The Cloister Read online

  Abelard pressed his hands to his head. “This! This! A particular thinker, with his particular thoughts! Yes, we listen! But then we think! With this!” He pressed his head between his hands, and turned slowly, showing himself to the crowd of students, as if to put the organ of rationality on display for the first time since the fall of Adam. “Here is the Word made flesh. In every one of us! Each person, particular, and alone. One. Here we have the Incarnation in all its glory. The conscious human mind, the knower aware of his own knowing. And in the conscious human mind, aware in the moment only of this, never of that—of the individual only, never of the general—what do we have but the Real Presence of the ineffable God—who, by virtue of this Incarnation, is no longer ineffable!”

  Now he was rolling, like a horseman heading downhill, toward the home corral. His voice had that gallop to it, that pitch. “What else does the Apostle mean when he says that God emptied Himself! Emptied Himself of all that is abstract, ideal, and universal. The Truth, if you will, emptied itself into, yes, half-truths. Call them what you will. In the banishment from Eden, half-truths are all we ever have. The reasoning human mind puts them together into something larger, but even larger—they are always and forever elements of the next computation. We poor humans do not possess the Truth. We are pilgrims, ever on the way to it. And the mode of our pilgrimage—investigating, assessing, judging, deciding—is thought.”

  “No! Faith!” cried the Master from the rear.

  “Faith that thinks!” Abelard shot back.

  “But God’s will!” Now another of the Dons joined in, this one with the trumping tone of an Inquisitor’s accusatio: “Where is God’s will in your scheme? God’s will is the Truth. The Church asserts it. The Church reveals it.”

  Abelard shot back, “God’s will is known completely to none but God. If there is ‘the Truth,’ it resides with Him, not with us. That, dear brothers…” Here Abelard’s entire physical appearance changed. The tension in his shoulders relaxed, like the King’s guard given leave to rest. He seemed to shake himself, as if throwing off the bad energy of combat. He turned back to the students, as if, having provoked his envious fellows in the back of the room to take his bait, he could at last complete the thought with which he had begun. “…is why the interior intent of the moral agent is the key to virtue. We return to Tomas Clare and Rudolph of Lyons.” Abelard quickly touched the gaze of each boy, showing fondness. He continued, “It is human to err in knowing God’s will. Therefore, your act in its pursuit can be wrong, but you can still be virtuous if your aim is pure. The intent defines, not the deed.”

  “But the Jews!” the Inquisitor called out from the rear. “Pilate declared the Lord’s innocence to the Jews! And the Jews cried, ‘Crucify him!’ What of that deed? What possible virtue was there in deicide?”

  Abelard stood firm, upright, moving only the muscles that controlled his eyes, to find the one who’d so challenged him. The look he cast now, in contrast to the teacherly affection he had just displayed, landed as dead weight—a blow. When he spoke, it was slowly, each word a millstone. “If the Jews believe they are enacting the will of God when they cry out ‘Crucify!,’ then theirs is an act of virtue.”

  “You lie! If the Jews are not guilty, no one is guilty!”

  “But are they damned?” Abelard asked. Still, he spoke with exquisite precision, wanting to be understood. “If the Jews believe God wants them to kill Christ, then, however gravely mistaken, their intention saves them.” The smallest smile crossed Peter Abelard’s face, and, given what he had just said, it added heat to the fire of his sacrilege. The silence broke only when, moments later, the teacher himself, still addressing his unnamed antagonist in the rear, said, “Guilty, yes. Certainly. But also redeemed. Thank you, esteemed brother, for drawing us to the conclusion of our lesson.”

  But Abelard was not finished. His habit, after such a joust, was to greet his antagonist, and wish him well. William of Champeaux, his great rival in Paris, had decamped from the city after being repeatedly bested precisely on the question of virtue’s meaning. The hecklers today were Champeaux’s disciples, and graciousness toward them was one of Abelard’s ploys. Therefore, in the general bustle of adjournment, he plunged into the crowd and made his way toward the fireplace, where the Masters had clustered.

