Abelard and Heloise: Love Letters That Survived Nearly a Thousand Years

“I swear to God, if the ruler of the world, the Emperor Augustus, were to honor me with marriage and grant me the world and its fullness forever, it would be more precious and honorable in my eyes to call you a whore than his empress.” (Héloïse Lavelar, first letter)

These days we, deer and Danny, are planning a tour of the shores of the Moravian Gulf together, as one of several star trips based at Château la Manoir Port de Roche, where I, Danny, live.

While planning our route, we chose the Rozili restaurant in Vannes, run by the young chef Mathias Carnot, as a place worth tasting, and then we noticed that in a small village on the Moravian coast, St-Gildas-de-Rhus, lies the monastery where Abelard, whom we will soon meet, found refuge from his enemies. From there, apparently, he corresponded with his beloved Heloise, almost a thousand years ago, in letters that are still considered to be the most wonderful ever exchanged between lovers.

We both cheered like horses, hooted like geese, shook like donkeys, chirped like birds. What a wonderful opportunity to combine scenery and love!

There will be a separate article about the landscape we will travel through. Now we will deal with love. The love of Abelard and Heloise. Actually, it is worth being precise: Heloise's love for Abelard. We will see.

The Book of Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise

First, a warning: This article may seem heavy, boring, and long-winded. But we can assure you that the book of their love letters, on which we have based our efforts for you, is even heavier, boring, and longer (published in 2016 in a new translation from Latin into Hebrew by Prof. Shulamit Shahar, published by “Miparshim.” Available for digital download on the “Evri” website).

Here is a link to the digital books website Hebrew.

I know. The transition from printed books to reading on a tablet or mobile phone is not easy; but I suppose the transition from scrolls to bound books was also so. “Oh, how could we give up the pleasant rustle of the unfolding scroll…”; the fact that we survived.

Let's return to the book of letters. It has been published in countless editions, in dozens of languages. In the nearly thousand years since the letters were written, interest in it has never waned.

But… allow us to doubt: it is doubtful that any of the readers, even well-read ones, could even read the first letter. The style is archaic, interspersed with long quotations from religious, moralistic, and tiffany letters.

So why at all? First, because we thought that on a site of respected Francophiles, it would be inappropriate to have an extensive article on these famous letters. (This article, by the way, is an extension of a previous article by Zvi, on The love story between Abelard and Heloise.) Second, because despite everything, within the vast amount of text, there are some brilliant, unforgettable, illuminating and enlightening sentences hidden. Eloise's, of course.

And in general, the only credit he honestly took was the initiative for the correspondence. The beautiful letters are the ones she wrote. As Yaara Shechory, editor of the new edition of the book, said in an interview with Haaretz:

“If they could, these pages would bleed.” Indeed, so it is.

Brief historical background

900 years ago, in 1118, Abler and Heloise met in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He was then a well-known and respected lecturer in philosophy and theology, about 40 years old. She was a 17-year-old girl, intelligent and educated. Heloise was an orphan and lived in the house of her uncle Fulbert, not far from Notre Dame. The uncle hired Abler as a private tutor for his protégé, and the two fell in love immediately.

In fact, as Abelard confessed in his first letter, the relationship between the two was born entirely on his own initiative. He offered to serve as a tutor and educator for Heloise, in exchange for his stay in their home, and he would also pay for his living expenses. Abelard, who was greedy, fell into the trap that Abelard had set for him.

As Abelard wrote about Fulber in his first letter:

If the official had been a sheep in the hands of a wolf from dawn to dawn, I would not have been more shocked.

Honesty, friends, honesty.

The relationship was intense, to say the least:

The books were open, but more words of love were spoken than words of learning; there were more kisses than references. My hand was more often sent to my chest than to the books.

The relationship between the two lasted about a year and a half. After it was discovered, while Heloise was already pregnant with their son, the two were forced to marry. The marriage did not silence the turmoil. Pulver, apparently due to a misunderstanding, believed that Abeler intended to get rid of Heloise. He sent thugs who attacked Abeler, beat him up a bit, and finally castrated him.

Heloise entered a convent, later moving to another, where she advanced rapidly until, at the age of 30, she became the abbess of the convent, which became one of the richest and most famous in France.

Abelard's fate

Abelard's fate was more bitter. His philosophical method was dialectical. I, Danny, am holding myself back from drifting back now to the wonderful days when I was a junior philosophy lecturer, and, oh, like Abelard, I was more interested in my students' breasts than in dialectics.

Therefore, I will be content with a superficial statement, according to which dialectics is a branch of the theory of logic, and uses the development born of the resolution of opposites, to solve problems in various fields, such as history, for example. Thesis - antithesis - synthesis. I will not continue. The memoirs. As long as Ebler limited his dialectics to the field of philosophy, everything was fine. The problems began when he decided to transfer it to the field of theology. Here he had many enemies, who saw the use of logical tools to solve religious issues as an attack on faith.

