The Calamitites of Peter Abelard

The Calamitites of Peter Abelard

THE CALAMITIES

PETER ABELARD

A LETTER OF CONSOLATION TO A FRIEND

The force of example often does more than words to stir our human passions or to still them. With this in mind, I have decided to follow up the words of consolation I offered you while we were together and write an account of my own experience of calamities to console you while we are apart. I expect you will see that your trials are only slight next to mine, or even nothing at all, and then you will find them easier to bear.

To begin, then—

I was born on the edge of Brittany, about eight miles I think east of Nantes, in a town called Palatium, or Le Pallet.1 Because of the nature of the land—or perhaps of my own origins—I was always quick in spirit with superior intelligence and a great aptitude for learning. But in addition, my father had had a little education before he became a knight and took to it with such enthusiasm that he decided to have all his sons trained in letters before they were trained in arms.2 It turned out as he intended. Since I was his firstborn, he

1 The town still stands, about twelve miles southeast of Nantes on the road to Poitiers.

Its name gave Abelard the epithet "Palatinus," meaning both "man of Le Pallet" and "man of the palace," or, as its meaning developed in the twelfth century, "knightcourtier," pointing to Abelard's known elegance of manners and even his later image as a courtly lover, as well as his success in intellectual jousts; see Clanchy 1997, 145–47.

2 Abelard's father, Berengar, was a minor member of the Breton nobility, probably of Poitevin birth. Somewhat unusually, he had gained some knowledge of "letters," as indicated here, meaning some facility in Latin and some familiarity with the Latin

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

saw to my education with all the care his special love for me could provide; and for my part, the more progress I made in my studies, the more passionately I devoted myself to them. In the end I fell so deeply in love with learning that I renounced the pomp of knighthood, turned over to my brothers my inheritance and other rights of the eldest, and quit the court of Mars to be raised at the bosom of Minerva. Of all the areas of philosophy, my primary interest lay in the weapons of dialectical reasoning, so I traded all my arms for these and gave up the trophies of war for the noisy clash of argument. Then I went out into the world, arguing my way through the provinces from one place to another, wherever I heard that the study of the art was most active, and became like one of the peripatetic philosophers of old.3

At last I reached Paris, which had long been the center of dialectical studies, and came to the school of William of Champeaux, then the leading figure in the field both in reputation and in fact.4 I stayed with him for some time. At first I was made welcome but classics. "Letters" in this sense was the substance of twelfth-century education, and it has been translated as "letters," "education," or "learning" as the context demands.

The names of four of Abelard's siblings are known: brothers Dagobert, Porcarius, and Radulf, and sister Dionysia, or Denise.

3 There were several schools in Brittany and its neighboring provinces that Abelard could have attended, but he omits all details of his early education. He is known, however, to have spent some years (probably after 1093 but before c. 1100, when he arrived in Paris) at Loches and Tours as student of Roscelin of Compiègne, one of the most famous and controversial teachers of dialectic of the time. Roscelin's theories about the nature of the Trinity led to charges of heresy against him at the Council of Soissons in 1092, and his "nominalist" theories about the logical status of universals provoked similar suspicions long afterward. Abelard was later to join in the attacks against his old master, and by c. 1120, their relationship had degenerated into unmixed acrimony. A vicious letter to Abelard remains Roscelin's only extant work.

The peripatetic philosophers were the ancient followers of Aristotle, probably sonamed because of Aristotle's habit of "strolling around" as he taught. In later centuries, the adjective was reinterpreted as "traveling around," somewhat in the manner of a knight-errant, as Abelard describes himself here.

4 This was the cathedral school of Notre Dame. Its master, William of Champeaux (c.

1070–1121), was a renowned teacher of rhetoric, grammar, and theology as well as dialectic, in which he held a "realist" position on the status of universals. He was also archdeacon of Paris and canon of the cathedral, a royal counselor, and an early supporter of Bernard of Clairvaux. Abelard mentions or alludes to other details of William's life: that he had been a student of Anselm of Laon, that he founded a community of canons regular and a school at the abbey of St. Victor (c. 1105), and that he became bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne (1113).

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

soon became nothing but a problem to him, doing what I could to refute his conclusions, often arguing against him in class, and more than once coming out the winner in debate. The so-called leaders among my fellow students resented this, of course, especially since I was so much their junior both in age and length of study. And so began the string of my calamities, which has continued unbroken until the present day, and as my reputation grew, so other men's envy was kindled against me.

It came to the point where, presuming on an intelligence beyond my years—I was still very young—I began to set my sights on directing a school of my own. I looked for a place where I could do this and settled on Melun, then a town of some importance and a residence of the king. My master anticipated this and, to put as much distance as possible between my school and his, schemed behind my back to block my plans and deny me the place I had settled on. But he had some enemies among the most powerful men of the country there, and with their help I got what I wanted. His naked envy in fact won me wide support.

From this first tour of duty at a school of my own, my reputation in dialectic began to spread until, slowly but surely, it eclipsed the fame of all my old schoolmates and even my master himself. This made me presume even further. I moved my school to the town of Corbeil, which was closer to Paris and allowed for more of those bold assaults of argument I would launch against him. Not long afterward, though, my health broke down under the strain of too much study and I had to return home to Brittany. I was away from France for several years, bitterly missed by everyone who cared about dialectic.

A few years later, after I had long recovered, William, who had been archdeacon of Paris, entered an order of canons regular,5 with the idea, everyone said, of winning a greater reputation for piety and, hence, a greater chance of promotion within the Church, as in fact happened soon afterward when he was made bishop of Châlons. Even with his new status, though, he did not give up his normal practice of philosophy or even withdraw from the city;

5 That is, priests bound by religious vows, living communally under the Rule (regula) of Augustine. William was founding abbot of the community of canons at the abbey of St. Victor, where he established a school that became one of the most important and influential of its time.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

rather, he kept on with public teaching in his usual way, only now inside the walls of the monastery to which he supposedly had retired to pursue the religious life. I went back to him then for his lectures on rhetoric. In the course of all our philosophical wrangles,

I once came at him with such clear logic that I forced him to modify—or I should say, abandon—his long-held position on the commonality of universals.6 He had maintained that the same undivided nature exists essentially in all the particular members of 6 The question is how universals (species or genera) are related to particulars (individual things, members of the species or genus), as Aristotle formulated it in his Categories. In his own textbook, the Logica "Ingredientibus," probably composed c. 1120,

Abelard set out the argument against William's position without taking a final stand on the question himself. Originally, the position had been that, for example, Socrates and Plato are essentially the same because human is the essence of both, and that this single essence is wholly present in both of them at the same time. They are differentiated from one another in accidental (nonessential, contingent) ways: e.g., Socrates is snub-nosed and Plato has a cauliflower ear. Abelard points out, however, that Socrates and Plato also would have to be essentially the same in being animals and living things, and that Abelard's ass Brunellus, "Brownie," is also a living thing and an animal—but asinine, not human. Does this mean that Socrates, essentially human, also shares an essence with an ass, that an essentially rational creature is also an essentially irrational creature? Or does it prove that there is diversity in essence among Brownie, Socrates, and Plato, and that variety arises from what is essential as well as what is accidental? Moreover, if we consider the universal all three have in common, animal, it is unclear how many animal natures there are (if Socrates has an animal nature and Brownie has an animal nature, does that make two animal natures?), and also unclear whether Socrates' animal nature is different from Brownie's. A position Abelard calls "closer to the truth" holds that nothing shares an essence with anything else. William's new formulation prevents his having to say that Socrates and Brownie share an essential animal nature, but only by invoking a new category: Socrates and Brownie share a non-different animal nature. Such nondifference was explained in various ways, but to Abelard all these ways were objectionable since they all ultimately identified the species with the individual and led to the absurd collapse of any distinction between the particular and the universal. See further King 2004, esp. 66–72.

The entire question is part of an old controversy about the status of universals themselves, as Abelard indicates, which in the twelfth century took the form of a division especially between those who held that universals have a real existence and those who held that they have a purely nominal existence, that is, that they exist only in language. The controversy became particularly intense when it was thought to impinge on discussions of the nature of the Trinity, that is, the relationship between the single God and the individual divine persons of which he was considered to be composed. Some of the so-called nominalists found themselves charged with the heresy of tritheism, or the belief in the existence of three separate Gods. Something of the sort happened to Abelard's old teacher, Roscelin, at the Council of Soissons in 1092, and to Abelard himself at Soissons in 1121.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

a species, and that there is no distinctness in essence among them, but only a variety arising from the number of accidental properties.

But now he changed his mind and said that the same nature exists in particulars not in essence but in non-difference. For dialecticians, of course, this has always been the fundamental question about universals: even Porphyry did not presume to settle it in the Isagoge, saying only, "It is a very profound matter."7 So, when William shifted his position—or when I forced him to surrender it—his lectures disintegrated into such a muddle that he lost almost all credibility on every other issue of dialectic, as if this one position on universals comprised the whole subject.

From that point on, my own teaching gained so much in stature and substance that those who had been William's strongest supporters—and my own greatest enemies—now came to my school in flocks. Even the man who succeeded him at the school in Paris offered me his own post to become one of my students himself and join the rest of them there in the same spot where his master and mine had once had his day. Now, I had been in charge of dialectic at the school only a few days at most when my old master started carrying on, seething with such envy, boiling with such pain that words cannot do it justice. And once he started, he could not bear it long before he found a scheme to get rid of me even then. Because there was nothing he could do in the open against me, he began to work against the man who had given me his post, smearing him with the ugliest of charges until he wrested the school from his control and put one of my enemies in his place. I went back to Melun and set up my school as before, but the more openly that man's malice hounded me, the more it confirmed my own stature. As Ovid says, "Winds sweep the summits, envy seeks the heights."8

Shortly after, though—in fact, as soon as he became aware of all the gossip flying around about his newfound piety: almost no one took his religious retirement seriously since he had hardly withdrawn from the city at all—he gathered up a small community of brothers of his order and, along with his students, went off to some village far from town. Expecting no more trouble from that quarter, I came back to Paris right away. But since, as I said, he had installed

7 Porphyry was a third-century Neoplatonic philosopher, whose introduction (Isagoge) to Aristotle's Categories remained an authoritative text in dialectic for centuries in its Latin translation by Boethius.

8 De Remedio Amoris 1.369.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

one of my enemies in the post that rightly belonged to me, I took my students to the hill of Saint Geneviève just outside the city and pitched camp there as if to lay siege to the occupying force.9 No sooner had William heard about this than he came back to Paris right away—no sense of shame at all—and marched himself and his little community and whatever he could salvage of his school back inside their old monastery, thinking, I suppose, to break the siege and rescue the poor soldier he had left behind to hold the fort. He imagined he would do the man some good by this, but it only made things worse. Before this, he still had a handful of students of one sort or another, mostly because of his lectures on Priscian, which was supposed to be his specialty;10 but after William's return to the city, he lost nearly every one of them and had to stop teaching altogether. Soon, in fact, he too retired to monastic life, as if he had finally given up any notion of worldly fame. Everything that happened after William's return—the jousts of argument my students had with him and his followers, the triumphs fortune gave us in our wars (myself not least among us)—is now an old story which certainly you know. To put it mildly, I can boast along with Ajax:

And if you ask me how The fighting ended, he did not beat me down.11

But even if I said nothing, the facts speak for themselves and the end of the tale tells all.

