Impossible Love: Abelard and Heloise

Medieval painting of Abelard & Heloise

In all of Western literature it is said there are but seven essential tales, seven essential plots. Seven: that’s a nice medieval number. For those whose lives spanned the eleventh and the twelfth centuries there were seven cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins, God made the world in seven days — and there were the seven ages of man.

The seven basic plots are actually a modern invention. But they have their place in my medieval tale. There is the story of the fatal flaw, for example, Achilles — which usually turns into tragedy, but it can be a source of comedy, too. There is the story of the Wandering Jew, the persecuted traveller who will never return home. Or there is the Cinderella story, that is, the story of unrecognized virtue that is finally noticed — now, that’s a story we all want to believe in. As a matter of fact, you will find elements of these three stories in the one I am going to tell.

But what we are concerned most with here is love, the story of a passion between a man and a woman. Now I would say there are only two kinds of love story, happy and unhappy: either the boy gets the girl, or he loses her. Curiously we seem to prefer the unhappy ones, perhaps because they help us come to terms with our own unhappinesses.

Abelard and Heloise: not a modern love story?

Three at a cocktail before the talk

The story of Abelard and Heloise is an unhappy story, probably one of the unhappiest ever told, I would further call their love the Impossible Love; you know — all you lovers — that is the love that is, despite the desire, just impossible to pull off. What is so enticing about the Impossible Love of Abelard and Heloise is that it has got a little twist in it. That’s what I want to bring to your attention, that little twist in their Impossible Love.

Now some people have said that this is not a modern story, not one that directly concerns us contemporary folk. Mark Twain was one of the first to say this. In his Innocents Abroad, one of his early works and one of his worst books, he argues that the public ‘have been wasting a good deal of marketable sentiment very unnecessarily’ on this story. Abelard was an ‘unmanly’ miscreant who debauched a ‘confiding, innocent girl’ in the home of her uncle who revenged himself by hiring a bunch of ‘ruffians’ to inflict on him a ‘terrible and nameless mutilation’. Abelard then had her shut up in a monastery and had no more to do with her until she wrote tenderly to him; then he addressed her from ‘the North Pole of his frozen heart as the “Spouse of Christ”.’ The only person Twain felt sorrow for was Fulbert, whose trust was abused. The rest is not worth weeping about, or spending ‘money on immortal flowers, or even a ‘bunch of radishes’. One should dismiss Mark Twain’s ‘Abelard and Heloise’ as a piece of youthful exuberance — so you are probably now going to read it!

The other account claiming that this is not a modern story comes, surprisingly, from Michael Clanchy, whose biography of Abelard is quite the finest that has ever been written. Clanchy, in the Penguin edition of the letters — which I also highly recommend — claims that the ‘agonized sexual morality of Abelard and Heloise becomes difficult for a new generation to understand, as contraception is routine and abortion is argued to be a woman’s right.’ Today, Clanchy says, Abelard and Heloise are seen as ‘ludicrous figures who could not get a grip on their lives.’

I think both Twain and Clanchy have got this utterly wrong. The story, I believe, has something to say to all you lovers, and especially those of you — perhaps the majority of you — who have lived the Impossible Love, the love that cannot be fulfilled.

Abelard, the scholastic

Heather introduces Gregor

It looks as if it is the classic love match that goes wrong: the moment of ecstasy, then the wretched descent. ‘Of all the wretched women,’ Heloise wrote to Abelard in her fluent Latin one decade after their catastrophe, ‘I am the most wretched, and amongst the unhappy I am the unhappiest.’ Abelard expresses almost exactly the same remorse: ‘All the grief and indignation,’ he says, ‘the blushes for shame, the agony of despair, the agony I suffered I cannot put into words. I judged myself the unhappiest of men.’

Follow that plot, you Impossible Lovers, and I think you will soon understand what I am talking about. The story slips down the descent familiar to all of you who are unhappy. It’s like a runaway train, isn’t it? Once boarded, you cannot get off. First, there is the forbidden love, the excitement. Then the tearing separation. Then the critical turning point, what Aristotle — an important figure, though dead 1400 years before Abelard— called in Greek the ‘peripeteia’. It is that turning point, the peripeteia which makes the story one of high tragedy, or banality that will transform it into dust, or even a comedy. Finally, there is the moral conclusion: a redemption of some sorts, or a condemnation, or a terrible descent into the void — into hopeless nothingness.

