The Cloister: A Novel

Constantine' Sword is of one of the few books that inspired me to take notes and write my own essay so I could remember the points I found important. When I finished the book I wanted to know more about the key rationalist figures who were silenced by Catholic church hierarchy. Abelard was first on that list for me. His humanistic thinking flew in the face of the Church's entrenched conclusions that Jews and Muslims were "the other." So much of human history would have been different if he, and others like him, had prevailed.The Cloister fills that void with an easily accessible presentation of Abelard's thought and his love, mirrored beautifully by a modern story of a man and woman brought together through their interests in faith and in the ancient story of Héloïse and Abelard. Carroll does a masterful job of story-telling, which is job #1 for a novel. And, since the theme of the book is based in documented, if forgotten, history, one can learn a lot along the way.

It has long been my fear as a Catholic teacher that history is our forgotten friend in the development of Faith. Not to belittle official catechisms and formularies, by any stretch of the imagination, but compelling and accurate creative writing throughout the Judeo-Christian Era—beginning with the Scriptures themselves—take believers and non-believers alike through the existential collision of belief and doubt. In James Carroll’s 2017 narrative of medieval dilemma carried forward to post World War II exhaustion and despair, the anguish and the militancy of troubled souls is exposed with the potential to compel any thoughtful reader to examine, perhaps for the first time, the bones of personal meaning and purpose, without which any religious expression loses its power to save.The hero and heroine of this narrative are Peter Abelard [1079-1142 C.E.] and Heloise [1090-1164 C.E.], possibly the most intriguing couple of medieval times whose letters of love and philosophical pursuit have remarkably survived and remain in healthy circulation today. The circumstances of their personal relationship are problematic enough: Peter Abelard was a widely known Catholic scholar and teacher in Western Europe who lectured to college classes of over a thousand. His writings and his approach to “doing theology” [i.e., processing the nature of coming to truth] was revolutionary and quite unsettling to his academic peers, churchmen, and local officials. He is described today as a proud and ambitious figure with enemies in high places, perhaps best personified in the Church scholar St. Bernard of Clairvaux.A very public figure coming into his most productive years, Abelard was introduced to the striking young Heloise, a scholar in her own right, about a decade Abelard’s junior but very much his equal in ego strength and erudition. Abelard took up residence in Heloise’s home, where she lived as a ward of a churchman named Fulbert, apparently her uncle. On paper, this was a tutorial arrangement, but in truth Carroll depicts the student as challenging her master to the logical conclusions of his writings on such matters as universal salvation and the nature of love.Both parties found that their unity of spirit fed the desire for full consummation, and the wedding night, so to speak, is described in the atmosphere of a religious rubric. There is still scholarly debate over the participants’ understanding of their intimacy as a state of marriage. Carroll’s narrative strongly suggests that Heloise, at least, believed herself truly married and would eventually become pregnant with Abelard’s child. While a cleric’s marriage was not unheard of, Abelard’s high visibility would have made a formal marriage for him a career-ending decision, to say the very least. Placing the child with Abelard’s family, the couple faced the consequences of their union; Heloise was shunted to a convent, and Abelard was set upon and castrated, and later retired to monastic life.Abelard’s castration was a symbolic blow to his radical theology as well, not least to his defense of Jews, and Carroll transports us from one scholarly pairing to another, eight centuries later in France. Having devoted a lifetime of work to Abelard’s lesser known texts on the possibility of amity between Christians and Jews, the elderly Jewish scholar Saul Vedette had lost his opportunity to escape the encroaching Nazi menace. He had remained behind at the insistence of his 20-year-old daughter Rachel who convinced him to finish his Abelard writings in France where his sources lie.Rachel Vedette is this work’s most enigmatic figure. Her life’s work at this juncture was undertaking critical research for her father’s opus and nursing him daily through debilitating disease. The decision to remain in France was hers, and the reader will need to sort out the motivations behind her course of action. Given the parallel universe of Abelard and Eloise, was Rachel assuming the Heloise mission of bringing her partner’s mission to completion by the very gift of herself? Or, as was true with Heloise, did Rachel see in her work one of those rare opportunities for a woman to breath the rarified air of personal and professional fulfillment in a society where men held sway?The reader must enter this dilemma and behold the gruesome consequences that follow Rachel and her father to the camps and the unthinkable things she and he must do to preserve any hope of life for herself. Having been broken in body and spirit under the Nazis and later the French resistance, she makes her way to New York where she finds work as a tour guide at the Cloisters Museum in upper Manhattan. Here she meets the one character in this tale who is not yet living under the shadow of Abelard, Father Michael Kavanaugh, a 38-year old parish priest assisting at a Broadway parish with five curates.Carroll knows priests, as well as the ennui of church life prior to the Council Vatican II in 1962. Kavanaugh was innocent of Abelard because, truth be told, American Catholic academic life in the 1950’s had bottomed out. But the priest was not without his personal shadows, particularly several unfortunate dealings with Cardinal Spellman’s apparatchiks. His tank running near empty, Kavanaugh finds himself visiting the Cloisters more frequently and ever so gradually entering the pained histories of Rachel and Saul, and eventually Abelard and Heloise, over Rachel’s lunch breaks.Having counseled abuse victims through my professional life, I am aware of the enormous burden of patient listening required of the hearer as trust is established in very uneven steps, and at times the process grinds to a halt altogether. Kavanaugh exercises this ministry exquisitely well with Rachel, though he never seems to think of the process as “ministry.” The irony—or perhaps the outcome to be expected—is that Kavanaugh’s entry into Rachel’s life makes him a better priest and awakens his long somnolent intellectual curiosity through—what else? –a reading of Abelard. Carroll does not connect future dots for Kavanaugh and Vedette, but leaves a hint of optimism, whatever the choice.

