Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  Abelard rooted his thinking in the writings of Plato’s student and antagonist Aristotle, only some of which were available in twelfth-century Europe. Plato, not Aristotle, was the Greek philosopher beloved of the fathers of the ancient church and, for that matter, of the whole ancient world. Plato was the one who taught that there was another world, a truer world, in which all the partial goodness, beauty, and justice that we experience in this world is whole and complete; and the fathers saw his description of this “World of the Forms” as a kind of Greek pagan anticipation of the Christian doctrine of the Heaven where God resides. Plato was a radical pessimist who bemoaned the broken incompleteness of our world and of our earthly existence, so much so that one can trace a direct line of development from Plato’s antimaterialism and scorn for human flesh to Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin.

  Aristotle denied that the World of the Forms was anything but a figment of Plato’s imagination.f While not denying the existence of the soul—a pagan Greek discovery—Aristotle pointed his students in the direction of this world, the world that could be observed, analyzed, and understood. Aristotle was no idealist like Plato, who believed that ideas were realer than everything we saw, heard, and touched. Aristotle was a rationalist and a materialist. His chief tool for understanding the world was logic, a science he invented; and though many of Aristotle’s writings had been lost to the West during the catastrophic destruction of its libraries, some of his writings on logic remained available.

  It was the panoply of Aristotelian techniques associated with rational persuasion that Abelard made such brilliant and innovative use of. In his book Sic et Non (Yes and No), he would one day show students how to set up an argument for almost anything (Yes) and then demolish it (No) by rational means. This practice would enable a student to feel at home in the world of argument to such an extent that he could finally come to think for himself, to critique the ideas of others—even ideas held sacrosanct by centuries of tradition—and to come at last to his own rational (but firmly held) conclusions. For, as Abelard would write in his famous book, “the prime source of wisdom has been defined as continuous and penetrating inquiry. The most brilliant of all philosophers, Aristotle, encouraged his students to undertake this task with every ounce of their curiosity.…For by doubting we come to inquire, and by inquiring we perceive the truth.”

  Uh-oh. Rational inquiry begins with doubt? Such as doubting, say, the revealed truths of the Christian religion? Though Abelard never directly challenged central truths, such as the Trinity or Christ’s divinity and saving mission, he brazenly announced solutions to knotty theological questions that left conservatives shocked to their marrow. He rejected Augustine’s claims on behalf of Original Sin, committed by Adam and Eve and inherited by all mankind. How could we inherit a sin that we had no part in committing? (We may, like the heirs of a bankrupt, he admitted, inherit the punishment.) He denied that Christ died to pay for our sins, as if God the Father either required such ghoulish restitution or permitted Satan to exact it. Christ, asserted Abelard, died—in an act of supreme generosity and identification with the human condition—out of love for us and to make us more loving. The young philosopher exonerated the Jews from the charge of deicide, a favorite in the canon of medieval prejudices. Since they had no idea that Jesus was God, the Jews cannot be accused of wishing to murder God, only of proposing for execution a man they considered a rebel against Jewish religious authority. As Jesus himself had said of all his executioners, “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  It would take more than eight centuries and the perpetration of unspeakable horrors before the Catholic Church—during the quasi-miraculous event of the Second Vatican Council—would conclusively adopt Abelard’s reasoning in respect to Jewish guilt for the death of Christ. As for Original Sin, it is chiefly because Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the ever-gentlemanly twentieth-century Jesuit paleontologist, distanced himself from this Augustinian position that his works of genius, offering a unique combination of scientific and theological insight, remain under a Vatican cloud. And though the idea that Christ died to repay his Father for human sin is still a favorite theory of many (especially evangelical) Christians, it is a doctrine no one can make logical sense of, for, like the Calvinist theory of Election, it necessitates a sort of voraciously pagan Father God steeped in cruelty and, in the case of Jesus’s horrific death, his son’s blood.

  At the age of twenty-five, Abelard set up his own Left Bank school on Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, which would soon provide the nucleus for the University of Paris. In 1113, when he was not yet thirty-five, he was invited to teach at the prestigious cathedral school of Notre-Dame de Paris, where his sensational lectures were sold-out, standing-room-only successes. There he also undertook a private tutorial for the niece of one of the cathedral canons, a man named Fulbert. The niece, Héloïse, was an extremely beautiful and intellectually accomplished teenager; and Abelard, the consummate scholar, who had previously seemed impervious to any temptation but learning and literature, fell deeply in love with her, as did she with him. “In looks she did not rank lowest,” Abelard would report smugly at a later date, “while in the extent of her learning she stood supreme.” Thus does the consummate scholar convey to us that he loved Héloïse especially for her mind, while giving himself away completely in his subsequent description of their union:

  We were united, first under one roof, then in heart; and so with our lessons as a pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired, and then 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. 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.

  Here in the second decade of the twelfth century we meet a couple whose sensibility is as modern as our own, as rational as the wryest critic writing in The New York Review of Books, as flagrant as the lovers in a buzz-worthy contemporary novel. Little if anything separates us from them.

