The Cloister Read online

  “ ‘To bless and be blest forever,’ ” Kavanagh read. “ ‘O God, what a life, and it is yours, O Priest of Jesus Christ.’ ” Kavanagh slipped the bookmark back between the pages and put the book down again, an act of punctuation. For a long time, the two men sat in silence.

  Finally, Kavanagh asked, “So what is it with John Malloy?”

  “I can’t discuss that.”

  “Seal of Confession.”

  “Or that.”

  “What can you tell me?”

  “He’s a teacher. A school in New Jersey. A coach.”

  “He was dressed like a stockbroker.”

  “It’s that kind of school.”

  “Why did he come to Good Shepherd?”

  “Beats me, Michael.”

  “Did he talk about me?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “I can’t discuss it, Michael.”

  “Can you put me in touch with him? I’d like to see him.”

  “If he gets back to me, I’ll ask him. Otherwise, it would be a violation.”

  “But you felt free to point him to me.”

  “Not the same.” Now, when Bishop Donovan stubbed out his cigarette, it carried the meaning that the session was over. Session. Not old friends together; not even counselor and client, Kavanagh saw suddenly, but employer and employee.

  Both men stood. Kavanagh’s gaze went to the crucifix on the wall, then to the portrait of Pius XII. “Something else, Sean,” he said.

  Bishop Donovan smiled, a full display of official, but still genuine, benevolence. He was a good boss. “Anything, anything at all.”

  “Simone Weil.”

  “The French saint?”

  “Was she a saint? I’ve been reading her book. She was never baptized. She wouldn’t join a Church that claimed the right to say ‘Anathema sit!’ ”

  Donovan snorted. “We don’t say it that much anymore.”

  “You said it to Runner.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I told you, at Good Shepherd yesterday, he knelt there but didn’t receive Communion. As in ‘excommunicated.’ That’s what you’d done to him. That’s what he was telling me.”

  “I protected you.”

  “What did I need protection from, Sean?”

  Bishop Donovan did not answer. The silence grew, becoming a kind of presence in the room. At last, Kavanagh bent over to pick up his breviary. Straightening, he asked, “Was Simone Weil an anti-Semite?”

  “Good God, no. She was a Jew.”

  Kavanagh nodded, and turned. That he left the room without a word of farewell was, he knew, quite rude. He did not understand what was happening to him.

  The morning sun washed down on Madison Avenue. The sidewalk was crowded with workers and shoppers, all happy, all moving briskly in the November chill. Kavanagh stepped into the rush. He was wearing neither a topcoat nor a hat, and this emphasized his clerical suit; passersby, as always, made way for him. Normally, aware of the impression he made as a priest in public, he would return the nods and smiles that the clerical collar drew from strangers, but not today. By the time he reached the nearest corner, he had to move out of the human current. What’s happening to me? He pushed to a lamppost and leaned against the stout, grooved metal, clutching his breviary, indifferent to appearances. His breath was short again. He looked skyward, as words came unbidden into his mind. Perhaps he spoke them: “Non credo.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  And, can you believe it, Philintus? Canon Fulbert allowed me the privilege of his table, and an apartment in his house….You, my dear friend, know what love is; imagine then what a pleasure it must have been to a heart so inflamed as mine to be always so near the dear object of desire! I would not have exchanged my happy condition for that of the greatest monarch upon earth. I saw Héloïse, I spoke to her: each action, each confused look, told her the trouble of my soul. And she, on the other side, gave me ground to hope for every thing.

  That first morning of what became their articulated attachment was, in fact, their eighth time together. They were in the cubicle off the main scriptorium, the large room in which the copyists tended to the Cathedral’s collection of ancient texts. Abelard routinely held his tutorials there during Terce, when the Cathedral scribes, bound to the Hours, would be at choir, and he could offer instruction without an audience. Through a single small window cut a wedge of light that illuminated, for the necessary period, just the square of space the Master and his pupil needed to do their work. In the bright air stood a small table and a pair of chairs. Their table. Their chairs.

