[In the following essay, Georgianna analyzes Heloise's letters to Abelard concerning her conversion to monastic life and her requests for a new form of religious rule.]

In Héloïse and Abélard, Étienne Gilson wrote:

The correspondence of Héloïse and Abélard lies open in front of us. We can gloss it to our hearts' content, and search for newer and stranger hypotheses to explain its origin. A lot of this kind of thing has been done already, and no doubt the future will see a great deal more of it. But the wisest and most convincing of all hypotheses is that Héloïse is still the author of the letters of Héloïse and Abélard of those of Abélard. If there are decisive or even urgent reasons for admitting the contrary, they have not yet come to light, …¹

How contemporary these words seem in light of recent criticism on the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise. Beginning in 1972 with John F. Benton's challenging argument that the letters falsely attributed to Heloise and Abelard were the product of an elaborate pattern of ‘fraud, fiction, and borrowing’, an intense reexamination of the authenticity question followed, capped in 1980 by Benton's own stunning retraction of most of his earlier arguments and tentative move toward yet another, less elaborate but no less hypothetical, theory of inauthenticity.² Reluctantly agreeing that no convincing evidence has emerged to disprove the theory that Abelard wrote the letters attributed to him, Benton now suggests that Abelard probably wrote Heloise's letters too. The arguments offered for this new hypothesis are tenuous at best; but more importantly they seem largely to repeat earlier arguments considered and rejected long ago by Gilson and others.³ Nevertheless, Benton's newest claims seemed to demand a response, and Peter Dronke has recently offered an updated and more specific version of the textual arguments first advanced by Gilson in answer to Bernhard Schmeidler and Charlotte Charrier, Benton's predecessors in this debate.⁴ Peter von Moos recently argued after considering Benton's latest claims that, in the absence of substantial new developments, we set aside for now the authenticity issue which, in spite of its positive effects, has tended to eclipse all other issues concerning the correspondence.⁵ Dronke would seem to agree in that he isolates his most recent brief comments on the authenticity question in an afterword appended to his extended and sensitive literary study of Heloise's letters. Having come full circle, we find ourselves once again without any ‘urgent reasons’ to doubt what the manuscript tradition unfailingly asserts, namely, that Abelard and Heloise wrote the letters attributed to them. Thus it seems appropriate that we follow von Moos' advice, and Gilson's as well, and get on with investigating the contents, context, and style of the letters, all subjects which deserve further attention and which may ultimately cast more light on the authenticity debate than more narrowly conceived studies devoted solely to that issue.⁶

In connection with Heloise's letters in particular several crucial questions remain. While the unity and context of Abelard's letters to Heloise have been thoughtfully explored, it is the disunity of Heloise's letters to Abelard that dominates criticism.⁷ Even though most scholars now see no reason to doubt the historical authenticity of Heloise's letters, they have frequently raised questions concerning authenticity of a different sort, asking, in effect, which is the more ‘authentic’ Heloise, the ‘très sage Heloys’ so admired by her medieval contemporaries as the holy abbess of the Paraclete who apparently composed the final two extant letters to Abelard dealing with monastic and biblical questions, or the ‘woman of sensuous mind’ apparently revealed in the early letters, the grieving, inconsolable lover of Abelard who is haunted by memories of the past, and whose persistent, unrequited passion is so familiar to readers throughout the Western world.⁸ A sharp break between what we might call a serious and a sensuous Heloise is reinforced by editors who divide the correspondence into two distinct halves and invent separate titles for them, such as ‘The Personal Letters’ and ‘The Letters of Direction’.⁹

Most criticism has focused on the so-called personal letters, whose dramatic, detailed self-analysis make them anomalous in the literature of the period. Heloise's third letter, her longest and most learned by far, in which she examines the monastic life of women and requests a new religious rule, is treated far less often and with much less enthusiasm.¹⁰ R. W. Southern's estimate of Abelard's two responses to Heloise's request might well be extended by most readers to apply equally to Heloise's third letter: ‘They are by no means readable and they are seldom read. They have no personal interest.’¹¹ For many critics, feminist, romantic, and more clerically-minded alike, Heloise's third letter represents primarily an act of submission or repression of her personal experience, a willed silence on the subject of her love for Abelard and her grief over losing him. Too often this letter is dismissed as providing evidence only of Heloise's conversion or her capitulation to Abelard's personal power or the power of his arguments.¹² Gilson, one of the few earlier critics to analyze the letter in any detail, does so apart from his extensive and subtle reading of the first two letters and in a very different historical context, reserving his study of Heloise's ideas about religious life for his conclusion, in which he depicts Heloise as a proto-Renaissance thinker.¹³ Among more recent critics, only Dronke has treated Heloise's third letter as worthy of serious attention, especially as it sheds light on the continuity of her letters.¹⁴

This article will explore the significance of Heloise's third and most neglected letter, especially when viewed in the context of contemporary controversies concerning the monastic life as well as other forms of spirituality. This discussion should help us to see that, in fact, Heloise's concerns in this letter rather closely resemble ideas expressed in other letters. Although primarily concerned with Heloise's third letter, the aim of this essay throughout is to suggest that we can understand better both Heloise and those aspects of twelfth-century spirituality which she epitomizes if we treat her works as a coherent and imaginative whole, rather than as a disjointed series of documents, explicable only in terms of forgery, interpolation, or repression.

In arguing for the unity of the letters, it is not necessary to assert the simple and neatly sequential development that some readers have found there, namely, the exemplary story of how Abelard was first converted himself, then converted Heloise from worldly love to the religious life. The literary model frequently invoked by these readers is the popular conversion narrative, and the supposed gap between Heloise's second and third letters is to be explained by Heloise's private and unrecorded moment of conversion, in which she dramatically renounces her past and embraces a new life of devotion.¹⁵ One finds no evidence anywhere in her works that Heloise renounces her past, or that she translates her previously complex analysis of her history into the simple ‘before’ and ‘after’ pattern of oppositions so prominent in conversion stories of the period, including Abelard's own. On the contrary, the difficulty of converting or dismissing one's memories is a large part of Heloise's subject throughout her correspondence with Abelard; it is the absence of a traditional conversion experience that informs the whole of her correspondence with Abelard and her notion of the spiritual life as well. Heloise is as eager to ‘authenticate’ her experience as scholars are to authenticate her letters. But she rejects all externally imposed models, literary as well as spiritual, that presume a conventional conversion, seeking instead a new spiritual model which adequately describes her complex spiritual state.¹⁶

In her first two letters, Heloise examines her personal history. She dwells particularly on the devastating emotional and spiritual consequences of her inability to repent of her worldly love for Abelard, in spite of having lived for many years, outwardly at least, the penitential life as defined in the Rule of St. Benedict. In her third letter, rather than repressing or converting her past, Heloise begins to generalize from her own experience, transforming what had seemed a unique spiritual predicament into a theoretical exploration of some basic assumptions of the monastic life as conceived by St. Benedict. Her assessment of the institution of monasticism can be seen as growing directly out of her previous descriptions of her own experience of the wide gap between her turbulent spiritual life and the seemingly static, external religious rule which she professes and teaches as Abbess of the Paraclete. In her third letter, Heloise moves away from viewing hers as solely a personal predicament caused by a particular and unjust set of circumstances and toward a highly sympathetic view of all Christians alike, men and women, monks and laymen, called to spiritual love, yet weak and troubled, bending frequently under the heavy burden of the Law, and more in need of spiritual comfort and direction than of prescriptive rules governing external behavior. If we view the correspondence of Heloise as a whole, we can trace the progress of a kind of evangelical awakening, to use Chenu's term for the twelfth-century apostolic movement which eventually brought widespread spiritual and institutional reform, especially in the area of lay spirituality.¹⁷ In her exploration of the relationship between external religious rules and an unruly inner life, between the most revered, traditional spiritual goals on the one hand and the most worldly memories and desires on the other, Heloise moves away from a theology of perfection as defined by Abelard and St. Benedict as well; instead, she challenges Abelard and later spiritual writers to provide a new kind of rule for the inner life.¹⁸

