Though the main concern of this volume is Abelard’s work in philosophy and theology, he made important and original contributions in a number of fields. His substantial essays in apologetic and biblical exegesis are discussed in other chapters.1 Studies still in progress are revealing his extensive and wide-ranging activity as a liturgist, and seeking to recover concrete evidence of his work as a composer of music. But his most remarkable non-philosophical role is as a literary artist, a master of narrative and lyric form who produced art of a high order out of his own complex and tormented life.
Any account of Abelard the artist must begin with the Historia calamitatum, the narrative of his struggles as man, philosopher, and monk over thirty years. Ostensibly written to console an unnamed friend by inviting him to contrast his own misfortunes with the far greater sufferings of Abelard, the Historia seems clearly to have been designed to engage a wider audience. Whether viewed as an authentic apologia pro vita sua or as an astute exercise in historical romance, this unique document and the story it tells have inevitably defined our sense of the character and personality of Abelard. So compelling is the Historia indeed, so evocative of romance and hagiography in its framing of the crucial events of Abelard’s life, and so eloquent in the lessons it draws from these events, that it is hard to resist the suspicion that it is essentially a work of imaginative fiction. But it is unique too in that its historicity has been tested perhaps as rigorously as that of any comparable work. Its status as a work of Abelard, and as initiating the series of “personal” letters by Abelard and Heloise that accompany it in virtually all manuscripts, now seems to have been decisively established, while the exhaustive readings to which it has been subjected have greatly enhanced our ability to appreciate it as a literary text. Moreover, as I will try to show, it also provides an invaluable framework for considering Abelard the poet. The love-lyrics which we can tentatively ascribe to him, the planctus or laments on Old Testament themes, and even the later hymns and sequences assume a richer significance when read in relation to the version of his life recounted in the Historia.
Since it has generated something of a renaissance in the study of Abelard the writer, the history of the authorship controversy is worth reviewing briefly. The question of authorship had been raised from time to time by earlier scholars, but assumed a new seriousness when, in 1972, the late Professor John Benton questioned the authenticity of the personal letters on the grounds of what seemed to be their basic inaccuracies and unaccountable omissions in regard to what is known about the lives of the protagonists from other sources. In addition Benton noted that the monastic Rule that Abelard offers to Heloise and her abbey of the Paraclete in the last of the letters does not accord with what we know of the practice of the Paraclete in Heloise’s day. Benton suggested that this letter was a thirteenth-century forgery, compiled, with the aid of authentic writings of Abelard, to promote certain changes in the Rule of the abbey, most notable among them the introduction of male authority. He further suggested that the Historia and the other letters were also forgeries, produced to reinforce the authenticity of the forged Rule, and were probably based on a twelfth-century work of fiction which in turn was based broadly on Abelard’s life.2
Benton was a gifted scholar and a specialist in medieval autobiography, and his developed argument is a good deal more substantial than it may sound in bald summary. But opponents pointed out serious methodological weaknesses in his analyses of the language of the letters and in his interpretation of crucial passages.3 Benton himself came eventually to the view that the personal letters must have been produced in the early twelfth century, and that attribution to Abelard was quite plausible.4 He continued, however, to argue on the basis of statistical analyses of the language of the letters that a single author had produced both sides of the correspondence, and so kept alive his earlier theory that the collection as a whole was an elaborate fiction.5
More recently the case for authenticity has been strengthened. A remarkable study by David Luscombe accounts for many of the seeming inconsistencies in the collection, shows that puzzling details in the Historia can be illumined by what is known of Abelard’s familial and political affinities, and demonstrates important connections between the personal letters and other, unquestionably authentic exchanges between Abelard and Heloise over the affairs of the Paraclete.6 Peter Dronke, analyzing the distribution of different patterns of prose rhythm in the personal letters, has made a persuasive case for seeing them as the work of two authors.7 Finally a recently discovered collection of excerpts from Latin love-letters exchanged by a man and a woman have been attributed on similar grounds, stylistic and circumstantial, to Heloise and Abelard.8
In the discussion of the Historia calamitatum which follows I assume that it is the authentic work of Abelard. It does not follow, of course, that it presents a factual and objective account of his experience or his relations with Heloise, and indeed, as I will show, there are good reasons to distrust it. But at a time when letter-writing was coming into its own as an art, and its possibilities as a vehicle for self-representation were beginning to be recognized,9 the Historia is a truly pioneering work. Its very distortions and contradictions can be seen as manifestations of the complexities of individual character. The radical shifts of tone and emphasis which make it difficult to read express the several, at times conflicting purposes of a work that incorporates the perspectives of consolation, romance, confession, and religious instruction, and in which much is left unresolved.
