SYMHC Classics: Abelard and Heloise

This episode revisits the story of poet, philosopher and theologian Abelard, and his student Heloise. This is a tragic love story, complete with lovers forced apart, a secret marriage, a castration and repeated exhumations. Happy Valentine's Day!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so
we thought we'd have a love story for today's classic
sort of. It's actually the tragic story, but even before
it turns tragic, one of its protagonists comes off as
a little bit of a creeper. Uh. This is the
story of Abalard and Heloise, which first came out on

(00:22):
the podcast in We got a number of notes after
this podcast was first published about whether eloise should be
pronounced with or without an H, and we basically had
pronounced it the way my medieval literature professor pronounced it.
So let's listen in Welcome to Stuff you missed in
History Class from how Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome

(00:53):
to the podcast Tracy Wilson. And today we have something
that has been request of listeners was also something I
planned to do, and that is uh, the story of
Abelard and Heloise. So. Abillard was a poet, of philosopher
and a theologian, and he was born uh in Brittany,

(01:15):
which is in northwest France today, in ten seventy nine.
And in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
he was quote the pre eminent philosopher and theologian of
the twelfth century. Heloise was one of his students, and
she was born right around the turn of the twelfth century,
and she was a respected abbess of a prominent community

(01:36):
of nuns. Uh So they sort of had their own
lives there. But they are best known today for their
very tragic love story. It's been commemorated in poems, songs, novels,
and films. If you've ever seen Being John Malkovich, you
may even remember the Avalard and Heloise puppet show that
features in that film. Um, this is a tragic love story.

(01:57):
It's one. I described the plot of it to the
boyfriend over the weekend, and every time I would sort
of get to a turning point, he would go and
then everyone's okay with that? Right? No, Um, that's so hopeful,
And no, honey, they were not okay with that. It's
complete with lovers who were forced to part, a secret marriage,

(02:19):
a castration, and repeated exhumations, which is why we're talking
about it right before Valentine's Day. What's more romantic than
an exhumation? Really, I know, well, the exhumations actually are
kind of romantic in a way. So we we will
get to that towards the end of the episode. I'm
laughing that awkward, silent laugh where no noise comes out.

(02:40):
My face is just frozen in this odd scowl. Yeah,
as as is often the case, we're talking about this
story because I kind of love it, but it is
very sad and and disturbing in many ways. So yes,
so we'll kick it off with sort of the background
of the whole thing, and we should at the front.

(03:00):
We don't really know very much about Heloise's life before
she met Abillard. We do not even know the identity
of her parents. On the other hand, Abillard had really
made a name for himself before Heloise was even born,
and he wrote his life story down in a letter
which is known as Historia Calamitatum, or the Story of
My Misfortunes. So Pierre Abillard, also known as Peter Abillard,

(03:24):
was the son of a knight, and his family was
on the lower wrongs of the nobility. His father was
an educated man and took pains to make sure that
all of his children were educated too, But as the
eldest son, Abelard was really meant to follow in his
father's knightly footsteps, and in doing so he would also
be receiving a sizeable inheritance. However, what Abillard really loved

(03:49):
was letters and learning, and he gave up all of
this potential knighthood to become a philosopher. And as he
described it, quote, I fled utterly from the court of
Mars that I might win learning in the bosom of Minerva,
which is a lovely sentiment. This quite lovely. There are
many lovely sentiments in this story to go with the
parts that are horrifying. Um. He became an inherent of Aristotle,

(04:14):
also known as a peripatetic, and the peripatetics purportedly got
their name from Aristotle's habit of pacing around while he
was teaching, but it also came to just generally described
people who moved around a lot, which applied to abial
Art as well. By the time he met Heloise, he'd
spent years studying and teaching Aristotelian philosophy and large logic

(04:37):
all over what is now France, and he had developed
his own philosophy of language, and along the way he
studied in Paris under William of Shampoo, who was another
prominent theologian and logician at the time, and it became
the first of many conflicts between Abialard and another public figure.
Allard really picked apart and debated William's teachings, and when

(04:58):
he Abillard was judged to be the winner, he was
quite boastful about it and unfortunately tried to shame and
embarrass William. Not the most noble behavior. Uh and this
simultaneously increased Abelard's reputation and it cost him some understandable
problems in the intellectual community. This was kind of his
standard way of relating to people. He had a similar

(05:20):
experience not long after with another teacher, and Salm of Leone,
who he'd sought out to learn from before later becoming
his arrival. After leaving Leon, Abillard went to Paris again
and became scholar and residence at Notre Dame. And that's
when Heloise. His uncle Fulbear sent Heloise to Abillard for tutoring.

