Exploring love with Peter Abélard and Héloïse

Discover the nature of true love through the story of two of history's most tragic star-crossed lovers on the day of Abélard's death

Gracious reader,

• Exploring love with Peter Abélard and Héloïse

• Beauty and learning: an invitation

• What should we learn together next? Philosophy + film

• Summer travel ideas: Champagne and Burgundy

• Win a YEAR of Wondrium + The Great Courses!

Exploring love with Peter Abélard and Héloïse

Peter Abélard—who died on this day, April 21, in 1142—is arguably one of the greatest intellects in the medieval world, and in human history.

In his time, his astounding intellectual capabilities were matched only by a young woman, Héloïse, whom Abélard once taught, and who would prove to be the love of his life.

Their love story begins like many other love stories: passionate and carnal.

The beautiful and precocious Héloïse with the brilliant Abélard

But their story’s tragic yet beautiful ending is rather atypical as far as stories of romance go: Abélard is violently castrated by Héloïse’s uncle, and the two, though married, live apart for the remainder of their lives. Despite their distance, their love, however, lives on because their shared love of God, ideas, conversation, and their meeting of the minds.

Storytelling has been used across history to form character and instill in people, especially the young, a sound moral foundation so that they can live life fully and well. The project of forming a person’s character through stories involves giving an inspiring vision of the good to strive for, and also using “cautionary tales” that show them what conduct and character traits lead to suffering.

I explore the importance of storytelling in my course being produced by The Teaching Company, and which will stream on Wondrium in 2023, called Storytelling and the human condition. I drew inspiration for this CR essay from my Wondrium course lecture on love.

Stories give people motivation to pursue virtue, and avoid vice.

St. Augustine, who we met in our lecture on guilt and blame, defined virtue as “rightly ordered loves.”

Augustine thought that even the love of good things could turn vicious and be bad for us if they were not loved in their proper proportion.

In his City of God, (15.22), he writes, “When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing. For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately.”

Even something good and beautiful, like beauty itself, or romantic love, or the love of a friend or family member could be perverted and harmful if loved wrongly. Even wonderful things can become bad if they are “not fitly loved in preference to God, the eternal, spiritual, and unchangeable good.”

In his On Christian Doctrine (I.27-28), he writes, “But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved.”

It is part of the human condition to love things wrongly, which often leads to suffering.

We’ll channel Plutarch and mine history for moral instruction through the story of two of history’s lesser-known star-crossed lovers—Peter Abélard and Héloïse—to explore the nature of proportional, or rightly ordered, romantic love.

Peter Abélard: The first man who knew everything

Peter Abélard was born in Britany, France in 1079 to a noble family. He renounced the duties and privileges of nobility, however, to lead a life of the mind. He left Britany for Paris with the goal of becoming the greatest scholar in the known world. He quickly became an intellectual superstar of his day. The brightest students from across Europe flocked to Paris to study under him.

The intellectual history of Paris’ Left Bank far predates its modern renown for hosting literary luminaries such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemmingway and Scott Fitzgerald.

In fact, it’s association with intelligentsia dates back to the Middle Ages, where intellectual communities also flourished on the Left Bank, with Abélard at the center, creating what would become a forerunner to the University. Abélard earned a reputation for being a master of rhetoric and logic, and enjoyed displaying his considerable talents before an audience, first arguing one side of an issue, and then the other.

Around 1116, a man named Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame invited Abélard to come live in his home on Île de la Cité in Paris, and serve as a tutor to his intellectually gifted niece, Héloïse.

Just a stone’s throw from where Abélard taught on the Left Bank, he accepted.

Héloïse, who was about thirty years Abélard’s junior, had been raised in a convent, which means that she was afforded the best education available to women of her day.

She could read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—an impressive feat even amongst the most learned men of the era, or any era for that matter.

So the scene is set: Abélard is Héloïse’s tutor. He is a brilliant scholar, she a precocious and beautiful student… and they also live together.

What do you think happened?