The main episodes of the story are well known: Abelard’s early success as a student and teacher, leading to a prominent position in Paris; his affair with Heloise and its discovery; her pregnancy, their marriage, Abelard’s castration by her vengeful kinsmen, and their taking of religious vows; his troubles as a monk and the condemnation of his treatise on the Trinity (TSB); the renewal of his teaching career at the Paraclete; his unsuccessful attempt to govern the monastery of St. Gildas; the establishment of Heloise and her nuns at the Paraclete. The purpose of the Historia, as stated in the opening lines and recalled in the final paragraphs, is consolatory: having read it, the anonymous friend to whom it is addressed will appreciate the enormity of Abelard’s sufferings and be better able to bear his own. But the sequence of events is disjointed, and the tone and governing conventions of the narrative change markedly from one section of the story to another.
The narrative proper begins on a note of self-advertisement. Abelard was the eldest son of a knight, and though he renounced his patrimony to study philosophy, his description of his restless, intensely competitive nature, and his travels from school to school in quest of conflictus disputationum, consciously evokes the way of life expected of young men who aspired to knighthood.10 The opening chapters describe a series of quasi-military victories over other philosophers, culminating in the successful besieging of Paris itself.
Abelard’s acknowledged brilliance and his disdain for envy and intrigue suggest the Arthurian heroes of Geoffrey of Monmouth and emergent chivalric romance, whose prowess coexists with sophistication and versatility. His victories are those of ingenium (“genius,” “talent”), gratia, and bold originality over authority and traditional practice. And they are emphatically victories. William of Champeaux is to Abelard as Hector laid low by Ajax; Anselm of Laon is a faltering Pompey to his brilliantly ascendant Caesar (HC 66–67; Radice 1974, 62). The dialectician-as-warrior is something of a topos in this period,11 but Abelard was its embodiment par excellence, and in his sixties the younger Bernard of Clairvaux could still compare him to Goliath.12
What is absent in these chapters is any hint of an informing ideal in Abelard’s intellectual development. Virtuoso argumentation and the humiliation of rivals, including former teachers, are evidently ends in themselves. In the face of the malice and envy of his opponents, Abelard’s only apparent failing is an ambitious pride, pardonable in view of his success. All of this changes abruptly when, finally established in Paris as by his own estimate “the only philosopher in the world” (HC 70; Radice 1974, 65), he allows his self-discipline to lapse. Just as abruptly, a narrative which had begun as a scholarly roman d’aventure, having attained the point at which the proven warrior turns to thoughts of love, is transformed into a confessional narrative in the tradition of Augustine:
But now the further I advanced in philosophy and theology, the further I fell behind the philosophers and holy fathers in the impurity of my life . . . Since therefore I was wholly enslaved to pride and lechery, God’s grace provided a remedy for both these evils, though not of my own choosing: first for my lechery by depriving me of those organs with which I practised it, and then for the pride which had grown in me through my learning – for in the words of the Apostle, “Knowledge breeds conceit” – when I was humiliated by the burning of the book of which I was so proud.
(HC 70–71; Radice 1974, 65)
This schematic balancing of sin and judgement is complemented by Abelard’s coldly analytical account of his conquest of Heloise, which he presents as a wholly self-interested exploitation of the pedagogical authority over the much younger woman that her unworldly uncle had granted him. His account of their eager love-making is clinical in its emphasis on the physical:
To avert suspicion I sometimes struck her, but these blows were prompted by love and tender feeling rather than anger and irritation, and were sweeter than any balm could be. In short, our desires left no stage of love-making untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it. We entered on each joy the more eagerly for our previous inexperience, and were the less easily sated.
(HC 73; Radice 1974, 67–68)
Exhausted by “nightly vigils,” Abelard neglects his teaching, and like Anselm of Laon as caustically described in an earlier chapter (HC 21–22; Radice 1974, 62), is compelled to abandon ingenium in favor of usus (“rote,” “standard fare”). From beginning to end of his account of the secret affair the prevailing tone is dispassionate and self-condemning.
But after the discovery of the affair by Heloise’s uncle there occurs another, more complicated shift of perspective:
Imagine the lovers’ grief at being separated! How I blushed with shame and contrition for the girl’s plight, and what sorrow she suffered at the thought of my disgrace! All our laments were for one another’s troubles, and our distress was for each other, not for ourselves. Separation drew our hearts still closer while frustration inflamed our passion even more; then we became more abandoned as we lost all sense of shame and, indeed, shame diminished as we found more opportunities for love-making.
