58. To this son, beloved in Christ, Peter of Poitiers

To the most beloved son, Peter, the brother Peter, the humble abbot of the Cluniac brothers, wishes the inheritance of the benign father through the servitude of the good son.

After meeting with the prince of Aquitaine – whom intoxicated by the chalice of Babylon, we were not able to make drink from the chalice of Christ nor with a catholic remedy were we able to draw out the schismatic flavour with which he was excessively infused – I decided to return back, concluding for many reasons that a retreat was more useful than an advance. Returning not by that route I had come, but making a journey through the more distant parts of Anjou and Maine [and Normandy], and when I had traveled along almost the whole coast of the Western Ocean, I found myself with my companions in the [Ile de] France and celebrated the birth of our Saviour at Paris. [180] Therefore, when established there and recollecting you –though you were not forgotten for even the briefest of instants!– the more pleasing I esteem your presence when you are with me, the more distressingly do I tolerate your absence. …

How often we closed the doors and admitted no other mortal within, only He was witness Who is never absent from those thinking and speaking about Him, have we conversed about the blindness and the hardness of the human heart, about the various traps set for sinners and the snares of the demons, the abyss of judgments of God, how terrible is he in his counsels over the sons of men, how he has mercy on those he wants and is hard on those he wants, and how a man does not know whether he is worthy of love or hate. We would also talk about the fearful burden of our vocation, of the conferral of human salvation through the incarnation of the son of god and his passion, of the fearful day of final judgment, of the incomprehensible harshness of the divine verdict by which he punishes the evil forever, of his unspeakable mercy, by which he hands over an eternal reward to the good.

where no outsider is admitted, where the whirl and noise of worldly tumults are quiet, where the voice of God speaking in the whistling of the gentle breeze is heard without any sound of a bodily voice.

If I wanted to explore the mysteries of Holy Scripture, you were always ready. If, on the other hand, I preferred to discuss some point of secular literature, you were quick and acute. And if we were talking about contempt of the world and love of heaven…your words were so unworldly and spiritual that you seemed to speak to me already as “I am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress concerning the works of men”.[1]

