Heroes of History by Will Durant

Author:Will Durant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ABÉLARD AND HÉLOÏSE

Héloïse was an orphan girl of uncertain parentage, niece of Fulbert, a canon or clergyman on the staff of the cathedral of Paris (not yet the Notre Dame that was built a century later). He sent her to a nunnery famous for its school and library. When he learned that she could converse in Latin almost as readily as in French, and was studying Hebrew, he took pride in her and brought her to live in his quarters near the cathedral. To tutor her in philosophy and other advanced studies, he sought the idol and paragon of all the scholars of Paris.

Pierre Abélard had begun life in Brittany in or near 1079, as first son of a prosperous farmer. Brilliant at school, he was excited to hear of men called philosophers, who proposed to prove by reason alone the articles of their religious faith. Abandoning his rights of inheritance, he set out to study philosophy wherever he could find it.

His quest soon led him to Paris, and its cathedral school, where William of Champeaux (by Abélard’s account) was teaching realism—which then meant that universal or class names—such as “man,” “crowd,” “stone,” “woman,” “book”—had an objective existence and reality additional to the reality of any individual member of the class; so “man” was as real as “Socrates”; the crowd was as real as any individual in it, and had its own logic and character. No, said Abélard; nothing exists outside of our minds, except specific individual men, specific things; all general ideas are conceptions formed as tools of classification and thought.

Abélard organized his own school, first at Melun, then at Mon Geneviève, just outside Paris. There his eloquence and brilliance and joy in the intellect attracted more students than he could house. They called themselves moderni, and founded a schola moderna, or modern school. Abélard’s fame had spread through France when Fulbert invited him to tutor Héloïse.

The year was 1117; he was thirty-eight, she seventeen. He admits that his first feeling for her was physical attraction, but this was soon transformed by Héloïse’s delicacy into what he described as a “tenderness surpassing in sweetness the most fragrant balm.” She seems to have yielded to him with almost childish trust; soon she was pregnant.

He sent her to his sister’s home in Brittany, and calmed Fulbert by offering to marry her, on condition that the canon should keep the union secret. Héloïse long refused to marry him, for this would bar him from the priesthood unless she should give up her husband and her child and enter a nunnery. If we may believe Abélard’s autobiographical Historia Calamitatum, she told him that “it would be far sweeter for her to be called ‘my mistress’ than be known as ‘my wife’; nay, this would be more honorable for me as well.”

She finally consented, and she, Abélard, and Fulbert agreed to keep the marriage secret. Soon Fulbert, to quiet scandal, revealed the legal union. Héloïse denied it; Fulbert beat her; Abélard sent her to a nunnery, bidding her accept the garb, but not the vows, of a nun.

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