My Necrophiliac Lesbian Love Affair
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I'm in love with a 800-year-old woman named Heloise. Some of you may know her as the female half of the Middle Ages' most notorious love affair. For those who don't, here's the story:
Born about 1079 AD, Peter Abelard was the most brilliant philosopher of his time. He had a huge following of students, and an ego to match. He alienated his teachers from his constant badgering and challenging of them, but survived because his brilliance attracted followers to his own classes at various locations, including the cathedral school of Notre Dame.
By 1116, he was so successful and so full of himself that he decided it was time to take a mistress. He lasered in on one of the most talented and beautiful women in France: Heloise, woman of letters and niece to a colleague. Her uncle had two weaknesses, according to Peter Abelard: his love of his niece and his love of money. So when Peter asked to rent a room in Heloise's house and tutor her, the uncle enthusiastically agreed. Till then Peter had a (well-earned) reputation for sober living, which eased his entry into the family trust. Peter mocks the uncle for this trust, noting that his uncle, in fact, urged Peter to "beat her" as necessary to help her learn her lessons. Peter describes the situation in his famous Calamities of Peter Abelard:
"What more do I need to say? First we were joined in one house, then in one heart. Under the pretext of study, we had all our time free for love, and in our classroom all the seclusion love could want. [. . .] To avert suspicion, there were some beatings, yes, but the hand that struck the blows belonged to love, not anger, to pleasure, not rage---and they surpassed the sweetness of any perfume. We left no stage of love untried in our passion, and if love could find something novel or strange, we tried that too. New at the game, we went at it with heat, and it never grew old for us."
Holy cow. (And kudos to William Levitan for the translation from Abelard's original Latin text.) But you will note that Abelard's memoir is called the Calamities, and with reason. His preoccupation with Heloise was so extreme that he couldn't concentrate on philosophy, his students all found out about the affair, and soon the uncle did too, catching them in flagrante. Abelard spirited the now-pregnant Heloise off to his sister's house, where she gave birth to their son, Astralabe (which apparently was as strange a name then as it is now). To assuage the uncle, Abelard proposed marrying Heloise, which Heloise fiercely resisted, as at that time, as during the classical era, marriage and domesticity were thought to be incompatible with philosophy, with Socrates and his shrewish wife Xanthippe the exception that proves the rule. Abelard could be a husband, but not a philosopher as well. They compromised: They wed in secret, to make Heloise an honest woman, but with the proviso that the uncle would keep the marriage secret.
But as the saying goes, a secret between two is safe if one of them is dead, and the uncle couldn't resist talking about the marriage. Once Abelard realized this, he sent Heloise off to the convent at Argenteuil (where she took the veil "freely, at my command"), apparently to make it clear that they were not an "active" couple and that he could continue in his role of (celibate) philosophy teacher. The uncle saw this as a rejection of the marriage, and committed the most famous act of vengeance in all of medieval history: he bribed a servant, hired some thugs, and had them sneak into Abelard's house at night and castrate him.
The trauma of this event is easy to imagine. His students were outraged, he himself was mortified, and he left Paris to enter the monastery of St. Denis. Abelard remained a monk the rest of his life, but found it impossible to get along with others. He eventually founded his own retreat in the Champagne region called The Paraclete, though he often left for other assignments. Heloise, an intelligent and noble woman herself, became abbess of her convent and eventually moved her nuns to The Paraclete as well. Abelard died in 1142 while staying at the monastery at Cluny, and Heloise died 1164 and was buried next to Abelard at The Paraclete.
Knowledge of their stories comes to us from Abelard's own Calamities but also through the seven surviving letters that Abelard and Heloise wrote to each other through the years of their religious life. Abelard's letters are, to put it simply, rather monk-like. Robbed of his capacity for physical passion, he lives the life of the mind and spirit, and he comes to see the castration of the least of his calamities (others being the persecutions he endures at the hands of various jealous rivals and the murder attempts he survives as abbot of a particularly "barbarian" and unruly country monastery). He finds a kind of "grace" in his state; once gone, his libido no longer afflicts him and is simply no longer of interest.
But Heloise . . . Heloise is a different story. She enters the convent under duress in her late twenties. And she is absolutely, passionately, head-over-heels in love with Abelard. In a time period in which women's sexuality was seen either as a menace or as simply nonexistent, Heloise lives in the memory of their affair and refuses to renounce it. Where Abelard is impersonal, she is personal. Where Abelard is appropriate, she is direct. Where he wants to forget the past, she throws it in his face. Let's start with this:
"You know, my dearest, all the world knows, how much I have lost in you, how that supreme, that notorious betrayal robbed me of my very self when it robbed me of you, and how incomparably worse than the loss itself is the pain from the way it happened. [. . .] As you alone are the source of my grief, you alone can grant the grace of consolation. You alone have the power to make me sad, to make me happy, or to console me [. . .] I threw myself away at your command. And the greater irony is that my love then turned to such insanity that the one thing it desired above all else was the one thing it put irrevocably beyond its reach."