What many would see as the gap between the sensuous and the serious Heloise, or the unconverted and the converted Heloise, occurs immediately after the opening paragraphs of her third letter. Because this passage is often referred to but rarely quoted, it deserves to be given here in full:

So that you cannot reprove me as disobedient in any way, I have imposed the curb of your injunction even on the words of my immoderate grief, so that in writing at least I may temper what is not so much difficult as in fact impossible to control in speaking. For nothing is less under our control than the heart; rather than being able to command it, we are forced to obey it. And so when its desires stimulate us, no one can repel their sudden impulses from easily breaking forth into action and more easily flowing into words, which are the ever-ready signs of the heart's passions. Thus it is written: ‘Out of the overflowing of the heart, the mouth speaks.’ I will restrain my hand, therefore, from writing words that I cannot hold back my tongue from speaking. Would that the heart that grieves were as ready to obey as the hand that writes.

Yet you have the power to bring some remedy for my grief, even if you cannot entirely remove it. For, as one nail is inserted to drive out another, so a new thought expels the old, when the heart intent on other things is forced to dismiss or interrupt its remembrance of the past. But, in fact, so much the more does any thought occupy the heart or lead it away from other things as what is thought is judged the more worthy and where we direct our heart seems the more compelling (necessarium).¹⁹

Although all readers agree that this passage marks a turning point in the correspondence, there is no consensus on what this turning signifies. Those who would see the correspondence as a spiritual conversion narrative locate the signs of it here. Yet few of these readers provide any textual analysis to support their claim. Robertson takes this paragraph as proof of Heloise's conversion, but the only evidence he cites is the fact that Heloise never again writes of her passion:

… Abelard's [second] letter proved efficacious, for in her reply Heloise says nothing further about her personal difficulties, but asks instead for instruction on the origin of nuns, and for a rule that she and her nuns may follow at the Paraclete. … There is no further talk about abandoning the Paraclete, but instead an expressed desire for Abelard, the founder, to establish its rule. … Heloise, that is, has now resolutely turned away from worldly joy and worldly sorrow to devote herself wholeheartedly to her profession.²⁰

Dronke, however, more willing than Robertson to read literary texts closely, points out that in this passage Heloise's silence on the subject of her grief is imposed from without, by Abelard, and accepted by Heloise reluctantly at best, hardly characteristics to be desired in a conversion exemplum. Furthermore, Heloise explicitly and repeatedly distinguishes here between interior and exterior reality, between the words that issue from the heart and those written by the hand. Since genuine conversion, as Heloise well knows, is an affair of the heart, it would seem that she is pointedly forewarning her reader not to confuse what Robertson calls a ‘sincere interest in her profession’ with proof of interior conversion.²¹ Heloise's willed silence concerning her heart's grief does not justify reading into that silence proof of conversion. In fact, as Dronke has pointed out, silence about the details of one's conversion would be unusual, to say the least, in a conversion exemplum, the climax of which is typically some unmistakable sign of God's grace (the miraculous voice of a child singing ‘Take up and read’ in St. Augustine's conversion story is a good example).²² If Heloise's correspondence is to be classed as an exemplary conversion narrative, it is of a kind so different from those preceding it as to require a redefinition of the genre.²³

If Robertson reads Heloise's silence as evidence of her conversion, many others have read the same silence concerning her grief as evidence that she persisted heroically in her passion for Abelard.²⁴ Even Gilson, far more sensitive to the subtleties of Heloise's thought than most critics, cautiously interprets Heloise's silence to mean that she probably persisted in her passion, and even ‘gloried’ in it. Following his complex analysis of the spiritual torment described in Heloise's first two letters, Gilson writes:

Nothing, not a single line, justifies our thinking that she ever changed [in her grief over her loss of Abélard]. Urged by Abélard to adopt an attitude towards God more in conformity with her state, she prefers to change the topic; for as long as Abélard was there, it would be quite impossible for her not to start in all over again. Thus Héloïse is reduced to silence, but for the same motives that ruled all her other acts—obedience. … We never know whether this was a disciplinary silence, once more carrying out the will of Abélard, or whether it was a kind of reconciliation to the will of God. We shall never know, and there are few reasons, humanly speaking, to suspect the latter. The iron will she everywhere displayed would hardly allow her to betray the passion in which she gloried. She could refuse to speak about it. But nothing from her pen has ever denied it.²⁵

One can sense in this passage Gilson's struggle not to draw conclusions impossible to prove from Heloise's silence. Yet the question of Heloise's conversion is most intriguing, and it is difficult, once drawn into it, not to choose sides. But such choices, based as they are upon ‘reading’ silences, go beyond the limits of literary analysis and become what Gilson labels his, ‘human’ choices. Perhaps less critical concern with Heloise's silence would lead us to examine more closely the subjects about which she chose not to be silent. Heloise's third letter does not offer evidence of a conversion in any conventional sense. But it does suggest that the kind of conversion she seeks is not the traditional event, sudden and miraculous, but rather an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual process, slow and painful at times, whose success is always reversible and always in doubt.

Only if we are intent on reading what is not there can we fail to follow the logic of this letter's exordium, in which Heloise lends urgency and force to her request by closely linking her personal with her institutional concerns. Her argument seems rather straightforward: I can and will control my written words to you, but thus far, Heloise says, I have found it ‘difficult’, even ‘impossible’, to control my spoken words, which issue directly from my heart's immoderate grief. My situation is not unusual, for the heart is notoriously uncontrollable. But a remedy is still possible and is entirely in your power. A new subject for reflection, one as compelling as my preoccupation with our past, might ‘dismiss or interrupt’ my old thoughts. The subject that Heloise proposes concerns religious history and monastic rules for women, and she asks Abelard to provide her with specific materials for thought: a history of the order of nuns and a new rule for the women of the Paraclete.

Although clear and forceful, Heloise's request is not without ironies which only become evident as we read through the letter that follows. Heloise's request to Abelard, couched in the tender terms of courtly love, claims that Abelard alone has the power ‘to bring some remedy’ for Heloise's grief by redirecting her thoughts. Yet, in the long, closely argued and immensely learned letter that follows, Heloise demonstrates that she is prepared to do the job herself.²⁶ For as she becomes increasingly engaged in her analysis of the monastic duties imposed upon women, she writes with the same passion and intensity of thought that she earlier brought to her analysis of her personal life.²⁷ Such intensity is not surprising once we see how closely related the two subjects are in fact. Of course, Heloise here as elsewhere depends heavily upon Abelard's thought for key ideas in her argument. Not only is Abelard's dialectical style evident in the spirit of open inquiry which Heloise brings to her examination of the Benedictine Rule, but also several of Abelard's most fundamental moral principles underlie Heloise's analysis of the religious life. Yet the fact remains that it is Heloise, not Abelard, who first applies these principles to the subject of monastic life. Abelard's reputation as a monastic reformer, as recently described by McLaughlin, rests largely on his two treatises written in response to Heloise's letter, treatises in which Abelard frequently makes use of slightly altered versions of Heloise's arguments.²⁸ Thus the grieving wife's modest request to her husband for guidance is not quite as humble and submissive as it might first appear. There is a further and perhaps greater irony in this request, which will become apparent after we have studied briefly the substance of Heloise's analysis of the Rule of St. Benedict.²⁹

We will return again to the opening of Heloise's third letter, but here only one further observation should be made, and that concerns the serious claims Heloise makes for the subject of this often-neglected letter. Having established her heart's grief as an extremely powerful, and up to now at least, inevitable preoccupation, Heloise works here to persuade Abelard that her new concern is equally compelling. In a sentence awkward to translate because it is so repetitive in its emphasis, Heloise forcefully asserts an equality between her old subject and her proposed new direction:

So much the more fully does any thought occupy the heart and lead it away from other things as what is thought is judged the more worthy, and where we direct our heart seems the more compelling (necessarium).³⁰

Her new project, she reiterates a few lines later, is ‘absolutely necessary’ (admodum necessaria), perhaps as commanding as the subject of her grief had been.

