The Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard

Peter Abelard and Heloise are one of the most celebrated couples of all time, known for their love affair and for the tragedy that separated them. Peter Abelard was a French theologian, and he was considered to be one of the greatest philosophical thinkers of the 12th century. And Heloise was at first a student of Abelard’s, and a highly intelligent person who excelled at writing. After her relationship with Abelard, Heloise ended up becoming a nun. 

Ok, so the iconic love story of Heloise and Abelard takes place in twelfth century Paris. The love letters between them, written around 1128, are amongst the world’s most powerful ones. And you could say in fact that their love story reaches such dramatic heights that it would have made Shakespeare proud! So what’s the story here? 

Well, ok so Abelard was a popular theologian and philosopher and teacher in Paris whose classes drew students from all over the world. And at one point, he was hired to tutor a gifted young woman named Heloise, who, importantly, was under the supervision of her uncle Fulbert, one of the city’s most influential people. Now Abelard and Heloise, well, they fell in love with one another pretty much immediately upon meeting each other, a love of both body and mind. I mean, in Abelard’s autobiography, written later, aptly called A Story of his Misfortunes, he praises Heloise’s intelligence and her supreme gift of language and he also describes the passionate sexual encounters and clandestine meetings they had, most of which took place in Heloise’s uncle’s place. As Abelard himself admits, we shared more kisses than sentences!

Now what happened is that, well, Heloise got pregnant. So what they decided to do, in an attempt to try to placate Fulbert, was to get married, something they didn’t want to do, and I’ll get to that a bit later. But that didn’t help the situation. And, to make a long story short, what occurred is that what Heloise’s uncle eventually did, is he hired some thugs to get his revenge on Abelard for his transgressions. And what form did the revenge take? Well, are you ready for this, so, these men stormed into Abelard’s home in the middle of the night and castrated him! Now, after this, Abelard and Heloise were forcibly separated, and several years passed without any communication between them. It turned out that Heloise ended up in a religious commune as a nun, and Abelard returned to his work as a theologian. 

Now, sometime later while she’s in that religious commune, what happens is that Heloise comes across Abelard’s autobiographical work, in which of course he’s  praised her. So what she does is she starts to write a few passionate letters to Abelard expressing her love for him, and to return words for words, even though they can’t ever be together again. Now it’s these letters to him that we want to focus on today, because they’re fascinating and say some really interesting things about love. 

Ok so what are some of the things Heloise says in these letters? Well, she says a lot but let me just mention a couple of things. So the first thing that stands out is when she talks about how much more love she feels for Abelard than for God himself. She prefers Abelard himself above everything else on earth and in heaven. Now given the religious context of the time, and the fact that she’s now a nun, this is pretty radical to say the least. That’s to say, what Heloise refuses is this; she refuses the idea that she should love Abelard for the sake of God. But again, this is radical because most people of the time would understand love, not as a personal love for other particular people, but as a kind of ladder to reach the divine. In other words, you love someone, not fundamentally for their own sake, but for the sake of God. Personal and particular love is a means to the greater love of God. But this is just not what we see in Heloise. No, her love for Abelard is completely unmediated, she loves him for the particular individual he is, free of any ultimate religious influence or motivation or goal. 

Actually you know, let me just deviate here for a moment and get a bit personal. Because in a way, I sort of had an experience that expresses some of this. So when I was in elementary school I had a really good friend, and for two years we used to spend all our time together. And things stayed pretty much the same until, well, one particular morning. So there we were one morning waiting for the school bell to ring and he tells me out of the blue that he’s become a born again Christian. Now being 12 or so and pretty ignorant, I really had no idea what he was talking about and so didn’t really put much stock into it. But then I did start to notice a few changes in him. I noticed how he would now start to walk around school, and this is going to sound weird for that age but it’s true, I noticed how he was going around trying to proselytize, trying to convert others, trying to save souls. And it was no different with me. Because he loved me, he would say, he wanted to make sure I too was saved. And in all this I started to notice his comportment with me and others changed too. It’s as if we as individuals in ourselves were not the ultimate object of his concern. Or to put it another way, his religious goals were mediating between his relationships with people. It’s as if he didn’t see me anymore, but instead what he saw was this higher mission he had.  

