9. Letter Twelve. To a Regular Canon
letter twelve.
To a Regular Canon The practice of canonical life had taken root long before the twelfth century, but during Abelard's time it grew up and ramified in directions and fashions that inevitably occasioned tensions between canons and monks. Viewed from afar, the two groups as they were then constituted may seem to resemble each other intimately, and in fact they have for a long time been treated as being nearly synonymous. Nonetheless, they can be differentiated.
Monachus (monk) was a term that usually designated a man who lived celibate and who was devoted to contemplation and the performance of religious duties, especially song and prayer. The exact feminine equivalent, monacha, was far less commonplace in the High
Middle Ages than monialis. Although the last-mentioned form is sometimes said to be an abbreviation of sanctimonialis, all these words derive from a Greek adjective for "single, unique, solitary," and in Letter Twelve Abelard cites Jerome to this effect. In a striking paradox, however, a medieval monk dwelled much more often within a particular religious community than in solitude. The communities tended to be separated from the world, to be governed by a rule, and to require of their members adherence to vows, with those of poverty, chastity, and obedience being especially important within the Benedictine order.
A canon was a cleric who resided with others in a cloister or in a house within the precinct of a cathedral or collegiate
other controversi es church.1 Canons were so called because they ordered their lives according to canons of the Church. The word canon was a Latin importation from Greek, meaning "rule." Different groups of canons followed different rules. Canons whose rule required them to renounce private property were known as Regular Canons (designation that is pleonastic, from an etymological standpoint), whereas others were called Secular Canons. The Regular Canons were also designated Augustinian or Austin Canons, since Augustine had referred to this practice, and as Black Canons, from the color of their garb.2
In 1120–1121 a new group evolved from the Regular Canons. Because they conformed to a stricter rule that was established by Norbert of Xanten (about 1080–1134, bishop of Magdeburg 1126–1134) and his followers in their community at Prémontré, they became known as the Norbertines or the Premonstratensian Canons.3 They were also called the White Canons, in reference to the hue of the clothing they wore.
Eventually canons and monks grew so similar in the rigor of the lives they led as to seem indifferentiable. Both were tonsured, wore habits that set them apart from secular folk, lived in common, and followed rules. Yet in Abelard's lifetime, many people—above all, monks—would have distinguished sharply between the two groups, and it is not surprising that monks fought hard to accentuate the differences between themselves and the canons. Once again, it warrants remark that Abelard was, despite the difficulties he caused and the failings he experienced in both capacities, a monk and an abbot.
During his monastic career he belonged to four abbeys (St. Denis, 1. For an introduction to canons and what they represented, see Jean Châtillon,
Le mouvement canonial au moyen âge: Réforme de l'église, spiritualité et culture, ed. Patrice Sicard,
Bibliotheca Victorina 3 (Paris: Brepols, 1992).
2. A straightforward account of the Augustinians can be found in John C. Dickinson, The Origins of the Austin Canons and Their Introduction into England (London: S.P.C.K.,
1950).
3. The standard biography of Norbert has not been translated into English, although an English summary is printed at the end of the German translation; see
Wilfried Marcel Grauwen, Norbert, Erzbischof von Magdeburg (1126–1134), trans. Ludger
Horstkötter, 2d ed. (Duisburg, Germany: Selbstverlag der Prämonstratenser-Abtei St. Johann, 1986).
to a regular canon
the Cluniac St. Médard, the unreformed St. Gildas, and Cluny itself) and spent time in several other cells, priories, oratories, and hermitages (such as the unlocalized cell where he moved from St. Denis to teach; St. Ayoul in Provins, the Carthusian priory in which he took refuge after fleeing St. Denis; his hermitage at Quincey; and St. Marcel at Châlons-sur-Saône, where he died).4
At the same time, Abelard's itinerary of abbeys, priories, and assorted other facilities argues that he had little knack for the stabilitas
(fixity in a given place, in a given community, or both) that is one of the promises a professing monk must make according to the Rule of Benedict.5 On the contrary, he passed from being a "peripatetic Palatine" to being a peripatetic monk. Bernard of Clairvaux had equal claim to the latter title, except that he was not tainted by an association with the schools that would render his movements suspect as vagabondage.6 Abelard was a far better contender to be classed, however wrongly, as a wandering scholar.
During a few of his sojourns as a monk, Abelard knew monastic retreat. Yet such interludes of withdrawal from the world, and particularly from the world of teaching, came almost only under constraint.7 Despite Abelard's avowals of reverence for monastic solitude, he was apparently unable to withstand on a permanent basis the enticements of his natural calling as a magister. In seeking to combine life as a monk with life as a master, and in striving to coordinate the cloister with the school, Abelard was swimming against the tide of 4. His experience in the latter class of institution did not induce him to exempt from his criticism the small cells or priories known as "obediences"; see Sermon 33, in PL 178: 589BC.
5. 4.78; 58.4, 9, 17; 60.9; and 61.5.
6. In a famous letter to Pope Eugene III (1145–1153), one in which he refers to himself as "the chimera of my age," Bernard reveals that he recognized in himself this inconsistency. See Letter 250.4, in Sancti Bernardi opera, 8: 147, lines 1–3: "Ego enim quaedam Chimaera mei saeculi, nec clericum gero nec laicum. Nam monachi iamdudum exui conversationem, non habitum" (For I am a kind of chimera of my generation, and I do not conduct myself as a cleric or a layman; for I have long shed a monk's way of life, not his habit). For astute analysis, see Godman, Silent Masters, 93.
7. Here too the circumstances under which Abelard himself turned to monasticism do not prompt him to be less critical of others who retreated to solitude out of a constraint, such as fear; see Sermon 33, in PL 178: 584AB.
other controversi es his times. The experiment of the oratory he built in the wilds was a utopian alternative to teaching in a town. At the Paraclete Abelard could be a master to his retinue of students, but he could do so only out of the public eye, in a monastic institution of his own devise.
The initiative was too radical.
The irony is that Abelard could have had his cake and eaten it too, by leading a regular life and by teaching—but as a canon, not as a monk. In the end it speaks volumes that while Abelard obsessed over the rivalry between monks and canons, Bernard of Clairvaux came to see the paramount competition almost as a war between the forces of light and darkness, except that the combatants were monks and scholars.8 Ultimately both Abelard and Bernard were enlisted on the losing sides of their respective campaigns. As far as Abelard's position goes, first canons and later friars only grew in strength in the teaching world at the cost of monks. But the bigger picture is that not even Bernard could arrest the ascent of the schools.
To complicate matters further, it must not be overlooked that Abelard had been a canon before his entrance into monastic life. In the Historia calamitatum he has Heloise, in her harangue to him against marriage, refer to him as being "clerk and canon."9 He dismisses his entry into religion as having been dictated "by shame and confusion
. . . rather than any devout wish for conversion," but was the necessity to escape from the world the only incentive for becoming a monk as opposed to a canon?10 His students, when trying to dissuade their master from remaining cloistered in St. Denis after his castration, interpreted his choice as one for wealth over poverty, since by remaining in the royal abbey, he would be ministering to the wealthy rather than educating poor students. They wanted him instead to be a philosopher of God by teaching, which is what he attempts both to achieve in reality at the Paraclete with his students and to promote as an ideal in parts of many later writings.11 In sum, it can be readily understood both why Abelard would consider himself a monk
8. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University, 49.