Thus, unlike many readers who would dismiss or slight Heloise's new concerns, she herself does not grant to her preoccupation with the past a higher rank than the subject of monastic life. She does say that the process of shifting from personal to institutional analysis is not easy: the image of one nail driving out another, borrowed from Cicero or perhaps Jerome, suggests a painful ordeal.³¹ But the process can succeed. Rather than being ‘cynical’, as one critic has described her,³² Heloise in fact moves from near-despair to hope in the great turn of this passage, in which she resolutely proposes a possible remedy for her grief, even as she describes the process of diverting her heart as difficult. Although Heloise portrays herself here as the victim of an uncontrollable heart, she neither glorifies her position nor assumes it is irremediable. If, as some critics argue, Heloise is awaiting either Abelard's return or God's call to conversion, she does not propose to wait in hopeless silence. The process Heloise proposes in the elaborate opening of this letter involves a willed act of imagination and intellect, her own more than Abelard's. Her study of the monastic life of women is not a dry, disinterestedly chosen piece of research, nor a sign of resignation or submission, but a subject chosen because she judges it to be as ‘necessary’ to her life as her passion for Abelard, and, for that reason, perhaps able to affect and even cure her grief.

Nevertheless, Heloise was by no means alone in judging the subject of religious rules and the monastic life as a ‘worthy’ subject at this time. For her own reasons and from her own perspective, Heloise in this third letter to Abelard joins the growing contemporary debate among religious groups over the meaning and purpose of the religious life. Beginning early in the twelfth century, with the rise of conservative Cistercian influence on the one hand, and the demands of the newly reformed Augustinian canons on the other, questions concerning the authority and the appropriateness of religious rules, especially the influential Rule of St. Benedict, began to reshape monastic intellectual life and ultimately redefined lay spirituality as well.³³ The quarrel between traditional Black Benedictines and the newer White Cistercians centered on their varying interpretations of the Benedictine Rule; each group justified its particular practices as more true to the spirit or the letter of St. Benedict's venerated Rule. The non-monastic canons, under pressure from both monastic groups to reform by allying themselves with an established religious order, added fuel to the controversy and expanded its scope by rejecting the Benedictine rule model and inventing an altogether new rule, the so-called Rule of St. Augustine. Ultimately, the controversy over the legitimacy of this or that rule, and over this or that interpretation of the Benedictine Rule, had effects beyond the religious houses themselves, as first preachers and schoolmen, and then the new friars at the beginning of the next century, denounced the legalism and presumption of all man-made rules and turned instead to the Gospel as the only truly ‘legitimate rule’ for Christians to follow.³⁴

But in spite of such broad, long-range effects, the debate over the authenticity and meaning of the Rule of St. Benedict was often, especially in its early phase, highly polemical and sometimes petty. Benedictine and Cistercian commentaries of the early and mid-twelfth century strongly suggest that this was, in its beginning at least, an insider's quarrel, one in which criticism concerning the length of another order's sleeves could carry real bite.³⁵ Heloise's contribution to the debate is especially noteworthy because she takes up the position of an informed and interested outsider and thus avoids the provincialism of so many monastic commentaries of the period. And, indeed, she is an outsider in many ways. Obviously, the peculiar circumstances of her entry to the monastery made her in the beginning, at least, a detached participant in monastic life. In addition, in her education, dialectical style and habit of mind, indeed, in her self-image as a whole, she has far more in common with academics or schoolmen than with monks.³⁶ It is a connection she seems almost to flaunt at times, as when she frequently pairs biblical quotations and passages from pagan poets in support of an argument.³⁷ Yet, although she shares many interests with schoolmen, she writes on this issue of religious rules long before the schools take up the controversy.³⁸ Her critique of St. Benedict's Rule is learned, eclectic, somewhat contentious perhaps, but above all reasoned and theoretical. Although she clearly means her analysis of religious rules to have practical effects, so fully informed is her letter by what can only be called scholarly concerns of accuracy, thoroughness, and careful judgment that she easily avoids the more parochial extremes of both Benedictine and Cistercian apologists. Indeed, both Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter, the abbot of Cluny, monks who disagreed sharply in their attitudes toward the Rule of St. Benedict, honored the Paraclete with personal visitations and lavished praise upon the monastery's young abbess.³⁹

Heloise's strategy in persuading Abelard to provide a new rule is to demonstrate the inadequacy of the Rule of St. Benedict as a suitable guide for religious women, and she brings to her task all of the objectivity and detachment that Abelard's dialectical training had evidently taught her. Consistently, she treats the Rule as a historical document, distanced in time and circumstances from her own age. Such a clear sense of history is unusual regarding any text in the Middle Ages, but particularly so regarding the venerated, almost sacred rule of St. Benedict. Although Heloise demonstrates great respect for Benedict as a wise legislator in his time, her chief concern is with the Rule as a current, practical guide for religious women. By paying close attention to the Rule itself, its background, form, and above all its particulars, Heloise builds a case against the widespread practice of interpreting Benedict's document as a universal rule, equally suitable to all religious men and women and to all times. She does so first by showing that Benedict's Rule was the product of its own time. She points out, for example, that Benedict composed his rule against the backdrop of earlier rules and institutes which influenced him to alter certain details, and she even engages in speculation about his possible sources and influences.⁴⁰ Furthermore, she deduces from her study of particular phrases that Benedict himself was strongly influenced by contemporary circumstances to make certain concessions ‘according to the quality [or condition] of men or the times’ (pro qualitate hominum aut temporum), such as allowing wine and some meat to his monks, when they refused to be persuaded that such luxuries are inappropriate to the monastic life.⁴¹ In describing the Rule as the product of its own particular history, Heloise strips it of the timeless aura so often assumed by monastic writers. In addition, she isolates numerous details in the Rule which suggest that it was written with a particular audience in mind. St. Benedict's Rule, Heloise asserts categorically, was clearly written ‘for men alone’ (viris solummodo), and she amasses details scrupulously collected from the Rule itself which amply demonstrate her conclusion.⁴²

For Heloise then, one cannot profess this or any other rule without first having studied the document itself, as she has, in a fairly rigorous way:

If indeed many of those who these days profess monastic vows rashly would attend more carefully and consider beforehand what it is that they promise in their vows, and examine diligently the actual tenor of the Rule, they would offend less through ignorance and sin less through negligence. But now nearly all alike rush without discretion to the monastic life, are received in disorder, and live in more disorder. Disdaining the Rule they are ignorant of with the same ease with which they profess it, they set up whatever customs they prefer as though they were law.⁴³

Her complaint is primarily that of a scholar, not a partisan, and thus her argument should not be confused with either the typical Cistercian or Benedictine position, although it has points in common with both. In its emphasis upon strict discipline, and in associating such discipline with strict observance of the details of the Rule of St. Benedict, Heloise seems to echo the Cistercian argument that monastic reform requires a return to the ‘purity’ of the Rule, observed in every detail ‘to the last dot’.⁴⁴