While all this was going on, my beloved mother Lucia called for me to return home; my father Berengar had entered monastic life and she was making arrangements to do the same.12 After everything was settled, I came back to France, where I wanted especially to take up the study of divinity. My master William was now in his

9 Abelard's school was established at the church of St. Geneviève on the left bank of the Seine, south of the Île de la Cité and, hence, outside what then constituted the city of Paris proper.

10 Priscian, sixth-century grammarian, author of Institutiones Grammaticae, a standard text on grammar at the time.

11 Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.89–90.

12 Such monastic retirement was not an unusual practice since monastic life provided its more elderly entrants with a modicum of medical care and the opportunity to supervise the distribution of their property while they were still alive, as well as a setting to prepare themselves spiritually for death.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

glory as bishop of Châlons, but his old master was then considered to be the greatest authority on the subject from time immemorial.

This was Anselm of Laon.13

So I went to the old man, who, I found, had bought himself a reputation more by long practice than by any capacity for learning or thought. Anyone who knocked on his door with a question went away more puzzled than before. Holding forth, he was a marvel to see; answering questions, he was nothing. The man had a marvelous way with words, but they were devoid of logic and abysmal in sense. He was like a fire which fills the house with smoke but gives no light, or a tree in full leaf if you see it from far off, but come up closer and look again, and it turns out to be barren. I came to this tree to gather fruit, but I saw it was the fig tree which the Lord cursed14 or the ancient oak in Lucan's simile for Pompey:

There stands the shadow of a once-great name, Like a towering oak in a fruitful field:

Laden with the trophies of a nation, Clinging to earth with roots no longer strong,

It stands fixed by its own weight; naked branches spread Leafless across the sky; only its trunk Casts a shadow, and though it totters, doomed

To fall with the first wind, and all around it Many trees with healthy timber rise, Yet it alone is worshipped.15

13 Anselm of Laon (c. 1055–c. 1117), student of St. Anselm and a well-known master of scriptural exegesis.

14 See Mark 11:13–14:

And when he had seen afar off a fig tree having leaves, he came if perhaps he might find any thing on it. And when he was come to it, he found nothing but leaves. For it was not the time for figs. And answering he said to it: May no man hereafter eat fruit of thee any more forever, and Matt. 21:19.

15 Lucan, Pharsalia 1.135–43. The manuscripts quote only the first two of these lines, though most of them add "etc." inviting consideration of the lines that follow, which are the ones that make Abelard's point. Directly after this passage, Lucan goes on to write of the younger warrior who ultimately defeated Pompey in Rome's civil wars, to whom Abelard may, at least in this context, wish implicitly to compare himself:

But Caesar Had no such name or reputation, only A virtue that could not rest. . . .

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

Once I found this out, I did not lie lazing in his shadow for long. I started skipping his lectures more and more, which annoyed some of his favorite students, who somehow imagined that I had no respect for this great master of ours. With their secret plots and snide insinuations they succeeded in turning him too against me. Then one day, when I was joking with some of the other students after class,16 one of them had the idea to challenge me by asking what I could possibly make of scriptural study when I had had no training at all outside philosophy. I answered that it certainly seemed very useful so far as the salvation of the soul was concerned, but that I was frankly amazed that educated men would find the writings or glosses of the Fathers insufficient by themselves to help them understand their commentaries without some extra instruction. They sniggered at this and asked if I thought I could do it or even presumed to try. I said, if that's what they wanted, I would, and they sniggered even more. "All right," they said, "we'll find you a commentary on some little-known text and see what you come up with," and they settled on an extremely obscure prophecy of Ezekiel. I took the commentary and invited them to a lecture on it the next day. No, they said, I couldn't hurry something as important as this; I should take my time to pore over the commentary and make sure of every point, especially with my total lack of practice. But I had no interest in their advice and told them in my most indignant tone that it was not my way to rely on practice but solely on the intelligence I was born with, and that either they would come to a lecture when and where I chose or else I would give the whole thing up.

Only a few people came, of course—everyone thought it was absurd that a complete novice in scriptural studies would charge straight into this—but they all thought the lecture was superb and 16 Abelard is more specific about the nature of the session, calling it sententiarum collationes (literally, "assemblage of conclusions"), which was both a type of class and an educational method. The traditional mode of scriptural education involved the exegesis of a biblical text through a verse-by-verse explanation, or gloss, by one of the Church Fathers. At this time, however—and to no small extent through the work of Anselm himself—another method was evolving, in which a teacher would lay out a set of conclusions (sententiae), arrived at by himself or another recognized authority, on a sequence of theological themes and then proceed to expand, elaborate, or, if necessary, defend them in a setting that could allow for more discussion than a lecture.

Abelard's objection to it, as he goes on to explain, is that an educated man should not need a teacher for this kind of work: the writings and glosses of the Fathers ought to be enough by themselves to allow him to understand their commentaries without intermediary. See further Clanchy 1997, 85 ff., and Muckle 1964, 22 n. 22.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

insisted that I prepare a gloss on the text along the same lines. When word got out, everyone who had not been to my first lecture came crowding to my second and my third, all of them frantic to copy out the glosses I had begun on the first day.

The old man was beside himself with envy. Certain individuals at the school, as I've mentioned, had already turned him against me, and now they egged him on to persecute me in scriptural study as William had done earlier in philosophy. There were two of the old man's students in particular—some considered them better than the rest—Alberic of Rheims and Lotulf the Lombard, two whose hatred of me was matched only by their self-infatuation17—it was largely due to their connivance, as it later came out, that the old man had the gall to forbid me from continuing my work on the gloss in a place where he was the master. He had a pretext, of course—to make sure that the mistakes I would make through my raw ignorance would not be attributed to him—but when the students heard about it, they exploded with outrage at this unprecedented attack of open spite. But the more open it was, the more honor it brought me: persecution only added to my fame.18

So after a few days, I returned to Paris, back to the school which had long been destined for me, which had once been offered to me, and from which I had at first been expelled. I had a peaceful tenure there for several years. My first aim was to complete the glosses on Ezekiel I had begun in Laon, and they were so well received that I won the same prestige in scripture as I already had in philosophy.19

My school then grew by leaps and bounds, as students of both subjects swelled its ranks. The wealth and fame this brought me I'm sure you already know.

17 Alberic of Rheims (c. 1085–1141) and Lotulf of Novara in Lombardy appear again as Abelard's prosecutors at the Council of Soissons in 1121 when Alberic was archdeacon of Rheims and both were masters at the school there. Alberic finished his career as archbishop of Bourges; little else is known of Lotulf.

18 Anselm's actions may not have been as unreasonable as Abelard paints them, especially in this era of intense politicization of religious thought, neither his objection to an untrained student assuming the position of teacher in his school nor his insistence on maintaining a supervisory role for himself. At least his actions were not unique to Abelard's case. A book of Gilbert de la Porrée—a student of Anselm's, who may have been at Laon at the same time as Abelard—concludes: "Here ends the gloss of Master

Gilbert de la Porrée, which he read out in the presence of his master, Anselm, so that he might correct it." See Clanchy 1997, 90.

19 No trace of the glosses exists, and it is doubtful that Abelard ever finished them, despite the implication here that he did.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

But success always puffs up the fool; worldly ease saps the strength of the mind and soon destroys it through the lures of the flesh. Now I thought I was the only philosopher in the world and had nothing to fear from anyone, and now I began to give free rein to my lust. I had lived with complete self-restraint up till now, but the more progress I made in philosophy and scripture, the more I fell short of philosophers and scholars of scripture in the foulness of my life. For we know that philosophers, and no less scholars of scripture—the ones, that is, who actually want to learn what scripture teaches—have grown strong through their self-restraint. As I was weighed down by lechery and pride, the grace of God brought me relief from both, though not in the ways I would have it: first from my lechery, by cutting from me the means I used to practice it, and then from the pride born of my learning—"Knowledge puffeth up," the apostle Paul says20—by humbling me with the burning of the book of which I was most proud.

Now, I want you to learn the truth of these events in all their proper order, and I want you to learn it not from hearsay but from the facts. I had no dealings with common whores—their foulness always disgusted me—and the demands of my scholarly life kept me from mixing often with high-born women, or women of the people for that matter. So fickle Fortune, as she's called, found a better way to seduce me and knock me down from my lofty perch—or perhaps it is better to say, for all my pride and blindness to the grace held out before me, God's mercy brought me low and claimed me for his own.

This is how it happened—

There was in Paris a young woman by the name of Heloise.21 She was niece of one of the canons there called Fulbert, who doted on 20 1 Cor. 8:1.

21 Heloise's birth date, and hence her age at this time (c. 1116), is not known. The tradition that she was sixty-three when she died (in 1163 or 1164) rests on no firm evidence but may well be derived from an imagined symmetry with Abelard, who died at that age. From Peter the Venerable's first letter to Heloise, it can be deduced that she was born c. 1090 and therefore was in her midor late twenties when she and Abelard met and not, as she has often been imagined, in her teens; see Clanchy 1997,

173–74. The most complete account of Heloise's life and what little can be known about her family is McLeod 1971, although a new biography by the late Mary Martin

McLaughlin has been scheduled for publication for some years.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

her and did everything he could to further her education. In her looks she was not the least of women, but in her learning she was supreme. As a gift for learning is so rare in a woman, it added all the more to her appeal and had already made her famous throughout the whole kingdom of France. Now, having carefully considered all the things that usually serve to attract a lover, I concluded that she was the best one to bring to my bed. I was sure it would be easy: I was famous myself at the time, young, and exceptionally goodlooking, and could not imagine that any woman I thought worthy of my love would turn me down. But I thought that this particular girl would be even more likely to give in because of her knowledge and love of letters. Through the written messages we could send one another we could be together even when we were apart. We also could write some things to each other more boldly than we could ever speak them and so could always be carrying on some very pleasant dialogues.22

I was all on fire for the girl and needed a way I could get to know her on a private and daily basis to win her over. So I approached her uncle through some of his friends and arranged for him to take me as a lodger in his house, which was right next to the school; I would pay whatever he asked. I told him that the burdens of my own household kept me from concentrating properly on my academic work and that, besides, it had been costing me too much. The man had two weaknesses, his love of money and his ambitions for his niece's education. Working on both, I easily got what I wanted, while he stood there gaping after my cash and imagining how much she would learn from my instruction. On top of this, he begged me—actually begged—and it was beyond anything my love could have dared to hope—to take complete charge over the girl, to spend all the time I had free from school teaching her, night and day, and not only that, but to beat her severely if I found her slacking off. The simplicity of the man just staggered me, as if he had set a ravening wolf to watch over a lamb. When he put her in my hands not only to teach but to discipline as well, what else was he doing but giving me complete freedom, even if I never took advantage of it, to convince her by force if more gentle inducements did not prevail? But two things kept him from any suspicion, his love for his niece and my solid reputation for self-restraint.

