To her lord, no, her father
To her husband, no, her brother
From his handmaid, no, his daughter
His wife, no, his sister—
To Abelard from Heloise.
The other day, my most beloved,
one of your men brought me a copy
of the letter you wrote as consolation
for your friend.1
From what was written at its head I knew at once
that it was yours, and I began to read it
with a warmth as great as the love
with which I hold its writer in my heart.
I hoped that at least by its words
I could be restored to life,
as if by some image
of the one whose real substance I have lost.
Almost every line, I noticed,
was filled with vinegar and gall,
as it told the sad story
of our entrance into monastic life
and the unending crosses which you,
my only one, have always had to bear.
The letter well fulfilled the promise you made
your friend at its beginning, that he would think
his own troubles small or nothing next to yours.
You wrote of your persecution
at the hands of your teachers,
the supreme betrayal
of the mutilation of your body,
and the enmity and hateful malice
of Alberic and Lotulf, who were once
your fellow students.
You wrote of what happened, through their intrigue,
to the glorious book of your Theology
and to you yourself
when you were condemned as if to prison.
You wrote of the plots of your abbot and false brothers,
the attacks of those spurious apostles
which the same enemies instigated against you,
and the scandal which arose when you gave
the Paraclete its uncustomary name.
And then, when you came to those unbearable assaults
which still are launched against you by that tyrant
and by the worst of all monks you call your sons,
you brought the sad story to an end.
No one, I am sure, could read or hear it without tears,
and my own grief became fresh with every detail,
and it grows greater still as the danger to you
even now is increasing.
We are all driven to despair of your life,
and every day our hearts beat in fear
of some final word of your death.
So, by that Christ who keeps you for his own even now,
we beg of you,
as we are his handmaids and yours,
write to us,
tell us of those storms
in which you find yourself tossed.
We are all you have left: let us share
your grief or your joy.
A community of grief can bring some comfort
to one in need of it, since many shoulders
lighten any burden or even make it
seem to disappear.
If, on the other hand, this storm abates
even just a little, you must write to us quickly
when your letters will bring us more joy.
But whatever it is you write to us about,
it will be no small relief, for in this way
at least you will show you are thinking of us.
Seneca teaches us by his own example
how much joy there is in letters from absent friends,
as he writes to his friend Lucilius:
“I am grateful that you write to me often,
for you show yourself to me in the one way you can.
When I receive a letter from you, we are suddenly together.
If images of absent friends bring joy,
if they refresh our memory and soothe the ache
of absence even with their false and empty solace,
how much more joy is there in a letter,
which carries the true signature of an absent friend?”2
And I am grateful to God that here at least
is a way you can grant us your presence,
one which no malice will hinder,
no obstacle impede, and no negligence—I beg of you—delay.
You have written your friend a long letter of consolation,
addressing his adversities but recounting
your own.
But as you told of them in such detail,
while your mind was on his consolation,
you have worsened our own desolation;
while you were treating his wounds,
you have inflicted new wounds upon us
and have made our old wounds bleed.
I beg of you,
heal these wounds you have made, who are so careful
to tend the wounds made by others.
You have done what you ought
for a friend and comrade
and have paid your debt to friendship and comradeship.
But you are bound to us by a greater debt,
for we are not your friends but your most loving friends,
not your comrades but your daughters—yes,
it is right to call us that, or even use
a name more sacred and more sweet
if one can be imagined.
We need no arguments or testimony
to prove the obligation you have toward us:
if men will keep their silence, the facts will speak
for themselves.
You alone, after God, are the founder of this place,
you alone the builder of this oratory,
you alone the architect of this congregation.
Nothing you have built
is on the foundation of another:3
it is all your creation, everything here.
Before you, this was a wilderness,
an empty range for wild beasts and outlaws;
it knew no human settlement and not a house stood.
Among these lairs of beasts, these dens of outlaws,
where the name of God was never pronounced,
you raised a tabernacle of the Lord
and dedicated a temple of the Holy Spirit
for him to call his own.
Nothing you brought to the task
was from the wealth of kings and princes,
though you could have had so much at your disposal:
it was all to be yours, whatever was done here,
yours alone.
The clerics and students who came flooding here
to learn from you provided all that was needed;
and suddenly, those who were used to living
on the benefices of the Church,
who had learned how to receive offerings
but not how to make them,
who had opened their hands to take
but not to give,
now became prodigal in their gifts
and even pressed them upon you.