An intellectual love affair

Years later, in letter to a friend, Philintus, which Abélard writes to console his friend in his time of suffering, Abelard writes of his own considerable suffering. Abélard recounts his first-time meeting Héloïse.

Rather romantically in my opinion, he states:

“I saw her; I loved her; and I resolved that she should love me.”

Abélard states that his “thirst for glory”—his ambition to be the most esteemed scholar in the world—cooled in his heart, and all of his passions were lost in his passion for her.

More than her physical beauty, however, Abélard says that he fell in love with her mind. She, like him, enjoyed learning for its own sake. They loved learning together. They made each other shaper, better people, and wiser in their pursuit of the good, hand in hand.

They conversed and contemplated any number of primary questions together, even developing novel theories and ideas jointly—such as the “theory of intentionality,” which is a predecessor of the mens rea requirement that is the cornerstone of legal theory in the western world, and for which Abelard alone is generally credited.

Their relationship was premised primarily on their intellectual compatibility.

One day, during one of their lessons, Abélard declared his love for her. “I love you, adorable Heloise! Till now I thought philosophy made us masters, of all our passions, and that it was a refuge from the storms in which weak mortals are tossed and shipwrecked; but you have destroyed my security, and broken this philosophic courage.”

His love for her sensitized his hardened, logical, analytical heart and made him feel richly, deeply and truly human.

To his dismay, she did not believe him! But Abélard worked to earn her trust and dispel the “suspicions which the general insincerity of men had raised in her,” he wrote.

He was thrilled to discover that his affections were returned, and they carried on their triste by contriving “coincidental” meet ups and midnight rendezvous.

During their love affair, Abélard found himself less interested in his scientific and philosophic pursuits, and driven to the romantic arts, trading Aristotle for Ovid.

“I could now do nothing but write verses to sooth my passion,” he writes. “I quitted Aristotle and his dry maxims, to practice the precepts of the more ingenious Ovid. No day passed in which I did not compose amorous verses. Love was my inspiring Apollo,” Abélard writes.

In flagrante delicto

His romantic verse gained popularity, and was even used by other young men to woo their beloveds. So famous did his love poems become that even Héloïse’s uncle, Canon Fulbert, heard about them! He began dropping in unexpectedly on their lessons. One day, he even caught them together.

“How fatal, sometimes, are the consequences of curiosity!” Abélard laments.

Fulbert forced Abélard to leave his home, but that did not end the romance between the two lovers. Abélard took a place close by Héloïse’s home, and then implored her handmaiden to help facilitate their affair.

In a surprise twist, however, Héloïse’s maid declared her love for Abelard. Needless to say, Abelard was surprised and speechless.

Abélard writes of this incident: “So entirely did I love Héloïse that without reflecting whether [the maid] spoke anything reasonable or not, I immediately left her. When I had gone a little way from her I looked back, and saw her biting her nails in the rage of disappointment, which made me fear some fatal consequences.”

“Love hath no fury like a woman scorned,” the saying goes.

Or, as Abélard put it, “A woman rejected is an outrageous creature.”

Sure enough, the spurned maid went directly to Héloïse’s uncle and told him that Abélard contrived to have her to contravene the uncle’s wishes, and facilitate his affair his Héloïse. Héloïse’s uncle was enraged, and both he and the handmaiden continued to take every effort to block Abélard’s communication with his beloved.

Love rightly ordered

Despite these obstacles to their romance, Abélard finally found an opportunity to meet Héloïse. When he discovered she was with child, he persuaded her to come away with him to his home in Britany, and they made plans to marry.

Abélard did not want to marry Héloïse until he had reconciled with her uncle. Abélard declared his intention to marry Héloïse, and her uncle made every gesture to affirm their reconciliation, and blessed their union.

When Abélard shared the good news with Héloïse of her uncle’s blessing of their marriage, she was dismayed. She opposed to the marriage!

Why?

It was not because she did not love him. It was, in fact, because she loved him that she didn’t want to marry him and therefore jeopardize his future and career as a scholar and a philosopher.

At this time, scholarship and the clergy were so intermingled, with scholastic communities closely affiliated with religious orders. This, in turn, meant that marriage would be a significant impediment to a scholarly career.

