Perhaps the most celebrated statement of Heloise is her rejection of the notion of marriage and external wealth, articulated in her initial response to Abelard’s Historia calamitatum. In a phrase that would be picked up by Jean de Meun in The Romance of the Rose, she says that she would rather have not married, and be called his prostitute (meretrix) than to obtain the wealth of the whole world as the empress (imperatrix) of Augustus (Letter 2, ed. Hicks, 49). Although this has often been read in a romantic sense as a declaration of her selfless love, Heloise’s argument here is part of a broader ethical reflection that true love is like true friendship in not being based on any external reward, but is pursued solely for the sake of the other person. Heloise takes the Ciceronian ideal that friendship should not be pursued for personal gain, but here transposes it to her own situation, that of her friendship with Abelard (Mews 2007). She does not accept Abelard’s presentation of their love (amor) in the past, as having been essentially lustful in character. After Abelard had responded with a letter urging her to turn her attention to Christ, away from the past, Heloise develops further arguments in her impassioned second letter about her failure to feel truly repentant about her past behavior, because she is certain about the fundamental rightness of her love for Abelard - even if she had committed sins in the eyes of the Church. These arguments challenge Abelard’s contrast between selfish lust and the love he thinks she should develop for Christ.
A similar emphasis on selfless love is evident in the young woman’s letters in the Epistolae duorum amantium, attributed to Heloise by Mews (1999) and Piron (2005), a view contested by Von Moos (2003) and Ziolkowski (2004). In letter 25, she responds to his attempt in letter 24 to answer her question about the nature of love, by adopting quite a different approach from her teacher. Whereas he had paraphrased Cicero’s notion that love creates a common mind to emphasize that love already existed between them, she argues that true love is more of an ideal that they strive to reach, but which must be distinguished from general precepts about loving one’s neighbor, and must involve the correct inner disposition. In letter 49, she engages on an extended reflection, linking amor to dilectio and amicitia as not concerned with external gain. This prompts her teacher to reflect in letter 50, that she was not so much inspired by Cicero, as giving him instruction - an accurate observation given that Cicero had only theorized friendship within an all-male context and had not related amicitia to the notion of dilectio. During their early relationship, Abelard may have admired such ideas in Heloise, but he was then more preoccupied intellectually by questions of logic than of ethics.
Heloise seems to have had more influence in shaping Abelard’s ethical ideas after resuming correspondence with him in the 1130s. Her emphasis, however, is always that outward behavior should reflect inner intention (Georgianna 1987). This underpins her critique of contemporary religious life. The 42 questions or Problemata that she puts to Abelard similarly show that she was also acutely aware of contradictions within the scriptural record, and shared Abelard’s concern to identify its underlying significance, beyond the variation evident in specific accounts within the Bible.
See also: > Bernard of Clairvaux > Peter Abelard
World History
