One must keep in mind that a knight’s lady was a complete stranger, a pretty face encountered on his travels. The Church didn’t allow marriages between even distant kin, so knights had to leave their homes and search for a mate. But it was also possible to be an unattached (or “free-lance”) knight, someone who owned no land and answered to no feudal lord. Such knights defined themselves through acts of valor, and prized a good reputation, that small theater district of self-regard. Their goal was to romance other men’s wives with a gusto and tenderness that contrasted sharply with the dreariness of a loveless marriage. Danger was a tonic.
Passionate devotion was possible because the lovers were abstract objects of desire, whose love was forbidden, a taboo and a novelty. Intimacy between lovers, a fairly recent idea, was not any part of the medieval mood, but it gradually arose from the pressure on lovers to be secretive. Wallowing in each other’s eyes, speaking through gestures, exchanging notes and signs, they learned to be a secret society complete with passwords and ceremonies and a holy crusade, a religion of two.
So many of our novels, poems, operas, and songs are about love that we take it for granted. What else, it’s assumed, should authors write about? But that fashion began in eleventh-century France. One day it is likely to change, as fashions do, into a mass obsession with something else. But, in the meantime, we still practice somewhat medieval codes of chivalry and etiquette—men opening doors for women, helping them on with coats, and so on—along with our understanding of love as a noble passion, and our taste for romance. No small change. As C. S. Lewis says so well,
French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution, the Renaissance is a mere ripple….
In the late twentieth century, while gangs riot in the ghettos, countries are craven for power, and sirens wail through the steep canyons of the inner cities and sprawling suburbs, we talk dreamily about courtly love. The twentieth-century Swiss thinker Denis de Rougemont railed against it and dismissed it out of hand as a plague, a bother, and a downright bad mistake. He despised the way it gave emotion mastery over reason. Sensible people longed for sound judgment, and romantic love left one feeling helplessly out of control. He asked: “Why does Western Man wish to suffer this passion which lacerates him and which all his common sense rejects?” He felt it made human relationships far too intense and unsettling, and he didn’t like the way suffering was openly sought and enjoyed, or how it ruined one’s chance for a happy marriage, which certainly couldn’t compete with the remembered succulence of love. More than that, it pandered to an instinct subterranean, dangerous, and unspoken—a yearning for death. People secretly felt this attraction but could not risk acknowledging the phenomenon. It was all so chaotic and plural out there, all such a battle to stay orderly. Struggling every second of one’s life against odds that would defeat one in the end, in fatigue heavy as a glacier, one secretly longed for annihilation. No one said so, but all this organized suffering and torment, wishing to die or be struck blind by the mere sight of the beloved—it felt too close to giving in to the seductiveness of death itself.
Perhaps de Rougemont was right. On the other hand, courtly love did help to raise the status of women and of many knights, granted individuals the right to make certain choices about their fate, encouraged mutual affection, and urged lovers to feel tenderness and respect for each other. As gentle-hearted friends, flushed with intimacy and regard, lovers tried to improve their character and talents, and so become worthy of love. No wonder it had such a powerful appeal.
ABELARD AND HELOISE
Another rigor of medieval love developed among the clergy, who were tormented by the conflict between church and heart. The outcome was usually calamitous, as the spiraling love affair between Abelard and Heloise illustrates so well. Of all the medieval love stories, their saga of passion, hope, despair, and pain seems especially tragic, touching people in every generation. Mythic lovers accidentally drink a love potion, and, thus biologically abducted, are not responsible for their destiny, pouring thick as cement, which they can do nothing to stop. Of the many curiosities about human intelligence, the widespread belief that things are “destined to be,” that we are prisoners of fate, is one of the strangest but most widespread. So powerful is this feeling that it made sensible myth, lore, and religion, and still does. Existentialism evolved, in part, as a rebellion against such a mental straitjacket. In a typically existentialist way, Abelard and Heloise freely chose their fate, and it is this that made their drama doubly tragic; with the best intentions and the most loving of hearts, they brought about their own downfall.
Peter Abelard was born in Brittany in 1079, the first child of Lord Berengar of Le Pallet, a minor aristocrat. Tutored in both the pagan and Christian authors, he received a top-notch education and was especially fond of Ovid, whom he often quoted. An intellectual boy with a passion for learning had only one path open to him—the clergy—so he went to the local cathedral school and then, at twenty, on to Paris. There, as one of five thousand Latin-speaking students from all over Europe, he learned the fine arts of rhetoric and debate. His fame quickly grew; at twenty-two, he opened his own school, which attracted many paying students. His career leapt from one success to the next, honors mounted, and no goal seemed beyond his grasp. In time, he was appointed head of the cloister school of Notre Dame (“the chair long since destined for me”), and students rushed to his classes, the most popular in Europe. Brilliant, learned, eloquent, charming, he was a man self-besotted, ranking himself “as the only philosopher of standing on the earth.” At forty, Abelard met Heloise, the seventeen-year-old niece of a neighbor.