Peter Abelard, Magister Petrus, ‘Master Peter’ was one of the greatest philosophers, the greatest scholars, the greatest teachers of logic of the Middle Ages. Pace Mark Twain, he was also a very funny man — he was known as joculator — who could tear a rival to pieces in ‘disputation’. ‘Logic has made me hated in the world,’ he writes in his Confession of Faith, the last piece he ever wrote — and it was written to Heloise.

‘What king or philosopher could match your fame?’ wrote Heloise. ‘What district, town or village did not long to see you? When you appeared in public, who — I ask — did not hurry to catch a glimpse of you, or crane her neck and strain her eyes to follow your departure? Every wife, every young girl desired you in absence and was on fire in your presence; queens and great ladies envied me my joys and my bed.’

Photo of Heather again

It would be wrong to say that Abelard was the founder of medieval scholasticism, but virtually every work of scholasticism that followed Abelard’s life on earth used him as a reference. Medieval scholasticism? Do not think, like Twain, that this was the wind ‘from the North Pole of a frozen heart.’ Medieval scholasticism introduced the idea of the individual into history, it liberated one from the dogmatism of an earlier Christian Church, it forced one to think, to question everything and not blindly accept the teachings of the Church Fathers; it was a precursor to Protestantism, to a critical reading of the texts. Logic could explain both God and the Trinity, argued Abelard. Indeed, without logic there could be no faith; blind faith was not faith at all: first explain with reason and, once you have explained, then you can develop your faith.

More interesting for our tale is what he had to say about sin. It was actually William of Champeaux — his teacher and one of his most insufferable rivals — who introduced the idea that sin was something subjective. Sin is nothing because it is not God’s creation; ‘solely the intention, and the will which stems from it is evil, said just William. Or as another of Abelard’s rivals put it, ‘God does not assess the magnitude of a sin by the magnitude of the things done, but its magnitude relates to the intention of the doer.’ Abelard introduced, with his typical provocation, the idea of the ‘just executioner’ who commits no sin by killing, because he spreads justice through the world.

Abelard’s three loves

Gregor starts speaking

So where does that put love, especially forbidden love?

We have no portrait of Abelard, so we do not know how he looked, but we know the girls liked him — though he remained chaste till he met Heloise when he was 39. Most say he was a big man, though some have claimed he was small, a David taking on Goliath. ‘Abelard’ was not his surname; there were no surnames in those days — one was usually named after the place one came from. ‘Abelard’ seems to have been a nickname he picked up in his childhood; it means ‘licker of fat’ — one imagines him fat, a sort of jovial Friar Tuck.

He was born in the little town of Le Pallet, less than ten miles south-east of Nantes around the year 1077 to a family of petty knights; his father may well have participated in a lost battle against the Normans in 1064 where, as the Bayeux tapestry shows, Harold, the future King of England, was knighted by William the Conqueror two years before he was killed at Hastings. The 1100s was the age when knights came into full flower.

But Peter Abelard had three loves in his life.

His first was his love of letters. ‘Because I was the eldest son and therefore most dear to my father’ he tells us in his dramatic Historia calamitatum, ‘The Story of My Calamities’, ‘he saw to it that I was brought up very carefully… (But) I was seduced by so great a love of (letters) that I abdicated entirely from the court of Mars so that I be educated in the bosom of Minerva. I therefore made over to my brothers the pomp of military glory, along with the inheritance and the privileges of my primogenitors.’ Abelard wrote like that, in a sometimes passionate prose full of references, not to the saints but to the heroes and the great authors of classical, pagan Latin.

This was written more than ten years after his second love affair, with Heloise, who was the greatest Latin prose writer of her age, a classicist by training; she was superior as a Latinist even to her lover, Abelard, and texts such as these show the influence of Heloise — which is now thought to have been immense.

