Dear all,
As I had somehow promised in my introductory post, here is a thread about a love story that I find fascinating.
It took place under the reigns of Louis VI (1108-1137) and Louis VII (1137-1180).
It allows us to address aspects such as philosophy, gender relations, medieval society and others.
All these questions have already been addressed much better than I will ever do by leading historians.
No, I would rather propose a different and rarer approach:
Abelard and Heloise as two contenders of the order established at their time.


A quick overview of their lives.

Pierre Abélard was born in 1079 into a noble family. Son of the Lord of Pallet, he was destined for the profession of arms like his brothers. But his thirst for knowledge and his passion for literature made him turn to education. He went to Paris where he taught philosophy. A gifted intellectual, a formidable dialectician, he is a young teacher admired by his students. Renowned and respected despite its inconvenience. At the age of 36, he is a brilliant master of theology at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. Canon Fulbert entrusted him with the education of his niece, Heloise. She is 17 years old. He was immediately overwhelmed by his intelligence and beauty.

Heloise was born in 1100. She was raised and educated at Argenteuil Abbey, a monastery reserved for women, and then at Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, where her uncle was a canon. A young nun of relevance, her liveliness of mind and beauty are disturbed by the presence of this new teacher, Pierre Abélard, a mature and seductive man.

Their story does not remain platonic for long. Passion inspires them and pushes them towards each other. The teacher and the student love each other against all odds. The carnal passion consumes them, far from the teachings received by each of them. Heloise then gets pregnant. Abélard kidnapped her and they took refuge in Brittany where she gave birth to their son Astrolabe. She then returned to Argenteuil, abandoning her child to her loved one's family. They're secretly getting married. At Abelard's insistence and out of love for him, she agreed to retire to the monastery where she had spent her childhood. The scandal of their relationship finally broke out when Canon Fulbert, furious, denounced their secret marriage and damaged Abélard's career, who had betrayed the church, according to the laws of the time. The canon then employs two henchmen to punish the philosopher. He will thus be emasculated. This mutilation ended his career as a clergyman and teacher, but the revenge was so cruel and scandalous that the canon was relieved of his duties for a few years.

Heloise takes the veil at Argenteuil Abbey. In 1129, she became abbess of the convent of the monastery le Paraclet, near the hermitage founded by Abélard and which she had succeeded in making prosperous. A recognized philosopher, she would administer it for the rest of her life. Far from her love, which she will transform into a spiritual bond, but to which she will never renounce.

Abélard took refuge at Saint-Denis Abbey where he became a monk and continued his work in philosophy. From now on, their fiery passion will be expressed in the letters of their love, magnificent and lyrical exchanges in Latin. She admits that she was condemned to the cloister by her tragic love for him, with whom she knew the fullness of being. The intellectual and mutual admiration springs from this correspondence between the spouses.

This love over the words has no age, it is universal. In their tragedy, the two lovers draw the inexhaustible source of their relationship far beyond the carnal. Imbued with spirituality, their passion is transformed into an intellectual and philosophical exchange that crosses time. Persecuted to the point of being forced to embrace monastic life, nothing alters their bond.

Abélard died in 1142, she claimed his remains and buried him in the Paraclete. When she died in 1164, legend has it that her wish to be deposited after her death in her husband's tomb was respected, and that Abelard, who had died so many years earlier, extended his arms to receive her and closed them, holding her kissed, forever. In 1917, the Paris City Hall had the remains of this legendary couple transported to the Père-Lachaise cemetery, their last resting place.

Quote :

"What man, bent on sacred or philosophical thoughts, could endure the crying of children…? And what woman will be able to bear the constant filth and squalor of babies?" She goes so far as to define marriage as the ultimate form of prostitution, a brash statement for a female in 12th century France. She states, "Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection; for it is evident that she goes after his wealth and not the man, and is willing to prostitute herself, if she can, to a richer."

Heloïse a feminist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lo%C3%AFse#Legacy



What do you think about that?

Quote :

"Doubt leads to examination and examination to truth"
"You don't believe what you don't understand"

Abelard, first steps of Renaissance?



Does it shock a more usual rose-coloured and romantic vision of the narrative of this love?


Or did they correspond rather to two free thinkers?


Kind regards,
Abelard

A great romantic story but I cannot help feeling that in many , or rather very many, historical facts are often not a complete accurate and comprehensive account of facts, but only what the dominant or orthodox view of the time has recorded for posterity.


Dirk

Abelard,


thank you so much for this excellent thread and well brought. It is on Meles meles level.
I studied this period a lot even from the time of the BBC starting in 2002.
Starting at first with the book of the well known Jacques Le Goff: Les intellectuels au Moyen Âge
https://www.amazon.fr/intellectuels-au-Moyen-%C3%82ge/dp/2757839950
I later discussed it on a small French language history board (and it is still there) as the middle ages a transfer period from the classics to the renaissance, with never losing the human centered aspect of the classics.