(05:41):
Fullbear was a cannon, which is a type of clergyman,
so at this point in the story, Abillard would have
been about thirty eight years old. Heloise's age is kind
of subject to debate because we don't know exactly when
she was born. It's cited as anywhere between seventeen and
twenty five. And here's how Abelard dis gribed Heloise in

(06:01):
his Historia Calamitatum. Quote of no mean beauty, she stood
out above all by reason of her abundant knowledge of letters.
Now this virtue is rare among women, and for that
very reason it doubly graced the maiden and made her
the most worthy of renown in the entire kingdom. It
was this young girl whom I, after carefully considering all

(06:22):
those qualities which are wont to attract lovers, determined to
unite with myself in the bonds of love. And indeed
the thing seemed to me very easy to be done. Meanwhile,
he described himself as quote possessed of such advantages of
youth and comeliness, that no matter what woman I might
favor with my love, I dreaded rejection of none. Not

(06:46):
really uh short on confidence. So the pair started out
with a written courtship, and eventually they wanted to have
more face to face conversations with one another. So Abillard
convinced Heloise's uncle to offer him lodgings in his house,
which was also near the school where he taught, and
Filbert basically gave Albillard free reign over Heloise's education. He wrote, quote,

(07:10):
the man's simplicity was nothing short of astounding to me.
I should not have been more smitten with wonder if
he had entrusted a tender lamb to the care of
a ravenous wolf. So that to me sounds a little alarming,
but it's less romantic and more like, Yeah, he seems
a little creepy. But his description of their developing relationship

(07:30):
sounds a little bit less predatory because he says we
were united first in the dwelling that sheltered our love,
and then in the hearts that burned with it. Under
the pretext of study, we spent our hours and the
happiness of love. Heloise's point of view at the very
start of their relationship, really his was not documented. Some

(07:51):
scholars argue that she was a willing participant, but others
point out passages from letters in which Abelard says that
he was sort of cool, worse even demanding, but in
the end she insisted that she loved him passionately and completely,
and their time together became so consuming and so extensive

(08:12):
that Abelarde started to shirk his other duties, both of
her education and of the school where he was supposed
to be teaching, and Heloise's uncle seemed blind to all
of this. So even as people gossiped and dropped hints
to the to him that something was up with his
niece and her teacher, uh, he didn't seem to catch on,
and when he inevitably did wise up to it, after

(08:34):
several months, Heloise's uncle, as one would anticipate, separated them.
Abelard is quite poetic about this too. He says, each
grieved most not for himself, but for the other. Each
sought to allay not his own sufferings, but those of
the one he loved. The very sundering of our bodies
served but to link our souls closer together, the plenitude

(08:58):
of the love which was denied to us, and flamed
us more than ever. Sometime after her uncle found them out,
Helloise realized she was pregnant, and she told Abillard that
she was so. One night, while her uncle was away,

(09:21):
Abelard spirited her out of the house and sent her
to live with his sister in Brittany until the baby
was born. Hallowise Is uncle, no surprise, was outraged. Abillard
went to him and begged for forgiveness, insisting that he
and Heloise truly loved one another. He offered to marry
Heloise in secret, and Fulbert agreed, but neither one of

(09:42):
them really wanted to get married. They both sort of
looked at marriage as this morally weak way to get
away with having physical lust. Getting married would also have
been a huge blow to Abalard's reputation, and it would
have put a cap on how far he could advance
in the church, since the highest levels of the clergy
couldn't really marry, and since church was really the only