9. Historia calamitatum, ed. Monfrin, p. 78, line 530; trans. Radice, p. 16.
10. Historia calamitatum, ed. Monfrin, p. 80, lines 623–24; trans. Radice, p. 18.
11. Historia calamitatum, ed. Monfrin, p. 81, lines 642–54; trans. Radice, p. 19.
to a regular canon
in good standing and yet why Bernard of Clairvaux would view him as "Master Peter Abelard, a monk without a rule, a prelate without commitment, [who] neither holds to an order nor is held by one."12
To Bernard, Abelard is master first, monk later; master first, abbot still later.
The most fundamental question in weighing monks and canons against each other was to determine the truest manner of leading an apostolic life.13 Was it by leading a communal life of worship, as monks did, or was it by emphasizing poverty and pastoral work, such as preaching, as canons did? The conception of their ministry that the canons held differed sharply from that of the monks. To the canons, the model was the communal life that early Christians shared, first in Jerusalem and later in the household of Bishop Augustine of Hippo. Their ministry was a kind of public apostolate, a matter of teaching, by both word and example: docere verbo et exemplo.14 This selfconception could have been very threatening to a monk as thoroughgoingly committed to teaching as was Abelard, and to one who set as much stock by the example of his own life as mediated through his own words as he did.15 To some extent Abelard's discomfort vis-à-vis the canons may have resulted partly from an unspoken contention over whether the roles of a magister were more compatible with those of a monachus or a canonicus.
12. Bernard, Letter 193.7, ed. Leclercq, 8: 44, line 16: "Magister Petrus Abaelardus, sine regula monachus, sine sollicitudine praelatus, nec ordinem tenet, nec tenetur ab ordine." Compare Letter 332, in Sancti Bernardi opera, 8: 271, line 7.
13. For the broad background, see Marie-Humbert Vicaire, L'imitation des apôtres.
Moines, chanoines, mendiants IVe–XIIIe siècles, Tradition et spiritualité 2 (Paris: Editions du
Cerf, 1963).
14. The classic study of this view among the canons is Caroline Walker Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-Century Spirituality, Harvard Theological Studies 31 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1979). When revisiting the topic later, she situated it within the larger context of the spirituality of canons in the twelfth century; see Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Publications of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, 16 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1982), 22–58.
15. For confirmation of the latter point one need look no further abroad than the inaugural sentence of the Historia calamitatum, ed. Monfrin, p. 63, lines 1–2; trans. Radice, p. 3.
other controversi es For the past few decades it has become routine to envisage the early Middle Ages as having had a tripartite social structure, which subsumed people into three categories: those who prayed (oratores), those who bore arms (bellatores), and those who worked the soil (laboratores).16 From the vantage point of a twelfth-century monk, the more compelling three-part classification may have been monks, canons, and laymen.17
In Letter Twelve Abelard enters the fray by taking to task a Regular Canon who contends that the way of life of his peers is superior to that of monks. In Letter Seven to Heloise and in The Sermons
Abelard dealt more than a half dozen times with the topic of "the dignity of women," specifically in the context of religious life.18 Over the course of this letter he manifests a similar intentness on delineating the "dignity of monks" and their way of life, a topic to which he devotes considerable effort also in Sermon 33 (dated 1127–1128), addressed to the monks of St. Gildas on John the Baptist. In particular, he advocates both the special dignity of monks in comparison with clerics and Regular Canons and a contemplative life in contrast to an active one.19
First Abelard seeks to elucidate whether his opponent means dignity in the eyes of men or of God, since only the latter is of moment.
Then he points out that often those who attain heights in the world enter monasteries later, so as to make amends for the worldly wrongs
16. The classic exposition of this perspective is Georges Duby, The Three Orders:
Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982).
17. See Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought: The Interpretation of Mary and Martha; The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ; The Orders of Society (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 249–360, especially 295–304.
18. Letter Seven is entitled "On the Authority and Dignity of the Nun's Profession." The relevant passages are identified in a rich study, McLaughlin, "Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women," 291, n. 1. Further information about Abelard's thoughts on women's weakness and dignity is presented in Fiona J. Griffiths, "Brides and Dominae: Abelard's Cura Monialium at the Augustinian Monastery of Marbach," Viator:
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 34 (2003): 57–83, at 71–74.
19. In Sermon 33, he takes particular pains to elevate monks over bishops, as the avatars of the secular clergy; for a few key passages, see PL 178: 585D ("Considerate, monachi dignitatem vestram"), 594B, 595C, 598D, and 599B.
to a regular canon
they committed as clerics. Those who become monks may not return to secular life. If they are assigned ecclesiastic offices outside the monastery, they retain their monastic habits. Monks may be appointed bishops, but clerics may not become abbots. The basic difference between monks and clerics is that monks have religio (religious or ascetic life, religious order) whereas clerics have officium (a charge, duty).20 The religio of monks consists in the liturgy of prayers and hymns.
To turn to authoritative statements by Church Fathers that buttress one or the other side in the debate, Abelard clarifies that one passage may leave a misimpression that Jerome supposed clerics to be superior to monks. In fact Jerome, drawing parallels between the desert fathers, on the one hand, and the holiest prophets and sons of prophets, on the other, held monastic life in higher regard than clerical life. Pseudo-Chrysostom established a similar analogy between John the Baptist and a monk. At this juncture Abelard proceeds to find instances in the New Testament of figures who show the preference of Christ for the contemplative over the active life. He interprets the bride in the Song of Songs and Rachel in Genesis to the same effect.
The choice of female examples may not be dictated entirely by the conventions of medieval allegory: it bears remembering that in Letter Six of the correspondence Heloise compares nuns with others who follow an apostolic life. Furthermore, Letter Twelve itself invokes in its final sentences nuns as role models: if even rich noblewomen have been able to habituate themselves to the asceticism required by the monastic life, then men should be capable of learning from them.
In the end Abelard leaves off defending monks and instead goes on the attack against canons. Since Regular Canons build convents
20. Once again, Abelard covers the same ground in Sermon 33, where (at PL 178:
586A, 593B, 597A, 598CD, 603ABC, and 604A) he rates the religio of monks above the officia of preachers, priests, bishops, and their Old Testament precursors. He draws the distinction most bluntly at 598C: "Monachus, fratres, seu eremita, nomen est religionis. Episcopus autem sive clericus vocabulum est officii et operis, magis quam devotionis" (Brothers, monk or hermit is a noun for religious life. But bishop or cleric is a word for duty and work, rather than devotion).
other controversi es so as to avoid the world, they should complete their "regularization" by conforming to monastic rules (and the Latin for rule is regula). Authoritative citations from the Church Fathers and from Christ confirm that the contemplative life is to be preferred to the active, and that consequently the monastic life surpasses the canonical.
