Their devastating romance led to a life of cloistered estrangement, yet medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise proved that true love conquers all, says Luz Wollocombe

Abelard and Heloise used to be up there with Romeo and Juliet in the Greatest Lovers’ Hall of Fame. History, however, has seen them toppled off their pedestals and into obscurity. This is a shame because I think we’ve got a lot to learn from this steamy, philosophic couple, who continued to love each other after Abelard was castrated and they both took holy orders.

For the uninitiated, Peter Abelard was a philosopher and one of the most original thinkers of what is generally referred to as the 12th-Century Renaissance – a wave of interest in matters of philosophy that spread across Europe in the medieval period. Unusually for the time, Heloise’s uncle, Fulbert, decided that his bright niece be educated – and Abelard was the man for the job. Bravo, Fulbert. Heloise, who was either in her teens or early 20s, fell head over heels for her handsome teacher, and soon the classroom was being used to learn about a whole new meaning of life. One that was probably much more gripping than the dialectical materialism that Abelard usually went on about.

As lust turned to love, Abelard lost interest in teaching his other students, began composing songs with Heloise’s name in them and spent far too much time in her bedroom – where, eventually, Uncle Fulbert found them in the throes of passion. In a Game of Thrones-style act of brutality, fulminating Fulbert had Abelard castrated.

Duly chastened, Abelard took refuge as a monk, while gamely continuing to write his philosophy books. Meanwhile, a defiant Heloise became a nun and set about writing him reams of erotic letters. One can only wonder what Abelard felt when he received yet another steaming envelope from the convent. Heloise certainly didn’t hold back:

The pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet – they cannot displease me, and can scarcely shift from my memory. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep.

Great stuff. Inspiring too, especially in a world where so many dating rituals are coded: Don’t reply too fast; Don’t chase; Don’t ask first. Heloise certainly didn’t play to the rules of her time, which I can only imagine went something along of the lines of: Assume nonchalance and play damsel in distress at all times. Oh, how depressingly familiar they seem 1,000 years on.

There’s something to be drawn from her complete refusal to play it cool – indeed, at one point, she declares she would follow her lover into the flames of Hell. There is a kind of glory in her internal chaos, how she seems to almost revel in the complete havoc love has wreaked in her life. An abandonment of the senses that might not be so welcome now that our sleep, fitness, friendships and so much more are measured out by smartphone. Perhaps this inability to completely relinquish control is one reason for the well-documented phenomenon of “relationship recession” – the recent sharp decline in marriage, cohabitation, dating, and sexual activity. Finding love requires “falling”– and when everything in our life is so organised, there’s little room for the surrender. Heloise’s passionate and unashamed misery reminds us that, often, the glorious bits of life come when we think, “Oh God, they all think I’ve lost the plot anyway. I might as well go the whole way.”

Heloise flouts the image of a woman-in-control, a persona so many aspire to. She also sticks two fingers up to today’s notion that dating an older man is somehow wrong. Abelard and Heloise’s love story remind us that it’s perfectly normal, and likely, for a younger woman to fancy her teacher or boss – especially when the two spend time in close a proximity with each other. “I’ve grown accustomed to her face,” as Henry Higgins says of Eliza Doolittle – and of course, Audrey Hepburn’s characters prefers this funny, slightly grumpy older man to the hapless, though handsome, Freddy, who sings about lilac trees.

Heloise also preferred the older, wiser man with whom she spent every day. Her other options probably consisted of some more age-appropriate knights jaunting around with lances and barking at one another. The medieval equivalent to the 20-something public schoolboys from Marlborough or Radley, new to the City and braying it up at the Sloaney Pony – aka the White Horse pub in Parsons Green – of a Friday night. Abelard had already renounced his privileged position as the eldest son of a Duke to pursue the philosophical life: “I chose the conflict of disputation instead of the trophies of war,” he declared. A bit like an Etonian going boho today. I can see why Heloise fell for him.

No doubt Abelard was a much better lover than any lancing crusader. From reading his autobiography – the rather self-pityingly titled Historae calamitatum or “The Story of His Misfortunes” – the couple didn’t keep things vanilla in bed. “In handing her over to me to punish as well as to teach, what else was he [Fulbert] doing but giving me complete freedom of my desires,” he boasts, implying the pair had a hoot under the covers and didn’t shy away from the teacher/student dynamic. Had Heloise shacked up with one of the knights on their White Horses, she would probably have been forced to “lie back and think of Jerusalem” for now and evermore.

Heloise was also very much Abelard’s intellectual equal. Her letters imply she was just as well-read as him, if not better, and could speak Greek, where he could not. Their attraction was about so much more than lust and their philosophical musings add another compelling layer of complexity to this tale. Heloise was stringently against marriage, both because it would bring down Abelard’s reputation as a philosopher, but, more because it went against her belief of what love was all about. She believed in the concept of gratia – love freely given – and that legal bonds could add nothing to a relationship. “I prefer love to wedlock and freedom to chains,” she wrote – a concept historians reckon she picked up from Cicero’s De Amicitia. This proto-hippy mentality was beyond radical at the time, and I’m always inspired by her ability to form her own opinions and then live by them.

In her years as a nun, Heloise seems to have decided that sex was irrelevant – though, the pair had little choice, considering the nature of Abelard’s punishment – and that the basis of love is true friendship. While she admits to missing their lovemaking, she writes: “the name of friend [amica] instead of wife would be dearer to me and more honourable”. Eventually her letters settle into general chit-chat about life and, after graduating to abbess, how to run a convent. Passion dissolves, yet they endure, year after year, chatting about the best way to go about life and its problems. These grand lovers are left, like the rest of us, getting on with the life that didn’t quite pan out as expected, while doggedly keeping their love alive. This, rather their tumultuous affair, is what’s really admirable.

Admittedly, neither had to worry about the other “moving on”. I used to wonder whether Heloise’s lasting obsession was helped by the fact she wasn’t meeting any new men – how many of us would like to lock our exes up in a cloister forever? But, the evidence of their letters forces me to withdraw my cynicism. Their unending relationship is down, mostly, to persistence, effort and having a lot in common. Sounds like the recipe for a good marriage, and a far better message than that of Romeo and Juliet, whose story tells us love isn’t love if it doesn’t end in two dead bodies after a one-night-stand. We should instead turn to Abelard and Heloise’s stoicism in the face of disappointment – and how it paid off in the end. The pair were buried together and their tomb at Père Lachaise is one of the most visited in Paris.

This article is from Idler #109.

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