Reason and the passions in Heloise and Abelard
In the lovers' letters, we see hormonal imperatives clashing with moral imperatives—and find ourselves realising that we should sometimes accord more weight and authority to the former.
There’s a weirdly persistent modern myth about castration, that is repeated in the In Our Time episode on Abelard and Heloise:
A. C. GRAYLING: I’ve always been very surprised that the castration took the form of removal of Abelard’s testicles, because when that happens in adult life, it doesn’t remove sexual potency—so he could continue to have sexual relations with Heloise, had the opportunity provided itself. So it seems rather odd.
MICHAEL CLANCHY: […] I think that was probably the case, and it was only psychologically, Abelard felt […] that he cannot have sexual relations with Heloise. [Around 14:25–15:00, emphasis in original.]
I have no idea where this idea came from,1 but I’ve heard it a lot, and in other contexts. (I assume it is a modern myth because the effects of castration have been well-understood since antiquity.) To be sure, castration doesn’t undo changes that have already occurred, it doesn’t cause chest hair to fall out or dropped voices to raise back up again. But it is not controversial that it has significant and persistent effects on (especially) libido and erectile function, through well-understood hormonal pathways. Testicular cancer patients who undergo ‘bilateral orchiectomy’ (the polite medical euphemism) absolutely experience these long-term changes, as anyone who’s seen Fight Club could tell you.
So while we can’t assert for certain that Abelard never had another erection across his whole life, he certainly would have had a much reduced sex drive and significant erectile dysfunction even if he’d not experienced any psychological effects. Of course, Clanchy is right that the psychological side will also have had a big impact on Abelard: both modern medical knowledge (about the significance of psychological causes of erectile dysfunction) and Abelard’s own testimony (that the shame and humiliation of castration caused him even more suffering than the physical pain) concur on this. But before we get to this kind of psychological analysis, we have to begin with the brute biological fact that Abelard’s castration affected his hormones.
I have been thinking about this a lot as I’ve read, for the first time, the letters between Abelard and Heloise, written ten to fifteen years after he was castrated and became a monk, and she was (at the same time) forced to become a nun. The castration did not just remove a part of Abelard’s body, it also—as he himself acknowledged—altered his emotions and ‘passions’, at the level of biology. The relationship between philosophical reasoning on the page, and the ‘passions’ that drove the lovers off the page, is one of the most fascinating—and terrifying—aspects of the story.
Heloise was certainly concerned with Abelard’s passions: in the stormy first letter she wrote to Abelard, she accuses him of having felt the wrong kind of feelings towards her during their relationship.
I will tell you what I think and indeed everyone suspects. It was desire, not affection which bound you to me, the flame of lust rather than love. So when the end came to what you desired, any show of feeling you used to make went with it. [Heloise, letter 2.]2
Heloise is here relying on a Christian opposition between ‘love’, which is virtuous because it is supposedly pure, and carnal ‘lust’. Love is associated with marriage, but this includes not only ordinary marriages but also (and indeed, in the medieval imagination, more centrally) the sexless marriage at the heart of the Holy Family and the mystical marriage between a chaste nun and Christ himself. (Abelard really focusses a lot on the the latter example in letter 5.)
But it’s important to recognise that this distinction doesn’t fit Heloise’s own situation at all. Her own love for Abelard was also intimately connected with sex: she writes that she would rather be Abelard’s pagan ‘lover’ or even his ‘whore’ than to be called his wife;3 at the high-point of their relationship, they could not keep themselves from ‘shameful behaviour’ even in the refectory of a convent; and she confesses that even a decade on, her thoughts are still interrupted even during Sunday mass by sexual fantasies about Abelard. Her frank and bold expression of sexual desire is the most compelling part of their whole correspondence, and it does not detract from but rather adds to the sense of her genuine and human love.
To be sure, we today still make a distinction between love and mere lust. And it is possible that Abelard had been opportunistic and lustful, taking advantage of his fame and his power over Heloise, only interested in sex and status: certainly, this interpretation is compatible with the textual evidence,4 and it’s also compatible with the knowledge of student-teacher relationships that we readers have from our own time.5
But I think there’s another hypothesis. Abelard perhaps really did love Heloise, just as she loved him. This would have been a deeply erotically charged love, the kind of love we see on full display in her letters: sexual and emotional and personal, not courtly or agapeic. This is also compatible, perhaps more compatible, with the textual evidence: for example, while in more self-consciously confessional passages Abelard also protests before God that he had been led by sinful lust, in a less guarded moment in letter 5 he describes Heloise as ‘you whom I loved beyond measure’. And this hypothesis is also compatible with what we today, free from intentionally-repressive Christian assumptions, understand about the relationship between love and sex.