There has been speculation, beguiling but unprovable, that Abelard composed Letter Twelve directly in reaction to one of two specific historical events. One would be the founding of the canonical community at Prémontré, about twelve miles west of Laon, by Norbert of Xanten (died 1134), the other the publication of the treatise De dignitate clericorum (On the Dignity of Clerics), perhaps around
1140, by another Premonstratensian, Philip of Harveng(t) (about 1100–1183), abbot of Bonne-Espérance (1157–1182), near Binche in the diocese of Tournai.21 The hypothesis about Norbert of Xanten is more plausible for three reasons. First, because the date when Philip is hypothesized to have composed his work would seem to fall too late for when Abelard could have and would have drafted his lettertreatise. Second, because in any event Abelard claims to be responding not to texts but to speech. Third, because whereas Abelard never names Philip elsewhere in his writings, he makes what is generally agreed to be a critical reference to Norbert in the Historia calamitatum, when he mentions that his onetime rivals whetted on against him: some new apostles in whom the world had great faith. One of these boasted that he had reformed the life of the Regular Canons, the other the life of the monks.22
21. The treatise is less properly known as De institutione clericorum (On the Institution of Clerics); see Norbertus Iosephus Weyns, "A propos des Instructions pour les clercs (De Institutione clericorum) de Philippe de Harveng," Analecta Praemonstratensia
53 (1977): 71–79.
22. "novos apostolos, quibus mundus plurimum credebat . . . quorum alter regularium canonicorum vitam, alter monachorum se resuscitasse gloriabatur": ed. Monfrin, p. 97, lines 1201–4; trans. Radice, p. 32. On Abelard's attitude toward Norbert, see Wilfried Marcel Grauwen, "Het getuigenis van Abaelard over Norbert van Gennep," Analecta Praemonstratensia 63 (1987): 5–25, and "Nogmaals over Abelard, Bernard en Norbert," Analecta Praemonstratensia 65 (1989): 162–5.
to a regular canon
The reformer of the Regular Canons is taken to be Norbert, that of the monastic life Bernard of Clairvaux. Corroborating this inference is that Norbert and Bernard were paired by others who wrote in the first half of the twelfth century, such as Herman of Tournai (abbot 1127–1136, died 1147) and Laurence of Liège.23 In a sermon written several years earlier, Abelard identified Norbert and a "coapostle" called Farsitus as having endeavored to no avail to revive the dead:
I should come to weightier matters and those highest miracles that were essayed in vain in connection also with the raising of the dead. We marveled in fact, and we laughed, that Norbert and his hench-apostle Farsitus recently presumed to do this. For a long time they lay, stretched out in like manner in prayer before the people and thwarted in their presumption. When, disconcerted, they left off their plan, they began shamelessly to rebuke the people, that its faithlessness worked against their devoutness and unremitting faith.24
Perhaps not coincidentally, Abelard uses the same verb in Sermon 33 to describe the revival of the dead as he does in the Historia calamitatum to qualify the revival of monasticism.
Yet it is also undeniable that throughout his career Abelard evinced hostilities toward not just Norbert but numerous other canons as well, such as William of Champeaux, Roscelin, and, last but not least, Fulbert (the uncle of Heloise who had him castrated). Beyond such personal animosities toward individual canons, already before marrying Heloise Abelard may have nurtured reservations about the very status of canons. Whereas he reports that in the antinuptial
23. Grauwen, "Het getuigenis van Abaelard," 21.
24. Sermon 33, in PL 178: 605BC: "Ad majora veniam, et summa illa miracula de resuscitandis quoque mortuis / inaniter tentata. Quod quidem nuper praesumpsisse Norbertum, et coapostolum ejus Farsitum mirati fuimus, et risimus: qui diu pariter in oratione coram populo prostrati, et de sua praesumptione frustrati, cum a proposito confusi deciderent, objurgare populum impudenter coeperunt, quod devotioni suae et constanti fidei infidelitas eorum obsisteret." There has been dispute over the identification of the Farsitus named here. Norbert's longtime companion and his successor as abbot of Prémontré was Hugh of Fosses (ca. 1093–1164). A Regular
Canon named Hugo Farsitus of Soissons delivered the funeral oration for Norbert in 1143. Quite possibly Abelard's Farsitus and these other two personages are one and the same.
other controversi es speech in the Historia calamitatum she sang to him the advantages to a philosopher of being a canon,25 he opted shortly after his castration not to remain a canon as he had been but instead to enter a monastery.
Abelard also makes mention of Regular Canons (once qualifying them as Augustinian Canons) twice in Letter Six. Elsewhere in Abelard's oeuvre, Sermon 33 frames the saint as the prototype of the contemplative life and therefore of monasticism.26 (For this reason it is à propos that Bernard of Clairvaux, in a letter to Cardinal Ivo of Asbach, taxes Abelard with being "Herod on the inside, John on the out.")27 The main thrust of the sermon is not to attack canons but rather to critique the monastic life of Abelard's day. Its conception of monasticism overlaps with that in the foreground of Letter
Twelve, and like Letter Twelve (and Letter Nine) it taps Jerome heavily as a source. Indeed, Letter Twelve goes so far as to present Elijah,
John the Baptist, and Jerome as almost the founding fathers of monasticism.
Many motives for Abelard's invocation of Jerome emerge in Letter Nine, as also in the correspondence with Heloise. Elijah and John the Baptist, who make cameo appearances in a number of Abelard's other works, need to be explained differently. At the risk of oversimplifying matters, they are both pre-Christians who nonetheless came with a scriptural imprimatur and could be used to legitimate the conception of the monklike philosophers that Abelard strove to realize in his own living and that he held out for emulation, first by his students at the Paraclete and later by the nuns there.
Other parallels to Letter Twelve can be seen in Letter Eight and Sermon 35 (with the incipit "Adtendite a falsis prophetis"), which 25. Historia calamitatum, ed. Monfrin, p. 78, lines 528–35; trans. Radice, pp. 15–16.
26. For a full examination, see Grauwen, "Het getuigenis van Abaelard," 8–18. On the use of John the Baptist as a model in medieval monasticism, see Gregorio Penco,
"S. Giovanni Battista nel ricordo del monachesimo medievale," Studi monastica 3 (1961):
7–32.
27. Letter 193, in Sancti Bernardi opera, 7: 44, line 17: "Homo sibi dissimilis est, intus Herodes, foris Ioannes, totus ambiguus, nihil habens de monacho praeter nomen et habitum."
to a regular canon
has been attributed to Abelard.28 Additionally, Sermon 24 contains an overt statement on the superior merits of monks and nuns over prelates and laymen.29 Finally, in the second book of the Theologia
Christiana Abelard conveys his views on the qualities necessary to a monk when he extols the lives of ancient philosophers. His Exhortatio ad fratres et commonachos (Exhortation to Brothers and Fellow Monks) may be lost, or it may be extant as Sermon 33. Yet even without it, a goodly pool of information remains that can elucidate Abelard's ideals about monasticism.30 Taken in combination, Abelard's antagonisms toward specific canons and his tendencies to philosophize about monasticism suggest that Letter Twelve, even in the event that it was addressed to a particular canon such as Norbert of Xanten, was meant for a more extensive audience than a single recipient. It was an open treatise-letter.
