Most people have heard of Abelard and Heloise as a pair of lovers as famous as Dante and Beatrice or Romeo and Juliet, and many know that their story is told in the letters they exchanged. If we are interested in what is generally called the Twelfth-Century Renaissance we soon find that Abelard is a key figure, one of the most original minds of his day, that the medieval university of Paris arose out of his fame as a teacher and that his theological views brought him into conflict with St Bernard of Clairvaux. Heloise too was more than a girl deeply in love and a pupil avid for learning; she was the widely respected abbess of a famous convent and its daughter foundations. The two are representative of the best of their time in their classical knowledge and the way they express themselves, in their passionate interest in problems of faith and morality, and in their devotion to the Christian Church which ruled their lives. At the same time their dilemma is of timeless interest, created less by circumstances than by the relations between two highly complex personalities.
Peter Abelard was born into the minor Breton nobility in about 1079, and his career to the age of about fifty-four is set out in a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing, Letter 1, Historia calamitatum or The Story of His Misfortunes. His father may have served the duke of Brittany and wished his sons to have some education before following the same career. Abelard soon decided to renounce his rights as the eldest son and to become a scholar: ‘I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war. I began to travel about in several provinces disputing, like a true peripatetic philosopher, wherever I had heard there was keen interest in the art of dialectic’ (p. 3).
Abelard is writing rather formally in Latin and using semi-technical expressions which would be more readily understood by his contemporaries than they are today, but these two sentences take us straight into the intellectual ferment of the early twelfth century and the revolution in teaching in which Abelard played a leading part. The accepted course for higher education at this time (and for a long time to come) was that of the seven liberal arts: the trivium, consisting of grammar and rhetoric, which were the study of classical (Latin) language and literature, and logic, or dialectic as it was called, followed by the quadrivium, the sciences of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. Beyond these lay the highest studies of theology, canon law and medicine. Abelard never shows much interest in science, and his knowledge of mathematics was elementary. He evidently decided at the start to concentrate on the trivium and, in particular, on logic (dialectic). The Greeks had been masters of logic, but at this time there was very little knowledge of their work. Abelard is not thought to have known any Greek, and what he knew of Aristotle was mainly from Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories and Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, both in a Latin translation by the sixth-century Roman scholar Boethius. Logic covered both linguistic logic, or theory of meaning of words and sentences, and formal logic, the theory of the correct manner to systemize known facts and to draw conclusions. It was ‘an instrument of order in a chaotic world’,1 and in Abelard’s hands it could provide a genuine intellectual education for his students. His unwavering determination to apply the rules of logic to all fields of thought was to dominate his life.
Abelard speaks of himself as moving from place to place wherever he heard that there was the teaching he wanted. This is the period of the ‘wandering scholars’. All teaching was in the hands of the Church, in some form, but the Cathedral schools were becoming more prominent and beginning to replace the monastic schools such as those of Bec and Cluny; out of them would develop the medieval universities. Abelard’s movements and his own career show that in these early days a teacher could set up a school of his own wherever he knew he could muster sufficient pupils, and the success or failure of a school rested on the teacher’s popularity and skill. His own pupils sought him out wherever he settled, and were even prepared to camp out in the remote countryside to be near him. One tends today to think of logic as something dry and scholastic, perhaps by contrast with Renaissance humanism, but Abelard can make it sound new and invigorating, the opening of a door on to wider horizons.
Abelard also speaks of himself as ‘disputing’, and here again he shows himself in the vanguard of a new movement. By disputatio is meant a new technique to replace the traditional lectio, a lecture by a teacher on a selected passage of Scripture which was read aloud sentence by sentence and then expounded by glosses on the grammar and commentaries on the meaning drawn from the writings of the early Fathers of the Church. Disputation adopted a more conversational method, posing a problem and discussing it by means of question and answer, by setting out the difficulties and attempting to resolve conflicts. One method of teaching should not exclude the other, but Abelard was never anything but impatient with the orthodox lecture – witness his unjustified attack on Anselm of Laon (p. 7). He must have been a thorn in his teachers’ flesh, conscious as he was of his own intellectual superiority, no respecter of persons and revelling in the cut-and-thrust of debate. So William of Champeaux found when Abelard arrived in Paris about 1100 and joined the Cloister School of Notre-Dame. Tension increased until Abelard set up his own school, first at Melun, then at Corbeil, with the intention of destroying William’s reputation. There was a respite when his health broke down through overwork, and he spent three or four years in Brittany. How he spent the time he does not say, but he returned to the fray to find that William had joined the Order of Canons Regular, but was still teaching at the Abbey of St Victor. Abelard started to attend his lectures again, this time on the subject of rhetoric, and soon made his position impossible.
Letter 1, Historia calamitatum, then raises the question of universals, or general and abstract terms. It had been discussed by Plato and Aristotle, and mentioned though not fully examined by Porphyry, and it was now hotly debated. If you and I and all of us are human, i.e. we belong to the human species, does anything exist which is humanity independent of the individuals who belong to the species? Abelard never says which teachers he sought out when he was a wandering scholar, but he must have stopped at Loches on his way to Paris to hear Roscelin, the chief exponent of Nominalism. Roscelin held that universals or abstract terms were no more than names given to the individuals which alone existed. This was seen by the Church as endangering the doctrine of Unity in the Trinity, because Roscelin was thought to postulate three individual Gods and not one God. He had been tried for heresy and banished, but later allowed to return to France and resume his teaching. William of Champeaux headed the opposite faction, that known as Realism. Following Plato and the Neoplatonist Porphyry, the Realists believed in the actual existence outside awareness of abstract ideas – Plato’s Forms or Ideas. Abelard is brief to the point of obscurity about what happened, but he seems to have forced William to modify his view by pointing out the absurdities of its logical development. William had taught that the essence of humanity was totally and essentially present in all human beings who are differentiated only by ‘accidents’ or local modifications outside their common nature. If this is so, it is hard to see how you and I can be genuinely different individuals. Under pressure from Abelard William modified ‘essentially’ to ‘indifferently’, meaning that you and I are united in the human species by non-difference or absence of difference. But William’s lectures then fell into disrepute ‘as if the whole subject rested solely on the question of universals’ (p. 5).
For Abelard, logic meant more than the nature of universals and also something rather different. He distinguished clearly (as William and many of his contemporaries did not) between logic and physic or metaphysic, the one concerned with words and how we express concepts in words, the other with things (physic) or the ultimate reality (metaphysic). Logic for him was linguistic logic, an essential discipline for understanding, and the problem of universals was only one element in it. His was a critical approach to the meaning of words and concepts as the basis of rational understanding. He was not trying to develop a philosophy of nature nor a system of theology. But the Realists did not draw the same distinction between things which exist outside our awareness and the expression in words of our understanding of them, so that for them the nature of universals was crucial.
Abelard’s triumph over William greatly increased his reputation, and a good many of William’s pupils joined the rival school he set up on Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, from which the university of Paris was to grow. There was continued friction between the students as William did his best to prevent Abelard from succeeding him as head of the Cloister School. Once again Abelard was summoned to Brittany, this time to see his mother, who was preparing to take vows and follow her husband into the religious life. He was not away long, and returned to find that William was now installed as bishop of Châlons and there was no rival for the headship of the Cloister School. Yet Abelard says that he returned to France for the express purpose of studying theology – maxime ut de divinitate addiscerem – and he left at once for Laon, where he could hear Anselm, who had long been established there as the greatest teacher. He gives no reason; some have wondered if it was his mother’s request that her brilliant eldest son should turn to more constructive thoughts of salvation. But this was a decision which was to have lasting and serious consequences.
Anselm’s reputation was deserved, both as a lecturer and part-compiler of the Glossa ordinaria or commentary on the Bible, a standard work for theological students for a long time. According to Abelard, his teaching was conservative, and he made no use of disputation; his wonderful eloquence was confined to lecture and exposition. As a trained dialectician and one who valued ability more highly than seniority, Abelard had little use for him, and soon made this clear. He fell out with the other students and was easily provoked into offering to produce an exposition himself by the light of his natural intelligence and a close study of the text. He soon showed that he could beat Anselm at his own game and, to the indignation of the students, Anselm was incited by his two leading pupils to forbid Abelard to teach in Laon. Abelard then returned to Paris to be head of the Cloister School. To his fame for dialectic and rhetoric he could now add a growing reputation for theology, and Anselm’s death soon afterwards left him supreme. Paris gained students from all over western Europe.
Abelard was then in his mid-thirties, at the peak of his powers. All accounts agree that he was a wonderful teacher, with a rare gift for kindling enthusiasm in his pupils and inspiring their devotion. He tells us himself that he had ‘exceptional good looks’, and Heloise adds that he had a talent for verse and song, though there is no mention of his enjoying the lighter side of student life as a young man but rather the suggestion that he kept himself aloof (p. 9). He had established himself as a logician by offering his own solution to the problem of universals, the middle way, which was to be known as Conceptualism: universals were neither realities nor mere names but the concepts formed by the intellect when abstracting the similarities between perceived individual things. It is remarkable that Abelard arrived independently at a solution much like that of Aristotle, in which we have perception of the particular and we know the universal, but we know it through the particular and perceive the particular in the universal. But he was already running personal risks as a professional dialectician who was now concerning himself with theology. The two pupils of Anselm, Alberic of Rheims and Lotulf of Lombardy, were his enemies from now on, and led the prosecution of Abelard for heresy at the Council of Soissons in 1121. This was not forgotten, and the final fateful clash between Abelard and St Bernard arose largely out of Abelard’s application of dialectic to questions of theology.
