Philosophical Themes in the Epistolae Duorum Amantium: The First Letters of Heloise and Abelard

Abstract

The exchange of letters between Heloise and Abelard has long fascinated readers as one of the great accounts of a love affair in medieval literature. Yet the question has often been asked whether a woman in religious life could really have written such an open letter to the man who was once her teacher at Notre-Dame.2 None of the songs that Heloise says Abelard wrote in her honor have ever been conclusively identified (although educated guesses have been made about at least one poem in the Carmina burana).3 Even less critical attention has been given to those “incessant letters” that she recalls at the end of her initial response to reading the Historia calamitatum. She was appalled that Abelard should have neglected her so brutally after entering the religious life while at the same time sharing the story of his life so openly with a unnamed friend, identified simply as “beloved brother in Christ, dearest companion from the religious life.”4 Abelard talks about Heloise as once the focus of his debauchery in the past and now his revered sister at the Paraclete but never addresses her in person (unless the amicus is a fiction by which he seeks to speak to her indirectly). He structures his narrative around contrast between worldly amor and the true consolation offered “to those who love God” (Romans 8.28: dikentibus Deum) by the Holy Spirit. Heloise asks Abelard to resume an epistolary dialogue with her in which he offers as much consolatio to her as to his male friend. Her famous three letters to Abelard make sense only in relation to this earlier exchange of letters, to which she attaches great importance even though Abelard dismisses them as no longer relevant.