  In truth, Peter Abelard’s condition was not as happy as, much later, he made out to Philintus—as no one knew better than Héloïse herself. His infatuation with her had come at him like ambush, an assault of feeling made worse by the feeling’s being necessarily and absolutely secret. In the early weeks, he had thought it secret from her, but wrongly. It had not occurred to Abelard that she could match him in fixation, even if she was made less distraught than he. A man of no carnal experience, he was far more afraid than he was delighted.

  In what became his famous letter to Philintus, as in much-sung lyrics he himself went on to compose, he described a storm of exuberant lust that promptly blew through the wills and consciences of a pair of formerly disciplined ascetics. The same house, the same love, united our persons and our desires. How many soft moments did we pass together!…We made use of all the moments of our charming interviews. In the place where we met we had no lions to fear, and the study of philosophy served us for a blind. Héloïse well knew it was not like that, although she, too, would later look back through a scarlet lens. In fact, they were a pair of timid neophytes, gingerly circling each other.

  Abelard and Héloïse now sat across from each other, as they had been doing, at this hour, twice a week for a month. They had fallen into a routine of stiff formality, a proper custom, and each assumed it must continue. Between them was a small stack of wax tablets on the likes of which Héloïse had been presenting her translations of Cicero and Ovid into Greek. At first, she had protested this novice exercise. Rome had surpassed Athens, and Rome’s language—her own language—was the pinnacle of expression. She assumed that Master Peter was simply testing her knowledge of Greek, but she was wrong, as she began to understand this morning. He had come to his real subject aslant.

  “Metamorphoses,” he said. “Ovid gives us the word for the transformation of essences. An ingenious coinage in our tongue, yet he has the word from the Greek.”

  “Metamorphoses,” she said, speaking the word not in Latin, but in Greek, with its proper accent. “Change of form.”

  “Precisely. But is ‘change of form’ possible? When ‘one thing’ becomes another, does it not cease to be ‘one thing’? Can it really be ‘another’? Translation is the case before us.”

  “Anima into psychē?”

  “Good. The ‘soul’ in one language, yet something more like ‘the mental faculty’ in the other. Shades of distinction. Distinctions lost in the handing over from tongue to tongue. In your translations, sister, you do not succeed in carrying the full meaning of Ovid’s thought from Latium to Attica.” Master Peter indicated the tablets between them. “I find no equivalence.”

  “My translations are accurate,” Héloïse said quietly. She picked up the stylus, to stop her hands. It looked like an oversized needle, a sharp-pointed utensil carved from the leg bone of a cow, the color of charred wood.

  “Yes. Wonderfully so,” Abelard said. “But accuracy is not equivalence. That is my point. No equivalence. Translation claims to be a kind of metamorphosis, but is not. No idea ever remains the same when it is translated. Not even when translated with such brilliance as yours. Give me an example from today’s passage.”

  “An example?”

  “Of metamorphosis.”

  “Actaeon, the hunter, into a stag, the hunted.”

  “Yes, good,” the teacher said, but he could b
e seen to stifle a pang, and Héloïse supplied its source. Actaeon, the Theban hero, wandering through a forest, comes upon a sacred grove in a small lake of which the goddess Diana is bathing. Actaeon beholds her nakedness—the mystery of her maidenhead. For this violation, he is—snap!—changed into a four-legged animal. At the evocation of that pool, with its attendant nymphs, Héloïse, knowing more than Abelard, sensed how both of them were seized by an image of the goddess in her glistening wet flesh: Diana’s arms raised to gather in the spray of her hair, her flawless breasts all the more alluring for being so innocently on display. As if to deflect an actual vision, Abelard’s eyes fell, but Héloïse saw them settle upon the embroidered yoke of her own gown. Above a tightly laced bodice, the gray tufted fabric rose with her breathing. Despite having no experience of men, she knew that his mind, thus set loose, would conjure her breasts, too: tumescent, erect, like the breasts of striding female figures in marble, Minerva, Juno. Surely, the classic statues of Lutetia would have been his only points of reference for the womanly nude. But at that moment the flesh to be seen of Héloïse, in all apparent modesty, was nothing more than the hollow of her throat, set off by a thin golden chain. Her fuller neck would be a deep red, pulsing with life.