And:
"I never wanted anything in you but you alone, nothing of what you have but you yourself, never a marriage, never a dowry, never any pleasure, any purpose of my own---as you well know---but only yours. The name of wife may have the advantages of sanctity and safety, but to me the sweeter name will always be lover or, if your dignity can bear it, concubine or whore."
Keep in mind, please, that this is the renowned abbess of a convent writing:
"I can expect no reward from God since it is clear I have done nothing out of love for him. I followed you as you went striding off to God and to his monastery."
And what does Abelard write back?
"I hope all of this [the dangers he faces at the barbarian monastery] will call you to your prayers---you and your sisters of the convent---with greater confidence that God will keep me alive [. . .] the prayers of so many, so devout---these I know will easily prevail. God loves the abstinence and self-restraint you all have consecrated to him."
With Abelard it is always "you and the sisters" and "you all," rarely "you," rarely "Heloise." His letters are all admonition, all scripture and generic encouragement. She wants something from him that he cannot give because he no longer has it: passion, emotion, remembrance. She eggs him on, even accusing God for the injustice of allowing Abelard's castration at a time when their affair had ended:
"And every law of justice was reversed to spite us further. When we were still pursuing the joys of love and---to use an ugly but a more expressive phrase---abandoning ourselves to fornication, God spared us his hard judgment. But when we took steps to correct what we had done [by marrying, and then living apart] [. . .] the Lord raised up an angry hand against us and struck our now-chaste bed when he had winked at our unchaste bed for so long before."
She is unrepentant for their affair, defending, implicitly, her own sexuality:
"There is no penance I could undergo that can appease God [. . .] since I charge him forever with the savagery of that act and, forever unreconciled to his will, offend him more with my outrage than I can soothe him with any fitting penance. How can it be called repentance of sins, whatever affliction the body undergoes, if the mind retains the will to sin and seethes with its old desires? [. . .] For me, the pleasures we shared in love were sweet, so sweet they cannot displease me now, and rarely are they ever out of mind. Wherever I turn, they are there before my eyes with all their old desires. I see their images even in my sleep. During Holy Mass itself, when prayer should be its purest, unholy fantasies of pleasure so enslave my wretched soul that my devotion is to them and not my prayers."
Abelard addresses his responding letter simply "To the bride of Christ, from his servant." He segues immediately into biblical exegesis and only briefly alludes to their relationship and Heloise's continued outpouring of pain and passion:
"I come now to the last remaining point---what I called your old, continual complaint, in which you dare lay charges against God for how we came to the religious life when in justice you out to glorify his name. [. . .] To please me the most [. . .] you will put this bitterness aside. You cannot please me with it or attain the state of blessedness at my side."
True enough. She cannot attain from him what she wants. He goes on to write, among other things, a Rule for convents, making special provision for the needs and "weaknesses" of women. Rule number one: isolation. No men, few visitors, even conversations between the overseeing abbot and the convent's abbess must be short and to the point---no conversation allowed. Even among the nuns, talk is dangerous:
"We should discipline the tongue with complete silence at least at certain times and in certain places: at prayer, at meals, in the hours after compline, in the kitchen, the dormitory, the refectory, and the cloister. There, if it is necessary, you should use signs in place of words."
I find this to be one of the saddest things I've ever read. He conceives of a silence, a world of emptiness, for these women that's pitiful. Like a writer of utopias, these rules are fantasies of his mind, which perhaps if he saw in place, he would judge to be as cruel as they actually are. He's never lived such a life. Even at the barbarian monastery, when he's forced to live outside the monastery walls because his monks keep trying to kill him . . . even there he is surrounded by his students and followers who wait on him.
Abelard isn't cruel, just unable to understand what he's asking and unable to connect with the passion that still animates Heloise. They still share a love, though, including a love for philosophy, and Heloise's ideas about the centrality of intention over action in moral matters becomes a cornerstone of his thought. Heloise's philosophy comes out of her head but also her life, as she lives every day the conflict between outer repentance and inner rebellion. I love her refusal to renounce her sexuality, to renounce in general; it reminds me of Dylan Thomas: "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light." It may be in vain, but Heloise goes out swinging.