22 Some scholars have identified the remnants of these early letters in the fragmentary text known as The Letters of Two Lovers; see Appendix B to this volume.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

What more do I need to say? First we were joined in one house, then in one heart. Under the pretext of study, we had all our time free for love, and in our classroom all the seclusion love could ever want. With our books open before us, we exchanged more words of love than of lessons, more kisses than concepts. My hands wandered more to her breasts than our books, and love turned our eyes to each other more than reading kept them on the page. To avert suspicion, there were some beatings, yes, but the hand that struck the blows belonged to love, not anger, to pleasure, not rage—and they surpassed the sweetness of any perfume. We left no stage of love untried in our passion, and if love could find something novel or strange, we tried that too. New at the game, we went at it with heat, and it never grew old for us.

But the more I was taken up with these pleasures, the less time I had for philosophy or teaching. It was torture to drag myself over to the school and utterly exhausting to stay there, since I was spending all my days in study and all my nights in love. My lectures became lukewarm and slack, relying now on my past practice and not on my intelligence at all. I did everything by rote, repeating only what had been new years before. All my new work, such as it was, now went into writing love songs and not the mysteries of philosophy.

Many of these songs are still popular, as you know, and are sung throughout the country, especially by those who like the sort of life I myself was living then.23 But what of my students? It is hard even to imagine their misery, their sorrow, their wails of lamentation when they understood what was preoccupying, or I should say, what was deranging my mind. It was all so plain that few could have been taken in, and no one was, I think, except the man whose honor was most at stake, that is, her uncle. People would give him hints from time to time, but he could not believe them because, as I said before, he doted on his niece and trusted in my well-known self-restraint. It never is easy to think ill of those we love: suspicion cannot exist where there is great affection. As Jerome says in his letter to Castrician, "We are the last to learn the evils of our own house or the faults of our wives and children, and the first to turn a deaf ear to what all the neighbors are saying."24 But what is learned last is still learned eventually, and what all people know is hard to hide from one. After a few months, this is just what happened with us.

23 See "Dull Is the Star" in this volume for the probable text of one of these songs.

24 Epistulae 147.10. Abelard is in error here, however: the letter is to Sabinian.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

How could I describe her uncle's grief when he found out, or our own grief when we were parted? What can I say about my shame and remorse, how I suffered at what she suffered, or the waves of anguish she endured at the thought of my disgrace? All our concern was for what could hurt the other, all our pain was for each other, not ourselves. But this same separation was the fusion of our hearts: love denied made us burn the more. The old shame we had felt now made us shameless, and we felt shame the less with each new chance to act. And then, what once happened in myth to Venus and Mars now happened to us: we were caught.25 Soon after, though, the girl discovered she was pregnant and wrote me in a delirium of joy asking what I thought we should do. And so, one night, when her uncle was away, I took her secretly from his house and brought her to Brittany, as we had agreed. She stayed there with my sister until she gave birth to a boy, whom she called Astralabe.26

When her uncle came back, he went almost insane, boiling with such pain and writhing with such mortification that no one would believe it who had not seen it for himself. What should he do to me?

How should he get me back? He had no idea. Have me killed or maimed somehow? But then his niece might have to pay for it among my people back in Brittany. No good to kidnap me and lock me up somewhere—I would be watching out for this, sure that's exactly what he'd try as soon as he could or dared. Finally, I took pity on the man. I met with him and, denouncing myself for this lover's trick as if it had been some supreme betrayal, threw myself on my knees and promised to do anything he asked to make this right. I pleaded the great power of love and what women had done from the beginning of the human race to bring even the greatest men to ruin. And I went further, offering him a satisfaction he never

25 Mars and Venus were discovered together in bed by her husband, Vulcan. See Ovid, Ars Amatoria 2.561 ff. and Metamorphoses 4.169 ff.

26 An extraordinary name, to say the least, bringing to mind some celebrity toy of the tabloids. An astrolabe is a scientific instrument used to measure the height of celestial bodies, though the word was also (falsely) etymologized as astris lapsus, "fallen from the stars." Few details of the life of Petrus Astralabius are available. That he grew to manhood, maintained at least some contact with his parents, and took up a career in the Church is indicated by the long poem Abelard addressed to him sometime after 1133 (see p. 295) and by the request Heloise makes of Peter the Venerable for a prebend for "your Astralabe" in her letter to him after Abelard's death. There is an "Astralabe" recorded as a canon of the cathedral of Nantes c. 1150, and this is almost certainly he, although there is more doubt about someone of that name who appears as abbot of the monastery of Hauterive in Fribourg in 1162–1165.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

could have hoped: I undertook to marry the girl I had wronged, so long as it was all done in secret in order to keep my standing intact.27 He agreed to every point, pledged his own faith and the faith of his relations, and then, to seal our compact, he kissed me— all the easier to betray me later on.

I went straight to Brittany to bring back my lover and make her my wife. But far from falling in with the idea, she vigorously argued against it on two fundamental grounds: it was dangerous, she said, and it would mean my disgrace.28 She swore that her uncle could never be appeased by this or anything else, as later proved to be true. And, she asked, is this how she would be remembered, as the woman who brought my name to ruin and shamed us both? What toll should the world exact from her if she robbed it of its great light? Could I even imagine what would follow this marriage—the censure and abuse, the tears of the philosophers, and the loss to the Church? What a pity it would be for me, whom nature had created for all mankind, now to become the property of one woman—could

I ever submit to this indignity? She rejected this marriage without qualification: it would be infamous and odious to me in every way.

Along with the disgrace, she brought up the problems of marriage the Apostle warns us against when he says:

Art thou loosed from a wife? Then seek not a wife. But if thou take a wife, thou hast not sinned. And if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned: nevertheless, such shall have tribulation of the flesh. But I spare you. . . . I would have you be without solicitude. He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may

27 Though somewhat fatuous under the circumstances, Abelard's desire for secrecy was not unwarranted. While it was permitted and not uncommon for clerics up through the rank of priest to be married, marriage for a cleric entailed the loss of Church benefices. It was also seen as morally incompatible with the position of a teacher, especially for one of Abelard's eminence and ambition: not only was

Abelard's "standing" at stake but his career was at stake as well. For applicable canon law at the time, see McLaughlin 1941. For a more general discussion, see

Brooke 1989 and, more briefly, Clanchy 1997, 187–91.

28 Heloise's arguments against marriage, set out here and expanded in the First Letter, became well known in medieval literature, paraphrased by Jean de Meun (who also translated the Calamities and the letters into French) in The Romance of the Rose, lines 8745 ff., and thence taken up by Chaucer in the Wife of Bath's Prologue in The Canterbury Tales, and by others as well.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

please God. But he that is with a wife is solicitous for the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided.29

But if I wouldn't take Saint Paul's advice or listen to the Fathers about the heavy yoke of matrimony, then at least, she insisted, I should turn to the philosophers for what they said on the subject and what was said about them. The Fathers themselves would often do the same—as Jerome does in his first book against Jovinian when he turns to Theophrastus for details of the stress of married life and his argument that the wise man should never marry; he then caps the philosopher's proof with his own conclusion, "When Theophrastus argues like this, can any Christian hear him and not blush?" and continues on to say:

After Cicero divorced Terentia, Hirtius asked him to marry his sister, but Cicero refused, explaining that he could not give equal attention both to philosophy and to a wife. He did not say just "attention" but "equal attention" since he did not want to do anything to compete with his study of philosophy.30

"But to leave aside for the moment this obstacle to philosophy, think of the real conditions of that respectable way of life.31 Scholars and nursemaids, writing desks and cradles, a book and a distaff, a pen and a spindle—what harmony can there be in that?32 What husband could ever concentrate on philosophy or scripture and still put up with babies howling, nurses mumbling their lullabies, and a riotous gang of servants tramping all throughout the house? What wife could stand the endless mess of children? Certainly the rich ones can, you'll say, who have room enough in their mansions and 29 1 Cor. 7:27–28, 32–33. The manuscripts do not include the final two sentences of this passage, relying on an added "etc." to invoke the extended context on which Heloise's point in fact depends.

30 Contra Jovinianum 1.47–48.

31 In the next two paragraphs, the grammatical first person shifts to Heloise, as if Abelard is reporting her actual words, although Heloise would later complain that he has omitted many of her arguments (see her First Letter). The narrative here slips easily into Heloise's voice just as her argument begins to take on relevance for the future of her own intellectual life as well as Abelard's.

32 Cf. 2 Cor. 6:14–16 and its extension in Jerome, Epistulae 22.29 for the rhetorical form.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

money enough to ignore the expense and the torment of worrying every day. But I say to you, this is not the way it is with philosophers, for the rich or anyone else concerned with worldly occupations will have no time for what philosophers must do. That is why the great philosophers of the past put so little value on the world— not merely turning their backs on it but actively striving to escape it—and why they denied themselves all pleasures, that they might rest in the arms of philosophy alone. The greatest of them, Seneca, wrote to Lucilius:

Philosophy is not something for just a little spare time. We have to ignore everything else, work only at this, for which no time is ever enough. . . . It does not matter if you leave off for a moment or leave off forever, for once put aside, philosophy does not last. . . . Give up all other business: do not simply put it in order—eliminate it.33

"How the true monastics of our time live in their devotion to God is how the pagan philosophers lived in their pursuit of philosophy.34 There have always been individuals among every people— pagan as well as Jewish or Christian—who were exceptional in their faith or ethical conduct and who cut themselves off from the mass of others out of some rare austerity or self-restraint. Among the ancient

Jews there were the Nazirites, who consecrated themselves to the Lord according to the law;35 the sons of the prophets, whom Jerome refers to as monks;36 and later, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes Josephus speaks about in his Antiquities.37 Among us there are monastics, the true ones, that is, who live the communal life of the apostles or the solitary life of John. But among the pagans, as I say, there were the philosophers; for the term 'philosophy' or 'wisdom' did not then refer to extensive knowledge but to a conscientious way of life, as we know from the word's origin as well as from the Fathers. Saint Augustine tells us:

33 Epistulae ad Lucilium 72.3.

34 These "true monastics" are monachi in the original, literal sense, that is, those who live their lives "alone" (monos in Greek), withdrawn from the world in austerity and self-denial.

35 See, e.g., Num. 6:21; Judg. 16:17; and Amos 2:11.

36 See 4 Kings 6:1 and Jerome, Epistulae 125.7.

37 Antiquitates 18.1.11.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

Pythagoras of Samos, founder of philosophy in Italy, was said to be the first to use the term. Before him men who seemed especially worthy in some mode of life were called simply wise men. But when someone asked him his profession, he replied that he was a philosopher—that is, a lover of wisdom—since it seemed the height of arrogance to call himself wise.38

Note the words 'especially worthy in some mode of life': the wise men among the pagans—the philosophers—were so named not because of their knowledge but because of the character of their lives. To give examples of their sobriety and self-restraint would be teaching wisdom to Minerva, but I will ask you this: If pagans and laymen could lead such lives as these while bound by no religious calling, what should you do—you, a cleric and a canon—to hold your sacred duties above your pleasures, to keep yourself from plunging headlong into this Charybdis and sinking irrevocably into sensuality and shame?39 If you care nothing for the privilege of a cleric, if you hold God's reverence in low esteem—if nothing else, at least defend the dignity of a philosopher and control this shamelessness with self-respect. Remember that Socrates was married and what an ugly penance he had to undergo to purge this stain to philosophy before he could become a caution to others. Jerome speaks of this as well in his first book against Jovinian:

One day, after enduring a long stream of abuse from Xanthippe in a window overhead, he was suddenly doused with slops from above. All he did was wipe his head and say, 'Just as I expected—first the thunder, then the rain.'"40

She went on to point out that it would be dangerous for me to bring her back, and added in the end that it would be dearer to her—and more honorable to me—for her to be called my lover than my wife. I would be hers through a love freely offered, not forced and constrained by some marital tie, and the time we spent apart could only increase the sweetness of our reunion, our joys together as precious as they were rare. But when she saw that she could not 38 De Civitate Dei 8.2.

