Heloise and Abelard became passionate lovers, and although Abelard had previously been dedicated to philosophy, intellectual pursuits became tedious, and in his infatuation with Heloise he composed love songs that celebrated his passion for her. None of these love songs survive, although some historians believe that some of the songs written by Abelard—and perhaps Heloise as well—are preserved in the Carmina Burana, a collection of poems and dramatic texts from the early thirteenth century. Many of these love songs circulated, and Heloise recalls later that the compositions were “on the lips of everyone” because of their sweetness and melody, which was hardly conducive to keeping their affair a secret. Recklessly driven by what he later describes as lustful desire rather than selfless devotion, Abelard neglected his students, and soon their clandestine affair was widely known. As a result, Fulbert learned of their affair and had them separated. Nevertheless, the lovers thwarted his efforts to keep them apart and they continued to meet in secret. When Heloise became pregnant, Abelard brought her to his family in Le Pallet disguised as a nun, and there she bore a son, whom she named Astralabe, after the scientific instrument the astrolabe.
Astrolabe: What's in a Name?
In about 1118, Heloise gave birth to a son, whom she named Astralabe; Abelard writes that Heloise selected the name. The astrolabe was an instrument used to locate and predict the positions and risings of the sun, moon, planets, and stars and to tell time. Astrolabes were known in ancient times, and they were introduced into Western Europe from Islamic Spain during the eleventh century. The device consists of a metal disk (called a mater) that holds one or more smaller plates (called climates) that are of latitude-specific design. The plate is engraved with a stereographic depiction of circles marking the azimuth and altitude and the celestial sphere above the local horizon. The rim of the largest disk is usually engraved with the hours of the day and degrees of arc. Above the disks is a rotating framework with the projection of the ecliptic plane and several bright stars (called a rete). As the rete is rotated, the stars and ecliptic move across the projection of the coordinates over the climate. In other words, the astrolabe is a flat representation of the celestial sphere that imitates the motion of the heavenly bodies as seen from a representation of a particular horizon and horizon coordinates. To name a child after this instrument was unusual at a time when children typically were named after saints. Some historians have suggested that the name was intended to reflect the desire on the part of the boy's parents to understand the universe, to evoke the lovers who called each other the sun and the moon, or simply to draw attention to their nonconformity. Unless heretofore-unknown evidence emerges, we will never know what was intended by the choice of this unconventional name.
As for the course of Astralabe's life, a bit more is known. A Latin poem offering advice to Astralabe is attributed to Abelard. When Heloise returned to Paris from Le Pallet, she left the child with Abelard's sister, who likely raised him. In 1144, as the abbess of the Paraclete, Heloise wrote to Peter the Venerable asking him to find Astralabe a prebend, which was a stipend or portion of the revenues from a cathedral allocated to a canon for his support. Because of the unusual name, there are few Astralabes in surviving twelfth-century documents, and therefore, when the name appears, it stands out. An Astralabe appears as a canon at Nantes Cathedral in 1150 and as an abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Hauterive in the modern Swiss canton of Fribourg from 1162 to 1165. The death of a "Peter Astralabe, son of our master Peter" is inscribed in the necrology of the Paraclete.
Abelard tried to defuse Fulbert’s anger over the affair by apologizing and claiming that he was powerless before the supremacy of love. These must have seemed like lame excuses, since Abelard himself acknowledges that he had planned to reside in Fulbert’s house for the very purpose of seduction. To further reduce Fulbert’s anger, Abelard offered to marry Heloise, but he proposed a secret marriage, in order to not jeopardize his present and future career prospects. Abelard writes in his Historia calamitatum and Heloise confirms in her own correspondence with Abelard many years later that she was strongly opposed to the idea of marriage. She cogently argued against the marriage, demonstrating sophisticated analysis and argumentation— enhanced, no doubt, by the study of logic and philosophy with her tutor. She asserted—rightly, as it turned out—that Fulbert’s anger would not be appeased by a marriage, and therefore, the union would hinder Abelard’s stellar career trajectory and not pacify her uncle. As a master of the school of Notre Dame, Abelard was a cathedral canon, and while canon law did not explicitly prohibit marriage, for a master to marry would have been quite unusual and an insurmountable obstacle to higher church office. Furthermore, Heloise drew on her extensive knowledge of classical literature—from authors like Pythagoras, Socrates, and Seneca—to support her opinion that married life, with its attendant domestic obligations of parenting, cleaning, and drudgery, was not compatible with the elevated life of a philosopher and a scholar. To tarnish the bright star of Abelard with the dirt of a common life, she wrote, would be obscene, and she implored him to live as the ancient philosophers did: in purity of intellectual pursuit, as a cleric and a canon. Furthermore, in a well-known passage from a letter she wrote to Abelard after his castration, she declares that even if the Roman emperor Augustus (63 B. C.E.-14 c. E.) proposed to marry her, she still would prefer to be Abelard’s whore, because wedlock represents chains, and love should be freely given and received, based only on the lovers’ devotion. In other words, her love for Abelard was based on love only, and the legality of marriage could add nothing to the strength of her feeling.
World History
