Lust, revenge and the religious right in 12th century Paris

Abelard and Heloise's affair lasted only about 18 months, but it changed their lives. Around 1115, Peter Abelard, already a famous philosopher, set his sights on Heloise, the niece of a local Parisian canon named Fulbert. Before long, she became Abelard's pupil, and then his mistress. When Fulbert found out, he cast out Abelard (who was lodging in Fulbert's house) and, when Heloise became pregnant, forced them to get married. They did so in secret, but Fulbert, still enraged at the loss of his family honor, sent his henchmen to Abelard's house one night, where they castrated him. The brutal act drove Abelard to become a monk and Heloise a nun. Some 12 years after their separation, Abelard wrote the story in a letter to a friend, and somehow Heloise obtained a copy of it. She wrote Abelard, and so began the correspondence that made them famous.

The wherefores of all the goings-on were driven by the politics of the age. Abelard and Heloise's affair took place between the first two crusades, when monasticism was on the rise, and when the reform movement was beginning to take over the monasteries and vilify philosophers. Previously, minor clergy -- including teachers like Abelard attached to a church -- could marry or have concubines; now they were subject to the same laws of chastity as monks. That's why Abelard's relationship with Heloise was a clandestine affair, and why their marriage had to remain secret. But the secrecy of the marriage couldn't restore Fulbert's public honor -- which he had lost when his niece bore a bastard child -- and his rage at Abelard couldn't be assuaged until he took personal vengeance.

Heloise and Abelard were something of a countercultural pair. They named their son Astralabe, after an astronomy instrument -- a bizarre choice in an age when most children were expected to be given Christian names. They had lots of premarital sex, and they wrote about it freely in their early letters. At least once they made love in the refectory of a church. Most dangerously, they applied reason to their lives and their faith, and that made them renegades in the eyes of the ruling reformists.

The basis of Abelard's philosophy, which he taught to Heloise, was that logic had to be applied to religion in order to arrive at the truth. (In fact, he coined the term "theology" -- "God logic.") He believed that one had to be judged by intentions rather than deeds, so knowledge and introspection were everything. It was sinful, in Abelard's view, to recite a prayer that one didn't understand; on the other hand, the Jews that crucified Jesus were sinless, because their intentions were pure. Naturally, such views got him into a lot of trouble. After his castration, Abelard faced two heresy trials, at both of which he was condemned.

Burge deftly analyzes the two trials, which were built on fear and anti-intellectualism similar to what we face today, and casts them as absurdist plays that would be funny if the future of Christian morality had not hung in the balance. In the first, Abelard stood accused of claiming that there was more than one god, because he had written a book that applied logic to the Trinity. His accuser could find nothing in the work that suggested heresy, except for a single sentence that wasn't Abelard's writing but a quote from St. Augustine. Still, Abelard was condemned and ordered to burn his book.

In his second trial, Abelard faced his archenemy, Bernard of Clairvaux, the head of the Cistercians. They were a reformist monastic order that would become the most influential in Christendom, and Bernard was the George W. Bush of their movement. He "was accustomed to having people listen to him and then eventually agree," Burge writes. Bernard was deeply anti-intellectual, casting Abelard as elitist, overeducated and anti-religious. He charged that in Abelard's theology "the faith of simple folk is laughed at, the mysteries of God forced open, the deepest things bandied about in discussion without any reverence." In another letter, Bernard used the logic of preemptive war to persuade the pope to condemn Abelard and his friends: "They have each drawn their bows and filled their quivers with arrows; now they lie in ambush ready to fire at unsuspecting hearts." Bernard would eventually persuade Europe to launch the second crusade -- a military expedition in the Middle East, built on an abstract moral idea, that would result in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims. Sound familiar?

As Burge writes, the conflict between Abelard and Bernard wasn't one of religious versus secular life, it was "faith with reason versus faith without reason," and faith without reason won in the end. Because Bernard insisted that logic couldn't be applied to religious matters, Abelard was fundamentally unable to argue against him. At the trial itself, Abelard faced a council of bishops who, Burge writes, "were not interested in theology ... They would seize on whatever idea was easiest to grasp." Abelard was condemned, and before he could appeal to the pope, he died.

Next Page: Instead of "wife," Heloise writes, "sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or ... that of concubine or whore"

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