39 Charybdis is the whirlpool from which Ulysses escaped. It is also used as an image of sensuality in the Fourth Letter.

40 Contra Jovinianum 1.48.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

prevail against my adamant stupidity nor bear the thought of committing an offense against me, she brought her case to a close in tears and sighs. "There is only one thing left for us," she said, "that in our utter ruin the pain to come will be no less than the love that has gone before." And in this too, the spirit of prophecy did not fail her, as all the world has learned.

And so, we entrusted our little boy to my sister and returned to Paris in secret. In secret, too, a few days later, we spent a night of prayer in a church I will not name, and at dawn in that same church, in the presence of her uncle and some friends, we were joined by the blessing of marriage. Soon after, and again in secret, we took our separate ways and later saw each other only rarely and when we could be unobserved, careful to keep hidden what we had done. But soon her uncle and his household, looking for some way to restore his public honor, began to spread word of the marriage, breaking every pledge he had given me. She responded by cursing him and swearing it was a bare-faced lie, and he exploded with fury and fits of abuse.

As soon as I heard what was happening, I took her away to an abbey of nuns in a town near Paris called Argenteuil, where she had been brought up as a small girl, and had her fitted and dressed in the garments of monastic life, except for the veil.41 But when her uncle heard about it, he, his kinsmen, and connections thought I had come up with an easy trick to disentangle myself by making her a nun. Then their anger reached its peak and they plotted their revenge. One night, as I slept peacefully in an inner room of my lodgings, they bribed one of my servants to let them enter and proceeded to wreak the savage vengeance that has made the whole world shudder—they cut off the parts of my body with which I committed the wrong they complained of—and then they fled. The only two who could be caught were blinded and had their genitals cut away, including the man who, while still in my service, was led by greed to betray me.

41 Abelard's action would ordinarily have signified an intention to dissolve the marriage, though Heloise's formal consent would have been required for such a step.

Neither Abelard nor Heloise, however, seems to have understood it this way, and his insistence on the absence of the veil seems designed to underscore a different intent.

The convent of St. Marie in Argenteuil—now an industrial suburb just north of Paris—was a royal foundation dating to the seventh century and, at the time of Abelard and Heloise, one of the wealthiest and most prestigious religious houses for women in the area of Paris.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

By the next morning, the entire city had converged outside my door, shocked and appalled, moaning and howling and wailing such earsplitting cries that it is hard—no, impossible—to describe it.

The clerics were the worst and my students worst among them, crucifying me with their screams and laments until I suffered more from their pity than my pain, more from chagrin than the injury itself, and more from the scandal than the scar.

I thought of the glory I once enjoyed and the simple, vicious act that brought it low, the judgment of a God who struck where I most had sinned, the vindication by broken faith when I had broken faith, the exultation of my enemies over this so fitting reward, the lasting grief this wound would bring to my parents and my friends, the way my particular shame would spread throughout the universe of men.

No road was now left open to me, no face I could show to the world, when every finger would point, every tongue would mock the monstrous spectacle I would become.

An abomination before God, according to the deadly letter of the law, forbidden to enter a church, as if stinking and unclean— that is what a eunuch is, his testicles broken or cut away.

Even such an animal is despised for sacrifice.42

42 Inspired by Abelard's biblical reminiscences, Deut. 23:1 and Lev. 22:24 (Num. 72 in an earlier system of biblical citation), the extant manuscripts continue with the full supporting passages and references:

Book of Numbers, Chapter 72—"You shall not offer to the Lord any beast that hath the testicles bruised, or crushed, or cut and taken away." Deuteronomy, Chapter

23—"A eunuch, whose testicles are broken or cut away, or organ cut off, shall not enter into the church of the Lord."

Their redundancy within the paragraph and the uncharacteristic baldness of their presentation indicate that the quotations are most likely a later interpolation in the text. The suggestion of an interpolation here was made by Orlandi 1980, in the context of a debate on Abelard's authorship of the entire Calamities.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

It was my shame, I will admit, my guilt and my confusion rather than my commitment to the religious life that brought me to the refuge of the cloister. In the meantime, she had taken the veil freely at my command. We both, then, put on the habit at the same time, I in the abbey of Saint Denis,43 she in the convent at Argenteuil, which I mentioned before. I remember that many people tried to stop her, concerned that for someone of her age the yoke of monastic rule would be a penance too hard to bear, but they could not. Through her tears and sobs the best she could, she broke into Cornelia's great lament:

O my husband, Too great for such a wife, had Fortune power Even over you? The guilt was mine For this disastrous marriage. Now claim your due,

And I will freely pay.44

And with these words, she rushed to the altar, snatched up the veil which the bishop had just blessed, and bound herself to the convent in the presence of all.

My wounds were still healing when my students started at me, rivers of them, flooding me and my abbot with their never-ending demands: I must take up my studies again, not for wealth or fame as before, but out of a love of God. I must understand that the great sum the Lord had lent me now must be paid back with interest, that while I was used to tending to the rich, now I must be teacher to the poor. I must realize that I was touched by the hand of the Lord, and now that I was freed from the lures of the flesh and the stresses of secular life, I would have the leisure for study to become, not the philosopher of the world, but in truth the philosopher of God.

Yes. But the abbey of my retirement was still part of this secular life and in the most corrupt way, and the abbot, great prelate that he

43 The abbey of St. Denis was a prestigious royal foundation just north of Paris, dedicated to the patron saint of France. The rebuilding program that was to transform its church into one of the splendors of medieval architecture was only a few years in the future.

44 Lucan, Pharsalia 8.94–98. Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, speaks these words to him shortly after his catastrophic defeat at the battle of Pharsalus. Contrast Abelard's earlier citation of Lucan, in which it is Anselm of Laon who is likened to Pompey.

Abelard will return to Lucan's Pompey and Cornelia again in the Fourth Letter.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

was, was as great in degeneracy and scandal.45 Certainly I brought this to my brother monks' attention, loudly and often, both in public and in private, denouncing their intolerable filth and making myself very well detested by them all. They would be happy to use the opportunity of my students' daily rounds as a means of getting rid of me. And so, as time passed and the students persisted, my abbot and the monks stepped in, and I withdrew to a priory somewhere to take up my teaching in my usual way.46 My students followed in such a stream that the place could not provide enough lodging for them, or the land provide enough food.

I concentrated on scripture while I was there, since it was more appropriate to my new position, but my main expertise was in the secular arts and that is what the students called for. So I used these arts as a kind of hook, offering them a taste of philosophy—as the History of the Church tells us Origen, the greatest Christian philosopher, also did47—to draw them in to the true philosophy. When it became clear that God had given me a gift for scripture no less than for secular learning, the number of my students increased dramatically in both subjects while all the other schools saw steep declines.

Because of this, the other masters became jealous and resentful and worked to undermine me in every possible way, constantly sniping behind my back with their charges, on the one hand, that my interest in secular studies was contrary to the profession of a monk and, on the other, that my interest in scripture was presumptuous since I was setting myself up as a master without having had a master in the subject myself. Their aim, of course, was to bar me from any sort of teaching whatsoever, and to that end they constantly went around pressuring bishops, archbishops, abbots, and anyone else in the Church hierarchy they could find.

My first set of lectures expounded on the fundamentals of our faith by analogy with human reason, and I wrote a treatise of theology

45 Abbot Adam, whose subsequent history with Abelard remained contentious until his sudden death in 1122, as Abelard recounts later.

46 Abelard does not say where this was, though it was most likely in or near Nogentsur-Seine in Champagne, where St. Denis held considerable property (including a priory) and where Abelard would later found the Paraclete.

47 The Historia Ecclesiae of Eusebius, 6.8 ff. Origen, the third-century writer and teacher of Alexandria, provides a model for Abelard in another way as well: he was a eunuch, having castrated himself to avoid any gossip or suspicion when he began to take on women students, as Abelard will later note.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

On the Unity and Trinity of God for the use of my students who kept asking for rational arguments, demanding things that could be understood instead of just mouthed.48 In fact, they said that words were pointless if understanding did not follow, that nothing can be believed if it is not first understood, and that for someone to preach to others what neither he nor they could understand was a ludicrous example of what Christ condemned as the blind leading the blind.49 When the treatise was circulated, it met with wide acceptance, appearing to answer every question on the subject in a thoroughly satisfactory way, the subtlety of my solutions seeming all the more impressive in light of the importance of the problems they addressed.

This only infuriated my enemies and they convened a council against me, those two old plotters in particular, Alberic and Lotulf, who, with the deaths of our masters William and Anselm, were determined to succeed them as their heirs and rule alone in their place. They directed the school in Rheims together and, with their constant prods and innuendoes, were able to bring their archbishop

Radulf to their side. He and Cardinal Cono of Palestrina, papal legate in Gaul at the time,50 organized in the town of Soissons a little meeting which they grandly styled a council. They invited me to 48 This treatise, condemned at the Council of Soissons in 1121 as Abelard explains later, evolved through many versions throughout the rest of Abelard's life. The first version, known in manuscripts as De Trinitate (On the Trinity) or Theologia "Summi

Boni" (named from its opening phrase), was expanded into the Theologia Christiana

(Christian Theology) and again reworked in the 1130s into the Theologia "Scholarium," which was the text condemned following the Council of Sens in 1140. This last version explicitly returns to the intentions of the first, beginning with the phrase that supplies its title, "Scholarium nostrorum petitioni—At the request of my students." See

Buytaert and Mews 1987.

Although Abelard was not the first to introduce the term theology (in the sense of "rational discourse about God") in place of the more conventional divinity, it seems to have been a catchword for him and both novel enough and provocative enough for Bernard of Clairvaux to mock Abelard's work as stultologia, or "stupidology," in his Letter 190.

49 See Matt. 15:14. Abelard's students here are also specifically and significantly reversing a widely cited version of Isa. 7:9, "Unless you believe, you will not understand," thereby offering a new understanding of the relationship between reason and faith.

50 Cono, bishop of Palestrina, was the most senior Church diplomat and powerful enough to have twice excommunicated Emperor Henry V on his own initiative; reportedly he had been the chosen successor of Pope Gelasius II in 1119, two years before the Council of Soissons.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

come and bring a copy of my treatise on the Trinity, and so I did. By this time, though, Alberic and Lotulf had already so worked up the clerics and the people against me that, as soon as I arrived in town with a few of my students, the mob nearly stoned us, claiming I had written and preached that there were three Gods, for that in fact is what they had been told.51

I went straight to the legate, presented the book for his examination and judgment, and announced myself ready to receive correction and make amends if I had said or written anything contrary to the Catholic faith. But he simply told me to take it to the archbishop and the prosecutors since they were the ones who had brought the charge—it seemed that the words, "Our enemies themselves are judges" were to be fulfilled in my case.52 They took their time inspecting it and reading it over and over again, but they found nothing they could bring up against me in open session, so they postponed the condemnation they were panting for until the council's closing day.

