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PERIPATETICUS PALATINUS (20) Let's think about Heloise for a moment. She did not at first take easily to life in a convent. She writes to Abelard, some fifteen years after taking the veil: 'In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we have 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 celebration of 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. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost. Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word. In my utter wretchedness, that cry from a suffering soul could well be mine: miserable creature that I am, Who will deliver me from this body of death?' (Infelix ego homo, quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius? - Romans 7:24). Before going on to consider Abelard's response, we may ask why Heloise saw St Paul's words as expressing her own situation. 'That cry from a suffering soul could well be mine' - why? From what was Paul suffering, and how did it relate to Heloise's sufferings? In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells how, to keep him from being too elated by the abundance of the revelations he had received, he was given a thorn in the flesh (skolops te sarki) a messenger of Satan, to harass him - literally, 'to give him a box on the ear' (kolaphize). Paul does not go into details as to what this thorn in the flesh was. Many of the Fathers (e.g. Tertullian, Jerome, Primasius, Gregory Nazianzen) regarded it as a painful physical affliction, perhaps, in view of kolaphize, a persistent headache or earache. However, in the Vulgate skolops is rendered as stimulus, and this has rather different connotations. Alfred Plummer made an interesting study of the resultant tradition of exegesis: "When the original Greek ceased to be familiar in the West, S. Paul's words were known chiefly or entirely through the Latin. The ambiguous rendering in the Latin version of Irenaeus and in Cyprian, stimulus carnis, was diffused through the influence of the Vulgate; and it produced an interpretation which in time prevailed over all others, and which for centuries held the field. It was maintained that the Apostle's great trouble was frequent temptations to sins of the flesh . . . Primasius, who preserves the tradition of pains in the head, gives as a secondary interpretation, 'alii dicunt titillatione carnis stimulatum.' Gregory the Great (Mor. VIII. 29) says that Paul, after being caught up to paradise, 'contra carnis bellum laborat', which perhaps implies this interpretation. "Thomas Aquinas says of the stimulus ; 'quia ad literam dicitur, quod fuit vehementer afflictus dolore iliaco'. But afterwards he quotes the opinion, 'quod inerant ei motus concupiscentiae, quos tamen divina gratia refrenebat'. Hugo of St Cher suggests that Thekla was a source of danger to the Apostle . . . Lyra, Bellarmine and Estius all take this view of it; and Cornelius a Lapide says that it is 'communis fidelium sensus'." The Glossa Ordinaria to 2 Corinthians 12:7 interprets 'stimulus pungens carnem' as 'angelus malignus missus a Satana, ut colaphizet, id est reprimat omnem motum superbiæ incutiendo tribulationes, vel tentando (ut quidem aiunt) per libidinem.' There was then a strong exegetical tradition that St Paul's affliction was a persistent temptation to lust. Heloise recognised a fellow-sufferer, or rather saw in her own affliction something that had been dignified by troubling in equal measure the greatest of Christian saints. Hers was no common lust; she was possessed by a diviner lust, a Pauline lust, an Apostolic lust. * * * * * The Supple Doctor. [I have taken part of the above from my article, "This Body of Death: Abelard, Heloise and the Religious Life" in "Medieval Theology and the Natural Body" edd. Peter Biller and A.J. Minnis, York Medieval Press 1997; of which it might be said, as Gibbon said of the Consolation of Philosophy, "A golden volume, not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or of Tully."] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%