Letters of Abelard and Heloise

LETTERS OF ABELARD AND HELOISE

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HELOISE TO ABELARD

To her lord, no, her father To her husband, no, her brother From his handmaid, no, his daughter His wife, no, his sister— To Abelard from Heloise.

The other day, my most beloved, one of your men brought me a copy of the letter you wrote as consolation for your friend.1

From what was written at its head I knew at once that it was yours, and I began to read it with a warmth as great as the love with which I hold its writer in my heart.

I hoped that at least by its words I could be restored to life, as if by some image of the one whose real substance I have lost.

Almost every line, I noticed, was ﬁlled with vinegar and gall, as it told the sad story of our entrance into monastic life and the unending crosses which you, 1 I have followed Peter Dronke's restoration of Heloise's original text, reading vestrum for the manuscripts' vestram and omitting forte. Dronke relies on the thirteenthcentury French translation of Jean de Meun, which in turn relies on a text predating any extant manuscript of the letter. See Dronke 1984, 304.

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my only one, have always had to bear.

The letter well fulﬁlled the promise you made your friend at its beginning, that he would think his own troubles small or nothing next to yours.

You wrote of your persecution at the hands of your teachers, the supreme betrayal of the mutilation of your body, and the enmity and hateful malice of Alberic and Lotulf, who were once your fellow students.

You wrote of what happened, through their intrigue, to the glorious book of your Theology and to you yourself when you were condemned as if to prison.

You wrote of the plots of your abbot and false brothers, the attacks of those spurious apostles which the same enemies instigated against you, and the scandal which arose when you gave the Paraclete its uncustomary name.

And then, when you came to those unbearable assaults which still are launched against you by that tyrant and by the worst of all monks you call your sons, you brought the sad story to an end.

No one, I am sure, could read or hear it without tears, and my own grief became fresh with every detail, and it grows greater still as the danger to you even now is increasing.

We are all driven to despair of your life, and every day our hearts beat in fear of some ﬁnal word of your death.

So, by that Christ who keeps you for his own even now, we beg of you, as we are his handmaids and yours, write to us, tell us of those storms in which you ﬁnd yourself tossed.

We are all you have left: let us share your grief or your joy.

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A community of grief can bring some comfort to one in need of it, since many shoulders lighten any burden or even make it seem to disappear.

If, on the other hand, this storm abates even just a little, you must write to us quickly when your letters will bring us more joy.

But whatever it is you write to us about, it will be no small relief, for in this way at least you will show you are thinking of us.

Seneca teaches us by his own example how much joy there is in letters from absent friends, as he writes to his friend Lucilius:

"I am grateful that you write to me often, for you show yourself to me in the one way you can.

When I receive a letter from you, we are suddenly together.

If images of absent friends bring joy, if they refresh our memory and soothe the ache of absence even with their false and empty solace, how much more joy is there in a letter, which carries the true signature of an absent friend?"2

And I am grateful to God that here at least is a way you can grant us your presence, one which no malice will hinder, no obstacle impede, and no negligence—I beg of you—delay.

You have written your friend a long letter of consolation, addressing his adversities but recounting your own.

But as you told of them in such detail, while your mind was on his consolation, you have worsened our own desolation; while you were treating his wounds, you have inﬂicted new wounds upon us and have made our old wounds bleed.

I beg of you, 2 Epistulae ad Lucilium 40.1.

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heal these wounds you have made, who are so careful to tend the wounds made by others.

You have done what you ought for a friend and comrade and have paid your debt to friendship and comradeship.

But you are bound to us by a greater debt, for we are not your friends but your most loving friends, not your comrades but your daughters—yes, it is right to call us that, or even use a name more sacred and more sweet if one can be imagined.

We need no arguments or testimony to prove the obligation you have toward us: if men will keep their silence, the facts will speak for themselves.

You alone, after God, are the founder of this place, you alone the builder of this oratory, you alone the architect of this congregation.

Nothing you have built is on the foundation of another:3 it is all your creation, everything here.

Before you, this was a wilderness, an empty range for wild beasts and outlaws; it knew no human settlement and not a house stood.

Among these lairs of beasts, these dens of outlaws, where the name of God was never pronounced, you raised a tabernacle of the Lord and dedicated a temple of the Holy Spirit for him to call his own.

Nothing you brought to the task was from the wealth of kings and princes, though you could have had so much at your disposal: it was all to be yours, whatever was done here, yours alone.

The clerics and students who came ﬂooding here to learn from you provided all that was needed; and suddenly, those who were used to living on the beneﬁces of the Church, 3 Cf. Rom. 15:20.

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who had learned how to receive offerings but not how to make them, who had opened their hands to take but not to give, now became prodigal in their gifts and even pressed them upon you.

Yes, it is yours, truly yours, this newly planted garden, whose living shoots are young, still delicate, and need watering to thrive.4

From the nature of women alone the garden is tender and would not be hardy even if it were not new.

Its cultivation, then, must be more careful, in the way Saint Paul intended when he wrote:

"I have planted, Apollos has watered, and God has given the increase."5

He had planted the Corinthians in the faith by the doctrine he had preached, and his student Apollos had watered them with his encouragement, and the grace of God bestowed on them the increase of their virtues.

But you are tending another's vine in a vineyard you have not planted, and it has turned to bitterness for you, all your words wasted and vain.6

While you lavish your care on another's vine, remember what you owe your own.

You try to teach rebels and do not succeed; you are casting pearls of God's word before swine.7

While you lavish so much on those who defy you, consider what you owe those who obey.

4 Abelard uses similar terms to speak of the Paraclete in his Sermon 30, which seeks to raise funds for the new convent.

5 1 Cor. 3:6.

6 Cf. Jer. 2:21.

7 Cf. Matt. 7:6.

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While you squander so much on your enemies, think what you owe your daughters.

But leave aside these others for a moment— remember what you owe me, and all you owe this whole community of devoted women you may repay at once to her who is, with more devotion, your only one.

The wealth of your learning knows better than the poverty of my own how many treatises the Fathers have composed— long, weighty, careful treatises—to teach, encourage, and, yes, console women in religious orders.

That is why, in the tender early time of my convent life long ago, your oblivion came as no small surprise to me when, unpersuaded by any reverence for God, or any love for me, or any example set by these same Fathers, you did not try to console me as I foundered, overwhelmed in sorrow day after day— never once, neither by a word when we were together nor a letter when we were apart— and yet you would know that you are bound to me by a greater debt, obliged to me by the sacrament of marriage, and beholden to me further by what is plain to everyone: that I have always held you in my heart with a love that has no measure.

You know, my dearest, all the world knows, how much I have lost in you, how that supreme, that notorious betrayal robbed me of my very self when it robbed me of you, and how incomparably worse than the loss itself is the pain from the way it happened.

This greater pain must have a greater solace, and it can come only from you, not from another.

As you alone are the source of my grief,

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you alone can grant the grace of consolation.

You alone have the power to make me sad, to make me happy or to console me, and you alone owe me this debt, now above all, when I have so completely fulﬁlled your commands in every particular that, rather than commit a single offense against you, I threw myself away at your command.

And the greater irony is that my love then turned to such insanity that the one thing it desired above all else was the one thing it put irrevocably beyond its reach in that one instant when, at your command,

I changed my habit along with my heart to show that my body along with my heart belonged only to you.

I never wanted anything in you but you alone, nothing of what you have but you yourself, never a marriage, never a dowry, never any pleasure, any purpose of my own— as you well know— but only yours.8

The name of wife may have the advantages of sanctity and safety, but to me the sweeter name will always be lover or, if your dignity can bear it, concubine or whore.

Do you imagine I debased myself to earn your gratitude and preserve your glorious distinction in the world?

You were not so entirely oblivious 8 In the margin of his own manuscript copy of the letter, the poet Petrarch wrote at this point, "You are acting throughout with gentleness and perfect sweetness,

Heloise."

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when it suited your own purposes in that letter to your friend, and did not think it beneath your dignity to set out at least some of the arguments

I used when I tried to dissuade you from this marriage of ours and its disastrous bed.

You kept your silence, though, about most of the reasons why I preferred love over marriage, freedom over a chain.

So I call my God to witness now:

If great Augustus, ruler of the world, ever thought to honor me by making me his wife and granted me dominion over the earth, it would be dearer to me and more honorable to be called not his royal consort but your whore.

No man's real worth is measured by his property or power: fortune belongs to one category of things and virtue to another.9

And no woman should think herself any the less for sale if she prefers a rich man to a poor one in marriage and wants what she would get in a husband more than the husband himself.

Reward such greed with cash and not devotion, for she is after property alone and is prepared to prostitute herself to an even richer man given the chance.

This is the argument the philosopher Aspasia used with Xenophon and his wife in the dialogue of Aeschines the Socratic.

After she set out her argument aimed at reconciling the pair, the philosopher capped her proof with this conclusion:

9 This argument will ﬁnd its way into Abelard's Ethics (Luscombe 1971, 48): "If this were true [that merit depends on external circumstances], then great wealth could make someone better or more worthy (that is, if wealth in itself could bring about merit or the increase of merit), and the richer men are, the better they could become because out of their abundance of riches they could add more in deeds to their devotion. But to think that wealth can add to real happiness or the worthiness of the soul, or to think that its lack can detract from the merits of the poor is utterly insane."

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"Therefore, if you two are not convinced that no worthier man exists and no ﬁner woman exists anywhere on earth, then above all else you will always be seeking that one thing you think is best— to have the best of all possible husbands or the best of all possible wives."10

This notion goes beyond philosophy and should not be called the pursuit of wisdom but wisdom itself.

There is a blessed delusion among the married, a happy fantasy that perfect love keeps their marital ties intact less through the restraint of their bodies than through the chastity of their hearts.

But what is a delusion for other women, for me is the manifest truth.

What other women only think about their husbands, I—and the entire world—not only believe but know to be true about you, and in this way my love is far from any delusion.

Has there been a philosopher or even a king whose renown could equal yours?11

Has there been any region of the country, any city, any town that did not boil with excitement just to see you?

Has there been a single person who did not come running to catch a glimpse as you came into sight, who did not stretch his neck and strain his eyes to follow you as you left?

Has there been a woman, married or unmarried, 10 Cicero, De Inventione 1.31.52. Aspasia was the companion (the "concubine or whore," as it were) of the Athenian leader Pericles, widely respected for her character and intellect. In Cicero, Aspasia's words are reported by Socrates, but Heloise has bypassed the middleman and gone straight to the source, the original philosopher herself.

11 Petrarch wrote in the margin of his manuscript copy at this point, "About Peter's fame—if love doesn't make her testimony suspect."

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who did not long for you when you were gone or lust for you when you were present?

Has there been a great lady or even a queen who did not envy me the pleasures of my bed?

And two things that belonged to you alone would win the heart of any woman— your beautiful voice and your gift for writing songs.

These are not common among philosophers, I know, but for you they were amusements, a diversion from your philosophical work.

You left countless songs, both in the classical meter of love and in the rhythms of love as well, that kept your name on everyone's lips; and they were of such surpassing sweetness that their melodies alone would not allow even the unlettered to forget you.12

For this above all, women sighed with love for you.

And since most of the songs told of your love and mine, in what then seemed an instant my name was sung in every corner of the country, and the envy of women was kindled against me.13

12 The indications here are that these songs were in Latin. The distinction between "meter" and "rhythm" is between verse forms based on syllable quantity (as in classical Latin) and syllable quality or stress accent (as in the accented verse of much medieval Latin poetry). The "classical meter of love," then, is the elegiac couplet, the standard form of classical Latin love poetry. The "unlettered" are those who did not know Latin but who nonetheless found it easy to memorize Abelard's songs because of the qualities Heloise notes. Outside what may be preserved in The Letters of Two

Lovers (see Appendix B), little of Abelard's elegiac poetry addressed to Heloise survives; see, however, the end of the Second Letter. For a likely example of his "rhythmic" poetry to Heloise, see "Dull Is the Star."

13 Petrarch commented in the margin at this point, "Muliebriter—Just like a woman."

Far from descending into vanity, however, Heloise is adapting Abelard's own remarks about the role of fame and envy in his life to help conﬁrm a parallel between their experiences. In the next sections, she proceeds to apply to herself the speciﬁc language Abelard used about his castration, the examination of his book at the Council of Soissons, and his isolation at St. Gildas of Rhuys, and refers to her own "calamitas—calamity."

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Has there been a grace of mind or body that you did not possess when you were young?

And is there now, of all the women then who envied me, a single one who does not feel compassion when my own calamity has cut me from those joys?

Is there any man or woman, even among our ancient enemies, who is not softened now by the pity owed to me?

I am entirely guilty; as you know, I am entirely innocent.

For blame does not reside in the action itself but in the disposition of the agent, and justice does not weigh what is done but what is in the heart.14

And what my heart has always been toward you, you alone can judge, who have put me to the test.

I submit it all for your examination, and rest my case on your testimony alone.

Now answer me one question if you can: why, after our entrance into religious life— which you alone decided, you alone— why I have fallen into such neglect and oblivion with you that I am neither restored to life with a word when we are together nor comforted with a letter when we are apart.

Yes, tell me if you can, and I will tell you what I, no, what everyone suspects— that it was appetite and not affection that connected you to me, your lust and not your love; and that when what you desired suddenly became

14 What evidently has been an issue of mutual concern between them will become central to the doctrine of Abelard's Ethics, that intentions alone, not actions in themselves, are subject to moral judgment; see, e.g., Ethics (Luscombe 1971, 52): "Indeed, we call an intention good, that is, right in itself; we do not say of an action, however, that it takes on any good in itself but rather that it proceeds from a good intention."

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impossible, everything you put on for its sake also disappeared.

My most beloved, this is not my inference alone but everyone's, not private and particular to me but public and universal.

I wish it were just mine alone, for then your love could ﬁnd someone to defend it, someone I could turn to to relieve the pain I am suffering now.

I wish there were some plausible excuse I could invent, for then I could ﬁnd, in defending you, some way of covering my own cheapness.

Remember what I ask, I beg of you— you will ﬁnd it is small and easy to do: so long as I am cheated of your presence, present me with an image of yourself at least in words, of which you have an exceptional supply.

I cannot expect your generosity in substance if I ﬁnd you miserly in words.

Up to now I had thought I deserved so much from you since everything I have done was for your sake and even now I continue in your service.

It was not any commitment to the religious life that forced me to the rigors of the convent when I was the young woman I once was: it was your command alone.

If even in this I deserve nothing from you, then you may judge how all my work here has been wasted.

I can expect no reward from God since it is clear I have yet done nothing out of love for him.

I followed you as you went striding off to God and to his monastery— No, I did not follow: I went ﬁrst.

Were you haunted by the image of Lot's wife

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turning back15 when you delivered me up to these vows and holy vestments even before you delivered yourself to God?

That you doubted me in this one thing, my love, overwhelmed me with grief and shame.

But, as God knows, I would have followed you to Vulcan's ﬂames if you commanded it, and without a moment's hesitation I would have gone ﬁrst.

My heart was never my own but was always with you, and now even more, if it is not with you it is nowhere: without you it cannot exist at all.16

Let it be at peace with you, I beg of you.

And it will be at peace with you if you are kind, if you return grace for grace,17 small things for large, words for real substance.

My love, I wish your love had less conﬁdence in me, so that it would be more careful and concerned.

But now it seems the more secure of me I have made you feel, the more negligent you have become.

Recall what I have done, I beg of you.

Remember what you owe me.

In the days when we shared the pleasures of the ﬂesh, no one was sure if I acted out of love or lust.

Now the end conﬁrms the beginning.

I have denied myself all pleasure to follow your will:

I kept nothing for myself but to become yours.

If you now give me less when I deserve 15 See Gen. 19:26.

16 Petrarch's marginal comment is "Amicissime et eleganter—Written with elegance and the greatest love."

17 Cf. John 1:16.

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so much more, if you now give me nothing at all, think what your injustice will be then.

And it is so small a thing I ask and so easy for you to do.

So, by that God who claims your dedication, I beg of you, grant me your presence in the one way you can— by writing me some word of comfort, so that at least in this one way I may be restored to life, readier and ﬁt for my own service to God.

In the days when you sought me out for pleasures long ago, you showered me with letter after letter, and with your songs you set your Heloise on the lips of everyone, and every home and every street re-echoed Heloise.

Is it not better now to summon me to God than it once was to call me to your bed?

Think what you owe me, remember what I ask, I beg of you, and I will end my long letter with these brief words—

Farewell, my only one.

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ABELARD TO HELOISE

To Heloise, his most beloved sister in Christ From Abelard, her brother in Christ.

If I have written you no consolation or encouragement in the time since we turned our lives toward God, it was not because of negligence on my part but because of your own wisdom, in which I have always had implicit trust. I did not believe you needed these things from me when the grace of God has given you all you need to instruct the wayward, console the weak, and hearten the lukewarm through word and example. This you have long been used to do since your ﬁrst days as prioress under your abbess. So, if you show your daughters now the thoughtful care you showed your sisters then, I am sure that it is ample and that anything further from me could only be superﬂuous. But if in your humility you think otherwise and believe you need my writings or my guidance in any matter that pertains to God, then write and tell me what you wish, and I will write back so far as the Lord allows me.

For the present, though, I must thank God that he has ﬁlled your hearts with anxiety for me in the constant and terrible dangers I face, and has allowed you all to share in my afﬂiction. With the support of your prayers, I hope his mercy will protect me and quickly crush Satan beneath our feet. To this end above all, my sister—once dear to me in the world, now dearest to me in Christ—I have been quick to send you the psalter you requested,1 with which you may

1 It is not precisely certain what this psalter may be or when or how Heloise may have made her request. The convent is most likely to have had a book of psalms already, but Abelard may be referring to a text of the Psalms properly translated and corrected, such as he mentions in the prefatory letter to the ﬁrst book of hymns he

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offer perpetual prayer to the Lord for our many great sins and for the dangers I confront every day.

There is certainly evidence enough to show how high a place the prayers of the faithful have with God and his righteous, especially the prayers of women for their loved ones and wives for their husbands. The apostle Paul then tells us to "pray without ceasing."2 We read that the Lord said to Moses, "Let me alone that my wrath may be kindled," and to Jeremiah, "Do not thou pray for this people . . . and do not withstand me,"3 and see that he himself bears witness that the prayers of the righteous put a bridle on his wrath, holding it back from raging against sinners as they deserve. When justice leads him to the vengeance he would take, the appeals of his friends can turn him aside and, almost by some force, restrain him, as it were, against his will. This is why before or during prayer a man will hear,

"Let me alone and do not withstand me." The Lord forbids our prayers for the unrighteous, but the just man prays despite the Lord's injunction, and he gains what he requests and alters the sentence of the angry judge. And this is why later in the passage about Moses we read, "The Lord was appeased from doing the evil which he had spoken against his people."4 Elsewhere it is written about the works of God in general, "He spoke and it was so";5 but here, though God said that the people deserved their afﬂiction, still he did not do what he ﬁrst said that he would do, prevented by the power of prayer. If Moses gained by prayer what was forbidden to his prayer and could turn God from what he had spoken, then surely you must see how great the power of prayer will be if we should simply pray as we are told.

The prophet Habakkuk once said to God, "When thou art angry, thou wilt remember mercy."6 I only wish the princes of the earth would hear this and take note when they are headstrong more than just in carrying out a sentence they have pronounced, ashamed to seem weak if they are merciful or to seem false if they go back on a composed for the Paraclete, where he also cites a request from Heloise. Heloise does not ask for a psalter in any extant letter but may easily have done so orally or in a written communication we do not have.

2 1 Thess. 5:17.

3 Exod. 32:10; Jer. 7:16.

4 Exod. 32:14.

5 The words are Ps. 32:9, though the thought is widespread.

6 Hab. 3:2.

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word they spoke in haste, even though they can now correct it with their actions. Such men remind me most of Jephtha, who had made a foolish vow and then more foolishly fulﬁlled it when he sacriﬁced his only one, his daughter.7 But those who would belong to the community of God will say along with the Psalmist, "Mercy and judgment I will sing to thee, O Lord."8 It is written that mercy is exalted above judgment, and that judgment is without mercy to him that hath not done mercy.9 So, taking this to heart, the psalmist David granted the appeal of Abigail, Nabal's wife, and though he had sworn in justice to destroy the man along with his entire house, he showed her mercy and broke the oath that he had sworn.10 In this way he set prayer above justice, and what the husband had done wrong the wife wiped clean.

There is an example in this for you, my sister, and an assurance that if this woman's prayers achieved so much from a mere man, your prayers for me can claim much more from God. For surely God our Father loves his children more than David loved the woman who entreated him, and while David was known as merciful and pious, God is mercy and piety itself. Besides, the woman Abigail was only secular and lay, not joined to God by a religious calling. So, even if your prayers perhaps should not be enough in themselves, the holy convent of virgins and widows you have with you certainly will gain what you cannot gain alone. Christ tells his disciples,

"Where there are two or three gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them," and "If two of you shall consent concerning anything they ask, it shall be done by my Father in heaven."11 Who, then, can be blind to the power before God of an entire congregation at constant prayer? If, as the apostle James said, "the continual

7 See Judg. 11:30–40. As an offering of thanks for victory, Jephtha had vowed to sacriﬁce whoever of his house ﬁrst greeted him on his return from battle. When this turned out to be his only child (the Vulgate's term is unigenita ﬁlia, "only-begotten daughter"; Abelard writes unicam, "only one"), Jephtha regretted his vow but fulﬁlled it nonetheless. The annual ritual that arose from this event among the daughters of Israel is mentioned in the Sixth Letter and was reﬂected in Abelard's "Lament for the Daughter of Jephtha," one of a series of laments he composed for use at the Paraclete; see p. 284.

8 Ps. 100:1.

9 Jas. 2:13.

10 See 1 Kings 25 for the story of Nabal the Carmelite. When Nabal died soon after,

David married the widowed Abigail.

11 Matt. 18:19–20.

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prayer of a just man availeth much,"12 think what we can hope from your whole sacred congregation. You know, my dearest sister, from the thirty-eighth homily of Saint Gregory, what help the prayers of an entire monastery brought to a single monk even when he doggedly refused it; how even at the point of death, when his soul was laboring in misery and fear, still in his stark despair and in his weariness of life he would try to call his brothers from their prayers.13

Yes, your wisdom surely knows what is written there.

I hope all this will call you to your prayers—you and your sisters of the convent—with greater conﬁdence that God will keep me alive for you, the God through whom, Paul tells us, "women received even their dead raised to life again."14 Throughout the pages of the Old Testament and Gospel, you will ﬁnd that the greatest miracles recorded there, the miracles of raising the dead, all were performed especially for women, either at their request or on their bodies. The Old Testament speaks of two men raised from death by Elijah and Elisha, his disciple, and both were raised at the entreaty of their mothers.15 And the Gospel contains just three instances of resurrection which the Lord himself performed, each time again especially for women. At the gates of Nain, he restored a son to his widowed mother because he was moved to pity for her; his friend Lazarus, too, he brought to life at the prayers of his sisters, Mary and Martha; and when on her father's request he bestowed the same grace on the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, then as well "women received their dead raised to life again," since on her return to life she took back the body she had, as those women took back the bodies of their dead.16

These dead were raised at the prayers of just a few. Your prayers, then, for the preservation of my life—the prayers of so many, so devout—these I know will easily prevail. God loves the abstinence and self-restraint you all have consecrated to him, and in his love he will be more inclined to hear your prayers with favor. For all we

12 Jas. 5:16.

13 Homiliae in Evangelia 2.38.16.

14 Heb. 11:35. Abelard departs very slightly from the Vulgate's wording here, though he returns to it in his citation later in the paragraph.

15 See 3 Kings 17:17–24 and 4 Kings 4:32–35.

16 See Luke 7:12–16 for the widow at the gates of Nain; John 11:17–44 for Lazarus; and Luke 8:40–56, Mark 5:21–43, and Matt. 9:18–26 for the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue.

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know, many of those for whom these miracles were performed were not even among the faithful—we read nothing at all of the widow's faith whose son the Lord restored without her asking—but in our case, an intact faith binds us together and the same religious calling unites us all.

Now let me leave aside your whole community for a moment, where virgins and widows in their number offer continual devotion to the Lord, and turn to you alone. I have no doubt your sanctity has power before God, and with that power you owe me this debt— now above all, when I am laboring at the point of crisis. Always remember in your prayers the one who is specially yours, and pray with greater conﬁdence knowing it is right for you to do so, and hence it is acceptable to God. I beg of you, listen with the ear of your heart to what your body's ear has often heard. In Proverbs it is written, "A diligent woman is a crown to her husband," and "He that hath found a good wife hath found a good thing and shall receive a pleasure from the Lord," and again "House and riches are given by parents, but a prudent wife is from the Lord." And in Ecclesiasticus,

"Happy is the husband of a good wife," and "A good wife is a good portion." And on the authority of Paul, "The unbelieving husband is sanctiﬁed by the believing wife."17

We have special, God-given proof of this here in our kingdom of France. When Clovis was turned to the faith of Christ—less because of the preaching of holy men than because of the prayers of his wife18—his whole kingdom submitted to God's laws so that the lesser men among them would be challenged by the greater and called by their example to insistent prayer. We too are called to this insistent prayer by the urgent invitation of the Lord. His parable tells us:

If he shall continue knocking, I say to you, although he will not rise and give him because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him what he needeth.

And I say to you, Ask and it shall be given you: seek and you shall ﬁnd: knock and it shall be opened. For everyone

17 Prov. 12:4, 18:22, 19:14; Ecclus. 26:1, 26:4; 1 Cor. 7:14.

18 Clovis (c. 466–511), founder of the Frankish monarchy, was baptized as a Catholic in 496 at the urging of his wife, the Burgundian princess Clotilda, revered as a saint in France.

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that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh ﬁndeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.19

It was by the same importunity of prayer, if I may call it that, that Moses softened the harshness of God's justice and altered his sentence, as I said before.

You know, my most beloved, the heartfelt charity your convent used to show me in its prayers when I was there among you, how every day at the close of every canonical Hour, it would offer to the Lord a special prayer on my behalf. After the proper response and versicle were read, a prayer and collect were added, which went like this:

Response: Do not forsake me nor be far from me, O Lord.

Versicle: Always come to my assistance, O Lord.20

Prayer: Save your servant, O my God, whose hope is in you.

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry rise up to you.21

Let us pray: O God, who through your servant has seen ﬁt to gather together your handmaids in your name, we ask you to grant both to him and to us steady perseverance in your will.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God.

Forever and ever. Amen.22

But now that I am apart from you, I have all the more need for your prayers, as this greater danger holds me in its grip. So, I implore and beg you, I beg and I implore: let me know in my absence how your charity extends to someone who is gone, by your adding at the close of every canonical Hour the following as a form of proper prayer:

19 Luke 11:8–10. The manuscripts include only the ﬁrst sentence of this passage, indicating the extended context with "etc."

20 Cf. Ps. 38:22 and 69:2.

21 Ps. 101:2.

22 The manuscripts include only the ﬁrst words of this section, "Through our Lord . . . ," indicating what follows with "etc."

SECOND LETTER

Response: Do not forsake me, O Lord, my Father and the Governor of my life.

Do not let me fall before my adversaries or let my enemy rejoice over me.23

Versicle: Take hold of arms and shield, and rise up to help me24 that my enemy not rejoice over me.

Prayer: Save your servant, O my God, whose hope is in you.

O Lord, send him aid from your holy place and watch over him from Zion.

Be his tower of strength, O Lord, in the face of his enemy.

Hear, O Lord, my prayer, and let my cry rise up to you.

Let us pray: O God, who through your servant has seen ﬁt to gather together your handmaids in your name, we ask you to protect him in all adversity and restore him safely to your handmaids.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God.

Forever and ever. Amen.

And if the Lord should deliver me into the hands of my enemies that they prevail over me and slay me, or if by some other chance I go the way of all ﬂesh while I am not there with you, I beg of you, take my body wherever it may lie, buried or unburied, and bring it to your convent cemetery.25 There every day my daughters—but I should now say, my sisters in Christ—may look on my grave and then pour out more fully to the Lord their prayers for me. There is no place more welcome and secure for a soul grieving in desolation for its sins than the place of the Consoler, the true Paraclete, consecrated to him and marked speciﬁcally with his name. There is no ﬁtter place for Christian burial among any of the faithful than among 23 Cf. Ecclus. 23:3.

24 Ps. 34:2.

25 After Abelard's death at the priory of St. Marcellus in 1142, his body was transferred to the Paraclete through the personal intervention of Peter the Venerable and buried in the oratory there (see Heloise's letter to Peter). Heloise was later buried at Abelard's side. Although their bodies were moved several times in the following centuries, they were reinterred in 1817 in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise in Paris in the neo-Gothic tomb where they lie today.

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women devoted to Christ. With precious oils they tended to the burial of the Lord Jesus Christ, coming before and following after, keeping watch around his grave and bewailing the Bridegroom with tears and sighs, as it is written: "Women sat at the tomb, weeping and lamenting the Lord." There they ﬁrst took comfort in the fact that he had risen when an angel came and announced the news to them, and soon they understood the joys there were in his resurrection when he twice appeared to them and found them worthy to touch his risen body with their hands.26

Above all else, I make this last request of you: that all of you who now are so concerned for the safety of my body will later remain concerned for the salvation of my soul, and that the love you showed the living man you will later show to me when I am dead through the special prayers you offer in my name.

Farewell, live long, yourself and all your sisters— Live long and well, but in Christ remember me.

26 Various details from Matt. 26; Luke 23:55–56; and Mark 14:3–8 and 16:1 are woven into this account. The quotation itself is from the antiphon to the Benedictus in the Roman Breviary for Holy Saturday.

THIRD LETTER

HELOISE TO ABELARD

To her only one after Christ From his only one in Christ.

I ﬁnd it strange, my only one, that you have gone so far outside the well-known rules of writing letters—

I should say, against the order of nature itself— that you have put my name ahead of yours in the greeting of the letter you wrote to me.

There I see a woman before a man, a wife before a husband, a handmaid before her lord, a nun before a monk, a humble deaconess before a priest, and an abbess before an abbot.

Surely it is the right and proper order to put the other's name ﬁrst when writing to an equal or superior, but to follow the normal precedence of rank when writing to someone whose importance is less.1

I also found it not a little strange that where you owed some comfort you have only brought more sorrow, and when you should have dried our tears you have made them ﬂow the faster.

Not one of us could listen without tears 1 Heloise refers to the precepts of the ars dictaminis, "art of composition," the rhetoric of epistolary practice, codiﬁed in several handbooks available at the time.

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to what you wrote toward the end of your letter:

"And if the Lord should deliver me into the hands of my enemies that they prevail over me and slay me. . . ."

What were you thinking, dearest, that you could say a thing like that?

May God never be so oblivious to his handmaids as to let us live on without you.

May he never grant us a life that would be worse than any death.

No, you must celebrate our funeral rites, you must commend our souls to God, you must send ahead of you to God those whom you have gathered in his name— this is what is proper— so that then you may rest easy about us and follow us to God with greater joy, more certain in the knowledge of our salvation.

Spare us this, I beg of you, my lord, spare us any more words of this kind.

Do not heap misery on our misery and take from us before our death the only thing in which we live.

"Sufﬁcient unto the day is the evil thereof,"2 and that day, dark with every bitterness, will bring sorrow enough to everyone it ﬁnds.

"What need is there," says Seneca, "to conjure future evils and throw away your life before your death?"3

You say, my only one, that if somehow you lose your life while you are not here with us, we are to bring your body to the convent cemetery, where our memory of you, forever fresh, could bear you a richer harvest of our prayers.

But how could you imagine that our memory would fail, or that that will be a ﬁtting time for prayer— that day on which the deepest agitation 2 Matt. 6:34.

3 Cf. Epistulae ad Lucilium 24.1.

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will shatter all our calm, when the soul will lose its reason and the tongue will lose its speech, and the mind in its madness, then more outraged against God than ever at peace with him, will never appease him with its prayers so much as enrage him with its protests and complaints?

Yes, then there will be time enough for tears, but not for prayers.

Yes, then it will be time for us to follow you in death, readier to be buried at your side than to see you in the earth— that day on which we will have lost our lives in you and can no longer live when you are gone.

Far better that we die before that day.

Even the thought of your death is a death to us— then what will be its stark reality if that day ﬁnds us living after you?

May God never allow us to repay the debt we owe you and live on.

May we never render you the service you owe us.

In this we should go ﬁrst, not follow you.

Spare us then, I beg of you— spare your only one, at least— any more words of this kind.

They pierce our souls like swords of death and make what comes before our death much worse than death itself.

The heart cannot be still when it is overwhelmed in sorrow; the mind can never free itself for God when it is occupied with such a deep unrest.

I beg of you, do not impede that service to God to which, above all, you have bound us.

If a sorrow must come, we must hope it will come quickly and not torture us beforehand with a long and vain foreboding that no knowledge of the future can allay.

This was the poet Lucan's prayer to God:

"Let it be sudden, whatever it is you plan, And let the mind of man be blind to fate:

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Allow our fear some hope."4

But is there hope for me if you are gone?

Or any reason to linger on this pilgrimage of life when I have no other answer but you, and nothing else in you but the fact that you are living, when every other joy from you has been forbidden, and even your presence is denied me, which could restore me to myself from time to time?

O, the ungodly savagery of God, if I may say it!

The mercilessness of his mercy!

The vast misfortune of that Fortune who besets me in her universal war!

She has launched all her arrows against me, keeping none for her rage against others.

See—her quiver now is empty, no one else should fear attack.

And if she had a single arrow more, she could ﬁnd no place in me that does not already have its wound.

Among so many wounds there is just one that gives her pause, the one that ends my torment with my death.

Never does she rest in my destruction, but while she rushes to destroy me, she would not have me destroyed.

I am the most unhappy of all women, I am the most unlucky of all women, to be raised as high above them all because of you as I am cast down low because of you, and because of myself as well: the steeper my ascent, the worse my fall.

Has there ever been a woman of power and birth whom Fortune preferred to me, who was then so overthrown and overwhelmed in grief?

Has there been glory like the glory that was mine 4 Pharsalia 2.14–15.

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because of you?

Or ruin like the ruin that is mine because of you?

Has there ever been a Fortune of such extremes, who knows no moderation in good or ill?

She made me blessed beyond others to leave me broken beyond others, so when I considered how much I have lost, the grief that consumed me would be no less than the loss that had crushed me, and the pain that was to come would be no less than the love that had gone before, and the deepest of all pleasures would now end in the deepest of all sorrows.

And every law of justice was reversed to spite us further.

When we were still pursuing the joys of love and—to use an ugly but a more expressive phrase— abandoning ourselves to fornication, God spared us his hard judgment.

But when we took steps to correct what we had done, to cover the illicit with the licit and repair our fornication with the proper rites of marriage, the Lord raised up an angry hand against us and struck our now-chaste bed when he had winked at our unchaste bed for so long before.

The punishment you suffered would be ﬁt for men taken in adultery, but it was for no adultery that you suffered, but for a proper marriage with which you thought you had made good any wrong you might have done: what faithless women bring their partners in adultery, your lawful wife brought you, her lawful husband.

We had even given up our former pleasures at the time and were living in abstinence and apart, you at the school in Paris and I with the nuns at Argenteuil, at your command.

And when in this seclusion you became more diligent in your work and I became more free for study of the scriptures and for prayer— at just the time when both of us

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were living lives of greater piety as well as abstinence, then you alone paid the price in your body for what we two had done.

One alone was punished while the two of us were at fault.

You took the entire payment on yourself although you owed no debt; for inasmuch as you had made full restitution by humbling yourself for me and had elevated me and all my family alike, then in the eyes of God as in the eyes of those men who betrayed you, you were not liable to further penalty.

But me— Was it my sorry birthright to become the cause of evil, the well-known curse of womankind to lead the greatest men to greatest ruin?5

Is this why the Book of Proverbs has this warning against woman—

"Now, therefore, my son, hear me and attend to the words of my mouth.

Let not thy mind be drawn away in her ways, neither be thou deceived with her paths.

For she has cast down many wounded, and the strongest have been slain by her.

Her house is the way to hell, reaching even to the inner chambers of death"6—

and the Book of Ecclesiastes this— 5 Here and in the following section, Heloise expands on a long-lived misogynist canard. Compare Abelard's plea to Fulbert in the Calamities on the basis of "what women had done from the beginning of the human race to bring even the greatest men to ruin" and Heloise's corresponding fear of falling victim to the pernicious cliché: "Is this how she would be remembered, as the woman who brought [Abelard's] name to ruin and shamed [them] both?" The passage here contrasts pointedly with Abelard's praise of women's piety at the end of the Second Letter, but by the passage's end Heloise will have shifted primary blame from womankind itself and will also have distanced herself from the group of evil female exemplars she mentions: by the ethical doctrine developed in the First Letter and later in Abelard's Ethics, she cannot be held morally responsible for Abelard's downfall since she did not consent to it.

6 Prov. 7:24–27.

THIRD LETTER

"I have surveyed all things with my mind and I found more bitter than death a woman who is the hunter's snare: her heart is a net and her hands are bands.

He that pleaseth God shall escape from her, but he that is a sinner shall be caught."7

The ﬁrst action by a woman lured man from paradise, becoming his undoing when the Lord created her to be his helpmeet.

Then Samson, the mightiest Nazirite of the Lord, whose conception even an angel had announced, was vanquished by Dalila single-handed; betrayed to his enemies and his eyes put out, his grief at last compelled him to destroy himself along with them in general ruin.8

The wisest man of all, King Solomon, lost his wits through the workings of one woman he had taken to his bed; she drove him to such insanity that that great man, whom the Lord himself had chosen to build his Temple, when even his righteous father had been rejected for the task, foundered to the end of his days in the worshipping of idols, abandoning the worship of the Lord, which he had taught and preached in all his words.9

And Job, whose sanctity was matchless, endured his last and heaviest blow from his wife, who urged him to curse God.10

Oh yes, the great Seducer in his cunning knew one thing well, and that from long experience: the easiest path to ruin for men is always through their wives.

So, when he would extend his well-known malice to our own time and found a man he could not bring down through fornication,

7 Eccles. 7:26–27.

8 See Judg. 13:3 and 16:4–31.

9 See 3 Kings 11.

10 See Job 2:9.

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he tempted him with marriage instead, using good to work his evil, now that evil was denied him for the purpose.

At least I can thank God for this—that the Seducer never drew me into guilt with my consent, as he did these other women, though he did make me a cause in the event.

My heart, however, is clear of guilt, no blame through my consent.

There were many earlier sins, I know, for which I bear responsibility— my devotion to the pleasures of the ﬂesh, whose consequences have become a ﬁtting punishment for me— and to that bad beginning do I owe this twisted outcome.

I only wish it lay within my power to do a penance worthy of the wrong done against you, that at least by long contrition I could offer some recompense for the wound that you sustained and take upon my mind throughout a lifetime of remorse what your body suffered in that hour.

This is but just, and in this way I may make some ﬁt amends— to you at least, that is, if not to God.

There is no penance I could undergo that can appease God— not if I should open my most wretched heart completely and confess all its weaknesses to him— since I charge him forever with the savagery of that act and, forever unreconciled to his will, offend him more with my outrage than I can soothe him with any ﬁtting penance.

How can it be called repentance of sins, whatever afﬂiction the body undergoes, if the mind retains the will to sin and seethes with its old desires?

Easy to announce that one is guilty and easy to confess one's sins, or even to afﬂict the body in some outward act of penance—

THIRD LETTER

but it remains the hardest thing of all to wrench the heart away from its desires for the greatest pleasures it has ever known.

So it was with every reason that Job began, "I will let go my speech against myself"— meaning, "I will open my mouth in confession to accuse myself of my sins"— and then immediately went on, "I will speak in the bitterness of my soul."11

As Saint Gregory explains:

"Some confess their sins aloud but cannot groan when they confess them: they announce their remorse with joy in their hearts.

So, if someone speaks with genuine displeasure for his sins, he then must speak 'in the bitterness of his soul,' since it is this very bitterness that punishes whatever the tongue confesses through the judgment of the mind."12

But just how rare the bitterness of true repentance is Saint Ambrose tells us:

"I have always thought it easier to ﬁnd someone who has kept his innocence intact than someone who has actually repented."13

For me, the pleasures we shared in love were sweet, so sweet they cannot displease me now, and rarely are they ever out of mind.

Wherever I turn, they are there before my eyes with all their old desires.

I see their images even in my sleep.

During Holy Mass itself, when prayer should be its purest, unholy fantasies of pleasure so enslave my wretched soul that my devotion is to them and not my prayers:

11 Job 10:1.

12 Moralia 9.43.

13 De Poenitentia 2.10.

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when I ought to groan for what I have done, I sigh for what I have lost.

Not only what we did but when and where— these are so ﬁxed within my heart that I live through them again with you in all those times and places.

I have no rest from them even in sleep.

At times my thoughts betray themselves in a movement of my body or even in involuntary words.

In my unhappiness, the lament of that despondent soul is mine:

"Wretch that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

I wish I could continue as he did, "The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord."14

It seems, my dearest, that this grace came earlier to you, when the injury to your body freed your soul from all such torments, and the God who seemed your enemy proved your friend, at least in this, a staunch physician, surely, not to spare his patient pain if he believed it would bring about a cure.

But this is not the way it is with me.

I am still young, and the passions of youth and my experience of those sweet pleasures exacerbate the torments of the ﬂesh, and their assaults against me are more ﬁerce, the weaker the nature is that they assault.

Men call me chaste who do not see the hypocrite I am.

They count purity of the ﬂesh among the virtues though the virtue belongs to the heart and not the body.15

14 Rom. 7:24–25, following a sentence that reads (7:22–23):

For I am delighted with the law of God according to the inner man: but I see another law in my members, ﬁghting against the law of my mind and captivating me in the law of sin that is in my members.

15 Paraphrasing Augustine, De Bono Coniugali 21, which Heloise cites directly in the Fifth Letter.

THIRD LETTER

Men give me praise, but I deserve no praise from God, who searches heart and mind and sees in all the secret places.16

They judge me a woman of religion at a time when little in religious life is not hypocrisy, when the highest praise ﬂows to the one who does not offend man's judgment.

Perhaps it is worth praise to some extent and acceptable enough to God if I do not become a scandal to the Church by overt deed, regardless of my inward disposition, if I do not blaspheme the name of God for inﬁdels to hear or shame my professed orders before laymen.

I know it is no trivial gift of grace, not only to do good but to keep from evil.

In vain, though, does one come ﬁrst if the other does not follow—"Decline from evil and do good," it is written17—and both are vain if not done for the love of God.

But in every circumstance throughout my life, as God knows well, I have feared an offense against you more than any offense against him, and I have sought to please you more than him.

It was your command, not love for him, that brought me to put on this habit of religion.

Consider then the life that I am living— how unhappy, how much more miserable than others'— if I must bear my burdens here in vain with no hope of compensation in the future.

You too were taken in by my charade like all the rest, mistaking my hypocrisy for religion.

And now you commend yourself to my prayers— to my prayers above all— and ask from me what I expect from you.

16 Cf. Prov. 24:12; Ps. 7.10; Jer. 11:20, 17:10, 20:12; etc. See also the Fifth Letter, and Abelard's Ethics (Luscombe 1971, 42) along with the discussion there.