In the meantime, every day before the council sat, I gave a set of public lectures, open to all, expounding the Catholic faith according to the arguments in my book. Everyone who heard them was deeply impressed by both my explanation and interpretation. This made the clerics and the people start to wonder, and they asked each other, "'Behold, he speaketh openly, and they say nothing to him.'53

He was supposed to be the target of the council, but it looks like it is going to end soon. Have the judges learned that the mistake was not his but theirs?" And so, every day, my enemies became more and more enraged.

One day while all this was going on, Alberic came to me, a few of his students in tow, with the idea of challenging me. After some

51 There is no reason to think that Abelard either imagined or exaggerated the threat against him. Charges of heresy were occasions for public theater as much as for juridical proceedings, and mob violence against suspected heretics often had official sanction. Just seven years before in Soissons, two accused heretics were dragged from their cells and burned by the mob; and in 1092, also in Soissons, Abelard's former master, Roscelin, was attacked by the mob, stripped, and robbed, although he already had been acquitted of the heresy of tritheism, precisely the popular charge against Abelard here. In both cases, the violence was subsequently endorsed by ecclesiastical authorities. See Clanchy 1997, 289–92.

52 Deut. 32:31.

53 John 7:26.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

polite small talk, he said that something he had noticed in my book was puzzling him, that is, while God begat God, and there is only one God, nonetheless I said that God did not beget himself.

"Oh," I said easily, "I'll go through the rational argument for you if you like."

"We don't care about the rational argument," he said, "or any interpretation you might have. The only thing that matters is the word of authority."

"Then turn the page," I said, "and you'll find it." I quickly leafed through the copy of the book he had with him to a passage I knew was there, though he had not seen it or else only bothered to notice what he thought could be used against me. By God's will I found it right away—the passage clearly headed "Augustine, On the Trinity,

Book I":

Whoever thinks that God has the power to beget himself is wrong. God does not have this power, any more than any spiritual or corporeal creature. There is no being whatsoever that can beget itself.54

His students stood there with their mouths wide open, turning a brilliant red, while he tried to cover himself, blustering, "But of course this must be understood in the correct way."

Yes, I said, of course; there was nothing new in that, but it also had nothing to do with the present circumstances: he was looking for words, not interpretation. But if he wanted interpretation and a rational argument, I was perfectly ready to give him both and prove by his own pronouncement that he had fallen into the heresy of believing the Father to be his own Son. At this he exploded and resorted to threats, swearing that none of my arguments or authorities would help me now. Then he stormed off.

On the last day of the council, before the official session was set to take up again, the papal legate and the archbishop held a long conference with Alberic, Lotulf, and some others to decide what to do about me and my book, which was the main reason the council had been convened in the first place. Since nothing I had said or written gave them any grounds for action, they all were silent for a while— or at least somewhat less open in their hostility—until Geoffrey,

54 De Trinitate 1.1.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

bishop of Chartres, who was first among the bishops there in piety and the dignity of his see, began to speak.55

"My lords," he said, "all of you here know the quality of this man's teaching and you know his intelligence. In whatever studies he has taken up, he has won so many followers that he has eclipsed the fame of his own masters as well as ours, and his vine, as it were, has spread its branches from sea to sea.56 If you act against him without a hearing—as I am sure you will not—even if your action is correct, you must know it will outrage many people, and many will readily come to his defense—all the more so since we see nothing in the book before us to justify its public condemnation. Now, since 'open courage will always have its enemies,' as Jerome tells us, 'and "Lightning always strikes the highest peaks,"'57 make sure no act of violence on your part will add to his reputation or do more harm to us through the envy of our charge than we can ever do to him through its justice.

'A false rumor is soon crushed,' the learned Jerome also remarks, 'and a man's later life pronounces judgment on his past.'58

"If, on the other hand, you would act according to rule, then bring his teaching or his writing here before us, and let him be free to answer our questions. Then, if he is convicted or confesses his error, he can be silenced once and for all. Remember the words of Saint

Nicodemus when our Lord himself stood accused: 'Doth our law judge any man unless it first hear him and know what he doth?'"59

My enemies broke into an uproar. "Oh, this is really brilliant advice," they said, "to have us wrangle with this silver-tongued sophist whose arguments confound the whole world!"

"Surely, though," the bishop replied, "it was harder to wrangle with Christ, but Nicodemus still demanded that he be heard."60

When he saw he could not persuade them, he tried another way to keep their envy from running wild. There were too few people present for a matter of this weight, he said, and the case needed

55 Geoffrey of Lèves, bishop of Chartres, 1116–1149.

56 Cf. Ps. 79:12.

57 Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim, Praefatio; the internal quotation is from Horace,

Odes 2.10.11.

58 Epistulae 54.13.

59 John 7:51.

60 The manuscripts omit any indication of direct speech or attribution of speaker here. Without it, however, the sentence remains a very uncharacteristic aside of Abelard's own.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

more time for examination; and so, he recommended that my abbot take me back to Saint Denis, where a larger number of more learned men could be brought together to examine my case more thoroughly and determine what should be done. The legate accepted this plan, as did everyone else. Then, rising to celebrate Mass before the council session formally began, he sent word through Bishop

Geoffrey of his permission for me to return to my monastery and await a decision there.

My enemies knew they would have accomplished nothing if the matter were moved to another diocese, where, with no case in law, they could have no recourse to violence. So they persuaded their archbishop that it would be both an affront to have the case heard somewhere else and a serious risk to let me slip away. They all went running to the legate, made him change his mind, and convinced him against his better judgment to condemn the book without a hearing, burn it in the sight of all, and sentence me to perpetual confinement in another monastery. It should be enough to condemn the book, they told him, that I had read it in public and had it transcribed without sanction of pope or Church; the Christian faith would only be stronger if such presumption were crushed by the force of my example. Because the legate was less educated than he should have been, he fell back on the archbishop's advice, as the archbishop fell back on theirs.

As soon as the bishop of Chartres saw what was coming, he came and told me of the whole dirty scheme. He urged me not to take it too hard—their violence was clear enough to everyone, and violence like this, he said, driven so plainly by envy, was bound to work against them and in my favor. As for the confinement, he knew the legate felt pressured into it and would release me a day or two after the council ended and he left town. We were both in tears as he gave me what consolation he could.

I was called before the council and, without any question or discussion, was forced to throw the book into the fire with my own hands and burn it. To make it seem as if they had at least something to say, one of my enemies mumbled that he had heard the book claimed that only God the Father was almighty.61 The legate caught a little of this and said that he was shocked; he couldn't believe even

61 Abelard's argument, reiterated and refined throughout his life, is that the divine property of power is expressed in the Father, as wisdom is in the Son, and goodness is in the Holy Spirit.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

a child would make a mistake like this since our faith clearly holds and professes that there are three Almighties. A man named Thierry, who was master of a school of his own,62 snorted in derision and intoned the words of the Athanasian Creed, "And yet they are not three Almighties, but one Almighty." His bishop started to rebuke him as though he were guilty of high treason, but he held his ground and continued on in the words of Daniel, "'Are ye so foolish, ye children of Israel, that without examination or knowledge of the truth, you have condemned a son of Israel? Return to judgment,'63 and judge the judge himself, the same one you have established for instruction in the faith and correction of error. Yet when he ought to pass judgment, he has condemned himself out of his own mouth, while God in his mercy today delivers this innocent man, as he once delivered Susanna, from the hands of false accusers."

The archbishop stood up to confirm the legate's opinion, tactfully changing its wording somewhat, as certainly was called for: "Yes, my lord, the Father is almighty, the Son is almighty, the Holy Spirit is almighty, and whoever dissents from this is clearly in error and should not be heard. And now, if it is your pleasure, it is fitting that this our brother should profess his faith in the presence of all, for us either to approve or to censure and correct, as may be appropriate."

But just as I was rising to profess my faith and explain it in my own words, my enemies stopped me, demanding that I do nothing more or less than recite the Athanasian Creed, a thing the merest schoolboy could just as easily do. And to prevent, as they said, a plea of ignorance—as if I were some dunce who did not know those words by heart—they handed me the text and made me read. I was choked with tears and sobs, but I read the best I could. Then, as if I were truly guilty and had been lawfully condemned, I was remanded to the abbot of Saint Médard and dragged off to his cloister as if to prison. The council was immediately dissolved.

The abbot and monks of Saint Médard welcomed me with open arms, glad to think I would be with them indefinitely.64 Though they did what they could to comfort me, it was little use.

62 Generally taken to be Thierry, chancellor of Chartres from 1141.

63 Dan. 13:48–49, which, however, speaks of a "daughter of Israel," referring to Susanna.

64 A different perspective on Abelard's reception at St. Médard is revealed by the medieval biographer of St. Godwin, prior of the monastery at the time and a former student of Abelard's who had fallen out with him at his school on Mont Ste. Geneviève. According to him, St. Médard functioned as a kind of monastic reformatory

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

God, who are the judge of equity, with what gall and bitterness of mind did I reproach you, accuse you in my wild madness, repeating over and over the lament of Saint Anthony,

"Good Jesus, where were you?"

I could feel then but cannot describe now the storm of my grief, the tumult of my shame, and the anguish of my despair.

I set what I had suffered in my body against what I was suffering now and thought I was the unhappiest of men.

That other betrayal seemed nothing next to this, far less painful that wound to my body than this to my reputation, for I had brought that other wound on myself but was brought to this open violence by the pure intention and love of our faith which compelled me to write.

Soon enough, however, the council's cruel and reckless act found the universal condemnation it deserved. The individuals involved began to shift the blame onto others, even my enemies denied responsibility, and the legate made a public statement deploring the envy of the French in this affair. Regretting now that he had complied with their envy under pressure, he released me from this new monastery after a few days and sent me back to Saint Denis. But there, at Saint Denis, things were still as I described them. Nearly every monk who had been there before detested me; their vile way of life and shameless practices made them hate a man whose censure they could not endure. Only a few months passed before luck gave them their chance to destroy me.

By accident one day, I came across a passage in Bede's commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, in which he records that Dionysius the Areopagite was not the bishop of Athens but of Corinth.65 Now, where "ignorant monks were sent to be educated, dissolute ones to be corrected, and headstrong ones to be tamed," and Abelard was threatened with corporal punishment for his sarcastic retorts.

65 This odd episode, beginning with an accident and a joke, would have remained purely comic if its consequences had not turned so serious, threatening Abelard with a charge of treason against the French crown and significantly changing the course of his career yet again. Behind it lay the confusion—both by Bede and, in a different pattern,

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

this seemed directly to contradict the boasts of those who take their own Saint Denis—whose history shows he was indeed bishop of Athens—to be the famous Areopagite converted by Saint Paul.