-
I'm in love with a 800-year-old woman named Heloise. Some of you may know her as the female half of the Middle Ages' most notorious love affair. For those who don't, here's the story:
Born about 1079 AD, Peter Abelard was the most brilliant philosopher of his time. He had a huge following of students, and an ego to match. He alienated his teachers from his constant badgering and challenging of them, but survived because his brilliance attracted followers to his own classes at various locations, including the cathedral school of Notre Dame.
By 1116, he was so successful and so full of himself that he decided it was time to take a mistress. He lasered in on one of the most talented and beautiful women in France: Heloise, woman of letters and niece to a colleague. Her uncle had two weaknesses, according to Peter Abelard: his love of his niece and his love of money. So when Peter asked to rent a room in Heloise's house and tutor her, the uncle enthusiastically agreed. Till then Peter had a (well-earned) reputation for sober living, which eased his entry into the family trust. Peter mocks the uncle for this trust, noting that his uncle, in fact, urged Peter to "beat her" as necessary to help her learn her lessons. Peter describes the situation in his famous Calamities of Peter Abelard:
"What more do I need to say? First we were joined in one house, then in one heart. Under the pretext of study, we had all our time free for love, and in our classroom all the seclusion love could want. [. . .] To avert suspicion, there were some beatings, yes, but the hand that struck the blows belonged to love, not anger, to pleasure, not rage---and they surpassed the sweetness of any perfume. We left no stage of love untried in our passion, and if love could find something novel or strange, we tried that too. New at the game, we went at it with heat, and it never grew old for us."
Holy cow. (And kudos to William Levitan for the translation from Abelard's original Latin text.) But you will note that Abelard's memoir is called the Calamities, and with reason. His preoccupation with Heloise was so extreme that he couldn't concentrate on philosophy, his students all found out about the affair, and soon the uncle did too, catching them in flagrante. Abelard spirited the now-pregnant Heloise off to his sister's house, where she gave birth to their son, Astralabe (which apparently was as strange a name then as it is now). To assuage the uncle, Abelard proposed marrying Heloise, which Heloise fiercely resisted, as at that time, as during the classical era, marriage and domesticity were thought to be incompatible with philosophy, with Socrates and his shrewish wife Xanthippe the exception that proves the rule. Abelard could be a husband, but not a philosopher as well. They compromised: They wed in secret, to make Heloise an honest woman, but with the proviso that the uncle would keep the marriage secret.
But as the saying goes, a secret between two is safe if one of them is dead, and the uncle couldn't resist talking about the marriage. Once Abelard realized this, he sent Heloise off to the convent at Argenteuil (where she took the veil "freely, at my command"), apparently to make it clear that they were not an "active" couple and that he could continue in his role of (celibate) philosophy teacher. The uncle saw this as a rejection of the marriage, and committed the most famous act of vengeance in all of medieval history: he bribed a servant, hired some thugs, and had them sneak into Abelard's house at night and castrate him.
The trauma of this event is easy to imagine. His students were outraged, he himself was mortified, and he left Paris to enter the monastery of St. Denis. Abelard remained a monk the rest of his life, but found it impossible to get along with others. He eventually founded his own retreat in the Champagne region called The Paraclete, though he often left for other assignments. Heloise, an intelligent and noble woman herself, became abbess of her convent and eventually moved her nuns to The Paraclete as well. Abelard died in 1142 while staying at the monastery at Cluny, and Heloise died 1164 and was buried next to Abelard at The Paraclete.
Knowledge of their stories comes to us from Abelard's own Calamities but also through the seven surviving letters that Abelard and Heloise wrote to each other through the years of their religious life. Abelard's letters are, to put it simply, rather monk-like. Robbed of his capacity for physical passion, he lives the life of the mind and spirit, and he comes to see the castration of the least of his calamities (others being the persecutions he endures at the hands of various jealous rivals and the murder attempts he survives as abbot of a particularly "barbarian" and unruly country monastery). He finds a kind of "grace" in his state; once gone, his libido no longer afflicts him and is simply no longer of interest.
But Heloise . . . Heloise is a different story. She enters the convent under duress in her late twenties. And she is absolutely, passionately, head-over-heels in love with Abelard. In a time period in which women's sexuality was seen either as a menace or as simply nonexistent, Heloise lives in the memory of their affair and refuses to renounce it. Where Abelard is impersonal, she is personal. Where Abelard is appropriate, she is direct. Where he wants to forget the past, she throws it in his face. Let's start with this:
"You know, my dearest, all the world knows, how much I have lost in you, how that supreme, that notorious betrayal robbed me of my very self when it robbed me of you, and how incomparably worse than the loss itself is the pain from the way it happened. [. . .] As you alone are the source of my grief, you alone can grant the grace of consolation. You alone have the power to make me sad, to make me happy, or to console me [. . .] I threw myself away at your command. And the greater irony is that my love then turned to such insanity that the one thing it desired above all else was the one thing it put irrevocably beyond its reach."
