THE LETTERS OF ABÉLARD AND HELOISE
The true interest of the correspondence between the abbot husband
and the abbess wife, which resulted from the publication of the
‘Story of my Calamities,’ needs to be pointed out afresh at the
beginning of the twentieth century. It has been obscured through
the eagerness of historians to indicate parallels and the tendency
of poets and romancers to isolate features which appeal to them.
During the eighteenth century the famous letters were made familiar
to English readers by a number of translations from the French or
from the original Latin. Even then there was a tendency to read
them apart from the lives of the writers, or at least without an
adequate preliminary study of their characters and their fortunes.
Those translations are read no longer. Apart from the limited number
of readers who have appreciated the excellent French versions of
Madame Guizot and M. Gréard, an idea is formed of the letters and
their writers from a few ardent fragments, which are misleading in
their isolation, and from the transference of the names ‘Abélard’
and ‘Heloise’ to more recent characters of history or romance. The
letters must be read anew in the light of our augmented knowledge and
of the juster psychological analysis which it has made possible.
There are those whose sole knowledge of Heloise is derived from the
reading of Pope’s well-known poem, which is taken to be a metrical
exposition of her first letter. With such an impression, and a few
broad outlines of the life of the lovers, one is well prepared to
accept the assertion of a parallel with the _Portuguese Letters_
and other of the _lettres amoureuses_ which were so dear to the
eighteenth century. Probably few who compare Pope with the original,
or indeed read him without comparison, will agree with Hallam that
he has put ‘the sentiments of a coarse and abandoned woman into
her mouth.’ Johnson found ‘no crudeness of sense, no asperity of
language’ in Pope’s poem. Yet no one who has carefully read the
original will fail to perceive that Pope has given a greatly
distorted version of it. French versifiers found it ‘un amusement
littéraire et galant,’ as has been said of Bussy-Rabutin’s version,
to isolate the element of passion in the finer soul of Heloise, and
thus present her as a twelfth-century Marianne Alcoforado. Pope has
yielded somewhat to the same spirit. He does indeed introduce the
intellectual judgment and the complex ethical feeling of Heloise
in his poem, but he alters the proportions of the psychic elements
in her letter, and prepares the way for a false estimate. Pope’s
_Heloise_ is framed in the eighteenth century as naturally as the
real _Heloise_ is in the twelfth. Still, it must be remembered that
Pope did not write from the original Latin letters. He evidently used
some of the so-called ‘translations,’ but really paraphrases, of his
time.[21]
[21] Mr. Leslie Stephen has kindly drawn my attention to Elwin’s
theory (Pope’s Works) that he followed the translation of J.
Hughes, author of the _Siege of Damascus_. Hughes’s ‘translation’
was little more faithful than the current French versions; it is
largely a work of imagination. Careful comparison does seem to
show that Pope used this version, but he seems also to have used
some of the very misleading French paraphrases. Elwin himself
thinks Pope did not look at the original Latin.
The charge must also be laid, though with less insistence, against
the parallels which some writers have discovered, or invented, for
Heloise. The most famous are the _Portuguese Letters_, a series of
singularly ardent love-letters from a Portuguese nun to a French
noble. The correspondents are said to have been Marianne Alcoforado
and M. de Chamilly—to look at whom, said St. Simon, you would never
have thought him the soul of the _Portuguese Letters_. He was
neither talented nor handsome, and his liaison with the nun seems to
have been no more than the usual temporary incident in a soldier’s
life. When he returned to France she wrote the letters which are so
frequently associated with those of Heloise. It is an unworthy and
a superficial comparison. There is a ground for comparison in the
condition of the writer and in the free and vivid expression of a
consuming love, but they are separated by profound differences. The
Portuguese nun has nothing but her love; her life is being consumed
in one flame of passion. Heloise is never so wholly lost in her
passion; she can regard it objectively. Even were Abélard other
than he was at the time, no one who knows Heloise could conceive
her, after her vows, to say, ‘if it were possible for me to get out
of this miserable cloister, I should not wait in Portugal for the
fulfilment of your promise,’ or imagine her, under any conditions,
to talk lightheartedly to her lover of ‘the languid pleasures your
French mistresses give you,’ and remind him that he only sought
in her ‘un plaisir grossier.’ There is not a word, in any of the
_Portuguese Letters_, of God, of religious vows, of any thought or
feeling above the plane of sense, of any appreciation of the literal
sacrilege of her position, of anything but a wilful abandonment to a
violent passion.
