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| Lives of the Sinners |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2006
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Originally published
in The Guardian
13 May 2006
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One wonders quite how Peter Abelard survived,
after Heloise's uncle's men "cut off the parts of [his]
body whereby [he] had committed the wrong of which they complained".
That is, they cut off his genitalia, and the two culprits who
were caught were blinded before being mutilated as Abelard had
been.
"The next morning," Abelard tells
us, "the whole city gathered before my house, and the scene
of horror and amazement, mingled with lamentations, cries and
groans which exasperated and distressed me, is difficult, no,
impossible, to describe. In particular, the clerks and, most
of all, my pupils tormented me with their unbearable weeping
and wailing until I suffered more from their sympathy than from
the pain of my wound, and felt the misery of my mutilation less
than my shame and humiliation."
This is very acute and informative and more
than makes up for the absence of practical detail as to how
he staunched the wound and eventually, as it were, went on to
manage without. The worst thing about being emasculated, we
learn, is the shame: "All sorts of thoughts filled my mind
- how brightly my reputation had shone, and now how easily in
an evil moment it had been dimmed or rather completely blotted
out; how just a judgment of God had struck me in the parts of
the body with which I had sinned, and how just a reprisal had
been taken by the very man I had myself betrayed."
Castration of animals was very much a part
of normal agricultural life. Castration or emasculation of a
man was more of a rarity, a horror, and a reduction of a man
to the level of a beast. Or worse than that, as we find turning
the page, where Abelard is appalled to remember the "cruel
letter of the Law" (as set down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy)
whereby "a eunuch is such an abomination to the Lord that
men made eunuch by the amputation or mutilation of their members
are forbidden to enter a church as if they were stinking and
unclean, and even animals in that state are rejected for sacrifice".
This, to us, comes as an unexpected twist of
the knife. And it cannot be that such consideration for Jewish
Law prevailed in Abelard's lifetime (1079-1142), for he is not
excommunicated on that ground. His autobiography, the Historia
Calamitatum or History of My Calamities, goes on to describe
his career as a teacher, preacher and disputant.
It is full of rancour. There is always a sense
of Abelard picking a fight and wishing to humiliate his opponents
with his superior skills of disputation. No doubt we are unlikely
to admire Abelard's personality in quite the same way we are
prepared to warm to that of Heloise. But in this matter of being
proud of your fame and your success in love, being humiliated
and mutilated and then setting the story down on paper: who
could fault the courage? And the pitiless self-accusation?
It is not the earliest surviving medieval autobiography,
but it is a peerless document. Betty Radice, who translated
the Penguin Classics edition of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise,
to which the autobiography forms a preface, compares it to St
Augustine, Cellini, St Teresa and Rousseau. Exalted company,
in other words. It and the letters survive in nine good copies,
testimony to the early fascination they exerted.
They appear to have been preserved by Heloise
herself, which is amazing since in one of the letters Abelard
recalls how the two made love, blasphemously, in a refectory,
and for her part Heloise does not express regret at their love-making.
She says that "the pleasures of lovers which we shared
have been too sweet - they can never displease me, and can scarcely
be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always
there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and
fantasies which will not even let me sleep. Even during the
Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those
pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts
are on their wantonness instead of on prayers."
According to Radice, the first person to take
a genuine interest in Heloise and Abelard was Petrarch, and
I have been told that Petrarch's copy of the manuscript carries
highly personal annotations, evincing sympathy with them. This
annotated manuscript is in Paris, at the Bibliothèque
Nationale. But surely someone must have published these annotations?
I would love to read them.
And surely, if what survives from this period,
as from other periods, is only a fraction of what existed, there
must have been many other autobiographies, some of them just
as startling. The genre is much earlier, and more widespread,
than we are led to believe.
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