And:
"I never wanted anything in you but you alone, nothing of what you have but you yourself, never a marriage, never a dowry, never any pleasure, any purpose of my own---as you well know---but only yours. The name of wife may have the advantages of sanctity and safety, but to me the sweeter name will always be lover or, if your dignity can bear it, concubine or whore."
Keep in mind, please, that this is the renowned abbess of a convent writing:
"I can expect no reward from God since it is clear I have done nothing out of love for him. I followed you as you went striding off to God and to his monastery."
And what does Abelard write back?
"I hope all of this [the dangers he faces at the barbarian monastery] will call you to your prayers---you and your sisters of the convent---with greater confidence that God will keep me alive [. . .] the prayers of so many, so devout---these I know will easily prevail. God loves the abstinence and self-restraint you all have consecrated to him."
With Abelard it is always "you and the sisters" and "you all," rarely "you," rarely "Heloise." His letters are all admonition, all scripture and generic encouragement. She wants something from him that he cannot give because he no longer has it: passion, emotion, remembrance. She eggs him on, even accusing God for the injustice of allowing Abelard's castration at a time when their affair had ended:
"And every law of justice was reversed to spite us further. When we were still pursuing the joys of love and---to use an ugly but a more expressive phrase---abandoning ourselves to fornication, God spared us his hard judgment. But when we took steps to correct what we had done [by marrying, and then living apart] [. . .] the Lord raised up an angry hand against us and struck our now-chaste bed when he had winked at our unchaste bed for so long before."
She is unrepentant for their affair, defending, implicitly, her own sexuality:
"There is no penance I could undergo that can appease God [. . .] since I charge him forever with the savagery of that act and, forever unreconciled to his will, offend him more with my outrage than I can soothe him with any fitting penance. How can it be called repentance of sins, whatever affliction the body undergoes, if the mind retains the will to sin and seethes with its old desires? [. . .] For me, the pleasures we shared in love were sweet, so sweet they cannot displease me now, and rarely are they ever out of mind. Wherever I turn, they are there before my eyes with all their old desires. I see their images even in my sleep. During Holy Mass itself, when prayer should be its purest, unholy fantasies of pleasure so enslave my wretched soul that my devotion is to them and not my prayers."
Abelard addresses his responding letter simply "To the bride of Christ, from his servant." He segues immediately into biblical exegesis and only briefly alludes to their relationship and Heloise's continued outpouring of pain and passion:
"I come now to the last remaining point---what I called your old, continual complaint, in which you dare lay charges against God for how we came to the religious life when in justice you out to glorify his name. [. . .] To please me the most [. . .] you will put this bitterness aside. You cannot please me with it or attain the state of blessedness at my side."
True enough. She cannot attain from him what she wants. He goes on to write, among other things, a Rule for convents, making special provision for the needs and "weaknesses" of women. Rule number one: isolation. No men, few visitors, even conversations between the overseeing abbot and the convent's abbess must be short and to the point---no conversation allowed. Even among the nuns, talk is dangerous:
"We should discipline the tongue with complete silence at least at certain times and in certain places: at prayer, at meals, in the hours after compline, in the kitchen, the dormitory, the refectory, and the cloister. There, if it is necessary, you should use signs in place of words."
I find this to be one of the saddest things I've ever read. He conceives of a silence, a world of emptiness, for these women that's pitiful. Like a writer of utopias, these rules are fantasies of his mind, which perhaps if he saw in place, he would judge to be as cruel as they actually are. He's never lived such a life. Even at the barbarian monastery, when he's forced to live outside the monastery walls because his monks keep trying to kill him . . . even there he is surrounded by his students and followers who wait on him.
Abelard isn't cruel, just unable to understand what he's asking and unable to connect with the passion that still animates Heloise. They still share a love, though, including a love for philosophy, and Heloise's ideas about the centrality of intention over action in moral matters becomes a cornerstone of his thought. Heloise's philosophy comes out of her head but also her life, as she lives every day the conflict between outer repentance and inner rebellion. I love her refusal to renounce her sexuality, to renounce in general; it reminds me of Dylan Thomas: "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light." It may be in vain, but Heloise goes out swinging.
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