Peripateticus Palatinus (9)

Following this disaster, both Abelard and Heloise embraced the religious
life.  Abelard says, 'it was shame and confusion in my remorse and misery
rather than any devout wish for conversion which brought me to seek shelter
in a monastery cloister.'  Heloise was later to write to Abelard, 'It was
not any sense of vocation which brought me as a young girl to accept the
austerities of the cloister, but your bidding alone.'  

Nevertheless, whatever sense of vocation either or both may or may not have
felt, both entered the religious life and both lived the life of
Benedictines for the rest of their days.  This needs to be kept in mind,
perhaps more than it has been, particularly in the case of Abelard.  If we
ask how Thomas Aquinas came to be regarded as the Church's leading
theologian, part of the answer will lie in the Angelic Doctor's undoubted
excellence, but part of the answer is also that he had a very strong support
group in the Dominicans.  The Dominicans have done their duty by Aquinas, as
also by Albertus Magnus.  We have excellent editions and exhaustive studies
of both these doctors.  Likewise the Franciscans have done their duty by
their more prominent theologians, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus and Ockham.
All have been well-edited and well studied by members of their own order.  

The secular masters, those who lacked the support of a religious order, have
fared less well.  Abelard began his career as a secular master, but spent
the last part of his life - over twenty years - as a monk.  And the
Benedictines have not done so well by Abelard, they have not taken him to
heart as one of their own.  Perhaps this is natural enough, considering that
Abelard on his own admission never wanted to be a monk anyway, and that his
life as a monk was somewhat irregular:  he was at loggerheads with the other
monks at St Denis and eventually had to leave;  when he became Abbot of St
Gildas de Rhuis he was in such enmity with the other monks that he believed
they were trying to poison him.  

For whatever reason, we have no Benedictine edition of the works of Abelard,
and indeed no critical edition of his complete works at all.  His works have
been edited piecemeal by various scholars, and some have not been properly
edited at all.  David Luscombe has written: 	'. . . future generations of
philosophers were not much aware of Abelard's writings or ideas.  The
reasons for this still await elucidation.'  
One reason is surely that Abelard lacked any support group to push his
cause.  The Benedictines did not rally round.  I have found that when I
mention this to Benedictines, they generally respond 'I didn't know Abelard
WAS a Benedictine.'  Of course, Fr Anselm knew . . .

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Oriens




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