26. To his son beloved in Christ, Peter of Poitiers

To my brother and son Peter, beloved to me with a special love, the brother Peter, the humble abbot of Cluny wishes eternal salvation.

After your corporeal presence departed from us, my beloved, and after you took yourself on a certain retreat, fleeing the worldly din (which often ends up drowning you out for us, and drowning us out for you), we decided to write to you frequently –both to learn about your state and to inform your sweetness of mine– but until now I have not been able to fulfill this [promise] on account of secular business, which has bound me to itself (as I thus will say) wishing that I release neither my hand for writing nor my heart for dictating. Not so much did I defer, as I was compelled to defer …

Having now finally laid down the yoke of the harshest lord for scarcely an hour (I find myself first a fugitive then a writer), I furtively compose this little text.I certainly express joy at your tranquility, I delight in your peace, if indeed it is such; whence you also must rejoice. And though I rise and fall on the open sea, though I despair about a life on a ship battered beyond measure by hostile winds and the raging tempest of a swollen sea, I am happy to see you offering a safe harbour and ridiculing the wraths of the sea and sky with a firm mind, The arguments of this matter are certain, because, though both the great love with which I embrace you and the great utility for which I require you strongly reminds that you should cleave to me always, I nonetheless subject my will to yours, I put your salvation before my necessity, I prefer your rest to my affairs. But never caring to reciprocate any return for our benevolence –what I call a salubrious privilege of friendship– you seem to live for yourself, to take care for your things, to slight the things of others and –which is even worse– of friends, [and finally] to withstand both the talons of eagles and the dangers of fearful hawks with an untroubled soul and dry eyes in a found home, like a sparrow, or in a discovered nest, like a turtle dove, amidst the sufferings of lamenting doves. But it lacks that I perceive this from your heart, about which I know nothing other than what I am accustomed to perceive from my heart. For I do not perceive this from your heart, nor do I impose this on it, that I do not doubt to be of a single mind in me. But even if you suffer along with our many tumults and straits, I protest however that you will demonstrate that you suffer along without any evidence. For even if you unable to offer rescue, at least you could offer to empathize. Even if you are not able to assist, at least you are able to advise. Even if you are not able to support, at least you are able to comfort. For if weakness prohibited any assistance who would restrain their words? If the ability to help lacked, who would uphold a speech? Who would prohibit the soul from dictating, the hand from writing? Do you plead that rest is lacking to you? Do you suggest that letters are unknown to you? Do you show that another hindered you? Certainly not. Therefore only indifference remains. If you will have responded by repenting, you will be capable of earning this forgiveness alone. But I will be sparing of shame, I will restrain the hand, I will hold back the whip, I will put up the pen, I will moderate my speech lest I attack beyond what is reasonable to suffer from a friend.I grant forgiveness. I do this but I understand that you have not. I wish to know fully how you consider yourself. For if you prove sufficient to repose with God well, tranquilly and freely (which you always desired), if that place serves openly to that end, if you did not offer rest to your eyes and slumber to your eyelids until you came to a place for the lord, a tent for the God of Jacob, then I will rejoice. If otherwise one looks for so good a place, I will offer a place I believe to be suitable. For I am not able to be concerned about your salvation (which I desire as I do mine own) and on account of this, I tolerate your absence more irksome to me than every other annoyance. I praise what you desired, I undertake what you attempted, I preach what you suggested. But if I am not yet capable of what you were capable, I still want what you wanted. What for? Who does not wish this? Who does not desire so great a good? Who does not wish to be removed from such great evil, by which life is list, by which death is attained, by which God is expelled, by which the enemy is admitted? For the involvement with worldly things that you fled brings either death or the neighbouring danger of death, with the result that almost none who has not run into one of them, have involved himself with them. And especially in this time, this does not return much …

but we seek what things are ours –glory, power, pleasure, money– and anything else there is which seems agreeable to the flesh but which engenders great detriment to the soul. This, at least, we do not discuss such that we consider it partly earth, partly heaven, or what would be more perverse but more endurable, that we understand it less heaven and more earth, or lastly what is completely perverse, that we are able to admit truthfully, utterly disregarding the heavens while cleaving by all means to the earth, since our soul is humbled in the dust, our body is clings to the earth. Beyond which I was able to progress, with this compelling, by stating the very conditions, or rather miseries, but since I heard myself often lamenting those things and you know most completely what I feel about these things, I adjudged it to be refrained from, in order that I not seem to drive the chariot off the course and to gallop outside the lane, and that what I want you alone to know is not made know, by some chance, to another reader.

Come to me soon, therefore, so that I may be able to entrust to the guarded ears of a friend what I would not normally presume to commit to unfaithful pages.