A Review
In the last few essays, I have focused in on Heloise’s
first two letters, those recognized as the “erotic letters” of Heloise, before
her transition to more theological matters. To reiterate, Abelard’s and
Heloise’s post-affair letters (eight in all; three of hers, five of his) were
exchanged some 15 years after their marriage, Abelard’s castration, and their
entry into the monastic life (when he was a monk and abbot; she a nun and
abbess). The eight post-affair letters are traditionally divided into two
categories, the personal letters and the
letters of direction. The first
series consists of four letters (two from each of the correspondents),
beginning with Heloise's response to reading the Abelard’s
autobiographical “letter of consolation” to a friend, the Historia
calamitatum (Story of My Misfortunes). The
second, directional series,
begins with the third letter from Heloise, in which she capitulates to the
formal requirement Abelard, impatient with her laments and complaints, has made
a condition of any further correspondence.
I have shown how Heloise’s first two letters contain
pervasive rhetorical strategies made with the aid of her favorite classical
Latin authors. She skillfully manipulates conventions drawn from the great
Roman-Latin auctoritates or authorities—i.e.,
Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, and Lucan. By these standards, Heloise’s letters
are carefully structured and poetically accomplished. I have assumed that it
was important to know this because what many readers of Heloise’s letters
criticize—elements which appear to be pure hyperbole and mere rhetorical
ploys—gain new meaning, if they are recognized as conventions and themes
associated with the genre of lament. The use of these literary genres help
Heloise in the rhetorical strategies she uses to get her point across, as she speaks
through the masks of classical, i.e., Greco-Roman models, oftentimes heroines
of the stories and myths. I have already discussed some of the formal devices
and rhetorical strategies of Heloise’s first two letters in terms of the
medieval epistolary and planctus
(lament) traditions and shown how skillfully Heloise uses the genre of
classical lament in her extravagantly emotional stances in response to
Abelard’s sufferings. And Heloise just as skillfully manipulates the
conventions of the complaintes d'amour (lover’s complaint) in response to Abelard’s neglect. We have seen
that from her Latin salutations, at the opening of her letters, to the ending
farewells Heloise’s literary prose warrants a close reading for rhetorical
devices and strategies in order to unlock the layers of meaning in her
exchanges with Abelard.
The last two essays have attempted to uncover some of
these meanings, but have actually only scratched the surface. Thus, in essays
to come my strategy will be to continually revisit Heloise’s two, perhaps
three, letters, each time exposing more of the hidden depths of Heloise’s
consummate Latin prose.
We have now heard the events that lead up to Abelard’s and
Heloise’s tragic separation and exile into monastic life. These events in their
impossible love story have been related
by Abelard in his autobiographical letter, the Historia calamitatum (History of My Misfortunes; the first in the collection of the Abelard-Heloise
letters), where he narrates the story of his life as a moral lesson on how
fame, pride, and lust lead to disaster, and how the most difficult situations
could always be turned to the good—in his case, the conversion to
monastic life (conversio).
To briefly review, we have heard how the secret lovers
were found out, how Abelard decided that they should marry to legitimate the
relationship and save Heloise’s uncle and guardian Fulbert’s honor, but marry
in secret in order to save Abelard’s academic reputation. Have heard how
Heloise emphatically protested this marital arrangement, both for philosophical
and practical reasons, and how this attempt at social legitimatization failed,
resulting in Abelard’s castration at the hands of Fulbert’s kinsmen. We have heard how this drove Abelard,
who had been up to this time a singularly famous scholar and canon at Notre
Dame, to decide that they should both enter the monastic life. Abelard went to
the Abbey of St Denis and Heloise to the Abbey of Argenteuil. When Heloise and
her nuns were wrongly evicted from Argenteuil, Abelard set them up at his
abandoned hermitage called the Paraclete in the countryside of Troyes, where
Heloise became abbess of the convent. This much we heard from Abbot Abelard,
when he decided to write the autobiographical letter of his misfortunes from
exile at St. Gildas in Brittany, some fifteen years later (1132).
His autobiography goes beyond the end of the love affair and their separation to concentrate on the vehement condemnation that his controversial philosophical ideas attracted from theologians and ecclesiastical authorities. In his narrative, he leaves Heloise in the convent and ends the episode with a picture of Abbess Heloise now at peace, her wisdom and her love diverted toward God. This account gives the impression, if not of a happy ending then certainly of a satisfactory closure to the Heloise story: Abelard has been punished for his pride and lust; Heloise is now settled and doing good—she has, according to Abelard, become a model of chastity and piety, making a success of the convent. This much is told in Abelard’s autobiography.
What we know of their story beyond this point is from
Heloise’s letters in response. It was further related in past essays that
Abbess Heloise received a copy of this “letter of consolation” (which “by
chance someone brought her”), not addressed to her but to a fellow monk of
Abelard’s. It has been around fifteen years since their separation and her
entry into the convent. By the terms of this letter, there seems to have been
little or no contact between the two of them. (Abelard, after installing them
at the Paraclete, began visiting, often to preach and assist the nuns as best
he could. But his visits set scandal‑loving tongues in motion yet again,
causing him to leave in haste.) Now, after a few more years of silence and
neglect, it seems that Heloise’s estranged lover and husband, in the guise of a
persecuted Christ-like figure, wants her to read his letter and have she and
her nuns pray for him.