There were a few monks standing around at the time and I showed them the passage as a kind of joke—Bede's testimony against our abbey. They were outraged, called Bede a liar, and said that their own abbot Hilduin was a far better witness to the truth, having traveled throughout Greece for years looking into just this question and finally dispelling any possible doubt in the life of the saint he had written. One of them demanded to know right then and there where I stood on the matter—with Hilduin or with Bede? I answered that I thought the authority of Bede, whose writings after all were known throughout the Latin Church, did seem to carry a little bit more weight.

They became incensed and started shouting that finally I had shown myself to be the enemy of the monastery I had always been and, what's more, a traitor to the entire country, a thief of that honor that was uniquely its own, to deny as I'd done that their patron was the Areopagite. I said I hadn't denied that he was the Areopagite, and besides, it didn't seem to matter very much whether he was the Areopagite or someone else from somewhere else, so long as he was worthy of such a great crown in the eyes of God. But they went running off to the abbot to tell on me and what they had made me say.

The abbot—who feared me more than the others, being much more corrupt than the others—grinned at the news, relishing any chance he could get to destroy me. He summoned his council and the chapter of brethren and threatened to send me to the king for punishment as a would-be thief of the country's honor and even the king's own crown. In the meantime, I would be kept under close guard. I offered to submit myself to the discipline of the monastic rule if in fact I had done anything wrong, but he would not listen. by the abbey's official account—of several distinct individuals: (a) Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by Paul in the first century (Acts 17:34) and traditionally considered to have been the first bishop of Athens; (b) a second-century bishop of Corinth also called Dionysius; and (c) the third-century St. Dionysius (St. Denis) venerated by the abbey and regarded as the patron of France, who, having been beheaded on the elevation in Paris now known as Montmartre ("Martyrs' Hill") was said to have carried his own severed head to his place of burial at the site of the abbey church. Bede confuses (a) and (b). The abbey's official life of St. Denis, composed by its abbot Hilduin in the ninth century, dates (c) to the first century and identifies him as a bishop of Athens and, therefore, as (a). Somewhat later in the controversy,

Abelard would write a conciliatory letter to Abbot Adam and the monks of St. Denis at least partly retracting his support for Bede's claim.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

I was horrified to think what they would stoop to, and, with everything else that had happened, I lost all hope, convinced that the whole world had conspired against me. Yet there were still some monks who pitied me and some of my students who would help me, so I slipped out of the monastery one night and made for the lands of Count Theobald not far away, where I had stayed in a priory some time before.66 I already had a slight acquaintance with the count and knew that he felt deeply for what I had suffered. I then took up residence in the town of Provins within a house of monks from Troyes, whose prior was an old, dear friend of mine.67 He was naturally very happy I had come and looked after me with every consideration.

One day not long thereafter, the abbot of Saint Denis came to Provins on some business with the count. The prior and I asked the count to intercede with him on my behalf, requesting his absolution and his permission for me to live as a monk wherever I could find a suitable place. The abbot and his party took the question under advisement and promised an answer before they left later in the day. In the course of their discussions, they decided my intention was to transfer to another abbey, and that, they felt, would be a great dishonor to Saint Denis. They took it as their abbey's special pride that I had come to them when I first became a monk, as if I had deliberately rejected all the rest, and now it would be a pointed affront if I rejected them and transferred somewhere else. They would hear nothing of our requests but instead laid down an ultimatum: I must soon return to Saint Denis or face excommunication, and the prior, too, who was sheltering me must henceforth cease or become a partner in my fate. We both, of course, were appalled when we heard this.

The abbot left town clinging stubbornly to his position but died a few days later. When his successor was chosen, I went with the bishop of Meaux to meet with him and repeat my request.68 At first, he too refused, but I appealed to the king through the interest of 66 Most likely when Abelard withdrew from St. Denis earlier to take up his teaching.

The powerful Theobald II was count of Champagne, Provins, and Meaux; count of Blois and Chartres from 1107; and count of Troyes from 1125 until his death in 1152.

67 Radulf, prior of St. Ayoul, a house belonging to the monastery of St. Peter.

68 The successor was the famous Abbot Suger (c. 1081–1151), adviser to Kings Louis

VI and VII and rebuilder of the great abbey church of St. Denis.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

some friends and soon got what I wanted. Stephen de Garlande,69 king's high steward at the time, summoned the abbot and his advisers to a meeting and demanded to know why they would keep me at the abbey against my will when it was clear that their way of life and mine were not compatible; there could be no good in this situation, he said, only a scandal in the making. I was also aware of the sentiment among the royal council that an abbey without rule should be subject to the king as a useful source of revenue, so I was sure I would win their support. It turned out as I thought it would.

Our two sides, then, came to an agreement, which was confirmed in the presence of king and council. To maintain the honor Saint Denis derived from my membership there, I undertook not to place myself under obedience to another abbot. Otherwise, I was free to go to whatever place of solitude I liked.

I went to a place of solitude I knew, a certain wilderness in the countryside near Troyes.70 The land was given to me and, with permission of the local bishop, I built a kind of oratory there out of thatch and reeds, which I dedicated to the Holy Trinity. In this seclusion, with only one of my clerics for company, I could cry out to the Lord in truth, "Lo, I have gone off flying away and I abode in the wilderness."71

As soon as they discovered where I was, however, my students started flocking from all over, leaving the towns and cities to come and live in this wilderness, giving up mansions to build themselves huts, fine foods to eat greens and coarse bread, soft couches to lie on mats of reed and straw, and tables to heap up mounds of turf instead.

In all, you would have thought they were taking up the ways of the early philosophers Saint Jerome describes. He explains their rationale:

Vice enters the soul through the windows of the senses, and the fortress of the mind cannot fall unless the enemy rush its

69 Stephen de Garlande (c. 1070–c. 1148), most powerful member of a powerful political family and holder of numerous royal and ecclesiastical posts under the reigns of Philip I and Louis VI. The sequence of these posts, their timing, and the vicissitudes of his long career correspond so well with the stages of Abelard's own career that it is reasonable to conclude that Abelard enjoyed the active sponsorship of the de Garlandes over many decades and not on this occasion alone. See Bautier 1981, 21–77.

70 On the banks of the Ardusson River, about four miles southeast of Nogent-surSeine and roughly thirty miles northwest of Troyes.

71 Ps. 54:8.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

gates. . . . If someone finds pleasure in the spectacle of games, the contest of athletes, the agility of mimes, the beauty of women, or the shimmer of gems, silks, and the like, then the freedom of his soul is taken through the windows of the eyes, and the words of the prophet are fulfilled: "For death is come up through our windows."72 When the armies of distraction have broken through these gates into the fortress of the mind, where is its freedom then, or its strength, or its thoughts of God—especially when sensation can leave traces of past pleasure and, through memories of vice, enlist the mind to rehearse, as it were, what it does not actually do?

That is why many philosophers left the crowds of the city and the gardens beneath the city walls—with their ponds and trees and birdsongs, reflecting pools and babbling brooks and every lure for eye or ear—to keep luxury and wealth from ever weakening the strength of the soul or compromising its purity. Why get used to sights that someday may enslave you, or even taste what someday you may miss? Even the Pythagoreans shunned the life of the city and made their homes in the wilderness and desert wastes.

And Plato himself, though certainly rich—Diogenes would wipe his muddy feet on Plato's couch73—still set his Academy far from the city to safeguard the leisure he needed for philosophy, and he even chose a site that was unhealthy in order to break the assaults of lust by constant illness and focus his students' pleasure on their studies alone.74

It was just such a life that the sons of the prophets also led, the followers of Elisha whom Jerome calls the monks of their time in a letter he wrote to the monk Rusticus:

The sons of the prophets, the monks we read of in the Old Testament, built huts for themselves on the banks of the Jordan, living on barley-meal and greens far from the throngs of the city75 72 Jer. 9:21.

73 In his life of Diogenes the Cynic, Diogenes Laertius reports this gesture of contempt for Plato's supposed pride; see Lives of the Philosophers 6.26.

74 Contra Jovinianum 2.8 ff.

75 Epistulae 125.7; see 4 Kings 6:1.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

—as my students now built their huts on the banks of the Ardusson, looking more like hermits than the scholars they were.

But as more students came and put up with more hardships all for the sake of my teaching, the more my enemies felt my renown and their own humiliation. Everything they had done to hurt me had turned to my good, and it stung them. And so, in the words of Jerome, "Far from the cities, the courts, and the crowds, as Quintilian says, envy found me in my seclusion."76 Now they would sulk in silence or mutter to each other, "'Behold, the whole world had gone after him.'77 Our persecution has only added to his glory. We tried to eclipse his fame but it just shines the brighter. Here are the students in the city with everything they need at hand, and look how they despise its luxuries and flood to the wilderness, actually choosing misery and want on their own."

This time it was poverty more than anything that drove me back into teaching. Since "to dig I was unable and to beg I was ashamed,"78 I returned to the art I knew, working with my tongue instead of my hands. My students happily provided for all my basic needs—food and clothing, work on the land or help with the cost of building—to keep these practical matters from distracting me from my studies. Since my oratory could not hold even a fraction of their number, they had to enlarge it and build a solid new construction of stone and wood. The building had been founded and first dedicated in honor of the Holy Trinity, but since I had taken refuge there in my despair and found some consolation by the grace of God, I renamed it for the Paraclete in memory of the gift I was given.

This new name struck many as odd, and some even attacked me for it with considerable violence, charging that by ancient custom a church must not be named for the Holy Spirit alone, any more than for the Father alone, but only for the Son or for the Trinity as a whole. What lay behind these charges, no doubt, was their belief that Paraclete can refer only to the Holy Spirit Paraclete, but this is an error. Just as the Trinity or any of its members may be called God and Sustainer, so it is correct to address each or all of them as Paraclete, or Consoler. As the Apostle said, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God

76 Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim, quoting Quintilian, Declamationes 13.2.

77 John 12:19.

78 Luke 16:3.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

of all consolation, who consoleth us in all our tribulation"; and the Truth said, "And he shall give you another Paraclete."79

Moreover, when the entire Church is consecrated in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and belongs to them all without distinction, why should a house of the Lord not be named for the Father or the Holy Spirit as well as for the Son? Who would dare erase the owner's name from the door of his own house? And when the Son has sacrificed himself to the Father, and prayers at Mass are addressed to the Father and the Host is offered specifically to him, why should the altar not belong to the Father, to whom appeals and sacrifice are made? Is it really more proper that the altar be named for the Son, who makes the sacrifice, than for the Father, who receives it? Or better to name an altar for the Lord's Cross or the Sepulcher, for Saint Michael, Saint John, Saint

Peter, or any other saint who makes or receives no sacrifice there and has no prayers addressed to him? Surely even among the heathen, temples and altars belonged to those who received sacrifice and worship there.

