The Tenth Chamber

TWENTY-SEVEN

Priory of St Marcel, 1142

For a priory as modest as the one in St Marcel, it was an extraordinary gathering. Well set back from the River Saône and nestled in a dense thicket, the priory was ill equipped to deal with the influx of pilgrims. They arrived from all the compass-points of France, and how such a diverse population had efficiently learned about one man’s imminent death, no one could say for sure.

Abélard, the great teacher, philosopher and theologian lay dying.

There were students, disciples and admirers from all the way-stations of his life – Paris, Nogent-sur-Seine, Ruac, the Abbeys of Saint-Denis and St Gildas de Rhuys, the Paraclete in Ferreux-Quincey, and finally, this friendly final sanctuary near Cluny. He had spent his life teaching and wandering, thinking and writing and were it not for the dreaded white plague, the consumption that was eating away at his lungs, he would have continued to attract many more followers. Such was his charisma.

The infirmary was little more than a thatched hut and in the trodden-down clearing between the hut and the chapel, perhaps forty men had pitched camp to pray, to talk and to visit at his bedside in ones and twos.

The path from Ruac to St Marcel had been a twenty-four year exploration of life and love. Abélard had left Ruac, his health and outlook restored and had travelled to The Abbey of St Denis, where he had assumed the habit of a Benedictine monk, and had begun an explosively rich period of meditation and writing. Not only did he produce his controversial treatise on the Holy Trinity, much to the discomfort of the Church orthodoxy, but he also continued to write letter after letter, ever more passionate, to his beloved Héloïse, still ensconced at the nunnery of Argenteuil.

He was nothing, if not feisty. His inquisitive temperament, rapier intelligence and boundless energy led him to argue and probe and shake established thought from its foundations. And whenever his spirits flagged or his pace slowed, he would set off with his wicker basket into the fields and meadows to collect plants and berries, much to the amusement of his fellow monks who knew not what he did with them.

He had his own personal trinity of sorts that occupied all his waking thoughts: theology, philosophy and Héloïse. Of the first two, few men had the sufficiency of mind to spar with him or share his intellectual proclivities. Of the last, all men could understand his longings.

Héloïse, sweet Héloïse, remained the love of his life, the fiery beacon on a faraway hill that beckoned him home. But she had taken the veil and he had taken the cloth and Christ was their proper object of devotion. All they could do was exchange letters that singed each other with their passion.

Neither he nor Bernard of Clairvaux, would have ever imagined that Bernard’s new-found enmity of Abélard would have formed the bridge that would unite the star-crossed lovers.

When Bernard left Ruac, and returned to Cîteaux healed in body but troubled in spirit, he bitterly rued the decision his brother Barthomieu had taken not to forsake the devil brew. On reflection, he blamed no one more than Abélard for the turn of events because among the players in this affair, none was more ample of mind and persuasive than that eunuch. His poor brother was a mere pawn. The true evil-doer was Abélard.

For that reason, he used his ever-widening sphere of ecclesiastical influence to keep tabs on that renegade monk and when Abélard’s treatise on the Trinity made it into his hands, he seized on its heresies, as he saw them, to have him summoned before a papal council at Soissons in 1121 to answer for himself.

Was he not proclaiming a Tritheistic view that Father, Son and Holy Ghost were separable, each with their own existence, Bernard fumed? Was the One God merely an abstraction to him? Had the devil brew made him lose his mind?

With no little satisfaction, Bernard learned that Abélard had been forced by the Pope to burn his own book and retreat to St Denis in disgrace. But bitter seeds had been sown. The monks at the abbey saw fit to rid themselves of Abélard and his heresy and he withdrew to the solitude of a deserted place in the vicinity of Troyes, in a hamlet known as Ferreux-Quincey. There, he and a small band of followers established a new monastery they called the Oratory of the Paraclete. Paraclete – the Holy Ghost. A stick-in-the-eye to his accusers.

The place suited Abélard. It was remote, it had a good spring nearby, fertile soil and an ample source of 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 Héloïse.

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, Abélard 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 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.

Past the new year and into the spring, Abélard grew weaker. Pierre believed a sister house to Cluny, The Priory of St Marcel, was a quieter venue with more tender hands, and that is where Abélard was sent to die.

A procession of nuns on horseback snaked into the clearing. It was a windy evening in April. The men in the camp stopped their cooking and rose to their feet. There was a murmur. A gust blew the hood back from a woman who rode straight in the saddle and took the veil with it. She had long grey hair in a single braid.

One monk ran to fetch the veil and helped her dismount.

‘Welcome, Abbess,’ he said, as if they had met many times.

‘Do I know you, Brother?’ she asked.

‘I am a friend of your friend,’ he said. ‘I am Barthomieu, of Ruac Abbey.’

‘Ah, from years ago.’ She looked at him curiously but said no more.

‘Would you like me to take you to him?’ Barthomieu asked.

She exhaled. ‘Then I am not too late.’

A coverlet was drawn to Abélard’s chin. He was asleep. Even though the consumption had melted the flesh from his face, Héloïse whispered he looked better than she had expected, then kneeled at his bedside and placed her hands together in prayer.

Abélard opened his eyes. ‘Héloïse.’ From his weak lips the utterance sounded more like a breath than a name.

‘Yes, my dear one.’