We have heard that instead of bringing Abbess Heloise any second-hand “consolation,” it only increased the old griefs she was already suffering—not only because of learning about Abbot Abelard’s current ecclesiastical troubles over his theological writings and over his management of St. Gildas, where his own monks were trying to do away with him—, but also because of what he had left out of his narrative about their relationship. For his former student and mistress, who had spent hours with him discussing the philosophy and truth in between lovemaking, and who is now reading the letter addressed to a third party, this narrative of their relationship leaves her distressed. Important to Heloise about what she read in Abelard’s story was what he left out and his total misapprehension of her real, interior situation. She is terribly frustrated by his lack of consistency about their relationship. He gives little attention to what they talked about in their discussions and literary exchanges, emphasizing only that his behavior was one of foolish passion. Questions about Abelard’s account of their relationship tormented her. Did Abelard really believe that this was the whole truth? Was this distortion only because his subsequent troubles had been so terrible that they had obliterated any memory of the true nature of Heloise’s love? Did he not remember that the letters she had written every day during the affair in Paris tell him repeatedly that her love is undying and indestructible? Did he forget the unremitting love letters he wrote when they first had to separate? Did Abelard really believe that she would have been able to abandon everything—her lover, her child, her studies? Had Abelard completely forgotten that she became a nun not as the result of a conversion or of a change of heart, but because he simply told her to? Abelard has written: “Heloise had already agreed to take the veil in obedience to my wishes and entered the convent.” She has read his depiction of herself as a dedicated nun, serving, with piety and chastity, the needs of the Paraclete. She wondered if it was possible that Abelard himself believed that this was the case. (She had indeed been very successful in running the Paraclete, the convent had not only survived but expanded, gaining papal approval and setting up a number of daughter houses. It would become the center of one of the most important women’s orders in Europe.) However, as Heloise would soon confess in a letter of her own to Abelard, she secretly felt like a “hypocrite,” for she felt nothing of this selfless service to the religious cause; she only was doing it because it was Abelard’s desire that she do so. She will remind Abelard of this—that it was at his command that she took the veil in the first place. But, more importantly, she had to remind him again that he was the centre of her life: “You alone have the power to make me sad, to bring me happiness or comfort.”
We heard all this from Heloise, because she took up her
pen and told Abelard what she was going through; her side of this narrated love
story. Heloise’s two letters are detailed responses to the Historia
calamitatum—her own autobiography in
return for Abelard’s—, complete with enhancements and corrections of the
story he has already told. Whereas Abelard told a story of sin (lust and pride)
and redemption, all for the glory of God, Heloise, using classical models of
the tragic heroines of literature, retells the same story as one of tragedy,
all due to the capriciousness of fortune and the cruelty of God. And, as we heard, what made it truly
tragic was the combination of Abelard’s castration (for which she felt both
guilty, in as much as she married him, albeit against her will, and innocent,
in as much as her “intentions” were pure) and her own self-destruction.
Heloise’s “unbounded love” for Abelard equated to her total submission to his
will, which meant that taking the veil that resulted in her “unbounded
grief.” Yet, as we furthermore
heard, the devilish outcome to their love affair was in the details, details
which Abelard failed to mention in his narrative, but which Heloise couldn’t
forget, because it compounded her “unbounded grief.” Thus, in her first letter
in response to Abelard, she felt the need to remind him the real nature of her
love for him; first of the situation of their marriage and then her taking the
veil:
Never, God knows, did I seek anything in you except yourself; I wanted only 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. [Heloise, First Letter]
Heloise emphasizes her commitment and devotion to him by
adding that she would have followed him anywhere—to Hell itself—implying
that he had no reason to mistrust her love: “I would not have had the least
hesitation,” she wrote, “in following you to Hell, if that was your command;
indeed I would have gone in front.” Going into the convent and taking the veil
was indeed “Hell” for Heloise, and, sure enough, she preceded him there, but
Abelard ignored or suppressed a detail that has a much larger significance when
Heloise comes to reflect on it some fifteen years later. Yes, it was true that
Abelard decided to withdraw from secular academic life into a monastic order
after his castration, and, yes, he obliged Heloise to do the same. And, yes, as
he relates in the autobiography, Heloise went before him (as she herself in her
subsequent letter avows she would have done anyway, upon his command).