Since no medieval manuscript survives, in constituting the text of Letter Twelve Edmé Smits and his predecessors were forced to rely on the 1616 editio princeps. Like so much connected with Abelard's letters, this earliest edition has a peculiarity pertaining to authorship.
It survives in two versions, both dated 1616, both having nearly identical texts, but each having different title pages and preliminary matter that ascribe the edition to different editors, the earlier to André
Du Chesne (1584–1640) and the later to François d'Amboise (1550– 1619). It has been supposed that d'Amboise began the edition, that Du Chesne completed it, and that Du Chesne took primary credit until the hazards of printing works by an author on the Index (as Abelard was) made expedient the tactic of attributing editorship to the more established d'Amboise. In any event, the mystery of the 28. On such parallels to other works within Abelard's oeuvre, see Smits, Letters
IX–XIV, 155–72.
29. Sermon 24, in PL 178: 529B–36B, at 534D–35A. See Van den Eynde, "Le recueil des sermons," 38–39.
30. For further information on the last two sentences, see David E. Luscombe, "Abélard et le monachisme," in Pierre Abélard—Pierre le Vénérable, 271–76, at 272, and "Monasticism in the Lives and Writings of Heloise and Abelard," in Monastic Studies:
The Continuity of Tradition, ed. Judith Loades (Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales: Headstart History, 1990), 1–11.
other controversi es editorship in the early seventeenth century is happily irrelevant to the constitution of the Latin text.31
Letter Twelve Through the reports of many people it has come to our ears that the status of our order (that is, the monastic one) has been injured quite often to no small degree by you in the presence of many. We believe that this has been undertaken for no other reason, than that you can thus endeavor to exalt clerics in your calling, whom you call Regular Canons, by humiliating ours. What is more, we are filled with wonder if that is the explanation, but we are filled with all the more wonder if it is not, since we can discern no other cause. You say, as people report, that our order is by far inferior to yours and that monks are very far removed from the dignity of clerics. In which regard indeed we wish to inquire of you first on the basis of which dignity you understand this, whether of eminence among men or of religious life in the sight of God. Certainly this dignity of religious life is the truest which commends us especially to God and adorns us with virtues and makes us all the more glorious among the heavenly, as we are considered humbler among the earthly.
But indeed you should say if you can (or you should go on to state why you cannot) by what reason or on what authority clerics are able to claim dignity for themselves. For who would not know, as we are instructed by daily experiences, that even these clerics who are prominent in a very high rank elect the monastic life, as they take pains to mend faultlessly the shortcomings they had in clerical life, and that when it is permitted them to make a transition to monkhood, they are in no way allowed to return to the clerical life? Or if sometimes, through the outstanding quality of 31. Smits, Letters IX–XIV, 59–60.
to a regular canon
their religious life, ecclesiastic persons elected from the monasteries are put in charge over the offices of clerics, the monastic habit itself also is distinguished by such great dignity that once taken up it must not be set down; for this monastic habit not only secular but even clerical garb is to be cast aside. Why is it indeed that nevertheless monks, having been made bishops, are often put in charge of clerics or are assigned to any ecclesiastic offices whatsoever? Why does the opposite not hold, that abbots in monasteries should not be made of clerics or that they should undertake care for monastic offices? Why, I say, why, I ask, if not that it is considered most unworthy that a less strict life should be preferred to the rule of that life, for which it is to be held of no value and through which, as we said, it is to be mended? Why else do even you yourselves and the entire Church say in the prayer of the litanies, "All holy monks and hermits, all holy virgins, all holy widows and chaste people pray on our behalf" and not "All holy clerics or holy priests or holy bishops?"32 Certainly because the latter names are rather of office, just as the former are of religious life. Why is it also that no mention of you is made, as it is made of monks and virgins in those hymns of the Feast of All Saints in which the good offices of the saints are sought as much by you as by the rest?33 For certainly it has been written thus:
Chorus of saintly virgins and of all monks, together with all saints, make [us] companions of Christ!34
32. Litanies are responsive petitions (or prayers) used in both public liturgical services and private devotions. With a few small but interesting discrepancies, this sentence is nearly identical to one in Sermon 33, in PL 178: 599A.
33. All Saints' Day is a solemnity celebrated on 1 November to honor (as the name would lead one to infer) all the saints.
34. This stanza is from a hymn (early ninth century) for All Saints' Day, with the incipit "Christe, redemptor omnium," in AH 51: 150, no. 129 (Schaller/Könsgen, no. 2220).
other controversi es Likewise:
May the good offices of the monks and all the citizens of heaven assent to the desires of suppliants and demand [for them] the reward of life.35
I hear nevertheless that you are accustomed to present to us as conflicting evidence also what our Jerome wrote: "If a monk has fallen, a priest will pray for him. Who will there be to pray for the lapse of a priest?"36 Certainly you could say this with some justification, if it happened that monks were in no way priests.
When indeed he says "monk and priest," assuredly that differentiates from the authority of a priest the monk who is not a priest.
For thus when we say "king and knight" or "bishop and priest" or "priest and deacon," although in fact kings may be knights, bishops priests, or priests deacons, we understand him to be a knight who is not a king, a priest who is not a bishop, and a deacon plain and simple. Also, when [Jerome] says "The priest will pray for him," he understands specifically that prayer is the mass which is proper to a priest, not that which suits any just man whatsoever.
The Apostle [James], commending the just generally, said, "For the continual prayer of a just man availeth much" [James 5.16]. For whoever is more just deserves to be heeded by him who weighs not 35. This stanza is from another hymn (ninth or tenth century) for All Saints' Day, with the incipit "Iesu, salvator saeculi," in AH 51: 152, no. 130 (Schaller/Könsgen, no. 7666).
36. This passage appears in Jerome, Letter 14.9 (to the monk, Heliodorus: 373 or 374), ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54: 59. Abelard's quotations of the letter here and later underpin his general argument well. Heliodorus was formerly a soldier, is at the time of the letter a presbyter, and will eventually become a bishop. After accompanying Jerome to the East and finding life as a solitary in the desert unsatisfactory, he returned to Aquileia and resumed his clerical duties. In the letter Jerome takes Heliodorus to task for abandoning the fulfillment of ascetic life. For the whole letter in English, see The Letters of St. Jerome, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow, vol. 1, Ancient Christian Writers:
The Works of the Fathers in Translation 33 (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1963),
59–69.
to a regular canon
so much words as works and considers not so much the tongue as the life. Moreover, how much the same doctor [of the Church =
Jerome] prefers to yours the monastic life on account of its perfection, he asserts overtly to the monk Heliodorus, writing in these words:
Interpret the word "monk"; this is your name. What are you who are alone doing in a crowd?37 [. . .] "What then? Are any people who are in the city not Christians?" You do not have the same motives as the others do. Hear the Lord saying, "If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor and come, follow me" [Matthew 19.21]. You however have promised that you are perfect. For when, after having left behind the worldly army, you castrated yourself for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, what else did you follow but a perfect life?38
And after some words he said, "As I mentioned before, the motivation of the monk is one and that of clerics another," which is to say that their calling and way of life differ greatly from one another and that their aim tends toward different ends, "As," he said,
"I mentioned before."39 Indeed, when he did this cannot be determined, unless it was when he distinguished monastic perfection from the life of the faithful who dwell in the city, saying, "What then? Are any people who live in cities not Christians?" In writing to Paulinus (who was at once a priest and a monk), he also asserts overtly that clerics ought to dwell among people rather than hold to the perfection of monastic solitude:
37. Abelard quotes this same pair of sentences from Jerome in Letter Eight. References to the etymology of monachus were conventional; see Jean Leclercq, Etudes sur le vocabulaire monastique du moyen âge, Studia Anselmiana 48 (Rome: "Orbis Catholicus"
Herder, 1961), 8–9.