There are the same defects, though they are less obtrusive, in the
parallel which Rousseau claimed in giving the title of the _Nouvelle
Heloïse_ to his Savoyard letters. The accidental resemblance of the
religious costume is wanting here, but, on the other hand, there is
a greater show of character. Rousseau has confused the Heloise of
1117 and the abbess of the letters. From another point of view, one
would like to know what Bussy-Rabutin or Colardeau would have thought
of the _Nouvelle Heloïse_ as the expression of an absorbing passion.
Rousseau, who held that the _Portuguese Letters_ had been written by
a man, was of the singular opinion that no woman could describe, or
even feel, love. The letters of his Julie are pale fires beside the
first and second letters of Heloise.[22]
[22] I hardly like to speak of the feeble creation of Robert
Buchanan in such a company, but his ‘New Abélard’ is a further
illustration. His pitiful Mr. Bradley has no earthly resemblance
to Abélard, except in a most superficial sense. It is grotesque
to compare him to Abélard for his ‘heresy’; and to say that he
recalls Abélard in his weakness (to the extent of bigamously
marrying and blasting the life of a noble woman) is deeply
unjust. Abélard was not a cad.
In direct opposition to the writers who find parallels for the
correspondence of abbess and abbot we have a few critics who deny or
doubt the authenticity of the letters. It is significant that the
recent and critical German biographers of Abélard do not even mention
these doubts. They have, in truth, the slenderest of foundations.
Lalanne, who has endeavoured to spread this heresy in faithful
France, can say little more than that he cannot reconcile the tone
of the letters with the age and condition of the writers; he also
says that Abélard would be hardly likely to preserve such letters
had he received them from his wife. Orelli has tried to sow similar
doubts in the apparently more promising soil of German culture, but
with no greater success. If it seems incredible that Heloise should
have penned the letters which bear her name, how shall we qualify
the supposition that there lived, some time within the following
century, a genius capable of creating them, yet utterly unknown to
his contemporaries? If they are the work of some admirer of Abélard,
as Orelli thinks, they reveal a higher literary competency than
Rousseau shows in his _Nouvelle Heloïse_. We are asked to reject
a wonder in the name of a greater wonder. Moreover, an admirer of
Abélard would not have written the letters which bear his name in a
style that has won for him anything but the admiration of posterity.
And it is quite impossible to admit one series of the letters without
the other.
Setting apart the letters of Abélard, which it is idle to question
in themselves, it must be admitted that there are features in the
letters of Heloise which are startling to the modern mind. These are
the features on which her romantic admirers have concentrated; they
will appear in due course. But when one evades the pressure of modern
associations, and considers the correspondence in its twelfth-century
setting, there is no inherent improbability in it. Rather the
reverse. As to the publication of letters in which husband and wife
had written the most sacred confidences, we need not suppose, as M.
Gréard does, that Heloise ever intended such a result, or built
up her notes into letters for that purpose. Nothing compels us to
think that they were brought together until years after the writers
had been laid in a common tomb. There are obvious interpolations,
it is true, but we shall only increase the difficulty—nay, we shall
create a difficulty—if we look upon the most extraordinary passages
in the letters as coming from any other source than the heart of an
impassioned lover.
As regards what a logician would call the external difficulty—that
we cannot trace the letters further back than the middle of the
thirteenth century—it need not discompose us. The conditions which
make a negative argument of that character valid are not present
here. Abélard had been condemned and his party scattered. There are
no writers to whom we should look for allusions to the letters before
Guillaume de Lorris and Jehan le Meung manifestly introduce them in
the _Roman de la Rose_. Indeed this circumstance, and the fact that
the oldest manuscript we have dates from one hundred years after the
death of Heloise, incline one to think that she wished the treasure
to be preserved in a reverent privacy.
To give any large proportion of the letters here would be
impossible, yet we must give such extracts from them as may serve
in the task of reconstructing character. It was an age when the
practice, if not the art, of letter-writing greatly flourished.