We know today that the difference between love and lust is not, as Heloise thinks, that love can subsist in the absence of sex. All of us know of genuine loving relationships that have failed when the sexual element broke down, and we don’t write these off as ‘mere lust’ in hindsight. Heloise was right to be concerned with the nature of Abelard’s desire for her, to hope that he had felt love and not mere lust; but the way she understood the distinction between these two ideas undermined her ability to think clearly about her situation.6 She was hemmed in by the medieval worldview and way of thinking; the implicit logic of her moral concepts failed to reflect the realities of her feelings.
Medievalists and Catholic apologists alike both have a real interest in trying to convey how radically ‘other’ the world of the middle ages was, often to try to romanticise it in contrast with the ‘baffling and utterly alien’ elements of our modern worldview. But even if the categories that structured the medieval world were radically ‘other’ (and I can probably agree that they were), the people who lived in that world were still human beings. Considerations of cultural plasticity can only get you so far away from the basic fact that human beings have basic drives and needs, and different social structures can be more or less suited to those drives and needs. And—after food, water, and sleep—sex and love are perhaps the most basic.
This is, I think, the right way to think about Abelard and Heloise. Their story shows us that the concepts the Christian middle ages had for thinking about sex, love, and relation between men and women—and the social structures that arose out of these medieval ways of thinking—were constrictive and destructive, and in their case led to tragedy.
The response to their relationship was indeed absolutely in line with the medieval worldview. As Michael Clanchy has persuasively argued, Abelard’s castration was a quasi-legal punishment: Heloise’s uncle Fulbert went about it in a procedurally improper way, but it was well within the confines of acceptable punishment for the ‘dishonour’ Abelard had wrought. Indeed, not only would castration have been considered acceptable, but (if anything) Fulbert might have been seen as positively merciful for letting Abelard live. In turn, after the castration Heloise (who had no interest in the life of a nun) was forced into the cloisters, this being the only life deemed suitable for a woman ‘like her’. Even a decade into her life in the convent, she was still stewing over it with unresolved resentment and shame—resentment and shame that were mixed with profound, unfulfilled sexual desire.
It might be thought rather chauvinistic, a form of cultural imperialism or just a lack of good historical sense, for a modern Westerner to assert that the medieval worldview was somehow inherently constricting, that the demands it placed on Abelard and Heloise were incompatible with their deeply human need for sexual love. But this is not my assertion, but Heloise’s: this is exactly the type of claim she made to Abelard when (hoping to keep some sort of relationship with Heloise after they were found out by Fulbert) he asked her to marry him.
[C]onsider, she said, the true conditions for a dignified way of life. What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles, book and tablets and distaffs, pen or stylus and spindles? Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying, nurses soothing them with lullabies, and all the noisy coming and going of men and women about the house? […]
Heloise went on to the risks I should run in bringing her back, and argued that the name of lover instead of wife would be dearer to her and more honourable for me—only love freely given should keep me for her, not the constriction of a marriage tie. [Abelard, Historia calamitatum, emphasis mine.]7
She had no interest in playing the role of a medieval Christian wife. We might think Heloise was grasping towards our modern idea of ‘partner’: this was what she required to fulfil her personal and social needs. But the world she lived in meant she could not reach this idea—not just that as a matter of fact she would never come across the idea, but that there was no place in the social world she lived in for such a role. Medieval society could not let her live such a life, nor could it let Abelard ‘freely give’ his love to her.
These points are made repeatedly by Abelard in his letters to Heloise. After Abelard’s castration, the only option left for Heloise was to be a nun. And so Abelard tells her to embrace the role, reconceptualise her situation as a privileged one: she is a bride of Christ, honoured by her spiritual prosperity. And, over the course of their subsequent letters, this is essentially what Heloise seems to do: we may doubt whether she managed to escape from her passions and ‘authentically’ embrace her religious role, but she successfully represses them in her writings, and the letters turn into a discourse on the right way to live as a nun.
In many ways, this was the best reasoned response that Abelard could have given to Heloise’s impassioned letters. Neither Abelard nor Heloise had any other categories with which to articulate, reason about, or make sense of their situation: their reason had no alternative to medieval Christian worldview. But we might feel—I certainly feel—that Heloise deserved better than a reasoned response. Heloise’s letters to Abelard certainly transcended the constraints that his responses are subject to. She didn’t achieve this by somehow transcending the whole medieval conceptual scheme: reasoning can only ever proceed with use of concepts, and the only concepts Heloise could use were those of her medieval Christian society.8
Rather, it was the effect of her ‘passions’ (as they would have said), as opposed to her reason, that mattered. She retained the basic, biological, hormonal impulse and the fire of love to redirect her reason. Even though she was stuck with categories of thought that were inadequate to her situation, she was able to reject the implicit logic of these categories: we find her crying out in impious frustration at God and declaring ‘better a whore than a wife’. Like Huck Finn, the ethical concepts and principles that Heloise had been taught came into conflict with her deeply-felt emotional responses, and we cannot but prefer the latter: we celebrate when we see her passions getting the upper hand over her reason.
