wood for building a church. And, to his satisfaction there was an abundance of possession weed, barley grasses and gooseberries in the environs.
When the basics of the oratory were constructed and there was a chapel and lodgings, he did something he could not have done had he not been the abbot of this new place: he summoned Heloise.
She came from Argenteuil on a horse-drawn cart, accompanied by a small entourage of nuns.
Though veiled in the simple habit of a sister, she was as captivating as he had remembered.
Surrounded by their followers, they could not embrace. A touch of hands, that was all. That was enough.
He noticed her crucifix was larger than her companions’. ‘You are a prioress, now,’ he observed.
‘And you are an abbot, sir,’ she countered.
‘We have risen to high office,’ he jested.
‘The better to serve Christ,’ she said, lowering her eyes.
He came to her at night in the little house he had built. She protested. They argued. He was wild-eyed, talking too fast in a dreamy way, cogent but fluid without the starts and pauses of normal discourse. He had drunk his Enlightenment Tea earlier in the evening. She did not need to know that. He was pressed for time. His mood would curdle soon enough and he did not want her to bear witness.
Her wit and tongue were rapier-sharp, as ever. Her skin was as white as the finest marble in her uncle Fulbert’s salon. Too little of it showed from under her chaste rough habit. He pushed her down on her bed and fell onto her, kissing her neck, her cheeks. She pushed back and chided but then yielded and kissed him too. He pulled at the coarse fabric that covered her to her ankles and exposed the flesh of her thigh.
‘We cannot,’ she moaned.
‘We are husband and wife,’ he panted.
‘No longer.’
‘Still.’
‘ You cannot,’ she said, and then she felt his hardness against her leg. ‘How is this possible?’ she gasped. ‘Your mishap?’
‘I told you there was a way for us to be man and wife again,’ he said, and he lifted her habit high over her waist.
Hypocrisy.
It weighed on them. She was married to Christ. He had taken the vows of a monk and those vows included chastity. Both of them had towering intellects and full knowledge of the religious, ethical and moral consequences of their actions. Yet, they could not stop.
After Matins, several times a week, Abelard would retire to his abbot house, drink a draught of Enlightenment Tea, and in the middle of the night come to her. Some nights she said no, initially. Some nights she spoke not a word. But every time he came, she would consent and they would lie together as man and wife. And every time, when they were done, he left her in a hail of self-deprecation and tears. And he too, when he was alone, would pray fervently for the absolution of his sins.
Their liaisons could have continued without interference. He was a eunuch. This was universally known. Their relationship, was by this twist of fate, beyond suspicion or reproach.
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 Abelard 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, Abelard 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, Abelard’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.
Abelard summoned Heloise 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 Heloise’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 Abelard’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. Abelard’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.
Abelard’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