Yet Heloise's sensitivity to the particularity of Benedict's Rule, rather than leading her to embrace the Rule as a tool for monastic reform, instead leads her to question its appropriateness to her own circumstances as a nun, which for her take precedence. Often she associates particulars of the Rule with specific conditions not relevant to current circumstances, a historical argument usually ignored by Cistercian apologists. In fact, the very specificity of the Rule, which the Cistercians stressed, becomes her strongest argument for rejecting Benedict's text as unsuitable to be a common rule for all religious. Furthermore, the particulars Heloise most often emphasizes concern Benedict's numerous references to the need for flexibility and adaptation of monastic practice according to individuals and to circumstances. This emphasis on flexibility associates Heloise more closely with Cluniac arguments used to defend their sometimes extremely loose interpretation of the Rule. Peter the Venerable and other traditional Benedictines argued that Benedict intended his rule as a spiritual ideal rather than as a literal, universal guide.⁴⁵

But Heloise seems unwilling to accept wholeheartedly the Cluniac position. When she castigates those who disregard what she calls ‘the actual tenor of the Rule’, she seems to be speaking specifically of those who fail to attend to the original text of the Rule, which Cluniacs especially were often accused of ignoring in favor of ‘whatever customs they prefer’, as Heloise puts it. Such disdain for the particulars of the Rule, Heloise asserts in the strongly worded passage just quoted, proceeds from ignorance and a lack of diligence in studying the Rule as written, and such carelessness, she argues, leads to a growing ‘disorder’ in place of the ordo of the monastic life.

Once again, Heloise is not taking sides in a bitter, political dispute; rather, it is her critical sense of what it means to ‘know’ the Rule which is offended by loose readings of Benedict's highly particular text. For Heloise, to know the Rule is to study it closely, from both a historical and a practical perspective, before taking any religious vows. Women in particular, she argues, cannot be adequately instructed by a mere three readings of the Rule, as Benedict prescribes.⁴⁶ Her own thorough study of the Benedictine Rule, though completed over thirteen years after her unexpected entrance into religious life, leads her to conclude that, whether strictly or loosely interpreted, the Rule is at best inappropriate to the nuns of the Paraclete. Never intended as a common rule, Heloise argues, the Rule of St. Benedict should not be used indiscriminately by every variety of religious group.

Viewed in light of the controversy over the meaning and authority of the Rule of St. Benedict, Heloise's intentions in this letter seem quite clear. The religious rule which she was forced by circumstances to adopt is inappropriate as a suitable guide for women, she argues. Other religious groups have created new and more appropriate rules (she refers specifically to the Augustinian canons), and so Abelard should, as founder of the Paraclete, provide a new rule for his charges. Some specific changes are necessary, and Heloise outlines them in some detail.

The most particular changes grow out of the need Heloise sees to adapt the monastic life to the special circumstances of women, whom she frequently calls ‘the weaker sex’.⁴⁷ In arguing this need, Heloise is, in fact, transforming into a more general version a personal complaint that she has made previously to Abelard. Her complaint against the Rule of St. Benedict, as currently practiced, is similar to her complaint against Abelard in her previous letters: both overlook differences between individuals. Throughout her first two letters, Heloise laments the differences between Abelard's circumstances and her own: he is converted, she is not; he is strong, she is weak; he is thoroughly holy, she is a hypocrite; he is castrated, and therefore without desire, while she is tormented by desire. Abelard rarely acknowledges these differences, instead repeatedly emphasizing ‘our conversion from the world to God’ (my emphasis), with the hope of persuading Heloise to adopt his rhetoric.⁴⁸ In her third letter, after agreeing to set aside the subject of her personal complaint to Abelard, Heloise turns to a generalized and institutional version of the differences between his circumstances and hers. Her analysis of the Rule of St. Benedict is built upon the most fundamental and general example possible of the differences between men and women that make some particulars of the Benedictine Rule clearly inappropriate as a common rule. In a strategy designed, one suspects, to shock Abelard into recognizing their differences, Heloise begins her new, institutional complaint with a boldly contentious example. How can we women be expected, she asks, to follow a religious rule that requires long underwear (femoralia) and close-fitting wool clothes when the ‘monthly purging of [our] superfluous humors’ (humoris superflui menstruae purgationes) makes such an injunction impossible to keep? Adding example after example, ranging from the physical weakness of women which makes the required harvest work inappropriate, to the reputed humidity of the woman's body, which makes her less susceptible to the intoxicating effects of wine, Heloise argues with a flood of observed details that Benedict did not have women in mind when he composed his Rule.⁴⁹

This extraordinary sensitivity to the particularity of life is a hallmark of Heloise's thought and provides another strong link between her personal and institutional concerns. In his previous letter, Abelard had asked his wife, whom he addresses as ‘the bride of Christ’, to replace her worldly attachment to him with an analogical, spiritual love of Christ, providing her with meditations on the black bride of the Song of Songs, the passion of Christ, and a moving prayer on the marriage bond. Yet when Heloise responds agreeing not to write again of her personal grief, the subject she chooses as a ‘worthy’ replacement is not the elaborate spiritual analogy outlined by Abelard (love Christ as you would a husband) but the basic, everyday details of monastic life, with which this letter, especially its first half, is saturated: tunics and underwear, work and sleep, meat and wine, guests and pilgrims, apple juice and date palms. And not one of these subjects is treated in the least bit metaphorically by Heloise. Her substitution of actual for Abelard's metaphorical details is telling. Religious rules, as a genre, are almost obsessive in their concern for minute details, and perhaps it is this obsession with the particular that Heloise finds so ‘necessary’ in her new theme.

Seen in this way, her concern for the particular in religious rules seems closely related to her attitude toward her memories as described in her previous letters. Indeed, what Heloise stresses about her memories and their effects on her is their particularity:

Not only what we did, but also the times and places in which we did it, are so fixed along with your image in my heart that in those recalled details I reenact all with you.⁵⁰

Similarly, early in her first letter, after summarizing in some detail Abelard's autobiographical letter, she complains that the sorrows renewed by his account were the greater the more carefully ‘each single event’ (singula) was described.⁵¹ In Abelard's case, the singular events of his life are convertible, or at least they have been converted, into spiritual analogies or signs of God's providential power. That, in brief, is the argument of his autobiographical letter which precipitates the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise some years after the events themselves have occurred. But, for Heloise, the same detailed memories remain wholly intact, ‘singular’, unmanipulable, and thus they retain all of their original associations with pleasure, guilt, and desire. What is perhaps suggested here is that while Abelard's is fundamentally a philosophical or logical temperament, Heloise's habit of mind is primarily influenced by imagination and memory.

Perhaps it is this distinction in their attitudes toward the past that Heloise alludes to in the famous but enigmatic superscription to her third letter: ‘Domino [or suo] specialiter, sua singulariter’, usually translated as ‘To Abelard, her lord [or hers] in a special sense, from Heloise, who is singularly his.’⁵² There is considerable play in this as in all of Heloise's superscriptions, which she seems to treat as something of a rhetorical contest with her former teacher and husband.⁵³ Of particular interest here is Heloise's allusion to her differences with Abelard in terms of Abelard's own philosophical language.

First of all, as Dronke has observed, in using the term specialiter Heloise is echoing a phrase from the close of Abelard's previous letter, in which he asks Heloise to remember him ‘qui specialiter est tuus’.⁵⁴ While Abelard had used the word in its most general sense, Heloise responds by playing upon the subtle philosophical distinctions between what is special and what is singular. Abelard, both in his dealings with Heloise after their marriage and in his academic study of logic, persistently confines his interests to species, to classes of things. In his letters to Heloise, for example, he conspicuously avoids forms of personal address, addressing her instead as a spiritual sister or as a bride of Christ. In distinguishing between Abelard's ‘special’ relation to his spiritual bride and her ‘singular’ relation to him, Heloise reminds Abelard of an important difference in their relationships toward the past.