  He composed his voice to say, placidly, “Still, identifying the animal with the prince, we are expected to regard the stag’s fate as tragic.”

  She said, in her best pupil’s voice, “Actaeon’s own hounds kill the stag, not knowing it is Actaeon.”

  “But there’s the point,” he declared. “The stag was Actaeon, but is no more. Our identification is in error. The tragedy is false.” Abelard tapped the topmost tablet, a teacherly gesture. He was now enacting a role, controlling himself. “The power of the myth,” he continued with apparent calm, “lies in this deception. We grieve the slaying of the prince, when, in fact, a mere animal has met an animal’s proper fate. By offering us one such instance of metamorphosis after another, a Roman, Ovid, not just drawing on the Greeks but mocking them, is showing us that there is no such thing as metamorphosis. Essences are not mutable. Things are what they are. That is all. It is an urgent point—a rebuttal, in anticipation of the mistake that comes later with Plotinus, the confusion of matter and form.”

  “But the chaos of primeval origins is transformed into the order of Rome.” Héloïse, too, could perform. “Is that not the poet’s true subject?”

  “Indeed. You perceive the depth of things, girl.”

  “Why do you call me ‘girl’? Why not ‘woman’?”

  “Why did you choose Actaeon? Of all the myths?”

  Héloïse lowered her eyes, as if found out.

  “Diana threw water in his face,” Abelard said quietly. “The curse that changed him into a beast. Why?”

  “Because he spied her.”

  “And saw?”

  “Her body unclothed.” Héloïse had the stylus now firmly between her two hands, pressing the thing as if to snap it in half, staring as if to see the exact moment of break. Then, all at once, she raised her face and brought her gaze directly to Peter Abelard’s. Each of them was blushing. She said boldly, “But is there shame in a body unclothed, Master?”

  “I would think not. ‘And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.’ ”

  “But that was before the sin of Adam.”

  “Adam’s sin was in loving Eve too much, nothing more.”

  “But the sin falls upon us all, so the Fathers instruct. We are ‘the mass of perdition,’ soul-wounded children of Eve. We come into the world naked, and our nakedness makes us ashamed.”

  “What norm of justice is it that accuses an innocent child in the presence of God, our most merciful judge, of the sin of the parents? That norm of justice would not stand in any court of man. Therefore, neither will it stand before the Judgment Seat of God. If the Doctrine of Ancient Sin means the innocent are doomed, then the doctrine is wrong.” Abelard’s words took on a sudden heat, as if he had debated this question in solemn disputation. “Is God cruel?” he asked. “Does God will the destruction of lives rather than the fulfillment of what He has created? What sort of God is this?”

  “How do you renounce settled doctrine?”

  “By thinking,” he said quickly.

  “About God?”

  “About the simple question: who would sit blissfully for all eternity in the presence of a monster?” Peter Abelard challenged her with a fierce look.

  Héloïse stared at him, her mouth agape.

  In the great legend of their romance—Under the pretext of studies, dear Philintus, she and I totally abandoned ourselves to love…there were more kisses than considerations of grammar—concupiscence determined their fate. They were a lascivious pair who gave in to “hurtful desire,” with dread consequences—the “calamity,” in Abelard’s own word. This was the lecherous story that a mutilated man later told, to appease his disapprovers and to assuage his guilt. In the story, he was the prime mover, the willful seducer; she the guileless quarry, though once incited to mad ardor she never recovered. But that trite saga of Eros explosively ignited, composed in the aftermath of an unspeakable punishment, deletes what was essential in the passion that first defined each of them, if separately.

