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. 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. . . . At the same time their dilemma is of timeless interest,
created less by circumstances than by the relations between two highly complex
personalities.
—Introduction to The Letters of Abelard &
Heloise
In the past three essays (which are part of the Gypsy
Scholar’s series on the Troubadours & the Beloved), listeners heard about
the famous ill-fated lovers, Abelard and Heloise, who lived over 900 years ago
in northern France in the period medieval historians have recently identified
as the “twelfth-century renaissance.” Their story of romantic love
—a mixture of philosophical learning, erotic passion, spiritual quest,
monastic political intrigue, horrific brutality, exile, and tragedy— is
probably the most memorable love story of all from the Middle Ages. Indeed,
this real-life account of love and loss served to inspire later troubadours and
trouvères (northern troubadours), poets, and romance writers of the love
between men and women called amor. As
stated in the very first essay, this current series of essays attempt to
reintroduce to a new audience the real-life star-crossed lovers, whose names
are synonymous with the syndrome of impossible love.
This attempt to put the story of Abelard and Heloise in
the tradition of the Troubadours and the Beloved, that is, into the context of amour
courtois or the courtly love tradition, is
justified by the fact that not only were the couple exactly contemporary with
the troubadours in the south of France (or Occitania). Thus in the case of the
famous lovers of medieval romance, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction,
because, contrary to the usual phenomenon of later real-life lovers being
inspired by the fictional romances, the real-life story of Heloise and Abelard
inspired this Amor-tradition.
Thus, Denis de Rougemont, in his classic study, Love In The Western
World, locates the real-life lovers within
the context of the courtly love tradition:
The cultivation of passionate love began in Europe
as a reaction to Christianity (and in particular to its doctrine of marriage)
by people whose spirit, whether naturally or by inheritance, was still pagan.
But this would
be mere theory and highly disputable were it not that we are in a position to
trace the historical ways and means to the rebirth of Eros. We have already
settled on a date. The earliest passionate lovers whose story has reached us
are Abelard and Heloise, who met for the first time in 1118! And it is in the
middle of this same century that love was first recognized and encouraged as a
passion worth cultivating. Passionate love was then given a name which has
since become familiar. It was called cortezia, or courtly love.
Unlike the famous lovers in our cultural imagination, they
were not just the fictional protagonists of a beautiful tale of tragic love
—Abelard and Heloise really existed. Moreover, they both left many
written letters that tell us exactly how they came to terms with the love
affair that changed their lives. Yet, for all this, their love story is also
“mythic” in the sense that it contains all the universal and archetypal elements
of the configuration of impossible love
anywhere and any time —the passion and sweet ecstasy, the betrayal and
destruction, the separation and bitterness, the exile and longing, and the
unswerving loyalty to the heart’s truth no matter what. This bittersweet
story (and the term “bittersweet” is an epithet for the god of love, Eros, who
seems to have been reborn in the courtly love tradition of the troubadours)
—this bittersweet story, then, reminds of another, one that was told and
retold many times in the medieval romances. One of its early authors, Gottfried
von Strassburg, succinctly demonstrates de Rougemont’s above quoted argument
about love and death in the Western world in the preface to his Tristan
romance:
I have undertaken a labor out of love for the world
and to comfort noble hearts: those that I hold dear, and the world to which my
heart goes out. Not the common world do I mean of those who (as I have heard)
cannot bear grief, and desire but to bathe in bliss. (May God then let them dwell
in bliss!) Their world and manner of life my tale does not regard: its life and
mine lie apart. Another world do I hold in mind, which bears together in one
heart its bitter sweet, its dear grief, its heart's delight and its pain of
longing, dear life and sorrowful death, its dear death and sorrowful life. In
this world let me have my world, to be damned with it, or to be saved.
Gottfried’s courageous sentiment is echoed in Tristan’s
response when it was revealed to him that the contents of the flask he and
Isolt had consumed was a potion that would cause their death. Tristan declared:
So then, God’s will be done, whether death it
be or life! For that drink has sweetly poisoned me. What the death of which you
tell is to be, I do not know; but this death suits me well. And if
delightful Isolt is to go on being my death this way, then I shall gladly court
an eternal death.
This is the defining moment of what was to become the
leitmotif of the love-death theme in the
courtly love tradition, which, in turn, becomes the leitmotif of “love and
death” that characterizes much of modern literature.[1]
We, today, may not appreciate how utterly daring and revolutionary this
sentiment was for the time. Unlike today, the people of the Middle Ages
believed in heaven and hell; this was a certainty. So to choose eternal death,
like Tristan did, for love of Isolt was unheard of and meant to willingly
choose damnation in hell. And this heretical sentiment of amor —which becomes something of a paradoxical
theme of bittersweet love (the
sweet poison, the noble sickness, etc.) —is echoed in many troubadour
lyrics:
About cruel Love [Eros] I always complain
And about His arrow which wounded my
heart.