Yes, it is yours,
truly yours, this newly planted garden,
whose living shoots are young, still delicate,
and need watering to thrive.4
From the nature of women alone the garden is tender
and would not be hardy even if it were not new.
Its cultivation, then, must be more careful,
in the way Saint Paul intended when he wrote:
“I have planted, Apollos has watered,
and God has given the increase.”5
He had planted the Corinthians in the faith
by the doctrine he had preached, and his student Apollos
had watered them with his encouragement,
and the grace of God bestowed on them
the increase of their virtues.
But you are tending another’s vine
in a vineyard you have not planted,
and it has turned to bitterness for you,
all your words wasted and vain.6
While you lavish your care on another’s vine,
remember what you owe your own.
You try to teach rebels and do not succeed;
you are casting pearls of God’s word before swine.7
While you lavish so much on those who defy you,
consider what you owe those who obey.
While you squander so much on your enemies,
think what you owe your daughters.
But leave aside these others for a moment—
remember what you owe me,
and all you owe
this whole community of devoted women
you may repay at once to her who is,
with more devotion, your only one.
The wealth of your learning
knows better than the poverty of my own
how many treatises the Fathers have composed—
long, weighty, careful treatises—to teach,
encourage, and, yes, console women in religious orders.
That is why, in the tender early time
of my convent life long ago,
your oblivion came as no small surprise to me
when, unpersuaded by any reverence for God,
or any love for me, or any example
set by these same Fathers,
you did not try to console me as I foundered,
overwhelmed in sorrow day after day—
never once, neither by a word when we were together
nor a letter when we were apart—
and yet you would know
that you are bound to me by a greater debt,
obliged to me by the sacrament of marriage,
and beholden to me further by what is plain
to everyone:
that I have always held you in my heart
with a love that has no measure.
You know, my dearest,
all the world knows, how much I have lost in you,
how that supreme, that notorious betrayal
robbed me of my very self
when it robbed me of you,
and how incomparably worse than the loss itself
is the pain from the way it happened.
This greater pain must have a greater solace,
and it can come only from you, not from another.
As you alone are the source of my grief,
you alone can grant the grace of consolation.
You alone have the power to make me sad,
to make me happy or to console me,
and you alone owe me this debt,
now above all,
when I have so completely fulfilled your commands
in every particular
that, rather than commit a single offense
against you,
I threw myself away at your command.
And the greater irony is that my love
then turned to such insanity
that the one thing it desired above all else
was the one thing it put irrevocably beyond its reach
in that one instant when, at your command,
I changed my habit along with my heart
to show that my body along with my heart
belonged only to you.
I never wanted anything in you
but you alone,
nothing of what you have
but you yourself,
never a marriage, never a dowry,
never any pleasure, any purpose of my own—
as you well know—
but only yours.8
The name of wife may have the advantages
of sanctity and safety, but to me
the sweeter name will always be lover or, if your dignity can bear it,
concubine or whore.
Do you imagine
I debased myself to earn your gratitude
and preserve your glorious distinction in the world?
You were not so entirely oblivious
when it suited your own purposes in that letter
to your friend,
and did not think it beneath your dignity
to set out at least some of the arguments
I used when I tried to dissuade you
from this marriage of ours and its disastrous bed.
You kept your silence, though, about most of the reasons
why I preferred love over marriage,
freedom over a chain.
So I call my God to witness now:
If great Augustus, ruler of the world,
ever thought to honor me by making me his wife
and granted me dominion over the earth,
it would be dearer to me
and more honorable to be called
not his royal consort but your whore.
No man’s real worth is measured by his property or power:
fortune belongs to one category of things
and virtue to another.9
And no woman should think herself any the less for sale
if she prefers a rich man to a poor one
in marriage and wants what she would get
in a husband more than the husband himself.
Reward such greed with cash and not devotion,
for she is after property alone
and is prepared to prostitute herself
to an even richer man given the chance.
This is the argument the philosopher
Aspasia used with Xenophon and his wife
in the dialogue of Aeschines the Socratic.
After she set out her argument
aimed at reconciling the pair,
the philosopher capped her proof with this conclusion:
“Therefore, if you two are not convinced
that no worthier man exists and no finer woman exists
anywhere on earth, then above all else
you will always be seeking that one thing
you think is best—
to have the best of all possible husbands
or the best of all possible wives.”10
This notion goes beyond philosophy
and should not be called the pursuit of wisdom
but wisdom itself.
