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."]



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