Yet it could not stand. In the end, Christ was stronger than their lust. Their guilt tore them to pieces and threatened their sanity. Their stealthy practice ground them down. She said she felt like a thief in the night and he could not disagree. He always insisted on leaving her after they made love and warned her of a dark side that had him in its grip, which he would not let her witness. And then he would run off into the woods before the rage overtook him. There, until the cloud passed, he would flail the trees with branches and pound the earth with his fists until the pain made him stop.
Their continual cycles of sin and repentance made them into oxen yoked to a grist mill, turning, turning, going nowhere. Did they not, they asked each other when they were spent from lovemaking, have higher purposes?
In time, despite his overwhelming desire and affection, he bade her to return to Argenteuil and she fitfully agreed.
They continued to write each other, dozens of letters, pouring their souls on to parchment. None affected Abélard more than this missive, which he reread every day for the rest of his life:
You desire me to give myself up to my duty, and to be wholly God’s, to whom I am consecrated. How can I do that, when you frighten me with apprehensions that continually possess my mind both night and day? When an evil threatens us, and it is impossible to ward it off, why do we give up ourselves to the unprofitable fear of it, which is yet even more tormenting than the evil itself? What have I hope for after the loss of you? What can confine me to earth when death shall have taken away from me all that was dear on it? I have renounced without difficulty all the charms of life, preserving only my love, and the secret pleasure of thinking incessantly of you, and hearing that you live. And yet, alas! you do not live for me, and dare not flatter myself even with the hope that I shall ever see you again. This is the greatest of my afflictions. Heaven commands me to renounce my fatal passion for you, but oh! my heart will never be able to consent to it. Adieu.
In her absence, Abélard threw himself back into a world of writing, teaching and fervent prayer. He was always a magnet for students who possessed the finest minds, and they found him at Paraclete.
But Bernard, now entrenched in the role of nemesis, found him too, or at least found his new writings. For several years, he taught and wrote but once again, Abélard’s views on the Trinity set him on a collision course with orthodoxy and by 1125, bowing to Bernard’s remote but powerful hand, his position at Paraclete became untenable.
Abélard summoned Héloïse one more time to Paraclete, assuring her there was important business, not passion on his mind. This was a half-truth, for his passion had never ebbed.
He told her he had been offered a position as head of the monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, and he had accepted it. Yes, Brittany was far away, but he could make a fresh start, further from the sphere of influence of his adversaries. He had much to write and still much to learn and his energy and ambitions had never been greater. And he could visit with their child, Astrolabe, who had since birth lived in Brittany with Héloïse’s sister.
And this he saved for last. He placed both hands on her shoulders in a manner both tender and authoritarian and bestowed on her the title of Abbess of the Oratory of Paraclete. The monastery was hers now. He would return to Paraclete only in death.
She wept.
Tears of sorrow for their lost love, for her daughter who did not know her mother.
But also tears of joy for Abélard’s miraculous triumph over her uncle’s cruel hand and his indomitable spirit and vigour.
Her nuns were summoned from Argenteuil to join her in this new place. Abélard’s brothers would vacate so Paraclete could be a community of women.
In a mass in the church, he formally consecrated her as abbess and passed on to her a copy of the monastic rule and the baculum, her pastoral staff, which she firmly grasped, looking deeply into his eyes.
And later, when he rode off to the west, never, he supposed, to see her again, she staunched her tears and serenely walked to the chapel where her nuns were waiting for her to preside over Vespers for the very first time.
Abélard’s time in Brittany proved short. He directed his sadness and frustrations into an autocratic style and before long had so alienated his new flock, who had expected him to be a lax master. He wrote furiously, prayed with anger in his eyes, cruelly cut the monks’ rations and worked them like beasts of burden. His only release was his episodic use of Enlightenment Tea to take him away from his torments and replenish his zeal. But once again, he saw it was time to move on when his brethren at Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys expressed their displeasure with his autocracy by trying to poison him.
Thus began the last chapter in his life, fifteen peripatetic years which saw him at Nantes, Mount St Genevieve, and back to Paris, where he accumulated students the way a squirrel accumulates acorns. And everywhere he went, he made sure he had a good supply of his precious plants and berries – not a week went by without an indulgence.
By twisted fate, unable to live in matrimonial bliss with his one true love, he felt he had little to lose by freely expressing his views. In tract after tract, book after book, he vented against the traditions of the church with his mighty intelligence and each publication eventually made its way to the desk of Bernard who had bit by bit become a theologian second in influence only to the Pope.
In Sic et Non, Abélard almost made parody of orthodox leadership and made it seem that the fathers of the Church could not express themselves clearly. Bernard gritted his teeth but the work was not, in and of itself, actionable. Finally, Abélard crossed the line, as far as Bernard was concerned. He believed that the eunuch’s Expositio in Epistolam ad Romanos, spat at the feet of the Church by seeming to deny the very foundation of the Atonement. Had not Christ died on the cross as payment for the sins of man by dying in their place? Well, not to Abélard! He maintained that Christ died to win men’s hearts by the example of reconciling love.
Love! This was too much.
Bernard threw the full measure of his weight to the task of crushing Abélard once and for all. The time for private warnings was over and Bernard took the matter to the Bishops of France. Abélard was summoned to the Council of Sens in 1141 to plead his case. He reckoned he would have the ability to meet his accuser openly, to debate his old friend and spar with him the way they had done during their convalescence at Ruac.
When Abélard arrived at Sens, he learned, to his horror, that the evening before, Bernard had met privately with the bishops and a condemnation had already been meted out. There would be no public debate, nothing of the kind, but the Council agreed to let Abélard have his freedom for the express purpose of making a direct appeal to Rome.
He never made it that far.
Bernard saw to it that Pope Innocent II confirmed the sentence of the Council of Sens before Abélard made it out of France, not that it would have mattered, because a few months earlier, one of Abélard’s students had coughed in his face, and had seeded his lungs with consumption.
Scant weeks after Sens he became ill. First came fever and night sweats. Then an irritated cough which progressed to paroxysms. The green flux from his lungs went from pink-tinged to streaky-red to gushes of crimson. His appetite dried up like a spent well. His weight fell.
He even lost desire for his red tea.
An old colleague and benefactor, the venerable Pierre, Abbot of Cluny, intervened when Abélard passed through his gates, as he persevered in his struggle to venture to Rome for an audience with the Holy Father.
Pierre forbade him from travelling on and confined him to bed. He obtained from Rome a mitigation of the sentence and even got Bernard to stand down when he passed word to him that Abélard was dying. Was not further earthly persecution of the monk pointless and cruel, he asked, and Bernard had sighed deeply and agreed.