(HC 74; Radice 1974, 68–69)
The conduct of the lovers is still programed by physical desire, but with this emphasis there now coexists a suggestion of mutuality that again recalls the world of courtly romance. Their concern with one another’s suffering and the intensification of their love through separation call to mind the story of Tristan and Isolde. We hear love affirmed for its own sake when Heloise, pregnant and in danger, climaxes the discourse in which she seeks to dissuade Abelard from marrying her by insisting that she would rather be lover than wife, and that “only love freely given should keep me for her, not the constriction of a marriage tie.” And it is in the spirit of the dark later stages of the Tristan story that she concludes her long dissuasio with a fatalistic prophecy: “We shall both be destroyed; all that is left us is suffering as great as our love has been” (HC 79; Radice 1974, 74).
This remarkable sentence is in fact the Historia’s final word on the love of Heloise and Abelard as such, and it has the effect of enshrining this aspect of their life as a thing apart, an experience profoundly meaningful yet with a meaning accessible only to themselves. It is an experience, moreover, which allows us to contrast the lovers, even as it illustrates their solidarity. For all his concern for the sufferings of Heloise, Abelard exhibits a wholly selfish anxiety for his reputation (HC 75; Radice 1974, 70), while Heloise, in her unfaltering devotion, assumes a virtually heroic stature. Even the most mundane of her arguments on the unsuitability of marriage for the philosopher, “the constant degrading defilement of infants” (inhonestas illas parvulorum sordes assiduas), has a certain grandeur (assiduas is especially fine), and she is consistent in utterly devaluing her own claim on Abelard in comparison with the value of his “shining light” to the world at large.
Our final glimpse of Heloise, after she has been ordered by Abelard to take the veil, is perhaps her finest moment. On the point of renouncing the world and disappearing from the narrative, her last words echo the speech in which Lucan’s Cornelia, wife of Pompey the Great, seeks to take on herself the blame for his defeat at Pharsalia (HC 81; Radice 1974, 76). This brief scene is both a splendid tribute to the heroically self-sacrificing Heloise, and a devastating comment on Abelard’s own situation. For it was to Lucan’s Pompey, “the mere shadow of a great name,” that he had compared Anselm of Laon (HC 68; Radice 1974, 62), and now compares himself. The haplessness of Pompey, whose very “greatness” now seems a curse, and the emptiness of the heroic posture he adopts in attempting to console his wife, have their counterpart in Abelard’s sense of himself at this moment, still overcome by the shock of his castration by the kinsmen of Heloise.13 More painful than the injury itself are the blow to his renown and the retribution that his earlier scorn for rivals will now bring upon him. Though his ability to interpret difficult biblical texts had seemed a divine gift (HC 82; Radice 1974, 78), he now finds himself utterly confounded by “the cruel letter of the Law,” which declares that no eunuch shall come before the Lord (HC 80; Radice 1974, 76).
Aside from the admission that the decision was motivated by shame rather than devotion, Abelard’s entry into the abbey of St. Denis is barely noted. But he emphasizes his concern to live up to the obligations of monastic life, and in fact the Historia henceforth is almost entirely the story of his attempts to realize religious goals in a hostile and conniving world. The next major episode, his trial at Soissons and the burning of his treatise on the Trinity (TSB), is carefully prepared. Having resumed teaching at the request of his followers, repudiated the lax monastic life of St. Denis, and established a successful school at a lesser, unnamed monastery, Abelard composed this treatise, as he explains, in response to his students’ demand that he bring “analogies from human reason” (humane rationis similitudinibus) to the support of the truths of faith:
They said that nothing could be believed unless it was first understood, and that it was absurd for anyone to preach to others what neither he nor those he taught could grasp with the understanding: the Lord himself criticized such “blind guides of blind men”.
(HC 83; Radice 1974, 78)
The final phrase, echoing Christ’s dismissive characterization of the Pharisees (Matthew 15:14), is the first of a series of allusions which in the next few pages will define the blind intolerance of Abelard’s detractors and set off the pure and enlightened motives of Abelard himself in terms of the persecution of Christ. At Soissons, while his detractors ransack his treatise in a futile search for heresy, Abelard gives public lectures to show the orthodoxy of his writings. He suggests the view of most of those present concerning his alleged heresy by citing John 7:26: “Here he is, speaking openly, and no one utters a word against him,” though he stops short of the explicit reference to Christ with which that verse concludes (HC 84; Radice 1974, 79). Later Geoffrey, Bishop of Chartres, pleading for a fair trial, is made to ask, with Nicodemus, “Does our law judge a man unless it first give him a hearing and know what he does?” (John 7:51; HC 86; Radice 1974, 81). Finally, after Abelard has been forced to burn his book, Thierry of Chartres, resisting his bishop’s attempt to silence him, rebukes the judges by quoting at length Daniel’s censure of the elders who had falsely accused Susanna (Daniel 12:48–49; HC 83; Radice 1974, 83). The effect of these allusions is to confer on Abelard’s condemnation the glory of an intellectual martyrdom.
