Library of the Worlds Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 | Page 9

power to provide for her safety and comfort. This was in 1129.
Two years later the Paraclete was confirmed to Héloïse by a Papal bull.
It remained a convent, and a famous one, for over six hundred years.

After this Abélard paid several visits to the convent, which he justly
regarded as his foundation, in order to arrange a rule of life for its
inmates, and to encourage them in their vocation. Although on these
occasions he saw nothing of Héloïse, he did not escape the malignant
suspicions of the world, nor of his own flock, which now became more
unruly than ever,--so much so that he was compelled to live outside the
monastery. Excommunication was tried in vain, and even the efforts of
a Papal legate failed to restore order. For Abélard there was nothing but
"fear within and conflict without." It was at this time, about 1132, that
he wrote his famous 'Historia Calamitatum,' from which most of the
above account of his life has been taken. In 1134, after nine years of
painful struggle, he definitely left St. Gildas, without, however,
resigning the abbotship. For the next two years he seems to have led a
retired life, revising his old works and composing new ones.
Meanwhile, by some chance, his 'History of Calamities' fell into the
hands of Héloïse at the Paraclete, was devoured with breathless interest,
and rekindled the flame that seemed to have smoldered in her bosom
for thirteen long years. Overcome with compassion for her husband, for
such he really was, she at once wrote to him a letter which reveals the
first healthy human heart-beat that had found expression in
Christendom for a thousand years. Thus began a correspondence which,
for genuine tragic pathos and human interest, has no equal in the
world's literature. In Abélard, the scholarly monk has completely
replaced the man; in Héloïse, the saintly nun is but a veil assumed in
loving obedience to him, to conceal the deep-hearted, faithful, devoted
flesh-and-blood woman. And such a woman! It may well be doubted if,
for all that constitutes genuine womanhood, she ever had an equal. If
there is salvation in love, Héloïse is in the heaven of heavens. She does
not try to express her love in poems, as Mrs. Browning did; but her
simple, straightforward expression of a love that would share
Francesca's fate with her lover, rather than go to heaven without him,
yields, and has yielded, matter for a hundred poems. She looks forward
to no salvation; for her chief love is for him. Domino specialiter, sua
singulariter: "As a member of the species woman I am the Lord's, as
Héloïse I am yours"--nominalism with a vengeance!

But to return to Abélard. Permanent quiet in obscurity was plainly
impossible for him; and so in 1136 we find him back at Ste. Généviève,
lecturing to crowds of enthusiastic students. He probably thought that
during the long years of his exile, the envy and hatred of his enemies
had died out; but he soon discovered that he was greatly mistaken. He
was too marked a character, and the tendency of his thought too
dangerous, for that. Besides, he emptied the schools of his rivals, and
adopted no conciliatory tone toward them. The natural result followed.
In the year 1140, his enemies, headed by St. Bernard, who had long
regarded him with suspicion, raised a cry of heresy against him, as
subjecting everything to reason. Bernard, who was nothing if not a
fanatic, and who managed to give vent to all his passions by placing
them in the service of his God, at once denounced him to the Pope, to
cardinals, and to bishops, in passionate letters, full of rhetoric,
demanding his condemnation as a perverter of the bases of the faith.
At that time a great ecclesiastical council was about to assemble at Sens;
and Abélard, feeling certain that his writings contained nothing which
he could not show to be strictly orthodox, demanded that he should be
allowed to explain and dialectically defend his position, in open dispute,
before it. But this was above all things what his enemies dreaded. They
felt that nothing was safe before his brilliant dialectic. Bernard even
refused to enter the lists with him; and preferred to draw up a list of his
heresies, in the form of sentences sundered from their context in his
works,--some of them, indeed, from works which he never wrote,--and
to call upon the council to condemn them. (These theses may be found
in Denzinger's 'Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum,' pp. 109 seq.)
Abélard, clearly understanding the scheme, feeling its unfairness, and
knowing the effect of Bernard's lachrymose pulpit rhetoric upon
sympathetic ecclesiastics who believed in his power to work miracles,
appeared before the council, only to appeal from its authority to