  For Héloïse, true, the manly beauty of her teacher, in combination with the physical charisma that drew legions to his lectures, was the beginning of attraction, but it was the free play of his mind that astounded her. He was unfettered not only by precept, but by power. “How can you say that?” she asked him more than once. His reply was constant: “I can say it because it is what I think.” A savvy young woman, Héloïse sensed that, despite the self-assurance with which the Master carried himself, he was desperate for the praise of scholars. He would sacrifice, for reputation’s sake, almost anything. But that “almost” was key, for the one offering he would not make in exchange for fame was the truth of his own thinking. And that, of course, was what brought him fame.

  But now, in her presence, another force was at work, and she understood it before he did. Abelard came most fully into a towering intelligence when, for the first time in his life, he felt its engagement physically. The body of Héloïse, as it were, gave Abelard his body, and only then did he grasp the one proposition toward which he had been groping, even in philosophy, for years—namely, that the hard distinction between body and soul is false. Therefore, also, between ideal and real; between substance and form: “because it is what I think”! But thinking in this woman’s presence was not what thinking had ever been before. Thus was fulfilled and released what had been an implicit, unadmitted impulse from their first meeting, in the Cathedral refectory, hemmed in by obnoxious young scholars, with Canon Fulbert standing by. Yet the first true coupling between the storied Abelard and Héloïse—and surely for these two it had to be like this—was of the mind. The furthest thing from profane desire, their connection was the sacred revelation of word become flesh—incarnatus est.

  Abelard was hardly breathing, rock-still. Yet she sensed full well the new meaning of it when he circled back to the lesson. “Translation,” he said at last, “is never fully true. There is no such thing as the total transformation of essences. A thing is only what it is.”

  Héloïse remained fixed upon the stylus between her fingers. “But what of the bread and wine?” she said, so quietly. “Transubstantiation. In Greek, metousiosis.”

  Abelard did not reply. This was a swerve, as she knew it would be, for which he was not prepared.

  She said, in her recitation voice, “ ‘But if the word of Elijah had such power as to bring down fire from heaven, shall not the word of Christ have power to change the nature of the elements?’ That is Father Ambrose.” She paused. She was in earnest, yet she was also extemporizing. “ ‘Hoc est enim Corpus Meum,’ ” she said. “Bread into flesh. Wine into blood. If that is not metamorphosis, what is? The bread is no longer the bread. The bread has become the body of Christ. Christ Himself said those exact words
—‘Hoc est enim Corpus Meum’—which is why the priest must repeat the exact words. The words must be fully true to have such power. The exact words effect the change of substance…of essence.”

  “No, dear girl. Not those exact words.” Abelard took refuge, again, in teacherly condescension. “The scrupulous priest, pronouncing each syllable for efficacy, is a superstitious fool, playing at magic. The Lord did not speak those exact words for the simple reason that He did not speak Latin. Saint Jerome spoke Latin. Father Ambrose spoke Latin. Not Jesus.”

  “Well, the Greek, then. The words Jerome translated. The meaning is the same.”

  “Not Greek, either. The Gospels are Greek, but Jesus was not. He spoke the language of Jewish peasants. A local dialect—not even Hebrew. Jesus spoke, and His words were translated by those who loved him. The translation was then translated again—still with love, yet with shifts in meaning at each point. Shifts in meaning not only in His words, but in the matter of the sacrament itself. This is not a trifling matter.” Peter Abelard’s gaze had fixed her, sternly. He went on, launched now in a serious discourse. “The bread He held up before the Apostles was not what we think of as bread, even at the Holy Mass. It was matzoh, of which we read in Exodus, the unleavened festival food of Jews. The Last Supper, before it was a Mass, was a Passover meal. Before it was Catholic, it was Jewish. Does that fact of the past change meanings of the present? How could it not? Pascha. Missa. The two things are not the same. Only in seeing that do we see the separate truth of what each one is. Was Jesus saying what we think He was saying? We cannot know with precision. The faith involves not meaning, but meanings. As for ‘transubstantiation,’ that high-flying word owes more to pseudo-philosophers than to the Lord. To Him, if He were here today, the word ‘transubstantiation’ would be babel.”

  Abelard reached across the table and closed his hand around her joined hands, the stylus. “Things are what they are. This writing instrument,” he said quietly, “is only a writing instrument.”