But it is important to remember that this almost bizarre emphasis on the injustice of the condemnation coexists in Abelard’s mind with a clear recognition of his guilt in the sight of God. The intellectual and the erotic aspects of his early career are closely related, themes of the same “romance,” expressions of the same desire for control and recognition on his own terms, and they lead to closely related sins of pride and lust for which, as he admits, God has justly punished him (HC 70–71; Radice 1974, 65). The connection is pointed up by clear parallels in Abelard’s narration, first of the seduction of Heloise, then of the composition of his treatise. The seduction is carefully framed in pedagogical terms, as a gradual displacement of linguistic by physical communication:
With our books open before us, more words of love than of our reading passed between us, and more kissing than teaching. My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts.
(HC 72–73; Radice 1974, 67)
Heloise will later recall vividly the charm of Abelard’s love-poems (Ep. 1, 71–72; Radice 1974, 115). What this passage describes is in effect the consummation of the appeal of love-poetry, the realization in concrete terms of the precepts of the Ovidian magister amoris. And when Abelard later describes the circumstances that led him to compose his treatise on the Trinity, he does so in broadly similar terms. Here again the secular arts function as a “baited hook” to draw his adoring students toward “the true philosophy” (HC 82; Radice 1974, 77). The treatise he produces in response to their demands can again be seen as displacing traditional authority by the force of personal ingenium, a self-assertion all the more striking in that what Abelard claims to have achieved, “matching the importance of the problem by the subtlety of his solution” (HC 83; Radice 1974, 78), is a rational demonstration of the relationship of the Persons of the Trinity. The parallel between the two acts of pedagogical presumption is surely intentional. Abelard will later acknowledge that the desire for wealth and fame had motivated his teaching in Paris (HC 82; Radice 1974, 77); here he seems to tacitly acknowledge the possibility that his indulgence in the innovative theological reasoning which made him famous had been itself a selfish exploitation of the authority of his office, a violation of trust comparable to his earlier exploitation of his tutorial relationship with Heloise.
It would perhaps have been appropriate to the confessional tone of this portion of the Historia for Abelard to have completed the comparison by dwelling on the ways in which the burning of his treatise might be viewed as a counterpart to his castration, a judgment on his having presumed to generate doctrine by an illicit appropriation of the arts of language.14 But while he continues to see a connection between the two afflictions, it is noteworthy that he views them henceforth in wholly providential terms. This new perspective is first revealed obliquely, in the context of his students’ attempt to persuade him to resume teaching, which recall the earlier exhortations of Heloise:
They urged me to consider that the talent entrusted to me by God would be required of me with interest; that instead of addressing myself to the rich as before I should devote myself to educating the poor, and recognize that the hand of the Lord had touched me for the express purpose of freeing me from the temptations of the flesh and the distractions of the world so that I could devote myself to learning, and prove myself a true philosopher not of the world but of God.
(HC 81; Radice 1974, 77)
Henceforth Abelard will never depart from this redemptive view of his two misfortunes, and indeed one of the most striking features of the later portions of the Historia is the absence of any acknowledgment of guilt on his part. It is easy enough to imagine personal motives, conscious or unconscious, for this evident suppression; here as throughout the Historia Abelard the autobiographer is a temptation for the psychoanalyst. As a victim of castration he is at the mercy of other people’s willingness to discover the traces, symbolic and emotional, which so traumatic an event must have left in his writings, and it is easy to hear paranoia in the constant fear that dominates the final episodes, and leads him to suppose that any assembly of Church officials must have been convened for the purpose of condemning his writings (HC 97; Radice 1974, 93). His attitude toward the writings themselves, moreover, is contradictory: the condemnation at Soissons, which seems at one moment a just punishment for ambition and intellectual pride, is elsewhere bemoaned as an abuse of his “pure intentions and love of our faith” (HC 89; Radice 1974, 85).
But with due regard for the conflicted preoccupation with self that seems to have been a basic element in Abelard’s personality, we should also make full allowance for the fact that he had come to see himself as genuinely embarked on a new life, in which intellectual labor and the renown to which it might lead were wholly at the service of the religious institutions with which he had now identified himself. There is a new emphasis in his account of how, having been driven by abuse to leave St. Denis for a second time, he was released from his obligation to the abbey and allowed to build himself a rough oratory in the countryside near Troyes. Though he describes at length the intellectual and spiritual community that his disciples create around him, there is nothing self-aggrandizing in his account of it. What he stresses is the zeal of the students themselves, which combines the austerity and dedication of the ancient philosophers as described by Jerome with that of the followers of Elisha (2 Kings 6:1–4). His enemies are forced to acknowledge that “the whole world follows after him” (John 12:19), that their persecution of him has defeated its own purpose, but his own attitude remains one of simple gratitude for relief from poverty and despair. This portion of the Historia is crowned by his naming his oratory for the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit as comforter, thereby affirming that his commitment to the religious life has been vindicated, and that a special providence has preserved him in his suffering (HC 94–95; Radice 1974, 90–91).