17 Ps. 36:27. Cf. also Abelard's Ethics (Luscombe 1971, 128).

THE LETTERS AND OTHER WRITINGS

Do not presume so much, I beg of you: you may forget to help me with your prayers.

Do not ever suppose that I am healed: you may withdraw the grace of your healing.

Do not believe that I am not in need: you may put off your help when I most need it.

Do not imagine that I am strong:

I may collapse before you stop my fall.

False praise has done great injury before, destroying the security we need.

As the Lord cries out through the mouth of Isaiah, "They that call thee blessed deceive thee and destroy the way of thy steps,"18 and through the mouth of Ezekiel, "Woe to them that sew cushions for each elbow and pillows for the heads of every age to deceive men's souls."19

But, then, through Solomon we learn, "The words of the wise are like goads and as nails deeply fastened,"20 and nails like these are never gentle with a wound but can only pierce it through.

Then stop this praise of me, I beg of you, or you will win yourself a name for ﬂattery and risk the charge of lying, and vanity like a puff of air will blow away any good you have found to praise.

No one skilled in healing ever judges the sickness within from outward signs alone.

God ﬁnds no merit in what is common to his chosen and his rejected alike, those outward deeds that hypocrites do 18 Isa. 3:12.

19 Ezek. 13:18. Whatever the original meaning of this obscure passage, it is taken here as a warning against those who offer deceptive comfort. Abelard offers a similar interpretation of the passage in his Sermon 33 on John the Baptist.

20 Eccles. 12:11.

THIRD LETTER

with greater zeal than any of the righteous.21

"The heart of man is perverse and unsearchable: who can know it?"22

"There are ways that seem just to a man, but their ends lead to death"23

Yes, the judgment of man is reckless and unstable in what is reserved for the scrutiny of God, and that is why it is also written, "Praise no man in his lifetime,"24 that is, while praise still has the power to make him unworthy of praise.

Your praise of me brings danger, and all the more because I want to hear it; I am the more caught up in it and charmed, the more I strive to please you in all things.

You must put no trust in me, I beg of you, but instead you must be constantly afraid: only your fear can help me.

And now you have most cause to be afraid— now above all, when you have no answer in you for my lack of self-restraint.

Do not talk to me of strength or of ﬁghting the good ﬁght.

Do not tell me that power is made perfect by weakness, and that no one is crowned who does not strive.25

I seek no crown of victory— enough that I keep from risk, far safer to keep from risk than to keep struggling in these wars.

Whatever corner of heaven God may grant will ﬁt me well enough: no one will envy another's state 21 Cf. Abelard's Ethics (Luscombe 1971, 4, 28, and 44).

22 Jer. 17:9.

23 Cf. Prov. 16:25 and 14:12.

24 Ecclus. 11:30.

25 See 2 Cor. 12:9 and 2 Tim. 2:5. Both were favorite passages of Abelard's, the ﬁrst quoted in Sermons 26 and 30, the second in Sermon 1 and in his Ethics (Luscombe

1971, 4). He will respond to Heloise by citing these passages again in the Fourth and Sixth Letters.

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when what each has will always be enough.

If there must be authority to conﬁrm what I resolve, then let it be authority strong as oak— yes, let us hear the words of Saint Jerome:

"I confess my utter weakness:

I will not ﬁght in the hope of victory, or else some day I may lose the victory. . . .

What need is there to hazard what is certain by ﬂitting after things that are uncertain?"26

26 Adversus Vigilantium 16.

FOURTH LETTER

ABELARD TO HELOISE

To the bride of Christ From his servant.

There are four points, by my count, in your last letter on which you base your sense of injury; I see nothing in the letter more than that.

First, you complain that, "outside the well-known rules of writing letters" and even "against the order of nature itself," my letter to you put your name ahead of mine in its greeting. Second, that I brought you sorrow when I owed you comfort and made your tears ﬂow faster when I should have dried them—this, it seems, by my writing in my letter, "And if the Lord should deliver me up to my enemies," and so on. Third is your old and continual complaint against God about the manner in which we came to the religious life and the savagery of the act of betrayal committed against me.

Finally, you countered my praise of you with an accusation against yourself, along with a not-inconsiderable appeal that I refrain from praising you again.

I will answer each of these points in turn. My purpose is not to make excuses for myself but rather to instruct you and to urge you, ﬁrst, to accede to my requests when you understand that they are grounded in reason; then, to hear me out when I speak of your requests, once you see I am not blameworthy in my own; and last, to be somewhat more reluctant to condemn me when you realize I do not deserve your reproach.

First, then, in the matter of my greeting, whose order you say I have reversed—You will note it was consistent with what you yourself have claimed. It is certainly common knowledge, as you say, that in letters to superiors their names should be placed ﬁrst. But

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you must understand that you are my superior and have been so from the time you became my lady, that is, on your becoming the bride of my Lord. As Saint Jerome wrote to Eustochium, "I write to you as 'My lady Eustochium' because, surely, I ought to call my

Lord's own bride 'my lady.'"1 A happy exchange of marriage ties for you, then—the wife, ﬁrst, of the least of men, now raised to wedlock with the greatest of all kings. As a consequence of this honor, you have been lifted not only above the man who was once your husband but above all the other servants of that King. It should not seem strange to you, then, if I commend myself, living or dead, to the prayers of the women of your convent, since by a widely accepted right brides have power of intercession with their lords beyond that of any member of their households, as beﬁts the relative status of ladies and servants. In fact, the type of these brides2 is the queen and bride of that great King himself, carefully presented in the psalm which says, "The queen stood on thy right hand, in gilded clothing, surrounded with splendor. Hearken, O daughter, and see. . . . The daughters of Tyre and the rich among the people shall entreat thy favor with gifts."3 In other words, she stands next to her husband, clinging closely to his side, and walks at a pace with him while all the others, as it were, follow behind or stand a long way off.

In the Canticles the bride rejoices over her distinction, the Ethiopian woman whom, in a certain sense, Moses took to wife.4 "I am black but beautiful, O ye daughters of Jerusalem," she says; "therefore, the king hath loved me and hath led me into his chamber."

And just after, "Do not consider me that I am brown, because the sun hath altered my color."5 She represents in genus the contemplative soul, which in species is called the bride of Christ; but in a more particular way the terms pertain to all of you, as your outer habit

1 Epistulae 22.2.

2 That is, the prototype or model, which may be presented in symbolic or allegorical terms. For the concept and its use in medieval exegesis, see the classic essay by Auerbach 1959.

3 Ps. 44:10–13. The manuscripts cite the passage up to "on thy right hand," indicating the extended context with "etc."

4 That is, applying a typological understanding to Moses' marriage to an Ethiopian in Num. 12:1, so that Moses' wife and the bride of the Canticles are expressions of the same type. Abelard will assimilate this kind of reading with the categories of his dialectic just below.

5 Cant. 1:4–5 in a pre-Vulgate version.

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also indicates.6 The garb of coarse black cloth you wear—so much like the mourning dress of worthy widows who lament the deaths of the husbands they loved—shows that you are, as the Apostle says, truly widowed in this world and desolate, deserving of the assistance of the Church.7 Scripture also remembers the widows' grief for their Bridegroom who was slain, saying, "Women sat at the tomb, weeping and lamenting the Lord."8

Now, the Ethiopian woman also has a black exterior—in her skin—and appears less beautiful than other women with respect to outward things. She is not different, though, in inward things, and in some of these she may even be whiter and more beautiful, as in, for example, her bones and teeth. [The whiteness of teeth, in fact, is praised even in a bridegroom, as in the phrase, "And his teeth are whiter than milk."]9 She is black, then, in outward things but beautiful in inward things, as if because she is outwardly blackened in her ﬂesh by her afﬂiction in this life with tribulations of the ﬂesh—as Saint Paul says, "All that live godly in Christ shall suffer persecution,"10 and, just as prosperity is signiﬁed by white, so adversity is appropriately signiﬁed by black. She is white within, though—as in her bones—as if because her soul remains strong in virtue, as it is written, "All the glory of the daughter of the king is within."11 For the bones within, which are covered by the ﬂesh, are the strength of the ﬂesh they sustain; they then well represent the soul which is within the ﬂesh, and gives life to the ﬂesh, and sustains and moves and governs the ﬂesh, and supplies all its well-being. And its whiteness, or its beauty, lies in the virtues which adorn it.

She is also black in outward things because, so long as she remains an exile on her pilgrimage in this life, her condition is degraded and low so that she may be exalted in the life to come—

6 Abelard is using the terms of formal dialectic, speaking of the contemplative soul as the genus, or large category, of which the nun, or bride of Christ, is a species, or smaller category, of which the nuns of the Paraclete are particular examples.

7 See 1 Tim. 5:3, 16.

8 From the antiphon to the Benedictus in the Roman Breviary for Holy Saturday. See the Second Letter.

9 A parenthetical remark included in the manuscripts, which most likely represents a scribal interpolation. The quotation is from Gen. 49:12.

10 2 Tim. 3:12.

11 Ps. 44:14.

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the life which is hidden with Christ in God12—when she will have gained her home country at last. The true sun alters her color because the love of her Bridegroom in heaven humbles her or torments her with trials so that prosperity can never make her proud.

He alters her color and, in that, distinguishes her from the rest of women who ﬁx their eyes on earthly things and seek the glory of the world. She becomes a lily-of-the-valley in her humility,13 not a lily-of-the-mountain-peaks like those foolish virgins who swell themselves with pride at their purity of the ﬂesh—their abstinence in outward things—only to wither in the heat of temptation. She is right to address the daughters of Jerusalem—that is, the more imperfect among the faithful who do not deserve the name of sons—and say to them, "Do not consider me that I am brown, because the sun hath altered my color," or in other words, "If I bear my adversities in humility like a man, it is not through my own virtue but through the grace of him I serve." Hypocrites and heretics will act otherwise, of course, who, always with their eyes on the eyes of other men, affect the most abject humility in the hope of earthly glory and endure their many trials to no avail. We can only wonder at their self-abasement and self-imposed austerity, for they are by far the wretchedest of men, with no share in the good things of this life or of the life to come. [Thinking about this carefully, then, the bride says,

"Do not consider it strange why I do this." But we can only wonder about them when, seething with a desire for earthly praise, they deprive themselves of earthly goods to no avail, remaining wretched both now and in the future.]14 Such, in fact, is the self-restraint of the foolish virgins of the parable who were shut outside the door.15

She is also right to say that, because she is black and beautiful, the king loved her and led her into his chamber—that is, into the seclusion and repose of contemplation—and to his bed, about which she says, "In my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loveth."16 Her color itself is not beautiful and prefers the hidden to the open, the private to the public; and a wife like this desires the 12 Cf. Col. 3:4.

13 Cf. Cant. 2:1.

14 A partial doublet of the sentences preceding, apparently deriving from an alternate version of the paragraph only imperfectly reconciled with what else of the letter we have.

15 See the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in Matt. 25:1–13.

16 Cant. 3:1.

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private pleasures of her husband more than the open ones, would rather, for example, be touched in bed than seen at table. Though less appealing to the eye, the ﬂesh of black women is often softer to the touch, and so the pleasure derived from them is greater and more suitably enjoyed in private than in public, and their husbands then take pleasure in their wives by leading them into their chambers rather than out in public view. Continuing with the ﬁgure, then, the spiritual bride is right to say, "I am black but beautiful," and to add immediately, "therefore the king hath loved me and hath led me into his chamber," aligning each particular with particular—that is, because she is beautiful, the king loved her, and because she is black, he led her into his chamber. As I said earlier, she is beautiful within, that is, with the virtues that the bridegroom loves; and she is black without, that is, with the adversity of the body's tribulations.

This blackness—that is, of the body's tribulations—can easily turn the minds of the faithful away from a love of earthly things toward a longing for eternal life, and it sometimes also draws them from the tumult of the world toward private contemplation, as Saint

Jerome said happened in the case of Paul at the inception of our monastic way of life.17 This low, coarse clothing, too, indicates seclusion more than public life, in keeping with the humble retirement most appropriate to our calling. There is nothing that more calls for public display than the expensive clothes no one wants or needs for any other purpose than the empty pomp and glory of the world, as Saint Gregory has shown: "No one adorns himself like this in private, but only where he can be seen."18 Moreover, the chamber of the bride I spoke of earlier is the one to which the Bridegroom in the Gospel invites anyone who prays: "When thou shalt pray," he says,

"enter into thy chamber and, having shut the door, pray to thy Father in secret," not in the streets or in public places like the hypocrites.19 He calls this chamber a place apart, secluded from the sight and tumult of the world, a place where prayer can be more quiet and more pure. The seclusion of monastic solitude is very much like this, a place where we are told to close the door and shut out anything that could disturb the purity of prayer or allow the eye to distract the unhappy soul.

17 See Jerome's Vita Pauli Primi Eremitae 5.

18 Homilia in Lucam 40.16.

19 Matt. 6:6 and cf. 6:5.

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I take it hard, then, that many members of my order choose to ﬂout God's teaching about this, as if it were a mere suggestion and no mandate—opening up their cloisters and their choirs when they celebrate the Divine Ofﬁces, carrying on without a scruple or a blush in full view of women as well as men, and polluting themselves with their high-priced trinkets above all during Mass, as worldly as the audience that watches their display. For them our rites are celebrated best when their outward show is richest and the offerings of their tables are overﬂowing. I know it is better to keep silent about this—disgraceful enough just to speak about their miserable blindness, so thoroughly opposed to the Christian faith, which should be concerned with the poor. They are more like the scribes and Pharisees of the Jews,20 as they follow their own custom, not the rule, and void the commandment of God for the sake of their traditions, not doing what they must but what they are most used to—as if Augustine never reminded us that the Lord said, "I am truth," not "I am custom."21 If someone wants to commend himself to the prayers of men like these—those prayers of the open door— let him go and do as he likes. I turn instead to you, to all of you who are led by heaven's King into his chamber to rest in his embrace behind doors forever closed. There you are given wholly to him, and as the Apostle has said, "Whoever is joined with the Lord is one with him in spirit."22 The more you cling to his side, the more I place my trust in the purity and power of your prayers, and the more I call upon their aid. I believe they will be offered on my behalf with all the devotion due our bond of mutual charity and love.

Now, if I have given you cause for disturbance by mentioning the dangers I face or the death I have reason to fear, let me remind you that this too was done at your request, or I should say, at your most strenuous insistence. In your ﬁrst letter to me, you wrote:

So, by that Christ who keeps you for his own even now, we beg of you, as we are his handmaids and yours, write to us, tell us of those storms in which you ﬁnd yourself tossed. We are all you have left: let us share your grief or your joy. A 20 The sentence draws heavily from the language and thought of Jesus' condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees in Matt. 15:1–6.

21 De Baptismo Contra Donatistas 3.6.9, with reference to John 14:6.

22 1 Cor. 6:17.

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community of grief can bring some comfort to one in need of it, since many shoulders will lighten any burden or even make it seem to disappear.23

Then why do you object that I let you share my fear when in fact it was you who insisted on it? When I am in despair for my life, is it better for you to feel glad? Or would you want to be partners only in joy but not in grief, to "rejoice with them that rejoice" but never

"weep with them that weep"?24 There is no greater difference between a false and true friend than that one would share in prosperity alone, the other in adversity as well.

Then, stop your complaints on this subject, I beg of you: they are far from the heart of charitable love. You still may resent it, but I am at such a point of danger and despair for my life that I must take thought for the welfare of my soul and act to secure it while there is time. If you truly care for me, you will not object to this—no, I will go further: if you have any hope that God will show me mercy, you will want me to be freed from the troubles of this life when you see they are unbearable to me. Whoever frees me from this life, you can be sure, will rescue me from terrible suffering. No one can know what pains I will face hereafter, but what pains I will escape no one can doubt. The end of every wretched life is welcome, and those who truly feel compassion for the suffering of others and grieve when others grieve will want that suffering to end, even at some cost to themselves: if they truly care for those whom they see suffer, they will look to the others' interests, not their own. This is how it is with a mother whose child has long been ill: she wants his illness to end even if it means his death, because the illness itself is unendurable to her, and she can more easily bear to lose her child than to keep him with her to share her agony. And someone who takes pleasure in the presence of a friend would rather that the friend be happy, although absent, than unhappy and present, because he cannot bear to see suffering unrelieved. But as it is, even my unhappy presence is denied you. So, unless you are acting to secure something in your interest, I cannot not see why you want me to live on in this abject misery rather than to die in relative happiness. If it is to 23 Abelard's reference to this as the "ﬁrst letter" indicates either that there indeed had been no earlier letter from Heloise or that the compiler of the letter collection has harmonized at least some of its elements.

24 Rom. 12:15.

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gain some interest, though, that you want my suffering prolonged, you have proved yourself my enemy, not my friend. But if this is not how you would like to appear, then, as I said, you must stop these complaints.

I do approve of your rejection of praise, however, since it shows you are even worthier of praise. "The just is ﬁrst accuser of himself," it is written, and "He that humbleth himself shall be exalted."25 I only hope you take to heart what you have written. If you do, then yours is the true humility which will not vanish merely because of something I might say. I beg of you, though, take care that you are not looking for praise by seeming to avoid it or rejecting in your words what you long for in your heart. Jerome wrote to Eustochium about this, saying among other things:

We are led along by an evil in our nature. We listen happily to those who ﬂatter us, and though we may say we are not worthy and a coy little blush may come over our cheeks, still the soul within us is very glad to hear the praise.26

Virgil describes the same coyness in the nymph Galatea, who sought what she wanted by running away and stirred her lover even more by the pretense of refusing him, "Fleeing to the willows, wanting to be seen."27 That is, before she could hide, she wanted to be seen in the act of ﬂight, by which she both gained and yet seemed to reject the company of the young man in love with her. It is the same with the praise of men: so long as we seem to shun it, we only increase it, and when we affect a wish to hide so that no one can ﬁnd the good in us to praise, we lead our shameless ﬂatterers on to praise us even more because we then seem to deserve it even more.

Now, I am saying this because it often is the case and not because I suspect you of any coyness—about your humility I have no doubts—but I want you to refrain from this subject as well. Not everyone knows you as I do, and I would not want you to seem to be "chasing glory by running away," in Jerome's phrase.28 I know my praise will never puff you up but will only challenge you to 25 Prov. 18:17; Luke 18:14.

26 Epistulae 22.24.

27 Eclogues 3.65.

28 Cf. Epistulae 22.27.

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higher things; and if you strive to please me, as you say, you will embrace the things I will have praised. And my praise does not pay tribute to your piety in a way that can feed your pride: we should put no more stock in the approval of our friends than we put in the censure of our enemies.

I come now to the last remaining point—what I called your old, continual complaint, in which you dare lay charges against God for how we came to the religious life when in justice you ought to glorify his name. I had thought that your bitterness of heart at such a clear example of God's mercy had vanished long ago—as dangerous as it is to you, eating away at your body and soul, it is as sad and disturbing to me. If, as you claim, you strive to please me in all things, then to please me most—or at least in this one thing to keep from torturing me further—you will put this bitterness aside. You cannot please me with it or attain the state of blessedness at my side.

Could you bear it that I come to this without you when you say you would follow me even to Vulcan's ﬂames? Hold fast to your religious life at least in this, so that you and I will never be apart as I go

"striding off to God," as you believe29—and do it gladly, my dear sister, for where we must come is blessed, and our company should be as gracious as it will be full of joy. Remember what you have said, recall what you have written about the way I turned to God, that although he seemed my enemy, he proved my friend.30 Be reconciled to his will at least in this, for it has been so thoroughly to my good—no, to my good and to yours, if you can admit the claims of reason in your grief. Do not torment yourself that you have been the cause of this great good, or doubt that God created you for this.31

And do not grieve over what I may have suffered, except when the blessings that ﬂow from the suffering of the martyrs and the death of our Lord himself will also make you sad. Would you ﬁnd it any less offensive or any easier to bear if what happened to me had happened in accord with perfect justice? Surely if this had been the case, it would redound more to my discredit and more to my enemies' honor, for the justice of their act would bring them praise and my guilt would bring me scorn, and no one then would blame what they had done or be moved by compassion for me.

29 Cf. the First Letter, p. 60.

30 Cf. the Third Letter, p. 80.

31 Cf. the Third Letter, p. 76.

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Nonetheless, it may relieve the bitterness of your grief if I demonstrate to you that what happened to us was both in accord with justice and to our advantage as well,32 and that God acted more properly against us after our marriage than he had done before.

After you and I were married and you were living with the nuns at Argenteuil, you know how I came to visit you one day and what my lust then did with you even within the walls of the refectory itself, when there was nowhere else for us to go. You know how shamelessly we acted in that holy place, consecrated to the Blessed Virgin.

Now even if there were no other sins, that one alone deserves a heavy retribution. But do I need to remind you of those shameful and polluting acts that came before our marriage? Or of my treachery toward your uncle, whom I so foully deceived about you even while I kept living in his house? Could anyone think that, when I had broken faith, his broken faith toward me was in any way unjust? Do you imagine that the momentary pain I suffered from my wound is enough to atone for all these sins? Or rather, that all the good that I derived from it is really proper payment for the wrongs that I have done? What wound do you suppose would be enough to satisfy God's vengeance for the pollution of his mother's precinct? Unless I am badly in error, it was not so much that soulpreserving wound that became my punishment as it is all these that I suffer every day without an end.

[And on the journey to Brittany when you were pregnant, you know how you disguised yourself in the habit of a nun and with that pretense mocked the religious calling that now is yours. Consider then how appropriately God's justice—or rather, it was God's grace—dragged you against your will to the calling you were not afraid to mock, wanting you to atone for that desecration while wearing the same habit you once profaned, to answer the lie with the truth of the event and correct the falsehood of your pretense.]33 32 Abelard is adapting the familiar double-pronged appeal of deliberative rhetoric, that a proposed course of action is (or is not) both ethical and advantageous.

33 This short paragraph, which interrupts the steady rhetorical crescendo and anticipates the shift accomplished in the following paragraph from God's justice to his grace, is most likely a later addition to the text. If taken at its face value, it could have been added only by someone in a position at least to pretend to know the facts, although it is unlikely to have been Heloise, who never exhibits this kind of religious sensibility in her own writings. But the story may also derive from a garbled version of Abelard's dressing Heloise "in the garments of monastic life" when he ﬁrst brought her to Argenteuil, as described in the Calamities.

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But if you look beyond God's justice to see the advantages we have gained, you can no longer call what he did for us his justice, but only properly his grace. Then, look, my dearest, look and see how the nets of God's mercy have ﬁshed us up from the depths of that dangerous sea, and how the Lord has drawn our shipwrecked souls safely from the whirlpool of Charybdis—yes, even despite our will—so that each of us may break out in that cry, "The Lord taketh thought for me!"34 Think and think again about the dangers we were in and how we found our rescue in the Lord. And always with the deepest gratitude proclaim what great things he hath done for our soul.35 Use the force of our example to console the unrighteous who despair of the goodness of God: let all of them know what may be done for suppliants in prayer, when such blessings come to sinners against their will. Ponder the high purpose of God's compassion—with what mercy he turned his judgment to our correction, with what wisdom he used these evils for our good, with what piety he then threw down all our impiety, and with a stroke of justice to one part of my body he began to work the healing of two souls.

Measure our danger against the manner of our deliverance. Measure our illness against its cure. Examine the cause, what our actions deserve; stand in awe of the effect, which is his mercy.

You know to what vile corruption my lust enslaved our bodies, how no reverence for God or any self-respect could keep me from wallowing in ﬁlth even on the days of the Passion of our Lord or on any holy day, however sacred—but when you resisted and you argued and you struggled to the limits of your strength, I would force you to my will with greater strength. I was welded to you by desire so hot that I set those low and degenerate pleasures—which we are at a loss even to name—ahead of both God and myself. His mercy had no other way, it seemed, but to sever me entirely from those pleasures and set them forever beyond my reach. And so with perfect justice and with perfect clemency—the treachery of your uncle not withstanding—I was lessened in that part of my body where lust had its dominion and desire its root cause, to become a greater man in many ways. What justice that those organs should lament all they had done to us and expiate in pain when they had sinned in taking pleasure, cutting me off from the loathsome ﬁlth in 34 Ps. 39:18. Charybdis is the whirlpool from which Ulysses escaped; cf. also its use as an image of sensuality in the Calamities.

35 Cf. Ps. 66:16.

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which I had been sunk to leave me circumcised in mind as well as body.36 It then would make me only the more ﬁt to approach the altar of God with no stain of pollution in my ﬂesh to call me back again. What mercy, too, that God should have me suffer only in that organ whose loss would advance the salvation of my soul but not disﬁgure my body or debar me from any exercise of the Ofﬁces.37

On the contrary, it only made me readier in all the things that can be done in decency and honor, once I was free of the yoke of that desire.

I was purged, not deprived, of those organs—so vile they are called the parts of shame for what they do and have no proper name of their own—and the grace of God did nothing else but rid me of corruption to leave me puriﬁed and clean. Many of the wise, in fact, have longed for this same purity, even to the point of laying hands upon themselves to be rid of the shame of desire. Saint Paul, we read, repeatedly begged the Lord to remove this thorn in his ﬂesh, though his prayers were never answered.38 But there is also the example of Origen, the great Christian philosopher, who was unafraid to do violence to himself to extinguish all trace of the ﬁre within him39—as though he read too literally what is written about those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven, and believed that they fulﬁlled the Lord's command to pluck out and cast away any organ that is our undoing; as though he understood Isaiah's prophecy not as the veiled mystery it is but as simple fact declaring the Lord's special love for eunuchs:

If they shall keep my Sabbaths and shall choose the things that please me . . . , I will give to them in my house and within my walls a place and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give them an everlasting name which shall never perish.40

36 Cf. Rom. 2:25–29.

37 Despite Abelard's anxiety in the Calamities about biblical prohibitions (in the Calamities), canon law does not preclude eunuchs from the priesthood, except in cases of self-mutilation. See Muckle 1954, 89 n. 94.

38 See 2 Cor. 12:8, in which Paul reports that he offered this prayer three times.

Abelard understands Paul's "thorn in the ﬂesh" to mean sexual desire.

39 See Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae 6.7.

40 Cf. Matt. 19:12, 18:8–9; Isa. 56:4–5.

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But Origen deserves our blame for seeking an answer for blame in the punishment of his body—an act of zeal for God, no doubt, but not in accord with knowledge41—becoming guilty of homicide through his self-mutilation. For surely it was at the suggestion of the devil, or else by some most serious mistake, that he did to himself what, through the mercy of God, was done to me by others. I escaped that blame, I did not incur it. And I deserve death, yet I live.

I am called, I refuse, I persist in my wrongs and am dragged to God's forgiveness against my will. And yet the Apostle prayed and was not heard; and yet he persisted in prayer and did not prevail.

Yes, truly the Lord taketh thought for me: I will go and proclaim what great things he hath done for my soul.42

And you come, too, my inseparable companion, and join me in this common act of thanks, my partner in God's grace as you once were my partner in our sins. Indeed God is thinking of your salvation as well—no, he is thinking of your salvation most of all, having marked you as his own with a sacred token of his name when he named you Heloise, that is to say, Of God, from the name that he himself bears, Heloim.43 In his merciful plan he provided for the two of us in one when the devil was contriving one destruction for us both. It was only a short time before that event took place that he joined us together in the bond of holy matrimony when I wanted to keep you forever for myself, beloved beyond measure.

But God himself prepared this means to bring us both to him; for if you had not already been bound to me in marriage, you easily would have clung to the world after I had withdrawn from it, succumbing to the pressures of your family or yielding to the pleasures of the ﬂesh.44

Then, see how the Lord hath taken thought for us, as if he would keep us for some great use and be grieved if the great sums of learning he had lent us were not dedicated to the glory of his name. Or perhaps he was afraid for his poor servant, so lacking in the power of self-restraint, for "women make even the wise fall away," as we

41 Cf. Rom. 10:2.

42 Ps. 39:18, 66:16.

43 There is no basis other than the pun for connecting Heloise's name to the Hebrew

Elohim or for taking its meaning as Abelard does here.

44 Abelard's account here of his motives for marriage differs from the one he gives in his Calamities, but he may be revealing a signiﬁcant reason for his insistence that Heloise take the veil, that is, his fear that she might remarry.

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know happened to Solomon, the wisest man of all.45 But the sum of your wisdom earns the Lord interest every day in the form of the daughters in the spirit you have borne him—while I remain forever barren, laboring without issue among these sons of perdition. What a waste it would be, what a hateful sorry loss if you spent your life amid the pleasures of the ﬂesh just to bear a few children in sorrow to the world,46 when now you can give birth to a multitude of offspring in joy and exultation to heaven. You would not then transcend the state of women, as you now surpass all men and have turned the curse of Eve into the blessing of Mary. What a sad misuse of your sacred hands, which now turn the pages of Holy Writ, to be slaves to the sordid business of women's work. God himself saw ﬁt to lift us from that mire, from that ﬁlthy sink of pleasure, and to bring us to himself—even if he used some force, as he once struck

Paul at the hour of his conversion.47 [And perhaps by our example he could deter other learned men from their presumption.]48

But none of this should trouble you, my sister, or move you to resentment of our Father, who has only corrected us as a father should. Remember what is written: "Whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth, and he scourgeth every son whom he receiveth," and "He that spareth the rod hateth his son." This is but a temporary punishment, not eternal, our purgation, not our damnation. And take some comfort in the words of the prophet that the Lord will not judge twice the same offense: "There shall not rise a double afﬂiction."

Remember, too, what the Lord himself has said, his greatest and his highest exhortation: "In your patience you shall possess your souls." Think also of the words of Solomon: "The patient man is better than the valiant, and he that ruleth his spirit better than he that taketh cities."49

Instead, you should be troubled and moved to tears by God's only-begotten Son, who for your sake and the sake of all mankind was taken up by the wickedest of men, led off and scourged, blindfolded, mocked and beaten, spat upon and crowned with thorns, and ﬁnally, in what was then the basest form of punishment, hung

45 Ecclus. 19:2; see 3 Kings 11:1 ff. for Solomon's fall.

46 Cf. Gen. 4:16.

47 See Acts 26:14.

48 A moralistic tag which, interrupting the ﬂow of argument through to the next paragraph, is most likely a later interpolation.

49 Heb. 12:6; Prov. 13:24; Nah. 1:9; Luke 21:19; Prov. 16:32.

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on a cross between two thieves to die there in such appalling agony.

He is your true Bridegroom, my sister, and the Bridegroom of all the Church. Keep him always before your eyes, hold him always in your mind. See how he goes to be cruciﬁed for you, see how he carries his cross. Be present there yourself among the "multitude of people and of women who bewailed and lamented him," as Luke has said. And then he turned to the women in his kindness, and in mercy he foretold the destruction that would come as vengeance for his death and how they might escape it if they were wise. "Daughters of Jerusalem," he said, weep not over me, but weep for yourselves and your children. For behold, the days shall come wherein they will say,

"Blessed are the barren and the wombs that have not borne and the paps that have not given suck." Then they shall begin to say to the mountains, "Fall upon us," and to the hills, "Cover us." For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?50

Pity him who suffered willingly to redeem you. Save your remorse for his death upon the cross. In your mind be ever present at his sepulcher, mourning and lamenting with the women who "sat at the tomb, weeping and lamenting the Lord."51 Prepare the oils for his burial—but let them be far better oils, the oils of the spirit, which he requires, not the oils of the body, which he did not take. Let all of your remorse and your devotion be for this, as he himself told the faithful when he spoke through Jeremiah, "All ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow";52 that is to say, "When I in my innocence alone must pay the price for the sins of others, for whom else should you grieve?" Yes, he is the way out of exile for the faithful, the way to their home country. And his is the cross from which he calls out to us, and which he has made a ladder for our use. Here, the only-begotten Son of God died for your sake, "offered because it was his will."53

Pity him in your grief, grieve for him in your pity. Fulﬁll the prophecy Zachariah spoke about devoted souls: "And they shall

50 Luke 23:27, 28–31.

51 From the antiphon to the Benedictus in the Roman Breviary for Holy Saturday.

52 Lam. 1:12.

53 Isa. 53:7.

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mourn for him as for an only son, and they shall grieve for him as for the death of the ﬁrstborn."54 See, my sister, how those who love the King mourn the death of his ﬁrst and only Son. See how the household mourns, how all the court is consumed with grief. And when you come to the widowed bride of God's only-begotten Son, you will not be able to bear her wails of sorrow. These should be your wails, my sister, these your cries of grief, for you are joined in marriage to this Bridegroom. Your brideprice was not his property but himself, for he bought you and redeemed you with his blood.

See what claim he has on you, look what price he has set on your worth. When Paul considered how little he was worth the price paid out for him and the debt he owed such grace in return, he said,

"God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world is cruciﬁed to me, and I to the world."55 But you are more than the heavens, you are more than the world, whose price was the Creator of the world. What did he see in you, I ask, when he himself lacked nothing, that he would buy you with the agony of his death? What does he seek in you except yourself? He is a true friend who wants nothing of what you own, but you yourself,56 a true friend who, when coming to his death for your sake, could say, "Greater love than this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his friends."57

It was he who truly loved you—I did not. My love, which brought us both to sin, was lust, which is not worthy of the name of love. I glutted my wretched pleasures in you, and that was all I loved. You say I suffered for you, and perhaps that may be true; but more, I suffered through you and unwillingly at that, and not from love of you but from my own compulsion, and then not for your good but for your grief. He suffered for you willingly to bring you your salvation. His suffering heals all sickness and puts an end to suffering. To him, I beg of you, and not to me do you owe all your devotion, your compassion, your remorse. Lament the savage injustice worked against his innocence, not the just vengeance brought to bear on me—or what I must call instead, that most extraordinary grace that has come upon us both. You are unjust if you do not love his justice, and most unjust if you knowingly stand

54 Zac. 12:10.

55 Gal. 6:14.

56 Cf. the First Letter, p. 55.

57 John 15:3.

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against the will, indeed against the grace, of God. Weep for your Savior, not for your seducer, for your Redeemer, not for the man who used you as his whore. Weep for the Lord who died for you, not his servant who is still living, or I should say, who only now has been truly freed from death. And, I beg of you, beware that the words that Pompey spoke to Cornelia in her grief not be said of you, and to your shame:

After the battle, Pompey is alive.

His fortune, though, is fallen. It is for that You shed your tears and that which you have loved.58

Yes, remember this and blush, unless you really would commend our former, foul ways.

Accept it then, my sister, I beg of you. Accept with patience what has come upon us through the mercy of God. It is the rod of our

Father that strikes us, not the sword of our oppressor, and a father strikes to correct that an enemy not strike to kill. With his wound he forestalls death, he does not bring it. He wields the knife to cut out the disease. He wounds the body and heals the soul. He ought to have killed and he gives life. He cuts away the unclean to leave only the clean, and he punishes once, not to punish forever. One of us endures his wound that both may be spared death. One alone was punished while the two of us were at fault. This too was through God's mercy—his indulgence of the weakness of your nature—and in its own way just, for inasmuch as you are by nature weaker in your sex and yet stronger in your self-restraint, you were not liable to further penalty.59

For this I thank the Lord, that he exempted you from punishment at the time and so preserved you for a crown. When I myself was seething with the lust that would consume me, he chilled me once and for all with what I suffered in my body, and so he kept me from my ruin. But what you suffer in your heart from all the longing of the ﬂesh, which certainly is far greater for your youth, he left intact and kept you then in readiness for your crown. I know it wearies you to hear it and you have told me not to say it, but still the truth is plain—where there is struggle, there is also a crown: "No one is

58 Lucan, Pharsalia 8.84–85. With this Abelard responds to Heloise's invocation of Cornelia as he had cited it in the Calamities.

59 Cf. the Third Letter, p. 76.

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crowned who does not strive."60 For me there is no crown, for there is no cause for strife, no grounds for struggle when the thorn of desire is gone.

Yes, I will win no crown, but even so, I still must think it something if I am spared some pain, if through that single momentary pain I may perhaps be pardoned many pains that last forever. It is written about the men of this most miserable life, "The beasts have rotted in their dung."61 But I do not complain that my merit is diminished so long as I can trust that yours is growing greater. For we are one in Christ, one ﬂesh through the law of marriage: whatever is yours must then be mine as well. And Christ is yours because you are his bride, and as I said, I am now your servant who was once your lord, but a servant joined with you in spiritual love, not bound over in obsequious fear. I place myself under your protection, then, fully trusting that through your prayers for me I yet may gain what I cannot gain alone. I do this now and now above all, when the dangers I face and my own deep agitation press on me every moment and give me no time to live, much less to pray. They will not let me follow the example of the eunuch of Ethiopia, that most blessed and powerful man who had charge over all the queen's treasure and had come from so far to worship in Jerusalem.62 For when he was returning home, an angel sent

Saint Philip to convert him to the faith since, though he was a rich man and a pagan, his prayers and constant reading of our scriptures had made him worthy. And even on his journey the goodness of God would not have him distracted from his reading, but instead it came to pass by God's great will that a passage of scripture was open before him, which gave the apostle the means for his conversion.

Now nothing must impede my request or delay its fulﬁllment, so I have been quick to compose a prayer for you to offer to the Lord on behalf of us both. I send it to you now:

God, who at the beginning of the human race sanctiﬁed the sacrament of marriage, 60 2 Tim. 2:5; and see the Third Letter, p. 83.

61 Joel 1:17.

62 See Acts 8:27 ff.

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creating woman from the rib of man; who, with your birth from a woman given in marriage and again with the ﬁrst of your miracles,63 raised up the bond of marriage to honors without measure; and who granted relief as it has pleased you for my weakness and my lack of self-restraint— do not despise the prayers of your poor handmaid, which I pour out to you in the sight of your majesty for my own transgressions and those of someone dear to me.

O most beneﬁcent Lord, indeed Beneﬁcence itself, forgive our sins, so many and so great.

May your mercy without measure test the multitude of our faults.

Punish the guilty now, I beg of you, that you may spare us in the future.

Punish us for a time and do not punish us forever.

Take up against your servants the rod of correction, not the sword of wrath.

Afﬂict our ﬂesh that you may preserve our souls.

Come to cleanse our sins, not to avenge them.

Be beneﬁcent more than just, our merciful Father more than our stern Lord.

Prove us, Lord, and test us, as the prophet asked for testing of himself:64

Examine my strength and lighten the burden of my temptations according to what it will bear.

As Saint Paul said to the faithful, "God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with temptation he will make release, that you may be able to bear it."65

63 That is, at the wedding feast at Cana, John 2:1–11.

64 Cf. Ps. 25:2: "Prove me, Lord, and test me: burn my heart and mind."

65 1 Cor. 10:13.

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You have joined us together, O Lord, and you have put us asunder when it has pleased you and how it has pleased you.

What you once began in mercy now complete in perfect mercy, and those whom you have sundered in the world for a time join together with you in heaven for all time.

For you are our hope and our portion, our comfort and our expectation, our Lord who are blessed forever.

Amen.

Now, bride of Christ, farewell in Christ; in Christ may you live and be well.

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HELOISE TO ABELARD

To him who is hers in species From her who is his as particular.1

Since there must never be the slightest cause for you to ﬁnd fault with my obedience, a bridle has been set upon my words, although my grief itself is still untamed.

Your order now is that I moderate myself and refrain at least from writing what is not difﬁcult but impossible to guard against in speech.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, which is more apt to command us than to obey.

And so when the heart's passions rouse us, no one can contain their sudden surge of pressure and keep them then from having their effects.

1 Suo specialiter, sua singulariter. Heloise is using the terminology of formal dialectic, perhaps responding to Abelard's formal language in the Fourth Letter. The phrase presents difﬁculties not only because of its clipped form. The word specialiter, "in species," may have a limiting sense when the reference point is the larger category of genus—compare English "especially" or "speciﬁcally" to "generally" or "generically." Here, however, it is opposed to the more limiting singulariter, "as particular,"

"as individual," "singularly," or "uniquely," and therefore points to species as the universal that applies to particulars or individuals. A single manuscript presents the variant reading Domino specialiter, which should be understood as "To her lord in species."

In Abelard's metaphysics there is no thing except for particulars, which are unique and distinct from all else, and Heloise's use of the terms of dialectic here may be an apt way of indicating that, even if Abelard should insist on maintaining an abstract or generic posture toward her, her stance toward him would remain concrete and personal.

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No, they will easily burst out and still more easily spill over into words, which are the ready symbols of the motions of the heart:2 as it is written, "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth doth speak."3

I therefore will restrain my hand from writing what I cannot keep my tongue from saying aloud.

If only the heart that grieves were as ready to obey as the hand that writes.

And yet you have it in your power to palliate my grief to some extent, even if you cannot remove it all.

For as one nail drives out another,4 so a new thought drives out an old, and the heart, which had been set in one direction, is forced to lay aside or to abandon its memories of what once was.

And the more this thought—of anything at all— occupies the heart and distracts it from other things, the more we think it an honorable thought, and the new direction in which we turn our hearts then seems more necessary and compelling.

So then— All of us, the handmaidens of Christ and your daughters in Christ, now approach you as our father with two requests.5 We see them

2 An understanding of words that is common in Latin treatises on dialectic, deriving ultimately from Aristotle, De Interpretatione 1. Cf. Heloise's description of her involuntary utterances in the Third Letter, p. 80.

3 Matt. 12:34.

4 Cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.35.75, and Jerome, Epistulae 125.14.

5 The inclusive plural "all of us" should be taken seriously. What follows from this point in the letter seems an orchestrated fugue of different voices developing a set of different themes connected to the central question of women's religious life: the inapplicability of the Benedictine Rule to women; the historical contingency of the Benedictine and similar Rules; the distinction between formal compliance and the inward disposition seen as proper to a Christian; the general importance of moderation and discretion in the Rule, and some speciﬁc areas in which accommodation for women's nature should be made; the need for better instruction in whatever Rule may be

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both as necessary to us. One is that you teach us how the order of nuns began and tell us of the origin and foundation of our calling.

The other is that you institute a rule for us to follow, a written directive suitable for women, detailing in full the condition and habit of our own way of life. This has not been done by any of the Fathers, and because of this failure, it now is the case that both men and women are received into monasteries to profess the same rule, and the same yoke of monastic regulation is laid upon the stronger and the weaker sex alike.

At present, throughout the Latin Church women profess the Rule of Saint Benedict on the same basis as men. But as this rule was written only for men, its instructions can be followed only by men, whether they apply to subordinates or superiors in our orders. For example, the regulations about cowls, scapulars, and breeches— what can they have to do with women?6 Or the ones about wearing tunics and woolen clothing next to the skin, when the monthly purgation of excess humors makes this something women must avoid?

Then, what does it imply for a convent of women that the abbot himself is required to read the lesson from the Gospel before proceeding to the hymn?7 And what about the abbot's table, where he is required to dine with pilgrims and guests?8 Will either be suitable for our religious practice—that an abbess never offer hospitality to men, or that she sit and take her meals with her male guests? On the one hand, the situation of women and men interacting in easy proximity is hazardous for the soul, but certainly most so at table, where gluttony and drunkenness are the rule and wine is consumed for adopted; and the need for a convent's material support. Some of the voices appear to have been introduced at a later date, as certain comments and sections seem to derive from Abelard's reply in the Seventh Letter and from other subsequent texts. In all, the main part of the letter, like The Questions of Heloise, has the air of a collective research project, which Heloise could be imagined to have set for the nuns of the Paraclete to help educate them more fully in the principles and particulars of their religious practice and which may well have continued for some time. The translation makes no attempt to distinguish the separate voices; however, passages that appear most plainly to have been composed at a later date are enclosed in brackets.

