in a consistent chain of policy; he almost writes as if to persuade us that from the outset he deliberately planned his mistress's ruin.[1] To those who read his words with a deeper perception of his character, and much more to those who go on to the long correspondence and the life long interdependence of Abailard and Heloïssa, such an explanation will appear not merely inadequate but incredible. Abailard's account, written moreover under the oppression of enduring remorse, is too highly coloured by these mixed feelings to be taken as it stands: his interpretation of his error, or his guilt, is misleading. In the words of his wisest biographer, 'he deceives himself; a noble and secret instinct bade him love her who had no equal:' and the same instinct kept the two in spiritual union, however far apart their lives might run, until the end.
Abailard privately married Heloïssa; but this step, a concession to the wishes of her family, was powerless to avert their vengeance. Here we must carefully observe that the marriage was in no wise thought of as an act unbecoming or forbidden to a clergyman. From Abailard's own writings we learn that he would be ready with arguments for such a case. The lower clergy, he held,[2]
- ↑ A recent biographer of saint Bernard has supposed that Abailard began this stage in his career by a course of indiscriminate debauchery, and afterwards paid court to Heloïssa in obedience to a craving for a more select form of gratification: J. Cotter Morison, Life and Times of saint Bernard, 296; 1863. The single basis for the former part of this hypothesis, which is contradicted by Abailard's express statement, Hist. calam. v. p. 9, is a letter by Fulk, prior of Deuil (Abael. Opp. 1. 703-707), whose rhetorical flattery, and whose professed aim of consoling Abailard, cannot conceal the brutality of his satire: he is in fact merely retailing and magnifying whatever idle calumnies were current about Abailard among his enemies, besides adding not a few from his own gross imagination. [Not long before he died Mr. Morison assured me he was convinced that the view which he had expressed was without foundation.]
- ↑ The passage is in the Sententiae, cap. xxxi, published under the misleading title of Epitome theologiae Christianae by F. H. Rheinwald, Berlin 1835, p. 91 (or in Cousin's edition of the Opera 2. 582). The work is based upon the Introductio ad Theologiam, but unfortunately the particular chapter represents a portion of the Introductio which is now lost. It has been supposed that the Sententiae, although almost certainly not the production of Abailard himself,