St. Bernard’s letters form a portly and a remarkable volume. The
chroniclers of the time have preserved an immense number of the Latin
epistles which busy couriers bore over the land. One is prepared,
therefore, to find much formality, much attention to the rules and
the conventional graces of the epistolary art, even in the letters of
Heloise. The strong, impetuous spirit does at times break forth, in
splendid violence, from its self-imposed restraint, but we have, on
the whole, something very unlike the utter and unthinking outpouring
of an ebullient passion which is found in the letters of the
Portuguese nun. Arguments are rounded with quotations from classic
writers; dialectical forms are introduced here and there; a care for
literary manner and construction of the Latin periods is manifested.
Bayle says her Latin is ‘too frequently pedantic and subtile.’ It is,
at all events, much superior to the average Latinity of the time,
though, as in the case of Abélard, the characteristic defects of this
are not entirely avoided.
Some day, then, after his ‘Story’ had gone forth on its peaceful
mission into France, Abélard received a folded parchment in the once
familiar hand.
‘To her lord, yea father: to her spouse, yea brother: from his
servant, yea daughter—his wife, his sister: to Abélard from Heloise.’
So ran the superscription, a curious effort to breathe life into a
formality of the day. Chance has brought to their abbey, she says,
a copy of the letter he has recently sent forth. The story of his
saddened life and of the dangers that yet multiply about him has
affected them so deeply that they are filled with anxiety for him.
‘In hourly anguish do our trembling hearts and heaving breasts await
the dread rumour of thy death. By Him who still extends to thee an
uncertain protection we implore thee to inform us, His servants and
thine, by frequent letter, of the course of the storms in which
thou art still tossed; so that thou mayst let us at least, who have
remained true to thee, share thy sorrow or thy joy. And if the storm
shall have abated somewhat, so much the more speedily do thou send
us an epistle which will bring so much joy to us.’ She invokes the
authority of Seneca on the epistolary duties of friends, and she
has a holier claim than that of friend, a stronger one than that of
wife. ‘At thy command I would change, not merely my costume, but my
very soul, so entirely art thou the sole possessor of my body and
my spirit. Never, God is my witness, never have I sought anything
in thee but thyself: I have sought thee, not thy gifts. I have not
looked to the marriage bond or dowry: I have not even yearned to
satisfy my own will and pleasure, but thine, as thou well knowest.
The name of wife may be the holier and more approved, but the name
of friend—nay, mistress or concubine, if thou wilt suffer it—has
always been the sweeter to me. For in thus humbling myself for
thee, I should win greater favour from thee, and do less injury to
thy greatness. This thou hast thyself not wholly forgotten, in the
aforesaid letter thou hast written for the consolation of a friend.
Therein also thou hast related some of the arguments with which I
essayed to turn thee from the thought of our unhappy wedlock, though
thou hast omitted many in which I set forth the advantage of love
over matrimony, freedom over bondage. God is my witness that if
Augustus, the emperor of the whole world, were to honour me with the
thought of wedlock, and yield me the empire of the universe, I should
deem it more precious and more honourable to be thy mistress than to
be the queen of a Cæsar.’
She claims no merit for her devotion. Abélard’s greatness more than
justifies her seeming extravagance. ‘Who,’ she asks, going back to
his golden age, ‘who did not hasten forth to look as thou didst walk
abroad, or did not follow thee with outstretched neck and staring
eyes? What wife, what maid, did not yearn for thee? What queen or
noble dame was there who did not envy my fortune?’
Yet she would ask this measure of gratitude from him, that he write
to her at times. He had never known refusal from her. ‘It was not
religious fervour that drew me to the rigour of the conventual life,
but thy command. How fruitlessly have I obeyed, if this gives me no
title to thy gratitude!... When thou didst hasten to dedicate thyself
to God I followed thee—nay, I went before thee. For, as if mindful of
the looking back of Lot’s wife, thou didst devote me to God before
thyself, by the sacred habit and vows of the monastery. Indeed it was
in this sole circumstance that I had the sorrow and the shame of
noting thy lack of confidence in me. God knows that I should not have
hesitated a moment to go before or to follow thee to the very gates
of hell, hadst thou commanded it. My soul was not my own but thine.’
Let him, therefore, make this small return of a letter to relieve
her anxiety. ‘In earlier days, when thou didst seek worldly pleasure
with me, thy letters were frequent enough; thy songs put the name of
Heloise on every lip. Every street, every house in the city, echoed
with my name. How juster would it be to lead me now to God than thou
then didst to pleasure! Think then, I beseech thee, how much thou
owest me. With this brief conclusion I terminate my long letter.