(10:04):
path for somebody who had Abelard's education at that point,
this was a problem. If he married her, he was
going to be stalling his career permanently, but he was
willing to do it because it seemed like the only
way to appease her uncle's fury. Abelard went back to
Brittany to retrieve Heloise and to marry her, but she
actually refused him. She said that the plan was too dangerous,

(10:28):
that she was not willing to sacrifice his potential in
his reputation, and that there was no way her uncle
was really going to forgive Abelard anyway just because he
married her. According to Avlard. After going on just at
length about how damaging marriage and children were to the
study of philosophy, Eloise said this, if layman and gentiles

(10:49):
bound by no profession of religion lived after this fashion,
what ought you a cleric and a cannon do, in
order not to prefer base voluptuousness to your sacred duties,
to prevent this charibdis from sucking you down headlong, and
to save yourself from being plunged shamelessly and irrevocably into

(11:10):
such filth as this not a favorite of the idea
of marriage at all? Yeah, what a pity. She went
on to say how much sweeter and romantic it would
be for her to be his mistress rather than his wife,
because love would be a stronger bond between them than
marriage could ever be. And in doing this, Heloise was

(11:30):
basically saying she would sacrifice herself entirely for Abialard's sake
to allow him to have her without standing in the
way of his life and career, while she would endure
basically all the consequences. Abillard could not be convinced, though,
and she finally gave up, saying, then there is no
more left but this that in our doom. The sorrow

(11:52):
yet to come shall be no less than the love
we two have already known, which is some foreshadowing. When
the baby was born, she named it Astrolabe, and they
left him with Abelard's sister and returned to Paris to
be married in secret. Very early one morning, in the
presence of Heloise's uncle and some of Abellard's friends, and Heloise,

(12:15):
being an intelligent woman, was definitely right about her uncle.
Even though their marriage was supposed to be a secret
Fulbeart told other people that they had gotten married, so
Heloise publicly insisted that her uncle was lying, which infuriated him, and,
fearing for her safety, Abillard sent her to the convent

(12:35):
where she had been educated when she was younger, a
place outside of Paris called Argentoya. They continued to see
one another. There's a passage in one of Heloise's letters
and which she talks about making love in a corner
of the convent itself. But Heloise's uncle interpreted her entry
into the convent as a ploy by Abillard to get
rid of her, so he bribed the servants in the

(12:57):
house where Abelard was staying so they could it access
to his rooms. And he sent his own servants to
break into Abelard's room in the middle of the night,
where they actually castrated him. So, according to Abelard, the
next morning there was an enormous crowd who came out.
It reads as though he's saying that they were mourning

(13:18):
the loss of his man parts. Probably it was, this
is the mark of the translation, that it was really
that people were extremely upset at the uh the physical
disfigurement he had undergone. And it's not so much just
the loss of physical sexual prowess. Right, So he says,

(13:39):
it is difficult, nay impossible, for words of mine to
describe the amazement which bewildered them, the lamentations they uttered,
the uproar with which they harassed me, or the grief
with which they increased my own suffering. He simultaneously bemoaned
his fate and saw it as a fitting punishment. So

(14:00):
that had removed from him the part of his body
with which he had sinned, Abillard retreated to the monastery
at San Denis. At first, this was more to hide
from what had happened to him than out of any
newfound religious devotion. He became a monk and Heloise who
at this point was already sheltering at a convent, took
vows and became a benedicting nun. While at Sandoni, Abillard

(14:23):
tried to continue with his life of study and teaching,
but to turn his attention to faith instead of philosophy.
But the monastery at Sandony was in Abalard's were words quote,
utterly worldly, and its abbot was corrupt. Ablard became popular
as a teacher, even as he criticized the monastery and

(14:44):
tried very hard to reform it. His constant and criticism
naturally drew the ire of the other teachers and monks
at the monastery, who all rallied against him and complained
about him to bishops, archbishops, and any other church official
who would listen. He also, while he was there, w
books that were deemed to be heretical, and his previous
feuds with other philosophical and religious thinkers, which we referenced