Heloise's complaint to Abelard, especially as described in her second letter, is that the details of her past remain singular and thus less easy for her than for Abelard to coerce into some logical pattern.⁵⁵ Indeed, it is the particulars of her past which coerce Heloise, rather than the abstract pattern that Abelard would impose upon those images, times and places that remain ‘fixed’ in Heloise's heart. The image of Heloise driven by the singular events of her past, so often alluded to in her first two letters, is recalled not only in her salutation but also in her request for a new thought to serve as a nail: ‘As one nail is inserted to drive out another’, Heloise says, emphasizing how much force will be required to ensure that a new but equally ‘necessary’ thought will drive out the old. The necessaries in Heloise's life, it seems, are the particulars, and she insists that they be accounted for and dealt with, whether they be the current details of her monastic life, the prescribed details of the monastic rule, or the highly charged details of her personal past.

If Heloise had ended her third letter to Abelard with her argument for the necessity of specific changes that Abelard should include in his new monastic rule, she would have performed the important service for the nuns of the Paraclete of realigning their rule and their religious life, and reserved for herself as well a place in the religious reform movement of the twelfth century. In addition, even had she stopped here, a strong link between her previous letters and this one would be clear: Heloise is as committed to her new subject as to her old because both concern what we might call the power of the particular. Yet, despite her knowledge of and interest in the details of monastic life, Heloise is not so naive as to assume that particular rules concerning food and clothing have the same emotional force as the particulars of one's memories and desires. When she begins to examine the end or goal of regulating the details of daily life in monasteries, namely, the spiritual ideal that religious rules are meant to serve, she then begins to question the very particularity that normally defines the genre of religious rules. Just as Heloise's request to Abelard in the beginning of her letter was not as straightforward as it seemed at first (since her object in this letter is less to request guidance than to offer it), so too the guidance that she offers Abelard proves contradictory. Less than halfway through her letter, Heloise slowly begins to turn her argument dialectically against itself: what begins innocently enough as a request for specific and relatively minor changes in an existing rule becomes, as Gilson observed long ago, a broad, speculative argument questioning the whole enterprise of attempting to regulate the interior, spiritual life by means of external, bodily rules.⁵⁶

The first signal of a change in emphasis comes quite early in the letter. While pursuing the argument that ‘weak women’ should not be subjected to a common rule with monks, Heloise begins to equate religious rules with the Old Law of retribution, not only the Rule of St. Benedict but all rules that go beyond the precepts of the Gospel in regulating spiritual life. Glossing a passage from a sermon by John Chrysostom which asserts that laymen must conduct themselves like monks in all matters except for continence, Heloise writes:

From these words we can easily gather that whoever adds the virtue of continence to the precepts of the Gospel will achieve monastic perfection.

And would that our religious life could reach as high as to fulfill the Gospel, rather than go beyond it, and would that we not seek to be more than Christians. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, this is why the holy Fathers decided not to fix for us as for men any general rule, as though it were a new law, nor to burden our infirmity with a great many vows. …⁵⁷

Heloise's remarks are curious in a number of ways. What John Chrysostom gives as a complaint against laymen who assume too much freedom from strict religious observance, Heloise sees in a very different light, as extending the definition of monastic perfection beyond the walls of the monastery to include all those who combine celibacy with a virtuous life lived according to the precepts of the Gospel, which are available and equally applicable to all Christians. Heloise's complaint is directed not at laymen but at monks who, by adding numerous and burdensome man-made rules to the precepts of the Gospel, become presumptuous and perhaps hypocritical in attempting to be ‘more than Christians’. The conclusion Heloise draws here, that perhaps the early Church Fathers did not provide a rule for women because they saw the danger of presuming to improve upon the Gospel, seems incongruous with the rest of the passage. Although it does serve to bring Heloise back to her ostensible argument concerning the ‘infirmity’ of women, the conclusion seems illogical in being restricted to rules for women. Obviously the dangers in trying to outdo the Gospel inhere equally in rules for men and women, and writers of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries will not hesitate to say so.⁵⁸ But Heloise is here making an argument against elaborate rules and observances well before the evangelical movement has really taken hold, and her hesitancy to draw the most radical conclusion is therefore understandable.

Yet this tendency to equate man-made rules with a ‘new law’, with all of the associations of legalism and presumption that that term carried with it, grows stronger as Heloise's letter continues, and by the end the distinction between the particular needs of men and women drops out altogether. Pitting what she calls ‘the freedom of the Gospel’ (a popular tag of the evangelical movement) against the burdening constraints of the Law, Heloise mounts an argument that love, not the law, is the object of the spiritual life; thus rules regulating outward behavior are inadequate and perhaps irrelevant to the ideal of personal, spiritual perfection. They may even be counterproductive, Heloise suggests, in that they tend to confuse ‘spirit’ with ‘matter’, inner virtue with the mere ‘show of virtue’.⁵⁹

Examples abound of Heloise's tendency to shift her argument from the special needs of women to the spiritual needs of all religious men and women. She refers several times to the new Augustinian canons whose simple rule and unencumbered way of life, though far from following strict, monastic observances, have won them favor and respectability. There is more than a hint of rebellion in her tone when she reminds Abelard that the canons are men ‘who consider themselves not at all inferior to monks, although we see them wearing linen and eating meat.’⁶⁰ Again, she does not distinguish between men and women when she castigates those religious who hastily profess the detailed Rule of St. Benedict, then ignore its precepts. However, immediately following her reproval Heloise writes:

We must take precautions not to presume for women a burden under which we see nearly all men fall or else they abandon it. We observe that the world has grown old, and man himself along with everything else of the earth has lost his natural vigor. And so too, in the words of Truth, the love not just of many but of nearly all men has grown cold, so that clearly it is necessary to temper or change according to man's condition in the present those rules which were written for men.⁶¹

Here Heloise seems to return to the premise of feminine weakness only to abandon it within a few lines, moving quickly from the weakness of women to the weakness of all men and all living things of the world. Clearly, it is ‘man's condition’ that has become Heloise's subject; the need for spiritual redirection is universal in an aging world where nearly all Christians fall beneath their burdens.

In the final third of Heloise's letter, she grows more bold and drops all pretense of arguing from the sole premise of women's weakness. Instead, she turns to the universal terms of Abelard's theology for her argument. Using monastic rules regarding the eating of meat as an example of the misdirected effort to control unimportant details, Heloise pleads in Abelardian terms for less emphasis in religious rules on ‘those areas lying between good and evil, which are called indifferent.’⁶² Echoing Abelard's views so closely that one editor has concluded that either Heloise is quoting Abelard directly or Abelard's later works draw from Heloise's letter, Heloise repeatedly distinguishes between intentions, which determine sinfulness, and outward actions, which are always morally neutral.⁶³ In language that must have sounded familiar to the author of Scito te ipsum, Heloise points out that what distinguishes Jew from Christian, and Old Law from New Dispensation, is that ‘true Christians are totally occupied with the inner man’ rather than with outward works.⁶⁴ Relying frequently on passages from Paul to the Romans, also a key text in Abelard's moral theology, Heloise argues that ‘love alone distinguishes between the children of God and those of the devil.’⁶⁵ And the love that God requires is not necessarily achieved by adhering to man-made and therefore arbitrary religious rules, but by accepting the grace and ‘freedom of the Gospel’ (evangelicae libert[as]).⁶⁶