His third love was Christian theology; and in that Heloise was not innocent either.

Mature love: Heloise was neither so young nor so beautiful

Jemma Birrell

Abelard’s passion for letters finally got him to Paris, the Cloister School of Notre Dame, a scholarly place — not unlike our seats of learning today — seething with envy and violence. ‘It was not my custom to benefit by practice’ — by which Abelard meant rote learning — ‘I relied on my own intelligence.’ He infuriated the old scholar, Anselm of Laon, by preparing a lively inquiry into the obscure prophecies of Ezekiel in a single day. The students were stupefied and flocked to his course, abandoning poor old Anselm; his reputation was based on repeating before his audience a mass of documents that made him so boring — he was useless when ‘put to question’, the ‘fire he had kindled filled his house with smoke but did not light it up.’ Abelard was all flame, passionate lightning. Anselm became wildly jealous: ‘envy seeks the heights, the winds sweep the summit.’ And it is just there, at Master Peter’s summit… that this love affair begun.

It was the beginning and the end. ‘Success always puffs up fools with pride,’ wrote Abelard in Historia calamitatum, ‘and worldly security weakens the spirit’s resolution and easily destroys it through carnal temptations.’ Abelard was not a man to fool around with the prostitutes and his intensive studies prevented him from frequenting the ‘society of gentlewomen’. But his eyes began to wander. They fell upon the niece of one of the canons of the Cathedral, a vengeful, money-grubbing old man who went by the appetising name of Fulbert. Abelard, world famous now, was thirty-eight, middle-aged for the time, who had not yet tasted the flesh of a woman. ‘There was at the time a young girl (some translations read adolescent girl) named Heloise…’

Adolescent. Now, the seven ages of man began with ‘infancy’, ‘boyhood’ (or ‘girlhood’), then advanced through ‘adolescence’, ‘youth’ and ‘manhood’ (or ‘womanhood’). Abelard described Heloise as ‘adolescent’, but Heloise also described Abelard as ‘adolescent’ — ‘For what perfection of mind or body did not adorn your adolescence?’ (1) ‘Adolescence’, like sin in the Middle Ages, was plainly a state of mind, driven by animus. (2) Moreover, Heloise’s learning ‘had made her renowned in the whole kingdom,’ which would have been extraordinary for a teenager, especially a woman teenager. (3) Correspondence shows that she must have been older than Peter the Venerable, who was born in 1092 or 1094. The love affair and the dramatic events that followed occurred in 1117 or 1118. So she was not that young. Perhaps in her late twenties.

Abelard also tells us that Heloise ‘looks did not rank lowest.’ So that she was not that beautiful either. It was that glorious Latin she wrote that inspired Abelard — there is a strong spiritual element there right from the start which is the key to the story. At any rate, it did not take long to develop; Abelard was ‘all on fire for this girl’ and ‘decided that she was the one to bring to my bed.’

Jocund intercourse: the forgery theory and a recent discovery

Gregor speaks to the crowd

Abelard actually paid Fulbert for the privilege of offering daily tutorials in the uncle’s house, for Fulbert ‘dearly loved money’.

Thus were they united in the privacy of the girl’s chamber. With their books open before them Abelard’s hands ‘strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts.’ They made love in every manner imaginable. Their previous inexperience only added to their fire.

Perhaps it was the lack of experience which made them so incautious. Abelard spent his nights in sleepless love-making and his considerable talents during his days went into composing love letters, poetry and songs, not the preparation of his courses.

Because of her fame as a great Latin stylist, Abelard expressed an interest on their very first encounter, in ‘jocund intercourse’ — which is not at all what you think. He wanted a correspondence for ‘many things can be put in writing more audaciously than they can be said.’ They became pen-friends or, rather, pen-lovers.

The argument about forgeries goes back centuries! But also decades. An American Roman Catholic priest and scholar, J.T. Muckle, concluded that the first surviving letters of Heloise to Abelard must be forgeries because Heloise ‘would not have desired to leave such a character sketch of herself’ to posterity — it was all too disgusting. This forgery theory, based on disgust, won a widespread following in America in the 1960s and 70s. But in the last twenty years or so scholarly thinking has done a complete U-turn.