I want thus only to speak about  that aspect and not about the love story, how a tragedy it may be. And now I see that you took first Héloïse before Abélard. Has that a special reason?   Because I always read, even from 2002 on about "Abélard et Héloïse"

Read this evening two papers both from Americans about the question...not easy stuff...even heavely criticizing my dear Jacques Le Goff about his book: the intellectuals. And not easy terms also... as "nominalists" and "structuralists"...on Passion Histoire a French English language teacher, a certain Yves, helped me with the term "nominalism", but I don't still understand it fully...
Abelard, dont read all this academic stuff ans it is more for a nordmann to understand...and perhaps if he has time to comment...
https://www.academia.edu/35577183/HUMANISTIC_PHILOSOPHY_
http://secularhumanist.blogspot.com/2013/05/abelards-early-humanists-reasoning.html
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&context=etd
The last entry about: The originality and influence of Peter Abelard upon Mediëval Thought.
And from Bergen Norway:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1016/j.jmedhist.2006.07.006


Abelard, I see overhere already after midnight...will comment tomorrow further with easier  to digest material...

Kind regards from Paul.

Dirk Marinus wrote:

A great romantic story but I cannot help feeling that in many , or rather very many, historical facts are often not a complete accurate and comprehensive account of facts, but only what the dominant or orthodox view of the time has recorded for posterity.
Dirk

Dear Dirk,
Indeed, it is impossible to claim to transcribe a historical "truth" that does not exist since truth is, as everyone knows, a philosophical abstraction beyond reach.
Taken to the extreme, the relativization of truth leads to the negation of all objective knowledge. Theorists still argue about whether mathematical laws reflect a hidden reality they discover or whether they are pure logical constructs of the intellect. This perception can make any science attractive, since each specialist in search of the "truth" can only present it from a different angle from other points of view. The naked truth, which everyone knows but no one has ever seen. The historian takes the view that the past can be reconstructed with a minimum of security, even if the historical truth is plural, since several explanations can adequately reflect the same event. It is his duty, as it were, to try to approach the truth to the best of his ability.
Knowing how to conduct autonomous reasoning, based on a critical reading of a bibliography, is an opportunity to develop an ability to synthesize after a contradictory argumentation according to the periods studied.
In this case, I base myself on a mixture of my intuitions and my amateur knowledge to ask myself a question without pretending to reach any certainty.
In the case of Heloise and Abelard I pick 3  paths:
-their love story and letters
-Abelard's philosophy and their relationship to religion
-their social life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Abelard#Conflicts_with_St._Bernard
I chose to ask myself a question based on their social life or more precisely whether they were not two free thinkers who had a great enough influence in their time.

Kind regards,
Abelard

Dear Paul,
Thanks for the little compliment, you'll make me blush.
I too am very interested in medieval philosophy, I read Le Goff, of course.
I don't have any more time, it's late and I'll do a little article on what I know about Abelard's philosophy tomorrow night.
It will also give me some time to go through the sources you posted.
See you tomorrow
Kind regards,
Abelard

Dear Paul,

Some insights into Abelard's philosophy.
Pierre Abélard owes his philosophical importance to the role he played during the "Querelle des Universaux". The problem of the status of the Universals was indeed one of the crucial questions that medieval philosophers would debate.
First of all, it is good, I think I should point out that the teaching of philosophy is called the liberal arts.
The liberal arts is a term that refers to the fundamental intellectual disciplines whose knowledge since Hellenistic and Roman antiquity was considered indispensable for the acquisition of high culture.

The liberal arts were grouped into two cycles: the trivium, the most famous, includes grammar, rhetoric and dialectics, and the quadrivium, includes all four branches of mathematics (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music).

The trivium gives the methodology, the "voces", while the quadrivium gives the content, the "res".

In Christian thought such as the Augustine formula, knowledge of the liberal arts is considered to be the preliminary step in the study of theology based on Holy Scripture, which must be understood and interpreted.

Philosophy is enthroned in the middle of the seven liberal arts


Abelard's philosophy is based on Aristotle's reading but only through Boethius and therefore only knows the logica vetus, the old logic. He also knows Saint Augustine and the Isagogé of Porphyry.  His thinking is done in the context of Christianity.

Abélard is first and foremost a logician and brings a new method. A champion of dialectics, he gave Western thought his first Discourse on the method, practising methodical doubt long before Descartes. This method involves a reflection on language.

Abelard is part of an era considered as a medieval golden age or the Renaissance of the 12th century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_du_XIIe_si%C3%A8cle

wikipedia wrote:

New technological discoveries allowed the development of Gothic architecture

The dispute over the Universals
The question of the Universals is that of the nature of Ideas. The question had already opposed Plato and Aristotle but it should be remembered that in the Middle Ages the texts of Antiquity are in large part lost. In Abelard's time, only the Timaeus and Aristotle are known as Plato and what is now called the old logic or logica vetus. Abélard considers a certain corpus from Boethius (4th century). Boethius translated "Interpretation and Categories". He comments (without translating them) on the other books of the "Organon". Abélard therefore ignores Aristotle's" Analytics". He read the "Isagogé" of Porphyry in which the latter asks the question that will be that of the Universals dispute:
do concepts exist?
If so, what is their nature?
Is the Universal a res (a thing) or a vox (a sound, a word).
Thus medieval thinkers question an issue that was debated in antiquity but ignore ancient solutions and thus take the problem to zero. It should also be noted that this dispute on the Universals must be thought of in the religious context of the time.