By temperament Abelard was stimulated by controversy and one can imagine him bored by finding himself at the top without a rival. As he says:
But success always puffs up fools with pride, and worldly security weakens the spirit’s resolution and easily destroys it through carnal temptations. I began to think myself the only philosopher in the world, with nothing to fear from anyone, and so I yielded to the lusts of the flesh … There was in Paris at the time a young girl named Heloise, the niece of Fulbert, one of the canons …’ (pp. 9–10)
Abelard relates the opening stages of the story as a calculated seduction on his part, confident as he was of easy success, and there is never anything romantic or idealistic about his attitude to sexual love. To do him justice, he may have chosen this cool tone deliberately because the Historia calamitatum was written as a letter addressed to a third party, and omitted the painfully intimate details which emerge in his subsequent letters to Heloise. But however the relationship started, he was soon totally involved. Many years later Heloise accused him of feeling only lust for her, not love, and he admitted this (pp. 53, 86–7). Several of her modern champions have emphasized that he could never attain the heights of her selfless devotion. But in the modern idiom, they were passionately in love, their lovemaking was uninhibited and ecstatic, and Abelard was completely carried away and consequently quite reckless in his general behaviour. He neglected his pupils, abandoned all pretence of serious teaching, paid no attention to gossip and allowed his love songs which mentioned Heloise’s name to be sung in public. When her uncle accepted the truth of what was common knowledge and tried to separate them, they took even greater risks and were found in bed together. Soon after, Heloise found she was pregnant and Abelard removed her to his people in Brittany where a son was born. From a later letter (p. 80) we know that he disguised her as a nun. Abelard returned to Paris and offered amends to Fulbert: he would marry Heloise so long as the marriage was kept secret so that his reputation did not suffer. Fulbert agreed, and Abelard returned to Brittany to fetch Heloise. It is at this point that she reveals her personality in an unexpected way.
Little is known of Heloise’s parentage, though much has been conjectured.2 She is thought to have been about seventeen at this time and born in 1100 or 1101. Fulbert’s possessiveness has suggested to some that she was really his daughter, but taken with his brutal treatment of Abelard it would seem to have a strong sexual element, probably subconscious. Every credit is due to the nuns at Argenteuil for her early education, and to Fulbert for his encouragement of her remarkable gifts at a time when women were rarely educated at all. During the short time she was studying with Abelard they probably worked on philosophy; it was certainly a trained logical mind which argued so cogently against the marriage he proposed.
Heloise saw clearly, as Abelard would not, that a secret marriage was not going to satisfy Fulbert for a public scandal and, indeed, ‘that no satisfaction could ever appease her uncle’ (p. 13). She therefore opposed any form of marriage, first because of the risk to Abelard, secondly because it would disgrace them both. Both have a low view of marriage, derived from St Paul and St Jerome; they see it from the Christian monastic standpoint as no more than legalization of the weakness of the flesh. As a scholar Abelard was a clerk (clericus), and as master of the school of Notre-Dame he would be a member of the Chapter and a canon. Neither was a legal bar to marriage; though a married master might be unusual, one feels that his personality could have made the situation acceptable.3 It is not known whether he was a priest in orders at this time: probably not. In any case, the Church forbade marriage only to the higher orders of the clergy. It is important to remember that there was no career open to an educated man at this time except in the Church, and that Abelard was prepared to sacrifice his ambitions for high office in order to secure Heloise for himself. He admits in a later letter that ‘I desired to keep you whom I loved beyond measure for myself alone’ (p. 83). Any marriage, open or secret, would be an effective bar. An open marriage would damage his reputation but might, just possibly, appease Fulbert, though Heloise who knew him well thought not. A secret marriage would not be damaging but would be dangerous in its effects on Fulbert.
All the authorities are now agreed that the question of reputation is crucial to Heloise’s arguments and refers to something much deeper than self-interest on Abelard’s part. If her arguments are read closely it is clear that she was much less concerned with the possible loss of Abelard’s services to the Church than with the betrayal of the ideal which they both admired, that of the philosopher as a man who is set apart and above human ties. She argues from a classical rather than a Christian viewpoint, and she takes her illustrations from Theophrastus, Cicero, Seneca and Socrates as recorded by St Jerome. ‘[T]he great philosophers of the past have despised the world, not renouncing it so much as escaping from it, and have denied themselves every pleasure so as to find peace in the arms of philosophy alone’ (p. 14). She points out the distractions and petty hindrances of domestic life which are inimical to philosophic contemplation, and compares the philosophers with ‘those … who truly deserve the name of monks’, that is, the dedicated solitaries such as John the Baptist or the ascetic sects of Jewish history. She concludes that ‘the name of friend [amica] instead of wife would be dearer to her and more honourable for me’ (p. 16), because then they would both be free from a permanent legal tie and Abelard would not incur the disgrace of renouncing the realization of his true self as a philosopher. They should be bound only by gratia – love freely given; marriage can add nothing of significance to an ideal relationship which is also classical in concept: that described in Cicero’s De amicitia, a work they both knew, which sets the standard for true friendship in ‘disinterested love’ where physical love would be sublimated.
Heloise amplifies this point in her first letter (p. 51), in the well-known passage where she says that if the Emperor Augustus offered marriage she would still choose to be Abelard’s whore; she says this in the context of preferring ‘love to wedlock and freedom to chains’. She has loved Abelard only for himself, not for anything he could give her, and indeed, in her view, marriage for what either party could get from the other was no better than prostitution. By contrast, a lasting relationship should rest on the complete devotion of two persons; this is true disinterested love, based on what she calls ‘chastity of spirit’. To such an ideal union a legal marriage could add nothing, and the presence or absence of an erotic element is, in a sense, irrelevant. The intention towards the ideal relationship is all-important. This is the ‘ethic of pure intention’ in which both Abelard and Heloise believed and to which she often returns. ‘Wholly guilty though I am, I am also, as you know, wholly innocent. It is not the deed but the intention of the doer which makes the crime, and justice should weigh not what was done but the spirit in which it is done. What my intention towards you has always been, you alone who have known it can judge’ (p. 53).
For Heloise the issue was clear and unequivocal, however difficult it is for us to follow her. Conventional morality would speak of a young woman who is willing to ‘live in sin’ with a man, so as not to stand in his path, as sacrificing herself, but for her living wholly for Abelard is self-realization. Abelard was torn by an impossible conflict between his desire for Heloise and all the jealous possessiveness which went with it, and his belief that his duty was to realize himself as a philosopher and to preserve his intention towards that ideal. It has been pointed out that the quotations used by Heloise all appear in a work of his own (Book II of his Theologia Christiana)4 written after they parted but several years before Letter 1. It certainly seems likely that he filled in the outlines of her arguments with references to chapter and verse when he wrote his account for circulation. But there is no suggestion that he did not accept their validity; he simply refused to be persuaded. Perhaps it was too much to expect of an ardent lover and a proud and hypersensitive man.
But at last she saw that her attempts to persuade or dissuade me were making no impression on my foolish obstinacy, and she could not bear to offend me; so amidst deep sighs and tears she ended in these words: ‘We shall both be destroyed. All that is left us is suffering as great as our love has been.’ In this, as the whole world knows, she showed herself a true prophet. (p. 16)
Heloise never reproaches Abelard for the secrecy of the marriage, which to her must have seemed an act of hypocrisy and another betrayal of the ideal. She was even ready to lie on Abelard’s behalf and deny it when Fulbert broke his promise and spread the news. Years later, however, in a bitter moment she pointed out the irony of the fact that they had been spared when guilty of fornication but punished ‘through a marriage which you believed had made amends for all previous wrong doing’ (p. 66). There were furtive meetings followed by scenes with Fulbert, which made Abelard decide to remove her from her uncle’s house. The convent at Argenteuil where she had spent her childhood was the obvious place to take her, and it was near enough Paris for further meetings to be fairly easy. We know that Abelard could not keep away; he argues in one of his letters (p. 80) that they were more justly punished for their conduct when married than for anything they did before, because of their sacrilege in making love in a corner of the convent refectory, the only place where they could snatch a moment together alone. What he had in mind when he made her wear a postulant’s habit no one can know, unless it was to give greater protection from Fulbert, but it was a disastrous thing to do. She could have stayed indefinitely with the nuns without it, and Fulbert very naturally assumed that Abelard was trying to get rid of her by making her a nun. This was the immediate cause of his horrible revenge: his kinsmen got into Abelard’s room at night and castrated him.