There are thousands and thousands of medieval manuscripts that have never properly been read. Reading medieval Latin in script is a painful task; I have had friends who would labour away for weeks on just one page. We say that the songs, the poems and the early letters of Abelard and Heloise have been lost, but, who knows, perhaps they have simply never been read?

In the 1470s a Cistercian monk, Johannes de Vepria, copied — for teaching purposes — what he called ‘flowers’ of good Latin style, from an early manuscript, since lost. It was a correspondence between a man and a woman, signalled in de Vepria’s manuscript as ‘V’ for Vir (‘Man’) and ‘M’ for Mulier (‘Woman’). There were 113 letters here. The man was a master of a school in Paris and the woman was also well versed in philosophy. Every letter was headed by different, elaborate salutations, and there follows these ‘flowers’ of a prose composed by a man and a woman in passionate love.

In 1974, when these letters were first published, questions were asked: could this possibly be Abelard and Heloise? By the time the letters were re-issued in 1999 there seemed little doubt: the style of Latin fitted, the vocabulary was the same, quotations were used that re-appeared in the authenticated letters. In the last ten years there has been almost unanimous agreement: these are the lost first letters of Abelard and Heloise, written in ‘jocund intercourse’ at the moment of their first encounter.

Lovers’ voices

The crowd’s view of Gregor

Here is the echo of lovers’ voices, written down in Paris before the cathedral of Notre Dame was built. Here are lovers’ voices of 900 years ago:

Woman: To her beloved, special from experience of the reality itself; the being which she is. (You know, ‘Abelard darling.’)

Just as fire cannot be extinguished or suppressed by any material, unless water, by nature its powerful remedy, so my love cannot be cured by any means — only by you can it be healed. My mind is bothered by not knowing through what gift I can enrich you. Glory of young men, companion of poets, how handsome you are in appearance yet more distinguished in feeling. Your presence is my joy, your absence my sorrow; in either case, I love you. Farewell.

Man: To his jewel, more pleasing and more splendid than the present light, that man who without you is shrouded in dense shadow: what else except that you glory unfailingly in your natural brilliance. (‘Darling Heloise,’)

Scientists often say that the moon does not shine without the sun, and that when deprived of this light, it is robbed of all benefit of heat and brightness and presents to humans a dark and ashen sphere. Surely the similarity of this phenomenon to you and me is very plain to see: for you are my sun, since you always illumine me with the most delightful brightness of your face and make me shine. I have no light that does not come from you and without you I am dull, dark, weak and dead. But to tell the truth, what you do for me is even greater than what the sun does for the sphere of the moon. For the moon becomes more obscure the closer it gets to the sun, whereas the nearer I am brought to you and the closer I get, the more on fire I become (Remember the ‘all on fire’ of Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum?) So much do I burn for you , that, just as you yourself have often noted, when I am next to you I become completely on fire and am burned right down to the marrow.

…

Envious time looms over our love, and yet you delay as if we were at leisure. Farewell.

Truly, Abelard was ‘all on fire for this girl’.

I have said, he was not preparing his lectures during the day; he wrote songs. The songs mentioned Heloise by name and were sung throughout the kingdom, by love-sick youth for years afterwards; the sonnets were recited in every lonesome parlour: Heloise, Heloise, Heloise. Not a soul in Paris was unaware of the affair, with the exception of the green-eyed, money-grubbing Fulbert. Until, that is, he surprised them one bright morn in bed with one another, ‘like Mars and Venus’ clasped naked together. Then Heloise discovered she was pregnant. Their love became Impossible.

An impossible love: a love of our times

Aerial view of the crowd.

It became impossible for several reasons, several of which one may say were historical, and do not apply to our times — our times of contraception, abortion, free love and non-commital. But stretch your minds a little; throw your imaginations into these ancient words; you’ll find here reasons and emotions you yourselves recognize.

Their love became Impossible on the first count because a good old fashioned, medieval blood feud developed between Abelard and Fulbert. In this classical age of knights, monks, troubadours and damsels, the state did not command a monopoly on violence and punishment: as in many parts of the world today, the family was a jealous guardian of its rights and authority. It could, if necessary, resort to feud and private war.