Porphyry, in his introduction to the Categories of Aristotle writes:

Quote :

"Do species and genera exist in nature as real things or do they only exist as thoughts in our minds. If they exist outside us, are they corporeal or non-bodily? Are they separate from or within sensitive objects? »

Abélard stands in the Conceptualism: There are only singular things and universality is only in words. But the Universals are not nothing, however. This is a fact that is based on divine ideas. The Universals are before man and things like Ideas and constitute the content of the divine spirit. Words are certainly meant to mean something, but they are based on reality. Language is not the veil of reality but its expression. The concept is not arbitrary.
Abélard distinguishes between vox (natural sound) and sermo (meaning of words to which he recognizes universality).
It distinguishes the denominative function from the significant function of an expression.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/#UnivAccoAbelArisConc

Abélard is the first to use the word "theology" in the current sense of the term. The word was only adopted belatedly by Christians because of its pagan origins.
In Abélard's work, theology became dialectical. It is not only a question of explaining the Scripture of the Bible but also of arguing with reason. In Sic et non (Yes and No), Abélard gathers a sum of contradictory sentences from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. It shows that the authorities' texts must not be adopted without criticism. The method should explain the different opinions and their reasons, evaluate them and, as far as possible, find a solution.
With regard to content, Abelard's theology refers the terms "Power", "Wisdom" and "Goodness" to the three persons of the Trinity. The Father is in agreement with omnipotence, the Son is in agreement with his wisdom. The Holy Spirit is in agreement with the Grace and Goodness of God. This is how God is three people. Some will accuse him of believing in tritheism (there are three gods), while others will claim that Abelard denies the reality of the three divine persons by reducing their names to simple divine attributes. These two theses are misinterpretations.

He will also apply a new notion of ethics.
What is important is not so much the act as the intention and the essence of repentance lies in contrition. Thus the external behaviour is, as such, morally indifferent. It is the intention or conviction that counts. Tendencies are not bad or good, but it is acquiescence to something bad that is sinful. Good lies in adhering to God's will, evil in despising it. Intention is therefore the foundation of morality because "Not what is done, but in what spirit it is done, that is what God weighs. »

Abelard's thought has the revolutionary aspect that man takes his place in creation and becomes its centre.
God created the world but man is free to follow the path he chooses.
He can do something other than God worshipped and can even be critical of the Holy Scriptures, which is not tolerated before him.
By refusing close control by the clergy of knowledge and opinion, Abélard goes beyond what the Gregorian reform (11th century) had more boldness and foreshadows the emancipation that we will see in the Renaissance.
We are not far from the

Quote :

Cogito Ergo Sum

(I think therefore I am) of Descartes.
He is innovative and opposes all his contemporaries, he initiates a new trend of universalist thought that will be taken up by others and will last until the revolution of the sixteenth century.

His main works:
Theology of the Sovereign Good (1120)
Sic et non (1122)
History of my misfortunes (1132)
Correspondence with Heloise and in particular the rule for the Paraclete (1135-1139)
Ethics or Know Yourself (circa 1139)

Kind regards,

Abelard, I just entered late this evening.

I read your article and I thank you for the new insights that you gave me. I have some questions about your article and some additional ones, as about "structuralists" and "nominalists" as we seem to have another "nordmann" on these boards.
And did some search on Passion Histoire for the Yves that I mentioned. But as this is here out of subject? (hors sujet) I will mention it in the "café" (the tumbleweed suite).

See you tomorrow and kind regards from Paul.

Dear Paul,
I spend a lot of time reading the interesting topics of this forum rather than posting.
In fact, there is much more to read here than elsewhere and I don't consider myself a scholar but rather an inquisitive person.

About nominalism and structuralism, here is wikipedia that can be useful for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism
See you soon,
kind regards,

Abelard,

thank you very much for the reply. I will try to return to the thread tomorrow. This evening I have "al mijn poer verschoten" (shot all my powder (and now no powder anymore) (used all my energy)) on a thread about myths and parables...
I will start a thread on the language board about the difference between the language use of the older people and the youngsters, also about the pronunciation of letters as for instance the alphabet, which was mentioned in the "Tumbleweed Suite"...
This expression was used in daily talk even still today, but don't exist in officlal Dutch.
http://www.vlaamswoordenboek.be/definities/term/poer+verschieten

Kind regards from Paul.

Abelard,

I have a bit enough of philosophy and religion for the moment as on the "myth" thread. Even here I will be a bit abstinate from thinking about all such terms as nominalism and structuralism and for the time being start as mentioned a thread on the language forum as I said yesterday or this morning...with seems to be for me! a bit easier...

Or it has to be that a nordmann or a Temperance start again an interesting discussion on that myth thread...

Kind regards from Paul.