Long afterwards Abelard could write of this to Heloise with hindsight as an act of God’s mercy which rid him of his personal dilemma along with the torments of the flesh. But in Letter 1 what he vividly recalls is the pain and horror, his urge to escape and hide from the noisy sympathy of the crowds outside and the outcry of his pupils pushing into his room, his feelings of humiliation and disgust at being a eunuch, the unclean beast of Jewish law. He admits that ‘it was shame and confusion in my remorse and misery rather than any devout wish for conversion which brought me to seek shelter in a monastery cloister’ (p. 18).
His entry into the Abbey of St Denis must have been hurried on quickly (and the period of novitiate entirely waived), for Abelard says that his wound was scarcely healed when the clerks were clamouring for him to continue his teaching from the cloister. He accepted the challenge, by far the best thing he could have done, for teaching took him out of the retirement which was unsuited to his temperament and enabled him to get back into the company where he was happiest – that of eager, questioning young minds. He emerged from the crisis still the perfectionist, the uncompromising challenger of beliefs and practices which he judged to fall short of truth and honesty, and now single-minded in his purpose. And whatever his original motives were for entering the religious life, there is no reason to doubt that his subsequent conversion was completely sincere. In his way Abelard was as firm an upholder of the faith and the purity of monastic life as St Bernard, and to the end of his days he spoke out against the shortcomings of the Church wherever he detected them. He remained a dedicated humanist and scholar, seeing that he could use his knowledge of Greek philosophy to lead his pupils on to the ‘true philosophy’, as the great Origen had done (p. 19). There was a general interest amongst twelfth-century scholars in Origen’s works through Latin translations, and Abelard had a close personal feeling for Origen, also a eunuch, though self-inflicted. He draws the comparison explicitly in a letter to Heloise (p. 82). Abelard’s continued interest in Greek philosophy was one of the charges against him by St Bernard, who said that Abelard proved himself a pagan by attempting to turn Plato into a Christian.
The Historia calamitatum is a personal record of his life between his entry into St Denis in about 1118 and its conclusion sometime after 1132. It is not necessary here to recapitulate in detail all his tribulations: quarrels with the unreformed monks of St Denis, persecution by his old rivals and enemies leading to his condemnation at the Council of Soissons in about 1121, further trouble at St Denis and his flight to Champagne, retirement to a hermitage near Troyes to which his students followed him and built the oratory he named the Paraclete. He was certainly greatly helped and sustained by the devotion of these young people, and by the knowledge that his gifts as a teacher were unimpaired by calamity and what he saw as the jealousy of his contemporaries, but he is so vague when writing about his continued dangers and apprehensions of further charges of heresy that one wonders if he was developing a persecution complex. There must have been some foundation for his fears; at one point he seriously considered abandoning Christendom to seek refuge in Islamic Spain (p. 33). Instead he accepted an invitation perhaps in 1126 to be abbot of the remote monastery of St Gildas de Rhuys on the west coast of Brittany.
This time he could hardly have made a worse decision. According to Abelard, the monks were not only idle and dissolute but murderous in intent when he tried to reform them, and he felt himself isolated amongst illiterate savages.
I used to weep as I thought of the wretched, useless life I led, as profitless to myself as to others; I had once done so much for the clerks, and now … all I did for them and for the monks was equally fruitless. I had proved ineffective in all my attempts and undertakings, so that now above all men I justly merited the reproach, ‘There is the man who started to build and could not finish.’ (pp. 34–5)
He was tormented especially by the thought that the oratory of the Paraclete was deserted and neglected. It was not until 1129 that he heard that Suger, who had become abbot of St Denis in 1122 and was engaged in active and controversial reforms, had got documents establishing the abbey’s claim to the convent of Argenteuil, and had expelled the nuns. Heloise was already prioress, and this is the first mention of her since she took her vows some nine years before.
She had taken them at his command and with no sense of vocation, as Abelard very well knew. She had had about eighteen months with him, and was probably in her twenties when she renounced any hope of further life outside the convent walls. Abelard says that she had refused to listen to those ‘who in pity for her youth tried to dissuade her from submitting to the yoke of monastic rule as a penance too hard to bear’ (p. 18); she had wept, and quoted from Lucan, a Stoic Roman poet whose works they both knew, Cornelia’s last words before her suicide after the death of her husband Pompey. ‘So saying she hurried to the altar, quickly took up (confestim tulit – almost ‘snatched’) the veil blessed by the bishop and publicly bound herself to the religious life.’ Her mood was not one of Christian hope but of tragic despair. Abelard says nothing about her admission being as hurried and irregular as his own, and records only the bare fact that she took her vows before he did. From her letters we learn that this hurt and offended her more than anything, and the memory still rankled for years. Had he been afraid that she would turn back, like Lot’s wife? She saw it as a sign of mistrust, though he knew that she would have followed him to the flames of Hell (p. 54). She may have guessed – and rightly – that jealous possessiveness prompted Abelard in this as in the secret marriage.
It is only from references in her letters that we know anything at all about her life as a nun at Argenteuil, and these are painful reading. Abelard was a changed man, physically and spiritually; she was not changed, she felt no vocation for convent life, and was tormented by frustrated sexual love. ‘[T]he pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet – they cannot displease me, and can scarcely shift from my memory. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep’ (p. 68). Any meetings they had had after his mutilation to arrange her hurried reception into the convent had been impersonal, and very probably in the presence of the nuns. In her first letter she reproaches him for giving her no sympathy nor support in person or by letter. Yet though she evidently did not pretend to herself that love of God had supplanted love of Abelard, her good brains and strong character must have saved her from going to pieces. She would have social standing as the niece of a canon, but she would not have been chosen to be prioress of the convent unless her outward behaviour had been scrupulously correct. The prioress stood second to the abbess and had many responsibilities, one being the education of the nuns, novices and children brought up in the convent as Heloise had been herself.
Abelard writes defensively, in answer to her reproach, that he had not thought it necessary to write a letter of advice or sympathy, knowing her good sense (prudentia): ‘God’s grace has bestowed on you all essentials to enable you to instruct the erring, comfort the weak and encourage the faint-hearted, both by word and example, as, indeed, you have been doing since you first held the office of prioress under your abbess’ (p. 56). It is arguable that Heloise was already prioress as early as 1123, though this is no more than a supposition based on a contemporary document, the obituary roll of the Blessed Vital, abbot and founder of the monastery of Savigny in the diocese of Avranches, who died in 1122. It was a monastic custom when a Church dignitary or benefactor died to inscribe the news of his death and a eulogy of his life on a parchment roll which a monk would then take round the monastic houses. Each of these would inscribe its full title and promises to pray for the departed, often with a request for similar prayers for members of its own community. The roll of the Blessed Vital contains the names of 207 religious houses in France and England, that of Ste Marie of Argenteuil being the fortieth. Beneath the title on the left is a Latin poem, while the conventional formulae for prayers are rather squeezed in on the right. There are other poems on the roll, four of them by convents of nuns, but this is written in correct Latin elegiacs (though the sentiments are not original in any way), and the handwriting is clear and well formed. It has therefore been supposed that this is the work and the writing of Heloise herself, and she would not have been entrusted with it had she not already been prioress.5
Abelard travelled from St Gildas to make arrangements to hand over the Paraclete to Heloise and some of the dispossessed nuns who stayed together, and there they met after a separation of ten years. Abbot Suger had made no provision at all for the nuns, and the Historia calamitatum records briefly that at first they suffered great hardship. The buildings could not have been more than the small church of wood or stone which the students had built to replace Abelard’s original chapel and the primitive cells they had occupied, and the women were dependent on what they could get out of the stream and the fields, helped out by gifts from the neighbourhood, which were generous when their plight was known. In 1131 Pope Innocent the Second visited Auxerre and granted a charter to the abbess Heloise confirming the nuns’ possession of the gifts they had received and any subsequent gifts in perpetuity. There were further meetings, all on an impersonal basis as the letters show, for Letter 1 records that at first local opinion criticized Abelard for not doing enough for the nuns, and then when he visited them more often, there was malicious gossip about his former relations with Heloise and the fact that he still seemed unable to keep away from her. It seems likely that he was absent from St Gildas for some time, for he had installed them in the Paraclete in 1129 and we know that on 20 January 1131, during Innocent the Second’s progress through France, Abelard was present at a large gathering in the Benedictine abbey of Morigny, near Etampes, where the pope consecrated the high altar. He had gone to ask for a papal legate to be sent to St Gildas for its reform (p. 41); there for the first time perhaps he met St Bernard. The journey between St Gildas and the Paraclete was some 360 miles and would take ten to fourteen days, so he would hardly have travelled to and fro. He had indeed cherished hopes of finding a haven of peace with the sisters, but the last pages of the Historia show that he is back at St Gildas, feeling himself an outcast and a wanderer like Cain, that he is recovering from a painful fracture after a fall from his horse, and has narrowly escaped from attempts to murder him by poison and ambush, and sees no prospect of any improvement in his position.
