Two Day Magazine

The Love and Sacrifices of Heloise and Abelard: The First True "Star Crossed Lovers"

The medieval tragedy of Abelard and Heloise is, in many ways, the first true story of Romance in the sense that that word is now used. They were the real-life “star-crossed lovers”, preceding Romeo and Juliet, or Lancelot and Guinevere. Their love blossomed in France in the early 11th Century c.e., at the birth of the conventions of courtly love, in which a wooer pledged himself to the service of his Lady, even going so far as to sacrificing his life for her, whether she reciprocated his affection or not, with a degree of devotion that had previously extended only to one’s feudal lord, or to God. With few exceptions, courtship in the Dark Ages from which Europe was only just emerging, was a matter of a contract negotiated between a suitor and the bride’s family, a negotiation involving dowries and the exchange of property; as unromantic as a business contract because that’s exactly what it resembled. Even so, be aware that this romance is as terrible as it is tender, and sadly needs to be told again because the tragedy is, regrettably, relived frequently today.

In 1115, Pierre Abelard was the biggest celebrity teacher in Europe, with thousands of students. Enjoying the patronage of the influential Garland family, Abelard was a superstar master of philosophical “dialectic” -- a then-popular form of debate in which western thought was being forged. The stakes couldn’t be higher in these verbal duels in the sophisticated Parisian schools and streets, where opposing schools of thought would throw down before large crowds. If you got served in one of these matches, you lost your students, your livelihood, and your career. Abelard was the Jesse James of these rhetorical shootouts, applying Aristotelian criticism to theological problems.

Abelard’s fame made him much sought-after as a teacher in the Cathedral School of Notre Dame and as a live-in tutor by the rich and powerful, such as the church canon Fulbert, who lavished every indulgence on his beautiful and brilliant teenage niece, Heloise (pronounced “Hello-weez”). Although from an undistinguished family, she was without equal among women in her knowledge of Latin, Hebrew and Greek classics.
 
A love bloomed during these private tutorials, a passion as physical as it was philosophical. Secret rendezvous were arranged to protect her reputation and his career. In the classrooms of 1115, beatings were common teaching tools, so Uncle Fulbert was not angry to find the welts Abelard had left on Heloise’s ass... but he would have been if he had known that she liked it. Their Latin love letters survive today:

“How ripe with delight is your breast, how radiant with the purest beauty, your body so full of wetness, that ineffable scent of yours...”

The “secret” lovers had become the talk of Paris society; duchesses and queens envied Heloise for her tall and clever poet-philosopher. Soon, everyone knew what went on in Uncle Fulbert’s house, except for Uncle Fulbert. Ultimately, nature intervened. When Abelard learned she carried his child (named, weirdly, “Astralabe”), Abelard spirited her away to his parents in Breton, fearing Fulbert would harm her for violating his family’s honor. Abelard suggested marriage, but Heloise was willing to sacrifice her reputation for Abelard’s illustrious career, preferring to be, in her words, his whore rather than his wife, but

Abelard vetoed this arrangement. He met with Fulbert, agreeing to marry his brilliant baby-momma on the condition that the marriage be kept secret. Abelard’s teaching post in the Cathedral school excluded married men. Abelard and Heloise were married in secret.

For some reason, Fulbert consented to these still-humiliating terms, but misjudged his own ability to abide by them; both to live without his beloved niece, and live with the continual disgrace. Convinced Abelard was insincere in his marriage vows, Fulbert both exposed their secret wedding, and with a gang of his kinsmen, assaulted and castrated Abelard. As strange as it may seem today for a man of God to round up a gang to rough someone up, this attack touched off a conflict which today resembles nothing so much as a vendetta between two Mafia families. Abelard’s patron, the Garland family, retaliated by having two of Abelard’s attackers both castrated and blinded.