6 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 55.

7 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 11. As indicated at the end of the letter when the issue brieﬂy returns, the difﬁculty is that the Gospel readings should be conducted by a priest or a deacon and are scheduled for the Night Ofﬁce, a time when inviting a man into the convent is especially unsuitable.

8 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 56.

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pleasure ["wherein is lechery"].9 "It is hard to preserve your modesty at a feast," Saint Jerome warned a mother and her daughter,10 and Ovid, the learned poet of seduction, described exactly the kind of opportunities a banquet affords, in the book he entitled The Art of Love:

When wine soaks Cupid's wings, he cannot ﬂy But sits there sluggish, rooted to the spot. . . .

A time for laughter, when even a poor man Unpuckers his brow, all care and sorrow gone. . . .

That's when girls make off with young men's souls; Mixing love and wine adds fuel to the ﬁre.11

But on the other hand, if only the women guests are invited to table, is there not some risk in that, too? There is nothing that so leads a woman astray as feminine ﬁnery, and a woman will spread her corruption of mind most easily to another woman—which is why Jerome so vigorously urged women in religious orders to avoid contact with women of the world.12 Also, if we do invite only women and exclude all men from our hospitality, will that not seriously offend the men on whose kind services all women's convents must depend, especially if we seem to give so little, or nothing at all, to the men from whom we receive so much? If in the end, however, it turns out to be impossible for us to observe the tenor of the Rule in full, then, I'm afraid, we risk the condemnation of the apostle James:

"Whoever shall keep the whole law but offend in one point is become guilty of all."13 [That is to say, if someone fulﬁlls many parts of the law but does not fulﬁll them all, he still is guilty in the one part he has left unfulﬁlled: unless he has fulﬁlled all parts, because of this one part he becomes a transgressor of the whole. As James goes on to say:

For he that said, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," also said, "Thou shalt not kill. Now if thou do not commit adultery, but thou shalt kill, thou art a transgressor of the law.

9 A tag from Eph. 5:18, most likely an interpolation imported from Abelard's reply in the Seventh Letter, where it is also cited.

10 Epistulae 117.6.

11 Ars Amatoria 1.233–34, 239–40, 243–44.

12 Cf. Epistulae 22.16.

13 Jas. 2:10.

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In other words, someone becomes guilty by transgressing any one precept of the law, because the Lord who set one precept also set the other, and whatever precept of the law is violated will show disdain for God, who made the law not in one but in all of its requirements.]14

But I do not want to dwell on those parts of the Rule which we cannot observe in full, or cannot without some risk; instead, here are some other points. Where in the world has it ever been the practice for a convent of nuns to work the harvest?15 Or to test the constancy of the women we accept through the probation of just a single year? Or to instruct them with just three readings of the Rule, as the Rule itself prescribes?16 What can be more foolish than entering on a path that is both unknown and as yet unexplained? Is there any more presumptuous act than committing yourself to a way of life you do not know or taking vows you have no capacity to fulﬁll? If discretion is the mother of all virtues and reason the mediator of all good, can something be a virtue or a good which seems so at odds with discretion and with reason? Virtues that exceed the mean and measure should be counted among the vices, Jerome says.17 Where, then, is the discretion or the reason in loading burdens on the backs of those whose strength has not ﬁrst been tested to make sure that the tasks assigned to human beings are in line with their natural constitutions? Would anyone give a donkey the same load as an elephant? Or the young or very old the same loads as full adults? Can the frail bear as much as the hardy, or the sickly as much as the well? Can women, who are the weaker sex, bear as much as men, who are the stronger? [Saint Gregory addressed this issue in Chapter 24 of his Pastoral, where he distinguished between women and men regarding both admonition and instruction:

Men should be admonished in one way and women in another, in that heavy burdens should be placed on men and lighter ones on women. Let men take up the greater tasks, but let women be corrected gently with the light ones.]18

14 This redundant section is a close paraphrase of Abelard's answer to the second of Heloise's Questions, which postdates this letter. Evidently, it is a later interpolation, imported from that source.

15 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 48.

16 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 58.

17 Cf. Epistulae 130.11.

18 Regulae Pastoralis Liber 3.1. The comment apparently derives from Abelard's reply in the Seventh Letter.

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The men who wrote the rules for monks were entirely silent about women, but they also laid down regulations which they knew did not suit women in the slightest. Bull and heifer were not to ﬁt their necks to the same yoke of the Rule: those whom nature had not created equal must not have equal work. Saint Benedict himself was consistently aware of the importance of careful distinctions, steeped as he was in the spirit of all things just. In fact, he tempered everything in the Rule to suit the character of the person involved and the season of the year, and in one passage concluded,

"Let all things be done in moderation."19 Beginning with the abbot himself, he instructed him to preside over his subordinates

"according to the character and understanding of each, adjusting and adapting himself to all in such a way that he may not only suffer no loss in his ﬂock, but may even rejoice in its increase,"20 and later continued:

Let him always keep his own frailty before his eyes and remember not to "break the bruised reed. . . ." Let him be discreet and moderate, bearing in mind the discretion of Jacob, who said, "If I should cause my ﬂocks to be overdriven, in one day they all will die." Following this and other examples of discretion, the mother of virtues, he should temper all things in a way that the strong may have something to strive for and the weak may not be discouraged.21

All of the allowances he made—for the young, the old, and the inﬁrm in general; for feeding the lector and the weekly kitchen workers before the other monks; and for the provision of different kinds and amounts of food to meet the different needs of different men—were based on moderation, and all of them were carefully written down.22 He even relaxed the statutory periods of fast in accord with the season of the year and the amount of labor to be done, as natural weakness would require.23

19 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 48.

20 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 2.

21 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 64. Internal quotations are from Isa. 42:3 and Gen. 33:13.

22 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapters 34–41.

23 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 48.

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Now, if this is the case, what would he do, Saint Benedict, who tempered everything to suit the character of the person involved and the season of the year in such a way as to enable everyone to follow the regulations without complaining24—what provision would he make for women if he were to institute a rule for them, as he did for men? If he found himself compelled to ease the rigor of his rule in certain parts to accommodate the weakness of the young, the old, and the inﬁrm, how would he accommodate the fragility of our sex, whose natural lack of strength is obvious?

You will need, then, to consider how far it is from reason and discretion to insist that women follow the same rule as men, that the weak bear as much as the strong. It seems to me that we do well enough in our weakness if we equal the leaders of the Church and other clerics in Holy Orders in the virtues of abstinence and selfrestraint: "Everyone shall be perfect," the Lord has said, "if he be as his master."25 If we could equal even the most devout among the laity, I think it would be taken as no small thing, for what seems of little moment in the strong is something we all admire in the weak:26 "Power is made perfect by weakness," the Apostle says.27

And of course, no one should disparage the devout among the laity, men like Abraham, David, and Job, simply because they were married. As Chrysostom reminds us:

There are many things . . . a man can do to charm that beast, things such as work, reading, and keeping vigils. "But what are they to us, who are not monks?" That is not a question for me but rather for Paul. "Keep vigil in patience and prayer," he said, and "Make not provision for the ﬂesh in its concupiscences." He was not writing only for monks but for all men. A layman should have no more latitude than a monk—except that he may lie with his wife: he has dispensation for that, but for nothing else—and should act in every other way as a monk acts. And Christ did not address the Beatitudes only to monks. . . . For if he had and if laymen in fact cannot obey them, . . . it will mean the destruction of the world, for then Christ has conﬁned virtue within 24 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 39.

25 Luke 6:40.

26 Cf. Gregory, Regulae Pastoralis Liber 3.1, quoted in the Seventh Letter.

27 2 Cor. 12:9.

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very narrow limits. If marriage by itself so hinders us, how can it be called honorable?28

The clear inference is that whoever adds the virtue of selfrestraint to the precepts laid down in the Gospel will attain monastic perfection. I only wish our own religious practice reached the heights where it simply fulﬁlled the Gospel—no need to surpass it, nor for us to try to be anything more than Christians. So, unless I am mistaken, this is why the Fathers decided not to set down a general rule for us, as they did for men, a rule which then would be like some new law, burdening our weakness with a multitude of vows: they obeyed Saint Paul, who said, "The law worketh wrath, for where there is no law, neither is there transgression," and "The law entered in that sin might abound." But even he, that great preacher of self-restraint, understood our weakness and urged younger widows to remarry: "I would have it, therefore, that the younger should marry, bear children, be mistresses of families, and give no occasion to the adversary to speak evil."29 And Saint Jerome agreed, telling

Eustochium about the ill-considered vows some women take:

But if, because of some other faults, even those who are virgins are not saved, what will happen to those who have prostituted the body of Christ and turned the temple of the Holy Spirit into a brothel? . . . Better for a person to have married and to have walked on level ground than to strain for the heights and plunge into the depths of hell.30

Saint Augustine, too, wrote of women's thoughtlessness in entering orders, in the book he addressed to Juliana on a widow's self-restraint:

A woman who has not begun on this path should think again; a woman who has begun should persevere. No opening should be given to the devil, and no offering taken from Christ.31

28 Homiliae in Epistulam ad Hebraeos 7.4, cited in the sixth-century Latin translation of Mutianus, not in the original Greek. Internal quotations are from Eph. 6:18 and Rom.

13:14.

29 Rom. 4:15 and 5:20; 1 Tim. 5:14.

30 Epistulae 22.6.

31 De Bono Viduitatis 9.13.

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Accordingly, Church regulations do not allow women to be ordained as deaconesses before the age of forty, and then only after careful probation, while men may become deacons at age twenty— it is another recognition of our weakness.

There are also those who call themselves the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine.32 They too live in monasteries, claim to follow a rule of sorts, and consider themselves in no way inferior to monks— and yet we see they are permitted to eat meat and wear linen clothing. Now, if we in our weakness could match their virtue, no one would see that as trivial at all. But any allowance made for us in food or drink would only need to be minor and could be made without much risk, since we are protected by a greater natural power of sobriety. Women, it is recognized, can be maintained at less cost and with less nourishment than men, and medical science indicates that we are also less easily intoxicated. As Macrobius writes in Book 7 of the Saturnalia:

Aristotle says that old men are often drunk, but women very rarely. . . . The female body is extremely moist—witness the lightness and clarity of a woman's skin and, especially, the regular purgation of her excess humors. So, when wine has been swallowed and incorporated into this great general moisture, it loses its strength . . . and does not easily strike the seat of the brain, once its force has been dissipated.

And again:

The female body, designed as it is for frequent purgation, is pierced with several holes, so that channels and passageways are open for the humors to drain out. Through these holes the fumes of wine quickly evaporate. In old men, on the other hand, the body is quite dry, as is indicated by the roughness and dullness of the skin.33

So allowances made for us in food and drink are more appropriate to our weakness and our nature and can be made without much risk, since women are less prone to gluttony and drunkenness, as we require less food and are protected by the constitution of our bodies.

32 See p. 3, n. 5.

33 Saturnalia 7.6.16–17.

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Now, it should be enough in our weakness—and may even be thought a great thing—if, living in poverty and self-restraint and occupied with our duties to God, we could equal the leaders of the Church or devout laymen in our own mode of life, or match the socalled canons regular, who pledge themselves to follow the apostles' way. But in the end, it shows considerable foresight if those who bind themselves to God actually vow less than they perform, in order that there may always be something they can add over and above what they are already bound to do, something of their own accord. The Lord said, "When you shall have done all those things that are commanded you, say, 'We are unproﬁtable servants; we have done that which we ought to do'"—in other words, "We are unproﬁtable, unworthy, and of no account if we rest content with what we ought to do, adding nothing of our own accord"—and he promised in a parable elsewhere, "Whatsoever thou shalt spend over and above, I, at my return, will repay thee."34

If those who rush blindly into their religious vows—and there are many of them in these times—were to watch more carefully what they were doing, consider beforehand the calling they professed, and actually study the import of the Rule, they would offend less through their ignorance and sin less through their neglect. But as it is, nearly everyone alike comes running to monastic life with little thought at all, and once received in disorder, they proceed to live in disorder, and, as easily as they profess a rule they do not know, will ignore the same rule, substituting customs they prefer for existing law. We must be careful, then, to avoid burdening woman with the load we see causing nearly every man to stagger and collapse. The world has now grown old, we see, and human beings, along with all the other creatures of the world, have lost the ancient vigor of their nature. "The love not of many but nearly of all has grown cold," to adapt a phrase of the Lord's.35 In accord with people's character, then, it is necessary to change, or at least to temper, the Rule that once was written for people to follow.

Saint Benedict, in fact—consistently aware of the importance of careful distinctions—admits that he has already tempered the rigor of monastic regulations in such a way that, in comparison with 34 Luke 17:10, 10:35.

35 Cf. Matt. 24:12.

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earlier systems, his Rule is little more than a guide to upright living and the ﬁrst step in the religious life:

I have written this Rule that we may show in its observance that we have reached a degree of upright living and the rudiments of the religious life. For the one, though, who would hasten towards the perfection of this life there are the teachings of the holy Fathers, whose observance will lead him to the pinnacle of perfection. . . . And so, whoever you are who are hastening to your home in heaven, with Christ's help fulﬁll this minimal Rule, which is the ﬁrst step, and at length you will attain the greater heights of doctrine and virtue under the protection of God.36

For example, he explains, there was a time when the Fathers used to complete the entire Psalter in a single day. He adjusted the recitation of psalms, however, to the needs of the "lukewarm," spreading them over the course of a week, so that now monks are content with a smaller number of psalms, as secular clerics are.37

Or another example—What is most inimical to a monastery's devotions and repose? What most foments lechery and sows the seeds of discord, or destroys reason, which is the image of God in man and our chief distinction from beasts? I mean of course wine, the item of food which scripture condemns beyond any other.

Solomon, the wisest of the wise, writes in the Book of Proverbs:

"Wine is a luxurious thing, and drunkenness riotous: whosoever is delighted therein shall not be wise."38

[Who hath woe? Whose father hath woe? Who hath contentions?

Who falls into pits? Who hath wounds without cause? Who hath redness of eyes? Surely they that pass their time in wine and study to drink off their cups. Look not upon the wine when it is red, when its color shineth in the glass: it goeth in pleasantly, but in the end it will bite like a snake and will spread poison abroad like a basilisk. Thy eyes shall behold strange women and thy heart perverse things. And thou shalt be as one sleeping in the midst of the sea, and as a pilot fast asleep when the stern is lost.

36 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 73.

37 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 18.

38 Prov. 20:1.

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And thou shalt say, "They have beaten me, but I was not sensible of pain. They drew me, and I felt not. When shall I wake and ﬁnd wine again?]39 And:

Give not wine to kings, O Lamuel, because there is no secret where drunkenness reigneth, and they might drink and forget judgments and pervert the cause of the children of the poor.40

In Ecclesiasticus we read, "Wine and women make even the wise fall away,"41 and when Jerome wrote to Nepotianus about the cleric's way of life, he seemed outraged that the priests of the old law could surpass our own in their abstinence from drink:

Never smell of wine, or else the words of the philosopher will be spoken about you, "This is not offering a kiss, but proffering a cup." Saint Paul condemned drunken priests, as does the old law before him: "Whoever serve at the altar shall not taste wine or sikera." In Hebrew, sikera means anything that can intoxicate, whether it is made by fermentation, or pressing dates, or boiling down apples or honey into a rough, sweet drink, or brewing roasted grain in water. Whatever can intoxicate and disturb your mental balance—stay away from it as you would wine.42

So, here is something that kings must not touch, priests must avoid, and everyone agrees is thoroughly pernicious. And yet Saint

Benedict, that most spiritual of men, is obliged by the conditions of the present age to allow it to monks. "Yes," he says, we read that wine is not a thing for monks. But since the monks of our day can never be convinced of this, let us at 39 Prov. 23:29–35, cited also in the Seventh Letter, from which it seems to be imported here.

40 Prov. 31:4–5.

41 Ecclus. 19:2.

42 Epistulae 52.11. Cf. 1 Tim. 3:3 and Lev. 10:9, 10:35. The source of "the words of the philosopher" has not been identiﬁed.

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least agree to drink sparingly and not to the point where we are sated, because "wine makes even the wise fall away."43

[Unless I am mistaken, he had been reading this passage in the Lives of the Fathers: "Abbot Pastor was once told about a monk who did not drink wine, and he replied that wine is not a thing for monks." And just afterward:

Once there was a celebration of the Mass on Abbot Anthony's mountain, and they found a jar of wine left over. One of the elders ﬁlled a cup and brought it to Abbot Sisoi, who drank it off. Then he brought him a second cup, which he also took and drank off. But when he brought him a third cup, he refused it, saying, "Peace, brother, don't you know that this is Satan?"

And another story about Abbot Sisoi:

So his disciple Abraham asked him, "If it happens in church on the Sabbath or the Lord's Day, is it still too much to drink three cups?"

And the old man answered, "If it were not Satan, it would not be too much."]44 [Where, I ask, did God ever condemn meat or forbid it to monks?]45

See how he had to temper the Rule even in what he knew was pernicious and not for monks, because in his day he could not persuade them to abstain. In our day, too, I would call for a similar dispensation, that the same moderation apply in all matters that fall between good and evil and are therefore called indifferent. What persuasion cannot now enforce, our vows should not exact. Once all of 43 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 40. The manuscripts quote the sentence only through "can never be convinced of this," indicating the rest with "etc." The internal quotation is from Ecclus. 19:2.

44 This string of quotations from Vitae Patrum 5.4.31, 5.4.36, and 5.4.37 is found in the same form and with the same connecting phrases in the Seventh Letter, from which it seems to be imported here.

45 This short question most likely has its origin as a reader's query, possibly inspired by a discussion in the Seventh Letter. Its inclusion as part of the text has made it appear that the subject has shifted, and also that Benedict had come to the same sort of accommodation with eating meat as he had with drinking wine. He had not, however, as chapter 36 of the Rule makes clear—the use of meat may occasionally be granted to the sick who are very weak; otherwise, "let all abstain from meat as usual"—and the subject here continues to be wine.

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these indifferent things are permitted that can be done without offense, it will be enough to forbid the sins alone. In food and clothing both, whatever can be purchased most cheaply will serve, so long as our concern is always for what is necessary and never more than that. We should not give too much thought to what neither commends us to God nor prepares us for his kingdom, for they are only outward things, common to both the chosen of God and his rejected, to the righteous and to hypocrites alike.46

This, in fact, more than anything else, is what separates Christian from Jew, the distinction made between inward and outward works—especially since it is love alone that distinguishes the children of God from the children of the devil, the love Saint Paul calls the fulﬁllment of the law and the end of the commandment.47 This is why he disparages the glory of works in favor of justiﬁcation by faith when he addresses the Jew:

Where then is thy boasting? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we account a man to be justiﬁed by faith without the works of the law. . . . For if Abraham was justiﬁed by works, he hath whereof to glory, but not before God. For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was reputed to him unto justice. . . .

But to him that worketh not, yet believeth in him that justiﬁeth the ungodly, his faith is reputed to justice, according to the purpose of the grace of God.48

At the same time, he allows Christians to eat any kind of food, distinguishing this from what is truly righteous:

The kingdom of God is not food or drink, but justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. . . . All things are clean, but it is evil for that man who eateth with offense. It is good not to eat ﬂesh and not to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother is offended, weakened, or undone.49

46 Cf. Heloise's words in the Third Letter, pp. 82–83.

47 Cf. Rom. 13:10 and 1 Tim. 1:5.

48 Rom. 3:27–8, 4:2–3, 4:5.

49 Rom. 14:17, 20, 21.

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Here he does not forbid any food as such but only the eating of what would offend some of the converted Jews when they saw foods being eaten which the law did not allow. Saint Peter was also trying to avoid this kind of offense when Paul corrected him, as Paul reports in his letter to the Galatians. In writing to the Corinthians, however, Paul said, "Food does not commend us to God. . . . Eat whatever is sold in the markets . . . for the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof"; and then to the Colossians:

Let no man judge you in food or in drink. . . . If, with Christ, you be dead to the elements of this world, why do you yet decree as though living in the world, Touch not, taste not, handle not those things which are all unto destruction by their very use, according to the teachings and the precepts of men?50

By "elements of this world" he means the principles of the law concerning worldly practices. In its early days, the world—that is, a people as yet worldly—was concerned with teaching these practices, somewhat as it would be with teaching the basic elements of the alphabet. But Christ and those who belong to Christ are dead to these elements—dead, that is, to these worldly practices—when they admit no further obligation to them, that is, when they are no longer living in the world among men who take note of outward forms and decide among them, distinguishing between foods or between one thing and another, saying, "Do not touch this, do not touch that," and so on. The things that are touched or tasted or handled are destructive of the soul "by their very use," he says, when we put them to use "according to the teachings and the precepts of men"—that is, of worldly beings who understand the law in a worldly sense—and not according to the teachings of Christ and his disciples.

When Christ sent the apostles out to preach, it was a time when he had to guard most against offense. Nonetheless, he allowed them to eat any kind of food, which would enable them to live in the same manner as their hosts, "eating and drinking such things as they have."51 Paul was able to foresee that they would fall away from the proper teaching about this, and he wrote to Timothy:

50 Gal. 2:11 ff.; 1 Cor. 8:8, 10:25–26; Col. 2:16, 20–22.

51 Luke 10:7.

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Now the Spirit manifestly saith that in the last times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy . . . , forbidding marriage or commanding abstinence from the foods which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and by them that have known the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving: for it is sanctiﬁed by the word of God and by prayer. Proposing these things to the brethren, thou shalt be a good minister of Christ Jesus, nourished in the words of faith and of the good doctrine which thou hast attained unto.52

If someone, then, is determined to make a display of his own outward abstinence, would he ever look to Christ and his disciples as a model? Or would he look instead to John and to John's followers, who were known to be extreme in their fasting? They once took even Christ to task in their apparent devotion to Jewish observances, asking him, "Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but thy disciples do not fast?"53 But when Saint Augustine examined the difference between virtue and its display, he concluded that such outward works add nothing at all to merit. In his book on the good in marriage he wrote:

Self-restraint is not a virtue of the body but of the soul.54

There are times when the virtues of the heart are evident in actions and times when they lie hidden in the propensities of character, as the virtue of the martyrs became apparent in the way they endured suffering. . . . For example, patience already existed within Job, as the Lord knew and even spoke about, but it came to the notice of men only through the evidence of Job's temptation. . . .

Or, to make it clearer how virtue can exist in character even if it is not seen in actions, here is an example no Catholic will question: the Lord Jesus hungered, thirsted, ate, and drank in the truth of the ﬂesh—this no one faithful to the Gospel doubts. Can it ever be said, though, that the Lord's

52 1 Tim. 4:1 ff.

53 Matt. 9:14.

54 Cf. the Third Letter, p. 80.

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virtue of restraint in food and drink was not as great as John the Baptist's? "For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, 'He hath a devil.' And the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they said, 'Behold a man that is a glutton and a wine drinker, a friend of publicans and sinners. . . ." And the Lord added, "Wisdom is justiﬁed by her children,"55 that is, by those who see that the virtue of selfrestraint must always exist in the propensities of the heart although it becomes manifest only through the opportunity of time and circumstance, as is also true of the virtue of patience in the holy martyrs. . . . Just as the merit of patience is not greater in Peter, who endured martyrdom, than in John, who did not, so the merit of self-restraint is not greater in John, who remained unmarried, than in Abraham, who had many children. John's self-restraint was in his actions and Abraham's in his character alone, but the celibacy of one and the marriage of the other each battled for Christ according to the circumstances of the times.

In those times and even after the days of the Patriarchs, the law cursed whoever did not raise up seed in Israel,56 and so a man with the propensity toward self-restraint was not allowed to show it, even though he did possess it. But the fullness of time was come57 when it could be said, "He that can take, let him take";58 that is, whoever has the propensity toward virtue should act accordingly, and whoever does not wish to act should not claim falsely that he has it.59

The inference is that virtue alone wins merit in the eyes of God: those who are equal in virtue will win equal merit, though they may be unequal in their actions. This is why true Christians are concerned entirely with the inward man, with adorning him with virtue and keeping him clean of vice, caring little or nothing about the outward man. And this is why we read that the apostles behaved in such an uncouth—we can almost say disreputable—manner even

55 Matt. 11:18–19.

56 Cf. Deut. 25:5–10.

57 Cf. Gal. 4:4.

58 Matt. 19:12.

59 De Bono Conjugali 21, 25–26.

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in the company of the Lord, as if oblivious to all propriety and reverence, to pluck and strip the grain in the ﬁelds and eat it like little boys with no sense of shame at all.60 They also did not bother to wash their hands before their meals, which led some to accuse them of uncleanness. The Lord defended them, though, saying, "To eat with unwashed hands doth not deﬁle a man," and he added that, in general, the soul is not deﬁled by outward things but only by what may proceed from the heart, that is, by "evil thoughts, murders, adulteries," and so on.61 Unless the heart is ﬁrst corrupted by a depraved will, what is done outwardly in the body cannot be sin.

And so, he says that murder and adultery proceed from the heart and can exist even where there is no injury or physical contact:

"Whosoever look on a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart,"62 and "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer."63 And physical contact or injury per se does not make for these crimes, as in cases where violence forces a woman against her will or the law compels a judge to execute a criminal. But no murderer, it is written, has a share in the kingdom of God.64

We must consider, then, not what is done but what is in the heart if we seek to please him who searches heart and mind and sees in all the secret places.65 The Lord, Paul tells us, "shall judge the secrets of men according to the Gospel."66 And so, he preferred the widow's offering of just two mites to the most lavish offerings of the rich.67 "Thou hast no need of my goods," he was told, and he loves the gift for the giver more than the giver for the gift. It is written, "The Lord had respect to Abel and to his offerings,"68 for he looked ﬁrst to the man's devotion before he was pleased with his gift. God is more pleased with the devotion of the heart, the less the heart is taken up with outward things; and the less we put our trust

60 Cf. Matt. 12:1 ff. The apostles' behavior won the Pharisees' disapproval because it happened on the Sabbath; however, this plays no part in the argument here.

61 Matt. 15:20, 19.

62 Matt. 5:28.

63 1 John 3:15, but said by John and not Jesus.

64 Cf. 1 John 3:15.

65 Cf. Prov. 24:12; Ps. 7.10; Jer. 11:20, 17:10, 20.12; etc.

66 Rom. 2:16.

67 Cf. Mark 12:42–44.

68 Ps. 15:2; Gen. 4:4.

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in outward things, the more humbly do we serve him and think the more of what we owe him. And so, after writing about the allowances made for food, Saint Paul tells Timothy about the exercise of the body, saying:

Exercise thyself unto godliness, for bodily exercise is proﬁtable to little, but godliness is proﬁtable to all things, having promise of the life that is now and of the life that is to come.69

The mind's devotion to God earns from him what is necessary to us in this life and what is eternal in the next. What else do we learn from this but Christian wisdom—like Jacob, to make a meal for our

Father from our domestic ﬂock and not, like Esau, to go out hunting wild game or act like Jews in regard to outward things?70 The Psalmist said, "In me, O God, are vows to thee, which I will pay, my praises to thee."71 To which the poet Persius added, "Beyond yourself seek nothing."72

There are, however, countless testimonials from the learned in both the Church and the secular world which point to this one lesson: we must care nothing for the outward things, which are indifferent, or else we would ﬁnd the works of the law and what Peter called the unbearable yoke of its slavery73 preferable to the freedom of the Gospel and the sweet yoke and easy burden of Christ.74 Yet Christ himself has called us to this yoke: "Come to me," he said, "all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you."75 And Peter rebuked those who had turned to Christ but still kept to the observance of the law:

My brethren, men, . . . why tempt you God to put a yoke upon the necks of the disciples which neither our fathers

69 1 Tim. 4:7–8.

70 See Gen. 27:6 ff.

71 Ps. 55:12.

72 Satires 1.7.

73 Cf. Acts 15:10.

74 Cf. Matt. 11:30.

75 Matt. 11:28. The manuscripts quote only through the words "and are burdened," adding "etc."

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nor we have been able to bear? But by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we believe we shall be saved, in like manner as they also.76

And so I beg of you—who would imitate not only Christ but Saint Peter in your discretion as you do in your name—temper the practices set for us in a way that will suit our weak nature. Let us then be free for the service of offering praise to God, which is the offering he commends to us, rejecting all our outward sacriﬁces:

If I should be hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine and the fullness thereof. Shall I eat the ﬂesh of bullocks? Shall I drink the blood of goats? Offer to God the sacriﬁce of praise and pay thy vows to the Most High. And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt praise me.77

Of course, we are not saying that we should be exempt from labor when necessity requires it, only that we should not put undue importance on what serves the body but interrupts our celebration of the Ofﬁce. This is particularly true when the authority of Paul grants women in religious orders a special means of sustenance apart from manual labor. As he writes to Timothy:

If any of the faithful have widows, let him minister to them and let not the Church be charged, so that there may be sufﬁcient for them that are widows indeed.78

By "widows indeed" he means all women who are devoted to Christ; for not only is their Husband dead but the world is cruciﬁed to them and they to the world.79 And so it is right that they ﬁnd support at Church expense, as if from the private wealth of their own husbands. This is why the Lord himself put his mother under the protection of an apostle instead of her husband,80 and why the apostles arranged for seven deacons, the ministers of the Church, to look

76 Acts 15:7, 10–11.

77 Ps. 49:12–15.

78 1 Tim. 5:16.

79 Cf. Gal. 6:14.

80 Cf. John 19:26.

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after the needs of these devoted women.81 Now, certainly we know that in his letter to the Thessalonians Saint Paul laid down the rule against idlers who mind everyone's business but their own—"If any man will not work, neither let him eat"82—and that Saint Benedict prescribed manual labor as the best safeguard against idleness.83

But we also know that Mary sat in idleness to listen to Christ's words while Martha continued working both for her and for the Lord, grumbling about her sister's leisure as if she envied it and as if she alone "bore the burden of the day and the heats."84 People still will grumble when they minister to the needs of those who are busy with their duties to God. Often they complain less about the taxes of a tyrant than their obligations to the lazy and the idle, as they call them, even though they see them not only listening to Christ's words but continually reading and chanting those same words.

They do not know that it is only a small thing, as Saint Paul has said, to supply material goods to those from whom they receive such spiritual goods,85 or that it is only ﬁtting for those who are concerned with earthly matters to serve others who are concerned with matters of the spirit. Even the old law granted this leisure to the ministers of the Church: the tribe of Levi received no inheritance in land but was to take its tithes and offerings from the labor of others, so that it might better serve the Lord.86

There is also the matter of fasting, which Christians see as abstinence from vice more than from food—you must consider whether you think anything should be added to what the Church has established, and institute what is ﬁtting for us.

You should also give some thought to two matters in particular: the ordering of the psalms and our conduct of the ecclesiastical

Ofﬁces. In the ﬁrst, at least, we need some accommodation to ease the burden on our weakness—if it seems right to you. As we complete the Psalter through the week, it should not be necessary to 81 Cf. Acts 6:5.

82 2 Thess. 3:10.

83 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 40.

84 For this account of Mary and Martha, see Luke 10:38 ff.; for the quotation, see Matt.

20:12.

85 Cf. 1 Cor. 9:11.

86 Cf. Num. 18:21.

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repeat the same psalms. When Saint Benedict arranged the weekly order to suit his purposes, he also left it open for others to arrange the psalms differently if it seemed best to them,87 no doubt aware that the beauty of the Church would grow with time, becoming a splendid ediﬁce where there was once a rough foundation. Before all else, however, we ask you to decide for us how we are to arrange for the reading of the Gospel at the Night Ofﬁce.88 It seems unsafe to bring into our presence the priests or deacons who must read the lesson at a time when we should be most secluded from the sight of any man in order to be freer from temptation and to give ourselves wholeheartedly to God.

It now lies with you, my lord, while you remain alive, to institute a rule for us, a rule which then will bind us for all time.

For you, after God, are the founder of this place, you, through God, are the planter of our congregation, and you, with God, should be the guide of our religious life.89

Perhaps we will have some other after you, who then will build on the foundation of another,90 and so, we are afraid, will be less concerned with us or less worthy to be obeyed, and although he may be equally as willing, he then will not be equally as able.

Speak and we shall hear.

Farewell.

87 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 18.

88 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 11.

89 Cf. the First Letter, p. 52.

90 Cf. Rom. 15:20.

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ABELARD TO HELOISE

Love, my dearest sister, divine love leads you to ask about the origin of your calling and how the religious life of nuns began. I will respond to you and to your daughters in the spirit as directly and succinctly as I can.1 The order of monastics, of nuns and monks alike, took the form of its religious life most fully from Jesus Christ, our Lord. Even before his incarnation, though, the rudiments of this way of life existed among men and women both; hence, Jerome can

1 Only the ﬁrst half of the letter, in fact, responds directly to Heloise's request, offering a roughly chronological account of the women followers of Jesus and the parity of women's and men's roles in the institutions of the early Church, with continual backward glances at Jewish precedents. The remainder may be described, as Abelard describes it in the ﬁnal paragraph, as praise of the "proper dignity" of nuns, although it is somewhat more than that—a wide-ranging assertion of the nature of women's virtue in general and the prerogatives and privileges of women in the religious life of pagans, Jews, and Christians. At times the letter takes on the character of an exhortation or a catalog of exempla similar to what Abelard in the Second Letter claims

Heloise does not need. To judge by its repetitions, rough transitions, tangential remarks, gross disproportion of emphasis and treatment, and other inconsistencies of its internal organization, much of the letter seems to have been cobbled together by Abelard from texts composed for other purposes (parts resemble in their rhetoric and structure the extant sermons Abelard wrote for audiences at the Paraclete and elsewhere), then overlaid with comments and additions by others sympathetic to his project and imitative of his methods. Since some transitions in the text appear to have been modiﬁed to accommodate these additions, it is often very difﬁcult to disentangle layers of the text with conﬁdence. However, sections that are most likely later additions and not by Abelard himself have here been enclosed in brackets. This should not, though, attest to the completeness or secure authenticity of everything left unbracketed.

Some of these sections were identiﬁed and used by John F. Benton (1975) to support an argument against Abelard's authorship of this letter and others in the collection.

Benton later (1980) retracted many of his claims, but problems remain. The letter shows signs of having been extensively reworked, and I have put forward the most conservative suggestions I believe are consistent with making sense of the text as it exists.

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write to Rusticus about "the sons of the prophets, the monks we read of in the Old Testament,"2 and the Gospel speaks of the widow

Anna, who devoted herself to God and the temple and, alongside Simeon, was found worthy to receive the Lord in the temple and to prophesy about him when he came.3 But Christ is the end of righteousness and the consummation of all good, and in the fullness of time he came to reveal the good that had been hidden and to perfect what as yet had only been begun. And coming as he did to summon men and women both to their redemption, he thought it best to unite each sex in the true monkhood of his community. In this, then, lies the source and the foundation of the calling for men and women both, its perfection of life set out for all to follow.

Already in the Gospel we read of a gathering of holy women who, along with the apostles and other disciples and the mother of the Lord herself, renounced the world and all of their possessions to be possessed of Christ alone. "The Lord is the portion of my inheritance," it is written, and they fulﬁlled the precept the Lord laid down, by which all those who turn from the world may enter into this communal life: "Every one of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth cannot be my disciple."4 They followed

Christ devotedly—these most blessed women, these nuns in the true sense—winning honor and favor from Christ himself and later from the apostles, as our sacred histories carefully record. We read in the Gospel, for example, that the Lord rebuked the Pharisee who had invited him to his table and then complained that his hospitality was valued less than the service of the woman who had sinned.5

We also read that, when the resurrected Lazarus sat with the others among the guests, his sister Martha served at supper alone, and that Mary poured a pound of precious oil on the feet of the Lord and dried them with her hair—the fragrance of the oil ﬁlled the house, angering the disciples with its seeming vanity and cost, and leading Judas ﬁnally into greed.6 So, while Martha was busy with the food, Mary dispensed the oil: one inwardly, one outwardly, they both attended to the Lord.

2 Epistulae 125.7. For Jerome's reference, see 4 Kings 6:1; cf. also the Calamities, p. 32.

3 See Luke 2:25–38.

4 Ps. 15:5; Luke 14:33.

5 See Luke 7:36–50.

6 A conﬂation of Matt. 26:8 ff., Mark 14:3 ff., Luke 10:38 ff., and John 12:1 ff.

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Only women ministered to the Lord, according to the Gospel, devoting their resources to his daily maintenance and providing the necessities of this life. He himself would serve the disciples at table and wash their feet as an example of complete humility;7 but we never hear of any disciple, or in fact of any man, doing this for him, only of women, as I've said, rendering him these and other services his humanity required. Martha, we see, did it in one way and Mary in another; and Mary served the Lord with all the more devotion, the more sinful her earlier life had been. When he washed the disciples' feet, the Lord poured water out into a basin;

Mary used the tears of her inner remorse. He dried their feet with a linen cloth; she used her hair in place of linen. And she added oil over and above, which is nothing we read the Lord had ever done.

The woman then so presumed upon his favor that she also anointed his head with oil, not simply letting it pour from an alabaster bottle but breaking the bottle open, it is said, in her desire to show her great devotion, so that once it had been used for such a service, it never could be put to use again. In this she fulﬁlled the prophecy of Daniel, that the time would come when the Holy of Holies would be anointed.8 And see—it was a woman who anointed the Holy of Holies and by her act proclaimed that he was the one whom the prophet had predicted and the one in whom she placed her faith. I ask you then, What is this benevolence of the Lord? Or what is this intrinsic dignity of women, that the Lord would offer his head as well as his feet to no one but to them to be anointed?

What is this prerogative of the weaker sex, that the supreme Christ, who from his very conception had been anointed by all the oils of the Holy Spirit, should be anointed again, and by a woman, as though she consecrated him priest and king with these material sacraments and made him the Christ in body, that is to say, the Anointed One?

We know that the patriarch Jacob ﬁrst anointed a stone in type of the Lord,9 and that afterward only men could anoint priests and kings or celebrate any rite of unction—although women may at times perform baptisms. As the patriarch once sanctiﬁed a stone, the bishop now sanctiﬁes a temple and an altar with oil. Men thus enact these sacraments in symbols, but a woman wrought in truth itself,

7 See John 13:5 ff.

8 Dan. 9:24.

9 See Gen. 28:18. For the typological reading of scripture, see the Fourth Letter, p. 86.

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as the Truth himself proclaimed, "The woman wrought a good work upon me."10 Christians are anointed by men, Christ himself by a woman; the members of the Church by men, its head by a woman.

And she let the oil pour upon his head not drop by drop, it is said, but in full ﬂow, in accord with what the bride in Canticles sings:

"Thy name is as oil poured out." The veiled speech of the Psalmist, too, preﬁgures this abundance: "Like the precious oil on the head that ran down upon the beard, the beard of Aaron, which ran down to the hem of his garment."11

We read that David was anointed three times over, as Jerome points out in his commentary on Psalm 26, and Christ and Christians also three times over. For Christians it is at baptism, conﬁrmation, and the anointing of the sick. For the Lord it was when a woman anointed his feet and then his head with oil, and when Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus prepared his body with spices after his death, as the Gospel of John reports.12 Consider, then, the dignity of the woman who anointed Christ twice while he was still alive, his feet and then his head, as she consecrated him priest and king. The myrrh and aloes used to preserve the bodies of the dead preﬁgured the incorruptibility of his body, which at their resurrection the chosen of God will share; but his earlier anointings by a woman express the dignity unique to Christ as priest and king, the higher dignity by the anointing of his head and the lower by the anointing of his feet.

He accepted the sacrament of kingship from a woman when he had rejected a kingdom offered him by men and even ﬂed when they came to seize him and force him to be king.13 But it was as heavenly, not as earthly, king that she anointed him, for as he later said, "My kingdom is not of this world."14 Our bishops strut in all their pride when they anoint earthly kings, and all the populace watches and applauds; or they dress themselves in their ﬁne golden robes when they consecrate mortal priests, and in fact they often bless those whom God cursed. But the woman was humility itself—no change of garment, no elaborate rite, and the apostles even took offense— when she performed this sacrament for Christ, invested with no ofﬁce of the Church but only with the merit of her devotion. How

10 Mark 14:6.

11 Cant. 1:2; Ps. 132:2.

12 See John 19:38.

13 See John 6:15.

14 John 18:36.

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great is the constancy of faith, how priceless the fervor of charitable love, which "believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."15 The Pharisee complained when a sinner anointed the feet of Christ, and the apostles were outraged that a woman had dared anoint his head. But a woman's faith remained unmoved on each of these occasions, trusting in the goodness of the Lord, and thus she won his favor. Her oils were acceptable and pleasing to the Lord, and when Judas objected, he said to him, "Let her alone, that she may keep it against the day of my burial."16 In other words, "Do not dismiss her service to the living, or you deny her devotion to the dead."

Women prepared the spices for the burial of the Lord—this is certain—which this woman would not have done with the same intense devotion if her earlier service had been refused. But when the disciples turned on her in anger, Mark recounts, the Lord answered them with mild words and praised her act of kindness, even saying it should be included in the Gospel, that wherever the Gospel itself would be proclaimed, her act would also be proclaimed as her memorial, praise for the woman who had done this daring thing.17 Nowhere do we read of any act of any other person receiving such commendation from the Lord. Then—and earlier when he praised the poor widow's gift over any other offerings to the temple18—he showed how thoroughly acceptable to him was the devotion of women. Peter once boasted that he and his fellow apostles had renounced all things for Christ,19 and Zacchaeus, who received the Lord at his coming, gave half of all his riches to the poor and returned fourfold whatever he might have taken deceitfully;20 and there were many others who had given even more on Christ's behalf, had made far richer offerings to God, or had renounced even more to follow Christ. But none of them won such praise from the Lord as the praise he gave to women.

We see their devotion to him most clearly toward the end of his life. When Peter, the prince of the apostles, denied the Lord and John, the beloved apostle, ran away, when the rest of the apostles

15 1 Cor. 13:7.

16 John 12:7.

17 See Mark 14:9.

18 See Mark 12:41–44.

19 See Matt. 19:27.

20 See Luke 19:1–10.

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then were scattered, these women remained ﬁrm.21 No terror, no despair could keep them from Christ, not in his Passion nor in his death, and to them in particular the words of the Apostle apply:

"What then shall separate us from the love of God? Shall tribulation or distress? Shall famine, nakedness, danger, persecution, or the sword?"22 Matthew says of himself and the others, "Then all of the disciples left him and ﬂed," but he also says that the women were undaunted, staying with the cruciﬁed Lord so long as it was allowed them—"There were many women there afar off, who had followed

Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him"—and waiting without stirring from his tomb: "Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sat against the sepulcher." Mark, too, speaks about these women:

And there were also women looking on afar off, among whom was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joseph, and Salome, those who followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him, and many other women that came up with him to Jerusalem.23

John tells how he was there beside the cross, standing by the cruciﬁed Lord although he had run away before; but before he mentions himself, he mentions the resolution of the women, as though it were the force of their example that heartened him and called him back:

There stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother and his mother's sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.