And my fate compels me
To serve someone who always brings me death.
Night and day this torment oppresses me
And I never rest as I am compelled
To serve someone who brings me death. . . .
We even find this heretical sentiment of amor declared in the love story of Abelard and
Heloise. However, it is not Abelard, the real-life counterpart of
Tristan, who makes the blasphemous statement; it is Isolt’s counterpart,
Heloise: “I would have had no hesitation, God knows, in following you or going
ahead at your bidding to the flames of Hell.” (First Letter) Joseph Campbell recognizes Abelard’s betrayal
of their ideal of love: “That was the love-death sought by Heloise, but feared
by Abelard —who, though from Brittany and a singer of love [like
Tristan], was, finally, no Tristan.” (Creative Mythology)
Because there is so much correspondence between the
fictional romance of Tristan and Iseult and the true-life romance of Abelard
and Heloise, in terms of the archetype of “unhappy love” in the Western world,
it is worthwhile to know a little about the historical background of the
Tristan legend. There are two main traditions of the Tristan legend. The early
tradition comprised the French romances of two poets from the second half of
the twelfth century, and can be traced back to the archetypal Celtic romance.
Later traditions come from the Prose Tristan (c. 1240), which was markedly different from the earlier tales. The Prose
Tristan became the common medieval tale of
Tristan and Iseult. The narrative of the star-crossed lovers predates and most
likely influenced the Arthurian romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, and has had
a substantial impact on Western art and literature since it first appeared in
the twelfth century. In any case, concerning the background of the courtly love
tradition and its sources, we can say for certain that, as far as the northern
literary romances themselves are concerned, there is now ample scholarly
evidence that Celtic myth and legend lie behind the medieval romances that came
out of the Courtly Love tradition, and in Christian Europe these Celtic myths
and legends were preserved in the Breton-speaking part of France called
Brittany — the birthplace of the scholarly knight-errant, Abelard.
But this is only half of the picture. As far as the new
ideal of passionate love called amor is
concerned, according to Denis de Rougemont (Love In The Western World), it came from two streams of culture, one from the
south and one the north of France: “A Celtic background of religious legends
— which, as it happens, were at a very remote period common to both the
Iberian South and its Languedoc and to the Irish and Britannic North.” By the
“Iberian South,” de Rougemont means the land on the other side of the Pyrenees,
Andalusia, from where the troubadours of Languedoc (such as William IX of
Aquitaine) found the Hispano-Arabic love lyric. [The Gypsy Scholar has
extensively written on this in his essay series “The Origins of the
Troubadours.” See essay link above, “The Origins of Amor, or Romantic Love.”] From the north of Europe came
the ancient myth or legend of the tragic lovers Tristan and Iseult, which is
believed to derive from the bardic oral tradition of the Celts. From the south
(Occitania), the Troubadours began to sing of the Knight and His Lady.
Eventually, these mythic elements were turned into written romances by twelfth-century
poets, which emphasized the new significance of chivalry. All this
amounted to the invention of amor,
or what is called today “romantic love.” And de Rougemont concludes: “Moreover,
the myth of passionate love is all contained in the legend as this was set down
by twelfth-century poets after they had endowed it with a new significance, and
that alone is what is still active within us today.”
Again, as pointed out in the last essay, Heloise and
Abelard have themselves attained a legendary status because their love story
actually partook of legend; it reflected the prototype of all “unhappy love” in
the Western world — the romance of Tristan and Iseult, celebrated in song
as “that old tune so full of sadness.” The historical irony is that this
real-life couple’s love story could have come out of a troubadour’s song or out
of the pages of a medieval romance —from Tristan and Iseult, for
instance. (It should be noted that there is some evidence that the real-life
story of Abelard and Heloise actually influenced the fictional romances of
Tristan and Iseult.)
This connection, as was pointed out in my last essay,
seemed like one of those quirks of history, since Abelard —a kind of
Breton knight-errant, called a “Peripatetic Paladin”— was from Celtic
Brittany in the northwest of France which just happened to be the very region
from where the story of the prototypal star-crossed lovers originated. Once
more, as listeners were informed in the last essay, Abelard was not only a
“wandering scholar” (vagantes), but also
a minstrel (jongleur), having
composed love songs to Heloise, songs that made her famous throughout the land.
And so, like the fictional Tristan, Abelard was also a tutor and harper. This
intriguing parallel between the twelfth-century real life lovers and the lovers
of medieval romance has been observed by Joseph Campbell in his discussion of
“The Way of Noble Love,” as it is portrayed in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, composed c. 1210, just over half a century after the
time of Abelard and Heloise.