  But by the time he was through the press of boys, the critics were gone. Almost alone beside the fireplace stood the Cathedral Canon, one Fulbert, whom, until now, Abelard had not noticed. Fulbert was the man appointed by the Bishop of Paris to preside over the College of Canons Regular and to maintain order in the Cloister, lest the unruly pupils of the school utterly destroy what was essential to contemplation. But the Canon’s sway as enforcer of discipline in the Cathedral precinct went further than students.

  In effect, Canon Fulbert was to the Bishop what the constable, cofferer, steward, and Grandmaster were to the King; he performed, that is, a great mélange of crucial roles. Fulbert’s gift was to sense what His Lordship needed before His Lordship did—and to supply it. Still, he was not given to study, cared nothing for the dialectic of lessons, and rarely attended symposia. He was a stout cleric, his ample girth and ruddy face contradicting the ascetic zealotry with which he policed his realm. His bald head was uncovered, and the pale flesh running up from his brow glistened with perspiration, as if for Fulbert the simple act of breathing was exertion. As always, he carried a staff, which, when walking, he habitually banged on the floor to the rhythm of his stride, a sound that the intimidated students took as warning of his approach, exactly as he intended. With that staff, Fulbert was known to have knocked unconscious men larger and more robust than he, and he was said to have killed some. When he was confronted with wreckage, his way was to stride through it and leave more behind. The young scholars were long accustomed to being beaten for mistakes in their letters, sums, and recitations; more grievous rowdiness could be a matter of mortal danger. As they left the refectory, therefore, they gave the Canon a wide berth.

  Immediately behind Fulbert was his so-called Brother Thrall, the Canon’s personal servus. A young man with a wispy beard, clothed in a rough woolen smock and leggings, the thrall was short and slender, with a dark face so unmoving and expressionless as to seem a mask.

  Thralls were disenfranchised persons of uncertain origin, the bastard sons of battle captives, fugitives, or vagabonds—rank outsiders in a ruthlessly structured feudal society. Snatched by priests from birthing beds, such male infants were, so it was said, rescued by the Church from the vale of sin, to be protected and raised in rectories and monasteries—but at the price of growing up as Church slaves. A major ecclesial institution like the Cathedral could count a dozen such servi, attached to the Cloister in perpetuity. Mostly, they were degraded laborers—rat catchers and gravediggers. Unlike even the lowliest serf, a man of the thrall could never expect to marry, work for himself, own a plot of land, or pursue a life outside his holder precinct. But some thralls, beginning as favored children, became personal servants to prelates, and such was the case with Canon Fulbert’s servus. He was always at Fulbert’s elbow, ready to clear the way ahead with the short, stout cudgel he carried; saddle the Canon’s horse; test his food for poison; sleep on the floor beside his bed—ready, for that matter, though this was not spoken of, to be drawn into that bed for the fondling he was taught to perform as a very young boy.

  Coming up behind Brother Thrall and Fulbert was a monk, his cowl drawn forward over his head, leaving his face obscured in shadow. In contrast to Fulbert, he was a slender figure, and taller. The monk’s hands, apparently joined at his waist, were hidden inside the bag sleeves of his habit. Fulbert turned and gestured him forward, and it was suddenly apparent that the monk was in the Canon’s company.

  Abelard bowed slightly to Fulbert. “My lord, your presence at my lecture honors me.”

  “As always, Master Peter, your presence honors the school.” There was something tight-lipped in Fulbert’s statement, as if he disliked having t
o acknowledge Abelard’s eminence. If Paris was lately outdrawing schools at Chartres and Orléans, it was due to this self-important genius, and the Canon knew it. Not only students flocked to the Cathedral environs, but merchants, dressmakers, woodworkers, wine sellers, and goldsmiths.

  Three new stall markets had sprung up on both sides of the Seine in the last year. Houses were being built as quickly as cut lumber could be brought in from the mills. All of this redounded to the Cathedral, therefore to Fulbert, who was the collector of tithes and manager of money. His standing depended on the growing prestige of the school, which led to the profits of the Cloister trades, and therefore revenues to the Church that the King did not control. The Bishop was prospering because of Abelard, although His Lordship seemed ready to credit Fulbert instead—an impression the Canon happily encouraged. Therefore, Fulbert had to be careful with the school prodigy. Yet he could not fully stifle his discomfort at what he had just witnessed. “The Jews as exemplars of virtue, brother?” Fulbert said. “You provoke as much as you enlighten.”