When Jesus therefore had seen his mother and the disciple standing whom he loved, he saith to his mother, "Woman, behold thy son." After that, he saith to the disciple, "Behold thy mother." And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.24

Now the failure of the disciples and the constancy of the women had already been predicted long before, that is, by Job, who was

21 For Peter's denial of Jesus, see Matt. 26:69 ff.; for the ﬂight of John and the other disciples, see Matt. 26:56 and Mark 14:50.

22 Rom. 8:35, where the Vulgate reads "the love of Christ." The manuscripts include the passage only through the word "distress," adding "etc."

23 Matt. 26:56, 27:55, 61; Mark 15:40–1.

24 John 19:25–27. The manuscripts break off with "etc." after "his mother and the disciple standing."

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speaking in the persona of the Lord: "The ﬂesh being consumed, my bone hath cleaved to my skin, and nothing but lips are left around my teeth."25 The strength of the body lies in the bone, which supports the ﬂesh and skin. In the body of Christ, which is the Church, the bone is the foundation of the faith or the fervor of that charitable love about which it is sung, "Many waters cannot quench charity, neither can the ﬂoods drown it,"26 and which, the Apostle says,

"beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."27 The ﬂesh is the inward part of the body and the skin its outward part; and so, the apostles, who looked to the inward nourishment of the soul, and the women, who supplied the necessities of the body, can be compared to the ﬂesh and skin. When the ﬂesh was consumed, the bone of Christ cleaved to the skin; that is to say, while the apostles fell away at the Passion of the Lord and yielded to despair at his death, the dedication of these holy women remained unmoved, not drawing back from the bone of Christ even to the slightest extent. It held so ﬁrm in faith, hope, and love that they never could be apart from him in body or in mind, even after his death. Since men are by nature stronger than women both in body and in mind, masculine nature is signiﬁed by the ﬂesh, which is nearer the bone, and feminine weakness by the skin. The apostles are also called the teeth of the Lord, since it is their duty to bite, as it were, at the faults of others. And so, only the lips had been left for them—that is to say, their words and not their deeds—since in their despair they more spoke of Christ than they acted on his behalf.

Such were the disciples, then, to whom the Lord appeared as they went out to Emmaus, talking with each other about what had happened and earning his reproach for their despair.28 Peter and the others had nothing else but words when the Lord foretold their failure at his Passion:

"Even if they all shall fall away on thy account," Peter said, "I will never fall away. . . . Yea, though I should die with thee,

I will not deny thee." And all of the disciples said the same.29

25 Job 19:20.

26 Cant. 8:7. The manuscripts quote only through "charity," indicating the rest of the verse by "etc."

27 1 Cor. 13:7.

28 See Luke 24:13 ff.

29 Matt. 26:33–35.

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Yes, they all said the same but did not act. And so, the ﬁrst and greatest of the apostles—the one whose constancy to the Lord in words could lead him to pronounce, "I am ready to go with thee, both into prison and to death," the one into whose hands the Lord had just entrusted his Church, saying, "And thou, being once converted, conﬁrm thy brethren"—this very one denied the Lord at a single sound from a serving-maid.30 Not once but three times did he do it, denying Christ while he was still alive; and all of the disciples, too, deserted him while he was still alive.

The women, on the other hand, would not part from the Lord in body or in mind, even after his death. The blessed sinner, Mary

Magdalene, searched for his body, proclaiming him her Lord: "They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulcher," she said; "if thou hast taken him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him and I will take him away."31 The rams all ﬂee and the shepherds of the ﬂock, but the ewes are unafraid. For their weakness of the ﬂesh the Lord reproached the men because even at the moment of his Passion they could not stay awake with him one hour.32 But the women spent a sleepless night in tears beside his tomb, and thus they were found worthy to be ﬁrst to see the glory of the risen Lord. By their devotion after his death, by their deeds and not only their words, they showed how much they had loved him while he was still alive.33

From their concern about his Passion and his death, they became the ﬁrst to rejoice in his resurrection to life. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus wrapped his body in linen along with spices for his burial, according to John, but Mark tells how Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph were watching to see where the body was laid.34 Luke also speaks of them: "And the women that were come with Jesus from Galilee, following after, saw the sepulcher and how his body was laid. And returning, they prepared spices and ointments"—since the spices of Nicodemus would not have been enough if they had not added their own—"and on the Sabbath day they rested, according to the commandment."35 And then, Mark tells us, when the Sabbath was over, in the earliest morning on the 30 See Luke 22:33, 32; see Matt. 26:69 ff.

31 John 20:2 and 20:15.

32 Matt. 26:41.

33 Cf. Abelard's request of the women of the Paraclete in the Second Letter, p. 70.

34 See John 19:38–40 and Mark 15:47.

35 Luke 23:55–56.

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very day of his resurrection, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome came to his tomb.36

That was their devotion—now for the honor they won. First, they saw an angel, who brought them comfort in the news that he had risen. Then they saw the Lord himself and touched him with their hands. The very ﬁrst was Mary Magdalene, whose devotion was more fervent than the rest. Soon after they saw the angel, she and the others went out from the sepulcher . . . running to tell his disciples about the resurrection of the Lord. And behold, Jesus met them, saying: "All hail." But they came up and took hold of his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them: . . .

"Go, tell my brethren that they go into Galilee. There they shall see me."37

Luke says, "It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary mother of James and the other women that were with them, who told these things to the apostles," and Mark says that they were sent to the apostles by the angel: "He is risen" the angel said, "he is not here. . . . But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee."38 But ﬁrst the Lord himself appeared to Mary

Magdalene and told her, "Go to my brethren and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your

God."39 From this we conclude that these holy women were appointed female apostles, so to speak, to the apostles,40 being sent—whether by angels or by the Lord—to announce the joy of his resurrection and to bring the apostles the ﬁrst tidings of what they would later preach to all the world.

After the resurrection, Matthew tells us, the Lord greeted the women as a mark of his great favor and concern. We never read that he gave the formal greeting of "All hail" to anyone but them—on 36 See Mark 15:1.

37 Matt. 28:8–10.

38 Luke 24:10; Mark 16:6–7.

39 John 20:17. The manuscripts quote only through "to my Father" and add "etc." The inconsistencies, real or apparent, among these Gospel accounts become the subject of the ﬁfth question in Heloise's Questions.

40 Abelard's qualiﬁcation "so to speak" refers to his use of the feminine form apostolae, "female apostles," not to the fact that he calls them apostles.

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the contrary, he had ordered his disciples to refrain from any greeting: "Greet no one by the way," he said, as if he would reserve for devout women the privilege he himself would show them when he had attained the glory of his immortality. Then, after his ascension, when the apostles had returned from the Mount of Olives and assembled in that sacred gathering in Jerusalem, the women joined them in their constant devotion, as the Acts of the Apostles tell: "All these were persevering with one mind in prayer with the women and with Mary the mother of Jesus."41

Now these Hebrew women had turned to the faith while the Lord was still preaching and living in the ﬂesh, and they ﬁrst adopted the form of this religious life; but there were also the widows of the Greeks who were received by the apostles afterward, and we must now consider them as well. Their care was entrusted to Stephen, ﬁrst martyr and glorious standard-bearer in the army of the Lord, and to other men of the Holy Spirit, as the Acts of the Apostles record:

The number of the disciples increasing, there arose a murmuring of the Greeks against the Hebrews, for that their widows were neglected in the daily ministration. Then the twelve, calling together the multitude of the disciples, said:

"It is not reason that we should leave the word of God and serve tables. Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. But we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word." And the saying was liked by all the multitude.

And they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip and Prochoros and Nicanor, and Timon and Parmenas and Nicolas of Antioch. These they sat before the apostles, and they, praying, imposed hands on them.42

It was the highest tribute to Stephen's self-restraint that he would have been selected for the task. Ministering to holy women was a noble service in the eyes of God and the apostles, as they indicated by their prayer and laying on of hands: those whom they appointed

41 Luke 10:4; Acts 1:14.

42 Acts 6:1–6.

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were solemnly entreated, as it were, by blessing and by prayer to act as faithfully as they could in aiding them. In fact, Saint Paul would claim this service as his own to help him fulﬁll his duties as apostle:

"Have we not the power to carry about a woman, a sister as well as the rest of the apostles?" he said.43 In other words, "May we too not bring holy women with us when we preach? The other apostles do this, and the women provide the necessities for them from their substance." As Augustine says in his book on the work of monks:

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."44

Again we see how women sustained the bodily needs of the Lord when he went out to preach and how they traveled with him and the apostles as their inseparable companions.

Soon after the beginning of the Church, the number of women living the religious life, like the number of men, had grown to the point where women, like men, took up residence in monasteries of their own. The History of the Church records the praise the learned

Jew Philo gave the church of Alexandria under Mark; in Book 2, Chapter 17 we read:

There are people leading this life in many parts of the world. . . . In each place there is a house of prayer called a semneion, a holy place or monastery. . . . There they not only

43 1 Cor. 9:5.

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

8:1 ff. The passage is also cited in this form in Abelard's Calamities.

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learn the hymns of the ancient sages but compose new hymns to God in a range of different melodies and meters, singing them in sweet and solemn arrangement.

He spoke at length about their austerity and their worship of God, and then continued:

Along with the men I have mentioned, there are also women, most of them elderly virgins who maintain their chastity not out of some necessity but out of devotion. They consecrate themselves body and soul to the pursuit of wisdom and think it unworthy to give over to lust the vessel which had been prepared to receive that wisdom, or to bring forth mortal children when their relations ought to be the sacred and immortal intercourse with God's word, which leaves no offspring subject to the corruption of death.

"Philo also wrote about their meetings, about the segregation of men and women living in a single place, and about the vigils they kept in the way that we still do."45

The Tripartite History has this to say in praise of the Christian philosophical life, that is, the monastic privilege taken up no less by women than by men:

Some say the founder of this most scrupulous philosophy was the prophet Elijah; others say it was John the Baptist.

Philo the Pythagorean says that the outstanding Hebrews of his time came from all over to take up the practice of philosophy on an estate overlooking the Lake of Mary. Their dwellings, food, and discourse are of the kind we now see among the monks of Egypt. He also writes that they . . . touched no food before sunset . . . , completely abstained from meat and wine, ate only bread ﬂavored with hyssop and salt, and drank only water. Women lived among them, older virgins who, from their love for philosophy, abstained from marriage of their own accord.46

45 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae 2.17. Abelard cites Eusebius' Greek text in the Latin paraphrase of Ruﬁnus.

46 Historia Ecclesiastica Tripartita 1.11, formerly attributed to Cassiodorus.

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[And Jerome has this to say in praise of Mark and his church in Chapter 8 of his book on distinguished men:

The ﬁrst to bring the news of Christ to Alexandria, he established a church of such rigor and self-restraint that all the followers of Christ were led to take up his example. Philo, the most eloquent among the Jews, saw that the church of Alexandria continued Jewish practices at ﬁrst, and so he wrote a book on its way of life, as if in praise of his own people. As Luke tells of the communal life of the faithful in Jerusalem, Philo records what he observed in Alexandria under the tutelage of Mark.

And in Chapter 11:

Philo, an Alexandrian by birth and from a priestly family of Jews, is nonetheless considered among the historians of the Church because he praises our people in the book he wrote about the church in Alexandria, established by the evangelist Mark. He speaks about them not only in Alexandria but in many different regions, and he calls their residences monasteries.47

Monastics now strive to follow the ways of the early Church, holding no property of their own, none of them rich, none of them poor, sharing their inheritance with those in need, devoting themselves to prayers and psalms, to learning and self-restraint—as Luke recounts of the ﬁrst believers in Jerusalem.]48

In earlier history, too, no distinction is made between women and men in any matter that pertains to God or in any particular of the religious life. Women sang hymns, as men did, and composed them as well. In fact, the very ﬁrst song the people of Israel sang to the Lord on their deliverance from bondage was sung by men and women both, which became the source and precedent for the role of women in the divine services of the Church:

Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went forth after her with 47 De Illustribus Viris 8 and 11.

48 This section, which takes up further comments on Philo and the early church of Alexandria but veers away from the main subject of the letter, is most likely a later addition to the text.

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timbrels and with dances. And she began the song to them, saying, "Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magniﬁed, the horse and his rider he hath thrown into the sea."49

There is no mention here of Moses acting as a prophet or singing as Miriam did, and no mention of men taking up timbrels and dancing as the women did. When Miriam is called a prophetess in her song, it is not because she recited or dictated what she sang but because her voice was lifted in prophetic utterance. When it is said that she began the song to them, we understand that they all chanted in concord and ﬁne order. That they sang with timbrels and with dances and not with the voice alone suggests their great devotion, certainly, but also signiﬁes in veiled speech the form of song particular to monastic congregations. We too are urged to the same form of song by the Psalmist who tells us, "Praise him with timbrel and dance," that is, in the mortiﬁcation of the ﬂesh and the concord of that charitable love about which it is written, "The multitude of believers had but one heart and one soul."50 That all the women went forth in song signiﬁes the joys of the contemplative soul, which, so long as it is ﬁxed on heavenly things, abandons, as it were, the tabernacle of its earthly dwelling and makes a hymn to the Lord from the inner sweetness of its own contemplation. Hence, in the Old Testament we also have the songs of Deborah, Hannah, and the widow Judith, and in the Gospel the song of Mary, mother of the Lord.51 [Hannah's offering of her son Samuel to the tabernacle of the Lord set the precedent for accepting children into monasteries, as Isidore writes to the monks of the Honorian abbey, Chapter 5:

Whoever has been designated for the monastery by his parents must know that he will remain there in perpetuity. For Hannah gave her son Samuel to God, and he remained in the service of the temple as his mother had intended, serving where he was established.]52

49 Exod. 15:20–21. The manuscripts quote only through "gloriously magniﬁed"; "etc." indicates the rest of the verse.

50 Ps. 150:4; Acts 4:32.

51 For Deborah, see Judg. 5:2–31; for Hannah, see 1 Kings 2:1–10; for Judith, see Jth.

16:2–21; for the song of Mary, see Luke 1:46–55.

52 A likely later addition to the text, prompted by the mention of Hannah. The ﬁgures of Hannah and Samuel apparently evoked considerable interest at the Paraclete, becoming the subject of no fewer than seven of Heloise's Questions (31–37). The passage quoted here is not actually by Isidore, as Muckle (1955, 261 n. 19) points out, but was accepted as Isidore's on the authority of Smaragdus and Gratian.

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Clearly the daughters of Aaron belonged to the sanctuary and shared with their brothers in the portion of Levi, the means the Lord established for their maintenance. As he said to Aaron in the Book of Numbers:

All the ﬁrst fruits of the sanctuary which the children of Israel offer to the Lord, I have given to thee and to thy sons and daughters by a perpetual ordinance.53

Hence, women in religious life, it seems, were not distinct from the order of clerics. Their titles also clearly were the same, since we speak of deaconesses along with deacons, recognizing, as it were, both male and female members of the tribe of Levi. In the Book of Numbers, too, we read how the consecration of Nazirites of the Lord, which entailed the strictest form of religious vow, applied to women as well as men. As the Lord said to Moses:

Speak to the children of Israel and say to them, "When a man or woman shall make a vow to be sanctiﬁed and will consecrate themselves to the Lord, they shall abstain from wine and from every thing that may make a man drunk.

They shall not drink vinegar of wine or of any other drink, nor any thing that is pressed out of the grape, nor shall they eat grapes either fresh or dried. All the days that they are consecrated to the Lord by vow, they shall eat nothing that cometh of the vineyard, from the raisin even to the kernel.54

It was women of this way of life, I believe, who watched at the door of the tabernacle, and from whose mirrors Moses made a basin for Aaron and his sons to wash themselves. It is written:

Moses set out a bronze vessel for Aaron and his sons to wash themselves . . . which he fashioned from the mirrors of the women who watched at the door of the tabernacle.55

53 Num. 18:19.

54 Num. 6:2–4.

55 Cf. Exod. 30:18–19 and 38:8. The exact form of the passage as quoted is found in Gregory, Homiliae in Evangelia 17.10, which also introduces the image of the mirrors of remorse taken up later in the paragraph.

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We read of their fervor and devotion as they watched outside the closed door of the tabernacle, praying and keeping vigil through the night, while the men were asleep. That the door was closed to them signiﬁes the life of penitents, who keep themselves apart from the rest to afﬂict themselves with harsher penance—indeed, the monastic calling in particular is said to be just such a life, nothing, that is, but a relatively mild form of penance. The tabernacle also must be understood symbolically, as the Apostle understood it in his letter to the Hebrews: "We have an altar whereof they have no power to eat who serve the tabernacle"56— that is to say, no one is ﬁt to have a share in the altar who indulges in the pleasures of the body while serving in this life on earth as in a camp. The door of the tabernacle is the end of this life on earth, when the soul goes forth from the body to enter into the life to come. Those who watch at the door are those who are concerned with the transit from this life and by repentance so arrange their death as to be worthy of eternal life. [The Psalmist refers to this daily entering in and going out of the holy Church in his prayer, "May the Lord keep thy coming in and thy going out."57 He keeps our coming in and going out when, once we have left this life and have been purged through our repentance, he leads us directly to that other life. The Psalmist very properly places "coming in" before "going out," acknowledging its priority in value, if not in time, since we leave this mortal life in pain but come to that eternal life in highest exaltation.]

[The women's mirrors are the outward works by which the beauty or ugliness of the soul is judged, like a human face by a material mirror. So, the vessel in which Aaron and his sons wash themselves is fashioned from these mirrors when the works of holy women and the constancy of their sex become a rebuke to the negligence of priests and bishops and move them to tears of remorse: if they look after the women as they should, the women's works will win them pardon for their sins. Saint

Gregory turned these mirrors into a vessel of remorse for himself when he marveled at the virtue of holy women and at their victory in martyrdom, asking with a groan:

What will big bearded men have to say when these delicate girls bear such burdens for Christ and the members of the fragile sex

56 Heb. 13:10.

57 Ps. 120:8.

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triumph in a struggle that wins them the double crown of virginity and martyrdom?]58

I have no doubt that the blessed Anna belonged among those women standing watch outside the door, the ones who had consecrated their widowhood to the Lord as if they were his female

Nazirites. For she, no less than Simeon, was found worthy to receive the unique Nazirite of the Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ himself, and to recognize him through the Holy Spirit at the same hour Simeon did, becoming something greater than a prophet as she revealed his presence and publicly proclaimed him to the world. [As Luke recounts:

There was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser. She was far advanced in years and had lived with her husband seven years from her virginity. And she was a widow until fourscore and four years, who departed not from the temple, by fastings and prayers serving night and day. Now she, at the same hour, coming in, confessed to the Lord, and spoke of him to all that looked for the redemption of Jerusalem.59

Note each thing he says and how he praises her in such detail. The grace she was granted with the gift of prophecy, her father, her tribe, the seven years she lived with her husband, the long period of her widowhood, which she devoted to God, her dedicated service to the temple, her fasting and her prayers, her praise of the Lord and her thanks to him, her public proclamation of the Savior who had been promised and now was born—all this the evangelist carefully sets down. He had praised Simeon earlier, but for his righteousness and not his prophetic gift, and he made no mention of his austerity or self-restraint nor said anything about his speaking of Christ to others.]

Also among the women of this calling are the true widows Saint Paul described to Timothy:

Honor widows that are widows indeed. . . . She that is a widow indeed and desolate, let her trust in God and continue

58 Not Gregory's actual words, but very like his Homiliae in Evangelia 11.3. The stress on outward works throughout this passage seems so at odds with the thrust of Abelard's arguments elsewhere that it may be enough in itself to cast doubt on his authorship of the section.

59 Luke 2:36–38, in which the Vulgate has "the redemption of Israel."

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in prayer night and day. . . . And this give in charge, that they may be blameless. . . . If any of the faithful have widows, let him minister to them and let not the Church be charged, so that there may be sufﬁcient for them that are widows indeed.60

The true widows, widows indeed, are those who have not disgraced their widowhood by a second marriage and have dedicated themselves to God out of devotion, not necessity. They are desolate having renounced the world and all their earthly possessions with no one to care for them. Such women, Paul instructs us, must be honored and supported by the Church, as if from the property of Christ, their

Husband; and from their number women should be chosen for the ministry of the diaconate, as he says:

Let a widow be chosen of no less than threescore years of age, who hath been the wife of one husband, having testimony for her good works, if she have brought up children, if she have offered hospitality, if she have washed the saints' feet, if she have ministered to them that suffer tribulation, if she have diligently followed every good work. But the younger widows avoid.61

[Jerome comments on this passage: "Avoid appointing to the diaconate someone who would set a bad example for others."62 Younger widows are more likely to set this bad example, being less steady and more open to temptation through their lack of experience, as Paul had learned from his own observation.]63 He goes on to explain:

For when they have grown wanton in Christ, they will marry, having damnation because they have made void their ﬁrst faith. And being idle, they learn to go about from house to house, and are not only idle but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not. I will,

60 1 Tim. 5:3–7.

61 1 Tim. 5:9–11.

62 Actually from Pelagius' Expositions of the Epistles of Paul, which had been attributed to Jerome; see Muckle 1955, 264 n. 70.

63 A likely later addition, perhaps derived from Abelard's Sermon 31, which it paraphrases.

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therefore, that the younger should marry, bear children, be mistresses of families, and give the adversary no occasion to speak evil. For some are already turned aside after Satan.64

And Saint Gregory agrees, writing to Maximus, bishop of Syracuse:

We strictly forbid young abbesses. Bishops should only give the veil to virgins at least sixty years of age whose life and character have been thoroughly tested.65

Those we now call abbesses were once called deaconesses, that is, ministers rather than mothers. The word deacon itself means minister or servant, and deaconesses were named for the ministerial function of their service rather than their rank. This is in accord with both the words and the example of the Lord: "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant," he said, and "For which is greater, he that sitteth at table or he that serveth? Is not he that sitteth at table? But I am in the midst of you, as he that serveth," and "Even as the Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister."66 So, when Jerome objected to the use of the term abbot, knowing how many gloried in the name, he relied on the authority of the Lord. Commenting on the phrase, "Crying, 'Abba, Father,'" in Paul's Letter to the Galatians, he said:

Abba is the Hebrew word for father . . . and the Lord said that only God should be called father. I do not understand, then, how we can use that term in monasteries, of ourselves or of someone else. The Lord also told us not to swear oaths, so if we do not swear oaths, we should not call any man father. If we understand father otherwise, we will have to think otherwise about swearing oaths.67

The Phoebe whom Saint Paul commended to the Romans was certainly one of these early deaconesses:

64 1 Tim. 5:11–15.

65 Epistulae 4.11.

66 Matt. 23:11; Luke 22:27; Matt. 20:28.

67 Commentarii in Epistulam ad Galatas, 2.4.451. Paul's phrase is in Gal. 4:6. Cf. also

Matt. 23:9 and 5:34.

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I commend to you Phoebe, our sister, who is in the ministry of the church in Cenchrae, that you receive her in the Lord as becometh saints and that you assist her in whatsoever business she shall have need of you. For she also hath assisted many, and myself also.68

In their commentaries on this passage, both Cassiodorus and Claudius assert that Phoebe was indeed a deaconess of her church. Cassiodorus says:

He means she was a deaconess of her mother church, an ofﬁce which still exists today in parts of the Greek world as a kind of training. In that church deaconesses are allowed to perform baptisms.

And Claudius:

The passage tells us on apostolic authority that women also may be ordained in the ministry of the Church. Phoebe had such an ofﬁce in the church of Cenchrae, and the Apostle praises her highly.69

When Paul writes to Timothy about the ranks of the Church ministry, he discusses these women along with deacons and holds them to a similar moral standard:

Deacons should be chaste, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of ﬁlthy lucre, holding the mystery of faith in a pure conscience. And let them also ﬁrst be proved, and so let them minister, having no crime. The women also should be chaste, not slanderers but sober and faithful in all things. Let deacons be the husbands of one wife, who rule their children and their own houses well; for they that have ministered well shall purchase to themselves a good degree and much conﬁdence in the faith which is in Christ Jesus.70

68 Rom. 16:1–2.

69 Abelard cites these passages to the same purpose in his Sermon 31. Cassiodorus' commentary is now lost, Claudius' not published.

70 1 Tim. 3:8–13.

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Deacons must not be double-tongued, he says, and deaconesses not be slanderers; deacons must not be given to much wine and deaconesses must be sober—all the other details he summarizes as faithful in all things. Deacons, like bishops, cannot have been married more than once, nor can deaconesses, as we noted before:

In fact, Paul is more precise in his requirements of deaconesses than he is in his requirements of deacons or of bishops. A deaconess must have testimony for her good works and must have offered hospitality, but not a deacon. Of a deaconess he says if she have washed the saints' feet and so on, but says nothing of a deacon or bishop beyond their having no crime. A deaconess should be blameless, he insists, but he adds that she should have diligently followed every good work. He also is cautious in stipulating her age—no less than threescore years—eager for her to have a general authority and command respect for her years as well as her mode of life.

[For a similar reason, the Lord set Peter over all the other disciples despite his greater love for John. There is less resentment at the preferment of an elder: we are more willing to obey him since his precedence derives not only from his character but from the passage of time and the order of nature itself. As Jerome says of the choice of Peter:

A single one is chosen, one head appointed to reduce the chance of schism. But why wasn't it John? Well, Peter was the elder, and deference was paid to age to keep someone who was young—still almost a boy, in fact—from being preferred to men of advanced years. The good master forestalled quarrels among his students, as he should, giving them no cause to envy the youngster whom he loved.71

Similarly, the abbot in the Lives of the Fathers transferred seniority from a younger to an elder brother even though the younger had joined the 71 Contra Jovinianum 1.26.

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monastery ﬁrst: the elder would take it hard, he was afraid, if his younger brother in the ﬂesh took precedence over him.72 The abbot remembered how even the apostles were annoyed when two among them seemed to have gained some privilege with Christ at their mother's request, especially since one of them was younger than the rest, in fact, this same John of whom we spoke just now.]73 [Saint Paul was certainly careful about the appointment of deaconesses, but he also showed remarkable concern for widows of the holy calling in general and how to isolate them from temptation. Just after "Honor widows who are widows indeed," he wrote:

But if any widow have children or grandchildren, let her learn ﬁrst to govern her own house and to make a return of duty to her parents. . . . But if any man have not care of his own and especially those of his house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an inﬁdel.74

Here he looked to both a human need and the needs of the religious life at once. No woman should leave her children in poverty on the pretext of her calling: her feeling for them could well interfere with her vows, causing her to look back or even leading her into sacrilege if she steals from the community to provide for her own. And so, he added this necessary caution, that before they pass to true widowhood and become entirely free for their service to God, women with family ties must ﬁrst return the duty they owe their parents; that is, they must provide for their children out of the same obligation that had bound their parents to provide for them. While his emphasis was on their religious life, with instructions to "continue in prayer night and day," nonetheless he remained concerned with their material needs: "If any of the faithful have widows," he said, "let him minister to them and let not the Church be charged, that there may be sufﬁcient for them that are widows indeed."75 In other words, "If a widow has family with the means to provide for her, it must do so, in order to allow the public funds of the Church to provide for the needs of others." If a family is reluctant to fulﬁll this obligation, it then should be compelled, upon the authority of Paul. This is not only a matter of a widow's needs but also of her honor: "Honor widows," he said, "who are widows indeed."]

72 See Vitae Patrum 5.10.113.

73 See Matt. 20:24 ff. and Mark 10:35 ff.

74 1 Tim. 5:4–8.

75 1 Tim. 5:5, 15.

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[We also can count among these women both the one whom Paul called "mother" and the one whom John called "lady" out of respect for her calling. Writing to the Romans, Paul said, "Greetings to Rufus, chosen of the Lord, and to his mother and mine," and in his second letter John wrote, "To the lady chosen of God and to her children. . . . I ask thee, my lady, . . . that we love one another."76 Jerome later followed John's precedent when, writing to Eustochium, a virgin of your calling, he addressed her without embarrassment as "my lady"—indeed why should he have been embarrassed at all? "I write to you as 'My lady Eustochium,'" he said, "because, surely, I ought to call my Lord's own bride 'my lady.'"]77

[Later in the letter, he set the privilege of the religious life above every earthly glory:

Avoid contact with married women. Avoid visiting the mansions of the rich. Avoid looking upon what you once despised when you chose to be a virgin. . . . If there is a crush to greet the emperor's wife, why insult your Husband and join it? You are the bride of God: why fawn over the wife of man? Learn a bit of holy pride in this and know that you are better than they.]78

Jerome also wrote about the heavenly blessedness and earthly dignity belonging to virgins consecrated to God:

We learn from scripture and the ways of the Church the blessedness virginity has in heaven and the special merit subsisting in those who have been consecrated in the spirit. All believers receive an equal gift of grace, and all glory alike in the blessings of the sacraments, but they have something of their own beyond all others. Out of the pure and holy ﬂock of the Church, these holier and purer victims come, chosen by the Holy Spirit for their merits and of their will, to be offered by the high priest on the very altar of God. . . . Virginity, then, has what others do not have, a special grace and the joy of its own privileged consecration.79

76 Rom. 16:13; 2 John 1:1–5.

77 Epistulae 22.2.

78 Epistulae 22.16.

79 Cf. Virginitatis Laus 1, once attributed to Jerome.

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Except when there is imminent danger of death, the consecration of virgins is reserved for only a few days in the year—Epiphany, Pentecost, and the nativities of the apostles—and only a high priest, that is, a bishop, may sanctify them or their veils. Monks, on the other hand, may be blessed at any time whatever, and they receive their own religious garments, that is, their cowls, from their abbot, even though monks are of the same order as nuns and the male sex has a higher dignity. Priests and those of lesser rank may be ordained throughout the fasts of Ember Days, and bishops may be ordained on any Sunday. The consecration of virgins, though, is as precious as it is rare, claiming the leading festivals for itself, when all the Church rejoices in their virtue, as the Psalmist said: "After her shall virgins be brought to the king. . . . They shall be brought with gladness and rejoicing . . . into the temple of the king."80 [It is also said that the apostle and evangelist Matthew wrote about their consecration, as one reads in his Passion, which tells of his martyrdom in defense of their consecration and their calling.81 No apostle, though, has left us a written blessing either for clerics or for monks.]

The religious life of women alone is marked with the name of sanctity, for nuns are known as sanctimoniales. As women are the weaker sex, their power is more perfect and ﬁnds greater favor with God. For this we have the testimony of the Lord himself, who urged

Saint Paul in all his weakness on to win the crown: "My grace is sufﬁcient for thee," he said, "for power is made perfect in weakness."82

Through the same apostle in the same letter [—the ﬁrst to the Corinthians—]83 he spoke as if to praise the weaker members of his body, that is to say, the weaker members of the Church:

Those members of the body that seem to be the weaker are also the more necessary, and what we think to be the less honorable members of the body, we adorn with more abundant honor. Those that are our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness, for our comely parts are not in need.

But God hath tempered the body together, giving the more 80 Ps. 44:15–16.

81 Cf. Acta Sancti Matthaei 2.19.

82 2 Cor. 12:9.

83 The citation "in the same letter" is an error and the phrase "the ﬁrst to the Corinthians" was apparently added to correct it.

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abundant honor to what was in need, that there might be no schism in the body, but its members might be mutually careful one for another.84

It is in the weakness of the female sex, debased by sin and nature, that the grace of God fulﬁlled these words completely. Look around at each of the conditions of the sex—at virgins and widows, married women, yes, but also at the hatefulness of whores—and you see the grace of Christ most fully there, in accord with what the Lord and his Apostle have said: "So shall the last be ﬁrst and the ﬁrst last" and "Where sin abounded, grace did more abound."85 If we look for the beneﬁts of that grace and the honor shown to women at the origin of the world, we ﬁnd that, in one respect at least, the creation of woman had a higher dignity than that of man: woman was created inside Paradise but man outside. Paradise, then, is women's natural home, as women should take note, and the celibate life of Paradise more ﬁt for them to lead. As Ambrose wrote in his book on Paradise:

God took the man he made and set him in Paradise. . . . You see how man already existed when God took him and set him in Paradise. . . . Note then that man was created outside

Paradise but woman inside. . . . In the inferior place man is found to be superior and woman, who was created in the superior place, is found to be inferior.86

[Moreover, the Lord restored Eve in Mary before he repaired Adam in Christ—as sin began in woman, so grace began in woman and the privilege of virginity ﬂowered again—and the form of women's holy calling was revealed in Anna and Mary before the pattern of men's religious life was set by the apostles or by John.] But if, beyond Eve, we look at Deborah, Judith, Esther and their power, we will surely feel ashamed for the powerful male sex. Deborah, a judge of the people of the Lord, gave battle when the courage of men failed; she conquered her enemies, freed her people, and won a mighty triumph. Judith went unarmed and alone against a 84 1 Cor. 12:22.

85 Matt. 20:16; Rom. 5:20.

86 De Paradiso 4.24. Cf. also Abelard's hymn "After the Virgin's Highest Honor," which also makes reference to Deborah, Judith, the anonymous mother in the Book of Maccabees, and Jephtha's daughter.

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fearsome army with only her maidservant at her side; she cut off the head of Holofernes with his own sword, destroyed the entire army, and set her people free. At the secret prompting of her spirit, Esther married a pagan king against the precept of the law; but she thwarted the designs of Haman and the edict of the king, and, in almost an instant, turned the import of the cruel decree into its opposite.87 That David could overcome Goliath with no more than a sling and stone is set down as a mark of his great virtue. The widow

Judith, on the other hand, went out against the enemy with not even sling and stone, in fact with no weapon at all, and she did battle.

Esther freed her people with only a word—her enemies fell by a plot of their own devising—and her deed is remembered every year in a joyous festival among the Jews, something no act of a man has ever achieved, no matter how splendid it was.

And who has read the story in the Book of Maccabees of the mother of seven sons and does not marvel?88 There was no equal to her constancy when the godless King Antiochus caught them all and tried in vain to force them to eat pork, which the law did not allow. Forgetting her maternal nature and blind to human feeling, she kept only the Lord before her eyes. One by one she sent her sons ahead, urging them all to win the sacred crown; and one by one she triumphed in their martyrdom until at last she won a martyrdom of her own. Throughout all of the Old Testament we ﬁnd nothing to compare with the constancy of this woman. The great Seducer, violent to the last against Job, thought human nature weak in the face of death: "Skin for skin," he said, "and all that a man hath he will give for his life."89 All of us shrink so naturally from death that to defend one limb we will often risk another, deterred by nothing if it will save our lives. But she could face the loss of all she had, of her sons' lives and her own, rather than offend against the law. And what was the transgression forced upon her? Renouncing God?

Burning incense before idols? No—the only thing demanded of them was that they eat some meat in contravention of the law.

Let me ask my brothers and my fellow monks, who every day gape after meat in violation of the Rule that governs their calling:

What will you have to say to the constancy of this woman? Are you 87 For the story of Deborah, see Judg. 4:4 ff.; for Judith, see Jth. 8 ff.; for Esther and the festival of Purim, see Est. 2:5 ff.

88 See 2 Macc. 7.

89 Job 2:29.

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really so entirely without shame that you can hear her story and not blush? Remember the Lord's reproach of unbelievers, that the queen of the south shall rise in judgment and condemn this generation,90 and know, my brothers, that even more will the constancy of this woman rise in judgment against you; for her deeds were so much greater than the queen's, and you are bound more strictly by your religious vows. Her virtue was tested in such a struggle that her martyrdom deserved the honor of a Mass and solemn lessons in the Church, something never granted to any of the holy who died before the coming of the Lord.91 [As the Book of Maccabees relates, however, the venerable scribe Eleazar had already won the crown of martyrdom for much the same reason.92 But it did not deserve commemoration in a feast because women's virtue is more honorable and acceptable to God, that sex being naturally weaker, as we said, and in this martyrdom no woman was involved. It is as though it were considered no great matter for the stronger sex to endure with strength. Hence, scripture praises the woman all the more:

Now the mother was to be admired beyond measure and worthy to be remembered by good men, who beheld her seven sons slain in the space of one day and bore it with a good courage, for the hope that she had in God. And she bravely exhorted every one of them . . . being ﬁlled with wisdom and joining a man's heart to a woman's thought.]93 The daughter of Jephtha, too, his only one, deserves a place in the praise of virgins.94 Rather than see her father break his word and defraud God's grace of the sacriﬁce he promised, she offered her own throat to her father's knife and urged him on to cut it. Imagine, then, what she would have done if she were faced with the struggle of the martyrs and ever forced by inﬁdels to deny God. If asked about Christ, could she ever say, "I know him not," as Peter did, who at the time was already prince of the apostles?95 Her father released her for two months, but when the time had passed, she

90 Matt. 12:42.

91 Cf. also the Seventh Letter.

92 Cf. 2 Macc. 7:18 ff.

93 2 Macc. 7:20–21.

94 See Judg. 11:30–40; also cf. the Second Letter, and Abelard's "Lament of the Virgins of Israel for the Daughter of Jephtha."

95 Luke 22:57.

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returned to him to meet her death willingly and unafraid—she even demanded it. Her father repented of his foolish vow, but she saved him from a lie in her supreme devotion to the truth. If she could not bear such a lapse in her father, how much would she have despised it in herself? If this was her love for her earthly father, what must it have been for her Father in heaven? By her death she kept Jephtha's word intact and insured that God would have his sacriﬁce. And so, the courage of the girl deserved the memorial it received, as every year the daughters of Israel assemble to commemorate her death with solemn hymns and lament her suffering with pious tears.

But to pass over other examples, was anything more essential to our redemption and the salvation of the world than the female sex, which gave birth to the Savior? The woman who dared approach

Saint Hilarion defended herself with this special honor: "Why avert your eyes?" she said, "why run away? Do not look on me as a woman but as a wretched being. This sex, remember, gave birth to the Savior."96 Can anything compare with the glory this sex won in the mother of the Lord? If he had wished, the Redeemer could well have taken his bodily form from a man, as he formed the ﬁrst woman from the body of a man, but he brought the grace of his humility to the honor of the weaker sex. He also could have been born from another part of her body and a worthier part than where other men are born, that is to say, from the place where they are conceived. But to the incomparable honor of the weaker body, he consecrated the genitals of woman by his birth far more than the genitals of man by circumcision.

But to leave aside this special honor of virgins, let me write, as we proposed, of the rest of womankind.97 Consider the grace which the coming of Christ brought to Elizabeth, who was married, or to Anna, who was a widow.98 While her husband Zachariah remained afﬂicted with the muteness he incurred through his lack of faith,

96 Jerome, Vita Sancti Hilarionis 13.

97 It is hard to reconcile this transition with the text of the letter as it has been transmitted: the immediately preceding subject is not in fact virgins. The indication of a proposal to treat the "rest of womankind" may refer to the earlier division of women into the various "conditions" of virgin, married woman, etc., but the paragraph begins a larger section on the gift of prophecy among women, which may derive from a work originally separate in conception.

98 For Elizabeth, see Luke 1:5 ff.; for Anna, Luke 2:25 ff.

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Elizabeth felt her child leap inside her womb as soon as Mary came to greet her. Filled with the Holy Spirit, she proclaimed her prophecy about Mary's conception and so proved herself more than a prophet; for immediately she knew that the virgin had conceived and urged her then to magnify the Lord. In her the gift of prophecy was more complete than it was in John, for Elizabeth could recognize the Son of God from the time of his conception while John revealed him only after he was born. As we called Mary Magdalene the apostle of apostles, so the title prophet of prophets belongs to Elizabeth [or maybe to the widow Anna, who was treated more fully above].

And if we extend the grace of prophecy to include the pagans, we must also bring the Sibyl to the fore and have her reveal her prophesies of Christ.99 In any comparison of prophets—including Isaiah, who, as Jerome said, was more an evangelist than a prophet100— woman far surpasses man in this grace as well. In his treatise against ﬁve heresies, Augustine says:

Let us also hear what the Sybil has to say: "The Lord has offered another to be worshipped by men of faith." And:

"Know that your Lord is the Son of God." Elsewhere she calls the Son of God the symbolum, that is, Counsel or the Counselor. And the prophet says: "They will call his name

Wonderful, Counselor."101

[In Book 18 of the City of God, the same Father Augustine writes:

Some say the Sibyl of Erythrae was prophesying at that time . . . though others believe it was the Sibyl of Cumae. . . . One passage contains a poem of twenty-seven lines . . . which in Latin translation runs:

Justice will soak the earth with its standard; Enduring forever, the king will come, Sent in the ﬂesh to judge the world at its end. . . .

99 There were several Sibyls, prophetesses of great authority and fame installed at various oracular centers throughout the pagan world. In the second or third century

Christians took up the practice of composing Sibylline prophecies of Christ after the fact, which were taken as genuine by some Church Fathers.

100 See the Prologue to his Commentarii in Isaiam Prophetam.

101 Adversus Quinque Hereses, chapter 3, no longer considered to be by Augustine.

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The initial letters of the lines yield an acrostic in Greek reading, "Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Savior" . . . Lactantius also introduces a Sibylline prophecy of Christ . . . :

He will later fall into the hands of unbelievers, who will beat him with their unclean hands and spit on him with their poisoned spittle. He will offer his back to their blows in meekness and endure their beatings in silence—no one may learn what word he speaks in hell or whence he comes—and he will be crowned with thorns.

They have given him vinegar to drink and gall to eat, spreading for him their inhospitable table. You have not known your God, you ignorant nation, but have mocked him with the minds of mortal men. You have crowned him with thorns and have fed him with gall. But the veil of the temple will be rent, and at midday it will be as night for three hours, and he will fall into death for three days.

But returning from hell, he will come to the light and be revealed at the beginning of his resurrection.]102

[Unless I am mistaken, our greatest poet, Virgil, had also heard a prophecy of the Sibyl, which he then recorded in his fourth Eclogue. It foretold the miraculous birth soon to take place in the consulship of Pollio under Augustus Caesar, the birth of a child, sent to earth from heaven to take away the sins of the world and establish, as it were, a whole new age. His source, he says, was the prophecy of Cumaean song, that is, the Sibyl of Cumae, and he writes as if to call upon the world to rejoice in the birth of the child, in comparison to which all else seems low and mean:

Now I would lift my song to a loftier plane, For the lowly woodland shrubs do not please all. . . .

The ﬁnal age foretold in Cumaean song Has come, the cycle of time begins again:

The Virgin returns and the realm of Saturn, A child, new and wondrous, descends from heaven. . . .]103

102 De Civitate Dei 18.23 ff., citing Lactantius, Divina Institutio 4.18 ff. The subject of the acrostic poem is the last judgment, and Augustine includes the poem in its entirety.

The manuscripts of this letter, the translator is happy to say, include only its ﬁrst three lines.

103 Eclogues 4.1–7, the so-called Messianic Eclogue, widely held among the Fathers of the Church to be a Christian prophecy. The section seems to be an interpolation within an interpolation, since the comments that follow it in the text refer to the earlier Sibylline prophecy cited by Lactantius.