  The punishment visited upon them, however, must bring any reader up short, reminding us that Abelard and Héloïse lived in a very different time and place from those most of us inhabit. Their steamy affair was the subject that all Paris was talking about. The lovers had thrown caution to the winds to such an extent that songs Abelard had written to Héloïse began to be sung everywhere—though undoubtedly in haunts not frequented by Fulbert, so it took a while for the uncle to catch on. Once he did, he attempted to keep the lovers apart, which drove them to such indiscretion that they were finally found in bed together. The sight of Héloïse’s growing belly impelled Abelard to send her to his sister in Brittany, where Héloïse gave birth to a son, whom she named Astralabe.

  Abelard then sought out Fulbert, made a clean breast of it, and promised to marry Héloïse. Abelard’s apologia for himself relied heavily on the language of Ovid and the troubadours: “protest[ing] that I had done nothing unusual in the eyes of anyone who had known the power of love.” The word he uses for love is amor, the Latin equivalent of Greek eros, meaning sexual desire. The usual word used by medievals (as by ancient Romans) to indicate nonsexual love was caritas, the Latin equivalent of agape, the Greek New Testament’s word for love that does not seek its own aggrandizement. In the ancient world, there was no connection between the two loves, for one was self-seeking, the other disinterested. But by Abelard’s day the new romanticism had already succeeded in blurring the difference between the two words,g so it may be that Abelard hoped to recruit old Fulbert to the newly laundered banner of amor. If so, he had badly misjudge
d his man.

  Abelard’s only stipulation to Fulbert was “that the marriage should be kept secret so as not to damage my reputation.” In those days, a master of the cathedral school, even if he was not an ordained priest (which Abelard was not), was expected to live as a celibate because the school was revered throughout Europe for the severity of its standards. Fulbert “agreed, pledged his word and that of his supporters, and sealed the reconciliation I desired with a kiss.” Abelard then set out for Brittany intending to bring Héloïse back to Paris “to make her my wife.”

  But here he ran into what was for him an entirely unanticipated difficulty: Héloïse was unwilling to marry. Unlike Abelard, she did not believe that Fulbert was genuinely satisfied with the arrangements nor that any “satisfaction could ever appease” him. Second, she believed that philosophers had no business marrying, since they belonged to “all mankind,” and that she could win no honor from such a marriage. She foresaw clearly “the unbearable annoyances of marriage and its endless anxieties … What harmony can there be,” she asked, “between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles, books or tablets and distaffs, pen or stylus and spindles? Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying, nurses soothing them with lullabies, and all the noisy coming and going of men and women about the house? Will [you],” she questioned Abelard, “put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home?”

  She proposed an unheard-of solution: she would stay out of her uncle’s reach in Brittany, where Abelard could visit her whenever he was free. As Abelard was to recount it later, she insisted that “the name of friend [amica] instead of wife would be dearer to her and more honorable to me—only love [amor] freely given should keep me for her, not the constriction of a marriage tie, and if we had to be parted for a time, we should find the joy of being together all the sweeter the rarer our meetings were.” A no-strings arrangement, which Abelard in his earnestness refused. So Héloïse gave way to his wishes, prophesying, however, that “we shall both be destroyed. All that is left to us is suffering as great as our love has been.”

  They were wed in secret, after which Fulbert and his friends began to spread news of the marriage, breaking “the promise of secrecy.” Fulbert then began to abuse Héloïse verbally and physically, so Abelard spirited her away to the convent of Argenteuil, where she had once gone to school. Fulbert, certain that Abelard intended to rid himself of Héloïse and leave her forever with the nuns, managed to enter his lodgings while he slept. There, with the help of kinsmen and servants, he held Abelard fast and castrated him. As the sun rose, news of the atrocity spread through Paris like wildfire, and “the whole city gathered before [Abelard’s] house,” lamenting, crying, and groaning. Their “unbearable weeping and wailing” so tormented the poor philosopher, lying in a pool of his own blood, that “I suffered more from their sympathy than from the pain of my wound, and felt the misery of my mutilation less than my shame and humiliation.”

  Fulbert seems never to have been held to account for his act of retribution, perhaps because Abelard never pressed charges, more likely because Fulbert was too well connected to be brought to justice. But, as Abelard informs us, “the two who could be caught”—his own treacherous servant and one of Fulbert’s men—were blinded and castrated, probably by students of Abelard. All that was left to the tragic couple was the lifetime of suffering Héloïse had foreseen. Héloïse became a famous abbess, Abelard a monk and an even more famous philosopher, theologian, and writer than he was alreadyh—but also a public thinker dogged by insistent accusations of heresy.