Farewell, beloved.’
It is small wonder that the epistle placed Abélard in some
perplexity. True, the devoted Heloise had spoken throughout in the
past tense. But the ardour and the violence of her phrases betrayed
a present depth of emotion which he must regard with some dismay.
He had trusted that time and discipline would subdue the flame he
had enkindled, and here it was indirectly revealed to live still in
wondrous strength. He could not refuse to write, nor indeed would
such a neglect profit anything; but he would send her a long letter
of spiritual direction, and endeavour to divert her meditations.
‘To Heloise, his sister in Christ, from Abélard, her brother in Him,’
was the characteristic opening of his reply. If he has not written to
her since her conversion, he says, it is not from neglect nor want of
affection, but from the thought that she needed neither counsel nor
consolation. She had been prioress at Argenteuil, the consoler and
instructor of others. Yet, ‘if it seems otherwise to thy humility,’
he will certainly write her on any point she may suggest. She has
spoken of prayer, and so he diverges into a long dissertation on the
excellence of prayer, which fills nearly the whole of his pages. On
one or two occasions only does he approach that colloquy of soul to
soul, for which Heloise yearned so ardently. ‘We ourselves are united
not only by the sanctity of our oath, but also by the identity of our
religious profession. I will pass over your holy community, in which
the prayers of so many virgins and widows ever mount up to God, and
speak of thee thyself, whose holiness hath much favour with God, I
doubt not, and remind thee what thou owest me, particularly in this
grievous peril of mine. Do thou remember, then, in thy prayers him
who is so specially thine own.’ And when at length he nears the end
of his edifying treatise, he once more bares the heart that still
beats within him. If, he says, they hear before long that he has
fallen a victim to the plots of his enemies, or has by some other
chance laid down his burden of sorrow, he trusts they will have his
body brought to rest in their home, his own dear Paraclete, ‘for
there is no safer and more blessed spot for the rest of a sorrowing
soul.’
The long letter is, on the whole, prudent and formal to a degree. Yet
it is not true that Abélard had nothing but coldness and prudence
to return to his wife’s devotion. It is quite obvious what Abélard
would conceive to be his duty in replying to Heloise. For her sake
and for his, for her happiness and his repute, he must moderate the
threatening fire. But that he had a true affection and sympathy for
her is made clear by the occasional failure of his pious resolution.
‘Sister, who wert once dear to me in the world and art now most dear
in Christ,’ he once exclaims parenthetically; and at other moments he
calls her ‘dearest sister,’ and even ‘beloved.’ When we remember the
gulf that now separated them, besides his obvious duty to guide her,
we shall accept the contrast of their letters without using harsh
words of the distracted abbot. But the pathos and the humanity of his
closing paragraph defeated his purpose, and the whole soul of the
abbess flames forth in her reply.
It opens with a calm and somewhat artificial quarrel with the
superscription of his letter, but soon breaks out into strong
reproach for his talk of death. ‘How hast thou been able to frame
such thoughts, dearest?’ she asks; ‘how hast thou found words to
convey them?’ ‘Spare me, beloved,’ she says again: ‘talk not of death
until the dread angel comes near.’ Moreover, she and her nuns would
be too distracted with grief to pray over his corpse. Seneca and
Lucan are quoted to support her. Indeed she soon lapses into words
which the theologian would call blasphemous. She turns her face to
the heavens with that old, old cry, Where is Thy boasted justice?
They were untouched in the days of their sinful joy, but smitten with
a thousand sorrows as soon as their bed had the sacramental blessing.
‘Oh, if I dared but call God cruel to me! Oh, most wretched of all
creatures that I am!’ Women have ever been the ruin of men—Adam,
Solomon, Samson, Job—she runs through the long category of man’s
sneaking accusations.
