Precious to grace: Necessary desolation in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard

Walk in faith even though Heaven seems out of reach. Think how good it would be if you could write that.

-Mark Salzman, Lying Awake 175

MOTHER Mary Joseph's words to Sister John of the Cross near the conclusion of Mark Salzman's recent novel, Lying Awake, capture the central impulse of Alexander Pope's 1717 poem, Eloisa to Abelard. Like Sister John who faces a devastating choice between living with a small brain tumor that provides moments of spiritual ecstasy and surgery that could potentially lead her back to the aridity of her prior monastic existence, Eloisa too faces a crisis of faith, here described as a choice between her unruly passion for Abelard and her spiritual love for God. Just as Mother Mary Joseph understands the power of language to console the fainthearted on their journeys to Heaven, so too does Pope realize that his poem creates both a painful dissonance and a compelling resolution that encourages and heartens others on their sometimes wayward walks to God.

Traditionally, much of the criticism that touches upon Eloisa's spiritual crisis-a crisis that seems to put "Heaven just out of reach"centers on the extensive interpretive debate about the struggle between "grace and nature, virtue and passion" that Alexander Pope articulates in "The Argument" to Eloisa to Abelard:

It was many years after this separation, that a letter of Abelard's to a Friend which contain'd the history of his misfortune, fell into the hands of Eloisa. This awakening all her tenderness, occasion'd those celebrated letters (out of which the following is partly extracted) which give so lively a picture of the struggles of grace and nature, virtue and passion.'

As this debate is typically formulated, it raises opposing questions concerning Eloisa's spiritual status in the poem. According to the dialectic Pope seems to have established in "The Argument," critics either emphasize her redemption through the saving power of God's grace, or they alert readers to her failure as a religious woman because of her inability to free herself from her idolatry of Abelard.2 Instead of taking sides in this debate, which grounds its arguments in the dialectic that Pope's "Argument" seems to suggest, I propose that we focus on another key concept presented in "The Argument"; that is, the idea of struggle. Pope's Eloisa rejects an easy conventional conversion narrative, seeking instead, as Linda Georgianna has written, "a new spiritual model that can adequately describe and account for her complex spiritual state" (190). Eloisa wishes to account for the gap between her unruly inner life and a static monastic life that she professes in order to help herself and others "do good and avoid evil, for the love of God, requirements that entail an ongoing interior struggle with one's motives, memories and desires" (205).

If we focus on Eloisa's ongoing interior struggle rather than on the irreconcilable tension between "grace and nature, virtue and passion," we can more fully appreciate the poem's deeply complex spiritual, monastic and Catholic dimensions. My aim in this essay is to historicize Pope's poem in several ways, first by closely analyzing Pope's representation of Eloisa in light of his own Catholicity and contemporary depictions of her, and then by showing how some understanding of the Benedictine monastic context which underwrites the poem serves to deepen the poem's pathos and increase our appreciation of Eloisa's sacrifice and pain. Further, within this fuller historical account, I will suggest that Eloisa remains an exemplary religious woman because she participates whole-- heartedly in the ongoing interior struggle between desolation and consolation. These movements, which Pope painstakingly delineates in his poem, effectively mirror the sometimes slow and painful spiritual process whose success is always in question. Finally, I will consider how Pope's introduction of the creator-poet at the poem's conclusion, just at the moment when Eloisa seems to recognize the futility of seeking spiritual perfection, points to a compelling paradox. Eloisa's consolation seems dependent upon a grace that falls to the poet, who, by retelling her story, may offer consolation and guidance to those who might, like Eloisa, "fear God's judgment even as they seek God's love" (Georgianna 202).

In his study of Alexander Pope's poem, Eloisa to Abelard, James Wellington describes in detail the processes by which Pope extrapolated material for his poem from an unfaithful English translation of the letters of Abelard and Heloise (Wellington 19-25). At one point in the analysis, Wellington notices that Pope's material is drawn mainly from the second, fourth, and fifth letters in this version, known as the Hughes translation, which was published in 1713. Furthermore, Wellington makes the point that "Hughes's French precursor completely suppressed the original third letter of Heloise, with its searching theological questions and its final acquiescence in the religious life and replaced it with a far more impassioned utterance of his own devising" (59). In its place, the anonymous authors included a "wholly fictitious" third letter which represents Heloise as "far more amorous than the real one and debases the dignity and piercing eloquence of the historical Heloise into the coquetry of a salon flirt" (23). As another part of my goal in this essay I would like to suggest that Pope was sufficiently well-versed in the Catholic tradition to recreate in his poem what was missing from the Hughes translation from which he worked: the sentiments of the historical Heloise's third letter in which she expresses her experience of both desolation and consolation in her religious life. In doing so, Pope not only acted like many early eighteenth-century writers who used their imaginations to bridge the gap between history and fiction, but he manifested his life-long need to be correct in his poetry, "to put the image straight" (Mack 660). With Pope, correctness meant "an exquisite weighing of sound, of textures, of rhythm, as well as an adaptation of metre to the idea, the congruence of feeling with form, and, one need hardly add, appropriate diction" as well as constant devotion to the craft of poetry (Dobree 188). Given Pope's startling poetic integrity, then, it is not inconceivable to suggest that Pope wrote Eloisa to Abelard to "correct" the misrepresentation of her in the Hughes translation of the letters by recreating her spiritual anxieties. Pope's knowledge and experience as a Roman Catholic find their way into the poem to emphasize the magnitude of Eloisa's genuine spiritual crisis, a crisis he recognizes as absent from his source for the poem.