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[See each thing the Sibyl says, how completely she embraces Christian teaching about Christ. She includes his humanity and his divinity, his ﬁrst and second coming, his ﬁrst and second judgment—that is, the Passion in which he was unjustly judged and the majesty in which he will justly judge the world—his descent to hell and his resurrection. In this, she seems to surpass not only the prophets but the evangelists as well, who actually wrote little about the descent to hell.] And who does not marvel at the woman of Samaria and her private conversation with the Lord?104 The apostles themselves were amazed when he spoke to her alone, carefully instructing her, a gentile and an unbeliever, rebuking her for the number of her husbands, and even asking for something to drink, which he never asked of anyone else. The apostles come offering him food they have bought:

"Rabbi, eat," they say, but he replies, "I have food to eat which you know not," and their offerings are not accepted. But he asks her for something to drink, while she even would decline his gracious favor:

How dost thou, being a Jew, ask of me to drink, who am a Samaritan woman? For the Jews do not communicate with the Samaritans. . . . Thou hast nothing wherein to draw and the well is deep.105

I ask you then, What is this grace shown to the weaker sex, that he who has given life to all men should now seek water from this woman? Does it not plainly indicate that the weaker the virtue of women is by nature, the more it is pleasing to him, and the more astonishing their virtue, the deeper his thirst for their salvation?

When he asks the woman for something to drink, he indicates that his thirst can be satisﬁed best by the salvation of women. "I have food to eat which you know not," he says and adds, "My food is to do the will of my Father,"106 as if the salvation of the weaker sex is the Father's particular will. Nicodemus, ruler of the Jews, also had a private conversation with the Lord, coming in secret for instruction about salvation, but it never bore the same fruit.107 For the spirit of prophecy ﬁlled this woman, and she proclaimed that Christ had

104 See John 4:7 ff.

105 John 4:9–11.

106 John 4:34, in which the Vulgate reads "the will of him who sent me."

107 See John 3:1–21.

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come to the Jews and soon would come to the gentiles as well: "I know that the Messiah cometh, who is called Christ," she said;

"therefore, when he is come, he will tell us all things." And at her words, a crowd came from the city and believed in Christ, and he stayed with them two days, despite his telling the disciples, "Go ye not into the way of the gentiles, and into the city of the Samaritans enter ye not."108 John elsewhere says that there were gentiles who had come to worship in Jerusalem and sent word to Christ through Andrew and Philip that they wanted to see him.109 He does not say, however, that any were admitted or were granted the abundance of Christ that this woman received, even though they sought it and she did not. Christ's preaching to the gentiles began with her: she both turned to the faith herself and was the means through which he brought others to believe.110 The Magi came to Christ as they were guided by the star but are not said to have brought any others to him.111 But she ran to her city to announce his coming and won many converts from her people, and in doing so she won herself grace from Christ among the gentiles.

[Throughout the pages of the Old Testament and Gospel, we will ﬁnd that the greatest miracles of God's grace, the miracles of raising the dead, all were performed especially for women, either at their request or on their bodies. First, we read of the men Elijah and Elisha raised from death and restored at the entreaties of their mothers. And the Lord himself also performed this miracle for women, resurrecting the son of a widowed mother, the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, and Lazarus at the request of his sisters. And so, the Apostle wrote to the Hebrews, "Women received their dead raised to life again," since on her return to life, the girl took back the body she had, as those women took back the bodies of the dead men they had mourned.112 The grace the Lord has always shown to women is clear, ﬁrst, in his resurrection of them and their kinsmen and, later, in his own resurrection where he exalted women, as we said, by appearing earliest to them. Women were found worthy because of their natural compassion toward the Lord, amid a people who had persecuted him. While men were leading him out to cruciﬁxion, their women followed bewailing and 108 John 4:25; Matt. 10:5.

109 See John 12:20 ff.

110 See John 4:41.

111 See Matt. 2:12.

112 This section closely paraphrases a section in the Second Letter; see p. 66 and the references there.

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lamenting him, as Luke has said. And he turned to them in mercy and in pity, even at the moment of his Passion, and told them how to escape the destruction he foretold:

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me, but weep for yourselves and your children. For behold, the days shall come wherein they will say, "Blessed are the barren and the wombs that have not borne and the paps that have not given suck." Then they shall begin to say to the mountains, "Fall upon us," and to the hills,

"Cover us." For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?113

Matthew explains how the wife of Pilate, Christ's most unjust judge, worked faithfully for his release:

As he was sitting in the place of judgment, his wife sent to him, saying, "Have thou nothing to do with that just man, for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.114

And while the Lord was preaching, a woman from the crowd lifted her voice in praise of him, saying: "Blessed is the womb that bore thee and the paps that gave thee suck." Although her declaration was most true, still she was found worthy to hear his holy correction: "Yea rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it."115]

[Among all of Christ's apostles John alone was called beloved of the Lord, but John himself writes, "Jesus loved Martha and her sister Mary and Lazarus."116 The same apostle who records that he alone had the privilege of being beloved of the Lord distinguished these women with the privilege he ascribes to no other apostle. If he included Lazarus in this honor, he nonetheless put the women's names before their brother's because he believed that they came ﬁrst in love.]117

113 Luke 23:28–31. The manuscripts quote only through "wombs that have not borne," indicating the remainder by "etc." The preceding section closely paraphrases a section in the Fourth Letter; see p. 99.

114 Matt. 27:19.

115 Luke 11:27–28.

116 John 11:5.

117 The preceding two paragraphs are very spottily preserved in the manuscripts, only two of the surviving seven retaining them in full.

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To return to women of the Christian faith,118 we ﬁnally must speak in wonder and must wonder in our speech about the mercy

God has shown even to common whores. Was anything more abject than the early life of Mary Magdalene or Mary the Egyptian?119 But afterward God's grace raised them both in honor and in merit, the ﬁrst remaining all her days in the communal life of the apostles, as I've mentioned,120 and the second contending beyond the bounds of human virtue in the solitary struggle of the anchorites. We then can see how much in both these modes of monastic life the virtue of women excels, and how the Lord's words to unbelievers apply also to men of faith: "The harlots go before you into the kingdom of God." In the differences of sex and way of life, the last shall be ﬁrst and the ﬁrst last.121

Women embraced the words of Christ and the guidance of the apostles with such a love for chastity that, to preserve the integrity of their minds and bodies, they offered themselves to God in martyrdom and, now victorious with a double crown, sought to follow the Lamb, the Bridegroom of virgins, wherever he might go.122 This perfection is rare in men, but we know it is common among women.

There even have been some who have so longed for this privilege of the ﬂesh that they laid violent hands upon themselves to preserve the purity they vowed to God and to come as virgins to their Virgin

Bridegroom. And God so loves their devotion that he saved a throng of pagans from the ﬁres of Mount Etna, when they sought the protection of Saint Agatha's veil.123 Never do we hear of a monk's cowl winning grace like this. We may read of the Jordan River being divided at the touch of Elijah's cloak, allowing him and Elisha to cross over on dry ground;124 but a virgin's veil saved a throng of unbelievers and turned them to the pathway to heaven. It also commends the dignity of holy women, that they are consecrated with the 118 Implying a direct transition, perhaps, from the Sibyls and the woman of Samaria.

119 Mary the Egyptian (possibly of ﬁfth-century date) was a prostitute of Alexandria who, after her conversion, lived as a solitary penitent in the wilderness.

120 It is not clear where in the letter this is.

121 Matt. 21:31; cf. Matt. 20:16

122 Cf. Apoc. 14:4.

123 Agatha was said to have been martyred in 251 in Sicily. Her veil was taken several times from her tomb and carried in procession as protection against eruptions of Mt.

Etna.

124 See 4 Kings 2:8 ff.

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words, "He has espoused me with his ring: I am his bride." These are the words of Saint Agnes, and virgins of her calling are wed to Christ in them.125

Now if anyone would search among the pagans for the dignity and form of your religious life, there are many examples that can be found and used for your encouragement. For among the pagans, as among the Jews, there were many early forms of institutions which the Church retained but transmuted for the better.

From the Synagogue, the Church derived the clerical ranks from doorkeeper to bishop, the use of tonsure, the fasts of Ember Days, and the sacriﬁce of unleavened bread, not to mention the ornaments of priestly vestments and other sacraments and ceremonies of dedication. From pagans who converted to the faith, the Church adopted the secular ranks of kings and other rulers, some ranks of ecclesiastical authority, many legal decrees and philosophical teachings, as well as a scrupulous form of bodily cleanliness and self-restraint. Hence, where once there had been ﬂamens and archﬂamens, bishops and archbishops now preside, and temples once dedicated to pagan idols now are consecrated to the Lord and the memory of saints.

The privilege of virginity, too, ﬂourished among the pagans in the days when the law enforced marriage among the Jews,126 and the purity of the ﬂesh was so valued among them that many women would dedicate themselves to the celibate life in their temples. Jerome, then, writes in his commentary on Paul's Letter to the Galatians:

What should we do, then, when Juno has her Women-ofOne-Husband to hold against us, and Vesta has her Virgins, and other idols their other women of self-restraint?127

[What he calls "Women-of-One-Husband" and "Virgins" are our monastic women, those who have been married and those who are virgins; for the word "monastic," meaning "solitary," derives from monos, meaning

125 The words are from the response to the seventh Lesson of the Feast of St. Agnes in the Roman Breviary. The manuscripts preserve a second version of this paragraph, although with a different conclusion, as the penultimate section of the letter.

126 See Deut. 25:5.

127 Commentarii in Epistulam ad Galatas 3.6.528.

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"one."]128 In his ﬁrst book against Jovinian, he also sets out many examples of chastity and self-restraint among pagan women, and concludes:

I know I have made a long list of women . . . but it was to allow those women who despise the Christian faith at least to learn some chastity from the pagans.129

He so praised self-restraint that it seems as if the Lord particularly approved of purity of the ﬂesh among all peoples and had exalted it even among some unbelievers by rewarding them with his gifts and manifesting miracles through their virtues:

There is the Sibyl of Cumae, the Sibyl of Erythrae, and eight others. Varro claims that there were ten in all, each distinguished by her virginity and each rewarded for it by the power of prophecy.

And:

To vindicate her chastity, the Vestal Virgin Claudia is said to have drawn a large vessel, which thousands of men could not move, simply with her girdle alone.130

[Sidonius, bishop of Clermont, writes in his preface:

This was no Tanaquil, this was no Lucretia, This was no Vestal, who, against the tide of Albula,

Could draw a vessel with her virgin's hair.131

Augustine, City of God, Book 22:

128 This comment is in apparent response to an earlier manuscript corruption. The word univiras, "Women-of-One-Husband," had prompted the copyist's error of univirgines for virgines, "virgins." The difﬁcult form univirgines—"Single-virgins"?

"Women-of-One-Virginity"?—would then demand some sort of explanation that also could apply to univiras.

129 Contra Jovinianum 1.6.

130 Contra Jovinianum 1.41.

131 Sidonius Apollinaris, Poem 24.39–43. Tanaquil and Lucretia were heroines of early

Rome; Albula was another name for the Tiber.

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The claims of pagan miracles held up against our martyrs will redound to our advantage in the end. Among the great miracles of their gods is one that Varro relates about a Vestal Virgin whose chastity was falsely challenged. She is said to have drawn water from the Tiber in a sieve and carried it to her judges without losing a drop. But who was it who kept the water in the sieve . . . despite its open holes? . . . Cannot Almighty God . . . move the heaviness of an earthly body so that the quickened body may exist in whatever element the quickening spirit wishes?]132

It is not strange at all that God should honor the chastity even of unbelievers with these miracles or allow it to be exalted through the agency of demons: it could only inspire the faithful all the more toward what they see is exalted among unbelievers. We know that the grace of prophecy was bestowed on the ofﬁce, not the person, of Caiaphas,133 and that even spurious apostles might occasionally succeed in working wonders134—again, through their ofﬁce, not their persons. Why then should it seem strange if God should grant—not to the persons of unbelieving women but to the virtue of their selfrestraint—the exculpation of an innocent virgin and the disproof of a false charge against her? The love of self-restraint is a good even among inﬁdels, as respect for the bond of marriage is God's gift among all peoples. It is not strange if God should honor his gifts— his gifts and not the error of unbelief—through the signs he sends to unbelievers, especially when it also means that innocence will be vindicated, wickedness defeated, and all people urged to extol this good: that even unbelievers sin the less, the more they refrain from pleasures of the ﬂesh. So, Jerome is right to conclude in his book against the heretic Jovinian that what does not surprise him in a Christian makes him blush to ﬁnd among the pagans. The power enjoyed by pagan rulers—no matter if they do not use it well— their love of justice, the clemency they derive from natural law, or any of the other things that rulers ought to have—who would deny that these are gifts of God? Is a good no longer a good because it may be mixed with evil? Does not Augustine argue and does not reason agree that evils cannot exist except in a good nature?135

132 De Civitate Dei 22.11.

133 See John 11:49–52.

134 Cf. Matt. 24:24.

135 See, e.g., De Civitate Dei 12.6.

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Would anyone condemn the thought of Horace—"Out of a love of virtue do the good hate sin"136—or the miracles of healing the blind and lame which Suetonius says Vespasian performed,137 or what

Saint Gregory reportedly did for the soul of the emperor Trajan?138

Men can ﬁnd a pearl in the mire and tell the wheat from the chaff; and God cannot be ignorant of his gifts, even when they are joined with unbelief, nor can he hate anything he has made. The more brightly they glow with his signs, the more he shows that they are his, and that what is his can never be corrupted by any depravity of men. If this is how he shows himself to unbelievers, what must he be in the hope of all believers?

The chastity women vowed in pagan temples was held in high enough esteem to have called down a terrible penalty on its violation. Juvenal writes about it in his satire against Crispinus—

With whom a sacred Vestal recently lay, And soon she'll lay again, her blood still hot,

Beneath the earth139 —as does Augustine in Book 3 of the City of God:

The ancient Romans used to bury alive . . . any Vestal Virgin proved guilty of sexual misconduct. They punished adulterous wives, certainly, but not with death, so much more heavily did they avenge what they considered a divine sanctuary than a human bed.140

The care that Christian rulers devote to protecting your chastity likewise indicates the sanctity with which it is regarded. The law of the emperor Justinian provides:

136 Epistles 1.16.52.

137 Vitae Caesarum, Vespasian 7.

138 As reported, e.g., by Paul the Deacon, Vita Gregorii 27, and John the Deacon, Vitae

Gregorii 2.44, Gregory was so moved by an example of Trajan's kindness toward a widow that he prayed for the soul of the pagan emperor to be spared the pains of hell. His prayers, it seems, were answered—at least to judge from the testimony of Dante's Paradiso 20.44 ff.

139 Satires 4.8–9.

140 De Civitate Dei 3.5.

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If anyone dares, I do not say to rape, but merely to make an attempt upon the holy virgins with a view toward matrimony, let him be sentenced to death.141

The sanction of the Church, which stresses penance and not death, is also unambiguous in the severity with which it responds to any lapses on your part. In the words of the decree of Pope Innocent,

Chapter 13, addressed to Bishop Victricius of Rouen:

If those who are spiritually married to Christ and veiled by a priest either openly marry or secretly become corrupted afterwards, they shall not be admitted to a course of penance, unless the one to whom they had been joined has already departed this life.142

And those who have not taken the veil but have consistently asserted a wish to remain virgins will undergo a course of penance, even though they have not been veiled, because their vow to the Lord remains intact. Now, if it is the practice among men that a contract made in good faith cannot be broken for any reason, how much less can a promise made to God be broken without some penalty?

And if, as the apostle Paul has said, those who have left their widowhood for a second marriage are to be condemned "because they have made void their ﬁrst faith,"143 how much more should those virgins be condemned who have not kept the faith of their earlier vow? As Pelagius says to the daughter of Mauritius:

Adultery against Christ incurs more guilt than adultery against a husband. The Roman Church, then, properly has decreed a sentence for this crime that is severe enough to judge them hardly ﬁt for penance who have polluted with lust a body sanctiﬁed to God.144

If we turn now to consider the Doctors of the Church, the diligent attention and the love they have always shown devoted women, we

141 Codex Iustinianus 1.3.5.

142 Epistula 2 to Victricius, chapter 13.

143 1 Tim. 5:12.

144 From the work known as Virginitatis Laus, Praise of Virginity, surviving under the names of various authors but not Pelagius. See Muckle 1955, 278 n. 99.

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ﬁnd that, like the Lord and the apostles, they embraced women's devotion with enthusiasm, continually seeking to foster and advance their religious life through various forms of teaching and encouragement. I will leave aside the rest and bring only the most important to the fore, namely, Origen, Ambrose, and Jerome. The ﬁrst, the greatest Christian philosopher, embraced the religious life of women with such zeal that he even dared lay hands upon himself, as the History of the Church records, in order to place his teaching and encouragement of women beyond any suspicion.145

And who is unaware of that great harvest of books Jerome wrote for Eustochium and Paula? In a sermon he composed for them on the assumption of the mother of the Lord, he told them, "I cannot deny you anything you ask, bound as I am by your great love. I will, then, attempt to do what you request."146 And yet we know that many of the greatest learned men, men of the highest eminence of rank and moral conduct, would write to him from the corners of the world, asking without success for some short, simple piece of writing. One of them was Saint Augustine, who in the second book of his Retractions says:

I sent two books I had written to Jerome in Bethlehem—one on the origin of the soul, the other about the dictum of the apostle James, "Whoever shall keep the whole law but offend in one point is become guilty of all"—eager to consult him about them. In the ﬁrst I knew I did not solve the question I posed, although in the second I put forward what seemed to me a likely solution; nonetheless, I wanted his opinion about both. He wrote back, glad that I had consulted him, but said that he had no time to reply. I held off publishing the books as long as he was alive, in the hope of eventually including his reply. I published them only after his death.147

Now here is a man of enormous distinction waiting for the smallest piece of writing from Jerome but never receiving it. The women, on the other hand, we know inspired book after book from him, as he sweated over his writings and transcriptions, showing them far

145 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae 6.8 ff.

146 This sermon is now attributed to Paschasius Radbertus.

147 Retractiones 2.79. The internal quotation is from Jas. 2:10.

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more respect in this than he ever showed Augustine. Perhaps it was that he embraced their virtue all the more because of their weak nature and could not bear to see them disappointed. At times his love toward women of this calling seemed to lead him in his praise of them a bit beyond the limits of the truth—as if he were speaking from his own experience when he wrote "Love knows no bounds."148 He begins his Life of Paula, in fact, by directing the reader's attention to himself:

If all the members of my body were turned to tongues and all its limbs could speak with a human voice, nothing I could say would yet be worthy of the virtues of this saintly and venerable woman.149

Jerome could recount the lives of many venerable Fathers—lives which shine with the light of miracles and far more remarkable events—but he never spoke of them with such warm praise as he spoke of the widow Paula. The beginning of his letter to Demetrias is another place where he seems to fall into excessive adulation:

Of all things I have written from my childhood to my old age, whether I have dictated it to a scribe or wrote it out with my own hand, nothing has been more difﬁcult than the present work. In writing to Demetrias, virgin of Christ and foremost in nobility and wealth in all the city of Rome, I should be called a ﬂatterer if I should attempt to say everything her virtue deserves.150

It was the greatest pleasure for Jerome to use all the verbal art at his command in rousing a weak nature to the pursuit of virtue. But in the end it is his actions, not his words, that offer the best argument for the love he had for these women, reaching the point where his very saintliness imperiled his reputation. Writing to Asella about his false friends and detractors, he said:

Some think I am wicked and overwhelmed with vice. . . .

You, however, do well to think that even bad men are good.

148 Epistulae 46.1.

149 Epistulae 108.1.

150 Epistulae 130.1.

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It is dangerous to judge another's servant and a grievous fault to speak evil of the just. . . . Some men have kissed my hand and then attacked me with a serpent's tongue. There is grief on their lips but joy in their hearts. And yet can they say that they have seen anything in me but what is proper to a Christian? 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 since I began to revere the woman, to honor her and take her in my charge for the sake of her sanctity and merit, all my virtues have deserted me, it seems. . . . Still, greet Paula and Eustochium for me: whether they will it or not, they are mine in Christ.151

We read that even the Lord incurred suspicion for associating with Mary Magdalene: the Pharisee began to doubt him in his heart, saying, "This man, if he were a prophet, would surely know who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him, that she is a sinner."152 Can it then be any wonder if, inspired by Christ's example, his followers do not hesitate to risk their reputations for the sake of souls like these? Origen, as I said, risked even more.

[Not only did the charity of the Fathers leave its mark in their teaching and encouragement of women but in their consolation of women as well. At times their compassion has been so great that, in their eagerness to console, they seemed to promise things contrary to the faith. One example is the consolation Ambrose wrote for the sisters of the emperor Valentinian. There he assured them that their brother had been saved when he had died only a catechumen, and this is at variance with the truth of the Gospels and the Catholic faith.]153 They understood how acceptable to God is the virtue of the weaker sex. Hence, many women follow the mother of the Lord in the excellence of this way of life, although only a few men have gained the grace of chastity by which they might follow the Lamb

151 Epistulae 45.1–2 p. 39.

152 Luke 7:39.

153 Cf. De Obitu Valentiani Consolatio 5.1. An orphan paragraph and a likely later comment.

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wherever he might go. There even have been women who laid violent hands upon themselves to preserve the integrity of the body they vowed to God—this is nothing we should blame in them: their martyrdom has earned them the dedication of many churches in their name. (Betrothed virgins, too—if they have decided on the monastery and have rejected their partners in favor of Christ before they have known them carnally—are allowed a freedom of action in this, a freedom which is denied to men.) And there also have been many who, inﬂamed with their desire for chastity, have dared to violate the law, to put on male attire and enter into monasteries, where they so surpassed the monks themselves in virtue that they were thought worthy of election as abbot. This was the case of Saint

Eugenia, who, with the knowledge, even the encouragement, of her bishop Saint Helenus, put on men's clothing, received baptism from her bishop, and was taken into a monastery of monks.154

My dearest sister in Christ, I have, I think, written enough in response to the ﬁrst of your requests. I have described the source and the foundation of your order and have praised its proper dignity in the hope that all of you can embrace your calling with greater warmth and in fuller recognition of its excellence. And now, God willing, for me to address the second, I must rely on your merit and your prayers.

Farewell.

154 For this episode in the life of Eugenia, see Vitae Patrum 1.7–9. The paragraph contains an alternate version of material presented earlier in the letter; see p. 160. It seems to have been set at the end of the letter as if in storage, either in anticipation of an integration of the text that never occurred or out of an editorial piety that could not discard something Abelard had written.

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ABELARD TO HELOISE

Now that I have responded to one part of your request, I will turn, God willing, to the other. You and your daughters in the spirit have asked me to provide a directive for your order that would function in its way as a rule, some written instructions which, more securely than custom, would guide you on an appropriate path. Relying in part on scripture, in part on reason, and in part on the best of our traditions, I have brought these disparate elements together to allow me to adorn God's spiritual temple, which you are, with only the choicest paintings, as it were, and out of these imperfect parts to compose a single work.1

In this, I have followed the procedure of the ancient painter Zeuxis, who worked in a material temple as I propose to work in a spiritual one. As Cicero tells the story, the people of Croton asked

Zeuxis to decorate a temple they held in high esteem with the ﬁnest paintings he could devise.2 He approached the task with care, selecting ﬁve of the town's most beautiful women to sit beside him as he worked and model their beauty for his painting. There were several good reasons for this. Zeuxis, we know, was a master in portraying women's beauty, which by nature is more elegant and delicate than men's. But as Cicero makes it a point to explain, he chose several women because he did not think he could ﬁnd one who was uniformly lovely in all her parts. Nature, he thought, had never conferred such beauty on a single woman that all her parts should have an equal share: nothing composed by nature is complete in all

1 The extant rule of the Paraclete in fact disregards many of the suggestions Abelard will make, in favor of a somewhat stricter and more traditional regime. For that rule, see Waddell 1987; for some signiﬁcant divergences from Abelard's proposals, see

McLeod 1971, 219–24.

2 See De Inventione 2.1.

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respects, as if, in bestowing all her bounties in one place, nature would have none left to bestow elsewhere.

Similarly, in my depiction of the beauty of the soul and the perfection of the bride of Christ—in which, as in a mirror of one spiritual virgin, you can all see your true ugliness or beauty—I have sought to guide your religious life by drawing from different teachings of the Fathers as well as from the best monastic customs, taking up each thought as it comes to mind and gathering them all like ﬂowers in a wreath appropriate to the sanctity of your order. I have included some instructions to monks as well as nuns, since as monastics we are united in our name and our common dedication to self-restraint, so nearly everything that has applied to monks will also be applicable to you. Selecting from all these ﬂowers, as I said, to set off the lilies of your chastity, I then should be able to depict the bride of Christ with greater warmth than Zeuxis could depict a pagan idol. For him, ﬁve women were enough to model a share of their beauty; but I will have a far greater store in the teachings of the Fathers, and trusting in the assistance of the Lord, I have no doubt that I will leave you with a far more ﬁnished work. Through it, I hope, you will be able to attain the state of the ﬁve wise virgins whom the Lord put forward to depict the virgin of Christ.3 But if I am to accomplish all I would like, I must ask the help of your prayers.

Now, brides of Christ, farewell in Christ.4

The treatise I have planned for your instruction, to detail and reinforce your religious practice and organize your worship of the Lord, is in three parts, constituting, in my judgment, the whole of monastic life, I mean, chastity, poverty, and silence. These, in turn, follow from the teaching of the Lord about girding the loins, renouncing all possessions, and refraining from idle or empty speech.5

About chastity, Saint Paul says, "The unmarried woman and the virgin thinketh on the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit." Note that he speaks of the whole body, not 3 See the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in Matt. 25:1–13.

4 The formal close of a letter introducing the main body of the text, similar to the letters accompanying the collections of sermons and hymns Abelard composed for use at the Paraclete and the Introductory Letter to The Questions of Heloise.

5 Cf. Luke 12:35, Luke 14:33, and Matt. 12:36.

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one part, for she must not succumb to licentiousness of word or deed in any part whatever. She is holy in spirit when pride does not puff her up and when consent does not lead her mind to sin like the foolish virgins of the parable, who ran off to buy their oil and were shut outside the door: although they knocked and shouted, "Lord,

Lord, open to us," they heard their Bridegroom answer, "I say to you, I know you not."6

And about poverty—We become like the apostles and follow naked a naked Christ7 not simply when we renounce all our possessions and earthly attachments for his sake but when we put our will itself behind us and live, that is, not by our own lights but at the command of our superior, obeying for the sake of Christ the one who rules in place of Christ as we would Christ himself; for as he says, "He that heareth you heareth me, and he that despiseth you despiseth me." If it so happens—though I pray it never will—that our superior lives an evil life though his teachings themselves are good, still we must not reject the word of God because of the sins of man: "Whatsoever they say to you, observe and do, but according to their works do ye not." This spiritual turning from the world to God the Lord himself describes: "Every one of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth cannot be my disciple," and "If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."8 To hate one's father, mother, and so on, is to renounce one's earthly attachments, and to hate one's life is to renounce one's will, as he says elsewhere, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."

We follow him most closely, then, when we take him for our model in his saying, "I came not to do my own will but the will of him that sent me"9—in other words, when obedience governs all our actions.

What else is self-denial but subordinating our own will and earthly attachments to the will of another? We carry our own cross, through which the world is cruciﬁed to us and we to the world,10 when we forbid ourselves our earthly desires by the free profession of our calling, and so renounce our will. What else do the worldly

6 1 Cor. 7:34; Matt. 25:11–12.

7 Cf. Jerome, Epistulae 125.20.

8 Luke 10:16; Matt. 23:3; Luke 14:33 and 14:26.

9 Luke 9:23; John 6:38.

10 Cf. Gal. 4:14.

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seek but the satisfaction of their will? What else is earthly pleasure but the fulﬁllment of that will, even when it involves us in great suffering and risk? And what else is it to bear the cross, to suffer some cruciﬁxion, but to act in a way against the will, though it seems so easy or advantageous? As the other, lesser Jesus says in Ecclesiasticus, "Go not after thy lusts, but turn away from thy own will. If thou give to thy soul her desires, she will make thee a joy to thy enemies." But when we renounce our possessions and ourselves, then truly is our property cast aside and truly do we enter on the life of the apostles, in which all things are held in common.

"The faithful had but one heart and one soul," it is written. "None said of anything he possessed that it was his own, but all things were common unto them. . . . And distribution was made to each according to his need."11 They did not have equal need nor an equal share of things, but each received according to his need—one heart in faith, for belief comes from the heart, and one soul in their mutual charity, for each wanted for the other what he wanted for himself, not seeking more for himself than for another. All things were for the common good and no one sought what was his own but only what was Christ's. There was no other way they could live without property, which consists more of desires than possessions.

And, ﬁnally, about silence—An idle or unnecessary word is the same thing as excessive speech; hence, Augustine says in the ﬁrst book of his Retractions, "I cannot call it excessive speech when what is said is needed, no matter how many words are used."12 Solomon tells us, "In excessive speech sin shall not be wanting, but he that refraineth his lips is most wise."13 Where sin shall not be wanting, we must especially beware and guard against the condition all the more when it is so dangerous and difﬁcult to avoid. This is what Saint

Benedict did, saying, "Monks should study silence at all times."14

Studying silence is something more than simply keeping silent, for study is the pointed application of the mind to accomplish a given task. We do many things in negligence or even against our will, but we cannot study a thing without acting with purpose and will.

11 Ecclus. 18:30–31; Acts 4:32–35.

12 Retractiones 1, preface.

13 Prov. 10:19.

14 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 42.

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The apostle James, however, tells us how difﬁcult it is to curb the tongue, but also how beneﬁcial it will be. "We all offend in many things," he says, but if any man offend not in word, then he is a perfect man. . . . For every nature of beasts and birds and serpents and the rest is tamed, and hath been tamed, by the nature of man, but the tongue no man can tame. . . . The tongue is indeed a small part of the body . . . but see how small a ﬁre can kindle a great wood. . . . It is a world of iniquity . . . , an unquiet evil, full of deadly poison.15

Nothing is more dangerous than poison or more to be avoided. But as poison will destroy a life, so babbling will destroy religious practice. As James says earlier, "If any man think himself to be religious, not bridling his tongue but deceiving his own heart, this man's religion is vain." And as it is written in Proverbs, "As a city that lieth open and is not compassed with walls, so is a man that cannot restrain his spirit in speech."16

I am reminded of the old man who once came to visit the abbot Anthony with a group of babbling monks. When Anthony asked him, "Father, have you found some good companions in these monks?" he answered, "Very good companions, I suppose, but it seems to me their barn still needs a door. Anyone can come into their stable and let loose the ass inside."17 It is as though our soul were tethered to the manger of the Lord, feeding on holy meditations there; but it is loose to run at random in its thoughts if silence does not restrain it. Words impart understanding to the soul, but with the end of directing it toward what it understands and having it hold fast by means of thought. Thought is the means we use to speak with God, as we speak with men through words; and so long as our minds are on the words of men, they must be misdirected, for we cannot direct our minds to men and to God at the same time.

We must avoid not only idle words but even speech that seems to have some purpose—from the necessary to the idle, from the idle to the harmful are easy steps. "The tongue is an unquiet evil," as James

15 A collage of phrases from Jas. 3:2–8, here minimally restored with other phrases from the passage to allow at least for an intelligible sequence.

16 Jas. 1:26; Prov. 25:28.

17 Vitae Patrum 5.4.1.

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said,18 smaller and subtler than other parts of the body, quicker in motion but not fatigued by use—rest, in fact, will sap its strength.

And the subtler and more pliant it is because of the softness of your female bodies, the quicker it is in motion and the readier in words, the seedbed of every evil, to be sure. Because he saw this vice especially in women, Saint Paul strictly forbade them to speak in church or even to ask questions about God, except of their husbands at home: in what they were to learn and what they were to do, women were enjoined to total silence. As he wrote to Timothy, "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. I suffer not a woman to teach or have authority over a man, but to exist in silence."19

These instructions were for married women and the laity, but what, then, is appropriate for you? Paul argued—again, to Timothy—that women are talkative by nature, prone to speaking when they should not. So, if we are to ﬁnd a remedy for this, we should discipline the tongue with complete silence at least at certain times and in certain places: at prayer, at meals, in the hours after compline, in the kitchen, the dormitory, the refectory, and the cloister.

There, if it is necessary, you should use signs in place of words.

Teach and learn these signs with special care, and when words are indispensable, use the signs to summon someone to a conversation in an appropriate place designated for the purpose. Then, after only the briefest and most necessary use of words, you should both return directly to your tasks.

Excessive use of words or signs should be disciplined severely, but the overuse of words more so, since the greater danger is there.

As Saint Gregory says in Book 7 of his Moralia:

If we are not careful about idle words, we soon will slip into harmful words, and there the seeds of discord are sown, quarrels arise, the ﬂames of hatred are kindled, and all peace is extinguished in the heart. Solomon is surely right to say, "The beginning of quarrels is as when one letteth out water." For letting out water is releasing the tongue in a ﬂood of speech. He does say, on the other hand, "Words from the mouth of a man are as deep water." But "the beginning of quarrels is as when one letteth out water" because whoever does not restrain his tongue also destroys concord.

18 Jas. 3:8.

19 1 Tim. 2:11–12.

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And so it is written, "He that putteth a fool to silence, appeaseth anger."20

We must then be strict in correcting this vice and prompt in punishing it, for it seriously endangers religious practice, bringing slander, strife, and calumny, and sometimes spawning the conspiracies and plots which do not so much undermine as overthrow the entire structure of religious life. Cutting off the vice may not eliminate evil thoughts completely, but it will stop them from corrupting others. In fact, the abbot Macharius thought that avoiding this one vice is almost all there is to religious practice, as the following story shows:

In far-off Scythia, Macharius the Elder told his monks, "After Mass is said, my brothers, I want you all to withdraw from the church." "But Father," one of the monks replied,

"to what place of solitude can we withdraw that is further than this wilderness around us?" The abbot put his ﬁnger on his lips and said, "This is what I am telling you to ﬂee," and with that he went into his cell, closed the door, and sat down there alone.21

Silence will make a man perfect, as James says; Isaiah calls silence "the service of justice"; and the Fathers pursued silence with such deep passion, it is said, that the abbot Agatho "kept a stone in his mouth for three whole years until he ﬁnally learned to keep silent."22

A place in itself cannot bring us salvation, but the location of the monastery can facilitate religious life and aid in its reinforcement, becoming a help or a hindrance as may be. This is why the sons of the prophets, whom Jerome calls the monks of the Old Testament, retired to the wilderness and built huts for themselves on the banks of the Jordan.23 And John and his followers, who were the founders of our calling, and Paul and Anthony and Macharius after them, and all those other ﬂowers of the monastic way of life—this is why they ﬂed the world with all of its temptations and brought their beds of contemplation to the quiet of the wilderness, where they

20 Moralia 7.37. The internal quotations are from Prov. 17:14, 18:4, and 26:10.

21 Vitae Patrum 5.4.27.

22 See Jas. 3:2; Isa. 32:17; Vitae Patrum 5.7.

23 Epistulae 125.7; see 4 Kings 6:1.

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could devote themselves more wholeheartedly to God. Even the Lord himself, who certainly feared no temptation, set us the example of leaving crowds of men behind and going off to lonely places whenever he had a thing of great importance to do. He consecrated the wilderness with his forty days of fasting; he refreshed the people in the wilderness and would withdraw there to the purity of prayer, not only from the crowds of men but even from the apostles.24 But he also led the apostles to a mountain to appoint them; on a mountain he was transﬁgured in their presence; on a mountain he revealed to them his glorious resurrection: and from a mountain he ascended into heaven—everything he did of great importance he did in the lonely places of the wilderness.25 He came to Moses and the patriarchs in the wilderness; through the wilderness he led his people to the promised land; for forty years he kept them in the wilderness, where he delivered his law, rained down his manna, drew water from a rock, consoled his people, appeared to them, and worked his miracles to show how much his Oneness loves a place of solitude, a place where we as well can devote ourselves to him in all the greater purity of prayer.

In the veiled speech he spoke to Job, the Lord praised the freedom of the onager, which loves the wilderness:

Who hath sent out the onager free, and who loosed his bonds, to whom I have given a house in the wilderness and dwellings in the barren land? He scorneth the multitudes of the city, he heareth not the cry of the driver, he looketh round about the mountains of his pasture, and seeketh for every green thing26 —in other words, "Who has done this, if not I?" The onager, which we know as the wild ass, represents the monastic who has been loosed from the bonds of worldly things, has retired to the tranquil freedom of the solitary life, and, ﬂeeing from the world, has not remained within the world. He lives in the barren land where his body is parched and dry through abstinence. He heareth not the cry of the driver but only his quieter voice when he provides his belly with nothing more than what it needs. No driver is as constant and as 24 See Matt. 4:2 and Mark 8:1 ff.

25 See Luke 6:12; Matt. 17:1, 28:16; and Acts 1:9.

26 Job 39:5–8.

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urgent as the belly, whose cry is the demand for extravagance in food and not merely for what is needed; and to that cry he never should give ear. The mountains of his pasture are the lives and lofty teachings of the Fathers, which restore us by our reading and meditation. And what he calls every green thing are the writings of the life in heaven that will not ever fade.27

Saint Jerome in particular urged us to this solitary life, as he wrote to the monk Heliodorus, "You are called a monastic, but think what that word means. If you are truly alone, then what are you doing among the crowd of men?"28 And he distinguished our monastic way of life from the life that clerics lead, writing to the priest Paul:

If you want to function as a priest, if the duties of a bishop—though I should call them the burdens—appeal to you, then by all means live in the towns and cities and make the salvation of others a source of proﬁt to your soul. But if you want to be what you say you are, a monastic—that is to say, alone—what are you doing in the city, where no man can live alone but only among the many? Every way of life has its forefathers. When it comes to the religious life, let priests and bishops follow the example of the apostles and men like them—they already have their honors: let them strive to have their merit. But we have forefathers of our own to follow: the Pauls, the Anthonies, the Hilarions,

Macharius, and—to go back to the scriptures—Elijah and Elisha, leaders of the prophets, who lived in the ﬁelds and the wilderness and built themselves huts on the banks of the Jordan, and the sons of Rechab who lived in tents and drank no sikera or wine, and heard Jeremiah tell them of God's praise, that they shall never lack a man of their stock to stand before the Lord.29

If we too are to stand before the Lord and better attend to his worship, then we too must build our huts in the wilderness, where the 27 Abelard interprets the allegory at greater length, while making similar points, in his Sermon 33 on John the Baptist.

28 Epistulae 14.5.

29 Epistulae 58.5. For the sons of Rechab, see Jer. 35.

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society of men can never shake the bed of our repose, disturb our quiet, or distract our minds from the holiness of our calling.

When the Lord led Saint Arsenius to the tranquil freedom of this life, he gave to all of us an example in this one man:

While he still lived in the palace, Abbot Arsenius prayed to the Lord, saying, "Lord, lead me to my salvation." And a voice came to him, saying, "Arsenius, retire from mankind and you will be saved." Then after he retired to monastic life, he prayed the prayer again, "Lord, lead me to my salvation." This time he heard a voice that said, "Arsenius, retire, keep silent, and be still: these are the roots of avoiding sin."

And so, he was instructed in the single rule of God's teaching: not only did he avoid all men but he drove them all away. One day, the archbishop came to him along with a certain judge to ask for some instruction. Arsenius said to them:

"If I answer you, will you follow my advice?" They promised him they would, and then he told them, "Wherever you hear Arsenius may be, do not come near him." A second time the archbishop wanted to see him, but he ﬁrst sent word to ask if he would be admitted. "If you come, I will admit you," Arsenius sent word back, "but if I admit you, I admit all men, and then I can no longer stay here." When the archbishop heard this, he said, "If my going means I persecute him, I will never go to see this holy man."30

There is also what Arsenius told a woman who came to visit him from Rome:

"How could you have dared make this long journey? Don't you know that, as a woman, you should never leave your home? Or is it that you want to go back to Rome and tell the other women, 'I have been to see Arsenius,' and they will make the sea a women's highway leading to my door?" She said, "If it is God's will that I return to Rome, I will not allow another woman to come here. But pray for me and remember me always." Arsenius answered, "I pray that 30 Vitae Patrum 5.2.3–4.

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God will wipe your memory from my mind." Dismayed by this reply, she went away.31

And when the abbot Marcus asked him why he withdrew from men, he told him, "I love men, as God knows, but I cannot be with them and be with God."32

Some of the holy Fathers went so far in their aversion to the company of men that they pretended to be mad or—strange to say— even spread the word that they were heretics. You can read in the Lives of the Fathers how Abbot Simon prepared for a visit from the provincial judge by sitting in the doorway to his cell and nibbling on a handful of bread and cheese, all the while keeping hidden under a sack.33 Or how a hermit, seeing men with lanterns on their way to visit him, stripped off all his clothes, threw them in the river, and stood there washing them, stark naked:

The man who looked after him blushed at this and told the visitors, "Please go away, for you see our old man has lost his mind." Then he turned and asked the hermit, "Father, why have you done this? Everyone who saw you said you were possessed by a demon." And the old man answered,

"That's just what I wanted to hear."34

Or how Abbot Moses ran off into a swamp to avoid a visit by the provincial judge:

The judge and his company caught up with him and asked, "Tell me, old man, where can I ﬁnd the cell of Abbot

Moses?" "What do you want him for?" Abbot Moses replied. "The man is crazy and a heretic."35

There was also Abbot Pastor, who would not see the provincial judge even to free his sister's son from prison.36 See how the great men of this world seek out the presence of the saints with the 31 Vitae Patrum 5.2.7.

32 Vitae Patrum 5.17.5.

33 Vitae Patrum 5.8.18.

34 Vitae Patrum 7.12.7.

35 Vitae Patrum 5.8.10.

36 For the story, see Vitae Patrum 5.8.13.

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utmost veneration and respect, and how the saints drive them away, even if it means their public shame.

Your own sex, too, has shown its virtue in this matter. Can there be adequate praise for the virgin who refused a visit from the most holy Saint Martin so that she could devote herself completely to her contemplation? As Jerome wrote to the monk Oceanus:

Sulpicius tells us in his life of Saint Martin that he traveled to see a virgin outstanding in her chastity and moral way of life. She refused to see him but sent him a guest-gift instead and spoke to him through her window. "Pray from where you are, my father," she said, "for I have never been visited by any man." Saint Martin then gave thanks to God that here was a woman of such moral conduct who could preserve the chastity of her will. He blessed her and went away, ﬁlled with joy.37

She would not rise, this reverend woman, from her bed of contemplation but was prepared to say to her beloved at the door, "I have washed my feet; how shall I deﬁle them?"38

Now, imagine how the bishops and other prelates of our day would respond if Arsenius or this woman treated them in such a way. Imagine their offense at the rebuff. The monastics in the wilderness—if there still are any left—should be ashamed to welcome the company of bishops as they do, erecting special houses to entertain them. Not only do they not avoid the so-called great men of this world who come with their huge retinues to visit, but they actually invite them to come, using hospitality as a pretext to set up building after building and turn the solitude they once sought into a city.

