AbÉlard had, of course, committed another serious blunder in accepting the proffered ‘dignity.’ There was an error on both sides, as there had been in his first fatal assumption of the cowl; though on this occasion the pressure behind him was greater, the alternative less clear, and the prospect at least uncertain. It will be remembered that AbÉlard probably studied at Locmenach in his early years. This was a branch monastery of the ancient abbey of St. Gildas at Rhuys, on the coast; and it is not impossible that some recollection of the monks of Locmenach entered into his decision to become abbot of St. Gildas. There were probably few abbeys in France at the time which were sufficiently moral and earnest in their life to offer a congenial home to this man who is held up to the blushes of the ages as a sinner, and of whom the Church only speaks in the low and solemn tone that befits a great scandal. If AbÉlard’s first and chief misfortune is that he was a Christian, his second is that he was a monk.
The abbey of St. Gildas had reached the last stage of monastic decay. The monks did not accept presents of pretty maid-servants, nor receive fine lady visitors in their abbey, like the monks of St. Denis; nor were they eager to have a nunnery of sisters in religion close at hand, like the cloistered canons. Theirs was not a case for the application of the words of Erasmus: ‘Vocantur “patres”—et saepe sunt.’ Each monk had a respectable wife and family on the monastic estate. The outlying farms and cottages were colonised with the women and the little monklings; there was no cemetery of infant bones at or near St. Gildas. Their monasticism consisted in the discharge of their formal religious exercises in church and choir—the chant of the Mass and of the breviary. And when the monk had done his day’s work of seven or eight hours’ chanting, he would retire, like every other Christian, to the bosom of his family. The half-civilised Celtic population of the district were quite content with this version of their duty, and did not refuse them the customary sustenance.
AbÉlard’s horror on discovering this state of things was equalled by the surprise of the monks when they discovered his Quixotic ideas of monastic life. They only knew AbÉlard as the amorous troubadour, the teacher who attracted crowds of gay and wealthy scholars wherever he went, the object of the bitter hostility of the monastic reformers whom they detested. It was the Bernardist or Norbertian AbÉlard whom they had chosen for their abbot. Surprise quickly turned to disgust when the new abbot lectured them in chapter—as a sexless ascetic could so well do—on the beauty of continence and the Rule of St. Benedict. They were rough, ignorant, violent men, and they soon made it clear that reform was hopelessly out of the question.
The very locality proved an affliction. He had exchanged the gentle beauty and the mild climate of the valley of the Seine for a wild, bleak, storm-swept sea-shore. The abbey was built on a small promontory that ran out into the Bay of Biscay, a few leagues to the south of Vannes. It was perched on the edge of the steep granite cliffs, and AbÉlard’s very pen seems to shudder as he writes of the constant roar of the waves at the foot of the rocks and the sweep of the ocean winds. Behind them stretched a long series of sand-hills. They occupied a scarcely gracious interval between desolation and desolation. For AbÉlard was not of the temperament to appreciate the grandeur of an ever-restless ocean or to assimilate the strength that is borne on its winds. He was sadly troubled. Here he had fled, he says, to the very end of the earth, the storm-tossed ocean barring his further retreat, yet he finds the world no less repulsive and cruel.
In the character of abbot, AbÉlard was at liberty to seek what consolation he could outside his abbey. He soon found that there was none to be had in the vicinity of Rhuys. ‘The whole barbarous population of the land was similarly lawless and undisciplined,’ he says; that seems to include such other monks and priests as the locality contained. Even their language was unintelligible to him, he complains; for, although he was a Breton, his ear would only be accustomed to Latin and to Romance French, which would differ considerably from the Celtic Bas-Breton. Whether the lord of the district was equally wild—as seems most probable—or no, the way to his chÂteau was barred by another difficulty. He was considered the bitter enemy of the abbey, for he had ‘annexed’ the lands that belonged by right to the monks. Moreover he exacted a heavy tribute from them. They were frequently without food, and wandered about stealing all they could lay their hands on for the support of their wives and families. They violently urged AbÉlard to fight for their rights and find food for them, instead of giving them his ethereal discourses. And the abbot succeeded just far enough to embitter the usurper against him, without obtaining much for his lawless monks. He found himself in a new dilemma. If he remained in the abbey he was assailed all day by the hungry clamour and the brutal violence of his ‘subjects’; if he went abroad the tyrannical lord threatened to have him done to death by his armed retainers.