From all accounts, she was a pleasant-looking girl (“tall and well-proportioned … with a high, rounded forehead and very white teeth”) with a superb mind, who was well educated and vibrant. Abelard fell in lust with her, and talked her uncle, Fulbert, into letting him pay to lodge at their house, adding that he would tutor Heloise for free. This was a generous offer, since women were not allowed to attend his classes. Heloise was overwhelmed by his looks, fame, and erudition. He was the pluperfect professor, superstar, hunk. “What wife, what young girl did not burn for you in your absence or become inflamed by your presence?” she would later write. For his part, Abelard was proud and lecherous and on the prowl. In Heloise he found quarry that was sexy, young, available. He knew he could manipulate her feelings. As he freely confessed:
I had such celebrity at that time and possessed such graces of youth and body that I feared no refusal from any woman I found worthy of my love. I thought moreover that this young girl would yield all the more readily because she was cultivated and loved her studies. Even when we were separated, we could be in contact by letters, writing things too bold to be uttered, and thus our delicious relations would never be broken.
He himself said that Fulbert had entrusted “a tender lamb to a famished wolf.” Before long, a tempestuous affair began to blaze, and they often made love all night long, with the books scattered around them. What began in opportunity ended in love. He wrote her love songs, she wrote him love letters; they became completely absorbed in each other. But their passion made them careless. One day her uncle discovered them in flagrante, and was outraged by the sight of his young niece being dishonored. He sent Abelard packing. Soon afterward, Heloise learned she was pregnant, and she and Abelard ran away to his sister’s house in Brittany, where Heloise gave birth to a son they named Astrolabe. Arguing that they were deeply in love, Abelard begged her uncle to forgive them, and he even offered to marry Heloise, provided the marriage be kept a secret, since it would compromise his prospects as a clergyman. This seemed fair enough, and Fulbert agreed. Helo
ise did not. She knew what marriage would cost Abelard—it would produce a scandal sufficient to scorch his career. Selflessly, she urged him to stay a bachelor. Leaving the child in Brittany, the pair nonetheless went to Paris and married in secret. But, in the eyes of the world, they appeared to be unmarried wantons. Her uncle started rumors about the existence of a marriage, which Heloise violently denied. Dreadful fights ensued. To get her out of the line of fire, Abelard carried her off to her former childhood convent at Argenteuil, where she dressed in nun’s clothing and they made sacrilegious love—in the refectory and sometimes even in the church itself. Her uncle fumed with rage when he discovered Heloise gone; it seemed to him that Abelard meant to hide her away like any common mistress. No doubt Fulbert was less concerned with Heloise’s happiness than his own reputation. A seduced daughter (in this case a ward) dirtied the name of the household; it was a form of public cuckoldry, and Fulbert would lose face if he didn’t react. For whatever reason, he and his friends plotted a monstrous revenge. As Abelard describes it:
One night as I lay sleeping in my chamber, one of my servants, corrupted by gold, delivered me to their vengeance, which the world would learn of to its stupefaction: they cut off those parts of my body with which I had committed the offense they deplored. Then they fled.
Word spread fast, and soon Abelard’s castration was known to all. He said he suffered far more from humiliation than from pain. Indeed, his humiliation tormented him. With what horror he remembered how the eunuch was depicted in the Bible as “an abomination to the Lord, forbidden entrance to church as if a stinking, unclean monster.” Without his testicles, he was no longer human, no longer a man, no longer holy. In shame, he retreated to the Abbey of St. Denis, and he ordered nineteen-year-old Heloise to become a nun and spend the rest of her life in celibacy. For her, their affair had always been all or nothing. She was totally given to passion, commitment, and love. She would have followed him “to hell itself,” as she said. And one must remember that, in her day, people took hell literally, as a real place of torture and damnation. Abelard waited for her to take her vows—to be certain that she did—before he took his own. For ten years, they lived in silent separation as monk and nun, not even exchanging letters. In an abstract sense, this was another form of castration. In time, Abelard recovered his equilibrium and returned to the pulpit, and once again he became a famous orator, expressing daring—some said subversive—ideas about Church doctrine. Nonconformists were not tolerated, and he was soon banished to an outlying abbey far from mischief. As abbot of the Abbey of St. Gildas de Ruis in Brittany, he had the power to help Heloise when her convent (where she was by this time prioress) was threatened with closure. So, after ten years apart, Abelard and Heloise met again. Abelard now thought of her as “my sister in Christ rather than my wife.” He began writing his autobiography, his “history of calamities,” which gives a blunt, at times self-mortifying, account of his life and marriage. A copy made its way to Heloise, and prompted her to write a love letter to Abelard. Filled with passion, confusion, torment, she begins by addressing it “to her master, no, her father; to her husband, no, her brother; from his servant, no, his daughter; from his wife, no, his sister; to Abelard, from Heloise.” He clearly plays so many roles in her heart that she is unable to reduce him to just one. Abelard worshiped God, but Heloise worshiped Abelard:
You know, my beloved, the whole world knows, how in losing you I lost all…. You alone can cause me sadness or bring happiness and comfort…. I have obediently carried out all your commands. Powerless to oppose you in anything, I had the courage, on a single word from you, to destroy myself. Even more, strange to say: my love was transformed into such madness that it sacrificed beyond hope of recovery that which it most ardently desired. When you commanded it, I changed myself, not only my dress, but my mind, to prove you were master of my soul, as of my body.