Nearly all the monastic houses of our time have succumbed to this temptation of the devil: ﬁrst founded to escape society, as their early fervor for religious life has cooled, they now invite society, assembling a mass of servants, men and women both, heaping up vast villages on their monastic sites, and in this way returning to the world, or I should say, attracting the world to them. Embroiled in the greatest misery, enslaved to ecclesiastical and secular powers, and living at ease on another's labor, these monks do not live alone at all but 37 The anecdote does not in fact appear in Sulpicius' Life of St. Martin, and the source of the quotation has not been identiﬁed.

38 Cant. 5:3.

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have abandoned their very name as well as their own proper mode of life. The troubles of the world so press on them that, in their struggle to safeguard their followers' possessions, they often come to lose what truly is their own. And when nearby houses burn, their monasteries too go up in ﬂames.39

Yet even this does not curb their ambition in the world. There are some monks who submit to no monastic restriction at all but go off by twos and threes into villages, towns, and cities, or even live by themselves outside any rule, and in this apostasy from their calling become worse than men of the world. The places where they live they abuse by calling them obedientaries, though they observe no rule and obey nothing but the belly and the ﬂesh, and there they stay with their friends and kin and act as freely as they like, far even from the fear of their own conscience. In these shameless apostates sins are criminal which in other men might be forgiven. The lives of men like these—I would not have you even hear about them, much less follow their example. On the contrary, women's weakness requires isolation from the world all the more, a place where the temptations of the ﬂesh are less severe and the senses less distracted toward bodily things. As Saint Anthony said:

Whoever resides in the wilderness and at rest is exempt from the three great wars of hearing, speech, and sight.

Only one war remains for him to ﬁght, and that is the war of the heart.40

And so, the great Doctor of the Church, Jerome, recommended a dwelling in the wilderness. "The wilderness rejoices in God's presence," he told Heliodorus. "What then, my brother, are you doing in the world when you yourself are more than the world?"41

Now that I have spoken of the proper location of the monastery, I should also say a word about the kind of place it should be. As Saint

Benedict advised, the monastery should be established in a place which, if possible, will allow for the inclusion in its precincts of the things most necessary to it: a garden, a source of water, a mill, a bakery

39 Abelard makes a similar point in his Sermon 33 on John the Baptist.

40 Vitae Patrum 5.2.2.

41 Epistulae 14.10.

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with an oven, and various other work places where the sisters may perform their daily tasks without the need for going about outside.42

As in the military camps of the world, so in the camps of the Lord—that is to say, our monastic communities—there must be certain persons who have charge of the others. In a military camp, a single individual is in overall command. Because of the size of the army and the sheer diversity of duties, however, he delegates responsibility to subordinates who look after different tasks or different troops of men. So, too, in the convent—one senior woman must preside and all the others do their work under her auspices and according to her judgment: no one must presume to oppose her in any matter or demur from any of her instructions. Without this unity of governance under a single head, no community can remain intact, not even the smallest household. [Hence, the ark of Noah, which provides the model for the Church, was many cubits in length and breadth but was ﬁnished in a single cubit.]43 Hence, it is written in Proverbs, "Because of the sins of the land, many are the princes thereof."44 When Alexander died and his kingdom was divided, the number of ills increased in proportion to the new number of kings. And when Rome was entrusted to multiple rulers, it also lost the harmony it had. As Lucan says:

With your three masters, Rome, you brought these evils on yourself:

There is no concord in realms divided Among a multitude. . . .

So long as earth supports the sea and air Supports the earth, so long as Titan rolls

Across the sky and night comes after day, Distrust will reign when rule is shared: all power

Detests a partner.45

Compare the situation that developed with the seventy followers of the abbot Saint Frontonius. So long as he remained in their monastery in his native town, he won great favor in the eyes of God and 42 Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 66.

43 See Gen. 6:15–16. This sentence, included in one manuscript, is most likely a later interpolation.

44 Prov. 28:2.

45 Pharsalia 1.84–93.

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men, but when he brought them to the wilderness with only their portable goods, they started to complain like the people of Israel complaining to Moses that he led them to the desert away from the ﬂeshpots of Egypt. "Is there chastity only in the wilderness," they asked him, "and none in the cities?"

Then why don't we return to the city we left? Or will God hear prayers offered only in the wilderness? Do you think we can survive on the food of angels, or take pleasure in the company of ﬂocks and wild beasts? Why can't we go back and bless the Lord in the place where we were born?46

As the apostle James once warned, "Be ye not many masters, my brethren, knowing that you receive the greater judgment."47 And as Jerome wrote to Rusticus:

No art is ever learned without a master. Even dumb animals and wild herds follow leaders of their own. Bees ﬂy after their queen; cranes line up in their V-formation behind a single bird. There is but one emperor and one judge to a province. At the founding of Rome, two brothers could not act as king at one and the same time, so Rome began with an act of fratricide. Jacob and Esau battled in Rebecca's womb. Each church has a single bishop, a single archpriest, a single archdeacon; and every ecclesiastical order is subject to its ruler.

One pilot to a ship, one master to a house. No matter how large the army, it looks to the standard of just one man. My aim in all of this is to tell you not to follow your own lights: live in a monastery under a single father's control but with many companions around you.48

For the sake of harmony and good governance, then, there must be one woman at the head of the convent, whose instructions all the others will obey. But there should be several others under her, as she herself determines, to function as magistrates, as it were, in charge of the duties she assigns them and acting as she sees ﬁt—captains,

46 Loosely paraphrased from the Life of St. Frontonius 2–3, contained in Vitae Patrum 1.

47 Jas. 3:1.

48 Epistulae 125.15.

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we might call them, or lieutenants in the army of the Lord, and all the rest like knights or foot soldiers ﬁghting against the minions of the enemy under the careful watch of these ofﬁcials.

Seven women, I believe, will be needed for the management of the convent, and seven should be enough: a portress, a cellaress, a wardrober, an inﬁrmarian, a chantress, a sacristan, and, over them all, a deaconess, who in these times is called an abbess.49 In this camp, this army of God—for you know that it is written, "The life of man upon earth is a warfare," and "terrible as an army in array"50— the deaconess functions as commander, obeyed implicitly by all.

The six others under her—the ofﬁcials, as I called them—hold the positions of captains or lieutenants. All the others, the nuns of the cloister, duly perform their service to God after the fashion of knights. And the lay sisters—those who have renounced the world and devoted themselves to the service of the nuns, wearing a kind of religious garb but not the full monastic habit—hold the lower rank of foot soldiers.

Now, if the Lord inspires me, I will set these ranks in order, so that they may truly constitute an army in array against the assaults of the devil. I will begin with the head, the one I called a deaconess when I traced the history of this calling, and I will marshal her duties as she is to marshal the duties of the others. As I noted in my previous letter, Saint Paul required that she be proven and distinguished in her sanctity:

Let a widow be chosen of no less than threescore years of age, who hath been the wife of one husband, having testimony for her good works, if she have brought up children, if she have received to harbor, if she have washed the saint's feet, if she have ministered to them that suffer tribulation, if she have diligently followed every good work. But the younger widows avoid. . . .51

He also spoke of deaconesses when he considered the life of deacons: "The women also should be chaste, not slanderers but sober

49 For Abelard's objection to the titles abbess and abbot and his preference for the term deaconess, see the Sixth Letter.

50 Job 7:1; Cant. 6:9.

51 1 Tim. 5:9–11.

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and faithful in all things."52 The intelligence and good sense of these requirements I have already discussed in my earlier letter, especially

Paul's stipulation that she have been married and be advanced in age; so I am not a little surprised at the offensive and dangerous practice that has developed in the Church of electing virgins rather than women who have been married and of putting younger women in charge of their elders, as now is often the case. The Book of Ecclesiastes speaks against it: "Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child," and also the Book of Job: "In the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days prudence," the Book of Proverbs: "Old age is a crown of dignity when it is found in the ways of justice," and the Book of Ecclesiasticus:

O how comely is judgment for a gray head, and for ancients to know counsel! O how comely is wisdom for the aged, and understanding and counsel to men of honor! Much experience is the crown of old men, and the fear of God is their glory.53

[Also:

Speak, thou that art elder, for it becometh thee.

Young man, scarcely speak in thy own cause. (This one was needed, too.) If thou be asked twice, let thy answer be short. In many things, be as if thou wert ignorant, and hear in silence and withal seeking. In the company of great men take not upon thee, and when ancients are present, speak not much.

In this way, the presbyters, or priests, who have charge of the people, are also understood to be "elders," showing by their titles the kind of men they ought to be. And those who recorded the lives of the holy men we now call abbots referred to them as "elders."]54 52 1 Tim. 3:11.

53 Eccles. 10:16; Job 12:12; Prov. 16:31; Ecclus. 25:6–8.

54 The additional quotations, from Ecclus. 32:4 and 32:10–13, and subsequent remarks are evident interpolations in the text. The comment, enim necesse fuit, "This one was needed, too," is parenthetical and refers to the second quotation; McLaughlin omits it from his text of the letter. The ﬁnal comment in the paragraph, "And those who recorded the lives of the holy men . . . ," takes notice of the fact that four books of the Vitae Patrum are known as the Verba Seniorum, "Sayings of the Elders."

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Every care must be taken, then, to see that Paul's counsel is followed in the election and consecration of the deaconess. Her life and doctrine should justify the charge she will have over others, her age should guarantee the ripeness of her character, and her own obedience should have earned her the right to govern. She should have learned the rule through daily practice, not merely by hearing it read. If she is not trained in letters, she should know how to apply herself, not to the logical wrangles of the philosophical schools, but to the doctrine of life as manifested in her deeds. It is written of the Lord, "He began to do and to teach,"55 by which we understand that doing is prior to teaching, since teaching is more perfect through action than through speech, better through the deed than through the word. What Abbot Ipitius said will help conﬁrm this: "He is truly wise who teaches others by his deed, not by his words."56 And there is also the argument of Saint Anthony, by which he confounded all the windy philosophers who laughed at his teaching as the teaching of a fool and a man untrained in letters:

"Now, answer me this," he said, "which comes ﬁrst, sense or letters? Which is the beginning of the other? Does sense arise from letters or do letters arise from sense?" When they replied that sense was both the source and the foundation of letters, he went on, "So, whoever is whole in sense will not need letters. Then let him hear the word of the Apostle and be strengthened in the Lord: 'Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?' and 'But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong. And the base things of the world and the contemptible hath God chosen, and things that are not, that he might bring to naught things that are, that no ﬂesh should glory in his sight.' For the kingdom of God, as he afterwards said, is not in speech but in virtue."57

But if she needs to turn to scripture for fuller knowledge of any point, she should not be ashamed to ask the educated and take

55 Acts 1:1.

56 Vitae Patrum 5.10.75.

57 Athanasius, Life of Anthony, in Vitae Patrum 1.45. The internal quotations are from 1 Cor. 1:20, 27–29.

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instruction from them. She should never reject an education in letters but rather should accept it diligently, as even Peter took correction from his fellow apostle Paul, for as Saint Benedict remarked,

"The Lord often reveals to the lesser man what is better."58

The better to fulﬁll the Lord's command which Saint Paul noted above, we should never elect a deaconess from a noble or powerful family, except when there is the most pressing need and the clearest possible reason. With their easy conﬁdence in their origins, people of this sort become too proud or too boastful or presumptuous in their conduct. Especially if they are native to the area, their prelacy may be harmful to a convent: the proximity of their relations may make them much more proud, their frequent visits may disrupt or burden the convent, and this familiarity may breed contempt for religious life and the prelates themselves, according to what the Lord has said: "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country."59 Saint Jerome raised these and similar problems when he listed for Heliodorus the difﬁculties facing monks who remain in their own country. "In sum," he concluded, "a monk in his own country cannot be perfect, and not to wish to be perfect is a sin."60

Think what a great loss of souls it would be if the woman who has charge of the teaching of religion should fall short in her own religious life. If she shows her virtues individually to each of her individual subordinates, that certainly is enough; but in her all virtues ought to shine, so that all those things she teaches to the others she may evince herself through her example. She must not undo in conduct what she teaches or destroy in deeds what she builds in words; she must not let the word of rebuke be taken from her mouth by her shame to correct in others what she herself is known to do. It was the Psalmist's prayer that this never happen to him. "Take not the word of truth utterly from my mouth," he said, for he knew it was the harshest of God's punishments: "But to the sinner God hath said, 'Why dost thou declare my justices and take my covenant in thy mouth, seeing thou hadst hatest discipline and hast cast my words behind thee?'" And Saint Paul said, "But I chastise my body and bring it into subjection, lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become cast out." Whoever's life has been despised will see his preaching and his doctrine both condemned.

58 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 3, and see Gal. 2:11 ff.

59 Matt. 13:57.

60 Epistulae 14.7.

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When someone ought to heal another of a sickness he himself is suffering from, the sick man then will charge him properly, "Physician, heal thyself."61

Whoever has high position in the Church must always be aware of the ruin his fall will cause if he himself ever comes to the brink and brings his followers with him. "He that shall break the least of these commandments and so teach men, shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven."62 To break a commandment is to act against it, and if someone corrupts others by example, he becomes an instructor of evil. But if that makes him least in the kingdom of heaven—that is to say, in the Church on earth—then what should we call that contemptible prelate whose carelessness has led the Lord to seek not his blood only but the blood of all souls under him? The Book of Wisdom rightly curses such a man:

For power is given to you by the Lord, and strength by the Most High, who will examine your works and search out your thoughts because, being ministers of his kingdom, you have not judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked according to the will of God. Horribly and speedily will he appear to you, for a most severe judgment shall be for them that bear rule. For to him that is little, mercy is granted, but the mighty shall be mightily tormented. . . . and a greater punishment is ready for the more mighty.63

It is enough for a subordinate to see to his own sins, but for superiors, there is death in the sins of others as well. When gifts increase, the reasons for those gifts also increase, and to whom more is given, of him more is demanded. And so the Book of Proverbs warns against this danger:

My son, if thou be surety for thy friend, thou hadst engaged fast thy hand to a stranger. Thou art ensnared with the words of thy mouth, and caught with thy own words. Do therefore, my son, what I say, and deliver thyself because thou art fallen into the hand of thy neighbor. Run about,

61 Ps. 118:43, 49:16–17; 1 Cor. 9:27; Luke 4:23.

62 Matt. 5:19.

63 Wis. 6:4–9.

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make haste, stir up thy friend. Give not sleep to thy eyes, neither let thy eyelids slumber.64

We become surety for a friend whenever our charitable love receives someone into the life of our community; we extend to him our supervisory care, as he extends to us his obedience. And we engage fast our hands when, by becoming surety for him, we commit ourselves to working for his beneﬁt. But we also are fallen into his hands because, unless we guard against him, we will ﬁnd him to be the destroyer of our souls. And so, the words run about, make haste, and so on, provide advice against the danger.

So let her now run all about her camp, ﬁrst here, then there, like a watchful and untiring commander, checking to see if, through someone's negligence, a way has been left open for the adversary, who "goeth about as a roaring lion seeking someone he may devour."65 She should be ﬁrst to see all the evils of her house and correct them before anyone can follow their example. She must always beware of the charge Saint Jerome laid at the door of the negligent and foolish: "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."66

The woman who presides in the convent must recognize that she has become the guardian of both bodies and souls. About the guardianship of bodies the Book of Ecclesiasticus says:

Hast thou daughters? Have a care of their body and do not show thy countenance light-hearted toward them. . . . The father waketh for his daughter . . . and the care for her taketh away his sleep . . . lest she should be corrupted.67

But bodies are corrupted not only by fornication but by doing anything unseemly with them—I mean with any part, including the tongue—or by misusing our senses for any vanity. "Death comes through our windows," it is written, meaning that sin comes to the soul through our ﬁve senses.68

64 Prov. 6:1–4.

65 1 Pet. 5:8.

66 Epistulae 147.10.

67 Ecclus. 7:26 and 42:9–10.

68 Cf. Jer. 9:21.

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No death, though, is more fearful than the death of souls, and no guardianship is more fraught with risk. The Lord said, "Fear ye not them that kill the body and have no more that they can do to the soul."69 But will anyone hear these words and still not fear the body's death more than the soul's? Who is less afraid of a sword than a lie? And yet it is written, "The mouth that belieth killeth the soul."70 What can be killed more easily than the soul? What arrow can be fashioned more quickly than a sin? Who can guard himself against a thought? Who is strong enough to guard against his own sins, much less another's? What ﬂeshly shepherd can protect his spiritual ﬂock against wolves of the spirit, guarding what cannot be seen against what cannot be seen? Who would not fear a predator who never ceases from his prowl, whom no wall will keep out and no sword slay? His snares are always set and, above all, for men and women of the religious life. "His portion is made fat and his meat dainty," the prophet Habakkuk said, and the apostle Peter: "Your adversary the devil goeth about as a roaring lion seeking someone he may devour." The Lord told Job about the adversary's great presumption in devouring us: "He will drink up a river and not wonder, and he trusteth that the Jordan may run into his mouth."71 For what would he then not presume to do, when he also dared to tempt the Lord himself, when he lured our ﬁrst forefathers from paradise, and when he snatched away from the company of apostles an apostle whom the Lord himself had chosen? What place is ever safe from him? What cloister can he not penetrate? Who can guard against his snares? Who can resist his strength? For he is the wind that shook the corners of Job's house and at one blast crushed his innocent sons and daughters.72

Then what can the weaker sex do to stand against him? No one should fear his seduction more than a woman, since it was a woman he ﬁrst seduced and through her ensnared her husband and descendants: the desire for a greater good robbed woman of a lesser. And now by this same artfulness, he will easily seduce a woman who, in her love for wealth or honor, is more attracted by supremacy than service. But which it was that ﬁrst attracted her, the aftermath will prove. If she lives in greater luxury as a superior than she had as a 69 An amalgam of Matt. 10:28 and Luke 12:4.

70 Wis. 1:11.

71 Hab. 1:16; 1 Pet. 5:8; Job 40:18.

72 See Job 1:19.

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subordinate, or if she claims something special for herself beyond her needs, then doubtless this was always her desire. If she seems more interested in costly adornments after her election than before, then plainly she is puffed up with vainglory. Whatever she had been before will later be revealed, and whether it was her virtue or only a charade that led to her election, her conduct in her ofﬁce will show.

She should be forced to her position and not come to it on her own, for the Lord said, "All who have come are thieves and robbers,"73 and Jerome observed, "Note who have come, not who were sent."74 That is, she should be taken for the honor and not take it to herself, according to the words of Paul: "Neither doth any man take the honor to himself but he that is called by God, as Aaron was."75 If called, she should lament, as if being led to death; if rejected, she should exult, as if reprieved. If we hear it said that we are better than the others, we modestly blush at the words; but if these words are proven true by the fact of our election, we carry on without any shame at all. Most certainly, the better should be chosen over others—hence, Saint Gregory says in Book 24 of his Moralia:

No one ought to undertake the leadership of others who is not in a position to correct them. Nor should someone who is elected to correct the faults of others do himself what ought to be rooted out76 —but if to avoid this shamelessness we only voice some weak refusal, we open ourselves to the charge of merely wanting to appear more righteous and deserving.

How many have we seen at their election, tears in their eyes and laughter in their hearts, proclaiming their unworthiness but currying men's favor all the more. They take note of the words, "The just is ﬁrst accuser of himself,"77 but afterward, when it comes their turn to be accused and they have the chance to retire from the ﬁeld, with what supreme, tenacious impudence do they assert their claims to those same honors which, with false tears but with truthful accusations of themselves, they originally said they were unwilling to 73 John 10:8.

74 Dialogus Contra Pelagianos 2.17.

75 Heb. 5:4.

76 Moralia 24.25.

77 Prov. 18:17.

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accept. Think of all the canons we have seen in our churches who resist their bishops' call to take holy orders, avowing their unworthiness for such a sacred ofﬁce, entirely unwilling to accept. But if a little later those same canons should be chosen for a bishopric by some chance, how weak will their refusal appear then—if in fact we hear a refusal at all. Those who only yesterday protested that the danger to their soul must force them to decline a deaconship, become reconciled to the higher ofﬁce overnight and now no longer fear the precipice. About such men the Book of Proverbs says, "A fool will clap his hands when he is surety for his friend."78

For only a wretch will exult at what ought to make him lament, when, coming to the governance of others, he is bound by his calling to the care of his subordinates, by whom he should be loved rather than feared.

We must guard against this evil as securely as we can. Therefore, we strictly forbid the superior to live in greater comfort than her subordinates. She should not have private rooms for sleeping or eating, but should do everything alongside her ﬂock: the more she is with them, the better she can look after them. I know that Saint

Benedict had assigned a separate table for the abbot to dine with pilgrims and guests.79 Although he acted out of a pious concern for the monastery's visitors, a more recent and sensible practice has developed in some monasteries by which the abbot does not separate himself from the community at large, but rather delegates the care of pilgrims to some other responsible person. Yes, it is easy to sin at table and discipline should be enforced especially during meals, but there are additional reasons for it. Many people use hospitality as an opportunity to cater to themselves more than their guests, and it is chieﬂy from a suspicion of this that those who are not present feel offended and complain. The authority of the superior is weakest when his life is not open to his followers, and further, any privation becomes easier to bear when it is shared equally by all, including— and especially—the superior. This we learn from the example of Cato, who, as Lucan tells it, would not accept the water offered to him "when the people in his ranks were thirsty," and so "the stream became enough for them all."80

78 Prov. 17:18.

79 Rule of St. Benedict, chapters 53 and 56. Abelard here begins to address one of Heloise's speciﬁc concerns from the Fifth Letter; see p. 107.

80 Lucan, Pharsalia 9.498 ff.

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Since sobriety is necessary for all prelates, they must live frugally to allow provision for the rest. They must not turn their ofﬁce, a gift conferred by God, into a source of pride, nor ever lord it over their subordinates. Instead, they must attend to what is written: "Be not as a lion in thy house, terrifying them of thy household and oppressing them that are under thee." "Pride is hateful before God and men." The beginning of pride is man's turning from God, as the beginning of sin is pride, for then his heart withdraws from his Creator. "The Lord hath overturned the thrones of proud princes and hath set up the meek in their stead."

"Have they made thee ruler? Be not lifted up. Be among them as one of them." And as Saint Paul instructed Timothy about his subordinates, "Rebuke not an ancient man but entreat him as a father, young men as brothers, old women as mothers, young women as sisters." And the Lord said, "You have not chosen me, but I have chosen and appointed you that you should go and bring forth fruit."81 All other prelates are chosen by their subordinates, created and constituted by them for service, not for lordship. The Lord alone is truly Lord and chose his own subordinates for his service; yet he showed himself as servant, not as lord, and by his own example corrected those of his followers who aspired to high honors, saying:

The kings of the gentiles lord it over them and they that have power over them are called beneﬁcent. But you are not so. He that is the greater among you should become as the lesser, and he that is the leader as he that serveth.82

Someone follows the way of the kings of the gentiles, then, if he strives for lordship and not service among his subordinates, if he seeks to be feared more than loved, and if, swollen with the authority of his ofﬁce, he loves "the ﬁrst places at feasts and the ﬁrst chairs in the synagogues, and greetings in the market place and to be called Rabbi by men." We should not glory in that title or in any titles at all but should look to humility in all things, as the Lord said,

"But be not you called Rabbi . . . and call none your father upon 81 Ecclus. 4:35, 10:7, 10:17, 32:1; 1 Tim. 5:1–2; and John 15:16 (the manuscripts include only the ﬁrst phrase, adding "etc.").

82 Luke 22:25–26. The manuscripts include the passage only through the words "But you are not so," indicating the rest by "etc."

SEVENTH LETTER

earth." And then, forbidding all boasting, he continued, "Whoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled."83

We must also insure that the absence of the shepherds does not endanger the ﬂock, letting discipline grow slack when they are away. I have resolved, therefore, that the deaconess, with her attention more on spiritual than on worldly things, is not to leave the convent for any business outside its walls. Her constant presence among her women will demonstrate her greater care, and her appearance in the world will be as honored as it is rare, as is written, "If thou be invited by one that is mightier, withdraw thyself, for so he will invite thee the more."84 If the convent requires any mission sent abroad, it should be monks or lay brothers who undertake it. Men always must see to the needs of women, and the greater women's religious life becomes and the more they devote themselves to God, the more they will need the protection of men.

Hence, the angel told Joseph to watch over the mother of the Lord, though he was not permitted to lie with her, and the Lord at his death found for his mother a second son, as it were, to care for her in worldly things.85 The apostles, too, arranged for the care of holy women and appointed the seven deacons to serve them, as I have already discussed at length.86 So, following their authority and aware of the real necessity, I have determined that in matters which concern the outside world the needs of women's convents should lay in the hands of monks and lay brothers, after the manner of the apostles and ﬁrst deacons. Monks will be needed chieﬂy for the Mass, lay brothers for their physical labor.

It is therefore necessary—as was the practice under Mark in Alexandria at the very beginnings of the Church—that women's convents be located near monasteries of men, and that all their business outside the walls be conducted through men who share the religious life. It is also my belief that women's convents adhere more securely to the tenets of their practice if they are guided by the wisdom of spiritual men and if a single shepherd watches over rams and ewes alike, that is to say, if the man presiding over the men also presides over the women. For always, as Paul says, "Let

83 Matt. 23:6–7, 8–9, and 12.

84 Ecclus. 13:12. Cf. also Abelard's comments on Heloise in the Calamities, p. 136 ff.

85 See Matt. 1:20 and John 19:26.

86 See Acts 6:5 and the Sixth Letter.

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the head of every woman be the man, as the head of every man is Christ and the head of Christ is God."87 It was for this reason that the convent of Saint Scholastica, which had been built on land belonging to a monastery of monks, was also guided by a monk and received his frequent visits, or his brothers', for its consolation and instruction.88

The Rule of Saint Basil endorses the wisdom of this system:

Question: Should the presiding monk ever speak with the nuns to offer them instruction except in the presence of the woman who directs the sisters?

Answer: How then will we follow Saint Paul's command, "Let all things be done decently and according to order"?

And in the next chapter:

Question: Should the presiding monk often speak with the woman who directs the sisters if it offends some of the brothers?

Answer: As Saint Paul says, "Why is my liberty judged by another man's conscience?" But it is also good to follow him when he says, "I have not used my power . . . lest I should hinder the gospel of Christ." He should see the women, then, as little as possible and all their conversations must be brief.89

There is also the decree of the Council of Seville:

It is decided by our common consent that women's convents in the province of Baetica be guided by the supervisory ministry of monks. It is only to the good of these devoted women if we choose spiritual fathers to protect and 87 1 Cor. 11:3.

88 St. Scholastica was the sister, and by tradition the twin, of St. Benedict. They were buried in the same grave, as Heloise and Abelard also were to be.

89 Basil was a fourth-century bishop of Caesarea in Cappodocia, a leading light in eastern monasticism, and a Doctor of the Church. Abelard cites his "Greater Rule," not in the original Greek, but in the Latin translation of Ruﬁnus; see Ruﬁnus, Regula

Fusius Tractata, 197 and 199. The internal quotations are from 1 Cor. 14:40, 10:29, and 9:12.

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instruct them. Yet we caution the monks to keep far from the women's quarters, not coming even so close as the entryway. Neither the abbot nor any man set in authority shall speak with the nuns to instruct them in morals, except in the presence of the woman who directs the sisters, nor should he often speak with her alone, but only in the presence of two or three sisters. Their visits should be infrequent and their conversations brief. Far be it from us to wish that the monks become familiar with the virgins of Christ—it is improper even to speak of it—but the men must be kept separate and apart, in accord with our canons and our rule.

We entrust the women only to their guidance, calling for the selection of a single man, the most tested of the monks, to have charge over the management of their town or country properties, the construction of their buildings, and the provision of anything else the convent may require. This will free the handmaids of Christ to live for the worship of God alone and see to their own tasks, concerned only for what will beneﬁt their souls. The man chosen for this ofﬁce by the abbot will of course be subject to the approval of the bishop.

For their part, the nuns will make clothing for the monks who look over them, receiving in exchange both their support and the fruits of their labor, as we said.90

Accordingly, I would have it that convents of women always be subject to monasteries of men, that brothers see to the care of their sisters, and that a single man preside as father over both communities. Both should look to his judgment, making "one fold and one shepherd" in the Lord.91 Indeed, such a spiritual family will be more pleasing to God and men when it can more fully accommodate anyone of either sex who would enter religious life, that is, when monks take in the men and nuns take in the women and the whole provides for every soul who is looking toward salvation. If a man with a wife or a mother, a daughter or a sister, or any other woman in his charge wishes to turn to the religious life, he can ﬁnd full comfort there; and charitable love would bind the two communities more closely to each other if their members are united by family connections as well.

90 Canon 11 of the second Council of Seville, convened in 619.

91 John 10:16.

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The one they call the abbot should preside over the nuns in recognition that they are brides of Christ, who is his lord, and that each of them, as such, is now his lady.92 He should exult in his service to them, not in his supremacy, acting as a steward in the house of the king, a steward who does not bend his lady to his command but is always attentive to her interests, who obeys her at once in what is necessary but declines in what may do her harm, and who sees to all external matters in such a way that he never need enter her chamber unless ordered. This is how the servant of Christ should see to the brides of Christ, attending them faithfully for the sake of Christ. All important matters he should discuss with the deaconess and, without consulting her, should not decide anything about the nuns or their affairs; nor should he presume to instruct them or speak to them except through her. Whenever the deaconess summons him, he should come without delay, and whatever she advises him about her or her charges' needs, he should carry out as quickly as he can.

And when the deaconess summons him, he should not speak with her except in the open and in the presence of other responsible persons. He should never draw too close to her or engage her in long conversations.

The sisters will collect all food and clothing and any money there may be and set it aside; whatever they have in excess they will make over to the brothers as needed. The brothers, then, will supply all outside goods, and the sisters only do what is ﬁt for women to do within the conﬁnes of the walls, for example, sewing and washing their own and the brothers' clothes, and kneading, baking, and handling bread. They will also take charge of the cows and the poultry and whatever else that women can do more easily and suitably than men.

When the man takes up his appointment as superior, he will swear in the presence of the sisters and the bishop that he will be a faithful steward in the Lord and will scrupulously preserve them from any carnal contact. If he is ever found negligent—and I pray he never is—he should immediately be deposed for perjury. Likewise, all the monks, when they make their vows, must bind themselves to the sisters by this sacrament that they will never allow them to be wronged and will protect their chastity with all their power. No man will approach the sisters without permission of the superior; nothing will be sent to them without going through the superior. No 92 Cf. the Fourth Letter, p. 86.

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sister will leave the precincts of the convent, but rather, as I said, the brothers will supply all outside goods as is only ﬁtting, the hard sex sweating in its hard work. No brother will ever enter the convent grounds without permission of the superior and the deaconess, and then only for a virtuous and compelling reason. If anyone dares act in any way against this rule, he will summarily be expelled from the monastery.

To insure that the men with their greater strength do not wrong the women in any way, I have resolved that they, too, should be subject to the deaconess and carry out her will in every matter. All members of these communities, the men and women alike, will make their profession to her and vow her their obedience. Peace will be more lasting and concord better preserved if the strong are set strict limits, while, on the other hand, the stronger sex will not feel wronged by its obedience to the weaker as it has no reason to fear the weaker's violence. The more a man is humbled before God, the more he is sure to be exalted.

I think I have said enough about the deaconess for the moment. I will turn, then, to the other ofﬁcials.

The sacristan, or treasurer, will look after the oratory and everything connected with the place of prayer. She will keep all its keys and safeguard its necessary items, and if there are any offerings, she will receive them. She will have charge over the manufacture and repair of items needed in the oratory and over all of its furnishings.

It is also her responsibility to look after the hosts, the vessels and books of the altar and all of its furnishings, the relics, the incense, the lights, the clock, and the striking of bells. The nuns will prepare the hosts, if it is feasible, purify the ﬂour from which they are made, and also wash the altar-cloths. But neither they nor the sacristan herself must ever touch the relics or the vessels of the altar or even the altar-cloths, unless they are brought to them to wash. For this they will rely on the monks and lay brothers. When it becomes necessary, certain worthy men will be appointed to act under the sacristan's supervision, and they will be the ones to remove the items from the chests, which she will have unlocked, and return them to their place again. The woman who presides over the sanctuary should be outstanding in the purity of her life, whole both in body and in mind, if possible, and proven in austerity and self-restraint.

She also should be trained in lunar calculation, so that she may look after the oratory according to the order of the seasons.

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The chantress will look after the choir, set the order of worship, and have charge over the teaching of reading and singing in the convent and everything connected to writing. She also will have custody of the convent's books, taking them to and from their storage, and either arrange for their copying and decoration or undertake it herself. She will organize and assign the seats in choir, allocate the spoken or sung parts, and make the list of weekly duties to be read each Saturday in chapter. She should, therefore, be well trained in letters and especially knowledgeable in music. She also will see to all the education in the convent, after the deaconess; if she happens to be busy with other matters, she will act as her deputy in this.93

The inﬁrmarian will tend the sick, keeping them from both bodily privation and sin. Whatever their illness demands in the way of food, baths, or anything else, should be allowed them, for as the saying goes, "The law was not made for the sick." Meat, too, should be permitted them, except on Fridays and the chief vigils or during the fasts of Ember Days and Lent. But they also should be cautioned against sin all the more since illness is a time for them to be thinking about death, a time for silence and insistent prayer, as it is written,

"My son, neglect not thyself in thy sickness, but pray to the Lord and he shall heal thee. Turn away from sin and order thy hands aright, and cleanse thy heart from all offense."94 There must always be an attendant for the sick, someone who can rush to their aid if the need arises, and the house should be equipped with everything necessary for their illness, including a supply of medicines so far as the convent's resources will allow. This, of course, is more easily done if the inﬁrmarian has some medical knowledge. Her charge also extends to the women who are issuing blood. It is important as well that she be skilled in bloodletting, so that no man will have to come among the women for that purpose. There should also be provision for the sick to celebrate the Ofﬁces of the Hours and take communion on Sundays at the least, but always after their confession and whatever atonement they are able to make. About the anointing of 93 In the single manuscript that preserves this section, the word inﬁrmaria is added at the end of the sentence, apparently anticipating the paragraph to come. McLaughlin, however, includes it as part of the text, according to which reading, then, the inﬁrmarian would act as deputy of the chantress in matters of convent discipline.

94 Ecclus. 38:9–10.

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the sick, the words of the apostle James should be strictly observed, especially when the patient is beyond hope of recovery.95 For this, two of the elder priests and a deacon from the monastery should be admitted to the convent, bringing the consecrated oil with them, and they should administer the sacrament with the sisters in attendance, separated from them, however, by a partition wall. When the need arises, a similar procedure should be followed with communion. The inﬁrmary, therefore, must be so arranged that the monks can easily come in and go out without seeing the nuns or being seen by them.

At least once each day, the deaconess and cellaress will visit the sick woman as if she were Christ himself to look after her physical and spiritual needs, and so they may deserve to hear the Lord say, "I was sick and you came to me."96 If the woman is near the end and has come to her death struggle, one of the attendants will run to the convent as quickly as she can, beating on a board to proclaim her sister's departure. The whole convent then must rush to the dying woman's side, no matter the hour of the day or night, unless the Ofﬁces of the Church prevent it. Since "nothing must be set before the work of God,"97 it is enough in this circumstance that the deaconess go herself with a few chosen women and that the convent as a whole follow later. But whoever comes running at the beating of the board should at once begin the litany down through the invocation of the male and female saints and then continue with the psalms or other texts appropriate to a death. As the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us:

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, for in that we are put in mind of the end of all, and the living thinketh what is to come. . . . The heart of the wise is where there is mourning, and the heart of fools where there is mirth.98

The nuns then will wash their dead sister's body, clothe it in sandals and a clean but common garment, and place it on a bier, wrapping

95 See Jas. 5:14: "Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord."

96 Matt. 25:36.

97 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 43.

98 Eccles. 7:3–5.

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her head in her veil. They will stitch or tie the clothes tightly to the body and not move them afterward. And they will carry the body to the church for the monks to bury at the proper time, during which they themselves, retired to the oratory, will chant the psalms or meditate in prayer. The burial of a deaconess will have only one distinction: her body will be wrapped in a shroud and the whole stitched together, as if in a sack.

The wardrober will look after everything concerning clothing, including shoes as well as everything else. She will arrange for the shearing of the sheep and will receive the leather for making sandals.

She will spin the ﬂax and wool, collect it, and see to all the weaving, and she will provide the others with their scissors, needles, and thread. She also will have charge of the dormitory and will see to all the beds. The table coverings, hand cloths, and every other article of cloth along with their cutting, sewing, and washing—all this is her responsibility, and to her in particular these words apply:

She hath sought wool and ﬂax and hath wrought by the counsel of her hands. . . . She hath put out her hand to the distaff and her ﬁngers have taken hold of the spindle. . . .

She shall not fear for her house in the cold of snow, for all her domestics are clothed with double garments . . . and she shall laugh in the latter day. . . . She hath looked well to the paths of her house and hath not eaten her bread idle. Her children rose up and called her blessed.99

She will keep the implements needed for her tasks and assign the sisters their own share of the work, since she also will have charge over the novices until they are received into the community.

The cellaress will oversee everything having to do with food: the cellar, the refectory, the kitchen, the mill, the bakery and oven, the gardens, the orchards, the beehives, the cows, the sheep, and the poultry—whatever is needed in the way of foodstuff will be her responsibility. It is especially important, then, that she be generous in nature, ready and willing to furnish what is needed, "for God loveth a cheerful giver."100 She is strictly forbidden to favor herself

99 Prov. 31:13–28.

100 2 Cor. 9:7.

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over others in carrying out her duty, to prepare food for herself alone, or to keep something for herself and so cheat the others. "The best steward," says Jerome, "keeps nothing for himself,"101 unlike

Judas, who abused his stewardship of the purse and was lost to the company of the apostles, or Ananias and his wife Saphira, who received the sentence of death for holding back part of the price of the land.102

The portress, or gatekeeper, will have the responsibility of receiving guests and anyone else who comes to the convent, announcing them, bringing them to the appropriate place, and taking general charge over hospitality. She should be discreet in mind and years, know how to receive and to give a message, and be able to determine whom to admit, whom to turn away, and the manner appropriate for each. Since acquaintance with the convent begins with her, she must be an adornment to its religious life, as if she herself were the vestibule of the Lord. She therefore should be soft in speech and mild in address, eager to increase the good will even of those she turns away by giving them a suitable reason—as it is written, "A mild answer breaketh wrath, but a harsh word stirreth up fury," and "A sweet word multiplieth friends and appeaseth enemies."103

Because she will be the one to see the poor most often and come to know them best, she also should distribute whatever food or clothing there is to distribute. If she or any other ofﬁcial needs assistance or relief, the deaconess will appoint deputies for her, choosing them mainly from the lay sisters, so that none of the nuns need ever be absent from divine worship or from the refectory or chapter.

The portress will have a small lodge by the gate, where either she or her assistant will always be on hand to meet people as they arrive.

But that is not a place for them to be idle or forget their study of silence, especially since it is that much easier for outsiders to overhear their talking from there. It is her responsibility, in fact, to keep the convent closed not only to unsuitable visitors but also to gossip of any kind—none must come inside without control, and for any lapse in this the portress should be held accountable; if she does hear some important news, however, she should bring it to the deaconess in private for her to act on as she herself sees ﬁt. When someone

101 Epistulae 52.16.

102 See John 13:29 and Acts 5:1–10.

103 Prov. 15:1 and Ecclus. 6:5.

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knocks or calls out at the gate, the woman stationed there will ask who it is and what they want and, if it is appropriate, open the gate immediately and take them in. Only women may be received as guests in the convent; men should be directed to the monks. No man will be admitted for any reason without the prior consultation and order of the deaconess, but women will have entry at once. The portress then will have the women—or any men who have occasion to enter—wait in her lodge until the deaconess can come to greet them, or some other sisters if it is necessary or more convenient. If the visiting women are poor and require washing of their feet, the deaconess herself or some of the sisters should perform this act of hospitality. The Lord himself was called a deacon for performing this service for the apostles, as is mentioned in the Lives of the Fathers: "On your account, O man, . . . did the Savior become a deacon, gird himself with a linen towel, and wash his disciples' feet, and in this way teach them to wash their brothers' feet."104 For this reason, Saint Paul required that the deaconess "have offered hospitality and have washed the saints' feet." And the Lord himself said,

"I was a stranger and you took me in."105

All of these ofﬁcials, except for the chantress, should be selected from the women who do not study letters if there are others in the convent better suited to spend their time on reading.

All the furnishings of the oratory should be necessary, not extravagant, and clean rather than costly. There should be nothing of gold or silver except for a single silver chalice, or more than one if needed, and nothing of silk except the stoles and maniples. There should be no carved images. A wooden cross should be set above the altar, nothing more, with a painting of the Savior, if desired, but no other images. The convent should be content with a single pair of bells. Outside the entrance to the oratory, there should be a vessel of holy water, where the women can bless themselves as they come in in the morning and go out after compline.

The nuns will all be present in the oratory at each canonical Hour.

As soon as the bell is struck, they will put aside any other business and come to the Divine Ofﬁce at a swift but modest pace. They will

104 Vitae Patrum 6.4.8; cf. John 13:4 ff.

105 1 Tim. 5:10; Matt. 25:35.

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enter the oratory quietly, but those who can should recite the words, "I will come into thy house and worship at thy holy temple in fear of thee."106 No book will be kept in the choir except the one needed for the current service. The words of the psalms should be pronounced clearly and distinctly so as to be understood, and the music should be slow enough to allow the weaker voices to keep up. No text is to be read or sung in church except what is taken from authoritative scripture, and from the Old and New Testaments in particular; these will be so divided among the lessons that they may be read in their entirety over the course of a year. Other instructional texts, including the commentaries and sermons of the Doctors of the Church, will be read in chapter or at meals; in other circumstances that call for reading, any other book will be permitted. No one will read or chant a text that she has not prepared, and if someone makes a mistake of pronunciation in the oratory, she will make open atonement then and there by saying quietly, "Forgive me for my carelessness, O Lord, this time as well."

At midnight, they will rise for the Night Ofﬁce, as the prophet has commanded.107 For this, they must retire early enough to enable their weak nature to sustain the vigil and continue with the Ofﬁces of the day when it is light, in the manner Saint Benedict prescribed.108

After the Night Ofﬁce, they will return to the dormitory until the bell is struck for morning lauds. For the remainder of the night, they may sleep if they like, for sleep refreshes a weak and weary nature, preparing it for toil and keeping it steady and alert. If any of them, however, feel the need to meditate on the psalms or other readings, as Saint Benedict suggests,109 they should take up their study in such a way that no one is disturbed—in fact, he speaks of meditation and not reading in that passage to insure that the sounds of reading will not keep anyone awake. When he speaks of "any brothers who feel the need to meditate," he does not require meditation of everyone. At times there may be need for singing practice, for example, but in such cases those who need the practice should see to it that no one is disturbed.

106 Ps. 5:8.

107 See Ps. 118:62: "I rose at midnight to give praise to thee." Cf. Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 16.

108 The Ofﬁces of the day being the Morning Ofﬁce or lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline; for the manner of their celebration, see Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 8 ff.

109 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 8.