But even if I named [yourself] a servant, how did I go beyond? [184] For the Rule commands that the monk subjects himself to his better with every obedience. If every [obedience], then also in servile [obedience]. If every, therefore the servile. Therefore you are my servant. And so I criticize the servant, fleeing the lord, seeking a hiding place, refusing to follow, unwilling to serve. Certainly in imitating your lord and God, you promised obedience until death, but you continued this labour not even for a short distance. He obediently descended from heaven to earth, you angrily retreated from earth to earth. A departure from the heights of heaven, and a conjunction of it with the highest of it, your departure was not able to be the cause of Christ from a frigid mountaintop, nor was your retreat able to be a briefly fulfilled trip to it. I certainly do not think that you were troubled by so much snows of the mountain that your suffered the fire of charity to be extinguished in yourself. But [yet] you say, I did not exceed the limits of obedience, since you remained with the permission of your father. But you did not receive it spontaneously, but grasped something extorted with improper requests. This clearly is not to be obedient. What therefore is obedience? As the law of the monks states, to abandon your proper will and fulfill the will of the master, and he imitates the voice of the lord in his deeds, as it says, I do not come to do my will, but the will of him who sent me.Therefore, the will of one commanding, more than the word, the affect, more than the voice, [and] the intellect, more than the sound must be observed by the monk. But you said, “I indeed will abide, but I will entreat God for your salvation. Thus also Saul, perversely choosing to sacrifice to God more than to be obedient, and placing his own desire above His will, heard from the prophets, DoesGod want sacrifices and victims, and no more that you obey his will?Be constant, therefore, since one ought to be obedient according to the will of his superiors and then finally is the true and salubrious obedience of the disciple when, with this obedience at the fore, he follows not only the voice, but also the will of the master. For when the disciple extorts a command of the master contrary to [the magisterial] will by relentlessness or faintheartedness, it should be said that he does not obey the master, but the master obeys him. In such a way, I obeyed your will, when I saw that you were unwilling to go on, and gave you permission to stay. You therefore changed the proper order, you made the head into a tail; you placed me, upside-down, last and yourself, first; as a son, a disciple, and a monk you refused to follow your father, master and abbot. Here I am laboring, while you rest; I am awake, while you sleep; I am weeping, while you are silent; I am fighting, while you relax; I am wandering over the world, while you are sitting on your mountain.[2]Not thusly did the good woman Ruth [suggest] when she responded to her great-grandmother Naomi (to whom she cleaved for a long time) strongly urging that she return to hers: Do not obstruct me from leaving you and departing. Wherever you go I will go. Where you lodge, I also will lodge. What land receives your dying body, there I will die, and there I will accept a tomb. May God do this for me and may he add this, if death alone ever separates your and me. But perhaps a woman seems to you to be inadmissible as testimony. Yet it is she whom the Old Testament and the gospel writings honourably memorialize, and they write about her seed that the son of God took on human flesh: Yet he also should come, indeed of a foreign people, but a man of virtue to be placed among men with merited praise, Ethai (Ittai), namely a Gittite, who, with the father’s errors abandoned, cleaved to that great king David, and was his inseparable companion. [Ethai’s] large band of companions passed before the king (who was fleeing the sight of his son the kin-slayer) and the king himself said to him (who was prepared to fight for his [king’s] life): Go back and stay with the king, since you are a foreigner, and also an exile from your home. You came yesterday and today you are compelled to leave with us? Go back and take your brothers with you. May you show gratitude and faith.And Ethai responded to the king, saying: The lord lives and the lord my king lives, since wherever you are, my lord and king, either in death or in life, there will be your servant.And David said to Ethai: Go and march on.But why did I mention this woman and this foreigner and if it does this for your sake and does not serve more my reasoning? For, the weaker the sex, the more remote the worship both before and away from God, the more laudable are either faith and charity. But praising them diminishes your praise, their faith notes your infidelity, their fervour condemns your torpor. And in fact, this daughter serves her great-grandmother, this knight serves his king, but this monk does not serve his abbot. They are driven to be reconciled to this by these same lords, but they do not wish that they leave them in great perils; you, equally a deserter and a despiser, do not hear your lord praying that he is not deserted. I see that Elijah about to be taken away and to be born up by galloping and fiery horses through the uppermost parts of the sky, takes a trip with Elisha and says to her: Remain here since the lord has dispatched me to Bethel. And a second time, Remain here since the lord has dispatched me to Jordan.And a third time, Remain here, since the lord has dispatched me to Jericho.To this third statement, I here the prophetess responding, The lord lives and he lives in your soul, since I will not leave you. Which means, she understands that a disciple who is a true lover of his master refuses to desert, and that she witnesses that he is born to the heavens and that there is able to be made a twofold spirit within him. And Elisha said to Elijah, The lord lives and he lives in your soul, since I will not leave you.[186] But what do you say to me? The lord lives and he lives in your soul, since I do not follow you. But perhaps you disdain to follow because you despair that it is possible I would be taken unto Heaven just like Elijah. I ask, I state, and I warn that you not despair since the goal of advancing is every, and at the same time the single, motive for us, that not only I, but equally you, are taken unto heaven. He alone was taken, while his disciple marveled and shouted; you will be taken with me, while all the people look on. You will marvel, perhaps, at what I say, and imagine that I speak madness. But I am not mad, since what I say I affirm through apostolic testimony: We will be taken up into the clouds, together with Christ in the air, and thus always we will be with the lord.This the lord himself affirms: He will send his angels,the son of Man said,with a trumpet and a great voice, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from the highest of the heavens to their ends.If therefore we endeavour to be among the number of elect gathered by the elected angels, and not divided in the clouds together with Christ in the air, but, as the apostle writes, we will be taken up at the same time, not returned as Elijah was, but we will be always with the lord. Thus, as I have said above, this is our complete purpose at home or abroad, either traveling or remaining somewhere; that both here we serve the Lord, and when taken there, we will find revelry in eternity. But I know what you might say to this: the fatherland (to which I proposed never to return) opposes lest I follow you. To this I respond: I concede that even Abraham left his fatherland at the command of God, and did not return to it afterwards. But however, I do not ignore Job in the land of Uz(which was his fatherland), a simple, upright and god-fearing man, a man turning away from evil. I hear from the apostle Peter that Lot in Sodom(of which there were no natives only colonists) was just in his appearance and rumour. I read that the mages, coming from the east to the manger of the Christ child and venerating him as a king, god and man with