After this episode, the spiritual center of the Historia, a final abrupt change occurs. Despite his withdrawal, the hostility incurred by Abelard in his early days continues to pursue him, and he retreats again to the protection of the cloister. The final portions of the Historia deal with his disastrous attempt as abbot to reform the Breton monastery of St. Gildas, and his role in establishing and maintaining Heloise and the nuns in her charge at the Paraclete after their expulsion from Argenteuil. This last episode is dealt with very briefly, perhaps because Abelard was only occasionally present during the community’s early days, but he makes it the occasion for an elaborate justification of his involvement with the sisterhood. Having defended himself against the charge of lewd motives, he goes on to cite patristic testimony on the positive role played by women in the early Church, and the many fathers who involved themselves with communities of women. This topic leads him to enunciate the principle that the weaker sex must be led by the stronger, and to reflections on the impropriety and even danger involved in letting male clergy be subject to the authority of abbesses, capped rather oddly by Juvenal’s dictum that nothing is more intolerable than a rich woman (HC 105; Radice 1974, 102). Abelard does not develop the misogynist implications of this line of argument, but the authoritarian note struck here will recur in his letters to Heloise.
The circumstances described in these chapters are too concrete and too fresh in memory to lend themselves to hagiographic stylization, but they provide their own distinctive perspective on Abelard at this stage of his career, mainly through extended citation of Paul and the Greek and Latin Fathers, and comparisons between Abelard’s situation and theirs. The lives of Athanasius, Origen, Benedict, and above all Jerome are recalled in attestation of the hardship and calumny Abelard is forced to endure, confirming him as a member of God’s body, the true Church, one of those who suffer persecution for seeking “to live a godly life as Christians” (2 Timothy 3:12; HC 107–108; Radice 1974, 105).
Jerome is an important presence in these last chapters. Like Abelard, he had sought to combine in his own life the austerity of the true philosopher and the regular discipline of the monk. Both men were strong-willed and combative in asserting their religious views, and both were dogged by constant controversy and hostility. Both took a strongly authoritarian position as spiritual advisors to female religious communities, and both were vilified for the alleged impurity of their relations with religious women. Abelard clearly recognized their affinity. His final reference to himself in the Historia takes the form of a comparison of his situation with that of Jerome, “whose heir in calumny and tribulation I am,” glossed by Jerome’s assertion that there is no time when the true Christian does not suffer persecution (HC 108; Radice 1974, 105).
The Historia, as I have said, brings together several literary modes, and it would probably be impossible to discover a fully harmonious design in its deployment of the conventions of apologia and confessio, its balancing of courtly idealism and Ovidian cynicism in its treatment of love, the juxtaposition of confessions of failure and abject self-pity with assertions of authority and near-sainthood. If a single thread holds its diverse elements together, it is probably Abelard’s consistency in frankly acknowledging his sins in the sight of God, and his failure to live up to the standard of fidelity and humility set by Heloise, while at the same time refusing to accept the judgment of any human authority on his life and work. Ignorant malice and envy of his superior intellect are the only motives he will allow his antagonists in the schools and at Soissons. The monks of St. Denis and later St. Gildas repudiate him because his austere rectitude is in such vivid contrast to their own corruption.
As the story goes forward, however, even self-analysis is abandoned, and Abelard’s spiritual state is presented as constant and beyond question. The betrayal of trust involved in his seduction of Heloise, and even the sins of lust and pride with which he taxes himself are forgotten. After the lovers’ separation the focus of the story narrows still further, to the point at which Heloise herself becomes merely incidental, hardly more important than the anonymous “friend” to whom the Historia is ostensibly directed. All that matters is Abelard’s endurance of suffering; we accept the strength of his commitment, but we must accept as well that everything else has ceased to matter.
Perhaps the most astute comment on this special difficulty of the Historia is offered by Heloise, candidly and perhaps with a certain irony, in the letter which conveys her response to Abelard’s narrative. After noting pointedly that she had seen the letter only by chance, and briefly reviewing the events of the story, she observes that while it declares itself a letter of consolation, and so is presumably intended to comfort the anonymous friend in his misfortune, it is really about Abelard himself, whose “incessant, intolerable persecutions” must drive any true friend of his to despair (Ep. 1, 68–69; Radice 1974, 109–111). There is perhaps a veiled accusation of selfishness here, and as the letter proceeds, the suggestion grows stronger. Heloise expresses gratitude for the gift of the Paraclete and assures Abelard of her enduring love for him, but then asks why, knowing her absolute loyalty and all that she has done at his bidding, he has never directed a word of comfort to her:
I have finally denied myself every pleasure in obedience to your will, kept nothing for myself except to prove that now, even more, I am yours. Consider then your injustice, if when I deserve more you give me less, or rather, nothing at all, especially when it is a small thing I ask of you and one you could so easily grant.