Now it may or may not be relevant that Abelard, like
Tristan of the legend, was born in Celtic Brittany, where, in those years, that
oft-told tale of illicit love was in the making which (in Gottfried's phrase)
was “bread to all noble hearts.” And, like Tristan, was a harpist of renown:
his songs composed to Heloise were sung throughout the young Latin Quarter.
And, like Tristan, he was given the task of tutoring the young lady, who, like
the maid Isolt, as comparable (in the words, again, of Gottfried) "only to
the Sirens with their lodestone, who draw to themselves stray ships. (Creative
Mythology)
If I may digress a bit, it is hard to know what to make of
this meaningful coincidence of reality and fiction. We have no textual evidence
that the real-life story of Abelard and Heloise was known to any of the later
authors of the Tristan and Iseult romances. Were some of the authors of the
various Tristan stories inspired to write them because of the real-life
notorious couple? Or, is this thematic parallel merely a coincidence and
nothing more? However, we do know, as I pointed out in my earlier essays,
that the real-life lovers were famous enough for the poet Jean de Meung, just
over a century later (c.1280), to include their story in his completion of the Romance
of the Rose, the defining romance of the
northern tradition of courtly love. (It is evident, according to scholars, that
he must at least have had a manuscript of Abelard's autobiography, the History
of My Calamities. The first reference in
vernacular literature to the letters of Abelard and Heloise occurs in a
seventy-two line exemplum, which contains an argument by the allegorical figure
of Jealousy, whose misogynist views about Heloise’s anti-matrimonial philosophy
make her part of his list of infamous women, but nonetheless earn her the
recognition as an exemplary woman.) The roman, along with de Meung’s French translation of the
letters of Abelard and Heloise in 1290, assured their immortality as symbols of
romantic love.
Then there’s Chrétien de Troyes, a French cleric and
trouvère who flourished in the late twelfth century. His Arthurian romances
represent some of the best regarded of medieval literature. He is the oldest
known trouvère whose work is closely related to that of the Old Provençal
troubadours, and he can perhaps be seen as the link between the older southern
troubadour tradition and that of the newer northern trouvère. We know that between
1160 and 1172 he served at the court of his patroness Marie of France, Countess
of Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and granddaughter of the first
troubadour William IX. Earliest of the northern French woman poets, she had at
one time, along with her mother, presided over the famous courts of love in
southern France. Between 1160 and 1215 Marie de France wrote short narrative
Breton poems, or lais, glorifying the
concept of courtly love through the adventures of their main characters. One,
entitled “Honeysuckle,” is about the two ill-fated lovers Tristan and Iseult. Chrétien
was familiar enough with the Celtic sources of the Tristan story to write one
of his own versions. This was the same Chretien who, within fifty years of
Abelard’s death in 1142, triumphantly declared “Chivalry and learning has
arrived in France; God grant that it remain here.” (Of course, this means only
northern France; it had arrived in southern France, the Occitan, in the early
twelfth century.) One scholar has argued in 1986 that Chretien, the originator
of French romantic writing, possessed a copy of the letters of Abelard and
Heloise, which he might have obtained in the Troyes region where Heloise’s
convent of the Paraclete was situated. Besides this, fragmentary Latin texts
concerning Abelard and Heloise have been examined, along with a couple of poems
that mention them. Some scholars believe that “existence of these two poems
suggests that the affair of Abelard and Heloise was discussed in clerical
circles and that it continued to be discussed even after her entry into the
convent.”
So far as scholars know, there is no evidence that the (8)
Latin letters of Abelard and Heloise were published before the second poet of
the Romance of the Rose, Jean de Meung,
translated them into French in the 1290s. How, then, we may rightly ask, did
these earlier authors know how enough of the story to use it in their romances?
The answer is that they need not have known about the letters of Abelard and
Heloise in the form in which we have them today. In other words, we need not
rely solely on written documents, since the knowledge of contemporaries about
Abelard and Heloise did not need to come exclusively from complete texts but
from hearsay of various sorts, including vernacular French gossip and
fragmentary Latin poems like those just mentioned. In literary circles Heloise
was the most famous woman in France, as a number of sources attest, and Abelard
was the most famous philosopher in Latin Europe. Everybody knew what they had
done, and their activities, separately and together, continued to be of
interest for most of their lives. Heloise had even said in one of her letters
that there was nothing personal or private about the poor opinion which
“everybody” had of Abelard's neglect of her since she had become a nun. This
was not merely a conjecture of hers; it was common knowledge.