Heloise boldly assigns to the category of morally indifferent acts a host of subjects ordinarily regulated by traditional religious rules. She not only rejects the rules governing the eating of meat but implies that all fasting regulations which go beyond what the Church generally requires of Christians may be inappropriate, since Christians should seek ‘to abstain more from vice than from food’.⁶⁷ On the subject of physical labor, Heloise is even more strident, perhaps in response to increasing complaints during this period, especially from male Cistercian houses, about ‘idle’ nuns who expected nearby monks to attend to their material needs.⁶⁸ Heloise attacks this argument directly and on several fronts. Noting that she in no way intends to shirk labor ‘when necessity demands it’, she nevertheless flatly denies that work in itself has any spiritual value, a denial that seems to fly in the face of the Cistercian emphasis on the value of physical labor. Using battle imagery, Heloise derides those who ‘bitterly complain less about what tyrants take from them by force’ (rapiunt) than about their obligation, sanctioned by apostolic concession and even by Christ himself, to provide for the material needs of holy women who are wholly occupied with spiritual things.⁶⁹

Heloise's argument concerning the primacy of the interior life overrules governing external behavior captures remarkably well the essence of the coming evangelical movement, which will rebel against overly elaborate and elitist religious rules in favor of an ideal of personal perfection as defined by the simple precepts of the Gospel. Nevertheless, her argument also seriously undermines the modest request, with which her letter began, for certain specific changes in the existing rule model. It certainly puts Abelard in a difficult position. On the one hand, Heloise has requested of him a new religious rule, and she has framed her request in terms of the most urgent obligation: if Abelard wants her to set aside her immoderate grief and preoccupation with their past, he has it in his power, she says, to offer a worthy replacement for her loss, in the form of a suitable and workable religious rule. On the other hand, she seems to reject, as either irrelevant or at least inadequate, much of the stuff of which religious rules are made, specific precepts regulating the external lives of monks and nuns, their food, drink, clothes and work. Furthermore, her rejection takes a peculiarly Abelardian form, showing how Abelard's own moral theology casts considerable doubt upon what she sees as a basic premise of the Rule of St. Benedict: that the inner life can be to some extent controlled and perhaps even judged by outward behavior. Thus Heloise's letter seems to fall into rather disjointed halves: one questions whether certain particulars of the Benedictine Rule are appropriate for women, while the other questions whether most rules regarding external particulars can affect the inner lives of Christians.

The object of Heloise's request, then, seems not to be a traditional religious rule at all, but some new form of rule that will help more directly to guide the inner life. But how? For Heloise, the goals of the spiritual life are absolute and strictly interior. The passages discussed above, as well as numerous other passages concerning the worthlessness of works without faith or love, make that much clear. Yet religious rules, as Heloise knows them, have more to do with works than with love. Although she never doubts that certain works are essential to religious life, namely, celibacy and poverty, she in fact has very little to say about them. The only facet of traditional religious rules in which Heloise shows very much interest is prayer. Close to the very end of her third letter, she begins to emphasize what she has only mentioned in passing until now, namely, that her rejection of bodily regulations is meant to foster increased attention to the Opus Dei, or divine office. In the area of prayer, Heloise actually requests more detailed prescriptions, asking Abelard to concern himself especially with directions regarding the order and distribution of psalms, and who should read the night offices.⁷⁰ Heloise's continuing interest in prayer is attested indirectly by the many prayers, hymns, and sermons which Abelard composed and delivered to the Paraclete at what he says was Heloise's ‘urgent request’.⁷¹ Thus the religious life which Heloise imagines can be defined, outwardly at least, quite simply. ‘It should be enough for our infirmity’, Heloise reasons, if religious women live ‘continently and without possessions, wholly occupied with the divine office’.⁷²

It may seem surprising that in spite of Heloise's request for rules regarding prayer, and her ample arguments against rules regarding exterior things, we hear very little in this letter about what she implies is the only goal of the religious life, that is, a loving spiritual relationship with God. The absence of this topic is especially noticeable in light of Abelard's previous letter, in which he invites Heloise to join in a rich, spiritual relationship with Christ, urging her, for example, to participate imaginatively as one of the women who witnessed the passion and death of Christ. His meditation on the Passion, in its vivid detail and in its emotionalism, is reminiscent of the justly famous meditations of Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), included as part of his religious rule for recluses, De institutione inclusarum.⁷³ A close contemporary of Heloise, Aelred seems to have shared some of her concerns regarding religious rules, for he divides his rule for women into an ‘outer’ followed by an ‘inner’ rule. For Aelred, however, the relationship between the two rules is not problematic: the richly sensuous meditations on the life of Christ, which compose his inner rule, serve as a kind of reward for the recluse who has achieved success in living the ascetic life defined in the outer rule. Aelred's emphasis on detailed, external rules follows directly from his faith in the Cistercian ideal of exact observance of the Rule of St. Benedict.⁷⁴

But in Heloise's case, as we have seen, the ascetic life as defined in the Benedictine Rule has not led to the withdrawal from the world that both Aelred and Abelard have assumed. Unconvinced of any automatic relationship between the interior life and the observance of a religious rule, Heloise consistently avoids the meditative mode in her works. Even in her last extant communication with Abelard, the so-called Problemata, Heloise is still taken up with particular, probing, and scholarly questions about Scripture. In the letter that we have been examining, instead of ending with a description of, or even a yearning for, the rich spiritual love that Abelard had depicted, Heloise provides as if in its place the image of a rather severe, probing God, who demands our love but who seems to judge its quality by searching out our ‘hidden thoughts’ or ‘secret places’, where ‘evil thoughts’ of ‘adultery or murder’ may be lurking in our hearts. He is a God who demands pure, disinterested love but who also ‘tests the hearts and loins’.⁷⁵ In an earlier letter, where Heloise refers to the same phrase from Ps 8, it is no wonder that she speaks not of God's love but of his judgment.⁷⁶ The rule that Heloise imagines, then, is far from Aelred's inner rule, or the inner rule of love later composed by the author of the Ancrene Wisse, who borrows the term ‘inner rule’ from Aelred.⁷⁷ Heloise focuses on the interior life more as a theoretical than as an applied principle. In comparison with Abelard's or Aelred's meditations, or the emphasis on love in the Ancrene Wisse, Heloise's argument for a new rule seems rather technical.

Other readers, especially Gilson, have noted the ‘absence’ of God in Heloise's first two letters, where the subject matter, Heloise's continuing desire and torment, makes obvious the gap Heloise experiences between herself and God. But in her third letter also, in spite of its religious subject, God is at least far distant, if not altogether absent, not because Heloise has defiantly excluded him, but because she has yet to find him. Her third letter provides proof that she is still searching, intellectually as well as emotionally, and is best understood, in my view, as a more institutionally-centered version of what she has asked of Abelard all along: consolation and guidance for an unruly heart, her own as well as the hearts of others who might fear God's judgment even as they seek his love. While some might believe that professing and following an established religious rule ensures salvation, Heloise proves herself throughout her letters as not the sort to take consolation so easily, nor is her faith in the institution of monasticism so secure. Abelard has reasoned that Heloise ought to take what consolation the religious life has to offer, redirecting her heart and her desire to Christ. Nowhere in her letters does Heloise refuse; instead, she asks, in effect, how. She prefaces her request for a religious rule with a thought reminiscent of a passage in Gregory's Regula pastoralis: ‘Nothing is less under our control than the heart’, to which Heloise adds emphatically, ‘rather than being able to command it, we are forced to obey it’.⁷⁸

This aphorism provides a key to understanding not only Heloise's third letter but all of her letters to Abelard. The immediate context bears repeating: Abelard has asked Heloise to stop dwelling on her loss and turn her attention instead to her present spiritual life. Heloise, in fact, has focused in her first two letters on her present spiritual life, complex and less than ideal though it might be, but Abelard has rejected her version of herself because it is unconverted, still ‘turning’ toward the past. In her third letter, Heloise agrees willingly to change the direction of her letters to Abelard, but she also emphasizes that she cannot so easily change her heart's turning, because her heart is not yet subject to her will. The clear implication in Heloise's request for a new religious rule is that neither Abelard nor St. Benedict's Rule has as yet taught her and her charges a way to control their hearts.