There is a blessed delusion among the married,
a happy fantasy that perfect love
keeps their marital ties intact less through the restraint
of their bodies than through the chastity
of their hearts.
But what is a delusion for other women,
for me is the manifest truth.
What other women only think about their husbands,
I—and the entire world—not only believe
but know to be true about you,
and in this way my love is far from any delusion.
Has there been a philosopher or even a king
whose renown could equal yours?11
Has there been any region of the country,
any city, any town that did not boil
with excitement just to see you?
Has there been a single person
who did not come running
to catch a glimpse as you came into sight,
who did not stretch his neck and strain his eyes
to follow you as you left?
Has there been a woman, married or unmarried,
who did not long for you when you were gone
or lust for you when you were present?
Has there been a great lady or even a queen
who did not envy me the pleasures of my bed?
And two things that belonged to you alone
would win the heart of any woman—
your beautiful voice and your gift for writing songs.
These are not common among philosophers, I know,
but for you they were amusements, a diversion
from your philosophical work.
You left countless songs,
both in the classical meter of love
and in the rhythms of love as well,
that kept your name on everyone’s lips;
and they were of such surpassing sweetness
that their melodies alone would not allow
even the unlettered to forget you.12
For this above all, women sighed with love for you.
And since most of the songs told of your love and mine,
in what then seemed an instant my name was sung
in every corner of the country,
and the envy of women was kindled against me.13
Has there been a grace of mind or body
that you did not possess when you were young?
And is there now, of all the women then
who envied me,
a single one who does not feel compassion
when my own calamity has cut me
from those joys?
Is there any man or woman, even among
our ancient enemies, who is not softened now
by the pity owed to me?
I am entirely guilty; as you know,
I am entirely innocent.
For blame does not reside in the action itself
but in the disposition of the agent,
and justice does not weigh what is done
but what is in the heart.14
And what my heart has always been toward you,
you alone can judge, who have put me to the test.
I submit it all for your examination,
and rest my case on your testimony alone.
Now answer me one question if you can:
why, after our entrance into religious life—
which you alone decided, you alone—
why I have fallen into such neglect
and oblivion with you that I am neither
restored to life with a word when we are together
nor comforted with a letter when we are apart.
Yes, tell me if you can,
and I will tell you
what I, no, what everyone suspects—
that it was appetite and not affection
that connected you to me, your lust and not your love;
and that when what you desired suddenly became
impossible,
everything you put on for its sake
also disappeared.
My most beloved,
this is not my inference alone but everyone’s,
not private and particular to me
but public and universal.
I wish it were just mine alone,
for then your love could find
someone to defend it, someone I could turn to
to relieve the pain I am suffering now.
I wish there were
some plausible excuse I could invent,
for then I could find, in defending you,
some way of covering my own cheapness.
Remember what I ask, I beg of you—
you will find it is small and easy to do:
so long as I am cheated of your presence,
present me with an image of yourself
at least in words,
of which you have an exceptional supply.
I cannot expect your generosity in substance
if I find you miserly in words.
Up to now
I had thought I deserved so much from you
since everything I have done was for your sake
and even now I continue in your service.
It was not any commitment to the religious life
that forced me to the rigors of the convent
when I was the young woman I once was:
it was your command alone.
If even in this
I deserve nothing from you, then you may judge
how all my work here has been wasted.
I can expect no reward from God since it is clear
I have yet done nothing out of love for him.
I followed you as you went striding off
to God and to his monastery—
No,
I did not follow: I went first.
Were you haunted by the image of Lot’s wife
turning back15
when you delivered me up to these vows and holy vestments
even before you delivered yourself to God?
That you doubted me in this one thing, my love,
overwhelmed me with grief and shame.
But, as God knows,
I would have followed you
to Vulcan’s flames if you commanded it,
and without a moment’s hesitation
I would have gone first.
My heart was never my own but was always
with you,
and now even more, if it is not with you
it is nowhere:
without you it cannot exist at all.16
Let it be at peace with you, I beg of you.
And it will be at peace with you if you are kind,
if you return grace for grace,17 small things for large,
words for real substance.
My love, I wish your love
had less confidence in me,
so that it would be more careful and concerned.
But now it seems the more secure of me
I have made you feel, the more negligent
you have become.