In terms of the comparison between the real-life and the
fictional lovers, Abelard's talents in music, combined with his origin in
Celtic Brittany, made him comparable to Tristan, just as Heloise's compulsive
and illicit love made her like Iseult. The romance of Tristan and Iseult was
taking shape in the lifetimes of Abelard and Heloise and it is possible that
their own tragic story contributed to its interest for twelfth‑century
audiences. Therefore, given both the literary connections just mentioned and
the common knowledge, passed by word of mouth, it seems almost impossible that
the real-life story of Abelard and Heloise didn’t influence the romance
tradition as a whole, giving a factual basis for the romances (like those of
Tristan and Iseult/Isolde). As for the fact that Abelard hailed from the same
Celtic world that generated the Tristan myth and that he was himself a tutor
and musician who fell fatally in love —this is simply wryd, in the Old English or Anglo-Saxon sense of a
mysterious fate. However, looked at from a psychological point of view, this
weird historical coincidence only goes to illustrate once again that the
universal archetypes of myth occasionally incarnate full-blown in the lives of
real people, in this case the exceptional lives of Abelard and Heloise.
The mutual passion between Heloise and Abelard lasted just
a few years, and yet it completely transformed their lives, setting each on a
path of exile, suffering, and struggle. And yet it also led to a creativity
that neither would have taken without their impossible love. But more importantly for the rest of us, not only
did their passion transform their individual lives but it also contributed to a
transformation in our very way of conceiving of love (i.e., “romantic love”) in
Western culture. In medieval Europe, they were the first real-life couple to
become famous for loving; the first people who left written documents for
posterity based on their relationship. It is a tribute to Heloise’s qualities
as a writer that her three letters alone have made her famous.
As the Gypsy Scholar has been at pains to point out in his
essays on the Troubadours, the love between women and men was at best a
by-product, not a goal or even an expectation in an age when marriages were
arranged or determined by social and economic criteria. By the time the century
was over —thanks to Heloise and Abelard and the troubadours—, love
(amor) was to have taken its place as a
central new value in the European mentality. For the first time in Western history
love became a path of what would be called “individuation,” or becoming who we
most deeply are and finding our own truth; for this way has never been a right
way or a collective enterprise. As mythologist Joseph Campbell points out, amor
was to become a symbol for the Western path of quest and consciousness. He
writes that this new form of “romantic love” —fin’amor or “true love”— between women and men
was “love neither as celebration of intercourse or sublimation towards Godhead
and neighbor, but as a refining force that opens the heart to the sad,
bittersweet melody of being —through sorrow and joy.” (Creative
Mythology)
It is recognized today that Heloise and Abelard
initiated the first modern love affair, one where the lovers enjoyed each other
sexually, intellectually, and spiritually. They were the first lovers in
Western culture to demonstrate that erotic “romantic love” could have a spiritual dimension. (And, as previous essays have argued, the
troubadours, contemporary with Abelard and Heloise, overcame the theological
split between sacred and profane love.) But it was only Heloise, as we shall
see, who saw no difference between the physical and spiritual aspects of her
love for Abelard, who retained the “lust” (eros) versus “love” (agape) opposition. Thus, Heloise embodies the courtly love
tradition of fin’amor, as
portrayed in the songs and romances —the protagonists who will face the
wrath of society, church, and threats of hell all for “true love’s” sake.
Abelard and Heloise faced disgrace and banishment by a vengeful church, but it
could not banish her love, which continued via the correspondence she had with
Abelard. This passage from Joseph Campbell speaks directly to Heloise’s
and Abelard’s situation:
Love was in the air in that century of the
troubadours, shaping lives no less than tales; but the lives, specifically and
only, of those of noble heart, whose courage in their knowledge of love
announced the great theme that was in time to become the characteristic signal
of our culture: the courage, namely, to affirm against tradition whatever
knowledge stands confirmed in one's own controlled experience. For the first of
such creative knowledges destiny of the West was of the majesty of love,
against the supernatural utilitarianism of the sacramental system of the
Church. And the second was of reason. So it can be truly said that the first
published manifesto of this new age of the world, the age of the self-reliant
individual, appeared at the first dawn of the most creative century of the
Gothic Middle Ages, in the love and the noble love letters of the lady Heloise
to Abelard. (Creative Mythology)
Campbell goes on to explain how Heloise, after she had
given birth to their illegitimate child, was pressured by Abelard to get
married. Abelard’s autobiographical letter relates how strongly his mistress
disapproved, arguing fine philosophical points against the entire concept of
marriage. Because this anti-matrimonial argument falls flat in a time when even
same sex couples wish to marry, we should recall here the social situation
concerning marriage in the twelfth century. Socially, the rise of educated
women to the feudal class meant women now could inherit property and,
therefore, regulate their own lives. They married, of course, but marriage was
understood to be a general social convention that had little to do with love.
As the new phenomenon of courtly love developed, it challenged the sacrament of
marriage, as it advocated and celebrated extra-marital love. It’s “code of
love,” championed by the women of the southern courts (like Eleanor of
Aquitaine), was beginning to undermine the code of masculine domination. To
quote Campbell again:
However, the Troubadours, minnesingers, and epic
poets of the century, in their celebration of amour . . . recognized . . . the
corruption ruinous of love was not nature (of which love is the very heart) but
of society, both lay and ecclesiastical: the public order and, most
immediately, its sacramentalized loveless marriages.