For three or four years AbÉlard sustained this miserable existence almost without alleviation. In 1129, however, an event occurred which, evil as it looked at the moment, proved a source of considerable happiness to him for some years.
Abbot Suger, the cowled warrior and statesman, had become monastic reformer after his conversion. The circumstance proved more lucrative to St. Denis than would be thought. In his De rebus a se gestis, Suger writes at great length of the additional possessions he secured for the abbey, and amongst these is enumerated the nunnery of St. Mary at Argenteuil. He was not only a rigid disciplinarian, but he had an unusual acquaintance with ancient records. Many of his early years at St. Denis had been spent in the archivium, in diligent scrutiny of deeds and documents relating to the earlier history of the abbey. One day when he was absorbed in this study he hit upon a document from which it seemed possible to prove that the convent of the Benedictine nuns at Argenteuil, two or three miles away, belonged to the monks of St. Denis. It was a complicated question, the nuns dating their possession from the time of Charlemagne. But when Suger became abbot of St. Denis himself, and eager to employ his political ability and influence in the service of the abbey, he recollected, along with others, the document relating to the nunnery. When, moreover, he had been converted, he was able to see the licentiousness of the nuns of Argenteuil, and make it a pretext for asserting the rights of his abbey.
In 1127, he states in his Life, he obtained from Honorius II. a bull which was supposed to legalise his seizure of the convent: ‘both in justice to ourselves and on account of the enormity of life of the nuns who were established there, he restored the place to us with its dependencies, so that the religious life might be re-instituted in it.’ In his Vita Ludovici Grossi he also lays stress on the ‘foul enormity’ of life in the nunnery.
How far we may accept the strong language of the enterprising abbot it would be difficult to say. Honorius, who would be flattered by the request to pronounce on the domestics difficulties of the Church of France, would certainly not be over-exacting in the matter of proof. Still, he sent a legate, the Bishop of Albano, and directed him to hold an inquiry into the affair, together with the Archbishop of Rheims and the Bishops of Paris, Chartres, and Soissons. The name of Geoffrey of Chartres is a guarantee that the inquiry was more than a mere cloak to cover the sanctioning of a questionable act. Although, we must remember, Suger does not quote their words in the above passage, they must have decided that his charge was substantially founded. The nuns were turned out of their convent a few months afterwards.
The asserted corruption of the nunnery is quite in accord with what we know of the period from other sources. We have already quoted Jacques de Vitry’s observation that none of the convents of the time, except those of the Cistercians (his own order), were fit places for an honest woman; and he describes the ‘thousand tricks and wicked artifices’ by which respectable dames were sometimes induced to enter them. The same Vandyke-like painter of the morals of the twelfth century elsewhere passes a comprehensive sentence on the convents of canonesses. Nor was this the first Parisian nunnery to be suppressed in the twelfth century. There was until 1107 a convent of Benedictine nuns on the island, on the site of the present Rue Calende. It was close to the royal palace; and the relations of the nuns to the nobles of the court had become so notorious that Bishop Galo had to intervene and put the good sisters on the street. One has only to read AbÉlard’s sermon on ‘Susannah’ (delivered to an exemplary community of nuns) to realise the condition of the average nunnery at that time.
Heloise was prioress of the convent of Argenteuil. This is, indeed, the only circumstance that need make us hesitate to accept Suger’s words at their literal value. The Heloise of those writers who have but touched the love-romance of the famous couple, without entering into a deeper study of their characters, is pitifully inadequate. She had all the passion that poetic or decadent admirer has ever given her; she had that freer, because narrower, view of the love-relation, which only regarded her own particular and exceptional case, and did not extend to the thousand cases on which the broad law of matrimony is based; and she retained her ardent love and her particularist view throughout long years of conventual life. We may examine this more directly in the next chapter. For the moment it reveals, when it is taken in conjunction with that integrity and altitude of life which none can hesitate to assign her, a strength and elevation of character which are frequently obscured by the mere admirers of her passion. We know nothing whatever of the eight or nine miserable years of her life at Argenteuil; but as soon as she does emerge into the light of history (in 1130) she is found to be of an elevated and commanding character. She was prior, not abbess, at Argenteuil. When she became abbess, her community became a centre of light in France.