(15:08):
at the beginning of the podcast, kind of came back
to haunt him. Abillard fled to Champagne and became a hermit.
Students of philosophy continued to seek him out to try
to get him to return to teaching, but he did
but He was constantly criticized and scrutinized for applying logic
to matters of faith, and that was a practice that
was viewed as very threatening to the medieval church. After

(15:30):
a while, he and his students created this community of
teaching and learning that they called La Perriclet. Eventually he
handed law Paraclete over to Heloise and the nuns from
the convent where she'd been staying because their convent had
been disbanded after some internal church feuding. She became the
abbess at La Perriclet, and Hallowe's became highly respected in

(15:53):
her own right at this point. Being an abbess required
skill in both administrative and religious work, and she drew
praise from Peter the Venerable and other prominent religious figures.
She was also fluent in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and
she taught these languages to the other nuns as well.
Abel Iron continued to teach and to serve as an abbot,
although his skeptical manner of approaching religious thought continued to

(16:17):
draw fire. Eventually he wound up because of this, being
accused of heresy, and he was condemned at a council
at Fans in eleven forty, his sentence was lifted only
after Peter the Venerable intervened. Evelard's health started to really fail,
and he died in eleven forty two. Peter the Venerable

(16:38):
built a tomb for him and Saint Marcel, but Heloise
had him moved and reburied at La Periclete so that
she could watch over him. She lived another twenty years
before dying sometime in eleven sixty three or eleven sixty four.
La Periclet also became a highly respected convent under under
her leadership, with six daughter houses as well, and there's

(17:02):
a story that she was actually buried in Abalard's grave,
but there's no substantiation of that in the record. She
was buried next to him, and their burial place was
moved to a drier location in four In sixteen sixteen,
the letters that she and Abelard had exchanged between each
other were published for the first time, and in sixteen

(17:23):
twenty one the nuns at La peric Let moved their
bodies to a new and more impressive tomb to satisfy
curious visitors. They repeated this whole exhumation and reburial a
few more times in conjunction most of the time, with
new translations of the letters coming out and the sort
of influx of Abelard and Heloise letter tourists had to

(17:44):
constantly um upgrade the setting for the additional crowds. I
presume yes. In the early nineteenth century, Abelard and Heloise
were moved to the cemetery Peer Laches in Paris, where
they are today. They lie together in a stone sarcophagus
carved with both of their was umblence is and it's
under a roof supported by pillars and arches. The tomb

(18:04):
in peir l Ches was designed by Alexandra Marie Lenoir,
who was the director of the muse de monument Francaise
between seventeen ninety and eighteen sixteen. Lenoir actually obtained their
remains from La Paraclete in eighteen hundred and then created
this tomb that had sort of a faux medieval look
and feel, and he incorporated some pieces from what was

(18:29):
reported to be some of the earlier tombs that had
existed at La Peraclet. The tomb itself is more about
being evocative of their lives and their love story than
authentic to the art and architecture of the period in
which they lived. We believe that the real remains are
probably buried there because they were measured and authenticated when

(18:49):
Lenoir acquired them. So anytime bodies get moved that many
times there's always a question markup. Is that really who
we think it is? They were verified, especially since the
remains started out in its twelfth century. And now to

(19:11):
return to Abelard and Heloise, they both wrote extensively. Heloise's
writings primarily included letters to Abelard and to other religious figures,
and then Abelard's writings also include works on theology, metaphysics, logic,
the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. He
also wrote poetry and songs, and some of these were

(19:31):
about Heloise. He never explicitly credited her, but modern scholars
contend that Heloise really was quite influential when it came
to Abelard's thoughts in the area of ethics. This is
a reversal of older scholarship, which claimed that Heloise's thoughts
were borrowed in their entirety from abial art. Yea has
to do with how focused she was on the idea

(19:52):
of hypocrisy and how the life you're living outward lea
should match up with the life that you're living inwardly,
which she herself was very distressed by that idea, given
the fact that she had got into a convent for
reasons other than a spiritual devotion. Ye. So they're in
addition to all this, they are the letters that Avalard