38. Jerome, Letter 14.6, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54: 52–53. Abelard quotes the first two sentences of this passage from Jerome in Letter Eight as well as in Sermon 33, in PL
178: 589A and 596D (where he also separately incorporates the same verse from Matthew); he modifies the first sentence lightly in quoting it in his "solution" to the fourteenth of Heloise's Problemata, in PL 178: 698C.
39. Jerome, Letter 14.8, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54: 55.
other controversi es Therefore, since you enquire as a brother by which path you ought to proceed, I will speak with you with my face unconcealed.40 If you wish to perform the duty of a priest, if either the work or honor of the episcopacy perhaps entices you, live in cities and castles and make the salvation of others into the profit of your soul. But if, however, you wish to be what you are called, a monk, that is "alone," what are you doing in cities which in point of fact are the dwelling-places not of solitaries but of multitudes? Each way of life has its leaders [. . .] and, to come to ours, bishops and priests should hold as their example the apostles and apostle-like men; and when they possess the rank of these others, they should strive also to have their merit. However, we should have as leaders of our way of life the Pauls, Anthonies, Julians, Hilarions, [and] Macariuses, and, to return to the authority of the Scriptures, our leader [is] Elijah, our [leader] Elisha, our guides the sons of the prophets, who dwelt in fields and solitary places and made for themselves tents near the running waters of the Jordan.41 Among these are also those sons of Rechab who did not drink wine and cider, who dwelt in tents, who were praised by the voice of God through Jeremiah, and it is promised them that there will not be wanting a man from their stock who stands before God.42
Among our leaders wonder not only at Elijah, who shone forth so greatly among people of old that while still living he deserved to be elevated into heaven, but also at John, coming in his spirit and like another Elijah, to whom the Lord gave so much power of witness that in proportion to the distinction of his life he called him a very angel by reason of the prophet's power of wit40. "With my face unconcealed" means "openly."
41. The Paul invoked here is known as both Paul the Hermit and Paul of Thebes (died about 347). Anthony the Hermit (about 251–356) has often been viewed as the founder of cenobitism. Julian is Julian the Hospitaller ("the Poor Man": no known dates). Hilarion, another hermit, was the first solitary in Palestine (about 291–about 371). Macarius the Elder was a desert monk, the father of Egyptian monasticism
(about 300–about 390). Elijah, who appears in 3 Kings, was one of the foremost prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Elisha succeeded him (3 and 4 Kings).
42. Jerome, Letter 58.5 (to Paulinus of Nola, written around 395), ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54: 533–34. Abelard quotes this letter twice in his Letter Eight and three times in Sermon 33, in PL 178: 585BC and 597A. On the Rechabites, see Jeremiah 35.6–7.
to a regular canon
ness and preferred him over not only prophets but all other men too.43 About him John Chrysostom comments in Homily 23 on the Gospels,44 which begins thus "About John it is said: 'There was a man sent from God' [John 1.6]":
He was named John. Grace is encompassed in the name; for John is interpreted as "God's grace," [. . .] inasmuch as he received a greater grace.
Therefore he teaches wisdom in the wilderness and holds himself for the arrival of Christ, because he was to announce Christ. At once he is nourished in the wilderness, at once he grows there; he does not wish to dwell with men, he moralizes in the wilderness with angels. [. . .] Consider, monks, your excellence. John, the originator of your doctrine, is himself a monk. As soon as he is born, he lives in the wilderness, he is nourished in a solitary place, he awaits Christ in a solitary place. [. . .] In that time when John was born and was in the wilderness, how many riches, what gold, and what silver this temple (which we see was destroyed) contained.
[. . .] Josephus [. . .] describes how many gems, how much silk, how many priests, scribes, and offices of all kinds there were.45 [. . .] Christ is not known in the temple and is preached in the wilderness. [. . .] Why do I say all of this? That I may show the founder of your doctrine to be John the Baptist.46
43. On Elijah's elevation to heaven, see 2 Kings 2.11. Matthew 11.7–9 (compare 11.11) and Luke 7.24–26 refer to John the Baptist as being more than a prophet. On the likeness of John to Elijah, see Matthew 11.12–14 (compare 17.12–13) and Mark
9.12–13.
44. St. John Chrysostom lived from about 347 to 407. The epithet that follows his first name means "Golden Mouth" and was bestowed upon him in recognition of his power as a preacher, which remains (along with his exegesis) his best-known attainment.
45. Flavius Josephus (born about 37–38 c.e.) was a Jewish priest who left extensive historical writings in Greek. Jerome refers in particular to Jewish War (about 75–
79), 6.9.3. For other descriptions of the Temple, see the Jewish War, 5.5.1–8, and Jewish
Antiquities (published in 93/4), 15.11.1–7.
46. The homily is in fact not by John Chrysostom but rather by Jerome, Homilia in Ioannem Euangelistam (Homily on John the Evangelist), 1.1–14, ed. Germain Morin,
CCSL 78 (1958): 517–23, at 517–18. For an English version of the entire homily, see
The Homilies of Saint Jerome, no. 87, translated by Marie Liguori Ewald, 2 vols., The Fathers of the Church (a new translation) 48 and 57 (Washington, D.C.: The Catho-
other controversi es You have heard, brothers, the founders of our order and likewise of yours invoked above so that the difference of each of the two may be apparent. If you rejoice that the apostles too are numbered among your founders and the priests of the Old as well as the New Testament (which is to say, from Aaron himself down to Annas and Caiaphas), do not, I beg of you, grieve that Elijah and John who are greater than these are the leaders of our order.47
There is no doubt that John exchanged a clerical for a monastic state. Since he was the son of a priest, priestly dignity was owed him by hereditary right at that time; he held the city of less account than solitary places, the priest than the monk, and he put perfection of life ahead of ecclesiastic preferment.
Jerome, writing about him to the monk Rusticus, said:
I hear that you have a religious mother, a widow of many years' standing, who nursed and reared you as an infant.48 John the Baptist too had a saintly mother and was the son of a priest, and yet he was convinced by neither his mother's affection or father's wealth to live at the risk of chastity in his parents' house.49 He lived in the wilderness and deigned to gaze upon nothing else with his eyes longing for Christ. [. . .] The sons of the prophets,50 whom we read in the Old Testament were monks, built lic University of America Press, 1964–1966), 2: 212–20. Abelard relies on part of this same passage in Sermo 33, in PL 178: 585D.
