To the Letter. Simon Garfield
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reputation to recommend me’).* His optimism was well placed. Having seen a young woman (believed to be at least 17, probably older) living in Paris, possessed of an outstanding education and looks ‘that did not rank lowest’, he set upon seducing her by impressing her uncle and guardian Fulbert (a canon at Notre Dame Cathedral), and successfully enrolling her as his protégé. ‘Need I say more?’ Abelard asks his unnamed correspondent. ‘With our lessons as our pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love.’ There followed ‘more kissing than teaching’ and hands that ‘strayed oftener to her bosom than the pages’. Indeed, Heloise seemed to receive very little formal teaching at all, as ‘our desires left no stage of love-making untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it’.
As their nocturnal passion endured, so Abelard found his teaching beginning to suffer. He became bored with his other duties, and his lectures became uninspired. And he never failed to be amazed at how everyone apart from Heloise’s uncle had a fairly good idea of what was going on. Abelard quoted St Jerome in his letter to Sabinian: ‘We are always the last to learn of evil in our own home, and the faults of our wife and children may be the talk of the town but do not reach our ears.’
But when he did find out, Fulbert, not an entirely indulgent guardian (he had previously told Abelard that he was permitted to hit Heloise with force if she didn’t apply herself), was not wholly happy at the way Heloise had applied herself. The lovers flee his anger, Heloise finds she is pregnant, and the two agree on a secret marriage, which initially seems to please Fulbert. A son is born named Astrolabe. But when Fulbert decides to make the marriage common knowledge, it is Abelard – shamed by his actions – who breaks off their relationship, sends Heloise to a convent and Astrolabe to his sister. And that should have been that, were it not for a fuming Fulbert, who sees his niece abandoned and her life ruined. So Fulbert and his friends hatch a plan.
As Abelard describes it, ‘one night as I slept peacefully in an inner room in my lodgings, they bribed one of my servants to admit them and there took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.’
Thus mutilated, Abelard takes up holy orders and devotes himself to the love of God and the scriptures. But he was a questioning soul, and he did not endear himself to his peers by exposing what he saw as the many inconsistencies in Christian teaching. He wrote much in favour of rational understanding, and publicly – by anatomical necessity – he renounced the pleasures of the flesh. But when, nine years after his castration, his epistolary confession fell into the hands of Heloise in her convent at St Argenteuil (how, we don’t know – it could be that Abelard sent her a copy), he again became ensnared with his former lover.*
Heloise disagreed with some of the details in Abelard’s account to his friend, and was wholly dismayed at his previous silence, but it was clear she was still devoted to him. More to him than God, indeed:
Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purest, lewd visions of the pleasures we shared take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on my own prayers. Everything we did, and also the times and places, are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I have no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in the movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word.
Heloise is convinced that her life has been wrecked, and is certain she has suffered more than Abelard. He has found redemption in faith; she feels only shame at her failure to do so.
Where God may seem to you an adversary he has himself proved himself kind: like an honest doctor who does not shrink from giving pain if it will bring about a cure. But for me, youth and passion and experience of pleasures which were so delightful intensify the torments of the flesh and longings of desire, and the assault is the more overwhelming as the nature they attack is the weaker.
Abelard’s rational response to her outpouring is subdued, and far more measured than she was asking for. He offers spiritual and religious assistance, and trusts that she will run her convent well. But he has abandoned all sexual desire for her, and it is not just his castration that has made this switch for him. He now regards libido as degrading, and views his nights with her as offering only ‘wretched, obscene pleasures’. He believes he often forced his lust upon her unwillingly, and is now grateful for his reduced state, regarding it as ‘wholly just and merciful’.
for me to be reduced in that part of my body which was the seat of lust and sole reason for those desires . . . in order that this member justly be punished for all its wrongdoing in us, expiate the sins committed for its amusement, and cut me off from the slough of filth in which I had been wholly immersed in mind as in body. Only thus could I become more fit to approach the holy altars.
Heloise reluctantly appears to accept these arguments, or is at least defeated by their force. The couple’s letters end on philosophical rather than intimate concerns, the so-called ‘Letters of Direction’, although the chiming of their minds appears still to form an irrevocable bond.
But the story does not end there. In the early 1970s, a German ecclesiastical scholar named Ewald Koensgen published a thesis in Bonn describing a series of love letters written on wax tablets that had originally been published in an anthology compiled by the fifteenth-century monk Johannes de Vepria. The writers of the letters were unknown, but Koensgen had a hunch – little more – that they might be the original letters of Abelard and Heloise written to each other in Paris before things went wrong. His hunch had become a little stronger by 1974 when he published Epistolae duorum amantium. Briefe Abaelards und Heloises?, but the slim book created little noise. There was more of a controversy in 1999, when Constant J. Mews, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, published the letters under the unequivocal title The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, and there was yet more commotion when the Latin letters appeared in a French translation in 2005. The debate still enflames medieval scholarly debate: are the letters genuine? If so, are they the genuine letters of Abelard and Heloise?*
Certainly there were letters between the two at the height of their passions. In his autobiography, Abelard reasoned that in their earliest days together, even when separated, ‘we could enjoy each other’s presence by exchange of written messages in which we could speak more openly than in person’. The more Professor Mews studied and translated the letters, the more he had become convinced of the similarities in grammar and language between the established letters and the later discoveries. When he examined their context within the mores and other manuscripts of twelfth-century France he found only further confirmations. The 113 letters range considerably in length from three or four lines to more than 600 words, and from incomplete snippets of prose to strictly metered long passages of verse. They speak of a constancy of love found in faithfulness, and there is a repeated mingling of human love, spiritual love and the love of God. Many seem to exist quite independently of any others, as if written into the wind with no expectation of consequential reply.
WOMAN: To one loved thus far and always to be loved: with all her being and feeling, good health, joy, and growth in all that is beneficial and honourable . . . Farewell, farewell, and fare well for as long as the kingdom of God is seen to endure.
MAN: To his most precious jewel, ever radiant with its natural splendour, he purest gold: may he surround and fittingly set that same jewel in a joyful embrace . . . Farewell, you who make me fare well.*
The lapidary cloying never lets up even in longer examples, and remains rather infuriatingly vague. (She: ‘Farewell, sweetest. I am wholly with you, or to speak more truly I am wholly within you.’ He: ‘To the inexhaustible vessel of all his sweetness . . .’ She: ‘Since you are the son of true sweetness . . .’) But the physicality of their relationship does emerge gradually, albeit in a more muted form than we are used to from the fantasy-in-the-pews of the later letters