The letters that passed between the two lovers were so passionate and tender, so tormented and candid, that they have moved generations of readers. For Heloise, love is consolation enough; it grants peace, happiness, and freedom. For Abelard, love is a hazard along the path to truth and salvation. Love is her philosophy; it obstructs his. Even as an abbess she kept his picture in her room and often spoke to it. The only other picture there would have been of Christ.
Both Abelard and Heloise felt that love could best be expressed through self-sacrifice. In the blunt economics of the heart, what costs the most is prized the most. But, for Abelard, God was paramount. Heloise shocked him by confiding that loving him was more important to her than loving God. It is clear from her letters that love filled her with a cleansing fire and made her feel sacred, holy, baptized by an earthy pagan faith. She became a nun as an act of enslavement to her lover; she was love’s martyr. Love was the real order whose vows she took. People praised her virtue and celibacy, she told Abelard, but she alone knew how wanton were her thoughts and her hands. Horrified by her confession, discovering that she was still the teenager desperately in love, Abelard wrote back reprovingly, explaining that his castration was actually an “act of divine mercy” because it brought him closer to God, and that he was glad to be rid of carnal desire, which was nothing but a bugbear and a burden and a quick ticket to sin. She stopped writing to him.
Abelard seemed to channel his erotic energy into reforming the Church, and he was accused of heresy and excommunicated. Making a pilgrimage to Rome to beg Pope Innocent II for clemency, he stopped first at Cluny, because his health was poor. And there he died in 1142, at the age of sixty-three. Told at once of his death, Heloise petitioned for, and finally received, a letter of absolution for Abe-lard’s sins. When she died twenty years later, also at the age of sixty-three, her body was placed in his tomb as she had requested. Rumor at the time said that, as her body was being placed there, his arms fell open to embrace her. Now both bodies rest in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, among the bones of other lovers. Both had believed deeply in love, courtly love—kept concealed, outside of marriage, full of quests and tests, a secret society. That is why Heloise preferred to be considered Abelard’s mistress rather than his wife. In the Middle Ages, to be a mistress was a far nobler calling.
Here is one of her heartfelt letters:
… Observe, I beseech you, to what a wretched condition you have reduced me; sad, afflicted, without any possible comfort, unless it proceed from you…. I have your picture in my room. I never pass by it without stopping to look at it; and yet when you were present with me, I scarce ever cast my eyes upon it. If a picture which is but a mute representation of an object can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls, they can speak, they have in them all that force which expresses the transport of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions, they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present; they have all the softness and delicacy of speech, and sometimes a boldness of expression even beyond it…. But I am no longer ashamed that my passion has had no bounds for you, for I have done more than all this. I have hated myself that I might love you; I came hither to ruin myself in a perpetual imprisonment, that I might make you live quiet and easy…. oh! think of me; do not forget me; remember my love, my fidelity, my constancy; love me as your mistress, cherish me as your child, your sister, your wife. Consider that I still love you, and yet strive to avoid loving you. What a word, what a design is this! I shake with horror, and my heart revolts against what I say. I shall blot all my paper with tears. I end my long letter, wishing you, if you can desire it (would to Heaven I could), for ever adieu.
*From the French for a man on horseback and, by extension, knightly behavior. Cavalier comes from the same source.
*The word testament comes from the Indo-European root tre, having to do with triads (two deal makers and a witness). A testament was a pledge, and it concealed the idea of castration. When a man swore something was true, giving testimony, he put his hands on his testicles. In effect, he was saying: You can cut off my balls if I‘m
lying. In time, law courts decided that asking a man to put his hands on the Bible might be more decorous.
*Compare this with a confidence offered by a twentieth-century Arabian woman, who said that wearing a veil gave her a profound sense of relief, because it freed her from being sexually attractive to men, a feeling that had dominated her thoughts and bedeviled her self-esteem.
*Because we use the word love in so many ways, we find “courtly love” a useful term. However, the phrase originated in the late nineteenth century, when a French medievalist, Gaston Paris, referred to the amour courtois of twelfth-century France.
MODERN DAYS
THE ANGEL AND THE WITCH
During the Middle Ages, people were more intimately woven into the fabric of their society. Vassalage meant wearing many ropes of obedience and, in combination, they held one securely in check. This was doubly true for a woman, who was also bound and defined by her relationships to men, as her father’s daughter, her husband’s wife, her son’s mother. Most of one’s life was played out in public, and few people moved beyond their small community, where everyone was known and gossiped about, values were uniform, and there could be little confusion about what sort of behavior was scandalous. Some adventurous souls traveled between towns, but for most people the world ended where their land did, or at the village outskirts. Visitors from afar were unlikely, and leaving home seemed both unnecessary and frightening. Surely monsters roamed the lands beyond the hills. Knights returning from the Crusades carried stories of grand cities and silks, but also of savagery and appallingly strange and sacrilegious customs.