In fact, because of this tradition, up until the 1877, that dons and fellows at Oxford University were not allowed to marry.

In a move that marks Héloïse as one of the most remarkably modern women of her era, she also thought that marriage was wholly unnecessary.

As she wrote in a letter Abélard,

“I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage-bond, no marriage portion, and it was not my own pleasures and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but yours. The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress... I believed that the more I humbled myself on your account, the more gratitude I should win from you, and also the less damage I should do to the brightness of your reputation…”

She goes on to say that she’d rather be his mistress than empress of Rome.

Despite Héloïse’s selfless protests, Abélard insisted on their union, and they were married in secret.

Unhappy endings

Their trouble was far from over, and their happy ending wasn’t happy for long.

Abélard thought Héloïse’s uncle was appeased and all was forgiven and forgotten. But that was not the case.

In the middle of the night, Fulbert hired an assassin to break into Abélard’s home and castrate him—a cruel and inhumane act if ever there was one. Fulbert’s logic of this crime was that Abélard had stolen his niece’s virginity, so he would take Abélard’s manhood.

After this, Abélard spent the remainder of his life in a monastery, and insisted that Héloïse live out her days in a convent.

His castration marked a shift in his romantic life, but also his work, too. Before, his scholarship was a way to display his own brilliance and garner praise for himself. After his mutilation, however, as he describes it in his memoir, Story of my Misfortunes, he declared that he wanted to no longer be a philosopher of the world and instead desired to be a “philosopher of God.”

Though they both lived the remainder of their lives in religious houses, they focused on contemplation, prayer, and intellectual pursuits, and they kept their relationship alive through intellectually vibrant correspondence.

One of the most beautiful works in history, and especially in the romance literature genre, are the letters between Abélard and Héloïse.

I highly commend them to your reading. It’s truly amazing that we have these letters that are nearly millennia old. We don’t have many letters from the 12th century, and it speaks to Abélard and Héloïse’s reputation in their day that their letters were copied and preserved shortly after they were written.

For my husband’s birthday, I got a late 19th century edition—cast in leather and bound in gold—of their correspondence. I think the relationship between Abélard and Héloïse, tragic though some aspects of it was, can serve as model for us today of what true love looks like.

First, their relationship embodies the lovely sentiment of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince. He writes, “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

A strong, healthy, loving relationship—romantic, familial or platonic—should be grounded in a love of something beyond the relationship itself. In the case of Abélard and Héloïse’s, their relationship was grounded in a love for learning, the true, the good, and the beautiful. This love of ideas both preceded and transcended their love for one another, which is why they were able to maintain a relationship even across distance and when their physical relationship ended.

Second, the love between Abélard and Héloïse exemplifies a love that is rightly ordered. Héloïse in particular embodied sacrificial love. She was willing to deny Abélard what he wanted—her hand in marriage—because she cared more for his interests rather than for hers. It goes without saying that a pregnant, unmarried woman at this time was in considerable danger—yet she was willing to risk that danger for what she thought was the well-being and best interest of be beloved, Abélard.

Consider, by contrast, stories such as Gustave Flaubert's 1856 debut novel, Madame Bovary, or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina published in 1878.

These stories follow protagonists that follow their love and passion, and destroy their own life, as well as the lives of those they love. Characters in these stories thought that by single-mindedly pursuing the object of their happiness, they would become happy. But in misplacing their ultimate meaning in the people they thought they loved, and pursuing it at all costs, they lost everything.

When one’s loves are disordered—when one makes an idol out of love of a person, and when one places personal fulfillment and “following their heart” above other duties and obligations—suffering is sure to follow.

These stories about the tragic nature of love embody the ancient view that love was a form of madness. The ancients attributed the power of love to external natural forces that were beyond a person’s control—and when they were struck, for example, by Cupid’s arrow, they had no choice but to surrender to it.

By contrast, the story of Peter Abélard and Héloïse show how passion, followed by denial in the name of a greater love and deeper connection, can lead to an even more fulfilling relationship—because the love is rightly ordered and proportionate.

