gilles? Did he not know what a den it was?”

  “Abelard knew less about other people than anyone I’ve ever known,” said Gilles. “He thought about things. He only knew it as the first abbey in France. And I think it was the first place came to his mind to hide his head in.” He was silent for a while. “So they took advantage of the hordes of young men that besieged the Abbey, to send him off to their priory near Provins to teach in peace. It emptied Paris, but Abbot Adam cared little for that. Only it began to empty Rheims, and that got friend Alberic on the raw.”

  “So it was Alberic,” said Pierre slowly.

  “You remember Alberic?”

  “I do. I suppose all that was four years ago. Do yo
u remember, Gilles, I nearly hit him? I wish now I had. So he planned a heresy hunt?”

  “Not at first. There were rumblings, of course. But the real pinch is that Alberic has a poor head for logic. If they ask him a question, he has to get two days’ notice, and meantime the little Lombard lawyer fellow looks it up for him. And Abelard has gone on from reasoning about the kinds and species to reasoning about theology. It is true he has a good many of the Fathers behind him. But Alberic quotes the Blessed Gregory, and St. Ambrose, that theology is to be believed, and not to be discussed.”

  “And Abelard?”

  “You’ll see his broadside there. ‘To a certain one ignorant of dialectic.’ He named no names: but it has gone like a spark in dry grass.”

  Pierre picked it up and leaved it over, his eye kindling as he read. “‘The age of miracles is past: but the war goes on. If we cannot convince by miracles, we must by words. And is not Christ Himself the Word, the Logos, from which our study, our logic, is derived? Moreover, did He not Himself convince the Jews in frequent argument, and build up the faith not only by the power of miracles, but by the potency of words? . . . Reason has more force with the discriminating than miracles, for it is debatable whether miracles may not be brought about by diabolic illusion.’”

  He whistled. “‘Above all is logic essential for such doctors as, confident that they have some skill in resolving questions, do not simply shuffle from under them.’ Can’t you hear his very voice in that subterfugiunt?” He looked down again at the sheet of parchment. “Is that his seal? It is a beautiful one.”

  “It is,” said Gilles, non-committal.

  Pierre had taken it over to the window. Gilles’ eye followed him. He saw his shoulders stiffen.

  “It is a tolerable likeness,” Gilles went on. “Though better of Heloise than of himself. He had it made from his own drawing, when she was first in Brittany. And he uses it still.”