This statement is not meant to make Heloise sound perverse, and certainly not ‘cynical’, anymore than Augustine is perverse or cynical in wondering in book 8 of his Confessions why he can will his hand but not his heart to obey his commands. Heloise's supposed blasphemy and defiance in her two most famous letters are misreadings stemming from unfamiliarity with Heloise's contentious, dialectical style, and, perhaps, with her third letter. At heart, Heloise is certainly not a libertine, nor is she primarily the Roman heroine that Gilson and even Heloise herself portrays her at times to be.⁷⁹ Instead, she remains throughout her letters a thoroughly Christian thinker, influenced by some of the twelfth-century's most sophisticated theology, a moral rigorist who learned her moral theology from Peter Abelard, one of the age's least compromising of moral theologians.⁸⁰ At times, she seems to outdo the master in her spiritual demands. Indeed, it is primarily because she is so uncompromising in her spiritual goals that she seems so sinful and sensuous in her two early letters and that she boldly demands a new religious rule in her third letter to Abelard. While Abelard depicts her as winning the heavenly ‘crown’ by continually overcoming her desire, Heloise sees herself in her first two letters as having lost the battle because, in spite of her efforts, her desire continues, or at least her memory of the pleasures of satisfying carnal desire. Unlike Abelard, who distinguishes between desire and consent, the constitutive element of sin, Heloise seems to equate the two and thus to damn herself.⁸¹ While Abelard repeatedly pictures Heloise as the model bride of Christ because she appears to be a successful abbess, Heloise, once again rigorously following Abelard's theology, presents herself as ungrateful and offensive to God. In his Redemptive theory, Abelard argues that Christ's death was purely an act of love, calling for an equally pure and disinterested love on man's part.⁸² Heloise seems to agree, and having searched her heart, judges that while she may have loved Abelard disinterestedly, she has yet to respond to God with the wholly disinterested act of love which she believes that he requires.⁸³

Thus the argument that Heloise uses in her third letter as the basis of her plea for a new religious rule, namely, that outer works can add nothing to faith, is not finally a comforting or liberating thought for Heloise. A simpler religious rule, rather than being merely a concession to female weakness, as Heloise sometimes characterizes it, may in fact make more acute the problem of her own salvation, because it demands that its followers focus squarely on the interior life that has caused Heloise so much torment. Although she seeks a less burdensome exterior rule, she remains uncompromising in her belief that her salvation depends upon fulfillment of the most basic and irreducible requirements of the spiritual life. In her second letter, she defines what she sees as the only legitimate goal of the spiritual life in its most absolute form: ‘to do good and to turn from evil’, as the psalm says, and to do both, Heloise adds, for the love of God alone.⁸⁴ While Abelard writes consistently of their mutual conversion ‘from the world’, Heloise is unable to consider herself converted until she can ‘turn from evil’ absolutely by means of ‘true contrition’ (vera poenitentia) for her sins, the same condition that Abelard argues in his Ethics is essential to forgiveness.⁸⁵ But pure contrition, as it will come to be called later in the century, the sorrow which springs solely from love of God rather than fear of punishment, is very rare, Heloise realizes, agreeing with Ambrose that it is easier to find an innocent man than a truly repentant one.⁸⁶ Indeed, Heloise reminds Abelard in her second letter, absolute contrition and conversion came to Abelard through the ‘grace’ of his castration, which literally and spiritually cut him off from his past and what he calls the sole source of his desire.⁸⁷ In fact, for Abelard, castration is an accurate emblem for true conversion, and in a remarkable passage Abelard associates both castration and conversion with cleansing, freedom from desire, and a return to innocence.⁸⁸

This sudden, complete conversion, though rarely achieved so violently, was a popular motif in eleventh and twelfth century literature. And it is precisely what Heloise has not yet experienced. Neither her experience in the world nor her penitential life in the monastery has taught her a way of cutting herself off, so to speak, from her past and her desires. Yet that is what both she and Abelard believe God requires of those who love him, and what St. Benedict's Rule hopes to encourage by means of strictly regulating the exterior life. Lacking pure contrition and pure love, Heloise can find no place for herself in the spiritual landscape created for her. Abelard in his letters and Benedict in his Rule describe that landscape in terms of heroic armies, combat, victories and losses, strength and power, weapons and crowns.⁸⁹ In fact, Heloise finally rejects this traditional heroic description of her spiritual life. At the very end of her second letter, Heloise writes:

I do not wish you to exhort me to virtue and call me forth to the battle, saying ‘Virtue is made perfect in weakness’ and ‘He will not be crowned who has not struggled rightfully.’ I do not seek the crown of victory. It is enough for me to avoid danger. Avoiding danger is safer than engaging in battle. In whatever corner of heaven God places me, it will be enough for me. None will be envious of another there, where whatever each has will be sufficient.⁹⁰

Heloise caps this essentially non-heroic view of spirituality with a quotation from Jerome, an ironic choice considering that Jerome is Abelard's favorite model of spiritual heroism: ‘I confess my weakness; I do not wish to fight in the hope of victory lest I lose the victory at some time. What need is there to let go of what is certain and strive after what is uncertain.’⁹¹ Here Heloise, who has herself often described her struggle in hyperbolic terms, finally rejects Abelard's larger-than-life portrayal of her spiritual state, probably for the same reason that she had rejected Abelard's abstract, providential view of their conversion, because it does not adequately account for the complex, unidealized particulars in her life, which for Heloise still have extraordinary power. Measured by Abelard's absolute standards of pure love, true contrition, final conversion and victories over desires, Heloise judges herself to have lost her spiritual battle for perfection. But this does not mean that Heloise capitulates to Abelard's arguments; still less does she glorify her failure. On the contrary, here and especially in her next letter Heloise begins, at first tentatively and then more surely, to break free from the very notion of absolute victory as a suitable spiritual ideal, to discover ‘any corner whatever of heaven’ reserved for herself and those like her who have quit the battle for perfection but who struggle on in weakness without any definitive victories or signs of spiritual progress.

Heloise's third letter to Abelard marks a turning point not because it demonstrates her conversion or even predicts it, but because in this discursive exploration of the meaning of the religious life she begins to move away from those definitions of the spiritual life which depend upon an absolute break with the world and the past. The theory of Heloise's conversion, so often evoked to ‘explain’ her third letter, seems extraneous once we examine more closely the supposed gap between Heloise's personal confessions of weakness and her request for a new religious rule. It is not that God is absent in the early letters but present in the later ones. As we have seen, Heloise's critique does not depend upon her experience of a rich interior spiritual life. On the contrary, she avoids the popular meditative mode of Abelard and Aelred as surely in her third letter as in her previous ones.

Nor can Heloise be described as sensuous in one half of the correspondence and serious in the other. She is highly serious throughout, as Gilson demonstrates, whether analyzing her own spiritual inadequacies or those of the Benedictine Rule. In her personal letters she concerns herself primarily with her failure to achieve Abelard's model of spiritual perfection, whether embodied in his heroic terminology, his logical but highly abstract treatment of their past, especially of their conversions, or his theology of pure contrition and disinterested love. In her third letter, she directs her attention toward a different but related model of perfection embodied in the Benedictine Rule, which in Heloise's reading becomes another example of a kind of misplaced heroism, depending as it does on highly regulated asceticism to achieve spiritual perfection. Arguing first of all that such an athletic approach to spirituality is inappropriate for religious women (and it may help to recall that ascesis comes from the Greek verb meaning ‘to exercise’), she moves toward a reformulation of the same critique she had used in her so-called personal letters, except that now the issue is not how Abelard has treated her spiritual dilemma, but how the Benedictine Rule treats the spiritual life in general. Heloise argues that the Benedictine Rule as practiced, like Abelard in his dealings with Heloise, ignores crucial differences between weak and strong, overvalues morally neutral external works, and, most importantly, fails adequately to guide the often unruly inner life, even though for Christians the interior life is all that matters. In Heloise's view, the result of both Abelard's and St. Benedict's spiritual models is the same, a kind of inauthenticity that Heloise experiences as a wide gap between her interior experience and her external circumstances.