She wishes she could make satisfaction to God for her sin, but, ‘if
I must confess the true infirmity of my wretched soul, how can I
appease Him, when I am always accusing Him of the deepest cruelty
for this affliction?’ There is yet a further depth that she must
lay bare to her father confessor and her spouse. How can there be
question of penance ‘when the mind still retains the thought of
sinning, and is inflamed again with the old longing? So sweet did I
find the pleasures of our loving days, that I cannot bring myself to
reject them, nor banish them from my memory. Wheresoever I go they
thrust themselves upon my vision, and enkindle the old desire. Even
when I sleep they torment me with their fancied joy. Even during the
Mass, when our prayer should be purest, the dreadful vision of those
pleasures so haunts my soul that I am rather taken up with them than
with prayer. I ought to be lamenting what I have done; I am rather
lamenting what I miss. Not only our actions, but the places and the
times are so bound up with the thought of thee in my mind, that night
and day I am repeating all with thee in spirit. The movement of
body reveals my thoughts at times; they are betrayed in unguarded
speech. Oh, woe is me!... Not knowing my hypocrisy, people call me
“chaste.” They deem bodily integrity a virtue, whereas virtue resides
in the mind, not the body.’ Moreover, virtue should be practised out
of love for God, whereas ‘God knows that in every part of my life I
have more dread of offending thee than Him; I have a greater desire
to please thee than Him.’ Let him not deceive himself with trust in
_her_ prayers, but rather help her to overcome herself. And the poor
woman, the nobility of her soul hidden from her and crushed under the
appalling ethical ignorance and perverse ordering of her times, ends
with a plaintive hope that she may yet, in spite of all, find some
corner in heaven that will save her from the abyss.
We have here the passages which have made Heloise an heroine in
erotic circles for so many centuries. On these words, isolated
from their context of religious horror and self-accusation,
have Bussy-Rabutin, and Pope, and the rest, erected their gaudy
structures; on them is grounded the parallel with Marianne
Alcoforado, and Rousseau’s Julie, and so many other women who have
meditated sin. Bayle has carried his Pyrrhonism so far as to doubt
that ‘bodily integrity’ which she claims for herself with so little
boasting; Chateaubriand, with broader and truer judgment, finds in
the letter the mirroring of the soul of a good woman.
There can be little doubt that the optimism of Chateaubriand has
for once come nearer to the truth than the cynicism of Bayle. The
decadent admirers of Heloise forget three circumstances which should
have diminished their equivocal adoration: the letter is from a
wife to her husband, from a penitent to her spiritual guide—women
say such things every day in the confessional, even in this very
sensitive age—from a thoughtful woman to a man whom she knew to be
dead to every breath of sensual love. There is no parallel to such a
situation.
Further, it is now obvious that the romancists have done injustice to
the soul of Heloise in their isolation of her impassioned phrases.
She objectifies her love: she is not wholly merged in it. She never
loses sight of its true position in her actual life. It is an evil,
a temptation, a torment—she would be free from it. Yet she is too
rational a thinker to turn to the easy theory of an outward tempter.
It is part of herself, a true outgrowth of the nature God has given
her; and between the voice of nature and the voice of conscience,
complicated by the influence of conventual tradition and written law,
her soul is rent with a terrific struggle. A modern confessor with a
knowledge of physiology—there are a few such—could have led her into
paths of peace without difficulty. There was no sin in her.
It is impossible to say that Abélard sails faultlessly through these
troubled waters, but his answer to her on this point is true and
sound in substance. ‘God grant that it be so in thy soul as thou hast
written,’ he says in his next letter. It is true that he is chiefly
regarding her humility, and that he does not shed the kindly light of
human wisdom on her soul which an earlier Abélard would have done;
yet we can imagine what St. Bernard or Robert d’Arbrissel would
have answered to such an outpouring. However, apart from the happy
moderation of this reply, Abélard’s third letter only increases our
sympathy with this woman who wanders in the desert of the twelfth
century of the Christian era. The wild cry of the suffering heart has
startled him. He becomes painfully ingenious in defending Providence
and the monastic or Buddhistic view of life. As to his death, why
should she be moved so strongly? ‘If thou hadst any trust in the
divine mercy towards me, the more grievous the afflictions of this
life seem to thee the more wouldst thou desire to see me freed from
them! Thou knowest of a certainty that whoever will deliver me from
this life will deliver me from a heavy penalty. What I may incur
hereafter I know not, but there is no uncertainty as to that which I
escape.’ And again, when he comes to her accusations of Providence:
if she would follow him to ‘the home of Vulcan,’ why cannot she
follow him quietly to heaven? As to her saying that God spared them
in their guilt and smote them in their wedded innocence, he denies
the latter point. They were not innocent. Did they not have conjugal
relations in the holy nunnery of the Virgin at Argenteuil?[23] Did
he not profanely dress her in the habit of a nun when he took her
secretly to Pallet? Flushed with the success of his apology for
Providence, the unlucky abbot goes from bathos to bathos. There
was not merely justice but love in the divine ruling. They had
merited punishment, but had, ‘on the contrary,’ been rescued from
the ‘vile and obscene pleasures’ of matrimony, from the ‘mud and
mire,’ and so forth. His mutilation was a skilful operation on the
part of Providence ‘to remove the root of all vice and sordidness
from him, and make him fitter for the service of the altar.’ ‘I had
deserved death, and I have received life. Do thou, then, unite with
me in thanksgiving, my inseparable companion, who hast shared both
my sin and my reward.’ How fortunate it was that they married! ‘For
if thou hadst not been joined to me in matrimony, it might easily
have happened that thou wouldst have remained in the world’—the one
thing that would have saved her from utter desolation. ‘Oh, how dread
a loss, how lamentable an evil it had been, if in the seeking of
carnal pleasure thou hadst borne a few children in pain to the world,
whereas thou now bearest so great a progeny with joy to heaven.’