Still, Heloise shared the fate of her sisters, if she had not shared their sin; in fact, we may see a protest against their life in her refusal to follow them to a new home. Suger had been directed to find a nunnery which would receive the evicted sisters, and most of them had gone to St. Mary of Footel. Heloise had not accompanied them, and she was still without a canonical home in 1129, when the news of these events reached the distant abbey of St. Gildas.
The finest and supreme test of love is to purge it of the last subtle admixture of sexual feeling and then measure its strength. As a rule this is wholly impracticable—Mr. W. Platt has a remarkable paper on the subject in his Women, Love, and Life—but in the case of AbÉlard the test was applied in supreme rigour, and with a satisfactory issue. There was indeed another consideration impelling AbÉlard, when he sought out his nun-wife. The desertion of the Paraclete had cost him many a heavy thought. The little estate was still his legal property, but it was insufficient to support a priest and companion at the oratory. He would assuage both anxieties by installing Heloise and such companions as she chose in his old home. But the course of the story will reveal more clearly the deep affection he had for Heloise. It was faithfulness to the views he held since his conversion, faithfulness to the ideal of the best men of the time, as well as a dread of the ever ready tongue of the calumniator, that separated him so long and so sternly from her.
In 1129, therefore, the year in which the plague ravaged Paris, AbÉlard revisited the quiet valley of the Arduzon. Thither he invited Heloise and some of her companions, to whom he made over the legal possession of the estate. Poor Heloise must have been disappointed. The ardour which she reveals in her letters was evidently met by a great restraint and formality on his side. He was severely correct in the necessary intercourse with his ‘sisters in religion.’ Later events showed that, ridiculous as it may well seem, he had good reason for this deference to detractors. However, Heloise soon won universal regard and affection in Champagne. ‘The bishops came to love her as a daughter,’ says AbÉlard, ‘the abbots as a sister, and the laity as a mother.’ They lived in deep poverty and some anxiety at first, but nobles and prelates soon added generously to the resources of the new foundation. Noble dames, too, brought rich dowries with them in coming to ask for the veil in Heloise’s respected community. The priory grew rapidly in importance and good repute.
In 1131 AbÉlard sought a further favour for the new foundation, in having Heloise raised to the dignity of abbess. Innocent II. was making a journey through France, and lavishing favours (when they cost him nothing) generously and gratuitously on all sides, behaving in a manner that departed widely from papal traditions. It was the second year of the great papal schism, and, Anacletus having bought or otherwise secured Rome, through his family, the Pierleoni, Innocent was making a successful bid for France, where exception was taken to Pierleone’s Jewish strain. Passing from Chartres to LiÉge, on his way to meet Lothair of Saxony, Innocent spent a day or two at the Benedictine abbey of Morigni. AbÉlard joined the crowd of prelates who assembled there to do homage to the pope, and he obtained the promise of a bull (which was duly sent), conferring the dignity of abbess on Heloise, and securing to her and her successors the full canonical rights of their abbey. AbÉlard seems to have been received with distinction by the papal court. The chronicle of Morigni mentions the presence of the Abbot of St. Gildas, and adds: ‘the most distinguished teacher and master in the schools, to whom lovers of learning flocked from almost the whole of Christendom.’ Later, too, AbÉlard boasts (so says Bernard) of his friends amongst the Roman cardinals; it must have been during the stay of the papal court at Morigni that he met them. Another noteworthy personage whom AbÉlard met there was St. Bernard. We have no details about this first meeting of the two great antagonists, but their names occur side by side in the chronicle as those of the most eminent teacher and the most distinguished preacher in France.
In the increasing bitterness of life at St. Gildas AbÉlard now naturally sought consolation in the new abbey of the Paraclete. His relation to Heloise personally remained marked by a reserve which hurt her, but his visits to the abbey became more frequent and prolonged. It appears that this loosened the tongues of some foolish people, and AbÉlard took up the accusation, or insinuation, with his usual gravity. His apology is often described as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘painful’; and one certainly cannot take very seriously his dissertation on Origen’s misdeed and the Oriental custom of eunuch-guardians. More interesting is the second part, in which he urges many precedents of the familiarity of saintly men with women. His favourite saint, Jerome, afforded a conspicuous illustration; and others were not wanting. It is too early in the history of theology to find the example of Christ adduced. A modern apologist could greatly extend the list, beginning with Francis of Assisi (and Clare) and ending with Francis de Sales (and Madame de Chantal). Perhaps AbÉlard’s own case is the clearest proof that even masked sexual feeling may be entirely absent from such attachments. Those who care to analyse them will probably find the greater refinement, gentleness, sympathy, and admiration of women to be quite adequate to explain such saintly intimacies, without any subtle research into the psychology of sex. However, the complaint seems to have moderated the abbot’s fervour for a time; and indeed events soon became absorbingly interesting at St. Gildas.