The Historia calamitatum was evidently written in 1132 or soon after, and Heloise says in her first letter that by chance someone brought it to her. If it was a genuine, personal letter of consolation to an unnamed friend and fellow-monk, as Abelard says, one wonders why it went further than him. It seems more probable that Abelard intended it for circulation (there may have been more than one copy) in order to win sympathy for his predicament and to pave the way for release from St Gildas so that he could return to his true vocation of teaching. He was still remembered for this; in the account of his meeting with Bernard he is described as ‘monk and abbot and so himself of the monastic order, the most distinguished master of the school to which flocked the scholars of almost all the Latin world’.6 It is known that he left St Gildas with his bishop’s consent and the right to retain his rank of abbot, and that he was teaching in Paris in 1136 at Mont-Sainte-Geneviève when John of Salisbury heard him lecture on dialectic, though he left Paris before John did.7 Perhaps this was only temporary; there are no other dates or indications of his whereabouts until 1140 or 1141 (the Council of Sens), but it is probable that most of the time he was in or near Paris and teaching, for this is the period of his greatest mental activity and output.
At first sight the Historia calamitatum looks as if it is written by a self-centred though not insensitive man, whose youthful years were ruled by self-assertion, pride and ambition. On reflection one sees it more as an attempt to put on record, from a detached standpoint, the facts of a life which the writer believed had often been misjudged and was now at risk. It has also been said that ‘the writing of this letter became the act of catharsis that turned what might have been merely an apology into a true self-revelation’.8 In this sense the Historia is a search for identity and a personal autobiography comparable with those of St Augustine, Cellini, St Teresa and Rousseau.
Heloise’s reactions in her first letter (Letter 2) are dismay at his misfortunes, the details of which are unlikely to have reached her before, and horror at the idea of his life being in danger at St Gildas. She then points out that if he can write a long letter of consolation to a ‘friend’, he can also write to advise and encourage the community at the Paraclete, as is his duty as their founder. He is wasting himself on monks such as he describes, but would find her nuns receptive. He can also write to her, to whom he has a personal obligation. For twelve years or more she has brooded over his apparent indifference in never giving her a word of recognition for the sacrifice she made in entering monastic life. He knows very well that she did it only for love of him, but his neglect has forced her to the conclusion that what he had felt for her was no more than lust and, when physical desire had gone, any warmth of affection had gone with it. She virtually demands a letter of explanation from him as her right.
In Letter 3 Abelard defends himself on the charge of negligence: he had not supposed that Heloise any longer had need of him. Could he really have thought that? No one can be sure, but it cannot be dismissed as simple wishful thinking. Disgust with his mutilated person may have made him want to shut the past out of his mind; he was changed, and knowing she was prioress and now abbess he may have been all too ready to believe that she was changed too. And his own conversion had, at some point, been sincere and permanent, so that he was now dedicated to God. The tone of his letter is set by the superscription: he writes as abbot to abbess. If the community is anxious for his safety, he says, they should remember the power of prayer. She must know that the sacrament of marriage which binds them, as well as ‘the integrity of our faith and … our profession of the same religious life’ (p. 59), increases the effectiveness of her own prayers. I think one should not see this as a selfish refusal to be drawn on Abelard’s part, but more as an attempt to put their relationship on a different basis because he knew this was in her best interests. But he certainly does not allow himself to enter imaginatively into Heloise’s plight, and this prompts her to be more explicit.
In Letter 4 she writes of her sexual frustration and inability to forget their happiness as lovers. She puts her dilemma clearly: she took vows not for love of God but for love of Abelard. Taking vows meant that she ought to be a nun in the true sense, and that her life should be ruled by love of God, but how was that possible when she loved him alone? She is perpetually conscious of being a hypocrite, for when the world admires her piety it sees only her outward behaviour and this means nothing to her; the intention is all, and her intention is lacking. She looks for reward only from Abelard, and he has denied it to her. She can hope for nothing from God for she has denied him, and she cannot repent. ‘How can it be called repentance for sins, however great the mortification of the flesh, if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with its old desires?’ (p. 68). She implores his help in resolving an intolerable situation.
This is a terrible picture of a soul in agony and of total human love which has brought only suffering. It is painful to contemplate how such intensity of feeling had been stoically concealed from the outside world for years of a young woman’s life. It is characteristic of Heloise that she never compromises, and never wavers from the moral view she shared with Abelard, that of the ethic of intention.9 Her keen intellect can analyse herself and her problem clearly, but the feeling behind the words is passionate and painful. Letter 4 jolts Abelard out of any suspected complacency. He replies at length, especially on the point of ‘your old perpetual complaint against God concerning the manner of our entry into religious life and the cruelty of the act of treachery performed on me’ (p. 72). The epithets (repeated later) imply that he had heard it before; the only time could have been when they met between his mutilation and her taking the veil. He sounds irritated by her raking it all up again, but perhaps that is reading too much into his words. He will not recall the past with nostalgia, as she does, but at least he shows he has not forgotten. He reminds her of certain events – their mockery of God when she dressed as a nun to go to Brittany, their overwhelming desire which led them to make love during the season of the Passion or in the refectory at Argenteuil – but he tries to make her see them as episodes which called for just punishment from God or, rather, for an act of God’s mercy which freed them both from the flesh which can be only a barrier to divine love. He begs her to make a supreme effort to shake off bitterness and resentment and to think only of the love of Christ. ‘It was he who truly loved you, not I. My love, which brought us both to sin, should be called lust, not love … You say I suffered for you … But he suffered truly for your salvation, on your behalf of his own free will …’ (p. 86). She must see herself as chosen to be the bride of Christ, and know that by surmounting her bodily suffering she can win the martyr’s crown which can never be his, for where there is no battle there is no victory. All the time he is trying to make her see the whole story of their relationship from its start until their entry into religion from the Christian monastic point of view, knowing that they were at least agreed in believing that chastity was something higher than wedlock. The letter ends with a prayer that though parted on earth they may be forever united in heaven (pp. 88–9).
Heloise replies in Letter 6 with great dignity, and the first paragraph of her letter marks the turning point of the correspondence. She will not argue nor trouble him further with heartsearchings; she now asks only for his help in occupying her mind with more constructive thoughts. We are never to know if she was able to achieve a change of heart and reorientation of herself towards God. Time the healer would make the physical severance from Abelard less acutely felt, and one hopes that she found compensation in her service to the Paraclete. Perhaps later on she came to feel that this was a true form of devotion to God and more than outward works under a cloak of hypocritical piety – as everyone who has written about her has wanted to think. Meanwhile she asks on behalf of her community for information about the origin of the order of nuns and for advice on a Rule suitable for women.
Remembering what has gone before we can only admire Heloise’s resolute self-control, and equally her intellectual and practical ability. She has lived under the Benedictine Rule for at least fourteen years, observing it, in a sense, from the outside. With her intelligence and erudition she is well equipped to offer criticism of what seems to her unsuitable if the Rule is to apply to women. She can appreciate that St Benedict was willing to temper his Rule to meet men’s capacity to observe it, and suggests that women should not have too great demands made upon their physique. She also argues cogently that many details of observance can be categorized as outward ‘works’ and are unimportant in comparison with faith and spiritual intent. Accordingly she asks for guidance on questions such as manual labour, fasting, clothing and diet, as well as for suitable arrangements for the Divine Office and for the reading of the Gospel at night. The emphasis throughout is on reasonable demands, avoidance of extremes and sincerity of intent; it is better to promise what one is capable of doing and then do more than to break down under impossible demands. She would have a longer novitiate, a deeper personal commitment and a truly spiritual training; she wants a poorer and a simpler life – different perhaps from the one she had known at Argenteuil – for she sees that ‘those who are true Christians are wholly occupied with the inner man … but they have little or no concern for the outer man’ (p. 107).
Abelard replies with two long treatises (Letters 7 and 8), one to answer Heloise’s question about religious communities of women,10 the other a detailed Rule for observance at the Paraclete. There is so little written about women’s Orders that this is a document of intrinsic interest for convent life at this time, though it is not very well expressed nor logical in its arrangement, and despite its elaborate formal opening it breaks off with curious abruptness. It combines long passages of sermonizing and erudition with a down-to-earth approach to practical details: the nuns are to be sensibly dressed in underwear and habit which hangs clear of the dust, with a full change of clothing and necessary sanitary protection, to wear proper stockings and shoes and to have adequate bedding. Dirty hands and knives are not to be wiped on bread intended for the poor, to spare the tablecloths. There is to be no self-imposed fasting, no undue mortification of the flesh, and no cutting down of hours of sleep or the nuns will not be mentally alert for their prayers or studies. There is a characteristic emphasis on education; routine practical tasks are to be assigned to nuns with no aptitude for letters, but any nun with the ability to learn must be taught to read and write. As far as possible we should worship God with understanding, a statement which Abelard amplifies into an attack on current illiteracy in monasteries (pp. 201 ff.).
This letter seems to be the basis for a later set of rules11 which were preserved in a manuscript at the Paraclete and were intended for the use of a mother foundation and its daughter houses; six of the latter were set up in Heloise’s lifetime, and this rather later Rule has been thought to be by her, but it cannot be firmly dated. It differs from Abelard’s recommendations in certain essentials and in a few less important points. There is no provision for the male superior ruling a double monastery such as he advocates (p. 155), but the abbess is to have authority over the monks and lay monks serving the convent, and the nuns are not strictly cloistered but may go outside the convent for necessary business. The blankets and pillows he specifies are not mentioned, and the nuns appear to sleep fully clothed instead of in their shifts as he wants; they may also eat pure wheat bread whereas he makes a point of one-third of the flour being of coarse grain. These are minor modifications, but a great deal has been read into the words ‘in refectorio nostro cibi sine carnibus sunt legumina …’ If they are translated as ‘in our refectory our meals are vegetables without meat …’, this would accord with stricter monastic practice but directly contravene the founder’s ruling (p. 189) that meat may be eaten three times a week and his expressed view that nothing except excess is forbidden. But if the words mean ‘the meatless meals consist of vegetables’ it is simply a reference to what Abelard goes on to say about the days when no meat is to be taken.
