The Repentant Abelard

Family, Gender, and Ethics in Peter Abelard's Carmen ad Astralabium and Planctus

J. Ruys

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780312240028
• eBook ISBN: 9781137051875
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Repentant Abelard is both an innovative study and English translation of the late poetic works of controversial medieval philosopher and logician Peter Abelard, written for his beloved wife Heloise and son Astralabe. This study brings to life long overlooked works of this great thinker with analyses and comprehensive notes.

PART I

CARMEN AD ASTRALABIUM

CHAPTER 1

CARMEN AD ASTRALABIUM ANALYSIS

Writing the Carmen

Many writers have liked to imagine how Astralabe must have felt as he made his way through life, the only offspring of such a famous—or infamous—couple as Abelard and Heloise.¹ We could, if we liked, imagine that the quotation below reflects Astralabe’s views on reading his father’s Historia calamitatum:

The entries read like an extended trial autobiography. Specifically, they chart the last ten years of his life and the first ten of mine (though I barely figure—a mere footnote in a life much lived). Often, though, they read like memoirs, as this increasingly ill and frustrated man brings to life the dazzling encounters and events of his early years. At other times, we can see his mind churning through philosophical quandaries, toying with his own mortality, and playing, always playing, with the game of language, what he called the great cause of words.²

The images, the sentiments, would fit remarkably well. In fact, the quotation is not from Astralabe, but arises from a life lived some eight centuries later. What that shows, perhaps, is that being the son of a brilliant, controversial, and literary father has never been an easy thing to bear.

But where Astralabe was indeed little more than a “mere footnote”—a passing reference—in his father’s complex, conflicted, proto-autobiographical Historia,³ he was front and center of another text that Abelard wrote, the Carmen ad Astralabium. Distilling in the Carmen the understandings he had accumulated through the life lived in the Historia, Abelard wrote a text designed primarily for his son, a text that in its desire to teach and advise can be seen as written out of paternal love for a child.⁴

Why Was the Carmen Written?

Despite the pervasive antifamilial rhetoric of his writings, as outlined in the Introduction, it is evident both early and later in his career that whenever Abelard felt under pressure, he always turned to his own family for recuperation and a sense of respite. For example, Abelard recounts that following his early conflict with William of Champeaux and the personal and political battles involved in founding his own schools at Melun and then Corbeil, he fell ill and had to return home in order to regain his health, where he was presumably nursed by his mother, Lucie, who had not yet entered the monastic life.⁵ Likewise, at the end of his life, when faced with the dramatic denouément of the Council of Sens, in which his orthodoxy was clearly going to be impugned, Abelard wrote a confession of his faith, sending it not to an official ecclesiastic source, but to Heloise at the Paraclete.⁶

In the same way as Abelard’s confession of faith to Heloise constituted a concise integration of philosophy, classical learning, and Christian piety, so the Carmen provides not so much the standard medieval didactic text comprising a few discrete commands on matters of behavior—a list of dos and don’ts—but rather a summa of Abelard’s thought over a number of decades. As such, it consists of tightly interwoven reflections on ethics, theology, philosophy, and the law. On two occasions, then, when Abelard felt the need to write the document that would define and justify his life and accumulated thought, he chose to address it to a member of his family.

We also get a sense of the way advice giving can be an expression of love for Abelard from his dedication of Treatise II of his Dialectica to his nephews. He confides to his brother Dagobert that he had been balking at so great an undertaking, but that when he was “exhausted and wearied with writing,” he found his strength “enlivened by love” (“ex amore”) as “the memory of your love” (“tue . . . caritatis”) and “the desire for the instruction of my nephews” (“nepotum discipline desiderium”) rushed in upon him.⁷ Could not the same impulses have inspired the compilation of the Carmen? This dedication in the Dialectica, and Abelard’s many writings for Heloise and the nuns of the Paraclete, reveal that Abelard typically expressed his love for others by writing instructive texts for them and sharing his hard-won knowledge with them. In the case of the Carmen, this love took the form of a didactic poem dedicated to his son.

When Was the Carmen Written?

It may not be possible to date the composition of the Carmen more specifically than to observe that it is of a piece with numerous other texts written by and to Abelard around the early to mid-1130s. The Heloise section of the Carmen (379–384, discussed in greater detail later in the chapter), must postdate Heloise’s Ep. IV. Similarly, numerous ideas expressed in Heloise’s Ep. VI, which were then re-presented by Abelard in his Ep. VIII, Rule for the Nuns of the Paraclete, appear again in the Carmen. Themes that arise in both the questions and solutions of the Problemata Heloissae occur in the Carmen. The Carmen also resonates with ideas relayed in Abelard’s ethical works, such as the Collationes and Scito te ipsum, with his biblical exegesis in the Expositio in Hexameron, the scriptural conundrums he explored in the Sic et non, and his poetic works, such as his Hymns and Planctus.⁸ In terms of theology, the Carmen perhaps most strongly presents the thinking on the Trinity evident in Abelard’s earliest Theologia “Summi Boni” (see 999–1006 in the poem),⁹ though the references in the Carmen to natural law and the ethics of pagan thinkers might suggest an association with the Theologia Christiana.¹⁰

Thinking about why the Carmen was written also provides answers as to when it was written. Certainly the period around 1135 was a testing time for Abelard. With the exit from contemporary political power of Stephen of Garland, who had watched over much of Abelard’s career to that point,¹¹ the political climate had swung against Abelard. This, combined with the failure of both his personal charisma and various ecclesiastical authorities to curb the excesses and personal violence of the monks of St. Gildas, may have led to a crisis of confidence and a desire to provide his knowledge and expertise to a more appreciative audience. It is tempting, therefore, to see this time of strife as the impetus that led him to focus on his son, Astralabe, and to wish to teach him, if his spiritual sons were unwilling to listen. This would explain the description in the opening line of the Carmen of Astralabe as the “sweetness of a fatherly life” (“dulcedo paterne uite”). That is, when failing in his spiritual fatherhood of his monks, Abelard turned his attention to his biological fatherhood of Astralabe as a source of consolation and an outlet for instruction.