  Jews were no mere theological abstraction where Fulbert and Abelard stood. The small island in the Seine was divided into three realms of influence: the Cathedral to the east, the Royal Palace to the west—and in the dead center the lively marketplace, which had become the pulse not just of the island, but of the city. And that center had been known for more than a century as Vicus Judaeorum. The Jewish Village.

  Abelard smiled easily. “I provoke to enlighten.”

  But the monk beside Canon Fulbert now spoke up, abruptly. “What nonsense.”

  Abelard faced him, taking in his appearance for the first time. The monk’s voice was high-pitched, but the Latin phrase—Quod deliramentum verba—was perfectly constructed, asserted with authority. “I beg your pardon?” Abelard said.

  “That business about the Saracens. Just because the venerable Jerome was misinformed, that does not justify repeating such flawed etiology.”

  “You know Jerome?”

  “His Life of Saint Hilarion, the anchorite in Palestine. The myth of Sarah, wife of Abraham, as the source of ‘Saracen.’ ” The monk’s self-assurance verged on cockiness. He continued: “Jerome was being fanciful. And Jerome, of course, predated Muhammad by more than two centuries. ‘Saracen’ refers to Arabs, not, as you call them, to Ishmaelites. And certainly not to Turks. Surely, you know this.”

  “In that case, dear brother, where does the word ‘Saracen’ come from?”

  The monk, aware of being tested, did not reply. The young scholars were gone from the refectory by now, and the three were alone.

  “Please,” Fulbert said. He put his hand on the monk’s arm, but tentatively. It was unusual for the Canon to betray insecurity.

  Abelard said, “Jerome gives us the simple explanation of ‘Saracen.’ Simplicity is the way to knowing.”

  “ ‘Sahara,’ Master Peter,” the monk replied. “The great desert. Known to reach from the Red Sea to the far ocean. Not one, but many deserts. Therefore, ‘Sahara,’ which is the plural of the Arabic word sahraa. Desert. ‘Saracen,’ speaking of simplicity, means ‘people of the desert.’ That is all. Abraham’s wife has nothing to do with it. Neither does a claim to legitimacy. The infidel is the infidel, descended from a whore.” At this, the monk’s hands went to the cowl and drew it back, exposing a plaited crown of brown hair, and fully showing the delicate features of a young woman. Her dark eyes were large, and her face was sharply defined by pronounced cheekbones, a thin nose, a small chin, and full lips, which took their rest in an easy smile. A face impossibly well proportioned—a finished composition.

  Fulbert glanced about, to be sure they were alone, then hastened to explain. “This is my late brother’s daughter,” he said anxiously. “Her mother was cousin to Gisela of Bourgogne, the mother of Adelaide, the Queen Consort, one of whose ladies sent her to me.” A sudden perplexity in Fulbert’s demeanor hinted at his dilemma. To be pressed by a member of the Royal household was a nightmare for a man whose first duty was not to the King, but to the King’s main rival, the Bishop.

  “And I am looking for a teacher,” the young woman said. She was not twenty years old.

  Abelard channeled his surprise into the imitation of offense. “A woman? In the sanctuary of study?” He turned to Fulbert. “My lord, does the Bishop know of this?”

  Fulbert blushed. The Bishop was known to whip women out of Cloisters reserved to men. “On matters of familial charity,” Fulbert insisted, “the Bishop would counsel deference. I cannot disrespect the memory of my brother. My niece here has been expelled from the convent at Argenteuil, where she defied the Prioress.”

  “Not expelled, dear Uncle,” the young woman said. “Not defiant. It was Mother Prioress who insisted on my further education, which was impossible at Argenteuil, where I learned all there was to learn.”

  “You pilfered candles from the sacristy.”

  “So that I could read at night. It is ridiculous that no one reads at night.”

  “Candles are a luxury,” Abelard put in.