Again the ‘mud and mire,’ and the thanksgiving. He even lends his
pen, in his spiritual ecstasy, to the writing of this fearful calumny
against himself: ‘Christ is thy true lover, not I; all that I sought
in thee was the satisfaction of my miserable pleasure.’ Her passions
are, like the artificially stimulated ones of the deacons in Gibbon
and of Robert d’Arbrissel, a means of martyrdom. He had been spared
all this, she had plaintively written; on the contrary, he urges, she
will win more merit and reward than he.
[23] The one from which the nuns had been driven ‘on account of
the enormity of their life.’
I have given a full summary of the long epistle, because its
psychological interest is great. We have seen the gradual
transformation of Abélard—the steps in his ‘conversion’—from chapter
to chapter. This letter marks the deepest stage of his lapse into
Bernardism.[24] It offers an almost unprecedented contrast to
the Abélard of 1115. And this is the man, I may be pardoned for
repeating, who is held up by ecclesiastical writers (even such as
Newman) to the blushes of the ages. Perhaps the age is not far off
that will sincerely blush over him—not for his personal defects.
[24] At a later date one of the censures passed by the doctors
of the Sorbonne on this classic sinner of the twelfth century is
that he finds a shade of sin in legitimate conjugal relations.
Heloise was silenced. Whether the pious dissertation had really
influenced her, or the proud utterance of her plaint had relieved
her, or she closed in upon her heart after such a reply, it would be
difficult to say. Her next letter is calm, erudite, dialectical. ‘To
her lord as to species, her beloved in person’ is the quaint heading
of the epistle. She will try to keep her pen within due bounds in
future, but he knows the saying about ‘the fulness of the heart.’
Nevertheless, ‘just as a nail is driven out by a new one, so it is
with thoughts.’ He must help her to dwell on other things. She and
her nuns beg him to write a new rule for them and a history of the
monastic life. There are points in the Rule of St. Benedict which are
peculiarly masculine; she discusses them in early mediæval style. She
would like her nuns to be permitted to eat meat and drink wine. There
is less danger in giving wine to women; and she naïvely quotes (from
Macrobius) Aristotle’s crude speculation on the subject. Then follows
a long dissertation on wine, temperance, and intemperance, bristling
with proofs and weighty authorities. Briefly, she quarrels with the
ascetic view of life. She happily avoids the hard sayings in which
Christ urges it on every page of the Gospels, and voices the eternal
compromise of human nature. Who may become Abélard’s successor as
their spiritual guide, she does not know. Let him appoint a rule of
life for them, which will guard them from unwise interference, and
let it concede a little in the way of soft clothing, meat, wine, and
other suspected commodities.
Abélard complies willingly, quite entering into the spirit of
the nail theory. ‘I will make a brief and succinct reply to thy
affectionate request, dear sister,’ he begins, at the head of a
very long and very curious sketch of the history of monasticism.
It is a brilliant proof of Abélard’s erudition, relatively to his
opportunities, but at the same time an illustration of the power of
constructing most adequate ‘explanations’ without any reference to
the real agencies at work.