Well, ok so high school quickly came and went,  and then at university we went our own ways. Well to make a long story short it turns out I didn’t see him for almost twenty years front that point on. But one day I decided to track him down and call him and ask him if he wanted to meet for coffee. And he did. And personally I was excited to meet up maybe in the hopes of reviving our friendship. At first everything was fine, fine until he asked me what I did. I said I was a philosopher. Well, apparently he didn’t want to hear that. Because I’m not exaggerating but within 2 minutes he was gone, he made some excuse and left, even though we’d only been there 10 minutes and hadn’t seen each other in 20 years. And he never called me back again. Now why did he do this? Well, I’m pretty sure it’s because he realized that he just wouldn’t be able to eventually convert me, that I wasn’t a good candidate for him. Now how horrible and, well,  inhuman is that, right. I mean, I wasn’t a friend, I was a means, my relationship was conditional to him. But this is what can sometimes happen when we let a higher love dictate or mediate our relationships in this world. It can distort and devalue them. 

Well, to go back to Heloise, her love for Abelard wasn’t like this. Her love was a love for a unique person and for an inimitable individual. Her’s wasn’t a love in the abstract, it wasn’t a conditional love ultimately grounded in the eternal or in a higher celestial love. No, it was an unconditional love that had everything to do with the intimate, personal, physical reality of another individual. It was a gritty, sensual love, one that sees, hears and touches another. And again, this is why she says her love for Abelard is above all else, and that includes, above Heaven and God! 

Ok, well, I said there were a couple of things I wanted to mention from Heloise’s letters. So the second thing has to do with what has become a very famous passage. I think it’s worth quoting at least a part of it, because it’s so powerful and suggestive. And it’s a passage that’s certainly helped to ensure her literary notoriety. So what she writes to Abelard is this:  

“God knows I have never required anything from you except for yourself. I only wanted you, not anything that belonged to you. Now the name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding to you, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.”

Ok so at least two things stand out here. First, she’s clearly not interested in marriage, and this is something she says elsewhere as well. And second, what she really wants is to be considered Abelard’s concubine or whore. And what’s incredible is she says all of this in the context of expressing her outright passionate and genuine love for him.  

Ok so what’s going on here. What’s her meaning in all of this? Well, she’s clearly not that interested in marriage. Why? Well it’s because what she wants is Abelard for himself and alone, without the sanctions and the restraints of marriage. Her love is extramarital. She prefers love to wedlock. Ok but we need to get a bit more specific and provide a bit more explanation. So I think part of what she means when she says she doesn’t want to be a wife but instead a whore to Abelard, is that she wants to preserve his freedom, she wants him to be who he is, because that’s who she loves. Heloise wants Abelard to be the philosopher and theologian that he is and not be tied down with worldly concerns, which is what she thinks marriage would do. 

So that’s one aspect of it. But there’s more. And it’s something that’s expressed in the first line of the quote I read. It’s when she says, I have never required anything from you except for yourself, I’ve never required anything that belonged to you. Now she goes on to expand on this in a different section of the letter. And what she basically says is this: she says it’s actually often the wife that prostitutes herself not the whore. In other words, Heloise flips the traditional perception of the two terms. To be a whore or concubine and to be a wife well, they each become the exact opposite of what people think. So how so? Well, Heloise says that many women marry men for the money or power that they have, and so they’ll more readily marry a rich man than a poor one. But this is to marry someone for their possessions, not for who they are. And to have your mind on someone’s property like this is to be ready to prostitute yourself for a richer man. So the wife, for Heloise, is in effect the real whore!

Ok but when she tells Abelard she’d rather be his whore or concubine than his wife, how does she understand that then? Well, I think she understands it to be a relationship not based on possession and contractual obligation, but rather simply on someone else’s being, the way they are, not what they have. That’s what Heloise is telling Abelard, she wants only him and nothing of his, she loves him in a way that leaves him free to be himself, and her to also be herself.  

I don’t know, at the end of the day, whatever we think about all that’s said here between these two, one thing is pretty clear… these just aren’t your everyday love letters!