These long ‘Letters of Direction’, as they are called here, written in the rather stiff, formal style of contemporary scholarship, are also vital for an understanding of Abelard and Heloise. They provide the necessary depth of background to their relationship and show how this developed in the only way possible to them. In a sense Heloise has won her point; she has forced Abelard to look at her problem honestly and to renew contact with her, though not in the way she first hoped. Abelard has sincerely tried to show her that the only love which can now unite them is love of God, and that God has acted mercifully towards them, but he has had to learn something of what human love such as hers really means. She has agreed to try to put the past behind her, and from now on she has only to ask and Abelard will put all his learning and practical wisdom at the service of the Paraclete.
Abelard wrote a long letter addressed to the nuns on the importance of study and even urged them to apply themselves to Hebrew. In this he twice referred to Heloise as having knowledge of Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin12 – a surprising statement, as Abelard himself showed no knowledge of Hebrew apart from an occasional word and had little or no Greek, and though Peter the Venerable had admired her learning and gift for logic when he was a young man (p. 217), no one else has said she knew any Hebrew except the monk William Godel, writing in 1173 (p. xlvi). She probably had enough Greek for liturgical purposes. Heloise wrote a short letter in which she addressed Abelard as ‘loved by many but most dearly loved by us’ to accompany what are known as the ‘Problems of Heloise’: forty-two difficulties of interpretation in the Scriptures, to each of which Abelard gives carefully reasoned answers.13 Her request for hymns for the use of the nuns is lost, but his answer14 accompanying the first batch he wrote gives the gist of it and shows how they now wrote to each other:
At your urgent request, my sister Heloise, once dear to me in the world, now dearest in Christ, I have written what are called ‘hymns’ in Greek, ‘tehillim’ in Hebrew. When you and the sisters of your holy profession kept begging me to write these, I asked your purpose in doing so, for I thought it superfluous for me to compose new hymns when you had plenty of existing ones, and it seemed almost sacrilegious for new hymns by sinners to rank as high or higher than the ancient hymns of the saints. I received several different answers, among them this reasoned argument of your own: We know, you said, that the Latin Church in general and the French Church in particular follows customary usage rather than authority as regards both psalms and hymns. We still do not know for certain who was the author of the translation of the Psalter which our own French Church uses. If we want to reach a decision on the basis of the words of the variant translations, we shall still be a long way from a universally accepted interpretation and, in my opinion, this will carry no weight of authority. Customary practice has so long prevailed that although we have St Jerome’s corrected text for the rest of the Scriptures, the translation of the Psalter, which we use so much, is of doubtful authority. Moreover, the hymns we use now are in considerable confusion; they are never or rarely distinguished by titles or names of the authors, and even when they appear to have definite authors, of whom Hilary and Ambrose are considered the best, and next to them Prudentius and several others, the words are often so irregular in scansion that it is hardly possible to fit them to the music: and without this there is no hymn at all, according to the definition that it is ‘praise of God with song’. You went on to say that several of the feasts had no hymns of their own, those of the Innocents and the Evangelists, for example, or those for saintly women who had been neither virgins nor martyrs, and there were also some feasts during which those who sang the hymns could not be truthful, either because these did not fit the occasion or because false material has been inserted …
The letter continues with a detailed discussion of certain hymns, and ends: ‘And so as you beg this of me, brides or handmaids of Christ, in my turn I beg you through your prayers to relieve my shoulders of the burden you laid on them, so that the sower and the reaper of this harvest may rejoice in their work together.’
There are 133 extant Latin hymns by Abelard, evidently sent to the Paraclete in three batches, the second two with short accompanying letters addressed to the whole community, as well as some fine verse Laments. The most famous of these are included in this volume (pp. 230–35): ‘Vespers: Saturday Evening’ (O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata – ‘How mighty are the Sabbaths’) and ‘Good Friday: The Third Nocturn’ (Solus ad victimam procedis, Domine – ‘Alone to sacrifice thou goest, Lord’).
Abelard also wrote thirty-four short sermons for the Paraclete, which were evidently sent with the following accompanying letter:
I recently completed at your request a little book of hymns or sequences, Heloise my sister whom I love and revere in Christ, and then, as you asked me, hastened to write as best I could (for it is not the kind of writing I am used to) several short sermons for you and your spiritual daughters gathered together in our oratory. As I was concerned with the written rather than the spoken word, I concentrated on clarity of exposition, not eloquence of style, literal sense rather than elaborate rhetoric. And it may be that plain wording instead of rhetorical speech will be easier for simple minds to understand as being more direct; moreover, for the type of person who will be listening, the simplicity of ordinary speech will seem like elegant refinement and will have a pleasant taste suitable for girls of limited understanding. In writing or, rather, arranging these, I have kept to the order of the feasts of the Church, beginning with the start of our redemption. Farewell in the Lord, you who are his handmaid, once dear to me in the world, now dearest in Christ, once in the flesh my wife, now in the spirit my sister and in profession of sacred purpose, my consort.15
This shows a side of Abelard we have not seen before: considerate, self-effacing and patient with the young. What he offers the nuns here seems decidedly more practical than advice to study Hebrew and Greek.
It was also at Heloise’s request that he wrote the Hexameron, a commentary on the six days of the Creation, and this too is now generally thought to have been written during the 1130s.
Whether Abelard ever visited the convent or the Paraclete again is not known, but as all his writings for the nuns are introduced by letters to Heloise, it seems probable that they did not meet again. Apart from the bare fact that John of Salisbury heard him lecture in Paris in 1136, nothing is recorded of his movements until his confrontation with Bernard in 1140 or 1141, but as he was attacked then mainly for the corrupting influence of his theological teaching, it sounds as though he was mainly with his students in Paris.
Bernard was born in 1090 and entered the Cistercian foundation of Cîteaux in 1112.16 In 1115 he was chosen to be abbot of the new foundation at Clairvaux, which by the end of his life in 1153 was famous throughout Europe, with sixty-eight daughter houses. Most monastic foundations hitherto had been based on the Rule of St Benedict of about 530, and the Cistercians preached ‘The Rule to the last dot’ (Regula ad apicem literae). But they also looked to the asceticism of the early Fathers of the Egyptian desert. Their return to the past was prompted by the desire to free themselves from the fetters of customary practice and an increasingly elaborate liturgy, in order to live a simpler life and thereby gain true spiritual freedom for meditation on the love of God. Many of the Benedictine houses at this time belonged to the congregation of Cluny, and from 1122 Cluny had its own outstanding leader in the person of Peter the Venerable. One of his most famous letters is addressed to Bernard17 and is a reasoned defence of the Cluniac way of life and its interpretation of the Rule according to the spirit rather than the letter. But as Bernard permitted nothing either to the individual or to the community which could distract from the exacting demands of the Cistercian life, it follows that he was opposed to knowledge for its own sake and to any disinterested pursuit of learning, as a hindrance to the quest for perfection. Teaching in a Cistercian monastery was confined to its members, starting from the novitiate, and its purpose was salvation.
The clash between Abelard and Bernard was a cause célèbre of the twelfth century18 and is in part an instance of the rivalry between two opposing systems of teaching, the traditional monastic instruction in the cloister and the greater freedom of the Cathedral schools. It rests still more on the conflicting temperaments of the two men, and the tragedy is that they had certain things in common. Abelard no less than Bernard criticizes insincerity, corruption and worldliness in the Church. He is as uncompromising with the licence he allegedly found at St Denis as with the flagrant immorality at St Gildas; he and Heloise exchange comments on precipitate entry into monastic life without proper preparation (p. 100), elaborate monastic building and luxurious living (p. 141), abbots who boast of the numbers in their care without being able to provide for them (p. 194), abbots who leave their monasteries (p. 196), ignorance and illiteracy (p. 201), ‘the empty chatter of idleness, to which we see present-day monastic cloisters much addicted’ (p. 206), and the prevalence of works instead of faith: ‘They clean the outside of the pot or dish but pay little heed to cleanliness inside’ (p. 183). But as a logician he believed in the importance of clear thinking, and as a Benedictine he taught that knowledge and understanding served faith, not hindered it.