(Ep. 1, 73; Radice 1974, 117)
The problem Heloise addresses in this letter is the fundamental problem posed by the Historia. What is its purpose? Whom could it possibly console save Abelard himself? What, then, does it reveal about Abelard’s ability to share the sufferings of others? It is as if with her seemingly gratuitous summary of the narrative Heloise had deliberately conjured up the spirit of the Historia in order to pit her intense humanity against the utter self-absorption of its author. Abelard had isolated himself within the epistolary conventions of consolatio and apologia. Heloise, by radically personalizing and eroticizing the epistola ad amicum, will challenge him to engage in a genuine dialogue.15
In the letters which follow, however, Abelard withdraws still further, persisting in his preoccupation with himself and addressing Heloise in the broadly homiletic manner of a spiritual advisor. He acknowledges the personal bond between them only as a special inducement to Heloise to offer prayers on his behalf, and as an occasion for recalling to her mind the efficacious prayers of biblical wives and mothers (Ep. 2, 74–77; Radice 1974, 121–125). In response to Heloise’s vivid evocations of their former passion, he expresses only relief that castration has now released him from “the heavy yoke of carnal desire” (Ep. 4, 89; Radice 1974, 148). Later, as if deliberately repudiating his own earlier tribute to Heloise’s loyalty, he cites the speech in which Lucan’s Pompey rebukes Cornelia for clinging to the memory of his former greatness (Ep. 4, 92; Radice 1974, 153; cf. also HC 81; Radice 1974, 76). While claiming to be the servant of Heloise (me habes servum quem olim agnoscebas dominum), he never abandons this authoritarian tone, and the only possibility of communion he will acknowledge is their common participation in the grace obtained by her prayers on his behalf (Ep. 4, 93; Radice 1974, 154).
It remains clear that Heloise and her sisterhood were a central concern of the last decade of Abelard’s life. Perhaps the best evidence is the sheer quantity of his varied contributions to the devotional activity of the Paraclete. Many of these have only recently come to light, and it would exceed the scope of this chapter to attempt an adequate assessment of material whose authorship and significance are still very much sub iudice. Suffice it to say that Abelard’s contributions seem to have included a virtually complete repertory of liturgical materials, and that he was certainly a significant innovator in liturgical poetry. His importance as a composer of music is much harder to determine, but it is clear that musical and perhaps dramatic performance were important considerations in all of his poetry, and that the music employed must in some cases have been his own.16
The most remarkable result of his labors is an extensive collection of hymns which, while they did not finally displace the older Cistercian and Gallican material in the Paraclete Office, were clearly intended as a complete hymn-cycle for the liturgical year.17 The scope of the project and its importance to Abelard are made plain in the preface to the first of the three books in which he presented the main body of his hymns to Heloise and her sisters. This takes the form of a justification of his undertaking by way of a critique of the state of traditional hymnody which he puts into the mouth of Heloise. She is made to complain that custom alone, rather than any coherent principle, determines the traditional repertory; that many texts are truncated or otherwise corrupt; that the hymns to the saints are tainted by fictional or apocryphal material; and that hymns are often lacking for specific festivals. In effect she is asking for a total reform of the monastic hymnary, and thus allowing Abelard to present his ambitious undertaking as the necessary labor of a spiritual mentor. But the ambition is hard to conceal. Though nearly all of the preface purports to be the words of Heloise, it is a wholly Abelardian manifesto, as carefully and confidently argued as the preface to the Sic et non.
The hymnary is the work of a remarkable poet, unique among twelfth-century religious poets in the variety and intricacy of his stanzaic forms and patterns of rhyme, but it is remarkable also for the tact and control with which Abelard adapts his prodigious lyric talent to his devotional purpose. The collection is informed by a thorough and deeply appreciative knowledge of the themes, diction, and rhythms of patristic hymnody.18 The finest hymns have the compactness and lucidity of Ambrose, and their straightforward deployment of the conventions of biblical typology is in striking contrast to the virtually free-associative rumination that at times obscures meaning in the sequences of earlier medieval liturgical poets like Notker or Gottschalk. The frequent reflections on the multiple meanings of scripture aim at effective pedagogy,19 and there is little of the flamboyant metaphysical word-play that marks the work of Abelard’s great contemporary Adam of St. Victor.