There are no surviving lawbooks in northern France that lay down the rules for sexual deviance; but The Laws of Henry I of England has a chapter on the rules for conducting feuds. A man, says the book, is entitled to use force if he finds, within closed doors, another man under the same bedcover with his wife, daughter, sister or mother. But he has a right of retaliation only if he has warned the fornicator three times, and he has to have seen the couple’s genitalia actually joined in sexual intercourse. If one can prove persistent offence, then the aggrieved man has the right of castration.

Castration was not an uncommon punishment in the 1100s.

So one can understand why Abelard, with his pregnant lover, disguised as a nun, decided to make a quick getaway to independent Brittany where she was placed under the care of Abelard’s sister, Denise. A son was born who was oddly christened Astrolabe. To this day no one has been able to explain it; it possibly could be translated as ‘the love of the stars, or of Heaven’ — which has some relation to the letter I have just read to you.

The book Metrostop on the knees of one of the participants

Abelard was not running away. He had to return to his duties in Paris and to the fury of Fulbert, ‘almost out of his mind’. Heloise was being protected, but she and her son could now also be considered a hostage of Abelard’s knightly family: if anything happened to Abelard, something could — by right of blood feud — happen to Heloise. Abelard now had a bargain in his hand with which he could negotiate with Fulbert.

Abelard recounts that a waiting game developed with Fulbert and then, eventually, ‘at last I had a meeting with the man and I vehemently accused myself of the highest treason.’ Fulbert was possibly linked with the Montmorency family, one of the most powerful of the kingdom. (1) Abelard had ‘corrupted’ (that is, ‘broken into’) a virgin, (2) he had betrayed Fulbert’s hospitality, (3) he had then abducted his niece — which was tantamount to rape — and (4) was now using her as a hostage. But he had the girl.

He began ‘supplicating’ Fulbert, meaning that he must have got down on his hands and knees. And then he made his bid: ‘I offered to make him satisfaction by joining to me in matrimony her whom I had corrupted.’ Heloise wrote that this ‘raised me and all my kin up to your level.’ She could only have meant at a spiritual level, for Abelard was certainly not at the level of a Montmorency. But they exchanged ‘pledges of good faith and kisses of peace.’ For Abelard, it was like Judas kissing Christ — Abelard often compared himself to Christ — claiming that Fulbert had done this ‘the more easily to betray me.’

The refusal and the tragedy

Three Shakespeare tumbleweeds

Now in this age of knights, monks, troubadours and damsels two other critical things were occurring. The authority of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, was beginning to exercise itself; up until the eleventh century all bishops were ‘papa’, or pope. Secondly, the principle of the celibacy of the clergy, which included clerics like Abelard, was beginning to be exercised. Clerics could still marry; but marriage would destroy your career. It was not then just marriage that was agreed upon with the seal of a kiss, but — to save Abelard’s brilliant career — a secret marriage.

So Heloise could return to Paris. But we are now at the peripeteia of the story, the turning point that will determine all that follows. She first refused the marriage and, when at dawn she was forced into marriage, she denied the secret marriage had taken place.

Was Heloise thus responsible for the tragedy that followed? She always expressed this in the form of a paradox, which is probably what most women feel when faced with that Impossible Love, even today. ‘Why was I ever born to be the cause of such a crime?’ she asks. ‘Even if my conscience is clear through innocence, for no consent of mine makes me guilty of this crime, too many sins preceded it to allow me to be wholly free from guilt.’ She constantly repeated this contradiction within her to Abelard: ‘Although I am very guilty, I am very innocent, as you know.’ She thus goes in two directions: innocence and guilt. Her life follows two orders: dependence and independence. ‘If my mind is not with you it is nowhere,’ she tells Abelard fifteen years after their separation; ‘truly without you it can be nothing at all.’ This scandalized Abelard, and it is worth pondering why.

