Reading Saving Paradise: Heloise

Heloise with Abelard

Heloise (1101-1162) was among the great abbesses of the 12th century.  Her letters place her among the most rhetorically brilliant and compelling ancient writers on love.  Her model of human love resisted violence, false piety, and the romance of suffering.

A gifted student, she grew up under the care of her uncle,  who – noting her intelligence – arranged for Abelard to become her private tutor.  The young Heloise and Abelard, twenty years older, became lovers.  They kept their affair secret; Heloise regarded voluntary love as a stronger bond than marriage (which was a civil contract, not a sacrament, at the time.)   

Unfortunately, Heloise became pregnant.  Abelard sent her to his parents’ estate and arranged for their son to be raised there.  Everything started to unravel when Heloise’s uncle discovered the affair.  To appease him, Abelard proposed a secret marriage, to protect his career.  Heloise refused.  When Abelard persisted, she finally agreed – but then her uncle demanded that the marriage be public to protect her reputation.  When she refused, Fulbert punished her severely, and Abelard sent her to a convent for safety.  This made Fulbert even angrier – and he sent two men to castrate Abelard. 

After recovering, Abelard entered monastic life.  Heloise remained at the convent and became its prioress.  Eventually she moved her nuns and became head of the Paraclete community – which Abelard left to her when he moved away.  Unlike Abelard, Heloise was a successful administrator, and the Paraclete grew to have five subsidiary communities. 

Heloise never spoke of her relationship with Abelard as a source of shame, guilt, or dishonor.  She had entered religious life, she insisted, because Abelard asked her to, not out of any particular love for God.   

Abelard presented himself and Heloise as embodying an ideal of selfless love in their post-trauma relationship.  Heloise countered that he took her love for granted, but she did not understand love as selfless.  Instead, she loved both boldly and with expectations of reciprocity.  For her, love had a right to make demands; it was grounded in integrity, connection, and care.   

But Abelard idealized a love that was not bound by obligations, fears of punishment, or hopes of reward.  For him, love was internalized as a condition of the heart – not a web of obligations and relationships. 

In her fiery letter responding to Abelard’s autobiography, Heloise said she was moved to tears by his sufferings, but his focus on his own troubles limited his ability to meet the obligations of love – not only to her, but to her community.  She said that because he was not open to receiving love from others, he did not love enough.  He had neglected to call on others to help him bear his burdens.  She understood compassion as something more than full identification with another’s pain and sorrow.  Compassion was more than subjective feeling, weakness and devotion; true love required action.

In contrast to Abelard, Heloise did not valorize weakness as the perfection of love.  She believed goodness had power: moral agency based on empathy was grounded in resistance to violence, the alleviation of pain, acts of healing, and compassion.  Her form of compassion combined empathy for another’s pain with sufficient self-possession to be able to offer help.  Hers was a world glimpsed in community and companionship.  Her love was not afraid to make demands – it expected accountability and responsibility, and understood that the best love was mutual.  In her understanding and in her experience, love was a great power. 

Understanding love

The ideas of Abelard, Heloise, Bernard and Hildegard would shape the modern world’s understanding of love.   

Bernard’s faith – loving and yearning, pastoral and kind – also had a dimension of hatred for the ‘other’ that sanctified killing for God as a form of love, and exalted self-abasement as true love.   

Hildegard’s viriditas, the greening of the soul, was the manifestation of Christ’s incarnation that could be glimpsed in cloistered life, but would only be fulfilled at the future end of time.   

Abelard’s logic was the foundation of scholasticism, education independent of the church; at the same time, his ideal of self-sacrificing love as the highest ideal for Christians encouraged victims to acquiesce to violence in passive, forgiving love.  

 Heloise’s love was grounded in honesty, mutual care, obligation, and responsible uses of power.  She stood in a long line of Christian dissenters who rejected the worship of violence, the demonizing of sexuality, and the valorization of suffering. 

Brock and Parker conclude, 

While Heloise held out for love that was active, earthly, and mutual, Christianity moved increasingly toward love that was submissive, brokenhearted, and always longing for final fulfillment. 

The church in western Europe had once been in love with the risen Christ, who joined his bride in the earthly garden of delight and helped her tend it.  Beginning in the 9th century, she began to doubt her lover and took a violent Lord into her bed, lay with him, blessed him, and finally, took him into the Christian family by marrying him.  Erotically enthralled by her seductive abuser, the church spawned devotional pieties of fear, sorrow, torture, and death, whose progeny journeyed into the world determined to destroy their own shadows and neighbors.  She told herself that conquest, genocide, and the colonization of Jerusalem were God’s will, a holy pilgrimage that would someday, if she sacrificed and suffered enough, deliver salvation, end the violence, and restore her to her first love. 

This delusional pattern would later carry conquistadors and pilgrims to the Americas and leave Jerusalem as one of the most contested cities on the planet.  (see Saving Paradise, p 305-306)

What do you think of Brock and Parker's analysis?