  “But reading is a necessity. Fewer candles for the altar, I say. More for the scriptorium.”

  “You see?” Fulbert said, opening his hands.

  “Dear uncle,” the young woman said, sweetly now, “Mother Prioress knows of your great influence. She sent me forth with a blessing, knowing you would provide. And my dear mother’s cousin, Lady Gisela, redoubled the blessing.” She looked directly at Abelard. “I need a teacher.”

  “So you were assessing me, in your disguise.”

  “I was.”

  “And you find me overly simple, like Jerome.”

  “There is more to learning than the Church Fathers.”

  “Yes, there are the philosophers. You have Greek?”

  “Oute o Theos mporei na allaxei to parelthon. ‘Not even the gods can change the past.’ ”

  “Besides Agathon, what philosophers do you favor?”

  “Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy, which, as you know, is an interchange between a disillusioned Boethius and the true spirit of philosophy, who appears in the work as a woman of erudition and tenderness.”

  Abelard shook his head, a negation. “Boethius was condemned as a Hellenist. A martyr to thought. You keep dangerous company, sister. The school of Paris is timid compared with that. Why would you study here?”

  “Your subject. Virtue. What makes a person good? It is said you draw on the Greeks, who come to us now from the Arabs and the Jews.”

  “It is true. There are texts coming from Toledo.”

  “Virtue lies in purpose more than in deed,” she said evenly. “I accept your argument, even if your logic fails.”

  “You use my own thrust against me.” Abelard felt a rare unease stirring in his chest. It was not the unease of debate. He stifled it, asking, “What failure of logic?”

  “The deicidii are still the deicidii, no matter the intention. The murder of God stands alone. What you said about Jews is absurd, on the face of it.”

  “So—your case is made,” he replied. “The infidel is still the infidel. The Jew is still the Jew.” Abelard paused, then added, “The woman is still the woman.” Again a pause. His gaze fell ever so briefly down the length of her hidden body. Under the loose-fitting monk’s habit—there—he saw the faint curve of her breast, a line at her hip. With counterfeit dash, emphasized by a sweep of his hand, he said, “On the face of it.”

  She smiled again. “Infidel. Jew. Woman. If, in the spaciousness of your thought, there is room for the first and the second, there must be room for the third. ‘What is the point of troubling to construct an argument, and to follow where it leads, if all we need, a priori, is the answer from above?’ ” The trap of her mind had caught his words, and now, released, they’d snapped back to hit him. “Your logic,” she added. Her smile now conveyed her savoring.

  Abelard nodded, but slightly.

  She went on: “My uncle has permitted me to be here, in the rear corner o
f your lesson hall, for three days now. I find you unconstrained in your thinking. You go where it takes you. I have learned the rules. Now I would learn to break them.”

  “Keep the rules, dear sister—”

  “—and the rules keep me. I know that. Would you teach me, or not?”

  “How would that work?” Here it was. Abelard felt ambushed—not by her request, which he had seen coming, but by the resistance he felt. Not to her mind, which beckoned as an open sky beckons the bird, but resistance, rather, to that bare suggestion of her breasts beneath the monkish garb. Resistance, therefore, to her body. No, to her body in perfect combination with her mind, the joining that so enlivened her amazing face. It was a rare thing for Peter Abelard to feel the stirring in his loins, but there it was. A man of continence, long without women, he had a fine-nurtured habit of turning efficiently away from such feeling, but now he did not. Still, he was like a war dog, tensed for danger. He glanced at Fulbert, as if it were the Canon to whom he had put his question—not himself.

  “You would take up residence here, on the close,” the stout cleric answered. “I would have you named to the College of Canons Regular.” Fulbert paused. The Canons Regular at Notre-Dame lived a quasi-monastic life, under the rule of Saint Augustine, a reforming impulse aimed at retrieving the ecclesiastical discipline of the early Church. Abelard did not react. Fulbert shrugged. “Or, once named as a Canon, you could simply join my household, a sort of chaplain. As a courtesy to me, you would offer a private tutorial, now and again, to various members of my domestic sodality. No one need know to whom, precisely.”