Peter Abelard wrote this for the convent of the Paraclete, where the abbess was Heloise. They had married in secret; her guardian, believing Abelard meant to discard her, hired men to break into his house at night and castrate him. He fled into monastic life and later called his past “the darkness of history.” Around 1131 he composed a full year of hymns for Heloise and her sisters, and this one closes the first volume, appointed for Vespers on Saturday. Its Latin title, O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata, sings of “those endless Sabbaths,” the day that supersedes both the weekly sabbath and the Year of Jubilee. In stanza 2 Abelard wrote that in that city the wish is not less than its reward. John Mason Neale rendered the line in 1851 as “wish and fulfillment are not severed there,” almost certainly without knowing how literally a man severed from his wife and his body would have meant it. Its closing stanza is a precise Trinitarian doxology, perhaps Abelard’s own answer to the Council of Soissons, where in 1121 he was forced to burn his book on the Trinity with his own hands.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025