Metrostop on display

It is said that the marriage was effectively a divorce. Heloise’s explanation of her refusal and subsequent denials of the marriage contain the most famous, and for some the most scandalous, passages in the whole correspondence. ‘I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage bond, no marriage portion, and it was not my own pleasures and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but yours.’ She pursues this line of logic: ‘The name of wife may seem more sacred and more binding, but sweetness to me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.’ Some of you may recall a dialogue, in Lawrence’s Women in Love, when Ursula lays down to Rupert Birkin the merits of being a lover rather than a wife. Love springs eternal or, at least, tries to. Heloise’s logic is impeccable. She drives herself to a singular conclusion: ‘God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable for me not to be called his Empress but your whore.’ That last word was ‘scortum’ in Latin, which means ‘skin’ or ‘rent-boy’, a prostitute of either sex: it was presumably meant to make Abelard sit up in his seat, as it did for generations of readers thereafter.

After the marriage, Abelard took Heloise away to the Sisters of Argenteuil, where she had been educated as a child. She wore the garments of a novice. And there they made love — one would have thought as man and wife. But it was not so. First, the place — a convent — forbade it. Second, they made love during Lent, during feast days and on Sundays, which the Church forbade. Third, they made love in the most secret corners of the convent, even in the refectory, beside and on the dining tables, reserved for prayer: it was an affront to God. Heloise explained the paradox of the situation: ‘While we enjoyed the pleasures of an uneasy love and abandoned ourselves to fornication we were spared God’s severity. But when we amended our unlawful conduct by what was lawful… then the law laid his hand heavily upon us, and would not permit a chaste union.’ Heloise was proven right, it would have been better to have remained Abelard’s whore.

What condemned them was Fulbert’s tragic error of judgement. He thought Abelard had removed his niece to the convent in order to rid himself of the young nuisance to his career whereas, in fact, the exact opposite was the case. At night he sent his armed servants into Abelard’s chamber: they severed his testicles.

Castration

Gregor speaking

That is itself an important point: the testicles. A carving on a column capital of the fourteenth-century Conciergerie — right by where the castration took place — depicts an unhappy Heloise lying on Abelard’s left shoulder, holding in her left hand a huge, erect phallus and scrotum. But if the soldiers had cut all that equipment off, they would probably have killed him; and that was not the purpose. Abelard claims he had felt nothing since he was asleep when the wound was inflicted. This could be true.

Castration was a professional technique; it’s the way you turn a bull into a bullock, as farmers will know. Abelard’s own servant participated. The servant could well have given Abelard a sleeping potion before he opened the door and let Fulbert’s soldiers in.

One must listen to Abelard. He says that the greater pain was the humiliation he felt at being henceforth a eunuch, the unclean beast in Jewish law unacceptable in the temple. And there was the huge crowd that gathered outside his house, screaming for vengeance. Two of the participants, one of them Abelard’s servant, were caught as they tried to escape and were, on the spot castrated and blinded with red-hot tongs. Neither Abelard nor Heloise showed any sympathy for them. Abelard pursued Fulbert in court for what he considered too severe a punishment. But vengeance was not his game. He took monastic vows and pursued his passion for teaching.

The descent, and the realization

David Delannet

The love story at this point enters its final moral phase — the redemption or the descent into the void, depending on the way you interpret the existing texts and on your beliefs. Heloise took on the veil just days before Abelard entered the monastery; we do not know the period of time that had elapsed after the castration, nor do we know exactly how Heloise was persuaded into holy orders. Abelard simply states that Heloise took the veil ‘in obedience to my wishes’ and that she accepted this with ‘tears and sobs’. Heloise pointedly remarks that ‘it was your command, not love of God, which made me take the veil.’ We are left to our own suppositions as to what happened. In our spiritless world, the sympathy leans towards Heloise and her remaining life of silent suffering. Abelard has not generally galvanized our affections; as with Mark Twain, he appears too cold, too logical, too academic by far.