47. Aaron, the eldest brother of Moses, was the first high priest, named repeatedly in the Pentateuch. Annas was a high priest in the time of Christ, while Joseph
Caiaphas was the high priest at the trial of Jesus; both are mentioned in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.
48. Jerome, Letter 125.6, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 56: 123.
49. The life of John the Baptist is described in the canonical Gospels, especially that of Luke. John's father, the priest, was named Zachary, while his mother was Elizabeth, cousin of Mary (Luke 1.36). The element upon which both Jerome and Abelard focused was the ascetic life John led in the desert.
50. The Old Testament expression "sons of the prophets" could be glossed less metaphorically as "disciples of the prophets." The expression is used particularly often in 4 Kings, sometimes in close proximity to "man of God." Both turns of phrase are tied closely to Elijah and Elisha. Their diet of pottage and wild herbs in a time of famine is mentioned in 4 Kings 4.38–39.
to a regular canon
hovels for themselves near the waters of the Jordan and, having left behind the throngs of the cities, subsisted upon pottage and wild herbs.51
Elsewhere he recalls of them, "Elijah was a virgin, Elisha a virgin, the sons of the prophets virgins."52 Why is it, I beg of you, brother, that the Lord as he was about to elect apostles did not summon
John from the desert, nor did he when to be baptized by him call him back from solitary places even for an hour, but like other people came to him among the others, even he himself to be baptized by the monk, as it was written, "Now it came to pass, when all the people were baptized, that Jesus also being baptized" [Luke 3.21] and so forth. Why is it, I say, unless that, as he said, he reckoned Mary's portion to be preferred to Martha's, which is to say, the repose of contemplation to the care and frequent disturbances of the world?53
In truth, preoccupied by these cares the Apostle [Paul] groans, saying: "Besides those things which are without: my daily instance, the solicitude for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is scandalized, and I am not on fire?" [2 Corinthians
11.28–29].54 The Lord himself taught openly, when he determined 51. Jerome, Letter 125.6–7, to Rusticus, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 56: 125. The passage was one to which Abelard resorted often for quotations or to which he (and Heloise, as reported by him) referred without quoting it verbatim: twice in the Historia calamitatum, ed. Monfrin, p. 77, lines 501–503, and pp. 93–94, lines 1084–1090; trans. Radice, pp. 15 and 29–30; once in Letter Seven; once in Letter Eight; and once in Sermon 23, in PL 178: 525C. Once again, the letter Abelard has chosen lends itself well to the case he is building. In the letter, Jerome counsels the young monk Rusticus not to become a hermit but to remain a cenobite. In addition, Jerome proposes rules for monastic life and indicates what characterizes a good and what a bad monk.
52. Jerome, Letter 22.21, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54: 172.
53. Martha, sister of Mary and Lazarus of Bethany (Luke 10.38–42 and John 12.1– 8), afforded a type for the practical life, as opposed to the contemplative life of her sister. Abelard employs the pair to stand for these two kinds of life in Sermon 8, in PL 178: 436B–44D, at 438D–439C, and Sermon 33, in PL 178: 582B–607A, at 595A and 598B. In Bethany Christ visited the house of Martha and Mary. At table Mary anointed Jesus' feet and wiped them with her hair, while Martha busied herself in serving. Jesus singled out Mary for praise. For information on the appearances and functions of the two women in twelfth-century thought, see Constable, Three Studies, 1–141.
54. The Douay-Rheims translates thus. Smits presents the Latin with commas
other controversi es to wash the feet of the apostles, how difficult it is amidst preoccupations and annoyances to maintain cleanness of heart and to frequent earthly routes without some pollution of dust.55 The bride in the Song of Songs, attending dutifully to this, excuses herself with foresight in these words to the betrothed who knocks at her door and asks that she arise from bed and open to him, "I have put off my garment, how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet, how shall I defile them?" [Song of Songs 5.3]. For what is the bed of the bride, if not the repose of a soul that is contemplative and removed from the concerns and cares of the world? Indeed, the more fully it devotes itself to God in the cloisters like the bride in the bedchamber and the more tightly it is bound to him in complete desire, the further it is removed from worldly preoccupations, and already in the secrecy of celestial chambers it is so joined to him through contemplation that the spirit is one with God, in accordance with what is read of blessed Martin: "He compelled his limbs as they grew tired to do service to the spirit; and reclining on his bedding he deigned not to see the earth and was wholly avid for heaven."56 For such repose of the bed and secrecy of contemplation the betrothed as he comes asks that the door be opened to him [Song of Songs
5.2], [in the same way] as the Christian people entreats whoever is of contemplative soul, that in undertaking their direction he may thus grant them entrance to [the bridegroom] himself.57 around "instantia mea," which would presume the alternative: "my instance, the daily solitude."
55. The washing of the disciples' feet before the Last Supper is related in John 13.
56. The quotation is based upon Sulpicius Severus (around 360–around 420–425), Letter 3.14, ed. Jacques Fontaine, Vita S. Martini episcopi, 3 vols., Sources Chrétiennes
133–35 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1967–1969), 1: 316–44, at 340. Sulpicius's various texts on St. Martin of Tours (about 316–397), including the letters, enjoyed considerable favor in the Middle Ages. St. Martin is best known for the episode in his legend in which he bestowed half his cloak upon a beggar and experienced afterward a vision of Christ that summoned him to baptism and religion, but here Abelard turned to the saint's asceticism, a feature of the life that better suited his preoccupation with the contemplative life. It is of course also apt to invoke Martin in this light, owing to his standing as the father of monasticism in France.
57. Commentaries on the Song of Songs sometimes counterpoise the repose of
to a regular canon
What Christ himself is said to do in his members,58 it is done through his inspiration and is entreated in his name and authority.
Indeed, so long as that perfect soul, passionately loving its repose, shuns toil (lest for the profit of others it should incur damage to its perfection), it refuses to rise from bed and says to the persistent betrothed, as has been said, "I have put off my garment" [Song of Songs 5.3], that is, "I have because of a vow disregarded the external care of worldly actions." Indeed the inner and more refined garment is a shift, the outer and coarser one a tunic.
For this reason the first adornment is to be called contemplative, but the second habit active. To be sure, these people, shutting themselves away in monastic cloisters, contemplate all the more subtly and perfectly the splendor of the highest light as they are the more fully distanced from outer cares of the world. Indeed, when the bride agrees in no way to return from contemplation to action, she avoids taking up again like a tunic this occupation of cares which Martha expends upon the needs of a neighbor and which those who oversee the people practice. For this reason, supplying a motive, the bride says, "I have washed my feet, how shall
I defile them?" [Song of Songs 5.3]. To be sure, our states of mind, by which we are drawn to whatever must be done, are (as it were) feet by which we are led. He washes off these feet who restrains his mind from worldly concerns; for it is difficult that a soul spread thin by these in different directions should not be spattered at least by some stains of thoughts or should not yield at some times to temptations. The bride, considering this, fears to set her feet from the bed to the ground, that is, to embroil herself again in cares, so long as she believes that no place outside her bed is free from conthe contemplative soul (associated with monks) with the action of the apostolic
Church. For an allegorical reading of Song of Songs 5.2–7 that may inform Abelard's presentation here, see Bede, In Cantica canticorum, section 3, ed. David Hurst, CCSL
119B (1983), 165–375, at 274–82.