There is also the possibility that Heloise’s first letter to Abelard may have spurred him to leave some legacy for his son. In that letter Heloise criticized Abelard for wasting his knowledge and educational expertise on the recalcitrant monks of St. Gildas, chiding him: “You teach and admonish rebels to no purpose, and in vain you throw pearls of divine eloquence to pigs.”¹² Heloise’s assertion of how much Abelard owed his “daughters,” by which she meant herself and the nuns of the Paraclete, may also have stirred in him a sense of what he owed his biological son.

There are precedents for the composition of a didactic text as therapeutic act, a means for its author to make sense of a world in which old certainties have perished. Cicero wrote his De officiis, for example, for his son Marcus in 45 BC, at a time of deep personal despair and political turmoil. As Cicero confides in a letter to his friend Atticus, he had in fact been contemplating writing an advice-text in his exile prior to the composition of the De officiis, in part as an antidote to grieving over what had been lost.¹³ This confession allows the act of didactic authorship to be seen as an attempt for its author to make sense of a disordered world and reassert a recognizable order. The De officiis also makes a nice comparison with the Carmen in its stated aims. Cicero wrote to his son: “Every investigation into duty is two-fold. One part is that which pertains to the highest good, the other is what is set out in precepts, to which the conduct of one’s life can be conformed in all its parts.”¹⁴ This serves as an eloquent description of the key thought of the Carmen as well.

Traditionally, in terms of medieval didactic literature, one would expect the recipient of a parental advice-text to be aged around fifteen years, that is, on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, and so requiring counsel in the mores of the adult world. This is certainly the common literary convention among anonymous didactic texts that purport to be from parents to children, even if evidence for real situations is more difficult to come by. Textual evidence suggests that William, the son of the ninth-century Frankish woman Dhuoda and the addressee of the handbook of advice she composed, was sixteen years old at the time she was completing the work.¹⁵ In terms of literary texts, the English “How a Wyse Man taught hys Sone” makes the point of emphasizing its didactic nature by specifying the age of the recipient: “Yt was A wyse man had A chyld | Was fully XV wynter of Age.”¹⁶ Merridee L. Bailey’s analysis of the manuscript transmission of this poem shows that this statement of age was a relatively stable component of the text among variants.¹⁷ Bailey also points out that where texts of the poem differed from this formula, the alternative reading, “yong and tendir of age,” employed terms recognizable from Chancery petitions as indicating an age of around twelve to fourteen years.¹⁸ Georg Misch’s dating of the poem to around 1138 was tied to his argument that at this time, Astralabe would have been about nineteen and undertaking studies for the holy profession to which he had already been committed.¹⁹ Misch does not, however, explain why he would locate such studies so relatively late in Astralabe’s life.

Yet such time frames need not be rigorously applied to Abelard’s Carmen nor the date of the poem’s composition tied to Astralabe’s putative age at any given point. Bailey makes a salient point when she suggests of didactic literature addressed to children, “in search for literal interpretations we sometimes lose sight of the open contexts authors and scribes may have deliberately intended to create.”²⁰ As an example, Hennig Brinkmann’s dating of the Carmen following the circulation of the Historia and Letters is primarily based on the textual evidence of the relationship between these texts, although he does note in support of his contention that Astralabe would have been undertaking his studies at this time.²¹ In similar vein, I would suggest that the composition of the Carmen was more likely a product of Abelard’s state of mind in the mid-1130s, and of his need to compile a digest of his thought at this time, rather than a concerted effort to educate his son on his entry into adulthood.

To a certain extent, Astralabe was the fortuitous addressee of the text that resulted from his father’s own needs. The fact that in the probable period of the composition of the Carmen (early to mid-1130s), Astralabe would most likely have been of the appropriate age to receive a parental didactic text—that is, in his mid- to late teens—was, in some ways, serendipitous. Or to put it in another way, Astralabe’s age may simply have consolidated in Abelard’s mind the generic form for the material he was already predisposed to write—hence, a poem of elegiac couplets in the didactic tradition of the Disticha Catonis, rather than, say, a treatise. This conjecture is bolstered by the many correspondences in thought and theme between the Carmen and Abelard’s Ep. VIII, Rule for the Paraclete. Here we can see what often amounts to the same advice and the same ethical considerations presented in two different forms: for Heloise, as abbess of the Paraclete, in the form of a rule for her convent; for Astralabe, entering upon adulthood, as a didactic poem.

Main Themes

In the Carmen, Abelard uses the form of the traditional advice-text but fills it with his own individual and even idiosyncratic thought. In his 1932 study of the poem, Brinkmann described it as an individualized hybrid, doubled in form, a type of teaching grown out of an admixture of personal experience and both new and traditional wisdom.²² Misch similarly characterized the poem as comprising pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Repentant Abelard
• Part I Carmen ad Astralabium
• Part II Planctus
• Part III Carmen ad Astralabium—Text
• Part IV Planctus—Text
• Appendix A: Additional sententiae appended to the Carmen ad Astralabium in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, lat. oct. 172
• Appendix B: Additional sententiae appended to the Carmen ad Astralabium in Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, 9210, and Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rossi 933
• Appendix C: Excerpt from the Carmen ad Astralabium in Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. 1761 (415)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index