I can imagine the claim that there should be no church or altar dedicated to the Father on the grounds that there is no deed of the Father that warrants a feast day dedicated specifically to him. But while this argument detracts from the Trinity as a whole, it does not detract from the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit has the Feast of Pentecost to commemorate his coming, as the Son has the Nativity to commemorate his birth: as the Son was sent into the world, so the Holy Spirit was sent among the disciples, and this justifies his feast. In fact, it seems more reasonable to dedicate a temple to the Holy Spirit than to any other member of the Trinity, especially when we consider both the authority of Saint Paul and the operation of the Holy Spirit himself. To none of the three does Paul ascribe a spiritual temple except to the Holy Spirit. He does not speak of a temple to the Father or to the Son in his first letter to the Corinthians, but of a temple to the Holy Spirit: "He that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit," and "Know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have of God, and you are not your own?"80 And it is well known that the sacraments of the Church are ascribed specifically to the operation of divine grace, which means the Holy Spirit. We are baptized by 79 2 Cor. 1:3–4; John 14:16.

80 1 Cor. 6:17, 19.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

water and the Holy Spirit and are reborn as a special temple for God. We are confirmed in the sevenfold grace of the Spirit, and this temple is adorned and dedicated. Is it at all strange then to name a material temple for the member of the Trinity to whom Saint Paul has specifically ascribed a spiritual one? Is there anyone else to whom a church more properly belongs than the one to whose operation all the sacraments administered in the Church are ascribed?

At any rate, it was not my intention to honor only one member of the Trinity when I named my oratory for the Paraclete. It was, as I mentioned before, simply in memory of the consolation I found there. But if it had been my intention, as was widely believed, it would not have been against the dictates of reason, though it was perhaps against the ways of custom.

Now, all the while my body lay hidden in this seclusion, my fame roamed free through the universe of men, ringing like Echo in the myth, whose voice was everywhere and substance nowhere.81 My old enemies now were too feeble for any action on their own, so they raised up against me a pair of new apostles, whose boasts were winning credit in the world—one that he had reformed the life of canons regular, the other that he had reformed the life of monks.82

These two now went scurrying through the world, preaching up and down, and gnawing away at me with all their impudent might.

For a while they convinced some Church and secular powers that I was hateful, and spread such twisted lies about my faith and way of life that even my strongest supporters turned from me, and if any still retained a part of their old love, they had to keep it hidden out of fear. As God is my witness, whenever I heard that a group of churchmen was meeting somewhere, I was sure that they met to condemn me. Stunned, I sat waiting for their lightning to strike, expecting any moment to be dragged off to their councils or their synods as a heretic or profaner. Though some may think the comparison unfair—an elephant to an ant or a lion to a flea—never did the heretics of old pursue Saint Athanasius with more cruelty and 81 See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.359.

82 The standard view identifies this pair with Norbert of Xanten, founder of the Order of Premonstratensian Canons, and the powerful Bernard, founder of the Cistercian abbey at Clairvaux and Abelard's dedicated antagonist at the Council of Sens in 1140.

Though this view has been challenged, it remains the most probable. For a concise discussion, see Marenbon 1997, 10, and his references there.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

spite than my enemies now came after me.83 Often, God knows, my despair reached such depths that I thought of leaving the Christian world entirely to go off among the pagans and live quietly there, whatever the tribute I would have to pay, a Christian life among the enemies of Christ. I was convinced that they would treat me well.

With these charges against me, they would hardly believe I was a Christian at all, but instead a likely convert to their sect.84

While I was pondering this desperate step—taking refuge with Christ among the enemies of Christ—the chance came, as I thought, to escape the plots against me, and I took it; but I fell into hands far more savage than pagans', and this among Christians and monks.

The abbey of Saint Gildas of Rhuys in the diocese of Vannes in Brittany had been without a head since the death of its last abbot.85 I was invited there as the unanimous choice of its monks, the local lord approved, and my own abbot and monks quickly gave their consent. And so, as Jerome was driven east by the envy of the Romans, I was driven west by the envy of the French. Except for the attacks I was continually under, I would never have accepted such an offer,

God knows. The country there was barbarous, I did not know the language, the monks were all notoriously corrupt beyond control, and even the people were uncivilized brutes. But I was like a man who plunges off a cliff in fear of the sword above his head, exchanging in an instant one death for another. I went from danger to danger with eyes wide open, and there, by the waves of the dreadsounding ocean where no spit of land now could offer me flight, I called out in my prayers again and again, "To thee have I cried from the ends of the earth when my heart was in anguish."86

The whole world, I think, knows the anguish I suffered and how that rabble of monks I had promised to direct tortured my heart night and day as I had to weigh the dangers to my body and my soul. If I tried to force them to the life of rule they professed, I was

83 Athanasius (295–373), patriarch of Alexandria and Doctor of the Church. For his staunch defense of orthodox teaching on the Trinity against the Arian heresy, he was exiled five times. It was also believed that he was the author of the creed that bears his name.

84 Most probably Abelard is imagining the Muslims of Spain, who were known to tolerate Christian communities.

85 Dedicated to a Celtic saint who fled his native Britain in the sixth century, the abbey faced the Atlantic by the rugged Pointe de Grand Mont, about 100 miles northwest of Abelard's birthplace at Le Pallet.

86 Ps. 60:3.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

sure I would be murdered; if I did not do what I could, I was sure I would be damned. But there was more: the abbey itself had long been in the power of a despot, a tyrant in the area who took advantage of the disorder in the monastery to appropriate all its adjacent land for his own use and extort from the monks a heavier tribute than even Jews have to pay. The monks kept pressing me for their daily needs even though there was no common fund I could distribute—they had all been supporting their concubines and children from their own purses—and they gleefully tormented me over this.

And they kept stealing, too, making off with everything they could get their hands on to force me to let up on my discipline when I finally came up empty, or else to get out altogether. Since the people of the country were all barbarians and every bit as lawless as the monks, there was no one I could turn to for help. I found all their behavior equally repugnant. Outside our walls, the tyrant and his minions would never stop harassing me; inside, the monks would never stop their plots. "Combat without, terror within," the apostle

Paul once said,87 and his words now seemed aimed straight at me.

It was a useless, wretched life that I was living— I thought this often and I wept— pointless and barren for myself as well as others.

I had students once and once had done them good, but I threw them aside for these monks.

And now for those students, for these monks, it is waste: all I began, all I undertook, everything I tried, all waste.

Above all men it can be said of me, "This man began to build but could not finish."88

And when I remembered what I had fled and saw where I had come, I would despair.

My earlier troubles seemed nothing to me now, and I would groan, saying over and over,

"All this have I deserved.

Forsaking the Paraclete and my consolation there, I have plunged into real desolation; anxious to avoid the dangers that were threatened,

I escaped into dangers that are real."

87 2 Cor. 7:5.

88 Luke 14:30.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

Above all else, what tormented me most was this—that when I left my oratory behind, I was not able to provide for the proper celebration of the Divine Office there since the area was so poor it could barely supply the needs of even one man. But now, once again, the true Paraclete brought me true consolation as I lay there desolate and lost. He saw to the oratory himself, as was only fitting, for it was indeed his own.

I have spoken of the convent of Argenteuil, where Heloise, my wife—now more, my sister in Christ—had taken the veil as a nun. By some means or other, my abbot at Saint Denis took possession of it, alleging that it was originally part of his monastery's domain, and he forcibly expelled its community of nuns, of which she, my companion, was now prioress.89 They now were scattered through the world like exiles. I saw this as an opportunity from God for the future of my oratory. So I returned to the Paraclete and invited her to come, bringing any of the women who wished to stay with her. Then, when I had gathered them together, I turned the oratory over to them with all its properties and land by deed of gift. With the consent and the help of our bishop, my donation was later confirmed by Pope Innocent II through a charter to the nuns and their successors forever.90

Their life at first was hard, for a time they were desolate, but the God whom they served with devotion soon brought them solace and showed himself their true Paraclete. He opened the hearts of the local people to pity and kindness toward them and, God knows, their worldly goods grew more in a year than mine could have grown in a hundred. As women are the weaker sex, their need more moves our human passions and their virtue finds more favor with God as well as men. And on her, my sister, who had direction of the nuns, God bestowed such favor in men's sight that bishops loved her as a daughter, abbots as a sister, the people as a mother, and all alike marveled at her wisdom and dedication, her unmatched gentleness

89 Abbot Suger claimed to have seen documents proving the ownership of the convent by St. Denis and also seems to have laid charges of immorality against its nuns. The claims were endorsed by the papal legate, local bishops, and the king, and St. Denis gained control of the convent in 1129. See the discussion of McLeod

1971, 93–104.

90 The original charter, dated November 28, 1131, is preserved at Châlons-sur-Marne.

The Paraclete remained a convent, honoring Abelard as its founder and Heloise as its first abbess, for over 600 years until its dissolution and the sale of its property on November 14, 1792, during the French Revolution.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

and patience in all things. If she appeared in public only rarely—to devote more time to prayer and meditation in the cloister of her room—the world outside was only the more eager for her presence and her spiritual counsel.91

Now, the people in the neighborhood started taking me to task for not doing as much for the women as I should or could, even by the preaching which would be easy to do.92 So I began to visit them more often and provide for them with any means in my power. But even in this I met slander and spite, and this blameless act of charity was now twisted—as they twisted everything in their foul, perverted way—into a lust they said still enslaved me to the woman I once loved and could never bear to be without. I often thought of Saint Jerome's complaint in his letter to Asella about false friends:

My only crime is my sex, and even that is not an issue except when Paula comes to Jerusalem. . . . Before I knew the house of that saintly woman, all of Rome sang my praises and thought I was worthy of the highest priestly office. . . . But I know the road to heaven runs through fair report and foul.93

Remembering the malice directed against this great man gave me no small comfort, and I thought, What if my enemies had those grounds to suspect me—imagine the malice they would aim at me then! But now that God's mercy has freed me from that suspicion and my power to commit those acts is gone, how could there be suspicion left at all? What can this latest accusation mean? The 91 Abelard could have been speaking only of the first year or two of Heloise's tenure, but the material institutional growth of the Paraclete under her leadership was in fact phenomenal; by the time of her death, no less than six daughter houses had been founded. For an excellent brief survey of the expansion of the Paraclete in its first thirty years, see McLaughlin 2000.

92 Abelard's involvement with the Paraclete was in fact intense. In time he came to write a collection of thirty-four sermons for use at the Paraclete (of which Sermon 30 was designed specifically for fund-raising), several sequences, and over ninety hymns for its liturgy. He also contributed to its educational program through a letter on the study of literature, a commentary on the Hexameron of Genesis, his answers to The Questions of Heloise (see excerpt), and the Sixth Letter. In the Seventh Letter he set out the terms of an extensive monastic rule for the convent to follow.

93 Epistulae 45.2.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

nature of eunuchs removes them so clearly from suspicion that women are entrusted to them for protection and care, as the Bible tells us about Esther and the other maidens of King Ahasuerus.94

We read, too, of the eunuch of Queen Candace, a powerful man who had charge over her treasure and whom an angel sent the apostle Philip to convert and baptize.95 Men like these have always had honor and trust in the households of virtuous women precisely to the extent that they are beyond suspicion of this kind. In fact, it was to remove this suspicion at the root that Origen, the greatest

Christian philosopher, laid violent hands on himself when he first undertook the religious education of women.96 When God set me free for a similar work, he was kinder to me than to Origen, though; for what Origen did himself—without reflection, it is thought, and in that he incurred no small blame—was done to me by others with no responsibility of my own and with only brief and sudden pain since I was asleep when they attacked me and felt almost nothing.