For Bernard the mystery of faith transcends human knowledge and can be gained only through mystic contemplation. He sees himself as a preacher with a sacred duty to proclaim revealed truth and to defend it and, for all his reforming zeal, he stands against Abelard as a champion of tradition. He sees Abelard as a danger to the faith of young people and simple men, and Abelard’s attempt to understand the Trinity as an evil example of intellectual arrogance and an insult to Christian belief. So he can write that ‘the mysteries of God are forced open, the deepest things bandied about in discussion without reverence’.19
Abelard sees this attack on discussion as unjustified and personal, similar to those he suffered before. He maintains that he is defending Christian faith by making it as intelligible as possible. He always believes that the words of the sacred Scriptures and the testimony of the Fathers must be true, but we must examine the evidence we have (often in the form of corrupt texts and unreliable witnesses) to remove difficulties and contradictions. His famous Sic et Non (Yes and No) had been written with this purpose in mind, though more than anything it had given a false and damaging picture of him as a sceptic. There he had selected and set out 158 problems where there are conflicting authorities; no synthesis is offered nor conclusion drawn – it is a teaching manual, designed for disputation on the question of the manuscripts being faulty or misunderstood, prompted by the belief that by stating propositions and their opposites we can provoke enquiry and arrive at understanding. He says in his preface that his aim is to sharpen the wits of his young readers and incite them to seek for the truth.
It would be equally wrong to suppose Abelard a rationalist in any but the twelfth-century sense of wishing to use his mastery of logic for the better understanding of his faith. He writes sadly in his ‘Confession of Faith’ (p. 211) that logic has made him hated by the world through misrepresentation, though ‘I do not wish to be a philosopher if it means conflicting with Paul, nor to be an Aristotle if it cuts me off from Christ.’ And he makes it plain in his philosophical works that he has no use for popular dialecticians who display their expertise on empty topics; properly used, dialectic has a moral basis and examines real problems, and it demands courage and honesty on the part of the user in giving way neither to authority nor to shallow cleverness in argument. But one can see how his scrupulous search for the proper terms in which to discuss theological problems could lay him open to misinterpretation and the charge of tampering with the content of faith.
The earliest reference to contact between Abelard and Bernard is a letter addressed to Bernard by Abelard when Bernard had visited the Paraclete soon after Heloise was installed and before Abelard went to St Gildas.20 He writes that on a recent visit to the convent Heloise had told him that Bernard had stayed there and had preached to the nuns ‘like an angel’. However, she had also informed him privately (secreto) that Bernard had taken exception to their use of the Vulgate version of St Matthew, which refers to ‘transubstantial’ rather than ‘daily’ bread in the Lord’s Prayer. The letter continues politely but firmly to defend Abelard’s preference without yielding an inch. We do not know Bernard’s reaction. The two men met at the gathering at the abbey of Morigny in 1131. Between 1132 and 1138 Bernard was travelling in France, Italy and Germany, preaching on behalf of Pope Innocent the Second, during the period of papal schism when many of the cardinals and important families in Italy recognized the rival claimant, Anacletus the Second. It was not until Anacletus died in 1138 that Innocent was able to live in Rome, and he must have left France deeply grateful for Bernard’s campaigns to establish his legitimate claims. During this time Abelard was probably teaching, and certainly writing a great deal. After the burning of his book on the Trinity in 1121 he had started to rewrite and expand it in his Theologia Christiana and he planned a comprehensive Theologia (Theology) in three parts. He also wrote his Ethica (Ethics) or Scito te ipsum (Know Yourself), a commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and the Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew and a Christian, as well as the hymns, sermons, answers to problems and the Hexameron for the nuns of the Paraclete.21
At some date in 1139 or 1140, a copy of Abelard’s Theologia was read by William, the former abbot of St Thierry in the diocese of Rheims, who had resigned to join a remote Cistercian monastery at Signy in the Ardennes. He had known Abelard personally, perhaps when both had been students at Laon, and he was a close friend of Bernard. He was dismayed by what he read and by what he had heard of Abelard’s teaching of ‘new things’ which would endanger the faith; he listed thirteen heretical points which he refuted, and sent the whole statement to Bernard and to Bishop Geoffrey of Chartres, the papal legate in France at the time, who had supported Abelard at the Council of Soissons eighteen or nineteen years previously. We do not know if the bishop replied, but Bernard acted at once.
According to Bernard’s biographer, Geoffrey of Auxerre, and other contemporary witnesses, Bernard twice met Abelard and suggested that he should modify his views and restrain his pupils, but to no effect. Bernard then approached first the bishop of Sens, and then the bishop of Paris to obtain permission to preach to the students. Abelard’s reply seems to have been to bring out a fourth edition of his Theologia, unchanged in all essentials. Bernard then appealed to the Pope, enclosing his treatise against Abelard’s heresies, and he also wrote to the cardinals at Rome. He links Abelard’s name with the notorious Arnold of Brescia, and his violent abuse and intemperate language are startlingly disagreeable to an unprejudiced reader. Abelard then asked Archbishop Henry of Sens to arrange for a meeting between himself and Bernard on the Sunday after Whitsun, which should take the form of a public disputation on their disagreements. It was already to be a great occasion: the relics of the cathedral were to be shown to Louis VII and his court in the presence of the bishops and dignitaries of the diocese. Bernard at first refused to attend, on the grounds that he was no match for a skilled dialectician and he disapproved of arguing about matters of faith. His friends persuaded him to change his mind, so he proceeded to lobby the bishops both by letter and by meeting them at Sens, to explain what he intended to do and to enlist their support. He also preached publicly to the people assembled in the town.
In a letter addressed to his friends and pupils which Abelard wrote at this time, he made it clear that he looked upon Bernard’s attack as yet another instance of misunderstanding and malice, this time from a monk who was greatly his inferior in intellectual capacity and training. He neither shared Bernard’s burning conviction that the purity of the faith was jeopardized, nor was he likely to accept that he was ‘a man who does not know his own limitations, making void the virtue of the Cross by the cleverness of his words’.22 He asked his friends to support him at the Council of Sens, and they must have been confident that Bernard would be defeated in the promised disputation.
Instead, there was no disputation, but something much more like a court of inquisition at which Bernard produced a list of Abelard’s heresies which he read aloud and called upon Abelard to defend, renounce or deny that they were his. Abelard refused to make any statement, on the grounds that he wished to appeal direct to the Pope, and left the Council. There has been much speculation why he did this. He may have felt that this was going to be another Council of Soissons, and that he could not face it again, or that a large social occasion with people like the king and Count Theobald of Champagne present was no place for subtle theological exposition and that no one would pay proper attention; this seems likely enough if we believe anything of the highly coloured satirical account of the Council given by Abelard’s pupil, Berengar of Poitiers, who says that the bishops were half asleep and drunk after a heavy meal, mumbling ‘namus’ (we swim) instead of ‘damnamus’ (we condemn).23 It has also been suggested that Abelard had long suffered from a progressive form of cancer, named as Hodgkin’s disease, that he had felt exhausted and ill at Sens but had remission afterwards at Cluny.24
The Council condemned nineteen points in Bernard’s statement as heretical, and Bernard sent off a letter describing the proceedings to the Pope. The archbishops of Sens and Rheims also wrote and Bernard wrote again to the cardinals. Six weeks later, on 16 July, the Pope sent his rescript to the archbishops and to Bernard condemning Abelard as a heretic, excommunicating his followers, ordering his books to be burned and himself to be confined in a monastery in perpetual silence. The news reached Abelard at Cluny, where he had stopped on the long journey to Rome and stayed on at the invitation of Peter the Venerable. Immediately after the Council of Sens (or possibly just before it) he had written his ‘Confession of Faith’, addressed to Heloise, a document of great dignity and restraint, which was probably the last personal message she had from him. If we accept an earlier dating, Peter the Venerable had already written to the Pope (p. 215) to report that he and the Abbot of Cîteaux had mediated between Abelard and Bernard, that the two men had met and were reconciled, and his letter asking permission for Abelard to remain as a monk of Cluny must have crossed the Pope’s rescript; the sentence was afterwards lifted.
Abelard died some months later, in April 1142 or perhaps in 1144; Peter the Venerable’s letter to Heloise (p. 217) describing his death in a daughter house of Cluny at St Marcel, near Chalon-sur-Saône, pays tribute to the simplicity and piety of his life and to his devotion to his studies, as far as his health permitted, right up to the end. It is uncertain if he actually wrote anything at Cluny and St Marcel. The long, rather platitudinous letter in verse giving advice to his son Astralabe is now generally dated to about 1135 rather than to this period, for the complete text25 refers to ‘the frequent complaint of our Heloise’ (nostrae Eloysae crebra querela) that she can have no hope of salvation if she cannot repent of what she once did with Abelard, an echo of her second letter (pp. 67–8). Abelard is not likely to have brought this up again some six years later. The Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew and a Christian and the Hexameron, which used to be considered late works, are now also ascribed to the mid-1130s. The short general Confession of Faith to Everyone (not the one preserved by Berengar of Poitiers) which was Abelard’s personal defence, may have been written before the Council of Sens, and an Apologia was planned but left unfinished – perhaps broken off when Abelard heard of the Pope’s sentence.26 There is no indication that he felt obliged to modify the theological views which he considered had been attacked in envy and ignorance, nor evidence that he put into writing the piety and humility to which Peter the Venerable testifies. He may well have been physically incapable of sustained creative effort.