‘You came.’

‘Yes. To be with you.’

‘To the end?’

‘Our love will never end,’ she whispered into his ear.

Despite the whisper Barthomieu heard her, and he excused himself so the two of them could be alone.

Barthomieu waited outside the hut all evening and all night, like a sentry. Héloïse stayed until the first light of morning, excused herself for a short while then returned, as fresh and determined as ever to maintain her vigil. When Barthomieu asked if she needed the assistance of the infirmarer, she brushed him off and said she was perfectly capable of attending to all his needs.

Later in the day, there was a commotion when a group of men, King’s soldiers aggressively rode into the Priory. Barthomieu met them, had a word with their captain, and blanched.

‘When?’ he asked.

‘He’s not far behind us. Maybe an hour. And you are?’

‘His brother,’ Barthomieu muttered. ‘I am Bernard of Clairvaux’s brother.’

A soldier opened the door for him and Bernard emerged from his fine, covered carriage looking pale and drawn. He was fifty-two but could have been mistaken for an older man. The pressures of high office and the years of spartan living conditions had turned his skin lax and sallow and rendered him arthritic and stiff-limbed. He took stock of the ragged conditions of the camp, a pilgrims’ enclave, and the assemblage of clerics and scholars, men and women.

Will I engender as much adulation at the time of my death, he thought. Then he called out, imperiously, ‘Who will take me to see Abélard?’

Barthomieu approached. The two men briefly locked eyes, but Bernard shook his head and looked elsewhere for a moment before refocusing on the man.

‘Hello, Bernard.’

He was momentarily angered by the informality. He was the Abbot of Cîteaux. Papal legates sought his counsel. He had sat by the side of popes and the current Holy Father valued his advice over any man. He was the founding benefactor to the Knights Templar. His name was uttered by Crusaders. He had healed great schisms within the Church. Who was this monk to simply call him Bernard?

He looked into those eyes again. Who is this man?

‘Yes, it’s me,’ Barthomieu said.

‘Barthomieu? It cannot be you. You are young.’

‘There is one, younger still.’ He called over to the camp fire. ‘Nivard, come here.’

Nivard came running out. Bernard had not seen him for half a lifetime, but his youngest brother Nivard would be well into his forties by now, not this strapping fellow he saw before him.

The three men embraced, but Bernard’s hugs were tentative and wary.

‘Do not fret. All will be explained, brother,’ Barthomieu said. ‘But be quick, come and see Abélard while he still draws breath.’

When Bernard and Barthomieu entered the sick house, Héloïse turned to hush the intruders, then realised the great man of the Church had entered.

She rose and made her intentions clear to kiss Bernard’s ring but he shooed her back and bade her keep at Abélard’s side.

‘Your Excellency, I am-’

‘You are Héloïse. You are Abbess of Paraclete. I know of you. I know of your intellect and piety. How is he?’

‘He is slipping away. Come. There is still time.’

She touched Abélard’s pointy shoulder. ‘Wake up, my dear. Someone is here to see you. Your old…’ She looked to Bernard for guidance.

‘Yes, call me his old friend.’

‘Your old friend, Bernard of Clairvaux, has come to be with you.’

A weak huffing cough signalled his wakening. Bernard appeared shocked at the sight of the man, not because he looked like skin and bones, but because he looked so young. ‘Abélard too!’ he hissed.

Barthomieu was standing in the corner with his arms tightly folded around his chest. He nodded.

Abélard managed to smile. In order to speak without inducing a paroxysm he had learned to whisper, using his throat more than his diaphragm. ‘Have you come to drop a heavy weight upon my head and finish me off?’ he joked.

‘I have come to pay my respects.’

‘I was not aware you respected me.’

‘As a person, you have my utmost respect.’

‘What about my views?’

‘That is another matter. But we are finished with those arguments.’

Abélard nodded. ‘Have you met Héloïse?’

‘Just now.’

‘She is a good abbess.’

‘I am sure she is.’

‘She is a good woman.’

Bernard said nothing.

‘I love her. I have always loved her.’

The abbot shifted uncomfortably.

Abélard asked that Bernard and he be left alone and when Héloïse and Barthomieu withdrew, he beckoned Bernard closer. ‘Can I tell you something, as one friend might say to another?’

Bernard nodded.

‘You are a great man, Bernard. You perform all the difficult religious duties. You fast, you watch, you suffer. But you do not endure the easy ones – you do not love.’

The old man slumped into a bedside chair and tears filled his eyes. ‘Love.’ He said the word as if it were foreign to his tongue. ‘Perhaps, old friend, you are right.’

Abélard gave him a sly wink. ‘I forgive you.’

‘Thank you,’ Bernard answered with a touch of amusement. ‘Would you like to confess to me?’

‘I am not sure I have the time left to confess all my sins. We have not seen each other since that night in Ruac when we drank some tea together.’

‘Yes, the tea.’

Abélard had a coughing fit and stained his mouth cloth red. When his breathing was under control he said, ‘Let me tell you about the tea.’

Two days later, Abélard was dead.

Héloïse took his body back to Paraclete and buried him in a grave on a small knoll near the chapel.

She lived to be an old woman and in 1163, according to her wishes, she herself was buried next to him, certain in the knowledge the two of them would rest side by side for eternity.