We know a lot about Heloise’s subsequent frustration and suffering. For almost fifteen years she heard not a word from the only love of her life. Then one of the nuns brought her a copy of the Historia calamitatum; she recognized immediately its author and wrote a letter to him. By that time she was prioress of her order which, having been expelled from Paris, had moved to a monastery, the Paraclete, that had been established by Abelard in the wilderness of Champagne. Heloise complained about his silence: ‘Why, after our entry into religion which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you?’ she demanded. He could have saved her. Praised for her piety by others, she was actually a hypocrite; she tried to please Abelard more than God and she was coninually haunted by memeories of their love, their pleasures. ‘Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes,’ she told him. Even during Mass ‘lewd visions of those pleasures take a hold upon my unhappy soul.’ Even in her sleep ‘my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body.’ In contrast ‘a single wound of the body freed you from these torments and healed many wounds in your soul.’

Heather

Abelard actually suffered terribly in those subsequent years. He wrote some of his greatest spiritual and philosophical works which, as Heloise later pointed out, owed a great deal to her knowledge of classical literature and philosophy. ‘Remember, I beseech you, what I have done and pay attention to how much you owe me,’ she states as she concludes her first letter after fifteen years of absence. ‘Ponder your own lack of justice, if when I deserve more you pay out less — or rather nothing at all… Ponder, I beseech you, what you owe me. Pay attention to what I claim.’ She sounds almost like a money-lender.

And let’s not forget what Abelard went through. Three years after the castration and their separation Abelard was condemned for heresy, at the Council of Soissons, for what he had to say about the Trinity in his Theologia. He could have been burnt at the stake. He was forced, in public, to burn his own works — which, so shortly after the castration, must have been a pretty nasty experience. Two years after that he went back to Brittany to become abbot of St. Gildas-de-Rhuys; all the monks turned against him and tried to murder him on several occasions. Abelard was not a man with what we would call a ‘team spirit’; he always took the difficult route, played the individualist, and was never a diplomat. In 1140 Abelard was accused of heresy at the Council of Sens by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Later that same year, 1140, Pope Innocent II sentenced Peter Abelard to perpetual silence as a heretic.

Signing with a girl

Abelard took up the protection of Peter the Venerable at the monastery of Cluny. Shortly before he died, in 1142, he wrote his Confession of Faith; it is his last letter, addressed to Heloise. He repeats, in the form of a credo his Christian faith, but ends with the classic hero of Heloise, Ulysses, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis: ‘The storm may rage but I am unshaken, though the winds may blow they leave me unmoved; for the rock of my foundation stands firm.’ ‘The rock of my foundation stands firm’ — those are the last written words of Peter Abelard.

But it is in the history, not the mythology, of the Classical Age where we find the clinch, the twist, of this love story.

The twist

Signing with the boy

At the moment that Heloise took the veil — which some would say was a form of castration for her — Abelard tells us in his Historia calamitatum that she cried out in public a passage from Lucan where Cornelia, Pompey’s husband, blames herself for Pompey’s defeat at the Battle of Pharsalia: ‘O greatest of husbands, I am unworthy of your bed! Did Fortune have power over one as great as you? Why did I so wrongly marry you and bring you to disaster? Now accept the penalty which I am willing to pay.’

Quite how the ceremonial proceedings continued after such an outburst is not explained. Perhaps it never happened. But an exchange between Abelard and Heloise on this well-known text does seem possible; it fits the circumstance. Perhaps it was exchanged in one of Abelard’s ‘tutorial’ sessions, in bed, in Fulbert’s house. At any rate, here one is back to Heloise’s paradox and her acceptance of guilt for Abelard’s humiliation. There is also in here Heloise’s claim of debt, her sacrifice for him, Abelard. Cornelia faints on the sight of Pompey returning from a lost battle. Did Heloise faint on the sight of Abelard castrated? Did she want to die, like Cornelia?

Fifteen years later Abelard returns to this same point. ‘My love, my love, you fool, you fool, you have forgotten the essential part of the story!’: when Cornelia faints and weeps, Pompey rebukes her, he has lost his fortune but ‘I am still alive.’

Was it his fortune she was weeping for? But ‘I am still alive!’

‘I am still alive’: Abelard had survived every misfortune. He was alive by faith. That was what turned — it was Abelard who turned — the Impossible Love of Abelard and Heloise into an Eternal Love, the love of a millennium, a love of hope, of faith, a love of life.