Ultimately, Chablais was confessed, excommunicated, forced to burn his books, and finally fled to a monastery in the remote village of St-Gildas-de-Rhus, on the shores of the Gulf of Morvan, where he received a partial pardon and was appointed abbot.

This beautiful place, not far from Port de Roche, from which we will soon depart on our trip, is described by Abelard in his first letter:

The country was barbaric and I did not know its language (I mean the Breton language, which is still spoken in Brittany today. C.H. D.A.) The monks were irrepressible and notorious for their shameful way of life; and the people of the country were cruel and rude.

During the ten or so years that Abelard spent in the monastery, he began to correspond with Heloise. They were already in middle age, decades after their relationship had been severed. This fact would influence what was in the letters, and even more so what was not in them. At least his own.

The love letters between Eloise and Abelard

Well, we come to the letters. There are eight of them. The first is Abelard's letter, supposedly written to an anonymous friend, but, not surprisingly, it reached Heloise, to whom it was of course intended. To this letter, Heloise replied in two letters to Abelard, to which he replied in two letters of his own.

These four letters are called the “personal letters.” Although together with the first they are 5 in number, they only take up a quarter of the book. The next three letters, the “Letters of Instruction,” take up about three-quarters of the book. They deal with tedious details of the monastic lifestyle, the ways of running a monastery, the relationship between nuns and monks, and all are immersed in a sea of ​​quotations from the Church Fathers. For fans of medieval theology.

Let's go back to the personal letters. They are also long, full of boring quotes, love is absent from them, but where it is found – it shines like diamonds. And as we said, what is not in the letters is no less important than what is in them. First in his, then in her.

The first letter

Abelard describes his life story to a friend, probably a virtual one. The description reveals a rather arrogant character. He defeats his teachers in debates. His fame grows. He considers himself “the only philosopher in the world.” When he hears and sees Heloise,

I decided that she was the right woman for me to have a romantic relationship with, and I believed that it would be easy for me to achieve this. At that time, I was famous and young, and I was even blessed with good looks, and I had no fear that any woman I honored with my love would reject me.

Maybe everything is true, but he wasn't humble.

He then describes the bond of love between them, and the intensity of their mutual passion:

There was no stage in lovemaking that we didn't try in our lust.

It describes the uncle’s discovery of the affair, the other’s fury, Heloise’s pregnancy and the birth of their son “Astrolab”. We wondered about the choice of name. An astrolabe is an auxiliary device used in the Middle Ages for navigation, mainly at sea, where there is no land route. It is a kind of protractor mounted on a moving system of discs.

By orienting it to the positions of certain stars in the sky, taking into account the date, it is possible to determine the coordinates of the place where the measurement is being made. So? What was the intention? Was it that the lovers' joint creation dictated their fate? We would welcome the interpretation of the Francophiles.

Abelard then describes his marriage to Heloise, their separation, his entry into the monastery, his castration, his sufferings, and his fear for his life.

I am still in danger, and every day it is as if a sword is hanging over my head.

The second letter

Eloise replies. Starts with -

To her master, or, more correctly, to her father; to her husband, or, more correctly, to her brother; to his maid, or, more correctly, to his sister; to Abelard, Eloise.

It’s a brilliant opening. It includes all the possible types of relationships between them, at first in the third person, cautious and distant, but she ends simply: “Labeler, Eloise.” We’re sure her hand was shaking.

She then addresses Ebler as “my beloved.” She writes in the plural:

We, your little servants, beg you to please write to us frequently.

This is, of course, just a slightly distant form of address, which soon disappears: “Consider the bond that binds you to me.” But then she starts nagging:

You alone owe me a great debt; tell me, if you can, why, after we entered the mansion, and this was solely due to your own decision, you abandoned me and forgot me?

She finishes in

I beg you, return your presence to me as much as you can… Please think about what you owe me and listen to my request… Peace be upon you, my only one.

However, the most poignant sentence in this letter is the one we quoted in the title:

For if the ruler of the world, Emperor Augustus, were to honor me with marriage and grant me the world and its fullness forever, it would be more precious and honorable in my eyes to call your whore than his empress.

Touching, isn't it?

The third letter

Abelard, who we believe already regretted the connection he formed with Eloise, opens his response to her with a cold shower:

To Eloise, my beloved sister in Jesus, to Abelard, my brother in Jesus.

Not only does he transfer their relationship to the religious level, meaning that their connection now boils down to both being in the congregation of Jesus, but even there they are brother and sister, not a loving couple. Later on, he also makes sure to draw a line between the past and the present:

My sister, who was once dearest to me in the world, and is now dearest to me in Christ.

