OF THE ARGUMENTS OF HÉLOÏSE AGAINST WEDLOCK--OF HOW NONE THE LESS
HE MADE HER HIS WIFE
Forthwith I repaired to my own country, and brought back thence my
mistress, that I might make her my wife. She, however, most
violently disapproved of this, and for two chief reasons: the
danger thereof, and the disgrace which it would bring upon me. She
swore that her uncle would never be appeased by such satisfaction
as this, as, indeed, afterwards proved only too true. She asked how
she could ever glory in me if she should make me thus inglorious,
and should shame herself along with me. What penalties, she said,
would the world rightly demand of her if she should rob it of so
shining a light! What curses would follow such a loss to the
Church, what tears among the philosophers would result from such a
marriage! How unfitting, how lamentable it would be for me, whom
nature had made for the whole world, to devote myself to one woman
solely, and to subject myself to such humiliation! She vehemently
rejected this marriage, which she felt would be in every way
ignominious and burdensome to me.
Besides dwelling thus on the disgrace to me, she reminded me of the
hardships of married life, to the avoidance of which the Apostle
exhorts us, saying: "Art thou loosed from a wife? seek not a wife.
But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry,
she hath not sinned. Nevertheless such shall have trouble in the
flesh: but I spare you" (I Cor. vii, 27). And again: "But I would
have you to be free from cares" (I Cor. vii, 32). But if I would
heed neither the counsel of the Apostle nor the exhortations of the
saints regarding this heavy yoke of matrimony, she bade me at least
consider the advice of the philosophers, and weigh carefully what
had been written on this subject either by them or concerning their
lives. Even the saints themselves have often and earnestly spoken
on this subject for the purpose of warning us. Thus St. Jerome,
in his first book against Jovinianus, makes Theophrastus set forth
in great detail the intolerable annoyances and the endless
disturbances of married life, demonstrating with the most
convincing arguments that no wise man should ever have a wife, and
concluding his reasons for this philosophic exhortation with these
words: "Who among Christians would not be overwhelmed by such
arguments as these advanced by Theophrastus?"
Again, in the same work, St. Jerome tells how Cicero, asked by
Hircius after his divorce of Terentia whether he would marry the
sister of Hircius, replied that he would do no such thing, saying
that he could not devote himself to a wife and to philosophy at the
same time. Cicero does not, indeed, precisely speak of "devoting
himself," but he does add that he did not wish to undertake
anything which might rival his study of philosophy in its demands
upon him.
Then, turning from the consideration of such hindrances to the
study of philosophy, Héloïse bade me observe what were the
conditions of honourable wedlock. What possible concord could there
be between scholars and domestics, between authors and cradles,
between books or tablets and distaffs, between the stylus or the
pen and the spindle? What man, intent on his religious or
philosophical meditations, can possibly endure the whining of
children, the lullabies of the nurse seeking to quiet them, or the
noisy confusion of family life? Who can endure the continual
untidiness of children? The rich, you may reply, can do this,
because they have palaces or houses containing many rooms, and
because their wealth takes no thought of expense and protects them
from daily worries. But to this the answer is that the condition of
philosophers is by no means that of the wealthy, nor can those
whose minds are occupied with riches and worldly cares find time
for religious or philosophical study. For this reason the renowned
philosophers of old utterly despised the world, fleeing from its
perils rather than reluctantly giving them up, and denied
themselves all its delights in order that they might repose in the
embraces of philosophy alone. One of them, and the greatest of all,
Seneca, in his advice to Lucilius, says: "Philosophy is not a thing
to be studied only in hours of leisure; we must give up everything
else to devote ourselves to it, for no amount of time is really
sufficient thereto" (Epist. 73).
It matters little, she pointed out, whether one abandons the study
of philosophy completely or merely interrupts it, for it can never
remain at the point where it was thus interrupted. All other
occupations must be resisted; it is vain to seek to adjust life to
include them, and they must simply be eliminated. This view is
maintained, for example, in the love of God by those among us who
are truly called monastics, and in the love of wisdom by all those
who have stood out among men as sincere philosophers. For in every
race, gentiles or Jews or Christians, there have always been a few
who excelled their fellows in faith or in the purity of their
lives, and who were set apart from the multitude by their
continence or by their abstinence from worldly pleasures.
