8 - The poetical conscience

Summary

The solemnity with which intellectuals discussed fictio during the second quarter of the twelfth century is alleviated only by a hint of humour in Abelard's autobiography, and even then his account of the inverted penance experienced by him and Heloise when their affair was discovered amounts to little more than a parenthesis. The main thrust of the narrative is, to establish the authenticity of a monastic vocation that had begun, at Saint-Denis, as a form of feigning. On the margins of this central issue, a touch of irony might be directed at Cuno of Preneste when he ‘repented’ the act of injustice that had made him unpopular, but the integrity of his own motivation was a truth at which Abelard allowed no one to laugh. Nor is there much that is comic in Heloise's self-accusations of insincerity. Despite a trace of black humour at her plight, she regarded herself, in her first and second letters, with deadly seriousness, concluding, from her impenitence for her past sins, the fictio of her religious life in the present. Heloise did not do so because her conscience ‘awoke’. It turned on itself. The savage scrupulousness of that turn, which made few concessions to comedy and granted no quarter to feigning, was also embodied, during her lifetime and Abelard'es, by that relentless enemy of mirth, St Bernard.

After his death in 1153, not everyone was willing to regard Bernard of Clairvaux with the earnestness he reserved for himself.