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Epistolae ad Petrum Abaelardum

(lit.: Letters to Peter Abelard)

An abbess writes to the husband who made her a nun, and refuses the praise for a holiness she says she does not have.

by Heloise69 passages held

  • Latin, the original language
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First published
(aged 32)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

A long letter that Peter Abelard had written to console an unnamed friend reached the abbey of the Paraclete, by chance, in the early 1130s. It told the story of his life: his fame as a teacher in Paris, his affair with his pupil Heloise, their marriage, and his castration. Heloise, by then abbess of the Paraclete, read it and wrote back. Her three letters argue that a love or a virtue is measured by what a person intends, and that what other people can see proves nothing. In the first she reminds Abelard that she had argued against marrying him, and says she would rather be called his whore than the wife of the emperor Augustus; a woman who marries a man for his wealth, she writes, is offering herself for sale. She took the veil at his command, she tells him, and expects no reward from God for it. The second letter turns on her own reputation. People praise her chastity and she calls herself a hypocrite, because chastity belongs to the mind, and her mind still returns to the pleasures they shared. In the third she obeys his order to stop writing about her grief and asks him for two things: an account of how the order of nuns began, and a rule written for women. The Rule of Benedict, which nuns professed exactly as monks did, was written for men, and she lists the parts of it a woman cannot keep. Abelard sent both. No copy of the letters survives from her lifetime. The oldest manuscripts date from the thirteenth century, and in that century the poet Jean de Meun translated the letters into French; Petrarch later owned a copy and wrote notes in its margins. The Latin was first printed in Paris in 1616. From the early nineteenth century some scholars doubted that Heloise had written her letters at all, and in 1972 the historian John Benton argued that the collection was a later forgery. He withdrew part of that case in 1980, and most scholars now accept the letters as hers.

Key concepts

Why does Heloise judge an act by its intention?

Because for her guilt and merit live in the mind. It is the disposition of the doer that makes the crime, she writes, never the outcome of the act, and justice weighs the spirit in which a thing is done. Outward works are common to the saved and the damned, and no one performs them as eagerly as hypocrites. Only God, who sees in secret, can therefore judge a heart.

What is disinterested love in the Letters to Abelard?

Love that wants the person and nothing the person has. She sought nothing in him but himself, Heloise writes: no marriage settlement, no dowry, his pleasure and his will and not her own. Its test is what it gives up, which is why she counts the humbler name as the better proof. Its opposite is wanting a husband's goods more than the man, which she says earns wages and not gratitude.

What does Heloise mean by hypocrisy?

A religious life that is correct on the outside and not meant within. She applies the word to herself: people judge her devout because her conduct offends no one, while she fears offending Abelard more than God. In her time, she says, no small part of religion is hypocrisy. She grants such conduct some worth, since it gives no scandal, but nothing done without love of God earns merit.

What is discretion, which Heloise calls the mother of all virtues?

The judgment that fits a demand to the person who has to bear it. Heloise uses the Latin discretio. A virtue pushed past its measure counts among the vices, she holds, and burdens must follow strength: no one asks of children or the old what they ask of grown men. Benedict, she notes, tuned his rule to persons and seasons, so that the strong have something to strive for and the weak do not run away.

What are 'indifferent things' in Heloise's letters?

Things that are in themselves neither good nor bad, such as what a person eats, drinks or wears. Heloise calls them the middle ground between good and evil and holds that they commend no one to God. From this she draws a practical rule: allow all of them where no scandal follows, forbid only sin, and provide what is cheapest and necessary. Her example is meat, which God nowhere condemned.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Love that asks no wages

What does a person owe someone who gave up everything at his word? Heloise measures love by what it wants for itself, and by that measure marriage comes off worse than its name.

She wanted him, she writes, and nothing that was his: no marriage bond, no dowry. The name of wife may be holier, but friend was always sweeter to her, or even concubine or whore. A woman who marries the richer man more gladly is for sale, and is owed wages, not thanks. From there she turns to his debt. He founded the Paraclete, wrote a long consolation to a friend and none to her, and she asks whether lust and not love bound him to her. When he speaks of his own death she forbids it: the mention alone is a kind of death to the nuns.

  • love
  • marriage
  • obligation
  • grief
  • consolation
  • death
  • suffering

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The hypocrite they call chaste

Can a life be holy if the heart behind it is not? Heloise refuses praise for a chastity that is only of the body, because justice weighs the spirit in which a thing is done.

Very guilty, she writes, she is also very innocent, for the crime lies in the disposition of the doer and never in how the act turns out. The same rule condemns her now. People call her chaste who have not caught the hypocrite. During Mass itself the pleasures she shared with him fill her mind, and she sighs over what she lost more than over what she did. Punishing the body is easy, tearing the mind from desire is not. She took the veil at his command and expects no reward from God for it. She asks for no crown of victory. Any corner of heaven will do.

  • intention
  • inner life
  • virtue
  • sin
  • desire
  • memory
  • temptation
  • moral responsibility
  • prayer
  • faith
  • religious devotion

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A rule written for men

Why should women vow to keep a rule that was written for men and that they cannot keep? Heloise asks for one that fits, and advises promising less so that more can be done.

Nuns profess the Rule of Benedict exactly as monks do, and she lists what does not fit: cowls and breeches, wool against the skin, the abbot reading the gospel and dining with guests, going out to bring in the harvest. No one loads an ass with an elephant's burden. Discretion, she argues, is the mother of all virtues, and Benedict himself bent his rule to the weak and to his times, as far as allowing wine. Food and drink are indifferent things, and only sin needs forbidding. It is enough if women equal devout laypeople and fulfil the gospel without trying to exceed it.

  • gender
  • monasticism
  • monastic life
  • religious rules
  • religious discipline
  • religious law
  • religious practice
  • temperance
  • food
  • vows
  • practical judgment
  • scripture

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Within this work

passages held
69
distinct concepts
147
by passages held, corpus-wide
#584

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “love” and “marriage”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 11 pairings. 56 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
lovemarriage4
marriagevirtue3
gendermonasticism2
genderreligious discipline2
lovevirtue2
gendergrief1
grieflove1
griefmarriage1
marriagescripture1
monasticismscripture1
religious disciplinescripture1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1132 Epistolae ad Petrum Abaelardum you are here LA
  2. 1135 Heloise's Questions (Problemata Heloissae cum solutionibus Abaelardi)

    Her later work, and the less read. Where the letters to Abelard speak for her alone, these questions come from the whole community of the Paraclete, and each stands with the answer he sent back.

     LA
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