Meanwhile, the political landscape of Europe was shifting. Two power blocks were jockeying for supremacy: Church and State. Both held land on which they applied separate laws and taxes. The church leaders, worried that its priests (who sometimes had mistresses, even wives) might be tempted to give away church property to their children, intensified both their enforcement of the rule of chastity, and their condemnation of adultery, and sex in general. Among the sinful practices these moral reformers sought to repress was the wearing by young ladies of pointy-toed shoes (the gotta-have-it accessory for the young and fabulous Parisian bad-girl), which flaunted a shameless suggestion of foot out from under the chaste canopy of the skirt. To bolster this political power-grab, questioning church policies became “heresy” (bad news for Abelard’s form of faith-tempered-with-reason), the first hardening of Christian dogma which would lead ultimately to the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition.

Because the blood was shed on church territory, the high-profile celebrity trial of Abelard vs. Fulbert was presided over by the Bishop of Paris. It was during this crack-down on unsanctioned sexual congress, that Canon Fulbert was given barely a slap on the wrist; merely fired from his post, to regain it a few years later. In a bizarre demonstration of punishing the victim, Abelard was obliged to become a monk, adding to his bodily loss the sacrifice of all wealth and property.

Although incapable of fulfilling his conjugal duties, Abelard was still Heloise’s husband, and she vowed to obey him in all things. Unable to bear the thought of her with another man, Abelard insisted that Heloise, still in the ripeness of youth, should become a nun.
Abelard and Heloise both lived long lives in convents and monasteries, and although their love never faded, they were almost always apart. Their loss has been western civilization’s gain, however, for all the zeal that once fired their sexual affair energized their philosophical correspondences with one another, by which writings we still can appreciate their genius, poetry, and wit. As Heloise matured, she became the influential Abbess of the convent Abelard founded, but Abelard was persecuted everywhere he went for his scientific inquiry into matters of faith, as well as for his scandalous reputation. Abelard represented everything the new Christendom was setting out to destroy, as Church slowly won out over State.

In fact, shortly after Abelard’s death, the Church expanded its attack on free love and free thought into what is known as the Albigensian Crusades, which has been described as the first genocide of modern European history, in which hundreds of thousands (perhaps as many as 1 million) Cathars of the Languedoc region of southern France were condemned at heretics and slaughtered. The Cathar Gnostics esteemed wisdom (“gnosis”) above faith, and emphasized the role of the female in their religion, which included ordained priestesses. But this Gnostic reverence for the feminine principle may live on, in a way, as many believe it was spread by the troubadours from the south of France in the form of the Romance stories and songs describing courtly love.

Telling a love story (in which category I include both the Bible and the history of Abelard and Heloise) is a more difficult thing than telling other sorts of stories, whether fact or fiction. The love between a woman and a man, or between a person and their God, is ultimately an indescribable affair between the lover and the beloved. The writer of either literary form struggles -- always, ultimately, with futility -- to convey the full sense to the reader of what that love is like. In this struggle, one way to convey the depth of someone’s devotion, whatever the object, is the lover’s gesture of sacrifice. Recall Kate Winslet floating on the debris of the Titanic as Leonardo DiCaprio sinks into the dark, cold Atlantic. Is it healthy to esteem love by the amount of pain and loss one would undergo for that love, when the last thing a lover would want is for their beloved to suffer? Are we ready to look at the enduring fame of Abelard and Heloise as truly a relic of the Dark Ages, sprung from the same morbid atmosphere which gave us the skeletal plague-era images of the Danse Macabre or those fanciful oral snuff-films, the brutal original medieval versions of many fairy tales, with which parents prepared their children for a brutal world?

I can only look back and wish that Abelard and Heloise could have healed, body and spirit, transcended their losses, and rather than Heloise joining Abelard in his castration beneath the nun’s veil, with its obligations of a sort of symbolic female castration; that they could have allowed her to savor the fruits of her youth as well as the many other forms of love they still shared. And looking forward, I hope we can judge the depth of a love not by what suffering we would inflict upon ourselves for our beloved’s sake, but by the greater happiness we can share.