In a later letter Abélard drew up the rule of life which had been
asked. It follows the usual principles and tendencies of such
documents. It offers, however, no little psychological interest in
connection with the modifications which the abbess has desired.
The dialectician feels a logical reluctance to compromise, and the
fervent monk cannot willingly write down half measures. Yet the human
element in him has a sneaking sympathy with the plea of the abbess,
and, with much explanation and a fond acceptance of Aristotelic
theories, the compromise is effected. To the manuscript of this
letter a later hand has added a smaller and more practical rule.
This is generally attributed to Heloise herself, and is certainly
the work of some early abbess of the Paraclete. It supplements
Abélard’s scheme of principles and general directions by a table of
regulations—as to beds, food, dress, visitors, scandals, etc.—of a
more detailed character.
The closing letter of the famous series is one addressed by Abélard
to ‘the virgins of the Paraclete’ on the subject of ‘the study
of letters.’ It is from this epistle that we learn—as we do also
from a letter of Venerable Peter of Cluny—of Heloise’s linguistic
acquirements. The nuns are urged to undertake the study of the
Scriptural tongues, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and are reminded that
they have ‘a mother who is versed in these three languages.’ There
is reason to think that neither master nor pupil knew much Greek or
Hebrew.
This is followed shortly by a number of hymns and sermons. Heloise
had asked him to write some hymns for liturgical use, so as to avoid
a wearisome repetition and to dispense with some inappropriate ones.
He sent ninety-three, but they are of little literary and poetic
value. The source of his old-time poetic faculty is dried up. A
sequence for the Feast of the Annunciation, which is attributed to
him, won praise from, of all people, Luther. But the number of hymns
and songs ‘attributed’ to Abélard is large. The sermons, of which
thirty-four are to be found in the collection of his works, are not
distinguished in their order. The abbot was not an eloquent preacher.
But they are carefully written, erudite compositions, which were
delivered at St. Gildas, or the Paraclete, or by special invitation.
Some of them have much intrinsic interest or value—those on Susannah
and John the Baptist, for instance, in connection with monastic
affairs, and that on St. Peter in connection with his rigid loyalty
to Rome.
A more interesting appendix to the correspondence is found in the
forty-two ‘Problems of Heloise,’ with the replies of Abélard. Under
the pretext of following out his direction, but probably with a
greater anxiety to prolong the intercourse, Heloise sent to him a
list of difficulties she had encountered in reading Scripture. The
daughters of Charlemagne had responded to Alcuin’s exhortations with
a similar list. The little treatise is not unworthy of analysis from
the historico-theological point of view, but such a task cannot be
undertaken here. The problems are, on the whole, those which have
presented themselves to every thoughtful man and woman who has
approached the Bible with the strictly orthodox view; the answers
are, generally speaking, the theological artifices which served that
purpose down to the middle of the wayward nineteenth century.
With this mild outbreak of rationalism Heloise passes out of the
pages of history, save for a brief reintroduction in Abélard’s
closing year. The interest and the force of her personality have
been undoubtedly exaggerated by some of the chief biographers of
Abélard, but she was assuredly an able, remarkable, and singularly
graceful and interesting woman. Cousin once suddenly asked in the
middle of a discourse: ‘Who is the woman whose love it would have
been sweetest to have shared?’ Many names were suggested, though
there must have been a strong anticipation that he would name Mme. de
Longueville, for he laboured at that very time under his posthumous
infatuation for the sister of Condé. But he answered, Heloise,
‘that noble creature who loved like a St. Theresa, wrote sometimes
like Seneca, and who must have been irresistibly charming, since
she charmed St. Bernard himself.’ It was a fine phrase to deliver
impromptu, but an uncritical estimate. It is a characteristic paradox
to say that she loved like a St. Theresa, and an exaggeration to say
that she ever wrote like Seneca. As to her charming St. Bernard—the
‘pseudo-apostle,’ as she ungraciously calls him,—they who read the
one brief letter he wrote her will have a new idea of a charmed man.
Yet with her remarkable ability, her forceful and exalted character
in the most devitalising circumstances, and her self-realisation, she
would probably have written her name in the annals of France without
the assistance of Abélard. It must be remembered that she had a very
singular reputation, for her age, before she met Abélard. She might
have been a St. Theresa to Peter of Cluny, or, as is more probable, a
Montmorency in the political chronicle of France.