Heloise’s deep need was to receive assurance and sympathy from Abelard, to hear from someone who shared her experiences. But Abelard could not fulfil this demand. His letters are notably at a lower emotional pitch than Heloise’s, and don’t respond to her impassioned cry with the empathy we would expect from a relationship partner. This is sometimes taken as evidence that he did not love Heloise in the first place; but I want to suggest an alternate suggestion. Abelard responded as he did because he had been physically stripped of his passions: his sexual desire was massively suppressed, the hormones that had previously driven his love were reduced. He was left only with his reason, and had no alternative but to reason from the concepts and categories he has.
And so, we find Abelard telling Heloise in letter 3 that he felt that he didn’t need to write to her because of her ‘good sense’—he only intended to write to provide practical guidance, and had no interest in writing to Heloise for its own sake or because he sought her (as Heloise sought him: ‘I wanted simply you’). And in letter 5, he urges her to understand the life she hates as the result of divine justice: God has made Heloise live as a nun, a life she does not want to live, as a suitable punishment for a time that she ‘mocked’ the vocation by wearing a nun’s habit as disguise. (This is a perfect encapsulation of Christian ethics: simultaneously incredibly bizarre and impossibly harsh.)
And unlike Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Abelard does not contrast this sort of strict justice with mercy. Rather, he says that such divine acts of justice are, at the same time, acts of mercy: God was merciful in allowing Abelard’s castration, or in having Heloise become a nun, because in doing so he kept them from sin, and was therefore (in a horrible sense) doing them a good turn. Abelard asks Heloise to not merely feel that what happened was fair, or even just fair enough, but to actively be grateful for it. As Bernard Williams describes, this type of Christian ethic—which was absolutely at the centre of the medieval worldview—‘takes the archaic idea that expressions of enmity are legitimated in the name of justice, and the Socratic idea that in applying justice to someone I must be benefiting him, and combines the two in a way that achieves, with an awesome dialectical horribleness, the worst of all worlds.’
All of these judgments were the product of the greatest thinker then alive reasoning about ethics as best as he could; and yet they disgust us. What humanity we see in the letters is not present in Abelard’s or Heloise’s theological philosophy, but in their sexuality and love. And it is precisely this humanity that was squeezed and constricted by religious reason. Heloise’s letters feel human, real, powerful. Abelard’s feel flat and indeed somewhat scary, as he asks Heloise to (as we would see it) give up her humanity—as has seemingly already happened to him. We see his humanity only in the pair’s reminiscences of what he used to be like. The primary tragedy of his castration took place at the time, both in its physical effects and its wider consequences for his and Heloise’s lives. But the secondary tragedy came over ten years later, when Heloise wrote in desperate need of sympathy—and Abelard could not provide it. All he could provide was reason, the reason of the medieval worldview that caused their tragedy in the first place.
You might at least hold out a minimum of hope that, even if it was not good (in a grand sense), or even good for Heloise, that Abelard’s love was suppressed, it might have made it easier for Abelard to live his life in medieval France under the power of the medieval worldview. This view, unfortunately, does not survive contact with Abelard’s own feelings, which you couldn’t call ‘suicidal’ but are certainly tending in that direction:
Indeed, had you any hope of divine mercy being shown me, you would be all the more anxious for me to be freed from the troubles of this life as you see them to be intolerable […]
Every unhappy life is happy in its ending, and those who feel true sympathy and pain for the anxieties want to see these ended, even to their own loss, if they really love those they see suffer […]
[…] I cannot see why you should prefer me to live on in great misery rather than be happier in death. [Abelard, letter 5.]
Even given the normal rules against diagnosing at a distance, and the literary conventions surrounding this type of writing, I feel relatively confident that we can use the word ‘depression’ to describe Abelard’s state of mind—the casual everyday meaning of the word, if not the clinical meaning. And while we obviously cannot be sure that this depression was specifically caused by his castration,9 again there’s good modern evidence that ‘orchiectomy’ brings with it significant risks of depressive symptoms—again, as anyone who’s seen Fight Club could tell you.
And (again) I don’t need to assume the privileged position of an Enlightened Modern: Abelard himself draws the connection. More than just highlighting his humiliation and shame after castration, when Abelard describes what we would call his psychological suffering, he links it with the castration as a single unified act of God’s justice: a single instance of suffering (the castration itself) would not on its own have been sufficient punishment for his sins. Or so Abelard argues.