Despite what Waddell rightly calls the “exhuberant efflorescence” of Abelard’s strophic forms, they are aptly and systematically deployed. Thus a cluster of Epiphany hymns report the events of Christ’s earthly career in an energetic meter that evokes the narrative hymns of Hilary and Fortunatus. These are followed by a group which reflect on the Purification of the Virgin in the stately rhythms of Ambrose, and these in turn by four which celebrate the Resurrection in a six-line stanza with free-standing internal refrain that anticipates the vernacular rondeau:
Golias prostratus est,
Resurrexit Dominus!Dicant Sion filie
Resurrexit Dominus!ense iugulatus est
hostis proprio.Vero Daui obuie
choros proferant,Cum suis submersus est
ille Pharao.uictori uictorie
laudes concinant.Goliath lies prostrate, The Lord has Risen!,the enemy’s throat has been cut by his own sword.Pharaoh and his people have been drowned.Let the daughters of Sion say it: The Lord has Risen!,Let them perform their dances before the true David,Let them sing for the victor the praises of his victory.20
In a hymn on the Apostles, the language of learning serves, as in the sermons of Augustine, to set off the humility of truth:21
Nil urbanitas hic rethorice, Eloquentia cessit Tulii;nil uerbositas agit logice, tace, dictum est Aristoteli;sed simplicitas fidei sacre leges proferunt mundo rustici.Here no rhetorical sophistication or logical word-playis at work, but rather the simplicity of holy faith.The eloquence of Cicero is stilled, and Aristotle is bidden tofall silent, while simple men teach the world their rules.
Both Abelard and Heloise identify Abelard as a love-poet (HC 355; Ep. 1, 71–72; Radice 1974, 68, 115), but no love-lyrics survive that can be identified as his. What we do have, in addition to the hymns, is a group of six lyrics, so original in conception as to constitute a genre in themselves, planctus or laments in which figures from the Old Testament protest the circumstances and injustice of their impending deaths or the deaths of those they love.
We can only guess at Abelard’s purpose in composing the Planctus, which Peter Dronke compares to the vocal works of Monteverdi.22 They are his most elaborate artistic productions, so intricate metrically as to invite comparison with the cansos of the Troubadours, and accompanied in the manuscripts by musical notation, some of which may be referable to Abelard himself.23 And they are equally remarkable thematically, in their consistent focus on the purely human nature of the emotion they dramatize. In some this involves expanding on biblical episodes, as in the two laments, for Abner and for Saul and Jonathan,24 which Abelard puts into the mouth of David. In others the grief expressed is wholly non-canonical. The Bible does not report the response of Jacob’s daughter Dinah to her brothers’ murder of her Philistine rapist-turned husband Shechem (Genesis 34), or the lamentation of the Israelites for Samson. Nor does Abelard provide the sort of conventional typology that would link these figures prophetically to New Testament counterparts. The common element in these two poems is their responsiveness to the cruelty of victimization and loss. Thus in the first, Abelard’s Dinah condones her rape: Shechem had himself been ravished by her beauty, and atoned for his violent act by marrying her:
Amoris impulsio, culpe satisfactio,quovis sunt iudicio culpe diminutio!The driving force was love; satisfaction was given for the wrong.Any judge must see that these make the crime less grave!25
The Israelites’ lament for Samson26 wholly ignores the tradition which portrays him as a figura Christi, and its treatment of the no less traditional theme of the hero’s vulnerability to feminine deceit is wholly original: rather than stress Samson’s folly in succumbing to Dalilah’s wiles, it dwells on the intensity of his suffering, and the disturbing fact that so noble a figure should be so inescapably doomed. By the end, “woman” has assumed the role of the fates or Furies of ancient tragedy:
Sinum aspidi vel igni prius aperi, quisquis sapis,quam femineis te committas illecebris, nisi malisad exitium properare certissimum cum praedictis.You who are wise, bare your breast to the serpent or to firerather than submit yourself to feminine deceits, unless it is your choiceto rush toward certain destruction like these men of old.
Even more radically heroic is Abelard’s treatment of the daughter of Jephthah.27 The Israelite maidens are made to recall how, learning of Jephthah’s promise to the Lord, she had embraced the opportunity to die for her nation, and rebuked her father for his unmanly desire to break his vow and deny her this glory. In the final stanzas, as she repudiates the elaborate ceremony which would have arrayed her for death as if she were a bride, and takes into her own hands the sword with which her father would have fulfilled his vow, her language and her commanding presence recall Vergil’s account of the death of Dido.