Thus Heloise was independently giving voice to the
troubadour manifesto of fin’amor or
“true love,” which had nothing to do with what the church sanctified as
“marriage.” The troubadours and another free-spirited and formidable woman of
the age, Eleanor of Aquitaine, were in perfect agreement that true love
—from the soul— purified from the false love associated with
marriage. Heloise’s letters attest to her independent spirit. (Scholar’s have
no evidence that Heloise had prior knowledge of courtly love ideas.)
In the first two essays, listeners also heard that we know
the love story of Heloise and Abelard because of the letters they exchanged.
Without them, we would have certainly known of Abelard because of his
reputation as the greatest philosopher and theologian of his age, but that’s
all. And Heloise would have only been an obscure name in the clerical records
of that time. Because of these letters, we better understand why Heloise could
declare: “Whenever they speak of great men, they will remember Peter Abelard.”
And we will appreciate why Abelard could, for his part, declare: “If I am
remembered, it will be for this: that I was loved by Heloise.”
These letters were in two collections. The first,
consisting of only eight letters, was discovered within a century after Heloise
died in 1163. These contain almost all the information we had about the famous
couple. The second collection was accidentally discovered by a scholar in 1980,
who was looking for an obscure Latin book from the fifteenth century, which was
a collection of examples of how to write letters; correct forms of address,
good style, etc. He soon discovered that these 113 Latin letters, originally
given the anonymous title “From the Letters of Two Lovers,” were none other
than those of Abelard and Heloise, writers who are simply: “The Man” and “The
Woman.” These were published, along with an English translation and scholarly
account of Abelard’s life, under the title of The Lost Love Letters of
Abelard and Heloise in 1999.
The first letter of the original (the post-affair)
collection is from Abelard. It is addressed not to Heloise, however, but to an
unnamed monk. It is what was called in the Middle Ages a “letter of
consolation,” the idea being that the recipient should be so moved by the
misfortunes of the writer that he himself would feel better about his own
troubles. At 20,000 words it is really more of an autobiography, an
account of Abelard’s life to date. (It is based on St Augustine’s Confessions.) It has been known for centuries by the phrase that
he himself uses, Historia Calamitatum, or the History of My Calamities (or sometimes translated as the Story of My Misfortunes). This autobiographical letter of 1132 tells, for the
benefit of the anonymous monk, the story of the couple’s meeting and falling in
love, of the birth of the child they called Astralabe, and of their secret
marriage. It tells also of the violence and tragedy that followed, which
culminated in a brutal attack on Abelard. As he slept he was set upon and
castrated by thugs acting on the orders of Heloise’s uncle and guardian,
Fulbert. In the aftermath, the couple separated and each entered monastic
orders (by the command of Abelard). The autobiography was written fifteen years
after these events, at a time when Abelard was in exile in Brittany, living in
a monastery that he detested, and where, according to him, the monks were
trying to kill him.
It is not known precisely how abbess Heloise, now 31 years
of age, came to read a copy of the autobiographical letter; perhaps Abelard
even sent it to her as well as to the monk. Her letter to Abelard in response
to this is the next in the series. She is reacting to a letter from the
husband with whom she has not spoken for fifteen years, written to a third
party, which tells the story of her own life. She writes to him, perhaps
understandably, with a considerable amount of passion and so begins a dialogue
that would continue for the rest of their lives, as they tried to make sense of
what had befallen them. Abelard, for his part, comes to see his fate almost as
a gift: a chance to pursue the truth without distraction. Heloise, however, is
unable to deny the essential rightness of the love they shared. This dialogue
takes place in the context of Abelard’s continuing —and ultimately
disastrous— conflict with ecclesiastical authority.
These letters not only contain the story of Abelard and
Heloise but they are a unique resource for anyone interested in the thoughts
and feelings of people from an age that is both so different from and yet so
similar to our own. In the totality of letters, early and late, we meet Abelard
and Heloise as people: we are allowed to eavesdrop on their most intimate terms
of endearment, the passion of their lovemaking, of inventive erotic sessions,
and frantic, stolen moments in churches.
Need I say more? We were united, first under one
roof, then in heart; and so with our lessons as a pretext we abandoned
ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as
love desired, and then with our books open before us, and words of love than of
our reading passed between us, and the more kissing than teaching. My 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.... In short, our desires
left no stage of love-making untried, and if love could devise something new,
we welcomed it. We entered on each joy more eagerly for our previous
inexperience, and we were the less eagerly sated. (Abelard, Autobiography)
However this is not the full extent of what we are allowed
to eavesdrop on. No, not the further sexual experimentation, but the further
disagreements and arguments between Heloise and Abelard about the nature of love itself —a debate that was destined to
preoccupy poets, philosophers, theologians, and psychologists from the Middle
Ages to today.
