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Documents relating to ‘In a Valley of This Restless Mind’ 1 ‘However, it may allay the bitterness of your grief if I prove that this came upon us justly, as well as to our advantage, and that God’s punishment was more properly directed against us when we were married than when we were living in sin. After our marriage, when you were living in the cloister with the nuns at Argenteuil and I came one day to visit you privately, you know what my uncontrollable desire did with you there, actually in a corner of the refectory, because we had nowhere else to go, I repeat, you know how shamelessly we behaved on that occasion in so hallowed a place, dedicated to the most holy Virgin. . Even if our other shameful behavior was ended, this alone would deserve far heavier punishment.’ Abelard, Letter 4, The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse tr. Betty Radice, Penguin Classics, 1974, p. 146. ‘Moreover, to add to my indignation at the outrage you suffered, all the laws of equity in our case were reversed. For while we enjoyed the pleasures of an uneasy love and abandoned ourselves to fornication (if I may use an ugly but expressive word) we were spared God’s severity. But when we amended our unlawful conduct by what was lawful, and atoned for the shame of fornication by an honourable marriage, then the Lord in his anger laid his hand heavily upon us, and would not permit a chaste union though he had long tolerated one which was unchaste. The punishment you suffered would have been proper vengeance for men caught in open adultery. But what others deserve for adultery came to you through a marriage which you believed had made amends for all previous wrongdoing; what adulterous women have brought upon their lovers, your own wife brought on you. Nor was this at the time when we abandoned ourselves to our former delights, but when we had already parted and were leading chaste lives, you presiding over your school in Paris and at your command living with the nuns at Argenteuil. Thus we were separated, to give you more time to devote yourself to your pupils, and me more freedom for prayer and meditation on the Scriptures, both of us leading a life which was holy as well as chaste.’ Héloïse, Letter 3, ibid., p.130. 2 ‘I set off at once…and brought back my mistress to make her my wife. But she was strongly opposed to the proposal… She absolutely rejected this marriage; it would be nothing but a disgrace and a burden to me. Along with my loss of reputation, she put before me the difficulties of marriage.. she argued, I could listen to the philosophers…Theophrastus sets out in considerable detail the unbearable annoyances of marriage and its endless anxieties, in order to prove by the clearest possible arguments that a man should not take a wife. ..But apart from the hindrance to such philosophic study, consider, she said, the true conditions for a dignified way of life. What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles, books or tablets and distaffs, pen or stylus and spindle? Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying, nurses nothing them with lullabies, and all the noisy coming and going of men and women about the house? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home?’ Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ibid., p.70 et seq. ‘Héloïse.. argued that the name of mistress instead of wife would be dearer to her and more honourable to me – only love freely given should keep me for her, not the construction of a marriage tie’ Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ibid., p.74. ‘I looked for no marriage –bond, no marriage portion.. The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore. ..But you kept silent about most of my arguments for preferring love to wedlock and freedom to chains. God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore. / For a man’s worth does not rest on his wealth or power; these depend on fortune, but worth on its merits. And a woman should realize that if she marries a rich man more readily than a poor one, and desires her husband more for his possessions than himself, she is offering herself for sale’ Héloïse, Letter 1, ibid., pp. 113/4. 3 ‘We have in France an old teacher turned into a new theologian, who in his early days amused himself with dialectics and now gives utterance to wild imaginations upon the Holy Scriptures…. I know not what there is in heaven above and in the earth beneath which he deigns to confess ignorance of; he raises his eyes to Heaven, and searches the deep things of God, and then returning to us, he brings back unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter, while he is presumptuously prepared to give a reason for everything, even of those things which are above reason; he presumes against reason and against faith. For what is more against reason than by reason to attempt to transcend reason? And what is more against faith than to be unwilling to believe what reason cannot attain?... He promises understanding to his hearers, even on those most sublime and sacred truths which re hidden in the very bosom of our holy faith; and he places degrees in the Trinity, modes in the Majesty, numbers in the Eternity. He ahs laid down, for example, that God the Father is full power, the Son a certain kind of power, the Holy Spirit no power… Did Arius ever go further? Who can endure this? Who would not shut his ears to such sacrilegious words? Who not shudder at such novel profanities of words and ideas?’ www.ccel.org/ccel/bernard/letters.lxiii.ii.i.html ‘If sentences were to denote or put forward real things, then surely they would have to be names. But sentences differ from all words precisely in this regard, namely that they propose something to be (or not to be) something else. Yet ‘being (or not being) some real thing’ is not any real thing at all. Thus sentences do not simply denote any real things, the way names do, but instead propose how they stand towards each other’ Abelard, Dialectica, quoted in Peter King, ‘The Metaphysics of Peter Abelard’, individual.utoronto.ca/pkingarticles/Abelard-on-Metaphysics 4 illustrated with Powerpoint 5 For it is not only now that I begin to love you; I can remember having done so for a long time. I had not yet quite passed the bounds of youth and reached early manhood when I knew of your name and your reputation, not yet for religion but for virtuous and praiseworthy studies. I used to hear at that time of the woman who although still caught up in the obligations of the world, devoted all her application to knowledge of letters, something which is very rare…. Later on when.. you turned your zeal for learning in a far better direction, and as a woman wholly dedicated to philosophy in the true sense, you left logic for the Gospel, Plato for Christ, the academy for the cloister’ ibid., p.277-278 For you are one of those animals in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel, woman though you are, and must not only burn like coal but glow like a lamp and give light as well’ ibid., p.279. ‘We have still been granted (the presence) of him who was yours, ..Master Peter, whom in the last years of his life that same Providence sent to Cluny.. Him, therefore, venerable and dearest sister in the Lord, him whom after your union in the flesh you are joined by the better, and therefore stronger, bond of divine love;.. God cherishes (him) in his bosom, and keeps him there to be restore to you at the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet-note of God descending from heaven’ Peter the Venerable, Letter (115) to Héloïse, ibid., p.281-4 ‘I, Peter, Abbot of Cluny, who received Peter Abelard as a monk of Cluny, and gave his body, removed in secret, to the Abbess Héloïse and the nuns of the Paraclete, by the authority of Almighty God and of all the saints, in virtue of my office, absolve him from all his sins.’ The Absolution of Peter Abelard, ibid., p.288