Though it would be a serious mistake to reduce the experience embodied in these poems to a coded version of Abelard’s own, it is hard to ignore certain obvious resemblances. The generosity of spirit that informs Dinah’s elegy for Shechem, and her indignation at her brothers’ treachery, must surely recall the all-condoning love of Heloise, and her pained reaction to the betrayal of Abelard’s good faith by Fulbert and his henchmen. It is reasonable to see Heloise’s unhesitating acceptance of the cloister in the heroic self-sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter, and Abelard’s endurance of mutilation and slander in the ordeal of Samson. The Planctus possess the autonomy of lyric, and in reading them we enter a lyric world where the quality of feeling is what matters. It is a world glimpsed tentatively at certain moments in the Historia, the world in which Abelard and Heloise, because of the authenticity of their love, will always enjoy an immunity from the judgments of their ignoble enemies. It is a world to which Abelard gives a certain moral legitimacy in the Scito te ipsum, with his compelling arguments for intention as the necessary basis for evaluating a human action. It is largely the sureness with which Abelard evokes this world and affirms its values that makes him the representative figure he has become in literary tradition, a real-life counterpart of Tristan and Aucassin, a living embodiment of the values of fin amor. There could hardly be a more telling comment on the limitation of these values than the detachment and irony with which Abelard the monk frames the experience of Abelard the lover, but the Planctus have an authority all their own, and they are our best evidence of the importance for Abelard of his encounter with Heloise.
Of the son of Abelard and Heloise, Peter Astralabe, we know only that he spent his adult life as a canon of the cathedral of Nantes. Our one glimpse of Abelard as father is the strange and tedious Carmen ad Astralabium, which devotes over 500 gnomic Latin couplets to advising Astralabe on study, moral duty, the nature of women, and other topics. The poem must have been one of Abelard’s last writings, and we might hope to gain from it some sense of his attitude toward himself and his experience in the years since the writing of the Historia calamitatum. But apart from one striking passage, to be discussed below, the tone throughout is resolutely impersonal, oscillating between the moral and the purely practical without becoming either hortatory or cynical.
All manuscripts assign the Carmen to Abelard, but modern readers have questioned the attribution of a performance so uncharacteristically flat. The one piece of internal evidence, apart from a few possible echoes of earlier writings, is a startling personal reminiscence, unique in the poem, which occurs in a discussion of the general value of religion. We accept the beliefs of our place and time uncritically, Abelard declares, for all men desire peace of mind, and trust in God is our assurance of this, just as the lack of such trust leaves us open to sin. It is by repenting our sinfulness before God that we become free of sin. Not all of us, however, are able to do this:
Sunt quos delectant adeo peccata peractaUt nunquam vere peniteant super hiis,Ymo voluptatis dulcedo tanta sit huius,Ne gravet ulla satisfactio propter eam.Est nostre super hoc Heloyse crebra querela,Qua mihi que secum dicere sepe solet:“Si nisi paeniteat me commississe priora,Salvari nequeam, spes mihi nulla manet.Dulcia sunt adeo commissi gaudia nostriUt memorata iuvent que placuere nimis.”
There are those whose past sins are [still] so pleasurable that they never truly repent them; indeed the pleasure they feel is so sweet that they are untroubled by any need for atonement.
Our Heloise frequently worried about this, and often spoke to me of what was in her mind: “If I cannot be saved unless I repent of my former actions, then there is no hope for me. The joys we experienced together are still so sweet that simply recalling our exceeding pleasure sustains me.”28
The last few lines echo the actual words of Heloise in her second letter to Abelard (HC 121–122; Radice 1974, 132–133). Even if we question the attribution of the Carmen, or suppose these lines to be an interpolation by an imaginative reader familiar with the earlier documents, there is something uncanny about the sudden emergence of her all-too-human voice, interrupting the slow, relentless march of Abelard’s elegaics, challenging the authority of their sober sententiousness as she had once tacitly rebuked the self-absorption of the Abelard of the Historia. If we accept the authenticity of the passage, and read it in the light of the Historia and its long aftermath, we must see the lines as virtually reorganizing the Carmen around themselves, as Abelard’s confession to Astralabe that he has failed in his spiritual ministry to Heloise, and as a final tribute to her unquenchable humanity.
1. See chapters 7–8 below.
2. Benton 1975.
3. Dronke 1976; Jaeger 1980.
4. Benton 1980.
5. Benton 1987.
6. Luscombe 1988.
7. Dronke 1992.
8. Köngsen 1974; Mews 1999.
9. Constable 1976, 31–35.
10. Duby 1977.
11. Clanchy 1997, 141–145.
12. Taylor 1998.
13. Pucci 1998, 185–194.
14. Bloch 1983, 141–149.
15. Irvine 1996.
16. Waddell 1987, 45–54; Mews 1995, 66–69.
17. Waddell 1987, 3–13, 54–85.
18. Waddell 1987, 27–45; Szövérffy 1975, 85–88.
19. Szövérffy 1975, 91–99.
20. Waddell 1987, 65.
21. Waddell 1987, 98.
22. Dronke 1996, 53–55.
23. Le Vot 1992, 113–116.
24. Meyer 1905, 371–374.
25. Meyer 1905, 366–367.
26. Meyer 1905, 369–371.
27. Meyer 1905, 347–352.
28. Dronke 1976, 43–44; Dronke 1992, 279–280.