Recall what I have done, I beg of you.
Remember what you owe me.
In the days
when we shared the pleasures of the flesh,
no one was sure if I acted out of love or lust.
Now the end confirms the beginning.
I have denied myself all pleasure to follow your will:
I kept nothing for myself but to become yours.
If you now give me less when I deserve
so much more,
if you now give me nothing at all,
think what your injustice will be then.
And it is so small a thing I ask and so easy for you to do.
So, by that God who claims your dedication,
I beg of you,
grant me your presence in the one way you can—
by writing me some word of comfort,
so that at least in this one way
I may be restored to life,
readier and fit for my own service to God.
In the days
when you sought me out for pleasures long ago,
you showered me with letter after letter,
and with your songs you set your Heloise
on the lips of everyone, and every home
and every street re-echoed
Heloise.
Is it not better now to summon me to God
than it once was to call me to your bed?
Think what you owe me, remember what I ask,
I beg of you,
and I will end my long letter
with these brief words—
Farewell, my only one.
_____________
1 I have followed Peter Dronke’s restoration of Heloise’s original text, reading vestrum for the manuscripts’ vestram and omitting forte. Dronke relies on the thirteenth-century French translation of Jean de Meun, which in turn relies on a text predating any extant manuscript of the letter. See Dronke 1984b, 304.
2 Epistulae ad Lucilium 40.1.
3 Cf. Rom. 15:20.
4 Abelard uses similar terms to speak of the Paraclete in his Sermon 30, which seeks to raise funds for the new convent.
5 1 Cor. 3:6.
6 Cf. Jer. 2:21.
7 Cf. Matt. 7:6.
8 In the margin of his own manuscript copy of the letter, the poet Petrarch wrote at this point, “You are acting throughout with gentleness and perfect sweetness, Heloise.”
9 This argument will find its way into Abelard’s Ethics (Luscombe 1971, 48): “If this were true [that merit depends on external circumstances], then great wealth could make someone better or more worthy (that is, if wealth in itself could bring about merit or the increase of merit), and the richer men are, the better they could become because out of their abundance of riches they could add more in deeds to their devotion. But to think that wealth can add to real happiness or the worthiness of the soul, or to think that its lack can detract from the merits of the poor is utterly insane.”
10 Cicero, De Inventione 1.31.52. Aspasia was the companion (the “concubine or whore,” as it were) of the Athenian leader Pericles, widely respected for her character and intellect. In Cicero, Aspasia’s words are reported by Socrates, but Heloise has bypassed the middleman and gone straight to the source, the original philosopher herself.
11 Petrarch wrote in the margin of his manuscript copy at this point, “About Peter’s fame—if love doesn’t make her testimony suspect.”
12 The indications here are that these songs were in Latin. The distinction between “meter” and “rhythm” is between verse forms based on syllable quantity (as in classical Latin) and syllable quality or stress accent (as in the accented verse of much medieval Latin poetry). The “classical meter of love,” then, is the elegiac couplet, the standard form of classical Latin love poetry. The “unlettered” are those who did not know Latin but who nonetheless found it easy to memorize Abelard’s songs because of the qualities Heloise notes. Outside what may be preserved in The Letters of Two Lovers (see Appendix B), little of Abelard’s elegiac poetry addressed to Heloise survives; see, however, the end of the Second Letter. For a likely example of his “rhythmic” poetry to Heloise, see “Dull Is the Star.”
13 Petrarch commented in the margin at this point, “Muliebriter—Just like a woman.” Far from descending into vanity, however, Heloise is adapting Abelard’s own remarks about the role of fame and envy in his life to help confirm a parallel between their experiences. In the next sections, she proceeds to apply to herself the specific language Abelard used about his castration, the examination of his book at the Council of Soissons, and his isolation at St. Gildas of Rhuys, and refers to her own “calamitas—calamity.”
14 What evidently has been an issue of mutual concern between them will become central to the doctrine of Abelard’s Ethics, that intentions alone, not actions in themselves, are subject to moral judgment; see, e.g., Ethics (Luscombe 1971, 52): “Indeed, we call an intention good, that is, right in itself; we do not say of an action, however, that it takes on any good in itself but rather that it proceeds from a good intention.”
15 See Gen. 19:26.
16 Petrarch’s marginal comment is “Amicissime et eleganter— Written with elegance and the greatest love.”
17 Cf. John 1:16.