58. Since the Church may be viewed as the body of Christ, his members are metaphorically equivalent to those of the Church; see Romans 12.5, 1 Corinthians 12.27, and Ephesians 4.25 and 5.30.
other controversi es tagion. At length she is compelled at the instance of the betrothed to arise from bed and to open for him, just as he demanded.
About him it has been added that when she wished to hold him and embrace him, as she was accustomed: "But he had turned aside, and was gone" [Song of Songs 5.6]. For God cannot be discovered in public just as in private, nor can the devotion of Martha, as she is crowded about with many concerns, attend constantly to Christ [Luke 10.38–42], nor can a mind attentive to worldly concerns keep watch quietly in God. For this reason the beloved himself advises that the chamber door be closed, so that we may pray more devoutly. Otherwise he turns aside and goes on from us, because the less we are free for him, the more we are abandoned by him and the more fully we are left destitute of the gifts of his grace. Even his spouse, having passed out into the public from the privacy of the bedchamber, finds how much for the profit of others she is diminished concerning her perfection; and the more the danger develops, the more the reckoning to be rendered remains with him for the souls committed to him.
Pay heed, brother, I entreat, to the dignity of your order and the state of your office, in which both merit is diminished and peril is imminent. See what the profit of dignity is, when the perfection of religious life is taken away, when he who is greater in the world becomes lesser in the face of God and endures a serious loss of himself. You rejoice that Leah, whom you married, is fertile, but you grieve when you see that she is bleary-eyed [Genesis
29–30].59 Leah had a marriage by night, as if such a bond were not worthy of daylight. So long as Rachel remained sterile, she lived in safety. Afterward, having become fertile, she expired through her own childbirth. From this event it is plainly indicated how hazard59. Rachel and Leah (or Lia) were sisters. Leah, the elder and less attractive, was
Jacob's first wife. She bore him six sons and a daughter. Rachel, the younger and more beautiful, was at first barren. The two were interpreted figuratively in various ways, with Rachel being associated with contemplation and Leah with activity or work. See Constable, Three Studies, 10–11 and 48–52.
to a regular canon
ous it is to receive that in which you glory, and that this glory is to be called ruin or degradation rather than exaltation.
According to that statement of the Psalmist "When they were lifted up, thou hast cast them down" [Psalm 72.18], blessed Jerome in fact paid heed to their easy fall and hazardous ascent and wrote in a certain passage to the monk Heliodorus with these words:
"But if the pious allurements of the brothers win you over to the same order, I will rejoice for the elevation, but I will fear for the fall."60 In commending the security of solitary (which is to say, monastic) life in Against Vigilantius, the same man says:61
"Why," you will say, "are you going to the desert?" It is plainly that I may not hear you, see you, be moved by your wrath, suffer your hostilities; that the eye of a prostitute not capture me; that a most beautiful form not lead to unlawful embraces. You will respond: "This is not to fight but to flee. Stand in the battle line, stand armed and resist adversaries, so that you may be crowned after you have vanquished." I admit my weakness. I do not wish to fight in hope of victory, for fear that at some time I might lose victory. If I flee, I have avoided the sword; if I stand,
I must either win or fall. But why is it necessary to part with sure things and to strive for unsure ones? Death must be avoided either with a shield or with the feet. You who fight can be both overcome and victorious.
When I flee, I do not vanquish in fleeing, but I flee so that I may not be vanquished. There is no safety in sleeping with a serpent nearby. It can happen that it might not bite me; nevertheless it can happen that at some time it might bite me.62
The same man wrote to Oceanus about the death of Fabiola:63
60. Jerome, Letter 14.8, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54: 56.
61. Jerome and Vigilantius (born 370), a presbyter from Aquitaine, had a quarrel that eventuated in Jerome's polemical invective, which attacked Vigilantius for many shortcomings, including failings in celibacy and monastic discipline.
62. Contra Vigilantium 14.8, in PL 23: 339–52 (353–68), here 367a. This text by Jerome is cited by Heloise in Letter Four, ed. J. T. Muckle, Mediaeval Studies 15 (1953): 82, and another part of it by Abelard in his solution to the fourteenth of Heloise's Problemata in PL 178: 700A (ed. Cousin, p. 262, line 2); in Sermon 33, in PL 178: 603A; and in Sermon 35 "Adtendite a falsis prophetis," ed. Engels, p. 226, line 46.
63. Letter 117.3, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 55: 425–26. St. Fabiola (died 399) was a Roman
other controversi es A religious man should beware of living there where he may have the necessity daily of either perishing or winning. For it is safer not to be able to perish than not to perish in the proximity of danger.
Seneca, that greatest moral philosopher, who also held this opinion and advised his Lucilius to philosophize in this fashion, said in the fifty-third of the letters which he wrote to him:64
We must choose a place that is healthy not only for the body but also for the morals. [. . .] We must do this so that we may shun as long as possible the incitements of vices. The soul must be hardened and kept far from the enticements of pleasures. One winter weakened Hannibal, and the pampering in Campania debilitated that man untamed by snows or the Alps.65 He conquered with weapons, he was conquered by vices. We must also serve as soldiers and in a certain manner of soldiery, by which leisure is never granted. [. . .] First of all, pleasures must be overcome which, as you see, have also captured for themselves even savage natures.
If anyone imagines how great a task he has approached, he will know that nothing must be done gently, nothing softly.
But perhaps to these counsels of holy fathers as well as of philosophers you will respond in truth that it is dangerous to undertake church administration and most difficult to toil in it, as much as is necessary; but for a fact it is certain that the greater the rewards are, the greater the difficulty weighs upon this labor. To which I reply first of all with that statement of Cicero, "Even if it matron who went in 395 to Bethlehem, where she stayed with Paula and Eustochium under the direction of Jerome. Eventually she returned to Rome. The passage also appears (with wording closer to what Abelard cites) in Pseudo-Jerome, Homilia ad monachos, in PL 30: 311–18, at 315A.
64. Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) was forced to commit suicide in 65 c.e. Among his extant works are the Epistulae morales, one hundred and twenty-four letters divided into twenty books. Their addressee is nominally Lucilius (Gaius Lucilius Iunior). Although Abelard cites Letter 53, in the numbering of standard modern editions the passage quoted is Letter 51.4–6.