In all my years of reading, I've never been so engrossed in a book where I lose sight of what's going on around me. But it happened recently while reading The Cloisters. Mr. Carroll somehow managed to write three stories simultaneously and yet they were all connected. In the medieval story, I learned about the relationship between Heloise and Peter Abelard and how rigid and uncompromising religious beliefs were; in the second story, I read about what Jews had to do to stay alive during the Holocaust; and in the third story, which took place in the 1950s, I'm still trying to assimilate what it meant. I rarely read books twice, but The Cloisters' demands a second and possibly third reading, along with a good dictionary. I'm also looking forward to reading more of James Carroll's books.

Must reading for leaders of Catholic education and curriculum. Why not tell it like it was/is? This is a warm-hearted, yet icily critical account of Catholic formation in the '50s. It is the story of the beauty of faith stunted by the hubris of power. Played out against the story of Heloise and Abelard and the inhumanity of the Holocaust, two honest souls seek the truth of their being.

A beautiful work of courageous thought. Carroll intercalates time and loss, love and surprise. Life echoes back and forth from the twelfth century to the twentieth. A book to savour.

Love the three point plot, the character development, and the truthful depiction of rigid Catholic life, pre-Vatican II. (Also, the comparison of Cardinal Spellman with The Little King in the '50s Sunday funnies. Anyone else remember him?)My only objection is having Abelard and Heloise fall in love at first sight. In my experience, lasting relationships don't happen that way, but that's just me.If Peter Abelard had been heeded in his own time, and not condemned, could the Holocaust have been avoided? What about the current wave of ugly anti-Semitism? Certainly worth consideration.This book is fantastic. Read it! Cat Lady

The first thing to strike me was that it was so well written; a joy to read. Then, it illuminates the history of Jewish/Catholic relations from the time of Jesus to the present. The author is a master of his detailed material and uses it to display his message lucidly. This is required reading for understanding our present age. I have pressed this book one all my friends and now I shall have to buy more copies.

I hated for this book to end. I loved each character, none of them stereotypical, even the historical ones, especially them. I love the complexity of relationship...no easy answers anywhere, as in real life. Real History.