The frequent journeys to Champagne increased the bitterness of his monks. Then he had a serious accident, nearly breaking his neck in a fall from his horse. When he recovered, he found that his monks had entered upon a most dangerous stage of conspiracy. The accident seems to have suggested an idea to them, and they determined to rid themselves of an abbot who was worse than useless. They even put poison in the wine which he was to use in the Mass one morning, but he discovered the fact in time. On another occasion he had an adventure which may have suggested an important incident in M. Zola’s Rome. He had gone to Nantes to visit the count in an illness, and was staying with his brother Dagobert, who was a canon in the cathedral. When the time came for the abbot and his monastic companion to sup, AbÉlard had, providentially, lost his appetite—or suspected something. The monk supped—and died. As AbÉlard’s servant disappeared after the meal, it was natural to suppose that he had been paid by the ferocious monks to poison their abbot. ‘How many times did they try to do away with me by poison!’ he exclaimed. But he lived apart from them, and succeeded in frustrating the attempt. Then they hired robbers to apply their professional skill to the task. Whenever the monks heard that he was going anywhere, they planted a few cut-throats on the route.
AbÉlard had no great love for this Dionysiac existence, and he resolved to make a bold effort at reform. He summoned the monks in solemn chapter, and hurled the sentence of excommunication at the leaders of the revolt. It sat more lightly on their shoulders than the abbot anticipated, and he proceeded to call in the help of a papal legate. The Duke of Brittany and several neighbouring bishops were invited to the function, and the sentence of excommunication and expulsion from the abbey was repeated with impressive ceremony. The chief rebels were thus restricted to following the abbot’s movements without—in company, apparently, of the hired assassins of the monks and the equally dangerous servants of the lord of the manor—and AbÉlard devoted his attention to reforming the remainder of the community. But the old abbey was past redemption. ‘The remaining monks began to talk, not of poison, but of cutting my throat,’ he says. The circle of knives was drawing closer upon him, within and without, and he saw that it would be impossible to guard his life much longer. He gave up the struggle, and fled from the abbey. There is a local tradition which tells of a secret flight by night through a subterranean passage leading down to the sea. AbÉlard at least intimates there was little dignity in his retirement, when he says: ‘under the guidance of a certain noble of the district I succeeded, with great difficulty, in escaping from the abbey.’
Where AbÉlard found refuge from his murderous ‘sons,’ and where he spent the next three or four years, it is difficult to say. He probably moved from place to place, generally remaining in the neighbourhood of Rhuys, but occasionally journeying to Champagne or accepting an invitation to preach at some special festival. The ‘certain noble’—an uncertain one, as the phrase usually implies—would be likely to give him immediate hospitality; and the Count of Nantes was friendly, and would find AbÉlard a graceful addition at his board. Then there was the family chÂteau at Pallet, and the house of his brother Dagobert at Nantes. We seem to find AbÉlard’s boy, Astrolabe, under the care of this brother later on. AbÉlard would at all events see much of him, and assist in educating him, either at Pallet or Nantes. The son had, apparently, not inherited the gifts of his parents. An obscure mention of his death in a later necrologium merely indicates the close of a correct but ordinary ecclesiastical career.
But though AbÉlard lacked neither wealth, nor honour, nor home, he speaks of his condition as a very pitiable one. Deutsch has hazarded the conjecture that the monks of St. Gildas really desired an abbot who would be generally absent. It seems rather that they wanted an abbot who would share their comfortable theory of life and at the same time have influence to enrich the abbey, discontinue the paying of tribute, and induce a higher authority to restrain their tyrannical neighbours. They were therefore naturally inflamed when AbÉlard deserted the immediate concerns of the abbey, yet remained near enough to secure his revenue out of its income. He retained his title (we find no successor appointed until after his death), and as he speaks of wealth, we must suppose that he somehow continued to obtain his income. The Count of Nantes would probably support his cause as long as he remained in Brittany. But, at the same time, this detained him in the constant danger of assassination. Wherever he went, he apprehended bribery and corruption, poison and poniards. ‘My misery grew with my wealth,’ he says, and ‘I find no place where I may rest or live.’ His classical reading promptly suggests the parallel of Damocles.