But if perhaps there was little pain from the wound at the time, there is more now from this protracted slander, and I suffer more from the cost to my reputation than the loss to my body. As it is written in Proverbs, "A good name is better than great riches,"97 and as Saint Augustine reminds us in his sermon on the life and morals of clerics, "It is a cruel man who thinks only of his conscience and neglects his reputation," because, as he says earlier:

"We look toward what may be good not only before God but also before men," the Apostle says. For the sake of ourselves, our conscience is sufficient, but for the sake of others, our reputation should be strong, not scorned. . . .

Conscience and reputation are two separate things: your conscience exists for yourself alone while your reputation exists for your neighbor.98

What would they have said about Christ if they had been living at the time—about Christ himself or his followers, the prophets, apostles, or other Fathers of the Church? Imagine their malice toward

94 See Est. 2:3.

95 See Acts 8:26 ff.

96 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae 6.8.

97 Prov. 22:1.

98 Augustine, Sermon 355; the internal quotation is from 2 Cor. 8:21.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

them when they saw them in such close association with women, and they with their bodies intact. As Augustine shows, women were inseparable companions of the Lord Christ and his apostles, even traveling with them when they preached:

Faithful women of means would go with them and provide for them from their substance so that they would lack none of the necessities of life. . . . If anyone doubts that women of holy life traveled with the apostles wherever they preached the Gospel . . . , let him but read the Gospel itself and learn that in this they had the example of the Lord. . . . In the Gospel of Luke it is written: "And it came to pass afterwards that he traveled through the cities and towns, preaching and evangelizing the kingdom of God, and the twelve with him and certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary who is called Magdalene . . . , and Joanna the wife of Chusa, Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others who provided for him from their substance."99

And Pope Leo IX says in his treatise against the epistle of Parmenianus of the monastery of Studius:

We declare that no bishop, priest, deacon, or subdeacon may give up the care of his wife in the name of religion or fail to provide for her food and clothing, though he may not lie with her carnally. For this was the practice of the holy apostles, as we read in Saint Paul: "Have we not power to carry about a woman, a sister, as well as the rest of the apostles and the brethren of the Lord and Cephas?" See now, you fool, he does not say, "embrace a woman" but "carry about," meaning that they should support their wives on the income from their preaching, not that there should be any carnal intercourse between them.100

99 Augustine, De Opere Monachorum 4.5 and 5.6; the internal quotation is from Luke

8:1 ff.

100 Abelard's elaborate citation is confused. The passage is from the response of Cardinal Humbertus to a tract written by the monk Niceta of the monastery of Studius in Constantinople, though a version contained in the Decree of Gratian attributes it to Leo IX while Humbertus was his legate. Augustine wrote a treatise "against the epistle of Parmenianus," which is, however, otherwise unconnected with this passage; see Muckle 1950, 207–08. The internal quotation is from 1 Cor. 9:5.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

Certainly the Pharisee who spoke within himself, "This man, if he were a prophet, would know surely who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him, that she is a sinner,"101 could more easily imagine—so far as human judgment ever could—a charge of vice against the Lord than they could imagine against me.

Whoever saw the mother of the Lord entrusted to the care of a young man or the prophets conversing with the widows who took them in would have far firmer grounds for suspicion.102 And what would they have said, those slanderers of mine, if they saw Malchus, the captive monk Jerome describes living in the same cottage as his wife? A great crime to them, surely, but to Jerome, an occasion for praise:

There was an old man there named Malchus . . . a native of the place, living in his cottage with an old woman . . . both of them devout and both ever wearing down the threshold of the church. You would have thought they were Zachariah and Elizabeth in the Gospel, except that there was no John between them.103

Finally, how can they justify not slandering the Fathers, whom we often read about or see founding convents for women and providing for their needs, after the example of the seven deacons the apostles appointed to wait at table and look after the women?104

The weaker sex so needs the help of the stronger that Saint Paul requires that the man always be over the woman as her head, and that in token of this she must keep her own head veiled.105 I am more than surprised, then, at the long-standing practice in convents of giving abbesses the same authority over women as abbots have over men, and of binding women to the profession of the same rule as men when there is so much in the rule that no woman, either abbess or nun, can possibly fulfill. There even are places where the natural order is overturned, and we see abbesses and nuns ruling over clerics, the same clerics whom the people must

101 Luke 7:39.

102 See John 19:27 and 3 Kings 17:10.

103 According to Jerome's Vita Malchi, quoted here, Malchus was captured by the Saracens and forced to marry, though he and his wife were pledged to celibacy.

104 See Acts 6:1–3.

105 See 1 Cor. 11:5.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

obey.106 Can they not, then, lead men more easily to improper desires when they have this authority over them and keep them underneath this heavy yoke? Why else does Juvenal say, "The worst of things is a woman who is rich"?107

After long consideration, I decided I would do everything I could to provide for the sisters and look after their affairs. And to win their greater respect, I would be with them in person, keeping watch and tending to their needs. My persecution from the monks at Saint Gildas was greater now, more persistent and severe, than it ever had been from the monks at Saint Denis, so I hoped I could turn to the nuns as a haven of peace in this storm, escaping its seething violence to find some rest. At least with the nuns I could do some good, which was impossible with the monks, and as urgent as this was for them, it would be as welcome to me and as good for the health of my soul.

Now Satan has blocked my path. Wherever I turn, wherever I go, I find no place to rest, no place to live. A vagabond and fugitive on the earth, I am hounded everywhere like the accursed Cain, tormented without end by this "combat without and terror within," as I said before, only now it is combat and terror without and within.108 The persecution from my monks rages on, more dangerous by far than from my enemies and more constant, for they are always with me and I face their treachery without cease. If I leave the cloister, I see the violence of my enemies threatening my person, and within the cloister I face the never-ending violence and deceit of my own sons—those monks, that is, entrusted to my paternal care as abbot. How often have they tried to poison me, as happened to Saint Benedict himself.109 If I ever thought of following the example he once set of a loving father abandoning his depraved sons, it was because I would not tempt God rather than love him or become my own destruction by exposing myself to certain death. Although

106 Abelard is careful to distance himself from the type of double monastery subject to the control of an abbess, such as existed at Frontevrault under the abbess Petronilla.

In the Seventh Letter he endorses a model of a double monastery with an abbot, however, in overall charge.

107 Satires 6.10.

108 2 Cor. 8:5. For the reference to Cain, see Gen. 4:14.

109 Benedict was called from his hermitage at Subiaco to become abbot of a monastery at Vicovaro, where the monks tried to poison him. He subsequently left the monks and returned to his hermitage.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

I guarded myself as well as I could against their ordinary plots by preparing my own food and drink, they once tried to murder me in the very act of sacrament by poisoning the chalice I used. Another time, when I had gone to Nantes to visit the sickbed of the count and was staying in the home of my brother, they tried to poison me by working through one of my servants, imagining, I suppose, that I would be less alert to a stratagem of this kind. Through the providence of God, I did not touch the food set out for me, but a monk I had brought with me from the monastery took a taste without knowing it was poisoned and died on the spot, and the servant who had dared do this deed fled in terror, driven by his guilt and the plain facts of the case.

From that point on, it was all out in the open, both their evil and the measures I took to counter their conspiracies. I started living outside the monastery in small rooms with only a few men around me, but whenever they found out I would be on the road, they would hire assassins and station them there to kill me. Beside everything else I had to contend with, I was struck by the hand of the Lord one day and fell from my horse, breaking a bone in my neck; the pain from the fracture was far greater and more debilitating than my earlier injury. There were times when I tried to control the insurgency by excommunication or by forcing the more dangerous ones to swear a public oath that they would leave the abbey forever and never trouble me again. But just as publicly, they kept breaking their oaths until they were forced to swear them again and promise other things as well, this time by the authority of Pope Innocent himself through a special legate he sent us for this purpose, and in the presence of the bishops and the count.110

Even still they have not stopped. I returned to the abbey only recently, having gotten rid of the ones I was talking about, to come back among the monks I thought I could trust. But these turned out to be much worse than the others. It was not poison now but a knife at my throat, and only with the protection of a local nobleman did I manage to escape with my life. I am contending with this danger even now. Every day I see a sword above my head, and I hardly dare to take a breath at meals. I remember the man we read about who thought the tyrant Dionysius sublimely happy with all his wealth and power until he looked up and saw the sword that hung

110 The papal legate was the same Geoffrey of Lèves, bishop of Chartres, who defended Abelard at the Council of Soissons.

THE CALAMITIES OF PETER ABELARD

above him by a thread, and then he knew the happiness that comes with earthly power.111 This is my experience every moment, a poor monk elevated to be an abbot, who grows more wretched as he grows in wealth. Let the force of my example curb the ambition of those who seek this course of their own will.

My most beloved brother in Christ and closest companion of all these years, this is the history of my calamities, which have weighed down upon me almost since the cradle. Let it now serve you in the wrongs you have suffered and in your own desolation. As I said at the beginning, you will see that your trials are only slight next to mine, or even nothing, and you will bear them more easily the smaller you consider them to be. Always take comfort from what the Lord told his followers about the followers of the devil: "If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If the world hate you, know that it hath hated me before you. If you had been of the world, the world would love its own." And the Apostle said, "All that will live godly in Christ shall suffer persecution," and "Do I seek to please men? If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ." And the Psalmist said, "They have been confounded that please men because God hath despised them."112

Jerome, whose heir in slander and detraction I see I am, knew these words well when he wrote to Nepotianus, "The Apostle tells us, 'If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.' He ceased pleasing men and became the servant of Christ"; and to Asella, "Thank God that I am worthy of the hatred of the world"; and to the monk Heliodorus:

You are wrong, my brother, wrong if you think that a Christian never suffers persecution. . . . Our adversary "goeth about as a roaring lion seeking someone he may devour," and you think of peace? "He sitteth in ambush with the rich in private places that he may kill the innocent."113

We must take heart from these precepts and examples and bear our burdens with the more composure the more we know that they

111 See Cicero's Tusculan Disputations 5.20–21 for the story of the sword of Damocles.

112 John 15:18–20, out of order; 2 Tim. 3:2; Gal. 1:10; and cf. Ps. 52:6.

113 Epistulae 52.13, 45.6, and 14.4, in which the internal quotations are from 1 Pet. 5:8 and Ps. 10:8.

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

are without justice. And if they do not serve our merit, we should not doubt that they serve to cleanse our souls. All things happen by the ordinance of God, and every faithful soul in every affliction should at least find consolation in this: that his supreme goodness allows nothing to be done outside his plan, and that all things that are wrong or twisted or perverse he himself will bring to their best end. And so, in all things it is right to say to him, "Thy will be done."114 What great consolation to learn from the Apostle, "For we know that to them that love God all things work together unto good."115 Solomon, the wisest of the wise, knew this well, for in Proverbs he said, "Whatsoever shall befall the just man, it shall not make him sad."116 All who are angered, then, by some physical distress, though they know it was done by God's plan, leave the path of justice to be led, not by the will of God, but by their own, and when they set their own will before God's, they are struggling in their hearts against the words, "Thy will be done."

Farewell.

114 Matt. 6:10.

115 Rom. 8:28.

116 Prov. 12:21.

↑ Back to top