Peter the Venerable is credited with a somewhat pedestrian verse epitaph which describes Abelard as ‘The Socrates of the Gauls, Plato of the West, our Aristotle, prince of scholars … the keen thinker and dialectician who won his greatest victory when he renounced all for the true philosophy of Christ.’ One wonders what he had in mind in referring to Socrates – another opponent of self-deception and loose thinking who had been misrepresented as a corrupting influence on the minds of the young. Five anonymous epitaphs are also preserved, all of which emphasize Abelard’s fame as a philosopher and scholar without reference to his chequered career as a teacher of theology.27
There remains an exchange of letters between Heloise and Peter the Venerable written sometime in 1144 (pp. 217 ff.), in which Heloise thanks Peter for visiting the Paraclete and bringing with him Abelard’s body to rest in the care of the community he had founded. She asks him for a written absolution for Abelard to be hung over the tomb, and for help in getting her son Astralabe a benefice in one of the cathedrals. Peter sends the absolution (p. 228) along with a ratification of his verbal promise that Cluny will say thirty masses for Heloise after her death, and promises to do his best for Astralabe. This is the only time Heloise mentions him, and nothing definite is known about the young man who had played so small a part in his parents’ lives.
Peter the Venerable died in 1156 or 1157, but Heloise outlived Abelard by some twenty-one years; she is recorded in the necrology of the Paraclete as dying on 16 May in 1163 or 1164. The romantics have liked to think that she died, like Abelard, at the age of sixty-three. In her competent hands the Paraclete grew to be one of the most distinguished religious houses in France. Six daughter houses were founded during her lifetime to receive the increasing numbers of postulants, and the Cartulary of the convent of the Paraclete lists twenty-nine documents which refer to the Paraclete when in her care, confirming privileges and registering deeds of gift. Eleven papal charters are among them; the one of Pope Eugenius of 1147 included arable land, meadows, woods, fish ponds, vineyards, farms, mills, tithes and money.28 It is clear from Peter the Venerable’s letter (p. 217) that Heloise was one of the Church’s great abbesses, revered for her sanctity as well as for her learning.
It is impossible not to speculate about her inner thoughts and to wonder if she found her vocation, but of course there can be no answer. Human love such as hers does not end with separation or the death of the beloved, but it changes in quality as the physical pangs of severance are blunted; at least it seems unlikely that a woman of her character and common sense allowed herself the indulgence of brooding over the irrecoverable past. At a higher level one hopes that reconciliation with Abelard through their exchange of letters made it possible for her to love him on a different plane, as his ‘sister in Christ’; at a lower level that her fine intelligence and administrative ability found full scope in what we should now call a rewarding career, and that with passage of time she achieved ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’.29
Heloise is recorded in the Paraclete’s burial record as having been buried alongside Abelard in the abbey church, which was later known as the chapel of St Denis or the Petit Moustier (‘Little Monastery’). This was the small oratory built by Abelard’s students many years before, to replace the simple reed and thatch structure he had first set up. In 1497 the abbess of the time had the bodies moved from what was described as a damp and watery position and placed on either side of the high altar in the new oratory which had been built further away from the Ardusson. They were moved again in 1621 to a crypt below an altar on which stood a stone representing the Three Persons of the Trinity, which was believed to have been carved under Abelard’s direction. In 1701 this stone was moved to a better position in the choir, and in 1780 the bodies moved again to a new position, still in the crypt. When the convent was sold at the time of the Revolution and the buildings demolished, apart from the residence of the abbess (the present Château, dating from 1685), the bones were taken to the church of St Laurent in Nogent-sur-Seine, and in 1800 to Paris, to Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français. They were later moved to the cemetery of Mont Louis, now Père Lachaise. There they are still, in a sarcophagus brought from St Marcel which Lenoir believed to have been Abelard’s original tomb, beneath a Gothic-style structure and surrounded by modern iron railings, through which flowers are still sometimes placed beside their effigies by tourists who know something of their history, and by Parisians on All Souls’ Day.
There are relatively few tributes to Abelard after his death, either as theologian or philosopher. People would remember or hear of the events at Sens who knew little or nothing of Abelard’s last months at Cluny, and Bernard’s influence was strong enough for Abelard’s name to be virtually erased even if his theological teaching continued in the Cathedral schools where Bernard’s traditionalism was not acceptable. The analytical and critical methods of the Sic et Non influenced such famous theological manuals as Peter the Lombard’s Books of the Sentences, and Abelard stands as one of the creators of open-minded thinking which led to the birth of the medieval universities, but as a logician he suffered from the discovery of Aristotle’s scientific works within a decade of his death. Once Aristotle’s solution to the nature of Universals was known, Abelard’s formulation of Conceptualism, which was remarkably Aristotelean, was no longer read.
There are, however, manuscripts of his logical works and his Apologia which date back to the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, as well as references to his teaching.30 The case of the letters is very different. The occasional references we have to the lovers in the twelfth-century chroniclers are short and factual. William Godel, a monk of St Martin of Limoges, writing in 1173, says that Heloise or Helvisa was ‘formerly Abelard’s wife and truly his friend’31 and a religious and learned woman well versed in both Latin and Hebrew. An allegorical poem, highlighting Abelard’s struggle with Bernard, depicts Heloise searching for him in this time of crisis:
The bride then asks where is her Palatine,
He whose spirit showed itself totally divine?
She asks why, like an exile, he has now withdrawn,
He whom she had cherished at her breasts.32
From the early thirteenth century, the chronicle of Tours describes how Abelard had built the Paraclete and installed the nuns there with his former wife Heloise as abbess, how she ‘who was truly his lover’ had his body brought there for burial and prayed constantly for him after his death, and then adds: ‘It is said that when she was lying in her last illness she gave instructions that when she was dead she should be laid in the tomb of her husband. And when her dead body was carried to the opened tomb, her husband, who had died long before her, raised his arms to receive her, and so clasped her closely in his embrace.’33
None of the nine known manuscripts of the letters can be dated before the late thirteenth century at the earliest, 150 years after the letters were written. There is no trace of an independent manuscript of Letter 1, Historia calamitatum, a copy of which Heloise herself (p. 47) says came into her hands. Jean de Meun must have had a manuscript when he translated the Historia and introduced the story of Abelard and Heloise into sixty-four lines of his continuation of the allegorical Roman de la Rose about 1280. It seems probable, as both J. Monfrin and R. W. Southern have suggested,34 that the letters were kept by Heloise at the Paraclete, and that more than a century after her death they were brought to Paris and copied. It would be unlikely that anyone would know of her self-revelations during her lifetime. Peter the Venerable would hardly have thought so highly of her holiness and sense of vocation had he read of her sensual longings and self-reproach for hypocrisy. There seems no reason to suppose that Heloise ‘edited’ the personal letters in any way,35 even if we accept that Abelard may have put words into her mouth in the Historia calamitatum. My own feeling is that once she had accepted that her relationship with Abelard must be re-established on a different basis and that henceforth she could look to him only for guidance as the founder of the institution of which she was a respected abbess, she would be unwilling to reread those painful outpourings of her heart. From the first paragraph of Letter 6 the correspondence takes on a different tone from which Heloise never wavers.
What became of Abelard’s copies of the letters no one can know. It was current practice for medieval writers to keep copies of their own letters and even to revise them for later circulation as a letter-collection. This would be of general interest as showing the learning and expertise in the art of letter-writing of a single individual – such as St Bernard, Peter the Venerable or John of Salisbury – and its importance would be literary rather than historical, with the younger Pliny or Sidonius Apollinaris as models for variety of content and elegance of style. It was unusual for answers to be included: they could disturb the literary unity of the collection. Here is a further indication that the letters were not issued either in Heloise’s lifetime or later as a literary letter-collection, but for their intrinsic personal interest when they came to light in the late thirteenth century.
Even after Jean de Meun, references remain scanty. Abelard and Heloise are not among the incontinent lovers in the Second Circle of Dante’s Inferno (Canto 5), though their story has something in common with that of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. Chaucer does no more than mention ‘Helowys That was abbesse nat fer fro Parys’ in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (lines 677–8), where she is one of an oddly assorted company in a satire on matrimony. He probably knew of her through the Roman de la Rose. The first genuine interest in the lovers was shown by Petrarch. One of the nine good manuscripts, dating from the early fourteenth century, belonged to him, and the marginal Latin notes to the Historia calamitatum and the personal letters are believed to be in his hand. It is certainly understandable that the author of the Secretum and of his own intensely personal letters should have read the manuscript closely. About a century later, c. 1461, François Villon included these lines in his Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis, his theme being that death is inevitable for all mankind:
Où est la très sage Hellois
Pour qui fut chastré, puis moine
Pierre Esbaillart à Saint-Denis?
Pour son amour eut cette essoyne …
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
(‘Where is that learned lady Heloise, for whose sake Pierre Abelard was first castrated, then became a monk at Saint-Denis? It was through love that he suffered such misfortune … But where are last year’s snows?’)
But this amounts to so little, especially at a time when romances like that of Tristan and Iseult or Aucassin and Nicolette were highly popular, that it seems likely that Abelard and Heloise could not be fitted into the current ideal of courtly love, with its emphasis on the lover’s devotion to the chaste and unattainable lady. Abelard and Heloise speak a different language of sensuous frankness, of pagan realism in love and classical Stoic fortitude in adversity. Their relationship found physical expression, and Heloise is neither cold nor remote but loving and generous, eager to give service and not to demand it. By contrast with the cruel reality of their tragedy, courtly love as depicted in the romances of chivalry appears mannered and artificial.