It was in these circumstances that AbÉlard wrote the famous letter which he entitled the ‘Story of my Calamities.’ The passage I have just quoted occurs in its closing paragraph. It is an invaluable document for the purpose of the great master’s biography. Without it, the life of AbÉlard would occupy only a score of pages. His contemporaries had numbers of monastic followers and admirers who were eager to write their deeds in letters of gold. The little band of friends who stood around AbÉlard in his final struggle were scattered, cowed, or murdered, by triumphant Bernardism. At the mention of Bernard’s name Christendom crossed itself and raised its eyes to the clouds: at the mention of the ‘Peripatetic of Pallet’ it closed its pious lips, forgetful, or ignorant, of the twenty years of profound sorrow for the one grave delinquency of his life. If the sins of youth are to leave an indelible stain, one is forced to recall that Augustine had been a greater sinner, and that the Canon of the Church contains the names of converted prostitutes, such as Mary of Magdala and Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. It may be thought by some Catholics that, in the uncertainty of human judgment, there is a providential criterion given in the working of miracles; but, once more, even the fifth century only credited St. Augustine with two miracles. And if intention to serve the Church be all-important, AbÉlard has won high merit; or if effective service to the Church, then is his merit the greater, for the thirteenth century, in its construction of that theology and philosophy which the Church even now deems sufficient for the needs of the world, utterly rejected Bernardism, and borrowed its foundation from Pierre AbÉlard.
As a piece of literature the ‘Story’ lies under the disadvantage of being written in degenerate Latin. With all his classical reading, AbÉlard has not escaped the use of forms which gravely offend the classical taste. Perhaps John of Salisbury is superior to him in this respect; there have certainly been later theologians, such as Petavius, who have far surpassed him. But, apart from this limitation in form, it is as high above the many biographies and autobiographies of his contemporaries as he himself was above most of their writers. Abbot Suger’s autobiography is a piece of vulgar and crude self-advertisement beside it. It has not the mere chance immortality which honours such works as that of Suger, and which is wholly due to the zeal of the modern collector of ancient documents; it has the germ of immortality within it—the same soul that lives in the Confessions of Augustine: those who understand that soul will not add the Confession of Rousseau. And the confession of AbÉlard has this singular feature: it is written by a man to whom the former sinful self is dead in a way which was impossible to Augustine. That feature implies both advantages and disadvantages, but it at least gives a unique value and interest to the document.
We have throughout relied on and quoted this autobiography, so that an analysis of its contents would be superfluous. There remains, however, the interesting question of AbÉlard’s motive for writing it. It is ostensibly written as a letter, addressed to a friend who is in trouble, and merely intended to give him some consolation by a comparison of the sorrows of AbÉlard. No one will seriously question that this is only a rhetorical artifice. Probably it reached such a friend, but it was obviously written for ‘publication.’ In its sincere acknowledgment of whatever fault lay on his conscience, only striving to excuse where the intention was clearly good, that is, in the matter of his theological opinions, the letter must be regarded as a conciliatory document. Not only its elaborate construction, but its care in explaining how guiltless he was in the making of most of his enemies—Anselm, Alberic, Norbert, Bernard, and the monks of St. Denis and St. Gildas—impel us to think that it was intended for circulation in France. In a few years we shall find him in Paris once more. Deutsch believes that the ‘Story’ was written and circulated to prepare the way for his return, and this seems very probable. From ‘the ends of the earth’ his thoughts and hopes were being redirected towards Paris; it had availed him nothing to fly from it. But there were calumnious versions abroad of every step in his eventful life, and even Bernard sneered at his experience at St. Gildas. He would make an effort to regain the affection of some of his old friends, or to create new admirers.
Whatever may have been the aim of AbÉlard in writing his ‘Story,’ it had one immediate consequence of the first literary importance. Great of itself, it evoked a correspondence which is unique in the literature of the world. It fell into the hands of Abbess Heloise, and led to the writing of her famous Letters.