  His chief tormentor would be Bernard of Clairvaux, sponsor of Hildegard of Bingen and would-be censor of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who now makes his third appearance in this book. Bernard was the self-appointed Grand Inquisitor of twelfth-century Europe, a sham saint capable of complete chastity as well as of undying jealousy and hatred. How he loathed Abelard for his former freedom of body and his continuing freedom of mind. How he wished him only further ruin—all of course under the deceptive umbrella of Bernard’s scrupulous monitoring of theological orthodoxy. “Faith believes,” proclaimed Bernard with a sneer. “It does not dispute.”

  His persecution, following his very nearly public castration, shook Abelard’s famous self-confidence. “God,” Abelard came to believe, “had struck me in the parts of the body with which I had sinned.” At his life’s end, Abelard even begged forgiveness for any inadvertent heresy he might have fallen into. “Logic,” wrote Abelard in his final “Confession of Faith,” “has made me hated by the world.…I do not wish to be a philosopher if it means conflicting with Paul [the first-century missionary apostle and author of many New Testament letters], nor to be an Aristotle if it cuts me off from Christ.” A sincere statement, but still the confession of a broken spirit whose fire has been quenched.

  Héloïse was someone else altogether. More Roman Stoic than medieval Christian, more feeling woman than merely cerebral philosopher, more astringent realist than pious believer, she nonetheless kept both her religious vows and her promises to Abelard. Having no alternative, she became an exemplary, cool-headed nun, but one who never forgot who she really was and what she really felt. Many years after the parting of the lovers and their claustration in separate monastic communities, they embarked upon an intense correspondence. Héloïse’s letters, in particular, are so unlike any other medieval expression left to us that many scholars for many years upheld the theory that they were modern forgeries. But they are written in an excellent, allusive twelfth-century Latin that would be nearly impossible to fake; and since no one has been able to offer a consistent theory on how they came to be if they are not by Héloïse, the scholarly tide has turned at last and named her as their author.

  Her first letter begins with a salutation that is both technically correct and utterly atypical of her time (and just as atypical of most other times, as well):

  To her lord, or rather father; to her husband, or rather brother;

  from his handmaid, or rather daughter; from his wife, or rather sister:

  to Abelard, from Héloïse.

  She upbraids her former lover in no uncertain terms for having failed to write to her for so many years, for forgetting her and leaving her comfortless, despite “the love I have always borne you, as everyone knows, a love which is beyond all bounds … God knows,” she goes on,

  I never sought anything in you except yourself; I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage-bond, no marriage portion, and it was not my own pleasures and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but yours. The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.…God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honorable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.

  What she asks for now is that Abelard write to her so as to fortify her courage and help her persevere in an arid life she would never have chosen freely. So it is her letter that initiates the famous correspondence that follows, one in which Abelard does his best to explain himself and to make up, as well as he can, for his long silence. “And so,” writes the abbess,

  in the name of that God to whom you have dedicated yourself, I beg you to restore your presence to me in the way you can—by writing me some word of comfort, so that in this at least I may find increased strength and readiness to serve God. When in the past you sought me out for sinful pleasures your letters came to me thick and fast, and your many songs put your Héloïse on everyone’s lips, so that every street and house resounded with my name. Is it not far better now to summon me to God than it was then to satisfy our lust? I beg you, think what you owe me, give ear to my pleas, and I will finish a long letter with a brief ending: farewell, my only love.

  The correspondence took p
lace over five years or so, containing many queries from Héloïse, ever the eager student, and many instructions from Abelard, and ending in all likelihood about the year 1138. Abelard died early in the next decade at the Cluniac monastery of Saint-Marcel, near Chalon-sur-Saône, at the age of sixty-three, probably of Hodgkin’s disease. Afterwards, Héloïse sought the favor of Abelard’s body from Peter the Venerable, the holy abbot of Cluny. Peter had admired Abelard, calling him “the Socrates of the Gauls, Plato of the West, our Aristotle, prince of scholars,” and was happy to oblige Héloïse, who buried her husband in a tomb in her Convent of the Paraclete, which Abelard had founded and turned over to her and her nuns. At the same time, Peter the Venerable promised Héloïse that he would try to get a good cathedral job (“a prebend”) for Astralabe—the only mention we possess of Astralabe’s continuing existence and of his mother’s continuing concern for him. When she died some twenty years later, the nuns buried her with Abelard, her “only love”; and though their bones have been disinterred several times over the eight and a half centuries that have intervened between them and us, they lie together to this day, close to the entrance of Père-Lachaise, where sympathetic Parisians still leave flowers on their grave.

  Despite Abelard’s intellectual brilliance, his handsome exterior and theatrical temperament worked against the wide acceptance of his novel ideas. But in the thirteenth century at the University of Paris, then in full swing, a man of very different aspect and temperament, though just as innovative and even more dependent on Aristotle, succeeded in baptizing Aristotelian thought in a manner that gained wide acceptance and, in the end, even lasting papal approval. That man was Thomas Aquinas, a slow-moving, seldom-speaking great lump of a friar,i who gave off no flashes of brilliance and even appeared to casual observers to be a bit of a dimwit.