The Latin text of the letters and of Abelard’s major works was printed for the first time in Paris in 1616 in two practically identical editions, one of François d’Amboise, the other of André Duchesne. Why there were two editions has never been explained. The introductory material in the two differs, but the text is the same, and the notes on Letter 1 by Duchesne appear in both. This text remained standard for over two centuries.
In 1718 Richard Rawlinson brought out in London a new edition of the letters which adds nothing to the edition of 1616, and in 1841 John Caspar Orelli of Zurich published the Historia and the four personal letters. This was followed in 1849 by Victor Cousin’s Petri Abaelardi opera, in two volumes, published in Paris, which became the standard edition. It includes Duchesne’s notes, and the text is based on d’Amboise, plus Cousin’s reading of four manuscripts. It is generally considered a better text than that of J.-P. Migne in Volume 178 of his Patrologia Latina (1855), though this too is mainly d’Amboise’s text with Duchesne’s notes.
Today the best edition for purposes of citation is by Eric Hicks, La vie et les epistres Pierres Abaelart et Heloys sa fame (Paris and Geneva, 1991). This prints the Latin texts of Letters 1–7, with numbered lines, in parallel with the French translation attributed to Jean de Meun. Letter 8 (Abelard’s ‘rule’ for Heloise and her nuns) has been edited by T. P. McLaughlin, ‘Abelard’s Rule for Religious Women’, Mediaeval Studies 18 (1956), pp. 241–92, without numbered lines.36
The d’Amboise–Duchesne text and the English edition by Rawlinson gave rise to an extraordinary number of translations and romantic paraphrases of the letters. The best translations were the English one by the Reverend Joseph Berington (London, 1787) and the French version by Dom Gervaise (Paris, 1723), but these were less influential than some of the wilder flights of fancy. In 1687 Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, sent Mme de Sévigné his own version of Heloise’s two love-letters and Abelard’s reply to the first, in which he had inserted fictitious incidents and reduced the whole story to a contemporary flirtatious intrigue. This continued to be reprinted until the mid-nineteenth century. Another version paraphrased by various hands and printed in Amsterdam in 1695 introduces the name ‘Philinthe’ for the unknown recipient of Letter 1, and a re-hash of this by F. N. Du Bois of the same year ran into many editions. It was Du Bois’s paraphrase which made the romance generally known in England and inspired the version by John Hughes, first published in London in 1714, and entitled Letters of Abelard and Heloise, to which is prefixed a particular account of their lives, Amours and Misfortunes, extracted chiefly from Monsieur Bayle, translated from the French.
The fourth edition of this (1722) was reprinted in 1901 by J. M. Dent in the Temple Classics series as The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise, and ran successfully through ten editions until it went out of print in 1945. It is edited by Miss H. Morten, who tells us in her short preface that ‘It is rather a paraphrase than a translation, but by its swiftness and sympathy best gives the spirit of the original.’ The Historia calamitatum, headed ‘Abelard to Philintus’, opens thus:
The last time we were together, Philintus, you gave me a melancholy account of your misfortunes; I was sensibly touched with the relation, and like a true friend bore a share in your griefs. What did I not say to stop your tears? I laid before you all the reasons philosophy could furnish, which I thought might anyways soften the strokes of fortune. But all these endeavours have proved useless; grief, I perceive, has wholly seized your spirits, and your prudence, far from assisting, seems to have forsaken you. But my skilful friendship has found out an expedient to relieve you. Attend to me a moment, hear but the story of my misfortunes, and yours, Philintus, will be nothing as compared with those of the loving and unhappy Abelard.
And so it goes on. Heloise is given a maidservant, Agaton: ‘She was brown, well-shaped, and a person superior to her rank; her features were regular and her eyes sparkling, fit to raise love in any man whose heart was not prepossessed by another passion.’ She also has a singing-master who ‘was excellently qualified for conveying a billet with the greatest dexterity and secrecy’, and Abelard’s sister Lucilla is persuaded to support her arguments against marriage. Typical of what flows from Heloise’s pen is the following passage from Letter 2:
Though I have lost my lover I still preserve my love. O vows! O convent! I have not lost my humanity under your inexorable discipline! You have not turned me to marble by changing my habit; my heart is not hardened by my imprisonment; I am still sensible to what has touched me, though, alas! I ought not to be! Without offending your commands permit a lover to exhort me to live in obedience to your rigorous rules.37
Hughes’s travesty of the letters was apparently accepted as genuine even after Berington’s translation of 1787. Its main interest now is that it is generally considered to be the source of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard which appeared among his works in 1717 (Rawlinson’s Latin text did not appear until the following year). Pope’s poem was immediately popular and frequently reprinted; it was also translated into French, German and Italian.38 There were many other poetic versions of the lovers’ story inspired by it, though none which showed the same imaginative intensity:
The darksome pines that o’er yon rocks reclin’d
Wave high, and murmur to the hollow wind,
The wand’ring streams that shine between the hills,
The grots that echo to the tinkling rills,
The dying gales that pant among the trees,
The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze;
No more these scenes my meditation aid,
Or lull to rest the visionary maid.
But o’er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence, and a dead repose:
Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,
Shades ev’ry flow’r, and darkens ev’ry green,
Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,
And breathes a browner horror on the woods.
But this is hardly the atmosphere of the gently undulating fields and farmlands of Champagne, with the Ardusson quietly flowing through the rushes by the Paraclete. Pope conjures up something more like the crags and caverns and rushing torrents of Clisson, already romantically associated with Heloise, and said to have inspired some of Poussin’s landscapes. It was there too that Lamartine is said to have written his lines in memory of Heloise. Nor does Pope’s Eloisa recall the historic Heloise, but is rather the neo-classical heroine painted by Angelica Kauffmann and her contemporaries, languishing over Abelard’s tomb or on her own deathbed.
In 1925 The Letters of Abelard and Heloise translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (the translator of Proust) from Migne’s text was published by the Cambridge University Press in an edition limited to 750 copies and now out of print. Scott Moncrieff quotes from Hughes’s translation but evidently knows nothing of Berington’s, as he claims to be the first to translate from Latin and not to adapt a debased French version. There are no explanatory notes, and as an introduction only a curious and rather facetious exchange of letters with George Moore querying the authenticity of the Letters. Moore’s novel Heloise and Abelard had appeared in 1921. The style of the translation is idiosyncratic to the point of being sometimes barely intelligible; it wavers uneasily between the cadences of the Authorized Version, a literal transcription of the original Latin sentence-structure, and the underpunctuated sentences of Moore himself. Here is a passage from Heloise’s first letter:
There were two things, I confess, in thee especially, wherewith thou couldst at once captivate the heart of any woman; namely the arts of making songs and of singing them. Which we know that other philosophers have seldom followed. Wherewith as with a game, refreshing the labour of philosophic exercise, thou has left many songs composed in amatory measure or rhythm, which for the suavity both of words and of tune being oft repeated, have kept thy name without ceasing on the lips of all; since even illiterates the sweetness of thy melodies did not allow to forget thee. It was on this account chiefly that women sighed for love of thee. And as the greater part of thy songs descanted of our love, they spread my fame in a short time through many lands, and inflamed the jealousy of many women against me.39
No other English translation has appeared since 1925,40 though there is no lack of interest in the human tragedy of the lovers and a growing one in Abelard as a logician.41 George Moore’s novel was followed by Helen Waddell’s popular Peter Abelard, and later by M. Worthington’s The Immortal Lovers; and in 1970 by Ronald Millar’s play which ran successfully in the West End.
Abelard and Heloise do not write in the unsophisticated Latin of the previous century, and they have not the easy grace of an accomplished letter-writer such as Peter the Venerable. The composition and style of their letters follow the rules for correct letter-writing of the twelfth century. The elegance these sought in formal address, proper choice of words and arrangement of material seems to us excessive, and Scott Moncrieff has shown that the frequent use of connecting relative pronouns and elaborate antithesis of clauses have to be eschewed in translation. Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, being largely narrative, is less rhetorical, and Heloise can write directly in her personal letters. But it was the convention of their day to overload a reasoned argument with strings of stock quotations from the Vulgate and the Christian Fathers, or to introduce a homily on an appropriate topic which reads like a set piece. Heloise, for example, has said something in Letter 6 about the evil of incontinence and the effect of strong drink (pp. 99 ff.) which Abelard elaborates on in Letter 8, repeating the same quotations (pp. 174 ff.). In addition, their intensive classical education leaves its mark both in quotation and choice of words. In this sense they are both learned clerks and write in ‘a mood of literary showmanship’.42 But they are also individuals who would be exceptional in any age, whose letters move through the widest range of emotions – devotion, disappointment, grief and indignation, self-confidence, ambition, impatience, self-reproach and resignation – all under the discipline of a keen critical intelligence which is as marked in Heloise as in Abelard. They deserve to be heard, even if imperfectly and at second-hand through a translation, in the words they wrote.