The letters (which would include Abelard’s
autobiographical letter, the History of My Calamities), which record one of the most daring and desperate
love affairs in Western history, not only give invaluable insight into the
thoughts and feelings of a Latin-based medieval couple, who dare to love
against all odds, but also give a valuable account of intellectual life in
Paris before the formalization of the University; of the intellectual
excitement of the period and of new monastic life that was to become one of the
hallmarks of the entire Middle Ages. Abelard and Heloise also played a
significant role in the intellectual culture of what has now been identified as
“twelfth-century humanism,” which comes from the scholasticism of which Abelard
was representative, a movement that sought to reconcile the philosophy of the
ancient classical philosophers with medieval Christian theology. (It should be
noted here that our notions of the “dark” medieval period do not take into
account what was happening in Abelard’s time —a cultural shift which he
himself helped to foster. Many scholars now consider that in Abelard’s lifetime
the spirit of the age underwent a transformation; the medieval worldview was
readjusted to a more human scale. Thus medieval historians now speak of the
“twelfth-century renaissance.”)
Therefore, the subtitle of the Gypsy Scholar’s series of
essays on Abelard and Heloise —“The Letters of Love & the Love of
Letters”— reflects the twin theme in their love affair: romantic love
and the love of learning. (Epistolary
or epistolatory: 1. associated with, conducted by, or suitable for
letters; 2. taking the form of a letter or series of letters. Letters: 1. a personal and informal piece of correspondence
addressed to another person or organization. 2. literature or literary culture;
3. knowledge and education.) As described in the first essay, this twin
theme perfectly reflects the twofold concern of the Gypsy Scholar’s radio
program —desire and
knowing; the secret relationship between love and ideas.
(“. . . the identity of desire and learning, of love and philosophy, Eros and
Socrates.”)
It should be clear by now that Abelard and Heloise were
highly educated intellectuals. Abelard was, at the time of meeting Heloise, a
prominent and famous philosopher who had taken intellectual Paris by storm. And
Heloise, at their meeting, was already well known for her great learning,
having mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as the classical (i. e.,
Roman) masters of rhetoric. She had a reputation for intelligence, wit, and
insight. Abelard writes that she was nominatissima, “most renowned” for her gift in reading and writing.
It was a perfect meeting of minds as well as bodies. Moreover, in their
exchange of letters after their affair, it is almost impossible understand
Heloise’s meaning (especially the layers of meaning hiding under her seemingly
straight-forward remarks in response to Abelard), if you don’t know her
sources, since she clothes her expression in allusions to classical Latin
sources in literature and myth in order to convey her real feelings about
herself and her situation. Heloise speaks a different language in her letters,
one of sensuous frankness, of pagan realism in love and classical Stoic
fortitude in adversity.
Here it could be argued that, counter to the standard view
that Abelard was the teacher and Heloise his student, it was Heloise who was
the more roundly educated. And, speaking of the teacher-student relationship,
most medieval historians and biographers have painted a picture of the illicit
love affair as that of an older academic seducer and naive schoolgirl, with all
the inference of inappropriateness that goes along with this picture. This is
an image that we today associate with the lecherous college professor taking
advantage of the helpless female student. While not taking away the difference
in the power relationship between the teacher and student, especially in a
society that was undeniably male-dominated, this view has been recently
challenged. First of all, the two were not extremely far apart in age when they
met in 1117 (some biographers put the date at 1115-1116); Abelard was around 36
and Heloise somewhere in her mid-twenties, which means that she couldn’t have
been more than 10 years younger than Abelard. Secondly, Heloise was herself
quite learned before she met Abelard. Her reputation for a young woman of
learning preceded her, which is why Abelard says she’s “most renowned.”
Thirdly, at the time of their meeting, Abelard described himself as “pre
eminent in grace of youth and form,” whereas Heloise was an “adolescent.”
However, the term “adolescent” didn’t mean the same thing as it does today. In
using the terms “youth” and “adolescent” Abelard was evoking the commonplace of
the “Seven Ages of Man,” and these stages of life do not have exact numerical
equivalents in terms of years (the early stages occur a decade or so later than
modern usage is accustomed to). Thus Abelard had already described himself as
an “adolescent” when he took charge of his first school at Melun in c.1102,
even though he was at least twenty-two or twenty-three. Even Heloise told him
he was “adolescent” at this stage of his life. Many women envied her, she
remembered: “For what perfection of mind or body did not adorn your
adolescence?” Therefore, Abelard's description of Heloise as an “adolescent”
does not mean she was a teenager, as biographers have assumed. She had
presumably been born around 1090 or earlier. She can hardly have been a
teenager in 1117, as it would have taken her some time, years perhaps, to
acquire (in the face of male prejudice) the scholarly renown which Abelard and
Peter the Venerable (who was around her age) describe. That said, it is
nevertheless true that the older teacher was planning to seduce his younger
student. As he says of the lovely Heloise: “. . . in the extent of her learning
she stood supreme. A gift for letters is so rare in women that it added greatly
to her charm and had won her renown throughout the realm. I considered all the
usual attractions for a lover and decided she was the one to bring to my bed.”