This shouldn’t be surprising: there’s no reason to expect that there would be a free-lunch way to ‘escape’ the basic human drives towards sex and love. But it introduces an uncomfortable element of inevitability into the story. Heloise was forced to endue the suffering of feeling passions and desires that the ethical world of the middle ages could not permit; while Abelard, who was stripped of those passions and desires, found himself enduring suffering of his own. Neither was in a position to escape their suffering, when the whole social and ideological order of their society was arranged against them; and indeed, first Abelard and then (tragically) Heloise found themselves justifying and rationalising their own suffering.
This is a surprisingly Enlightenment or Victorian reading of the letters (the barbaric middle ages repressing individuality and authentic love), even if I think it is basically right. So as a penance, let me add a second takeaway that the Victorians may not have been comfortable with.
What makes Heloise’s letters so much more powerful than Abelard’s, I have suggested above, is that she was able—at least initially—to reject the implicit logic of the categories that both of them were forced to reason in terms of: she was forced by her education and socialisation to choose between obedient wife and whore, ‘partner’ was not a realistic alternative; but her desire was powerful enough to break through expectations and invert the expected ordering of these categories. And I have suggested that what allowed her to do this, while Abelard could not, was the continuing presence of sexual desire, driven fundamentally by biology—by hormones.
Usually the word ‘hormonal’, when describing people’s reasoning and actions, has a negative connotation: ‘the man who thinks with his penis’ is not a respected category. I think this is usually right. But that is because our society is (in relevant respects)10 basically humane, basically tolerant, and basically adept at allowing people to meet their most basic needs, and this is reflected in the ideas that are available to our reasoning and the logic of those ideas; as such, when someone turns away from that logic in the name of sexual desire, it is usually not a good idea. But in Heloise and Abelard’s society, none of these things were true. The castrated Abelard was Platonically ruled by his reason; the resentful Heloise was ruled by her passions. And we prefer the Humean example: it is sometimes better—more human, more authentic, and not more painful—for moral reasoning to be enslaved by hormonal impulses.
My best guess is: farmers don’t really practice adult castration on their animals any more, because it’s unreliable and unhelpful to their purposes compared to infant castration; this slightly nuanced set of facts has been replaced in farming lore with the simplified ‘castrated adults can still have sex’; and since we don’t castrate many humans any more (yay!), people are inclined to trust farming lore? I have not asked any farmers about this, this is only a guess.
All citations are to the Radice translation, as revised by Clanchy.
Quick note on translation. The passage in question is given in my English copy as follows: ‘The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.’ [Heloise, letter 2, trans. Radice as revised by Clanchy.] The Latin word here rendered ‘friend’ is ‘amica’, the feminine equivalent of ‘amicus’, which—to be sure—usually meant friend (it’s where we get Spanish ‘amigo’). But ‘amica’ and ‘amicus‘ literally mean ‘one who loves’ or ‘one who is loved’. Latin writers were happier than we are to speak of the ‘love’ that exists between friends, which is where the usual friendly connotations of the words came from; but given what we know about the nature of Heloise’s love for Abelard (which was anything but platonic and friendly) and the fact that she places ‘amica’ beside ‘concubine’ and ‘whore’, the traditional translation of ‘friend’ is completely contextually wrong. ‘Lover’ can be misleading in contexts where Latin writers meant only to refer to the love between friends, but it is absolutely correct here. Importantly, Heloise’s letter 2 isn’t the only Latin text where translating ‘amica’ as ‘friend’ is wrong, this isn’t special pleading: look at Catullus 72 or (plausibly) Ovid, Amores, 1.6 line 45. (Heloise knew her Ovid very well.) Radice’s original translation was better, rendering ‘amica’ as ‘mistress’; it was Clanchy whose revisions introduced ‘friend’.
Especially his self-presentation in the Historia calamitatum, but also the troubling passages of his letters where Abelard writes that, at times, he forced himself on Heloise. I think that, even given Heloise’s lack of acknowledgment of these passages and her continuing love for Abelard, we should not necessarily write these off as confessional, self-flagellating exaggeration on Abelard’s part (although he is absolutely guilty of such exaggeration in the Historia): there could be truth to them. The relationship between love and (what we would call) consent is complicated and unsettling throughout history, as indeed as it is complicated and unsettling in many abusive relationships today.
For reasons that will be set out below, I don’t think it is necessarily anachronistic to use our modern understandings to interpret this case, though we have to be careful.
Rawls would say that Heloise had the right concepts (‘love’ and ‘lust’) but not the right conceptions of these concepts.
I have silently changed ‘friend’ to ‘lover’—see note 3.
Indeed, when applying herself philosophically, she finds herself having to agree with Abelard’s perverse judgment that the castration was a blessing, that it ‘freed’ him from temptation.
There were many calamities in Abelard’s life (hence the traditional title of his Historia calamitatum!), though it’s not a stretch to imagine that castration and de facto restriction to a monastery may have been the worst.
Though certainly not in all respects.