Among the Jews of old there were the Nazarites, who consecrated
themselves to the Lord, some of them the sons of the prophet Elias
and others the followers of Eliseus, the monks of whom, on the
authority of St. Jerome (Epist. 4 and 13), we read in the Old
Testament. More recently there were the three philosophical sects
which Josephus defines in his Book of Antiquities (xviii, 2),
calling them the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes. In our
times, furthermore, there are the monks who imitate either the
communal life of the Apostles or the earlier and solitary life of
John. Among the gentiles there are, as has been said, the
philosophers. Did they not apply the name of wisdom or philosophy
as much to the religion of life as to the pursuit of learning, as
we find from the origin of the word itself, and likewise from the
testimony of the saints?
There is a passage on this subject in the eighth book of St.
Augustine's "City of God," wherein he distinguishes between the
various schools of philosophy. "The Italian school," he says, "had
as its founder Pythagoras of Samos, who, it is said, originated the
very word 'philosophy.' Before his time those who were regarded as
conspicuous for the praiseworthiness of their lives were called
wise men, but he, on being asked of his profession, replied that he
was a philosopher, that is to say a student or a lover of wisdom,
because it seemed to him unduly boastful to call himself a wise
man." In this passage, therefore, when the phrase "conspicuous for
the praiseworthiness of their lives" is used, it is evident that
the wise, in other words the philosophers, were so called less
because of their erudition than by reason of their virtuous lives.
In what sobriety and continence these men lived it is not for me to
prove by illustration, lest I should seem to instruct Minerva
herself.
Now, she added, if laymen and gentiles, bound by no profession of
religion, lived after this fashion, what ought you, a cleric and a
canon, to do in order not to prefer base voluptuousness to your
sacred duties, to prevent this Charybdis from sucking you down
headlong, and to save yourself from being plunged shamelessly and
irrevocably into such filth as this? If you care nothing for your
privileges as a cleric, at least uphold your dignity as a
philosopher. If you scorn the reverence due to God, let regard for
your reputation temper your shamelessness. Remember that Socrates
was chained to a wife, and by what a filthy accident he himself
paid for this blot on philosophy, in order that others thereafter
might be made more cautious by his example. Jerome thus mentions
this affair, writing about Socrates in his first book against
Jovinianus: "Once when he was withstanding a storm of reproaches
which Xantippe was hurling at him from an upper story, he was
suddenly drenched with foul slops; wiping his head, he said only,
'I knew there would be a shower after all that thunder.'"
Her final argument was that it would be dangerous for me to take
her back to Paris, and that it would be far sweeter for her to be
called my mistress than to be known as my wife; nay, too, that
this would be more honourable for me as well. In such case, she
said, love alone would hold me to her, and the strength of the
marriage chain would not constrain us. Even if we should by chance
be parted from time to time, the joy of our meetings would be all
the sweeter by reason of its rarity. But when she found that she
could not convince me or dissuade me from my folly by these and
like arguments, and because she could not bear to offend me, with
grievous sighs and tears she made an end of her resistance, saying:
"Then there is no more left but this, that in our doom the sorrow
yet to come shall be no less than the love we two have already
known." Nor in this, as now the whole world knows, did she lack the
spirit of prophecy.
So, after our little son was born, we left him in my sister's care,
and secretly returned to Paris. A few days later, in the early
morning, having kept our nocturnal vigil of prayer unknown to all
in a certain church, we were united there in the benediction of
wedlock, her uncle and a few friends of his and mine being present.
We departed forthwith stealthily and by separate ways, nor
thereafter did we see each other save rarely and in private, thus
striving our utmost to conceal what we had done. But her uncle and
those of his household, seeking solace for their disgrace, began to
divulge the story of our marriage, and thereby to violate the
pledge they had given me on this point. Héloïse, on the contrary,
denounced her own kin and swore that they were speaking the most
absolute lies. Her uncle, aroused to fury thereby, visited her
repeatedly with punishments. No sooner had I learned this than I
sent her to a convent of nuns at Argenteuil, not far from Paris,
where she herself had been brought up and educated as a young girl.
I had them make ready for her all the garments of a nun, suitable
for the life of a convent, excepting only the veil, and these I
bade her put on.
When her uncle and his kinsmen heard of this, they were convinced
that now I had completely played them false and had rid myself
forever of Héloïse by forcing her to become a nun. Violently
incensed, they laid a plot against me, and one night, while I, all
unsuspecting, was asleep in a secret room in my lodgings, they
broke in with the help of one of my servants, whom they had bribed.
There they had vengeance on me with a most cruel and most shameful
punishment, such as astounded the whole world, for they cut off
those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the
cause of their sorrow. This done, straightway they fled, but two of
them were captured, and suffered the loss of their eyes and their
genital organs. One of these two was the aforesaid servant, who,
even while he was still in my service, had been led by his avarice
to betray me.