However, we know that his plan backfired, and he fell madly in love with her.
Years later, at the time when they again exchanged letters, when Heloise was an
abbess and her estranged lover a monk, nowhere in her letters, which do contain
accusations against her former lover, do we find the accusation of taking
advantage of her innocence. No, though younger than her teacher, Heloise knew exactly
what she was doing. And though the relationship had started on the unequal
grounds of a patriarchal society, in the embrace of love they were both equally
adolescents and quick to learn.
In the story recounted in their letters, their love was
all too soon discovered and the lovers forced to deal with the tragedy that
followed. Exiled to monasteries, they each in their own way came to terms with
their fate. Most of what we know is recounted in Abelard’s autobiographical
letter, The History of My Calamities,
the same letter that initiates the post-affair correspondence between them.
Heloise suffers with her now unrequited love for Abelard, while her estranged
husband continues to battle with the ecclesiastical authorities who brand him
as a heretic and ban his books. He ends his life in exile. His burial near
Heloise at the Paraclete (the monastery he founded), allowed Heloise what she
never could have in life; faith and company with her beloved for the rest of
her days. Six hundred years later, Josephine Bonaparte, was so moved by their
story that she ordered that the remains of Abelard and Heloise be entombed
together at Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The legendary status of Abelard
and Heloise is attested by the fact that Lovers come from the world over to put
flowers on their joint tomb in the cemetery in Paris.
Getting back to the letters of the lovers and ex-lovers,
we find that Heloise was such a consummate rhetorical stylist that recently
(around the 1970s) a group of scholars have argued that the letters must be
either mere convention, hence disingenuous, or outright fakes; an argument that
caused the famous couple to fall out of fashion in the last four decades. In
response to the revisionists, one sympathetic scholar has called for beginning “afresh,
from medieval assumptions and medieval attitudes for which we have concrete
evidence, and not from modern preconceptions.” He concluded that “the majority
of contemporaries of whom we have evidence, and the generations immediately
following, were convinced of the uniqueness and stature of Abelard’s and
Heloise’s love, and regarded their tragedy with wonderment and compassion.”
Exactly so, friends and enemies alike recognized Abelard and Heloise to be
special. Furthermore, Abelard and Heloise were still being celebrated in
1956, when Ella Fitzgerald recorded Cole Porter's song, ‘Just One of Those
Things.’ Porter had placed Abelard and Heloise in the company of Dorothy Parker
and Romeo and Juliet as free spirits, who acknowledged that their love had been
“great fun, but it was just one of those things.” The song assumed listeners
knew the story of Abelard and Heloise and would appreciate the irony of such
lines as:
As Dorothy Parker once said
To her boyfriend, "fare thee well"
As Columbus announced
When he knew he was bounced,
"It was swell, Isabel, swell"
As Abelard said to Eloise,
"Don't forget to drop a line to me,
please"
As Juliet cried, in her Romeo's ear,
"Romeo, why not face the fact, my
dear"
It was just one of those things
Just one of those crazy flings
One of those bells that now and then rings
Just one of those things
It was just one of those nights
Just one of those fabulous flights
A trip to the moon on gossamer wings
Just one of those things
If we'd thought a bit, of the end of it
When we started painting the town
We'd have been aware that our love affair
Was too hot, not to cool down
So good-bye, dear, and amen
Here's hoping we meet now and then
It was great fun
But it was just one of those things
If we'd thought a bit, of the end of it
When we started painting the town
We'd have been aware that our love affair
Was too hot, not to cool down
So good-bye, dear, and amen
Here's hoping we meet now and then
It was great fun
But it was just one of those things
Just one of those things
Porter's song had been written in the 1935 and his
reference to Abelard and Heloise may already have been incomprehensible to some
listeners by 1956. Yet today, over fifty years later, listeners to ‘Just One of
Those Things’ probably know next to nothing about Abelard and Heloise. As one
commentator has pointed out, most people in America know little about these
medieval lovers, the ones behind the legends and songs. But it seems that they
are beginning to make a comeback. The film Stealing Heaven (1988) chronicles their story and Howard Brenton’s
play, In Extremis: The Story of Abelard and Heloise, premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater (2006).