(20:14):
and Heloise wrote to each other after their relationship had ended.
The first one was to Abillard from Helloise after she
had read his Historia calumtatam. He wrote this about fifteen
years after their relationship had ended, and when Heloise got
it and read it, she was deeply distressed and very
worried by what she read there about his mental state

(20:35):
and how they had depicted their relationship, and like she
was also quite angry that in twelve years he had
not once expressed concern or gratitude for her joining the convent,
which she had not really wanted to do, and she
had done entirely as like a sacrifice for his sake.
Her personal letters are very passionate and very pained. She

(20:57):
wrote of how upset she is that, as we referenced
a moment ago, she took thous and because she loved Abillard,
not because she loved God. She also wrote of how
much she loved Ablard, saying things like my heart was
not in me but with you, And now even more,
if it is not with you, it is nowhere. Truly

(21:18):
without you, it cannot exist. She also wrote of her
sexual frustration, quote, even during the celebration of Mass, when
our prayers should be purer, lewed, visions of these pleasures
take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my
thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on our prayers.
I should be groaning over the sins I have committed,

(21:38):
but I can only sigh for what I have lost.
At one point in her letters, she accused Abillard of
feeling only lust for her and not love, and in
a reply he agreed with her, that's not what you
want to hear back. Abillard's letters are reserved, they're a
bit luxury, and they're really lacking in romance. So some

(21:59):
people frame this as Abalard being rational while Helloise is emotional.
But a lot of Avalard's writing really is quite emotional too.
It's just that all of his emotion is directed toward
religious matters and his sort of personal torment uh and
what his life has become. While Helloise emotion is all

(22:22):
directed at Avalard, and they also exchanged letters of direction
about how to establish a rule for her community of nuns,
and they discussed matters of faith in scripture. So not
all of their correspondence was just I loved you, I
loved you, I loved you so much and you kind
of dropped the ball and him say. Most of the time,

(22:43):
when you find collections of them, they're they're divided into
like the more personal letters and the more spiritual letters
where they address questions about scriptures and how La peric
Let should operate and that kind of thing. There is
some debate about the authenticity of these letters. You know,
their relationship happened during the eleven eleven hundreds, but the

(23:06):
oldest copies of these letters are from the thirteen hundreds,
So naturally this has led to speculation about whether they
each really wrote everything that was attributed to them. And
the three schools of thought are that they're exactly what
they're said to be that and then there's another that
is that abial Ard in fact wrote all of the letters,

(23:27):
And then there's another that some other unrelated person wrote
them later on as a bit of medieval fanfic. Uh
the overall, but you know, definitely not a hundred percent
unanimous consensus is that they are what they say they are.
That their letters from Abillard to Helloween's and vice versa.

(23:47):
Because they are so old, you can read many of
them on the internet for free, should you be so inclined. Yes,
Happy Valentine's Valentine's. They castration and we don't really or
at least I couldn't find what happened to baby aster Labe,

(24:09):
like we know this, Yeah, I don't remember ever hearing
about that. Yeah, baby aster Labe stayed in Brittany with
Abelard's sister, but otherwise, like, don't really have any sense
of that. Yeah, and it's interesting to me that they
have been uh buried many times together when it seems like,

(24:30):
at least from a romantic point of view, things had
kind of fizzled out. Yeah, well they're the time they
were both deceased. Yeah, they're they're I think they're there.
Romantic relationship with one another seems to have come to
a complete halt, uh from the time that he was castrated.

(24:54):
I think had he not been castrated, they probably would
have continued to have some kind of u secret relationship
with one another. But that then once that happened, it
wasn't just because he did not have the physical parts anymore,
but because that was such a hugely devastating experience for him.

(25:14):
He felt completely shamed by the whole thing. He had
sort of become this public figure who had been literally
disfigured because of this whole thing. Like he was like, no,
now I'm going to devote my whole life to this
other thing. I think allows though, continued to for the
rest of her life, even after their correspondent stopped being
about how much she missed him and how much she

(25:37):
loved him. I think she really cared that forever. It
certainly seems that way. Thank you so much for joining
us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of
the archive, if you heard an email address or a
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(25:59):
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