The entire letter deals with the virtues of pious women in general, and ends with Heloise and her sisters being bound to a monastery: “Live well, and may your sisters live well with you.”

The fourth letter

Eloise lifts the glove, opening it, carefully:

For unity after Jesus, unity in Jesus.

She doesn’t agree with generalizations. He is unique to her and she is unique to him. But she adds “his,” so as not to upset him. She continues to flatter him:

You alone have atoned with your body for what we both have done.

While he praised women for their virtues, she cites contrary examples from the Scriptures. Proverbs tells us:

The ways of Sheol descend to the chambers of death.

Congregation number:

I find the woman more bitter than death.

From Genesis she quotes Eve tempting Adam; from Job his wife inciting him to curse God. We believe she smiled as she wrote these words. Heloise does not give up trying to arouse Abelard's passion. She repeatedly mentions "the pleasures of lovers in which we enjoyed ourselves together"; "pleasures that were so pleasant"; but ends with piety, quoting St. Jerome, "I confess my weakness."

The fifth letter

Abelard is getting restless. She is still able to show up at his monastery and create a scandal. He opens

To the bride of Christ, the servant of Christ.

Not only is their relationship on a religious level, but he no longer wants any direct relationship, not even that of brother and sister. She is the bride of Jesus, he is his servant, there is no direct relationship between them. For a moment he is tempted to mention a past meeting, of which we have not known until now:

When you lived in the Argentati convent with the nuns, I came to you one day for a private visit. Do you know what I did to you that day in my unbridled desire in the corner of the convent refectory, because we had nowhere else to go?

Maybe this is a hint: If you open your mouth, a nun like you, I can also do dirty things to you. He quickly comes to his senses, goes back to justifying the punishment imposed on them, and ends with

In Jesus, peace be with you, and in Jesus, my life, Amen.

The rest of the letters

The next three letters, the “Letters of Guidance,” deal exclusively with religious matters. The explanation lies in Heloise’s understanding that there is no chance of a loving relationship between her and Abelard, not even in letters. If she wants the correspondence to continue, she must limit herself to receiving religious guidance from him. Only once, in the sixth letter, does she give a hint of her continuing feelings: she announces that she is now restraining her words about her heartache, but adds, “I wish the aching heart were as ready to be heard as the writer’s right hand.”

If they could, these pages would bleed.

Abelard lived another 8 years after the last letter. He left the monastery of St. Gildes, returned to Paris. He probably wrote sermons for the monastery of Heloise, but they did not meet. He was again excommunicated, his writings were condemned to be burned.

At the age of 63, Abelard died, suffering and in pain, and was buried in the Parclet monastery. Heloise lived 22 years after him, and before her death she requested to be buried in his tomb. According to legend, when the tomb was opened to place Heloise's body inside, Abelard's skeleton sent the bones of both his arms to receive it. It turns out that in the end he succeeded.

For five years the two lay together, until the nuns came to the conclusion that it was not modest, and separated their graves. After about three hundred years, in 1792, when French RevolutionWhen the church's power waned, the couple moved into a single-room apartment, where a partition separated them.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the cemetery was established in Paris. Pere Lachaise (Pere Lachaise). The place was not popular, the rich bourgeois avoided it (and all their bodies). The developers understood that a marketing move was needed. They moved the playwright's grave there Molière, the writer La Fontaine, and finally the tombs of Abelard and Heloise.

There they lie together to this day. It is said that every day a mysterious hand places a flower on their grave.

For those who are not yet tired, and are ready to hear a little about Abelard's religious thought

According to Abelard, sin is not in the will to sin. There is no person who does not want to sin. Sin is also not in the act, because the act in itself is devoid of moral significance. So far, it is identical to what a first-year student hears in an “Introduction to Law” class, about the need for Mens Rea and Actus Reus to create criminal guilt.

Abelard's innovation begins here: sin is also not in the combination of desire and action. It is found in that split second, in which a person decides to respond to the inner voice calling him to put his desire into action, through action. That is where the sin is committed. This has implications. The acts of sin themselves no longer change anything. Whether they are one-time, or continue throughout a person's life. Sin has already been born, completed, and perpetuated at the very point at which a person decided to respond to the evil inclination. Of course, there is always room for atonement. Atonement is achieved through suffering.

A few words about Danny Ashkenazi and the castle in which he lives

With Zvi's permission, I am bringing here again the details of the chateau where I live, and inviting you to stay there.

A 12th-century castle, from the days of Abelard and Heloise, but well-equipped.

Danny Ashkenazi

Kfar Saba – Port de Roche

0505-211079