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The Morning Ofﬁce will be celebrated as soon as it is light, the bell rung at sunrise if it can be arranged. At the end of the service, they will return to the dormitory. During the summer months, when the nights are short and the mornings long, they may sleep a little before prime until awakened by the bell. There is a reference to this morning nap after lauds in the second chapter of Saint Gregory's

Dialogues, where he recounts a story of the venerable Libertinus:

But on the following day, there was a court case to be heard which would mean much for the monastery's beneﬁt. So, after the morning hymns had been sung, Libertinus came to the bedside of the abbot and humbly asked his blessing.110

The morning nap should be permitted from the time of Easter to the autumn equinox, when the nights begin to be longer than the days.

When they leave the dormitory, the nuns will wash, then sit in the cloister with their books, reading or singing until the bell for prime. After prime, they will go to their chapter, where the phase of the moon will be announced and a portion of the martyrology will be read. This should be followed by an instructional sermon or the reading and exposition of a portion of the Rule. Then, if there are things to be set in order and corrected, this is the proper time.

We must recognize that a monastery or any other house should not be called disorderly simply because disorderly things may happen there, but rather because when such things happen, they pass without correction. No place is entirely free from fault, as Saint

Augustine reminds us:

The discipline of my house can be as watchful as you like— I am still a man and live among men. I dare not claim that my house is better than the ark of Noah, where of the eight people aboard only one was found to be a sinner; or the house of Abraham, where it was said, "Cast out this bondwoman and her son"; or the house of Isaac, where Jacob was loved but Esau hated; or the house of Jacob, where a son deﬁled the bed of his father; or the house of David, where one son lay with his sister and another took up arms against the indulgence of his father; or the company of the 110 Dialogi, 1.2.

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apostle Paul, who if he lived among good men would never say, "Combat without and terror within," or "There is no man of the same mind who is solicitous for you: all seek the things that are their own and not the things of Christ"; or the company of Christ himself, where eleven good men put up with the treachery and theft of Judas; or, ﬁnally, better than heaven itself, which saw the fall of angels.111

But urging a vigorous pursuit of discipline, he added this:

I confess before God that, from the day I ﬁrst became his servant, I have seen few men better than those who have prospered in monasteries. But I also have seen few men worse than monks who have fallen.112

[As I believe is written in the Book of Apocalypse, "He that is just, let him become more just, and he that is ﬁlthy, let him be ﬁlthy still."]113

Strict discipline must therefore be enforced. Whoever witnesses a fault in another but conceals it will be subject to a harsher punishment than the one who committed the original fault. No one must be remiss in pointing out a failing, whether it is another's or her own; but if she comes forward to accuse herself ﬁrst, she will deserve a lighter punishment if her negligence has ceased, for "the just is ﬁrst accuser of himself."114 No one must make excuses for another, unless the deaconess questions her about the truth of a matter she alone may know. No one must ever strike another for any fault whatever, unless the deaconess so orders it. Some passages about discipline and correction:115

My son, reject not the correction of the Lord, and do not faint when thou art chastised by him. For whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth, and as a father in the son he pleaseth himself.

111 Epistulae 78.8. The internal quotations and references are to Gen. 9:22 ff., 21:10;

Mal. 1:2–3; Gen. 25:22; 2 Kings 13:11, 15; 2 Cor. 7:5; Phil. 2:20–21; John 13:29; and Apoc. 12:9.

112 Epistulae 78.9.

113 A close but inexact citation of Apoc. 22:11, included in one manuscript and a likely later interpolation.

114 Prov. 28:17.

115 It is not possible to determine which, if any, of these passages might belong to Abelard's original text and which might be later additions.

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He that spareth the rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes.

When the wicked man is scourged, the fool shall be wiser.

When the pestilent man is scourged, the little one will be wiser.

A whip for a horse, a snafﬂe for an ass, and a rod for the back of fools.

He that rebuketh a man shall afterward ﬁnd favor with him more than he that deceiveth him with ﬂattering tongue.

Now all the chastisement for the present indeed seemeth not to bring with it joy but sorrow. But afterwards it will yield to them that are exercised by it the most peaceable fruit of justice.

A son ill taught is the confusion of the father, and a foolish daughter shall be to his loss.

He that loveth his son frequently chastiseth him that he may rejoice in his latter end. . . . He that instructeth his son shall be praised in him, and shall glory in him in the midst of his household.

A horse not broken becometh stubborn, and a child left to himself will become headstrong. Give thy son his way, and he shall make thee afraid. Play with him, and he shall make thee sorrowful.116

In the advisory discussions of the chapter, anyone may offer her opinion; but whatever may seem best to everyone else, the decision of the deaconess will be ﬁnal, for everything is subject to her will, even if she is in error and her decision turns out for the worse, as I pray will never be the case. "To disobey one's superiors in any matter is a sin," Augustine says in his Confessions, "even if one chooses better things than he has been ordered to do."117 It is far better to do well than to do good, since we should not weigh what is done so much as how it is done and what is in the heart.118 Whatever is done

116 Prov. 3:11–12, 13:24, 19:25, 21:11, 26:3, 28:23; Heb. 12:11; Ecclus. 22:3, 30:1–2, 8–9.

117 The passage cannot be found in Augustine's Confessions.

118 Cf. the First and Fifth Letters and Abelard's Ethics (Luscombe 1971, 24).

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in obedience is done well, no matter if what is done seems the least good. However great the material harm, it is right to obey superiors in all things, so long as it does not entail a danger to the soul. A superior must see that he orders well since for subordinates it is enough to obey well and follow not their own will but the will of their superiors, according to the terms of their profession.

In these discussions, we strictly forbid that custom ever be valued over reason, that any action be justiﬁed by custom rather than by reason or because it is the practice rather than because it is good. The better a thing is, the more warmly we should embrace it; otherwise, we act like Jews, who reject the Gospel, preferring their old law.

Saint Augustine speaks to this matter, drawing on the counsel of Saint Cyprian:119

Whoever dares scorn truth to follow custom is acting either out of envy of his brothers, to whom the truth has been revealed, or out of an ingratitude to God, whose inspiration has instructed his Church.

In the Gospel, the Lord said, "I am truth," not "I am custom." And so, let custom yield to truth, now that the truth has been made plain.120

Now that truth has been revealed, let error yield to truth, as Peter, who had been circumcised, yielded to Paul, who preached the truth.

Those who are vanquished by reason now plead custom against us, but in vain—as though custom were greater than truth, or what the Holy Spirit has revealed for the better were not to be followed in spiritual things. But plainly reason and truth must be valued over custom.121

And Gregory VII wrote to Bishop Wimund:

And surely, to use the words of Saint Cyprian, no custom, however ancient or widespread, is ever to be valued over 119 Reading consilio Cypriani with two of our three manuscripts against Concilio Cypriani, "the Council of Cyprian," which McLaughlin accepts.

120 De Baptismo 3.5, 3.6. The internal quotation is from John 14:6.

121 De Baptismo 3.7, 4.5.

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truth, and practices which are contrary to the truth must be abolished.122

We are told in Ecclesiasticus how much we should love truth in our words as well:

For thy soul, do not be ashamed to speak the truth.

In nowise speak against the truth, but be ashamed of the lie of thy ignorance.

In all thy works let the true word go before thee, and steady counsel before every action.123

Nothing must be taken as authority because it is done by the many but because it is proven by the wise and the good. As Solomon says,

"The number of fools is inﬁnite," and according to the Lord, "Many are called but few are chosen."124 What is rare is precious, and as things become more common they also diminish in price. No one, then, should follow the majority but rather what is best, not looking toward a person's age but to that person's wisdom, and not regarding friendship but the truth; hence Ovid's saying, "It is right to learn even from an enemy."125

Meetings should be called whenever there is need for counsel or serious matters to decide. Less important matters the deaconess may discuss with a few of the senior sisters alone. Some passages about counsel:126

Where there is no governor, the people shall fall, but there is safety where there is much counsel.

The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but he that is wise hearkeneth unto counsels.

My son, do nothing without counsel, and thou shalt not repent when thou hadst done.127

122 The origin of the text is uncertain, as McLaughlin notes 1956, 266 n. 55.

123 Ecclus. 4:24, 4:30, 37:20.

124 Eccles. 1:15; Matt. 22:14.

125 Metamorphoses 4.428.

126 It is not possible to determine which, if any, of these passages might belong to Abelard's original text and which might be later additions.

127 Prov. 11:14, 12:15; Ecclus. 32:24.

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A thing done without counsel may turn out well by chance, but fortune's gift does not excuse man's presumption. A thing done with counsel at times may go astray, but the power that asked for counsel is not guilty of presumption. The man who took advice is less to blame than those to whom he yielded in his error.

When the chapter meeting is over, the women will turn to the tasks that are suited to them—reading, singing, or handiwork— until terce. Afterward, Mass will be said. To celebrate the service one of the monks from the monastery should be appointed priest for the week. If their community is large enough, he should have a deacon and a subdeacon to assist him in his duties, but they also may perform their own ofﬁces. The sisters must not be able to see their coming in or going out. If more than these are needed, provision should be made for them, but only if it can be arranged without taking the monks from the Divine Ofﬁces in their own monastery on account of the Masses they say for the nuns.

If the sisters will receive communion, an older priest should be chosen to administer the sacrament after Mass, during which time the deacon and subdeacon will have withdrawn to remove any opportunity for temptation. The convent as a whole will receive communion at least three times a year, at Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas, as the Fathers established for the laity as well. They will prepare for these communions in the following way: three days before, they will offer confession and do appropriate penance; then for three days they will purify themselves with a fast of bread and water and frequent prayer, taking to heart, in all humility and awe, those fearsome words of the Apostle:

Whoever shall eat this bread or drink this cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man prove himself, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of the cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord. Therefore are there many inﬁrm and weak among you, and many sleep. But if we would not judge ourselves, we should not be judged.128

After Mass, they will return to their work until sext. At no time will anyone be idle, but each will do what she can and what is

128 1 Cor. 11:27–31.

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appropriate for her. After sext, they will go to their meal, unless it is a fast day when they must wait until none or even until evening during Lent. There will be someone reading to them throughout every meal; when the deaconess wishes her to end, she will say, "It is enough," and then all will rise and give thanks to God. In the summer, they will rest in the dormitory until none and afterward return to their work until vespers. Immediately after vespers, they will take something to eat or drink, or, depending on the season, go on to collation.129 Before collation on Saturdays, however, they will wash their hands and feet, the deaconess acting as their servant in this task, assisted by the kitchen workers for the week. After collation, they will go straight to compline and then retire to sleep.

About food and clothing, the dictum of Saint Paul must be observed: "But having food and covering, with these we are content."130 That is to say, what is necessary is enough: we must not seek more than that. Whatever can be purchased most cheaply or had most easily should be permitted, and whatever can be used without offense. For in matters of food, Saint Paul avoided only what would cause offense to his own or another's conscience, knowing that the fault is in the appetite and not in the food itself:

Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and he that eateth not, let him not judge him that eateth. . . . Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? . . . He that eateth, eateth to the Lord, for he giveth thanks to God. . . .

Let us not therefore judge one another any more. But judge this rather, that you not offend your brother nor put a stumbling block in his way.

I know and am conﬁdent that nothing is unclean in itself in the Lord Jesus but to him that esteemeth it unclean. . . . For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. . . . All things indeed are clean, but it is evil for that man who eateth with offense. It is good not to eat ﬂesh and not to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother is offended, weakened, or undone.131

129 That is, the evening readings instituted by Benedict, which on fast days are to follow vespers directly after a short interval; see Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 42.

130 1 Tim. 6:8.

131 Rom. 14:3–21.

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After discussing the offense to his brother, Paul continues with the offense a man commits against himself when he eats in violation of his conscience:

Blessed is he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth. But he that discerneth is condemned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith. For all that is not of faith is sin.132

We sin in everything we do against our conscience and against what we believe. And we judge and condemn ourselves in what we allow—by the terms, that is, of a law we accept and approve—if we eat the foods which we discern—that is, distinguish as unclean and exclude according to the law. So powerful is the witness of our conscience that this, above all, will condemn or acquit us before God.

Hence, John remarks in his ﬁrst letter:

Dearly beloved, if our hearts do not reprehend us, we have conﬁdence toward God. And whatever we shall ask we shall receive of him, because we keep his commandments and do those things which are pleasing in his sight.133

Paul, then, spoke correctly when he said above, "Nothing is unclean in Christ but to him that esteemeth it unclean," or impure and forbidden to the man who believes it so. We apply the term common, or unclean, to foods which are called impure according to the law,134 because when the law forbids these foods to its adherents, it makes them available or public, as it were, to those outside its jurisdiction; hence, common is also a term for impure women, and anything cheap or less valuable which is made public is also known as common.135

And so, Paul says that in Christ no food is common, or impure, 132 Rom. 14:22–23.

133 1 John 3:21–22.

134 Reading immundi with mss. C and E against mundi of ms. T, which McLaughlin accepts.

135 Much of what seems to be an odd punctiliousness about language in this paragraph derives from a divergence between the usage of the Vulgate and the normal

Latin usage of Abelard's time. The word the Douay-Rheims version reasonably translates as "unclean" in Rom. 14:14 is commune, normally "common." Abelard then feels a need to gloss what would appear to be a strained meaning at the least.

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because the law of Christ forbids no food, except to avoid an offense to one's own or another's conscience. As he says elsewhere:

Wherefore, if meat be an offense for my brother, I will never eat meat, lest I set a stumbling block in his path. Am not I free? Am not I an apostle? Have I not seen Christ Jesus our

Lord?136

In other words, "Do I not have the freedom which the Lord gave the apostles to use what others offer and eat any food at all? For when he sent out the apostles, as he says, 'eating and drinking such things as they have,'137 he did not distinguish one food from another." And so, Paul carefully proceeds to say that every sort of food—even the food of unbelievers which has been consecrated to idols—is lawful for Christians to eat, so long as it does not constitute an offense to another's conscience. "All things are lawful to me," he said, "but not all things are expedient."

All things are lawful for me, but all things do not edify. Let no man look to his own, but to that which is another's. Eat whatever is sold in the markets, asking no questions for conscience's sake, for "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." If any unbeliever invite you and you be willing to go, eat of anything that is set before you, asking no questions for conscience's sake. But if any man say, "This has been sacriﬁced to idols," do not eat of it for the sake of him that told it and for conscience's sake—conscience, I say, not thy own but the other's. . . . Do no offense to the Jews and to the gentiles and to the church of God.138

The clear inference from his words is that we are forbidden nothing we may eat without offense to our own or another's conscience.

Now, we act without offense to our conscience if we believe that we are keeping that calling in life that enables us to be saved; and we act without offense to another's if we are believed to be living such a life. Indeed, we will live such a life if we keep away from sin while allowing for the requirements of our nature, if we stay within our

136 1 Cor. 8:13–9:1.

137 Luke 10:7.

138 1 Cor. 10:22–29, 32. The internal quotation is from Ps. 23:1.

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strength and do not bind ourselves by our calling to such a heavy yoke that, overburdened, we collapse. And our fall will be the worse, the steeper the ascent of our calling has been.

To forestall such a collapse and the foolish taking of a vow, the Book of Ecclesiastes says:

If thou hadst vowed anything to God, defer not to pay it, for an unfaithful and foolish promise displeaseth him: whatsoever thou hadst vowed, pay it. But it is much better not to vow than after a vow not to perform the things promised.139

Saint Paul adds this counsel against the danger:

I would have it, therefore, that the younger widows marry, bear children, be mistresses of families, and give no occasion to the adversary to speak evil. For some are already turned aside after Satan.140

He considers what is natural to women's weakness at that age and weighs the remedy of a looser life against the risks inherent in a better. In the end, he advises remaining in the low places to keep from falling from the heights. And Saint Jerome agrees, saying in his letter to Eustochium:

Throughout all of Saint Paul's writings, it is only women who are permitted this second marriage—men are urged to the highest selfrestraint: "Is any man called who has been circumcised? Let him not then seek to be uncircumcised," he says, and "Art thou loosed from a wife? Then seek not a wife." Moses gave men more latitude than

139 Eccles. 5:3–4.

140 1 Tim. 5:14–15.

141 Epistulae 22.6. The passage is also quoted in this form in the Fifth Letter, where it also directly follows Paul's words from 1 Tim. 5.

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women, allowing a man more than one wife but a woman only one husband, and setting stricter penalties for adultery on a woman than a man. But Paul said, "A woman, if her husband be dead, is delivered from the law of her husband, so that she is not an adulteress if she be with another man"; and elsewhere, "But I say to the unmarried and to the widows, it is good for them if they continue so, even as I. But if they do not restrain themselves, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn"; and again, "If her husband die, a woman is at liberty. Let her marry whom she will, but only in the Lord. More blessed shall she be if she abide according to my counsel."142 And he allowed them not only a second marriage but any number of marriages: if their husbands have died, they may marry again. No limit is set on the number of times, so long as they do not incur the guilt of fornication. Let them marry again and again rather than fornicate once; let them discharge their carnal debts to many husbands rather than prostitute themselves even to one man. For although the payment of the marital debt is not entirely without sin, still the lesser sins are permitted them to keep them from the greater.

Is it any wonder, then, if, to keep women from sin, something is permitted them in which there is no sin at all—that is, whatever food they like, so long as it is necessary and nothing more than that? The fault is not in the food itself but in the appetite, as I said, by which I mean, in taking pleasure in what is unlawful, desiring what is forbidden, and using it without shame even when it creates the greatest possible offense. In fact—of all our foods is there one so dangerous to us, so condemned, or so inimical to our devotions and repose as wine? Solomon, the wisest of the wise, would keep us from it more than anything else: "Wine is a luxurious thing, and drunkenness riotous: whosoever is delighted therein shall not be wise."143

Who hath woe? Whose father hath woe? Who hath contentions? Who falls into pits? Who hath wounds without cause? Who hath redness of eyes? Surely they that pass their time in wine and study to drink off their cups. Look not upon the wine when it is red, when its color shineth in the glass: it goeth in pleasantly, but in the end it will bite like a snake and will spread poison abroad like a basilisk.

142 1 Cor. 7:18, 27; Rom 7:3; 1 Cor. 7:8–9, 39–40.

143 Prov. 20:1.

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Thy eyes shall behold strange women and thy heart perverse things. And thou shalt be as one sleeping in the midst of the sea, and as a pilot fast asleep when the stern is lost.

And thou shalt say, "They have beaten me, but I was not sensible of pain. They drew me, and I felt not. When shall I wake and ﬁnd wine again?144

And:

Give not wine to kings, O Lamuel, because there is no secret where drunkenness reigneth, and they might drink and forget judgments and pervert the cause of the children of the poor.145

In Ecclesiasticus we read:

A workman that is a drunkard shall not be rich, and he that condemneth small things shall fall little by little. Wine and women make even the wise fall away.146

And Isaiah mentions no other food, blaming wine alone for the captivity of his people:

Woe to you that rise up early in the morning to follow drunkenness and to drink till the evening to be inﬂamed with wine. The harp and the lyre and the timbrel and the pipe and wine are in your feasts, and you regard not the work of the Lord nor consider the work of his hands. Therefore is my people led away captive, because they had not knowledge. . . . Woe to you that are mighty at drinking wine and stout men at drunkenness.147

He then extends his complaint to the prophets and the priests:

But these also have been ignorant through wine and through drunkenness have erred. The priest and the prophet have

144 Prov. 23:29–35.

145 Prov. 31:4–5.

146 Ecclus. 19:1–2.

147 Isa. 5:11–13 and 5:22.

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been ignorant through drunkenness; they are swallowed up with wine; they have gone astray in drunkenness; they have not known him that seeth; they have been ignorant of judgment. All their tables were full of vomit and ﬁlth, so that there was no more place. Whom shall he teach knowledge, and whom shall he make to understand the hearing?148

And the Lord said through the prophet Joel, "Awake, ye that are drunk, and weep all ye that take delight in drinking sweet wine," though he did not forbid the use of wine when it is necessary, as Saint Paul advised Timothy, "for thy stomach's sake and for thy frequent inﬁrmities"—not only "inﬁrmities," note, but "frequent inﬁrmities."149

Noah ﬁrst planted the vine, perhaps still unaware of the evils of drunkenness, but he became drunk and uncovered his loins— since lust is connected to wine—then cursed the son who mocked him to a life of slavery, which we never hear happening before.

Lot, who was a holy man, would never have been induced to commit incest with his daughters if they had not ﬁrst arranged that he was drunk. And the blessed widow Judith, too, thought that only by this trick could Holofernes be deceived and undone. The angels who appeared to the patriarchs, we read, were offered meat but never wine. And Elijah, too, the ﬁrst and greatest forefather of our calling, was brought meat and bread by ravens in the morning and the evening, but we never read that they brought him any wine. The people of Israel even fed on the sumptuous meat of quails in the desert, but took no wine and did not wish for it; and the meals of loaves and ﬁshes which sustained the people in the wilderness are never said to have included wine.150 Only a wedding, where some loosening of self-restraint is permitted, saw the miracle of wine,

"wherein is lechery."151 But the wilderness, which is the proper habitation of monastics, has known the gift of meat but not of wine.

148 Isa. 28:7–9.

149 Joel 1:5; 1 Tim. 5:23.

150 For Noah, see Gen. 9:20 ff.; for Lot, see Gen. 19:31 ff.; for Judith, see Jth. 13; for the patriarchs' receiving angels, see, e.g., Gen. 18:7–8; for Elijah, see 3 Kings 17:6; for the feasts of quails, see Exod. 16:13; for the meals of loaves and ﬁshes, see Matt. 14:13 ff.,

Mark 6:31 ff., Luke 9:10 ff., and John 6:5 ff.

151 See the wedding at Cana in John 2:1–10. The quoted phrase is from Eph. 5:18.

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The single most important point in the rule by which the Nazirites consecrated themselves to God was that they stay away from wine or anything else that can intoxicate.152 There is no virtue and no good in intoxication, and so the priests of former days were forbidden not only wine but anything that can intoxicate. [So, when Jerome wrote to Nepotianus about the cleric's way of life, he was outraged that the priests of the old law could surpass our own in their abstinence from drink:

The Rule of Saint Pachomius tells us, "Let no one touch wine or liquor except in the inﬁrmary."154 And who has not heard that wine is not a thing for monks and that they used to avoid it with such horror they called it Satan? In the Lives of the Fathers we read, "Abbot

Pastor was once told about a monk who did not drink wine, and he replied that wine is not a thing for monks." And just afterward:

Once there was a celebration of the Mass on Abbot Anthony's mountain, and they found a jar of wine left over.

One of the elders ﬁlled a cup and brought it to Abbot Sisoi, who drank it off. Then he brought him a second cup, which he also took and drank off. But when he brought him a third cup, he refused it, saying, "Peace, brother, don't you know that this is Satan?"

152 See, e.g., Num. 6:3.

153 Epistulae 52.11; cf. 1 Tim. 3:3 and Lev. 10:9, 35; the source of "the words of the philosopher" has not been identiﬁed. The passage is quoted with virtually the same introductory words in the Fifth Letter, from which it is likely to have been imported as an interpolation here.

154 Pachomius was a fourth-century Egyptian monastic and the ﬁrst to organize monks in communal life according to a written rule. Abelard here quotes chapter 45 of Pachomius's Rule in the Latin translation of Jerome.

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And another story about Abbot Sisoi:

So his disciple Abraham asked him, "If it happens in church on the Sabbath or the Lord's Day, is it still too much to drink three cups?" And the old man answered, "If it were not Satan, it would not be too much."155

And Saint Benedict was aware of this, even while he allowed wine to his monks by a special dispensation:

Yes, we read that wine is not a thing for monks. But since the monks of our day can never be convinced of this. . . .156

For monks to be completely barred from what Saint Jerome strictly forbids to women would not in fact be strange, since women's nature, though weaker in itself, is nonetheless stronger against the effects of wine. Jerome wrote sternly to the virgin of Christ, Eustochium, about the importance of preserving chastity:

If my counsel has any force with you or my experience any credit—before anything else, I warn the bride of Christ to keep away from wine as she would from poison. It is the devil's ﬁrst weapon against youth. Greed does not unsteady us so much, nor pride so puff us up, nor ambition so lead us on—we can forgo these other vices easily. But this enemy is within us, and we carry him with us wherever we go. Wine and youth together make a double conﬂagration. So why throw oil on the ﬂames or add fuel to a young body, which is already on ﬁre?157

Yet medical writers agree that wine has much less effect on women than on men. In Book 7 of his Saturnalia Macrobius explains why:

155 Vitae Patrum 5.4.31, 36, and 37.

156 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 40. The interrupted sentence is continued below.

157 Epistulae 22.8.

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been swallowed and incorporated into this great general moisture, it loses its strength . . . and does not easily strike the seat of the brain, once its force has been dissipated.

And:

If this is the case, then what can be the sense in allowing to monks what is denied to the female sex? Madness, it seems, to permit it to those who would suffer most harm while denying it to these others. Is there anything more foolish than for religious life not to shrink in horror from what is most contrary to it and most makes us turn away from God? Is there any greater audacity than for the abstinence of Christian perfection not to shun completely what was forbidden even to kings and the priests of the old law?

But no, we see it even takes the greatest pleasure in it. For we all know how devoted the monks of our time—and the clerics even more—are to the contents of their cellars, how they stock them with wines of different sorts, how they ﬂavor them with honey, herbs, and spices to increase their pleasure in the taste as they get increasingly drunk, how they sharpen their lust as they grow hotter in their wine. It is not so much a lapse as lunacy that those who bind themselves most tightly by their vows of self-restraint should prepare themselves least carefully to keep those very vows—or I should say, that they should so arrange it that their vows are certainly least likely to be kept. Their bodies may be walled inside a cloister, but their hearts are ﬁlled with lust and on ﬁre for fornication.

When Saint Paul wrote to Timothy, "Do not still drink water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thy frequent inﬁrmities,"159 it was clearly because Timothy would take no wine when he was in good health. So, if we profess the apostles' way of life and vow abstinence as a form of penance, if our calling is to renounce the world, then why do we take most pleasure in what is

158 Saturnalia 7.6.16–17.

159 1 Tim. 5:23.

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most hostile to our calling and in what is the most enjoyable of all foods? In his book on penance, Saint Ambrose condemns no food except for wine:

Would anyone call it penance when we still seek worldly honors, when wine still ﬂows and we still enjoy the pleasures of the marital bed? No, we must renounce the world. I have always thought it easier to ﬁnd someone who has kept his innocence intact than someone who has done a proper penance.160

And in his book on renouncing the world, he says:

Your renunciation is well done if your eye also renounces the sight of bowls and goblets and does not become voluptuary as it lingers over wine.161

Wine is the only food he mentions, and he makes our renunciation of the world subject to our renunciation of wine, as if every worldly pleasure depended on it alone. He does not in fact speak of the palate renouncing the taste of wine but of the eye renouncing its sight, to prevent its being caught by pleasure and desire for what it sees— as Solomon said in the words noted above, "Look not upon the wine when it is red, when its color shineth in the glass."162 But what will we say, I ask you, when, to gratify the palate as well as the eye, we ﬂavor our wine with honey, herbs, and spices and even want to serve it up in bowls?

When Saint Benedict felt obliged to allow wine to his monks, he did so with this limitation: "Let us at least agree to drink sparingly and not to the point where we are sated, because 'wine makes even the wise fall away'"163—though I would call for a limit at the point where we are sated, to keep us from the greater sin of drinking to excess. Saint Augustine, too, in the Rule he wrote for clerics in monastic life, allowed them wine but limited it to Saturday and Sunday—"On Saturday and Sunday, those who wish may take some

160 De Poenitentia 2.10.

161 De Fuga 9.

162 Prov. 23:31.

163 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 40, the continuation of the interrupted sentence above.

The internal quotation is from Ecclus. 19:2.

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wine, as is the custom"164—out of respect for the Lord's Day and its vigil, which is Saturday, but also because the brothers would be gathering at those times, when otherwise they lived separately in their cells, [as Saint Jerome also noted in the Lives of the Fathers when he wrote of the place he called The Cells: "They remain in their individual cells except on Saturday and Sunday, when they come together in church and greet one another as if they had been restored to each other's sight in heaven."165 So it was meet to grant them this allowance, to allow them to rejoice with some refreshment when they meet,166 each one thinking, although not saying aloud, "See how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity."167]

See, though, how important many people seem to ﬁnd it if we simply abstain from meat, no matter how far we may exceed any limit when we feed on other foods. Even if we spend vast sums to buy our platters of ﬁsh, even if we season them with pepper and other spices, even if, when we are drunk on the strongest unmixed wine, we add goblets and bowls of mulled and herbed wine over and above—everything—so long as we devour these meals in private—everything is pardoned by our abstinence from meat, as though the fault lay in the kind of food and not in the excess. The Lord himself, however, prohibited "surfeit and drunkenness" alone, that is to say, not the kind of food or wine but only its excess.168

But Saint Augustine understood this well and, opposed to nothing in food except for wine and excluding no kind of food in itself, believed that a single principle would sufﬁce for abstinence, which he expressed succinctly: "Subdue your ﬂesh with fasts and abstinence from food or drink so far as your health permits."169 Now, unless I am mistaken, he had been reading this passage in Saint

Athanasius's exhortation to monks:

164 Regula Secunda Augustini, fragmentary ﬁfth-century work once attributed to Augustine.

165 From Ruﬁnus, Historia Monachorum 22, which forms the second book of Vitae Patrum, and had been attributed to Jerome.

166 The English pun on "meet" reﬂects the Latin, I'm afraid: "conveniens erat haec indulgentia ut . . . convenientes . . . congauderent."

167 Ps. 132:1.

168 Luke 21:34.

169 Epistulae 211.8.

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There should be no ﬁxed limit on fasts for the willing, but only so far as possibility allows and not to the point of suffering; and, except on Sunday, they always should be solemnized if they have been vowed.170

In other words, if fasts are undertaken in fulﬁllment of a vow, they must be performed devoutly at all times, excepting Sundays. The term of fasts is not ﬁxed here except as health permits; as it is said,

"He looks only to the capacity of our nature and allows it to set its own limits, aware that there can be no delinquency if moderation is observed."171 That is to say, we must not become relaxed by our pleasures beyond what is right, as was written about the people fed "with the marrow of wheat and the purest wine": "The beloved grew fat and kicked."172 But on the other hand, we must not waste away from abstinence beyond the proper measure and then collapse completely, or squander by our complaining any good we might have gained, or glory in what we take to be our own special distinction. As the Book of Ecclesiastes says, "A just man perisheth in his justice. . . . Be not over just, and be not more wise than is necessary, lest thou become stupid" and swell with pride at your sense of your own distinction.173

Instead, it must be discretion, the mother of all virtues, that governs our diligence in this. It must carefully take note what burdens are placed on whom and allot to each individual only what his strength will bear, following rather than forcing nature, and preserving the good use of being sated while destroying the abuses of excess. Vices should be rooted out without injuring nature. For the weak it is enough to keep from sin even if they do not reach the summit of perfection; and, yes, it is enough to ﬁnd a corner of paradise if you cannot claim a place among the martyrs.174 There is no risk in making only modest vows, in order to add something of your own accord beyond what you are already bound to do; for as it is written, "When you shall have done all those things that are commanded you, say, 'We are unproﬁtable servants; we have done

170 Athanasius, Exhortatio ad Monachos, an appendix to the Codex Regularium of Benedict of Aniane.

171 The source of this passage is unknown.

172 Deut. 32:14–15; reading dilectus, "beloved," with the Vulgate and mss. C and E against dilatatus, "distended," with ms. T, which McLaughlin accepts.

173 Eccles. 7:16–17.

174 Cf. the Third Letter, p. 83.

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that which we ought to do.'"175 As Saint Paul said, "For the law worketh wrath. Where there is no law, neither is there transgression." And also:

For without the law sin was dead. And I lived some time without the law. But when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment that was ordained to life was found to be unto death to me. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment seduced me, and by it killed me . . . so that sin . . . might become sinful above measure.176

[Augustine to Simplician: "Forbidding desire has made it sweeter, and so it has undone me." And in his book of eighty-three questions: "Pleasure persuades us to sin all the more when the pleasure is forbidden." And as Ovid writes, "We desire the forbidden and denied."177]

This should give pause to anyone who would take on the yoke of monastic rule as if he were professing some new law.178 Let him choose only what he is able to do and avoid what he is not. No one becomes guilty of breaking a law which he has not professed. So, think before you enter into orders, but once you have entered orders, persevere; what ﬁrst is voluntary, afterward becomes obligatory.179 "In my Father's house there are many mansions," and many paths lead to it.180 The married are not damned, but those who practice selfrestraint are more easily saved. The rules of the holy Fathers were not laid down in order that we may be saved, but in order that we may be more easily saved and with greater purity devote ourselves to God.

"And if a virgin marry," Saint Paul says, "she hath not sinned: nevertheless, such shall have tribulation of the ﬂesh. But I spare you."

The unmarried woman and the virgin thinketh on the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in 175 Luke 17:10.

176 Rom. 4:15, 7:8–13.

177 Augustine, De Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum 1.1.5, De Diversis Quaestionibus

LXXXIII 66.5; Ovid, Amores 3.4.17. These later interpolations miss the point that Paul and Abelard are making: the issue is not in fact psychological but structural.

178 See Heloise's discussion in the Fifth Letter, p. 112.

179 Cf. Augustine, De Bono Viduitatis 9.13, cited in the Fifth Letter, p. 112.

180 John 14:2.

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spirit. But she that is married thinketh on the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I speak for your proﬁt, not to cast a snare upon you, but for that which is decent and which may give you power to attend upon the Lord without impediment.181

And this, of course, is most easily done when we retire to the cloisters of our monasteries, physically withdrawing from the world so that none of the world's troubles may disturb us.

Likewise, whoever makes the law must not create a multitude of sins by laying down a multitude of strictures. In coming to earth, the Word of God curtailed the word on earth. The words of Moses were many, yet Paul says, "The law brought nothing to perfection"182—yes, his words were many and so onerous that Peter admits no one could endure all of his commandments: "Men, brethren," Peter says, why do you tempt God to put a yoke upon the necks of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we ourselves have been able to bear? But by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we believe we are saved in like manner as they were.183

Christ's words on ethical conduct and the holy life were few, and yet he taught perfection. Eliminating the harsh and onerous, he commanded what was sweet and light, and thereby brought religious practice to its full consummation:

Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you and learn of me, because I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall ﬁnd rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light.184

What often happens in worldly business also happens in our good works. There are many people, we know, who work hard in their business but with only diminishing returns. And there also are

181 1 Cor. 7:28, 34–35.

182 Heb. 7:19.

183 Acts 15:7–11.

184 Matt. 11:28–30.

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many who afﬂict themselves the more in outward acts of penance but earn less reward from God, who looks more to our hearts than to our deeds. In fact, the more these people are taken up with outward things, the less they can devote themselves to inward things; and the more they receive the attention of men, who judge by outward things, the more they seek out glory among them and more easily are beguiled by their esteem. Saint Paul corrects this error by disparaging outward works in favor of justiﬁcation by faith:

For if Abraham were justiﬁed by works, he hath glory, but not glory before God. For what saith the scripture? "Abraham believed God, and it was reputed to him unto justice."

. . . What then shall we say? That the gentiles, who followed not after justice, have attained to justice, even the justice that is of faith. But Israel, by following after the law of justice is not come unto the law of justice. Why so? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were of works.185

Those who scour the outside of the platter or the cup are looking less to the cleanliness within, and when they guard the body more closely than the soul, they become more worldly than spiritual themselves. But when we desire that Christ live in the inner man through faith, we count as only little those outward things which are common to God's chosen and rejected alike, taking to heart what is written: "In me, O God, are vows to thee, which I will pay, my praises to thee." And so, we do not follow that outward abstinence of the law which cannot justify us, to be sure. In matters of food, the Lord forbids us nothing but "surfeit and drunkenness" alone,186 that is to say, excess; and what he allowed us, he was not ashamed to exhibit in himself, although many were offended and reproached him severely for it, as he said:

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, "He hath a devil." And the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they said, "Behold a man that is a glutton and a wine drinker, a friend of publicans and sinners."187

185 Rom. 4:2–3, 9:30–32. The internal quotation is from Gen. 15:6.

186 Ps. 55:12; Luke 21:34.

187 Matt. 11:18–19.

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He defended his followers, who did not fast like the followers of John nor even care if they washed their hands before they ate:

Can the children of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when then bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then they shall fast.188

And:

Not what goeth into the mouth deﬁleth a man, but what cometh out of the mouth. . . . The things that proceed from the mouth come forth from the heart, and those things deﬁle a man. . . . But to eat with unwashed hands doth not deﬁle a man.189

No food in itself deﬁles the soul, but only the appetite for foods that are forbidden. As the body cannot be deﬁled except by some physical stain, the soul cannot be deﬁled except by a spiritual stain.

We should never waste our fear on what may happen in the body if the heart has not been forced to give consent; we should never dare to trust in any cleanness of the ﬂesh if the mind has been corrupted by the will. The life and death of the soul, therefore, lie entirely in the heart. Hence, Solomon in the Book of Proverbs says, "Keep thy heart with all watchfulness, because life issueth out from it."190 And there come forth from the heart the things that can deﬁle a man, as the Lord said just above, because the soul is saved or damned by good or evil desires. But since the union of body and soul within a person is so close, it is especially important to see that the pleasures of the ﬂesh do not lead the soul to give consent, and that the ﬂesh itself, becoming lawless with immoderate indulgence, does not struggle against the soul and begin to take command when it should obey.191

Now, we will be able to accomplish this if we permit all that is necessary but entirely eliminate excess, as I've often said, not denying the weaker sex the use of any foods but denying them the abuse of them all. Let them take and consume anything at all, but nothing

188 Matt. 9:11. The manuscripts include only the ﬁrst sentence of this passage, indicating what follows by "etc."

189 Matt. 15:11, 18, 20.

190 Prov. 4:23.

191 Cf. the Fifth Letter, p. 105.

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outside the bounds of moderation. "For everything made by God is good," the Apostle says, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctiﬁed by the word of God and prayer. Proposing these things to the brethren, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of faith and the good doctrine which thou hast attained unto.192

So let us then, like Timothy, follow this teaching of Saint Paul, avoiding nothing in food but "surfeit and drunkenness" alone, according to the word of the Lord. But let us also temper everything in such a way that we support the weak nature in all things and do not encourage its vice: whatever can do more harm must be limited more strictly. Eating in moderation is in fact more worthy of praise than total abstention. Hence, Augustine says in his book on the good in marriage during his discussion of the sustenance of the body:

No one uses these things well unless he can refrain from using them. For many, in fact, it is easier to abstain and thereby not use them at all than to temper their use and thereby use them well. But no one can use them wisely unless he can exercise self-restraint and not use them.193

And Paul spoke, too, out of the same disposition: "I know both how to have plenty and how to suffer need."194 Any sort of man can suffer need, but only the great know how to suffer need; and any man can have plenty, but to know how to have plenty is only for those whom plenty does not corrupt.

Now, since "wine is a luxurious thing and riotous," as it is said,195 contrary both to self-restraint and silence, women should either abstain completely for the sake of God—as the wives of the gentiles did out of fear of committing adultery—or temper their wine with water in such a way that it will quench their thirst and serve their health without having the strength to do them harm—I 192 1 Tim. 4:4–6.

193 De Bono Coniugali 21.

194 Phil. 4:12.

195 Prov. 20:1.

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recommend a mixture of at least a fourth part water. But it is extremely difﬁcult, when the wine is right there before us, to keep from drinking to the point where we are sated, as Saint Benedict would have it.196 Therefore, to avoid the greater risk, I think it is safer not to prohibit being sated, as I've said, for the fault does not lie in being sated but rather in excess. And herbed wine may be prepared as medicine, and even unmixed wine may be drunk—neither should be forbidden—but this is only for the sick and never for the convent as a whole.

[We also forbid the use of pure wheat ﬂour; when the nuns have wheat ﬂour, it must always be mixed with at least a third part coarser grains. And they should never indulge themselves with bread hot from the oven, but only after it has been sitting at least a day.]197

As for all the other kinds of food, the deaconess should see to it that the women's needs are met by whatever can be purchased most cheaply or had most easily. [Is it not the height of foolishness, when our own goods will sufﬁce, for us to go and buy the goods of others? Or when we have what we need at home, for us to seek something more outside the walls? Or when we have enough at hand, for us to struggle for what would be excess?]198 Indeed, for this lesson in moderation and discretion we have the teaching, not only of mortal men, but also of angels and the Lord himself, that in serving the needs of this earthly life, we should not be particular about the kind of food we eat but should rest content with whatever is before us. The angels ate the meat which Abraham set out for them, and the Lord Jesus fed the hungry multitude with ﬁsh found in the wilderness199—from which we learn that the eating of meat or ﬁsh indifferently is not to be condemned: any food may be eaten which does not give offense, which presents itself freely, is most easily had, and involves the least expense.

This is also the teaching of Seneca, who of all philosophers was the foremost teacher of ethical conduct and the greatest exponent of austerity and self-restraint. "My idea," he said, "is to live in accord with nature."

196 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 40.

197 One manuscript includes these later comments.

198 These rhetorical questions, included in one manuscript, emphasize a different point and are most likely later interpolations.

199 See Gen. 18:1–8; Mark 8:1–8; and John 6:1–9.

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But it is against nature to torment the body, to despise cleanliness and seek out squalor, to eat food that is not only cheap but loathsome and disgusting. If it is luxury to crave expensive things, it is lunacy to thumb your nose at ordinary things that are available for only little cost. Philosophy calls for thrift, not penance, but there is such a thing as thrift without disorder, and that is what I like.200

Gregory, too, teaches us to look less to our food than our hearts; in Book 30 of his Moralia, he distinguishes among the different appeals of the palate. "At times," he says, "the palate may want more sumptuous food or, at times, a dish that requires more elaborate preparation."201 But sometimes what it desires is more humble, yet still it sins by the heat of its desire. The people of Israel succumbed in the desert because they scorned God's manna and longed for meat instead, which they considered a more sumptuous kind of food. But Esau, on the other hand, lost the glory of his birthright because he longed for a simple dish of lentils, which in the great heat of his desire meant more to him than the sale of his own birthright. The fault is in the appetite, not the food itself. We often can eat a humble food and incur substantial guilt, but still can take the more sumptuous food without any sin at all, just as Esau lost his birthright for some lentils while Elijah in the wilderness kept his physical strength intact by eating the meat which God had sent him. So, knowing that the desire for food and not the food itself can lead to our damnation, the old adversary tempted the ﬁrst man with an apple, not with meat, and tempted the second man with bread alone.202 Since we often commit the sin of Adam when we eat humble or simple foods, we must eat only those foods that the requirements of our nature demand and not those foods that pleasure may suggest. Our desire, though, is less intense for what we take as less valuable, for what is plentiful and can be cheaply bought, and this is the case with common meat. Meat also strengthens a weak nature better than ﬁsh, is less expensive, and is easier to prepare.

200 Epistulae ad Lucilium 5.4.

201 Moralia 30.18.

202 For Esau, see Gen. 25:29; for Elijah, see 3 Kings 17:2–6; for the temptation of Jesus,

"the second man," see Matt. 4:1–4.

