A Mythic Struggle

The lives of Heloise and Abelard were spent challenging authority, says Constant J. Mews.

In 1141, after a career of 40 years spent challenging some of the most cherished intellectual assumptions of his fellow churchmen, Peter Abelard was excommunicated for heresy. The man who brought the charge against him was Bernard of Clairvaux, moral and military crusader and the intellectual and spiritual heir of Abelard’s earliest opponents in the chief philosophical debate of the age. For, long before the scandalous love affair with his brilliant student Heloise, Abelard was a controversial figure, notorious for his outspoken criticism of authority.

Born the eldest son into a wealthy family near the border of Brittany and Anjou, Abelard abandoned his inheritance in order to study, leaving for Paris in around 1100 at the age of 21. It might seem that, by throwing away all knightly opportunities, Abelard was committing himself to a less dangerous life. In reality, he was joining an equally dangerous war of ideas; a life given over to radical logic used in the service of questioning established philosophical categories and other orthodoxies. And his encounter with Heloise would stretch him further than any of the books he read. The story of their relationship and struggle with authority would acquire a mythical character because it embodied the central tensions of the age in which they lived.

These were exciting times. In 1095, Pope Urban II had issued a call to Crusade, ostensibly to help fellow Christians in the East, but in reality to provide a focus for the military ambitions of the nobility of Western Europe. The expedition was unexpectedly successful, resulting in the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. The Church, for centuries subject to secular political control, found itself in a new position of influence within society.

Intellectuals like Abelard, however, questioned the authority of established figures within the Church. In particular, he challenged the views of his own teacher in Paris, William of Champeaux, about universals. Did ‘man’ have any real existence as an abstraction, or did there exist simply individual men? Abelard’s reading of the few texts of Aristotle then available in Latin translation led him to reject the reality of ‘man’ as a general notion. What mattered were the words that we might invent to describe any particular subject, whether it existed or not. After a protracted absence from Paris, prompted initially by overwork, Abelard returned to the city in 1111, and challenged his teacher in debate about universals. He then obtained a position at the public school of the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, where his supporter Stephen of Garlande was dean. Two years later, Abelard went to Laon, in theory to study theology, but in reality to challenge the authority of William’s own teacher, Anselm of Laon. His prowess in debate resulted in him being offered the position he always craved, running the cathedral school of Notre-Dame in Paris.

In around 1115, Abelard became aware of Heloise, a niece of canon Fulbert, then lodging with her uncle in the cathedral close, after having been raised since childhood in the privileged environment of the royal abbey of Argenteuil. They became infatuated with each other. Some 17 years later, he would tell the story of their relationship in his Historia calamitatum (History of my calamities), addressed to ‘a friend in distress’ as a way of describing how providence could turn the most difficult of situations to a positive end. As if to distance himself from the youthful passion by which he was smitten in those years, he describes himself as having fallen victim to the twin vices of pride and debauchery. He recalls how stunned he was by the literary genius of Heloise, and mentions briefly the messages that they secretly exchanged with each other. He gives much more attention, however, to the sexual excesses in which they engaged when they should have been studying. Abelard disguises the complexity of that early relationship. He makes it seem like a mistaken folly, which would deserve the punishment that would ensue.

After Fulbert had discovered their liaison, and after she had given birth to a boy—whom she called Astralabe, perhaps indicating that he was an instrument for contemplating the heavens—Abelard urged a reluctant Heloise to marry, in the vain hope that this might placate her uncle. As a cleric, marriage was legally permissible, but would prevent any promotion to higher orders. When they continued to see each other after the marriage, Fulbert wrought revenge by having Abelard castrated, a traditional punishment for sexual crimes. Stricken more by shame than genuine repentance, Abelard became a monk at St Denis, plunging himself with new vigour into his studies. He started to develop a theology that considered that all men of reason (and, he acknowledged, a few women) sought out the same supreme good, which Christians call God.

Following his example, Heloise took vows at Argenteuil, devoting herself to the study of literature and poetic composition. Some years passed. In 1122 Abelard founded a school, dedicated to the Paraclete or Holy Spirit, in which he emphasized the common goals of secular and religious wisdom. His attempts to run a school there were an abysmal failure and, in 1129, some twelve years after the end of their affair, he asked Heloise to take over. She proved herself a more able administrator than her teacher, even securing support from Abelard’s great Cistercian opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, famous for his emotionally intense preaching about the love of God. It was at about this time that she read Abelard’s account of their past – quite possibly deliberately intended for her edification – and she was shocked at what seemed to her to be a betrayal of those earlier promises of selfless love, promises very evident in an exchange of over 100 love letters, which record a much more complex relationship than the adventure sketched by Abelard in the Historia calamitatum. The young woman’s letters foreshadow the haunting honesty of the more mature letters that Heloise the abbess would compose in response to Abelard’s moralistic account. Only gradually would Abelard absorb Heloise’s argument, first formulated in those early love letters, that true love was for the sake of the other person, not for any reward. As her spiritual director, however, he could not come to terms with her insistence that she could never feel true remorse for the love she had offered to him. Even during the solemnity of the mass, she could not escape the memory of the pleasures they had once enjoyed.

Whereas Bernard of Clairvaux was loud in defending the authority of the Church, Heloise shied away from any public role in society. Her letters reveal her to be a woman who questioned her famous teacher just as Abelard would always be remembered as one who questioned authority.

Constant J. Mews, Director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology at Monash University in Australia, is author of The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (Palgrave Macmillan 1999) and Abelard and Heloise (Oxford University Press 2005).

This article is published in the magazine of Shakespeare's Globe 'Around the Globe', issue 36, Summer 2007. Subscription details

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