65. After the Carthaginian general Hannibal (247–183/2 b.c.e.) wintered with his troops in southern Italy (216–215 b.c.e.), his campaign against Rome (217–202 b.c.e.) met with less success. "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" reasoning has attributed the subsequent failures of the Carthaginians to "the debauch of Capua."
to a regular canon
be laborious, it is not necessarily excellent" [Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.4.6]. Otherwise in the Church of God those who are entangled in the daily bothers of marriage and in incessant cares would have to be preferred to those who in leading a celibate life are less oppressed by the weight of the world and on this account are devoted more freely and purely to God, as if having obtained the repose of bed.66 In sum, if for the increase of merits you extol those who, trusting in their virtues, have resolved to endure rather than flee fights of temptations and enticements of the world, consider whether it should be counseled to those who have taken vows of chastity that they should strive to preserve this virtue in brothels or where they see frequent fornications and that exposing themselves voluntarily to perils, but, as if attending closely to angels rather than human beings, they should presume to test
God through so great a complacence about themselves.
Why indeed are clerics prohibited from having women in their dwelling place, except such persons of close blood relationship about whom no suspicion of baseness could be held? Augustine, your instructor most particularly (as you say), also decreed that these women should be avoided to such an extent that he did not allow even his most saintly sister to dwell with him, saying: "Those who are with my sister are not my sisters."67 Why, even you yourselves, newly called "Regular Canons" by yourselves, just as you are newly arisen, do you not remain separated from the enticements and temptations of the world, hedging your cloisters about with a great circumference of walls in the manner of monks?68 If 66. The phrasing of the "bothers of a marriage" comes close to that used in the description of Susanna in Letter Nine. "The repose of bed" refers to Abelard's explication of Song of Songs 5.2 earlier in Letter Twelve.
67. Smits, Letters IX–XIV, 267, has pointed out that although this anecdote appears in Possidius's Vita Augustini (Life of Augustine) 26, in PL 32: 55, it does not appear in Augustine's own writings. Abelard's likely source is Ivo of Chartres, Decretum 6.77, in PL 161: 462B, a text on which Abelard often relied.
68. This sentence holds at least twofold interest. On the one hand, Abelard presents himself in it tacitly as defending against innovation, a stand that he also took in
other controversi es therefore, as you also teach and as is evident to one and all, it is more fitting for human frailty to be protected from dangers than to oppose itself to them willingly, indeed the advice is to avoid all temptations to the extent that we can, especially if we should choose that life which both is of greater merit and lies less open to temptation. This is declared by the authority of the fathers as well as by certain examples of deeds.
It is apparent that the life of contemplation and repose were preferred by the Lord to the tumultuous activity of the faithful, and it is certain that the part of Mary (which he called the best
[Luke 10.42]) was preferred to the part of Martha. For although Martha refreshed the Lord, Mary was more blessedly refreshed by the Lord; and the Lord administered refreshment better by far than did Martha. The ministration of Martha is to see to the body's needs, to distribute the word of preaching, to take care of others by virtue of one's own office rather than of oneself. For the pastors of the Church, in that they are shepherds (pastores), are obliged to think not so much about their own nourishment as about that of those subject to them, and in this they benefit not so much themselves as others. For this reason the Lord, when he established Peter in this office, did not say at all "Feed yourself" but "Feed my sheep"
[John 21.17] or "my lambs" [John 21.15–16], that is, instruct them or bolster them with the bread of spiritual teaching or encouragement. About the bread of God's word it has in fact been written elsewhere: "Not in bread alone doth man live, but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God" [Matthew 4.4].
But if in this time you compare the toil and hardness of life of clerics and monks, what becomes evident through daily experiences need not be discussed in a long debate. Compare bishops with abbots, archpriests of churches with priors of monasteries, clerics
Letter Ten. On the other, it confirms that he viewed both the name and the institution of Regular Canons as being new. The newness could be merely relative to monasticism or could conceal another, more specific reference.
to a regular canon
with monks, and ask whomever you wish who among them lead a harsher or more toilsome life than who. The result will be that if you should ponder the toil, you would find far superior in merit us, to whom you yourselves ascribe a life not other than that of penitents, and you call our cloisters not places of worthiness but prisons of penance. Blessed Jerome, differentiating this from the life of clerics, also writes to Heliodorus on the death of Nepotian in these words:69
If anyone, having forsaken the clergy, should hand himself over to monastic rigor, let him be incessant in prayers, watchful in devotion, offering tears to God and not to men.70
Certainly if the life of clerics were more bounded and if those who are preeminent in worthiness within the Church also stood out for the severity of their lives, not at all would monks be sought after with such great desire to become bishops nor would spiritual fathers solicit clerics with such great anxiety to the monastic way of life. Of this sort too is that passage from the same teacher [Jerome] when exhorting the deacon Praesidius:
Deacon, you will say, "I cannot safely forsake the Church. I fear to commit sacrilege, if I abandon the altars." But consider, I beg you, that it is quite difficult to fill the place of Stephen or Paul, to stand in the ministry of an angel and to look down from above in bright vestments upon the people who lie below.71 The pearl is precious, but it is readily broken, and once broken, it cannot be restored.72
69. Bishop Heliodorus of Altinum has suffered the loss of his nephew Nepotian, a presbyter who died of fever in 396.
70. Jerome, Letter 60.10, ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54.561.
71. Stephen was one of the Seven (Acts of the Apostles 21.8), a group that has been taken as the archetype of the order of deacons. Paul the Apostle was a great missionary and preacher (also discussed passim in the Acts of the Apostles).
72. Jerome, Epistula ad Praesidium, ed. Germain Morin, Bulletin d'ancienne littérature et d'archéologie chrétiennes 3 (1913): 51–60, at 57.
other controversi es Likewise, When they tear to pieces the good life in cities, what will you do, brother, caught in the middle? Either you will seek out things that are contrary to continence or, if you do not wish to do them, you will be condemned yourself. I pass over various enticements by which even the most unyielding minds are softened. Now I assert this because, even if matters were not so, you would have been obliged to forsake things that are lesser in comparison with so enormous a good.
Add that you are a deacon, but by your withdrawal the churches will not experience losses. Elijah lived in the desert, a chorus of prophets followed Elisha. John, the harbinger of the Lord, having been nurtured in a solitary place, came down to the banks of the Jordan for this reason only, that he might rebuke the peoples flowing together and, understanding the Pharisaical clerics of the Jews, might designate them as broods of vipers [Matthew 3.7]. Recently you have seen the deserts of Egypt, you have gazed upon the angelic family. How many flowers are there? How are the meadows verdant with spiritual jewels? You have seen the garlands with which the Lord is crowned.73
Likewise, You will have a little cell that holds you alone. But you will not be alone; an angelic throng will live with you. However many comrades, that many saints. You will read the Gospel, Jesus will converse with you. You will repeat again and again the words of apostles and prophets. Will you be able to have any other such companion for your words? Let us at least strive to imitate little women; may the weaker sex instruct us. However much they prospered in riches as well as in nobility, they then (in fact,
I do not wish to say the words for fear that I seem to be fawning), by abandoning material goods and spurning close relations, rated as easy to do what you thought difficult, owing to your own fear.74
73. Jerome, Epistula ad Praesidium, ed. Morin, 57.
74. Jerome, Epistula ad Praesidium, ed. Morin, 57.