an offering of gifts, returned, although by another path, nonetheless it was to their land. But if you make an objection by referring to Abraham, whom I mentioned above, I say that he, as much as he was a perfect man, did not ever fear for himself as disloyal on account his departure from his fatherland, but wisely looked towards a powerless future. For he feared lest his kin chosen by God abide among idolaters or those corrupt in morals, and be turned, even a little, from the worship and fear of God by the example of evil-doers. On this account, he neither wished to return to his departed fatherland nor permitted his son to be escorted back there, showing to his kin by his example what [path] they ought to follow. In this, he demonstrated what he wished to become of his descendants, commanding to his servant: Beware, lest everyou escort back my son there. [187] It is evident, therefore, that he did not look out for himself (who strongly prohibited that his son be escorted back there), but for his descendants. Certainly, if the fatherland must be loathed by the good, neither Job would have abided in his (as I already said), nor would the devoted wise men have returned to theirs, nor would the lord himself have publicize his by his miracles. Therefore it is not the fatherland that needs to be fled by the good, but the morals of the fatherland –if they are evil. But if remaining in the fatherland allows for a sound program of sanctity, how much better is it to traverse it. But perhaps still you will offer an answer that this is a question of being perfect. Why are you called to a program of perfection, will you touch on imperfection? Why must you, following the apostle, extend yourself in a row, will you return again? Why must you be made better than your very self by a daily progress, will you be inferior? Be perfect, the lord said,just as your father in heaven is perfect. I openly praise, since it is laudable, if the sight of parents, of friends, of kin is fearful for you, if grave words, if suspect morals, lest they move …I certainly praise a not overly-confident caution, but I do not praise a judgment inflexible unto the good. But if these things terrify you, if you recoil from the sight of familiar servants as if they were belligerent enemies, for the enemies of a man are the enemies of his servant, erect the tower of Zion against the face of Damascus, put on the armor of God in which you might destroy all the fiery weapons of the enemy. If the thought of things to be destroyed softly murmurs in your mind, the delight of eternity will hold them in check. Or if the serpent dared hiss something with the mouth of a parent, not only would it not be heard, but the wicked head would be immediately suppressed with virile steadfastness. If you continue to see them (who should be called friends and parents) as infected by the plague of an “in-dweller” with which they wish to infect you, you should not depart until you restore those purged by the salubrious admonition to good health, with the result that, with the vessels of the most evil enemy snatched back, you deliver a noble triumph to God by this. For it is right not that they make you weak, but that you make them strong, not that they make you carnal, but that you make them spiritual, not that they make you terrestrial, but that you make them celestial. You must strive, therefore, not to put an imperfect trust in flight, but, like the son of perfection, to present examples of virtue to your imperfect householders. For the laurels of victory are given, not to the one who flees, but to the one staying put, not to one who yields, but one resisting, not to the one who succumbs but to the one triumphant. I also should have the will, if the ability is granted and I should not, I well know, want it for you alone, in fact I should have the will as Isaiah records, to hide in a hole in the dirt from the face of the awesome lord, who in coming days will arrive to break the world and to seek a place for me, both spiritual and corporeal, in a stone grotto, in a rock cave. [188] But if it is not granted, or it is not granted for some time, let us imitate him who, while among crowds of people, royal feasts and golden walls, said: Lo, I have gone far off, flying away and I abode in solitude. And as in the enclosures of mountains, so let us build for ourselves in the hidden places of our hearts, solitudes where alone a true hermitage is found by those who truly despise the world, where no outsider is admitted, where the storm and the noise of worldly tumults is calmed, where the voice of the speaking God is heard without any sound of a bodily voice in a whistling of a gentle air. Let us go back constantly to this solitude while we are in body and are absent from the Lordand placed in the middle of crowds and let us find in ourselves what we seek in the uttermost borders of the world, for the kingdom of God is within you.[3]Once there and having taken silence upon ourselves, let us adore the solitary and fall prostrate before Godand let us weep in the presence of the Lord who made us, let us pour out our hearts before him and as the blessed Jerome said, let us mourn our world and our miseries. Certainly for us, much is the material of mourning, such that I leave unmentioned [much evidence] which is suitable: that the world lies in the midst in evil, that dangerous times are at hand, that iniquity abounded and charity grew cold, that truly now saint falters since the truths are diminished by the children of men, that all deviate at the same time that they are made useless, thatthere is none who does good, there is not even a single one, that with Jewish madness, lost men daily crucify the son of God on their own and hold him as a sign, that those hoarding for themselves without pause the anger on the day of anger, they ceaselessly furnish their very selves with the fodder for an eternal fire. And who might specify everything? Desiring things similar to this and those with an interior regard and weeping in the presence of the Lord within the desert of the mind in order that we may light one coal from another, we beseech that this ever-suffering font of mercy never hold himself above us, we prefer to be in the home of mourning with those serving wisely, not in the home of celebration with foolish courses, as was also said to us by the Lord: And so you now have a certain sadness, but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice and no one can take your joy from you. And behold, when I write these words, a messenger arrives; mournful in equal measure to our own mourning, and with abundant tears narrated that one deserving of memory –this our Gerard, ours completely ours– departed from us, and –to say what I truly feel– he was not removed from life in death, but rather he exchanged death for life. Henceforth absolving him [189] in the presence of his brothers with a voice scarcely sufficing for this, I lifted myself at the urging of an interior fire and reaching the church, I soon began the rites. There, although the sweet funeral was of one absent and known late, I commended a pious soul to the most pious redeemer to whom it had always cleaved, presenting many tears, as was fitting, and myself offering the sacrifice of our holy Lord’s body and blood for him at the vigil of the epiphany. For though I keep silent about his other good deeds, which would have demanded a separate and lengthy treatise, in whom was more fully satisfied the promise of the lord saying, he who eats my body and drinks by blood will remain with me and I with him, and again, I am the bread of lifewho descended from heaven, anyone who eats of this bread will have life everlasting, than in this our dead [brother], who (while he lived) almost always daily received for life this bread of life, (that is the body of his Lord). He will live, I say, he will live everlasting, who with the witness of good conscience always chewed the bread which grants life everlasting.

[1]Trans. By Giles Constable LPV, II, p. 332.

[2]LPV, ep. 58, I. pp. 184-85 (translated by Constable, LPV, II, p. 340)

[3]LPV, ep. 58, I, p. 188; translated in Giles Constable, “Ideal of Inner Solitude,” p. 29;