But—and here’s the rub for Heloise—what is ambiguously stated in
the autobiography becomes clear in Heloise's first letter: not only did Abelard
extract this agreement from her prior to his own vows, but he insisted that she
precede him in the act:
When you hurried towards God I followed you, indeed,
I went first to take the veil . . . when you made me put on the religious habit
and take my vows before you gave yourself to God. Your lack of trust in me over
this one thing, I confess, overwhelmed me with grief and shame. [Heloise, First
Letter]
Her “grief and shame,” in other words, is not so much because she had to go through with this
irrevocable act of self-sacrifice along with him—or even before
him—, since she had always claimed to be willing to do anything for him;
no, what brought her to this miserable, grief-stricken state was Abelard’s
“intention” in making her do it first. Heloise now speculates that the reason
Abelard wanted her to take the veil and go into a religious order before him
was because he mistrusted her love —i.e., he was worried that she might
find the pleasures they once had with someone else. (Heloise’s devastation
isn’t just because of purely emotional reasons: she and Abelard had formulated
an ethical doctrine of “intention,” which held that you could judge whether an
act was good or bad depending upon the “intention” of the actor. This, in fact
was the basis of Abelard’s treatise on ethics, which became his unique
contribution to moral thought in the twelfth century. Recently, some scholars
have suggested that it was Heloise who gave him the idea in the first place.)
To Heloise, this mistrust in her “unbounded love” betrays what she had assumed
was their mutual abidance in an ideal love that was based upon selfless
friendship—amor/dilectio. She
now, after all these interim years of assuming this special kind of love to be
mutual—a belief that probably was the only thing of confront, if not
strength in endurance, through the many years of loneliness and
pain—comes to the terrible and intolerable realization that it wasn’t so;
that Abelard was only motivated by something much baser, what he himself refers
to as “lust” in his autobiography—hence Heloise’s overwhelming “grief and
shame.” In fact, with this terrible realization, Heloise feels that she truly
had destroyed herself in the act of taking the veil. As cited in the last
essay, she writes as much to Abelard of the tragic consequences of the
“madness” of her love:
. . . now that I have carried out all your orders so
implicitly that when I was powerless to oppose you in anything, I found
strength at your command to destroy myself. I did more, strange to say—my
love rose to such heights of madness that it robbed itself of what it most
desired beyond hope of recovery, when immediately at your bidding I changed my
clothing along with my mind, in order to prove you the possessor of my body and
my will alike. [Heloise, First Letter]
Thus, upon reading and reflecting on Abelard’s autobiographical letter, Heloise, as we heard in the last essay, reacts with a combination of grief and outrage. Abelard may be the possessor of her body and will, but Heloise has not in fact changed her mind forever. Indeed, it seems that her keen intellect the one thing that is still hers and hers alone—the unique characteristic that has made her admirers through the centuries call her independently minded and brilliant and her detractors stubborn and opinionated. So whether Abelard wants to hear her views about what happened or not, she is going to tell him. She may have been young and inexperienced in matters of the heart when she fell in love with the great master of the Paris school, but she had gained an experienced woman’s sensitivity into her lover’s foibles and probably judged Abelard’s psychology correctly. Abelard, as recounted in his autobiography, has supposedly left his “pride” behind—the pride that came from chopping his adversaries to pieces in debate—and found humility in Christ. She knows that it’s going to take some doing to get her former lover/husband to engage the issue with her, since it seems that he has closed the book on their affair and moved on to the higher love of Christ, whose sufferings, aside from his own, are the only things he now feels are worth discussing. Heloise, with the emotional accuracy of an unrequited female lover, knows just where to strike; Abelard is quite likely to be goaded by an accusation of shallowness:
Why, after our entry into religion, which was your
decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have
neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the
consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can—or I will
tell you what I think and indeed the world suspects. It was desire not affection
that bound you to me—the flame of lust rather than love. [Heloise, First
Letter]
Heloise has tactically reminded him that she did everything exclusively for him—got married and became a nun in act of submission to him—, but her submission, however, goes only so far. Now she uses it as a negotiating point; Abelard is in her debt and she demands some recompense in the form of a renewed epistolary relationship—even if it’s on Abelard’s own terms and even if it takes the enticement that it would help her serve the God that she has heretofore been temperamentally ill-disposed to serve.
I have finally denied myself every pleasure in obedience to your will, kept nothing for myself except to prove that now, even more, I am yours. And so, in the name of God to whom you have dedicated yourself, I beg you to restore your presence to me in the way that you can—by writing some word of comfort, so that at least I may find increased strength and readiness to serve God. [Heloise, First Letter]
However, after writing two letters (with one letter from
Abelard in between), Heloise, at Abelard’s command, was once more
ready—at whatever interior cost—to obey her dominus. (Abelard has reached the end of his patience and
orders her to cease her “old and continual complaint against God” and the
expression of her frustrated sensuality.) That at least becomes clear in the
much‑discussed opening of her third letter. Heloise was still to write to
Abelard of many things, yet she never again (as far as we know) brought up in
writing her “old and continual complaint against God.” Nor did she, openly at
least, ever again “reproach” Abelard. Overtly, all she discusses—or, more
accurately, is allowed to discuss—in the rest of her third letter has to
do with spiritual advice, questions on details of the monastic life and on
theological problems encountered in her biblical reading. Thus begins Heloise’s
and Abelard’s “letters of direction.”
Gypsy Scholar
8/24/9