Their love, even from the beginning was about more than carnality. They cared about the right things, connecting on the level of the mind first, resulting in long-lasting and deeply satisfying intellectual and emotional relationship that endured after their physical relationship faded.

Pascal is often quoted as saying, “There is a God shaped vacuum in every human heart.”

What he actually said was:

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him… since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” [Pascal, Pensees #425]

I think Pascal’s insight rings true whether or not one is a theist.

The human heart is built to love. We are beings with deep desires and longings and we crave fulfillment.

We are beings defined by longing and a compulsive search for meaning. We often find our meaning and fulfil our need to love in relationship with others. At its best, love for others can give our lives richness and meaning.

It is often the case, however, that we turn to love—romantic, but also familial and relational—to define us and give us ultimate meaning in our lives.

When we do that, when we make gods out of human beings, we are bound to be disappointed because, as we all know, human beings are far from perfect and divine. We crush the object of our affection with the weight of our expectation—and finally, our disillusionment.

Anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Becker noted this, writing:

“The failure of romantic love as a solution to human problems is so much a part of modern man’s frustration… No human relationship can bear the burden of Godhood…However much we may idealize and idolize [the beloved], he or she inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection… After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to this position? We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know our existence has not been in vain. We want redemption-nothing less. Needless to say, human partners cannot give this.”

In placing the object of our love at the center of our lives instead of something higher and transcendent, we are bound to bring havoc on ourselves and those around us.

That is why loving things—even good things, like spouses, friends and children—in their proper order or proportion is so important.

A few questions for you to consider:

• What do you think of the importance of rightly ordered loves?

• Why do you think it is so difficult for human beings to love the right things, and so easy to love things wrongly?

• What other lessons do you think the story of Abélard and Héloïse can offer us?

I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at ah@alexandraohudson.com

(If you found value in this essay please consider supporting Civic Renaissance with a paid subscription!)

Beauty and learning: an invitation

Why has our modern system of education become obsessed with the practical and technical to the detriment of a contemplative view of education?

It’s time to recover the role of Beauty in education, to show how a liberal arts education can form us—mind, body, and soul—and order our loves.

Join us on April 27th, noon EDT to discover the importance of restoring beauty to learning!

What should we learn together next? Philosophy + film

In my experience, the best teachers and are the best students.

I LOVE creating courses because I love to learn. Courses are an excuse to talk about the highest things and ideas in a community with other who care about the high-test things, too.

I loved learning alongside the many of you who took CRs first class, Five classic books that will change your life, this past September.

I’m considering launching a new course, perhaps as early as next month, called “The Philosophy of Film: Explore life’s biggest questions through the ideas of great films.”

The course would be four weeks, and each week we’d watch a film and read a book that explore a foundational question in life.

Module 1

How do we know what we know to be true? Plato’s Allegory of the Cave + The Matrix

Module 2

What is the meaning of life? Terrence Malick’s Tree of life + Søren Kierkegaard

Module 3

How can we be happy in life? Citizen Kane + Ecclesiastes

Module 4

How can we make the most of our time on earth? Babette’s Feast + Seneca’s De Otium (On Leisure

What do you think? Is this a course you would enjoy taking?

Write to me directly with your thoughts at ah@alexandraohudson.com

Summer travel ideas: Champagne and Burgundy

As you dream about summer travels, please feel free to use my travelogs from last summer for inspiration! These pieces, as well as others forthcoming, are part of my third book: a travel guide to walk in the footsteps of the great men and women who built our world. They also reflect my belief in the importance of good living, and of enjoying a full, rich inhabited life of enjoyment and leisure.

We should travel, explore new intellectual territory, and savor good food and drink for this reason. Enjoy!

Burgundy, France: Where to stay, eat, drink

Champagne, France: Where to eat, drink and stay

Win a YEAR of Wondrium + The Great Courses!

I’m giving away a year of streaming to Wondrium—the ultimate gift for lifelong learners.

To be entered to win, write me an email at ah@alexandraohudson.com

Thank you for being part of this community!