In conclusion, the letters of Abelard and Heloise give us
privileged access not only to their inner world and its struggles, but also to
a stage of Western civilization that many medieval historians now see as the
first step toward our modern (humanistic) world. Furthermore, the letters of
Abelard and Heloise, as they explore the issues of relationship, love, and
marriage, not only give a classic psychological portrait of impossible love,
but they also, in their train, bring up
complex issues of our own era —gender politics in light of the greater
role of women in society, the move away from hierarchical structures toward
more egalitarian relationships, the liberation from repressive sexual attitudes
and the challenging of the theological division of “love” into sacred and
profane types, the challenge to marriage and the prevailing social mores, the
conflict between faith and reason, individual identity and the exploration of
personal feelings, the effect of the rise of the popular performing artist to a
cult status (i.e., the troubadours), the history of the Church in shaping our
attitudes and culture. These are
the legacy of the profound changes in the medieval period that influence us
today.
Because of all this, the Gypsy Scholar would invite
listeners to take a long look at the one who modern scholars credit as “the
keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the twelfth century” and the one who
the French refer to as the “Woman Who Invented Love.” Therefore, the Gypsy
Scholar’s essays on the medieval couple, whose love was “just too hot to cool
down,” attempt to do their part to remedy the fact that Heloise and Abelard
have fallen out of favor in our time. Then we may again be able to fall
in love with Heloise and
Abelard—with their ideal of love.
Gypsy Scholar
6/20/9
[1]
The whole of the Occitanian [Troubadourian], Petrarchian, and Dantesque lyric
has but a single theme—love; and not happy, crowned, and satisfied love,
but on the contrary, love perpetually unsatisfied . . . . Moreover, the myth of
passionate love is all contained in the legend as this was set down by the
twelfth-century poets after they had endowed it with anew significance, and
that alone is what is still active within us today. . . . Because, in being the
passion that wants Darkness and triumphs in a transfiguring Death, it must
represent for any society, whatsoever, a threat overwhelmingly intolerable. . .
. The passion contained in the original myth spread out into everyday life,
invaded the subconscious, and invoked or, if necessary, invented new
compulsions. . . the very ardour of the dark passion required the avowal to be
masked. . . . The myth itself, in the strict sense, was formed in the twelfth
century, at the very time the leading caste was making a great effort to
establish social and moral order. . . .Contemporary chronicles, sermons, and
satires show that in this century there occurred an early breakdown of marriage
. . . . The Romance illustrates something the influence of which has gone on
extending all the way down to our own day. . . . It is manifested in the
majority of novels and films, in the popularity these enjoy with the masses,
the acceptance with which they meet with in the hearts of middle-class people .
. . . The myth operates wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of
being feared like a malignant fever . . . . To raise up the myth of passion in
its primitive and sacred vigour and in its monumental integrity, it means
raising up that image of the Dying Lovers . . . . Love and death, a fatal
love—in these phrases is summed up if not the whole of poetry, at least
whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature,
alike as regards the oldest legends and the sweetest songs. Happy love has no
history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon
and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is
neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled
couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means
suffering. There we have the fundamental fact. . . . Suffering, askesis, is to be accepted, and is the “beloved pain” of the
troubadours. To love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own
sake, has been to love to suffer and to court suffering all the way . . .
down to modern romanticism. Passionate love, the longing for what sears
us and annihilates us in its triumph—there is the secret which Europe has
never allowed to be given away; a secret it has always repressed—and
preserved! Tristan reaches self-awareness and tests himself only by risking his
life—in suffering and on the verge of death. . . . The lovers, Tristan
and Isolde, experience a “delightful sadness” . . . . Why is it that we
delight most of all in some tale of impossible love? Because we
long for the branding; because we long to grow aware of what is on fire inside
us. Suffering and understanding are deeply connected; death and self-awareness
are in league; and European romanticism may be compared to a man for whom
sufferings, and especially the sufferings of love, are a privileged mode of
understanding. . . . Of course, this is only true of the best romantics
among us. Most people do not bother about understanding or about
self-awareness; they merely go after the kind of love that promises the most
feeling. . . . What moves us is not its presence, but its nostalgia and
recollection. Tristan and Isolde is about unhappy mutual love. . . . For they
can never be united till, bereft of all hope and of all possible love, they
reach the heart of utter obstruction and experience the supreme exaltation
which is destroyed in being fulfilled. . . . The ending of the myth shows that
passion is an askesis. . . . We
must ask ourselves if to understand through suffering is not the capital
feature as well as the daring element in our most self-conscious
mysticism. The two passions—the erotic (in a higher sense) and the
mystical—speak one same language, whether because either is cause or
effect of the other or because they have had a common origin—and perhaps
both sound to our ears the same “old tune so full of sadness” . . . . Two
ways now beckon—one leading back to the historical and religious
background of the myth, the other down from the myth to our own time. —
Love in the Western World