Love and Philosophy

What draws Abelard to Heloise is not only her beauty but her learning. In the Historia, he describes her as surpassing all other women in her knowledge of letters — she was, by his own account, the most intellectually gifted woman he had encountered. He arranges to become her tutor, and the tutoring quickly becomes something else. The erotic and the intellectual are intertwined from the beginning, and Abelard's account makes clear that what he fell in love with was a mind as much as a person.

Abelard's self-reproach in the Historia is extensive and specific. He admits that he exploited his position as tutor, that he was consumed by lust rather than genuine love, that he neglected his philosophical work, and that he brought disaster on Heloise through his own failure of self-governance. This is remarkable: a philosopher who applies to himself the same rigorous moral analysis he applies to abstract cases. The man who would write Scito te Ipsum — "Know Thyself" — demonstrates in the Historia what self-knowledge looks like when it is painful.

When Heloise became pregnant, the question of marriage arose. Abelard wanted to marry; Heloise famously resisted, arguing that a philosopher's life was incompatible with the obligations of marriage and family, that a philosopher's wife would always be a distraction from the life of the mind. Her arguments draw on Jerome, Cicero, and Theophrastus. The marriage happened in secret and solved nothing. Abelard's account of this debate is one of the most extraordinary passages in medieval literature: a woman arguing, against her own interests, that the philosophic vocation demands celibacy.

The letters between Abelard and Heloise — of which the Historia Calamitatum is the first — were widely read in the medieval period and became one of the founding documents of the literature of courtly love and spiritual friendship. Their authenticity has occasionally been questioned but is now generally accepted.