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The use of wine or meat—like marriage itself—is a matter that falls between good and evil and is therefore called indifferent,203 though the marriage bond is not entirely without sin and wine remains the most dangerous kind of food. But if the moderate use of wine is not forbidden in religious life, why do we forbid any other kind of food, so long as it too is used in moderation? If Saint

Benedict admits that wine is not a thing for monks, yet is compelled to allow it by a special dispensation in these times when the initial fervor of charity has cooled,204 why should we not allow women all those things which none of their vows now forbids? If popes and other leaders of the Church may all eat meat, if canons regular in their monasteries too may all eat meat because none of their vows prevent it, what reason can there be to ﬁnd fault in allowing the same to women, especially if they are bound more strictly in every other thing? It is enough for the disciple if he be as his master;205 and it seems a great injustice if what monasteries of clerics have is forbidden to convents of women. It also should not be taken as a small thing if women, with all the other strictures of the monastery, could equal the devout among the laity in this single matter of having access to meat. Chrysostom says, "A layman should have no more latitude than a monk—except that he may lie with his wife";206 and in Saint Jerome's judgment, the religious obligations of clerics are not less than the obligations of monks: "Whatever is said against monks reﬂects also upon clerics, who are the forefathers of monks."207

For the weak to bear the same burdens as the strong, for women to be bound to the same standards of abstinence as men, is at odds with the principle of discretion. If someone needs an authority beyond the teaching of nature, let him consult Saint Gregory, who, while not a Doctor of the Church himself, instructed other Doctors.

In Chapter 24 of his Pastoral, he notes:

Men should be admonished in one way and women in another, in that heavy burdens should be placed on men and lighter ones on women. Let men take up the greater

203 See the Fifth Letter, pp. 117–18.

204 See Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 40.

205 Cf. Matt. 10:24.

206 Homilia in Epistulam ad Hebraeos 7.4. Cf. the Fifth Letter, pp. 111–12.

207 Epistulae 54.5.

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tasks, but let women be corrected gently with the light ones. . . .208

For what seems of little moment in the strong is something we all admire in the weak. Moreover, eating common meat affords less pleasure than eating the ﬂesh of birds and ﬁsh, which Saint Benedict does not in fact forbid.209 Now, Saint Paul distinguishes among different kinds of ﬂesh, saying, "All ﬂesh is not the same ﬂesh, but one is the ﬂesh of men, another of beasts, another of birds, and another of ﬁsh,"210 and since the law includes the ﬂesh of beasts and birds among permitted sacriﬁces to the Lord but does not mention ﬁsh, no one would suppose that the eating of ﬁsh was cleaner in the sight of God than the eating of other ﬂesh. Fish also imposes a greater burden on our poverty than meat because it is more expensive, being in scarce supply, and does less than meat to strengthen a weak nature, so that one presents the greater burden, the other the greater sustenance.

So, considering both human nature and resources, I forbid nothing in the way of food, as I've said before, nothing but excess. But I also place such limits on the eating of meat and other foods, that, with every kind of food permitted them, the abstinence of nuns may be greater than the abstinence of monks, who still are forbidden certain kinds of food. The nuns will not eat meat at more than one meal a day; no more than one dish will be prepared for any person; no separate dish of condiments will be added to the meat; and under no circumstances will anyone eat meat more than three times in a week—on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, that is— no matter how many feast days the week contains. In fact, the greater the feast, the greater should be the abstinence that honors it. As Gregory of Nazianzus, that great Doctor of the Church, tells us in the third book of his treatises, "On Lamps, or Second Epiphany," "Let us celebrate a feast by exulting in the spirit, not by indulging the belly";211 and in his fourth book on Pentecost and the Holy Spirit:

208 Regulae Pastoralis Liber 3.1; cf. the Fifth Letter, p. 109.

209 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 39, speciﬁes only the ﬂesh of four-footed animals as prohibited.

210 1 Cor. 15:39.

211 Oratio 39, In Sancta Lumina 20. Abelard cites Gregory in the Latin translation of Ruﬁnus, where it is presented as the third of a set of treatises.

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This is our feast: let us lay down in the treasure-house of the soul something that will last forever, not transient things that will melt away. The body has enough in its own evil, it does not need anything more; and the insolent beast of the belly does not need another meal to make it both more insolent and insistent.212

A feast should rather be celebrated in the spirit, as Gregory's follower, Saint Jerome, also remarks:

So, we must be careful to celebrate a feast day less with an overﬂow of food than with an exultation of the spirit. How thoroughly absurd to gorge ourselves in remembrance of a martyr who we know had honored God by fasting.213

Augustine, On the Remedy of Penance:

Think of the thousands of martyrs. Why does it please us to celebrate their births with all these worthless banquets and not please us to follow their example with our conduct?214

At meatless meals, however, the nuns may have two vegetable dishes of any sort, and ﬁsh may be added to these. No expensive ﬂavorings will be served at the convent: the nuns must be content with whatever grows locally. Fruit will only be eaten at the evening meal, but it may be served, along with roots, herbs, and other things of the sort, to those who require it for medicinal reasons. If there is a visiting nun at table, received as the convent's guest, let her feel the kindness of its charitable love by being offered an additional dish; if she wishes to share any of it, she may. But she—and any other visitors there may be, no matter the number—will sit at the high table, where the deaconess will serve her before taking her own meal with the others who are serving at table. A sister who wishes to subdue the ﬂesh with a leaner, more sparing diet must not presume to do so without permission; if her wish seems grounded in virtue and not caprice, and if her physical strength can bear it, permission should

212 Oratio 41, In Pentecosten 1.

213 Epistulae 31.3.

214 Sermons 351.4.

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not be withheld, but no one will be permitted to leave the convent for this purpose or spend a whole day without eating.

The nuns will not use animal fat to ﬂavor their meals on Fridays but must be content instead with Lenten fare, enduring some abstinence out of compassion for their Bridegroom, who died on that day of the week. And they are not only forbidden but must absolutely shun the custom that is practiced in some monasteries of wiping food-stained hands and knives on some part of the bread that is held back for the poor: merely to spare their hand-cloths, they pollute the bread of the poor—no, not in fact their bread but his, who said, "What you have done for the least of my brethren, you have done also for me."215

On the matter of fasting, what the Church has established for the general populace will be enough. I do not presume to impose a burden on nuns beyond what is observed by the devout among the laity, and would not dare set their weakness in this above the strength of men. From the time of the autumn equinox to Easter, though, I think one meal a day will be enough—not, however, for the sake of religious abstinence, but because of the shortness of the days, and here I make no distinction among the different kinds of food.

The rich clothing which scripture condemns must also be avoided, as the Lord himself warns against it, condemning the pride of the rich while praising the humility of John. Saint Gregory knew this well, saying in his sixth homily on the Gospels:

What does it mean to say, "They that are clothed in soft garments are in the houses of kings"? It means that they are soldiers in an earthly, not a heavenly, kingdom, who will not suffer hardships for God but devote themselves to outward display, seeking the softness and pleasure of this, our present life.216

And in his fortieth homily:

Some think there is no sin in the love of ﬁne, rich dress. But if there were not, the Lord would not have made the point

215 Matt. 25:40.

216 Homiliae in Evangelia 6. The internal quotation is from Matt. 11:18.

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that the rich man tortured in hell had been "clothed in purple and ﬁne linen." For no one wants or needs expensive clothing except to seem superior, that is, for the sake of the empty pomp and glory of the world. Here is the proof: no one adorns himself like this in private, but only where he can be seen.217

[The ﬁrst letter of Peter also warns married women and the laity against this vanity:

In like manner, also let women be subject to their husbands, that if any believe not the word, they may be won without the word by the conversation of the wives, considering your chaste conversation with fear. Let their adornment not be the outward plaiting of the hair, or the wearing of gold, or the putting on of apparel, but the hidden man of the heart in the incorruptibility of a quiet and meek spirit, which is rich in the sight of the Lord.218

The warning is properly directed more toward women than toward men because, women's minds being weaker, they are more susceptible to the lures of luxury. But if secular women are to be so warned, what then is appropriate for women devoted to Christ, whose adornment consists in remaining unadorned? A woman who seeks out adornment, or who does not refuse it when it is offered, forgoes this witness to her chastity and should be thought readying herself for fornication, not religious practice, less nun, that is, than whore. Her adornment itself announces her whoredom, betraying an unchaste heart, as it is written, "The attire of the body and the laughter of the teeth and the gait of the man show what he is."] 219

As I noted above, the Lord praised John more for the roughness and cheapness of his clothing than for his rough food. "What went you into the desert to see?" he said, "A man clothed in soft garments? But they that are clothed in soft garments are in the houses of kings."220 At times there may in fact be reason to eat expensive

217 Homilia in Lucam, 40.16. The internal quotation is from Luke 16:19.

218 1 Pet. 3:1–4.

219 Ecclus. 19:27. The stress in this passage on outward forms, so at odds with Abelard's consistent position elsewhere, may be enough in itself to cast doubt on his authorship.

220 Matt. 11:8. The manuscripts quote only through "a man clothed in soft garments," inserting "etc."

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food, but there never is a use for expensive clothing. The more expensive the clothing, in fact, the more carefully it must be protected; and the less it is then used, the less use it will be, creating only problems for its owner: its fabric can be easily be ruined and affords only little warmth. Black cloth is most appropriate for the garb of penitence, and lamb's wool best for the brides of Christ, who in their very habit may be seen, or reminded, to be clothed in the Lamb, who is their Bridegroom.

Their veils should not be silk, but dyed linen. I recommend two different kinds of veils, one for nuns who have already been consecrated by the bishop, the other for the sisters who will not be. The ﬁrst should bear the sign of the cross to indicate that they belong to Christ in the chastity of their bodies: as they are set apart by consecration, so their habits will be distinguished by this sign, a warning to the faithful not to burn with lust for them. The virgin will wear this mark of purity detailed in white thread at the top of her head, but she will not presume to wear it before her consecration, and no other veils will bear this sign.

The women should wear clean shifts next to the skin and always sleep in them as well. They may use soft mattresses and sheets because of the weakness of their nature, but each of them must sleep and eat alone. No one ever must presume to take offense if an item of clothing or anything else allotted for her use is made over to a sister who needs it more. Instead, she should be glad to have realized the fruit of her charity in meeting the needs of her sister and also to have recognized that she is living for others and not for herself alone. Otherwise, she is not part of a sisterhood of holy community but is guilty of the sin of claiming possessions.

For covering the body, I think a shift and woolen gown will be enough, and an outer cloak when it is very cold, which may also be used as a coverlet in bed. Because of the need to wash them and to treat them against vermin, there should be two of each article of clothing, exactly as Solomon says in his praise of the strong and prudent housewife: "She shall not fear for her house in the cold of snow, for all her domestics are clothed with double garments."221

The cloaks should not be more than ankle-length, so as not to stir up dust, and their sleeves should not extend beyond the arms and hands. Shoes and stockings will be worn; no one must ever go barefoot on the pretext of religious practice. A single mattress, cushion,

221 Prov. 31:21.

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pillow, blanket, and sheet should be enough for their bedding. They should wear a white headband with a black veil over it and a lamb's wool cap if needed, because of their close-cropped hair.

Not only in matters of food and dress but in buildings and other material possessions, excess must be avoided. What constitutes excess in buildings is in fact easy to see—if they are larger and more beautiful than we need or if they are ornamented with paintings and sculptures, not humble dwellings for the poor, that is, but stately palaces for kings. Jerome once said, "'The son of man hath not where to lay his head,' but you lay out wide porches and vast expanses of roof."222 The pleasure we take in beautiful, expensive things betokens vanity as well as excess. When we multiply our herds of cattle or extend our holdings of land, our ambition swells for outward things; and the more things we possess on earth, the more we are forced to give them our attention and so are called away from thoughts of heaven. While our bodies may be walled inside a cloister, our hearts are compelled to follow what they are attached to in the world outside, and become widely scattered like the things themselves. And the more things we possess that can be lost, the more we are tormented by the fear that we may lose them; and the more costly they are, the more they can attach us and the more ensnare the wretched heart with ambition to possess them.

For this reason, we must ﬁx limits on our households and expenditures, never going beyond what is needed, not in our desires, nor in the offerings we receive, nor in what we keep for ourselves of what we gather. Everything we have beyond our needs, we have by theft, and we are guilty of the deaths of as many of the poor as we might otherwise have been able to sustain. Each year, therefore, when all the food has been collected, a determination should be made of how much will be needed for the year, and anything beyond that should be given, or rather returned, to the poor.

There are some for whom economy has no meaning, who despite their meager revenues, still rejoice in the grandeur of their household. In their struggle, then, to secure its maintenance, they shamelessly go begging or use violence to extort from others what they do not have themselves. We see many such monastic fathers in these times, who glory in the size of their monasteries and work to increase the number, if not the virtue, of their sons, anxious to 222 Epistulae 14.6. The internal quotation is from Matt. 8:20.

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seem superior in their own esteem by becoming the superiors of a multitude. They attract these crowds with the promise of ease— when they should be talking of the hardships they will face— accepting anyone without discrimination, without scrutiny or standards, and losing them all easily, as they all fall away. The Lord said of such men, "Woe to you who go round land and sea to make one proselyte, and when he is made, you make him the child of hell twice more than yourselves."223 They would surely glory less in the number of souls if they cared more about their salvation and put less reliance on numerical strength in the ﬁnal accounting of their rule.

The Lord himself chose few apostles and of these only one fell away, of whom he said, "Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?"224 Just as Judas was lost to the apostles, Nicolas was lost to the seven deacons;225 and when the apostles had not yet assembled many followers, Ananias and his wife Saphira were found worthy of the sentence of death.226 Many of his disciples turned away from the Lord while a few remained with him, for "strait is the way that leadeth to life, and few there are that ﬁnd it," but wide and broad is the way "that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat." As the Lord himself bears witness, "Many are called, but few are chosen," and as Solomon conﬁrms, "The number of fools is inﬁnite." So, whoever rejoices in the number of his subordinates must be afraid that only few of them are chosen, and that he himself, in increasing his ﬂock beyond the proper limit, may fail in his guardianship of souls; in the words of the prophet, "Thou hast multiplied the nation but hast not increased the joy."227 While they glory in the size of their monasteries, they are compelled to go out in the world again and again, scurrying about for handouts to supply their own and their subordinates' needs.

Their concerns are now for material things and not for the things of the spirit, and while they look for glory in the world, they ﬁnd there only infamy and scorn.

223 Matt. 23:15.

224 John 7:71.

225 Nicolas is named as a deacon in Acts 6:5. The tradition that he was "lost" to them apparently derives from the identiﬁcation of the "Nicolaites" condemned in Apoc. 2 as his followers. Abelard refers to his downfall more pointedly in his Sermon 31.

226 See Acts 5:1–10.

227 Matt. 7:13–14, 20:16; Eccles. 1:15; Isa. 9:3.

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For women, there is even more shame in this scurrying through the world, more shame, to be sure, and considerably more risk.

Whoever would lead a life of tranquility and honor, devoted to the Ofﬁces of God, whoever would be held as dear to God as to the world, must never assemble a ﬂock whose needs he cannot meet, nor rely for his expenditures on the depths of another's purse. His attention must be set on giving alms, not on receiving them. Even the apostle Paul, that great preacher of the Gospel, who had power from the Gospel to accept offerings, did manual labor himself because he would not "be chargeable to any" and "make his glory void."228 If that is so, then how can we, whose business is not preaching but lamenting our sins, go out begging through the world in recklessness and shame merely to support a mass of followers, which we have so thoughtlessly assembled? Look how we erupt into such madness that, unable to preach ourselves, we bring preachers along with us and go out through the world with these spurious apostles, toting our reliquaries and crosses to sell these things and the word of God itself—and even ﬁgments of the devil—to those poor, ignorant Christians who are simple enough to credit whatever promises we make to extort their money.229

And by this greed—which has no shame, which seeks only its own and not the things of Christ—our order and the preaching of God's word are both debased—how much debased, I think is plain to all.

And so, these abbots and so-called superiors go knocking at the doors of earthly princes and soliciting at the gates of worldly courts.

They become more courtiers than common monks, using every art and charm to curry favor and gossiping with men more than they talk to God.230 Perhaps they read but never paid attention, perhaps they heard but never stopped to listen to the warning of Saint

Anthony:

If ﬁsh try to live on dry land, they die. If monks try to live outside their cells or spend their time among men of the world, they weaken their ties to the tranquil life. Just as ﬁsh must return to the sea, so we must hasten back to our cells

228 1 Thess. 2:9; 1 Cor. 9:12.

229 Abelard describes a similar scene in his Sermon 33 on John the Baptist.

230 Making a similar point in his Sermon 33 on John the Baptist, Abelard says (also with rhetorical alliteration), "They become more citizens than solitary monks."

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or else, in our lives outside, forget our guardianship of what lies within.231

But the author of the monastic Rule, Saint Benedict, knew this well and, not only by his writings but by the force of his example, taught abbots to keep careful watch over their ﬂock by their constant presence at the monastery. Once, when he was away from his monks on a visit to his most holy sister, she begged him to remain with her, at least for a single night, to continue her education, but he refused; there was no way, he said, that he could remain away from his cell.

He did not say that they could not, only that he could not, because the monks in fact could do so, given his permission, but he himself could not, except by a revelation from the Lord, as did happen afterward.232 For this reason, then, when he wrote the Rule, he never referred to the abbot's absence from the monastery, but only to the absence of the monks. His provision for the abbot's constant presence is implied by his insistence that the Gospel readings at the Night

Ofﬁce on Sundays and feast days, and other matters that pertain to them, are to be done by the abbot himself.233 His requirement that the abbot take his meals with pilgrims and guests or, "when there are no guests, with whomever of the brothers he chooses to invite, leaving one or two senior monks with the others,"234 implies the abbot's presence at all meals, never forgoing the daily bread of his subordinates in a preference for the luxurious food of princes, unlike those who "bind heavy burdens on men's shoulders but do not move a ﬁnger themselves," as the Lord said. And as he also said about false preachers, "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."235 For they are not sent by God, he says, but come of themselves in the expectation of an offering. John the Baptist, our founder and forerunner, to whom the priesthood passed by right of inheritance, left the city for the wilderness—that is to say, the priesthood for the monkhood—only once, withdrawing from the towns to the lonely places; and the people came out to him, he did not go in to the people. When he became so 231 Vitae Patrum 5.2.1.

232 See Gregory, Dialogi 2.33.

233 See Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 11.

234 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 56.

235 Matt. 23:4, 7:15. The manuscripts quote only through "who come to you," indicating the rest of the verse by "etc."

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great that he even was believed to be the Christ and able to put right many things that were wrong in the cities of the world, he was already on the narrow bed of contemplation and was prepared to say to the beloved at the door, "I have put off my garment; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I deﬁle them?"236

And so, whoever longs to withdraw to the tranquility of monastic life should rejoice that his bed is narrow and not wide. From the wide bed, the Lord says, "The one shall be taken, and the other shall be left." But the narrow bed, we read, belongs to the bride of the Lord, that is to say, to the contemplative soul, which is closely bound to Christ and clings to him with the most intense desire; and once someone has come into that narrow bed, we do not read that he ever has been left. For of him the bride herself says, "In my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loveth."237 But she does not deign to rise from that bed but rather speaks to her beloved at the door as I have said, for she knows that there is no stain except out of that bed, and she does not want to deﬁle her feet.

Dinah went out into the world to see the women of a strange country, and was deﬁled.238 And as the captive monk Malchus heard from his abbot and later discovered for himself, the sheep that leaves the fold quickly becomes prey to the wolf.239 We should never, then, assemble a great number in our monasteries and use its maintenance as a reason—or excuse—to go out into the world, acquiring wealth for others while we bring harm to ourselves and are consumed, as lead is in a furnace, for the sake of a little silver; for the lead and silver both will be consumed in the furnace of temptation. They will object that the Lord has said, "Him that cometh to me, I will not cast out," but I do not want to cast out those we have already accepted, only that we provide for them without casting out ourselves when we accept them. For the Lord himself did not cast out anyone he had accepted, but rejected anyone who too eagerly offered himself; when the scribe said, "Master, I will follow thee wherever thou shalt go," he replied, "The foxes have holes, and the birds have nests, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head."240

236 Cant. 5:3. The point is elaborated in Abelard's Sermon 33 on John the Baptist.

237 Luke 17:34; Cant. 3:1.

238 For the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, see Gen. 34:1 ff.

239 See Jerome, Vita Malchi.

240 John 6:37; Matt. 8:19–20. The manuscripts quote only through "foxes have holes," adding "etc."

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He also told us to look to the charges that are necessary before we consider any action:

For which of you having a mind to build a tower doth not ﬁrst sit down and reckon the charges that are necessary, whether he hath the means to ﬁnish it, lest after he hath laid the foundation and is not able to ﬁnish it, all that see it begin to mock him, saying, "This man began to build but could not ﬁnish"?241

If someone has the means to save himself alone, that certainly is a great thing, but it is dangerous to provide for others when one hardly has the means to look after himself. No one can be careful in looking after others if he has not been cautious in accepting them; and no one can persevere in a task he has undertaken as well as someone who is slow and deliberate in beginning. Indeed, the caution of women must be all the greater as their strength to bear burdens is less and their need to foster stillness is more.

Scripture is the mirror of the soul, it is agreed. We live through its reading and thrive through its understanding. In it each of us sees the beauty or ugliness of his character, endeavoring to increase the one and remove the defects of the other. As Saint Gregory says in his

Moralia:

Holy Scripture is like a mirror held up before the eyes of the mind, in which our inner aspect can be seen. In it we see our faults and look upon our beauty. In it we realize how far we have advanced and how far we are from advancing.242

But someone who looks at scripture without understanding is like a blind man holding up a mirror to his eyes. He does not have the means to see who he is and does not seek to learn what scripture teaches, which is its only purpose. Like an ass with a lyre, he sits idly with the book,243 as if he had some bread set down before him that does not satisfy his hunger. He cannot enter God's word

241 Luke 14:28–30; cf. the Calamities, p. 37.

242 Moralia 2.1.

243 See the proverb cited by Jerome, Epistulae 61.4.

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through his own understanding or use another's teaching to break his way in. His bread does him no good; he does not thrive.

This is why the Apostle calls us all to the study of scripture. "For whatsoever things were written," he says, "were for our learning, that through patience and the comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope." And elsewhere: "Be ye ﬁlled with the Holy Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and good songs of the spirit." A man speaks to himself or with himself when he understands what is to his good and can reap from his understanding the harvest of his words. Paul also said to Timothy, "Till I come, attend to reading, to exhortation, and to doctrine," and:

But continue in those things which thou hast learned and which have been committed to thee, knowing from whom thou hast learned them, and because from thy infancy thou hast known the holy scriptures, which can instruct thee to salvation by the faith which is in Jesus Christ. All scripture inspired by God is proﬁtable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice, that the man of God may be perfect, furnished to every good work.244

He also urged the Corinthians to understand scripture to be able to expound what others say about it:

Follow after charity, be zealous for spiritual gifts, so that you may prophesy. For he that speaketh in a tongue, speaketh not unto men but unto God, for no man heareth. . . .

But he that prophesieth, ediﬁeth the church. . . . And therefore he that speaketh in a tongue, let him pray that he may interpret. I will pray with the spirit, I will pray also with the understanding; I will sing with the spirit, but I will also sing with the understanding. Else, if thou shalt bless with the spirit, how shall he that holdeth the place of the unlearned say "Amen" to your blessing because he knoweth not what thou sayest? For thou indeed givest thanks well, but the other is not ediﬁed. I thank my God I speak with all your tongues, but in the church I had rather speak ﬁve words with my understanding that I may instruct others also than ten thousand words in a tongue.

244 Rom 15:5; Eph. 5:18–19; 1 Tim. 4:13; 2 Tim. 3:14–17.

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Brethren, do not become children in sense, but in malice be children and in sense be perfect.245

To speak with a tongue means to form words with the mouth alone and not minister to others by an explanation that operates through the understanding. But to prophesy, or interpret, means to understand what one says and so be able to explain it to others, in the manner of the prophets, who are also called seers, and those who see are those who understand. To pray or sing with the spirit is to form words with a certain prolongation of the breath alone without ﬁtting them to the understanding of the mind. But when our spirit prays—that is, forms words only with the prolongation of our breath without conceiving in the heart what is uttered by the mouth—our mind loses the beneﬁt it ought to have from speech, that is, to be impelled toward God through its own understanding. So, Paul tells us to realize this full perfection in our words, so that we may not, like children, merely utter words but know how to understand their sense.

Otherwise, he indicates, all our prayers and singing bear no fruit.

[Saint Benedict also follows him in this, saying, "Let us approach our singing in such a way that our mind may be in harmony with our voice."246

And the Psalmist tells us, "Sing ye wisely," that is to say that the savor of understanding should be added to our song so that we may say in truth along with him, "How sweet are thy words to my palate, more than honey to my mouth." And elsewhere he says, "The Lord shall not take pleasure in the legs of a man,"247 for the tibia, or the leg bone, that is to say, the ﬂute, produces sounds for the pleasure of the senses, not for the understanding of the mind. So, people are said to sing well or to play well on the ﬂute but not to please God by their music if their pleasure in the melody is such that they derive no understanding from it.] [And, the Apostle asks, how can someone say "Amen" to the blessings offered in church if he does not understand what the blessings pray for?248

He couldn't know if it is for something good or not. We often see many people in church who do not know any Latin, and they could end up praying for something harmful by mistake. For example, the words, "That we may so pass through temporal things that we lose not eternal things,"

245 1 Cor. 14:1–20.

246 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 19.

247 Ps. 46:8, 118:103 (the manuscripts quote only through "palate," indicating the rest of the verse by "etc."), 146:10.

248 See 1 Cor. 14:16.

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could be confused with "we choose not eternal things" because they sound so much alike, or maybe "use not eternal things." But the Apostle says something to prevent it: "Else, if thou shalt bless with the spirit"—that is, if you form the words of a blessing with the prolongation of the breath but do not instruct the mind of your hearer with its sense—"how shall he that holdeth the place of the unlearned"—that is, somebody nearby who is supposed to answer and give an answer that the unlearned couldn't or shouldn't give—"say 'Amen'?" and so forth—that is, when he doesn't know if you're making him give a blessing or a curse? And ﬁnally, how can women even edify themselves with a sermon, or understand and explain the Rule, or correct someone's bad pronunciation, if they do not understand what the writing says?]249 So, I cannot help but wonder what wiles of the devil have brought it about that there is no study of scriptural interpretation in our monasteries, although there is formal education in singing alone and in the formation of words alone, but not in their understanding.

It is somewhat as if the bleating of sheep were considered more useful than the feeding of them. But the soul has its own food, its own spiritual nourishment, and that is the understanding of God's scripture. When the Lord sent out Ezekiel to preach, he ﬁrst caused him to eat a book, which suddenly "became as sweet as honey in his mouth." And of such food it is written in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, "The children have asked for bread, but there was none to break it unto them." To break bread unto children is to open the meaning of the letter to the ignorant, but these children ask for their bread to be broken when they long to feast their souls on the understanding of scripture. As the Lord bears witness elsewhere, "I will send forth a famine into the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord."250

But our ancient enemy has sent forth into our cloisters a famine and a thirst for hearing the words of men and the swiftly passing rumors of the world. As we devote ourselves to this vain, empty talk, the more tiresome we think the word of God, more stale and ﬂat and tasteless to us without the spice or sweetness of understanding. And so, the Psalmist says, "How sweet are thy words to my palate, more than honey to my mouth," and the source of that sweetness he reveals in the next verse, "By thy commandments I 249 Likely later additions to the text by readers eager to try their own hands at scriptural exegesis.

250 Ezek. 3:3; Lam. 4:4; Amos 8:11.

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have had understanding—that is to say, I have taken understanding from your commandments and not the commandments of men, and they have taught me and instructed me. The result of this understanding follows next: "Therefore, I have hated every way of iniquity." The ways of iniquity are many and so open in themselves that they are hated and contemned by all, but only by the word of God do we recognize these ways and become able to avoid them. And so, he says, "Thy words have I hidden in my heart that I may not sin against thee."251 They are hidden in the heart, not merely sounded on the lips, when our thought retains the understanding of them. But the less we apply ourselves to this understanding, the less we can recognize and avoid those evil ways, and the less we can protect ourselves from sin.

Such negligence is reprehensible, especially in monks, who aspire to perfection and have all the facilities for learning at hand: their libraries abound in sacred books, and they have all the tranquil leisure they can use. But those who glory in the number of their books but still refrain from reading deserve the stinging rebuke from the elder in the Lives of the Fathers:

The prophets composed the books, and your forefathers came after them and added many things. Their successors then committed them to memory. Then the present generation came and copied them out on paper and on parchment, and put them back to sit idle on the shelves.252

And Abbot Palladius calls us both to learn and to teach: "It is ﬁtting for the soul that lives according to Christ's will either to learn faithfully what it does not know or to teach plainly what it knows."253

But if, when it can, the soul will do neither, it suffers under a madness; for the ﬁrst step in withdrawing from God is a weariness with learning, and when the soul has lost an appetite for what the soul forever craves, how can it love God?

In his exhortation of monks, Saint Athanasius recommended reading and learning to the point where he allowed it even to interrupt prayer. "I will trace the course of our way of life," he said:

251 Ps. 118:103, 11.

252 Vitae Patrum 5.10.114.

253 Vitae Patrum 5.10.67.

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First, the cultivation of abstinence, endurance of hunger, persistence in prayer and reading—or, for someone who has not yet learned to read, let him have the desire to hear, born from an eagerness to learn. These are the ﬁrst stages, as if of nurselings in the cradle, of our progressive knowledge of God.

But soon he continues, saying ﬁrst, "But we must become so insistent in our prayers that scarcely any time should come between them," and adding ﬁnally, "And nothing should interrupt them, except for intervals of reading."254

[The apostle Peter would offer no different advice: "Be always ready to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of the word of hope and faith."255

And the apostle Paul: "We do not cease to pray for you and to beg that you be ﬁlled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding." And again: "Let the word of Christ dwell in you abundantly in all wisdom." In the Old Testament, too, God's word inspired men with a similar concern for his teaching; so David says, "Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly. . . . But his will is in the law of the Lord. . . ." And the Lord says to Joshua, son of Nun, "Let not this book depart from thy hands and thou shalt meditate upon it day and night."256]

[The slippery ways of evil thoughts often work themselves into these matters as well. Constant diligence may prepare the heart for God, but the cares of the world gnaw at us and make us apprehensive for them. If a man must endure this without end who is devoted to the struggles of religious life, surely the indolent man will never be free from them.]257

And Pope Gregory says in Book 19 of his Moralia:

We lament the fact that the time has already begun when we see many with positions in the Church who do not act on what they understand, or who even scorn to understand and know the holy word itself. They turn their attention from the truth and listen only to fables, and "all seek the things that are their own, not the things that are Jesus

254 Athanasius, Exhortatio ad Monachos.

255 Cf. 1 Pet. 3:15, in which the Vulgate reads, "a reason of that hope which is in you."

256 Col. 1:9, 3:16; Ps. 1:1–2; cf. Josh. 1:8, in which the Vulgate reads, "Let not the book of this law depart from thy mouth."

257 A series of comments on a variety of points made over the last several pages, most likely added by later hands.

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Christ's." The scriptures of God are everywhere and are set before their eyes, but men think it beneath them to come to know his word. There is hardly a man who seeks to know what he has believed.258

Both the Rule that governs their calling and the examples set by the Fathers strenuously urge them to this reading. Benedict says nothing about the practice and teaching of singing, but lays down many instructions about reading, even setting ﬁxed times for reading as he does for manual labor. He also makes provision for the teaching of writing and composition, including tablets and a pen among the necessary articles the abbot should supply the monks.259

And when among other things he commands, "At the beginning of Lent, each monk will receive a book from the library, which he will read straight through from the beginning,"260 what can be more absurd than to spend this time on reading without troubling to understand? [The proverb of the wise man is well known: "Reading without understanding is not reading at all," and to such a reader the words of the philosopher apply: "An ass set in front of a lyre."]261 For a reader with a book but without the capacity to fulﬁll its purpose is like an ass confronted with a lyre. Far better for him to turn to other things, in which there may be some use, than to sit there dumbly staring at the letters and then idly ﬂip the page, for we see in such a reader the words of Isaiah fulﬁlled:

And the vision of all shall be unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which when they shall deliver to one that is learned, they shall say, "Read this," and he shall answer, "I cannot, for it is sealed." And the book shall be given to one that knoweth no letters, and it shall be said to him, "Read," and he shall answer, "I know no letters."

And the Lord said, "As much as this people draw near me with their mouth and with their lips glorify me, still their heart is far from me, and they have feared me with the commandment and with the doctrines of men. Therefore,

258 Moralia 19.30. The internal quotation is from Phil. 2:21.

259 See Rule of St. Benedict, chapters 48 and 55.

260 Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 48.

261 Distichs of Cato, prologue (Chase 1922, 12); cf. Jerome, Epistulae 61.4. One manuscript includes this passage, most likely added by later hands.

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behold I will proceed to cause an admiration in this people by a great and wonderful miracle. For wisdom shall perish from their wise men, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid."262

These days in our cloisters men are said to know letters who have learned only to make the sounds. But as far as understanding is concerned, they might as well not know how to read, since for them the book remains as sealed as it is for those they call illiterate. The Lord rebukes these men, saying they draw near him with their mouth and lips but not with their heart, for the words which they can pronounce in a fashion they cannot understand at all. In their ignorance of the word of God, they tamely follow the customs of men rather than the useful value of scripture. Because of this, the Lord threatens that those who are considered wise and sit as doctors among such men also will be blinded.

The greatest true Doctor of the Church and the glory of our monastic calling, Saint Jerome, calls us to a love of reading—"Love knowledge of the scriptures and you will hate sins of the ﬂesh"263— and we know from his own testimony the labor and expense he incurred to learn. Among the many things he wrote about his own course of study to help teach us through the force of his example, he wrote this to Pammachius and Oceanus:

When I was young, I burned with a love of learning, but I was not so presumptuous, as some men are, as to try to teach myself. I heard Apollinaris often at Antioch, and I honored him because he made me learned in scripture. I already had some gray in my hair—more like a teacher myself than a student, I'm afraid—but I went off to Alexandria to study with Didymus; I am still grateful to him for many things, for I found out how much I didn't know. They thought I'd put an end to all this schooling but, back to Jerusalem, back to Bethlehem—the work! the cost!—where I took lessons from the Hebrew Baranina. The lessons had to be at night because he was afraid of the Jews, but he turned out to be a second Nicodemus.264

262 Isa. 29:11–14.

263 Epistulae 125.11.

264 Epistulae 84.3. For Nicodemus, who came to Jesus secretly at night, see John 3:1.

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Surely, he remembered what he had read in Ecclesiasticus: "My son, from thy youth receive instruction and even to thy gray hairs thou shalt ﬁnd wisdom."265 But he himself found instruction not only in the words of scripture but in the example of his monastic fathers; to his rich praises of that most excellent monastery, he added this on its practices in scriptural education: "I never saw such study or understanding of sacred knowledge and scripture.

You would have thought that almost every one of them was an orator on divine learning."266 The Venerable Bede also, who was taken into a monastery as a boy, has this to say in his history of the English:

Spending all the remaining time of my life in that same monastery, I wholly applied myself to the study of scripture, and along with my observance of the discipline of the Rule and my daily singing in church, I always took delight in both learning and writing.267

But those who are educated in monasteries nowadays remain so stubbornly foolish that, content with the sound of the letters, they ignore the meaning of the words, happy to instruct the tongue and leave the heart alone. As Solomon says in Proverbs, "The heart of the wise seeketh instruction, and the mouth of fools feedeth on foolishness."268 And the less these men are able to love God, the further they would keep us from an understanding of him and from the meaning of the scripture that teaches us about him.

I think there are two main reasons for this: the envy of the lay brothers or the superiors themselves, and the empty talk of idleness, which has captured the devotion of so many monastic cloisters in these times. When they want to have us concentrate, as they do, on earthly rather than spiritual things, these men act like the Philistines who persecuted Isaac, continually ﬁlling his wells with earth, even as he dug them, and stopping the ﬂow of water.269 As Saint Gregory explains in Book 16 of his Moralia:

265 Ecclus. 6:18.

266 Ruﬁnus, Historia Monachorum 21, formerly attributed to Jerome.

267 Historia Ecclesiastica 5.24.

268 Prov. 15:14.

269 See Gen. 26:14 ff.

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When we concentrate on the holy word, we often have to put up with the intrigues of malignant spirits, who throw the dust of earthly thoughts on our mind to darken the eyes of our concentration against the light of inner vision.270

The Psalmist had put up with this too long when he said, "Depart from me, ye malignant, and I will search the commandments of my

God,"271 indicating that he could not observe the commandments of God while he had to put up with the intrigues of malignant spirits in his mind. In the work of Isaac this is signiﬁed by the wickedness of the Philistines, who kept ﬁlling the wells he dug with earth. For we are digging wells of our own when we penetrate the depths of holy scripture for meanings that are hidden there. But the Philistines—in the hidden or symbolic sense—ﬁll these wells with earth when unclean spirits heap thoughts of earthly things upon us as we strive for these depths, and they keep us, as it were, from the water of sacred knowledge we have found. No one overcomes these enemies by his own strength, as we hear from Eliphaz: "And the Almighty shall be against thy enemies, and silver shall be heaped together for thee,"272 or in other words, "So long as the strength of the Lord keeps malignant spirits from you, the great treasure of his word will shine in you the brighter."

But unless I am mistaken, Saint Gregory had been reading the homilies of Origen, the great Christian philosopher, and had drawn from Origen's wells what he now is saying about Isaac's. For Origen worked hard to dig wells of the spirit and urged us both to drink from them and to dig others of our own. As he says in his twelfth homily:

Let us try to do what wisdom advises: "Drink water from thy wells and from thy springs, and let thy spring be thine own." And you, my listener, even you, try to have a well of your own and a spring of your own, so that when you take up a book of scripture, even you may begin to bring forth some understanding derived from your own sense and following what you have learned in the church. And try, even you, to drink from the spring of your inborn intelligence.

270 Moralia 16.18.

271 Ps. 118:115.

272 Job 22:25.

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Inside you is a source of living water, veins that never cease to ﬂow, running channels of rational understanding—if only they are not clogged with earth and stones. Dig away your earth, clear away the rubble that is blocking your intelligence, rid yourself of sloth, shake off the torpor of the heart.

For hear what scripture says: "Prick the eye and bring forth tears, but prick the heart and bring forth understanding."

Free your intelligence from rubble, even you, so that someday you may drink from your own springs, swallow drafts of living water from your wells. For if you have taken the word of God into yourself, if you have received the living water from Jesus and have received it with faith, it will become in you a spring of water ﬂowing to eternal life.273

In his next homily he writes of the springs of Isaac:

The wells the Philistines had ﬁlled with earth are, no doubt, men who are blocked in their spiritual understanding; they do not drink themselves nor allow any others to drink. Hear what the Lord has said: "Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, for you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves have not entered in, and those that were entering in you have hindered." And the passage continues: "And as he was saying these things to them, they began violently to oppress him and to stop his mouth about many things, lying in wait for him and seeking to catch something from his mouth that they might accuse him."274

But we must never give up digging wells of living water but, by arguing all things, disputing all things—sometimes new things, sometimes old—become like the scribe, instructed in the kingdom of heaven, of whom the Lord said, "He bringeth forth out of his treasure both new things and old." Let us then return to Isaac and dig wells of living water as he did. And even if the Philistines stop these wells, and even if they ﬁght, let us continue digging nonetheless, so that we too may hear it said, "Drink water from thy cisterns and thy wells." And let us dig them deep, and let the 273 Homilia in Genesim 12.5. Internal quotations are from Prov. 5:15 and Ecclus. 22:24.

274 Luke 11:52. The manuscripts quote only through "you have hindered," indicating by "etc." the rest of the passage, which Abelard, of all people, surely knew.

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water overﬂow, not only so that the knowledge of scripture may be enough for ourselves alone but so that we may educate others and teach all men to drink. Yes, let them drink, and the beasts of the ﬁelds as well. In the words of the prophet, "Thou wilt preserve both men and beast, O Lord."

And then:

A Philistine knows earthly things but does not know where in all the earth to ﬁnd water, where to ﬁnd rational sense.

What is the good in having education but not knowing how to use it, in having language but not knowing how to speak? That is the condition of the children of Isaac, who dig for living water across the earth.275

But it must not be that way with you. Those of you who, standing aloof from vain and idle talk, have attained the grace of some learning must apply yourselves to become deeply learned in those things that pertain to God, as it is written of the man called blessed in the psalm: "His will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night." The good that results from this study follows next: "And he shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit in due season." For a tree is dry and barren which is not watered by the rivers of God's word, of which it is written, "From his belly shall ﬂow streams of living water." These are the streams the bride in Canticles describes as part of her praise of the Bridegroom: "His eyes are as doves on brooks of waters, which are washed with milk and sit beside the plentiful streams."276 And you as well, washed with the milk that is the whiteness of your chastity, must sit like doves beside these streams and drink drafts of wisdom from them—not only to learn but to teach, to show others, as it were, the way to turn their eyes; not only to know the Bridegroom for yourself but to have the means to speak of him to others.

It is written of the matchless bride of God, who was found worthy to conceive him through the ears of her heart, "But Mary kept all

275 Origen, Homilia in Genesim 13.2–4. Internal quotations are from Matt. 13:52, Prov.

5:15, and Ps. 35:7.

276 Ps. 1:2, 3 (the manuscripts quote only through "waters," indicating the rest of the verse by "etc."); John 7:38; Cant. 5:12.

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these words, pondering them in her heart."277 And so, the great mother of the highest Word itself, keeping these words in her heart, not on her tongue, then pondered them all carefully, arguing every one, weighing each against the other, to determine how they might all be consistent. She knew that, according to the veiled speech of the law, every animal was called unclean which did not ruminate, or chew the cud, and have divided hooves. For, in fact, no soul is clean which does not, by meditating to the best of its ability, ruminate, or chew the cud of God's commandments, and which does not display discretion in following them, so as not only to do good but to do well, that is, to act with correct intention. This discretion of the heart is the division of the hooves of all clean animals, and of it, it is written, "If thou offerest rightly but dividest not rightly, thou hast sinned."278

"Anyone who loveth me will keep my word," the Truth has said.279 But who can keep the words and the commandments of the Lord in all obedience without ﬁrst understanding them? No one will be diligent in observance who has not been attentive in her listening. Think of that blessed woman who put aside all other things and sat at the feet of the Lord to hear his words;280 and she heard them with the ears of her understanding, which is precisely what the Lord himself demands: "He that hath ears to hear," he tells us,

"let him hear."281

[But if you cannot be ﬁred to such intense devotion, at least follow in your study of holy scripture the example of Paula and Eustochium, those blessed students of Saint Jerome, at whose request he brought light to the Church with so many volumes of his writings.]282

277 Luke 2:19.

278 Gen. 4:7 in its Septuagint version.

279 John 14:23.

280 That is, Mary, sister of Martha; see Luke 10:38–42.

281 Matt. 11:15.

282 This anticlimactic passage, which also segues a bit too neatly into Abelard's letter on the nuns' studies and The Questions of Heloise, is likely a later addition.

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