Heloise's search for her own authenticity takes the form in her third letter of a forcefully presented request that Abelard define the rules for attaining that ‘corner of heaven’ that she has described as her goal. The rule which she requests, though simpler than most religious rules, is not necessarily easier, for Heloise knows full well that the new rule cannot serve as a substitute for the rich spiritual life that Abelard has falsely presumed she already enjoys. In fact, that the one cannot possibly be confused with the other is, for Heloise, a strong point in the new rule's favor, because it lessens the danger she sees in all religious rules, namely, that they tend to substitute works for faith. What the new rule emphasizing the simple apostolic life of celibacy and prayer can do, Heloise suggests, in addition to providing some practical guidance on the subject of prayer, is to help the nuns of the Paraclete, including herself, to focus more directly on the Gospel's irreducible demands that true Christians seek to do good and avoid evil for the love of God, requirements which entail an ongoing interior struggle with one's motives, memories, and desires. Most of what is needed in the new rule can be summarized, Heloise asserts, in a line from Persius: ‘Do not look outside of yourself.’⁹² Most other rules are superfluous. Heloise asks for guidance concerning prayer, because she sees prayer as providing her only hope, not of perfection, but of salvation. Fearful of God's judgment and sure that he judges only the ‘hidden places’ of the heart, whose secrets she has already revealed, Heloise hopes yet for grace, realizing that God accepts not only prayers of praise but also those asking for help. Only rarely does Heloise refer directly to this modest hope, but in the climax of her letter she begs Abelard to substitute interior for exterior rules, reminding him that God himself says that he prefers cries for help to outward sacrifices, saying, ‘Call on me in time of trouble and I will rescue you, and you shall honor me.’⁹³

Heloise's call to Abelard for help is neither a sign of defeat nor of conversion. It is instead a reasoned, learned critique of contemporary monastic life in light of her own history as well as her theology. Few writers in the twelfth century were prepared to offer such a balanced theoretical and practical appraisal of the monastic life.

Notes

1. (Paris, 1938; 2nd revised edition, 1948), trans. L. K. Shook (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1960), p. 166. In this article I have used for all letters except Abelard's so-called Historia calamitatum and Heloise's so-called Problemata the excellent edition of J. T. Muckle, ‘The Personal Letters between Abelard and Heloise’, Mediaeval Studies 15 (1953) 47-94 and ‘The Letter of Heloise on Religious Life and Abelard's First Reply’, ibid. 17 (1955) 240-81. In the notes that follow, I will cite these letters by number and page according to Muckle's editions (for example, 5.246=Letter 5, p. 246). For the Historia calamitatum, I have used the third edition of Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1967). The Problemata appear in PL 178.677-730. Most of the correspondence, with the exception of the Problemata, has been translated along with several additional relevant documents by Betty Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Baltimore, 1974). There is some confusion concerning how the letters should be numbered. Both Muckle and Radice number the letters beginning with Heloise's first letter, rather than with Abelard's autobiographical letter to a friend which in fact seems to initiate Heloise's letters. Thus the letter with which this essay is primarily concerned, Heloise's third letter, is referred to as Letter 5 here, following Muckle's edition, but as Letter 6 in many other studies.

2. ‘Fraud, Fiction and Borrowing in the Correspondence of Abelard and Heloise’ in Pierre Abélard—Pierre le Vénérable (Colloques internationaux du Centre national de la recherche scientifique 546; Paris, 1975), pp. 469-506; see also the extensive debate following this controversial address, pp. 507-11, and ‘A Reconsideration of the Authenticity of the Correspondence of Abelard and Heloise’ in Petrus Abaelardus (1079-1142): Person, Werk und Wirkung, ed. Rudolf Thomas et al. (Trierer Theologische Studien 38; Trier, 1980), pp. 41-52. These two important volumes of essays will hereafter be cited as Colloque and Trier 1980. Benton's retraction was due largely to the convincing refutation of his earlier arguments by Chrysogonus Waddell, in still unpublished research.

3. What we might call the classic arguments against the authenticity of the correspondence were made by: Ludovic Lalanne, ‘Quelques doutes sur l'authenticité de la correspondance amoureuse d'Héloïse et d'Abélard’, La correspondance littéraire 1 (1856) 27-33; Bernhard Schmeidler, ‘Der Briefwechsel zwischen Abälard und Heloise: eine Fälschung’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 11 (1913) 1-30, ‘Der Briefwechsel zwischen Abälard und Heloise als eine literarische Fiktion Abälards’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 54 (1935) 323-38, and ‘Der Briefwechsel zwischen Abaelard und Heloise dennoch eine literarische Fiction Abaelards’, Revue bénédictine 52 (1940) 85 95; Charlotte Charrier, Héloïse dans l'histoire et dans la légende (Paris, 1933), especially pp. 3-30, 182-229. It was these arguments that Gilson countered in Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 145-66. Numerous summaries, refinements and reevaluations have followed the Schmeidler-Gilson debate. See especially: Muckle, ‘Personal Letters’, 48-67; Jacques Monfrin, ‘Le problème de l'authenticité de la correspondance d'Abélard et d'Héloïse’ in Colloque, pp. 409-24; Peter von Moos, Mittelalterforschung und Ideologiekritik: Der Gelehrtenstreit um Héloise (Kritische Information 15; Munich, 1974) and ‘Was kommt nach der Authentizitätsdebatte über die Briefe Abaelards und Heloises?’ in Trier 1980, pp. 75-100; D. E. Luscombe, ‘The Letters of Abelard and Heloise since “Cluny 1972”’ in Trier 1980, pp. 19-39. The most innovative approaches to appear since Gilson's study, in addition to von Moos' studies just cited, are Peter M. Dronke, Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies (Glasgow, 1976) and Jean LeClercq's ‘Modern Psychology and the Interpretation of Medieval Texts’, Speculum 48 (1973) 476-90. The most recent contributions to the authenticity debate are cited below in n. 4.

4. ‘Excursus: Did Abelard Write Heloise's Third Letter?’ in Women Writers of the Middle Ages. A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†1310) (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 140-43. For a different but equally compelling argument which can be read as a response to both of Benton's theories, see C. S. Jaeger, ‘The Prologue to the Historia calamitatum and the “Authenticity Question”’, Euphorion 74 (1980) 1-15.

5. ‘Was kommt nach der Authentizitätsdebatte’, 75-100.

6. Leclercq's study of the relationship between psychology and rhetoric in the letters is a good example of how more broadly based studies can help to resolve the authenticity question. See ‘Modern Psychology and the Interpretation of Medieval Texts’, cited above in n. 3. See also Jaeger, ‘The Prologue to the Historia calamitatum’, and Luscombe, ‘The Letters of Heloise and Abelard’, 23-31.

7. On the unity of concerns in Abelard's letters see Mary Martin McLaughlin, ‘Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women: Twelfth Century “Feminism” in Theory and Practice’ in Colloque, pp. 287-333.

8. Not only have Heloise's first two letters been adapted and translated into many languages and literary forms, but this romantic Heloise has also been recreated for Caedmon Records by Claire Bloom, reading from Heloise's early letters opposite Claude Rains' Abelard. (The other side contains readings from The Song of Songs.) D. W. Robertson, Jr., Abelard and Heloise (New York, 1972), pp. 54, 120-24, argues that medieval readers would have responded only to the holy and wise Heloise (whom he identifies as the ‘historical Heloise’) and that the notion of a romantic Heloise is an anachronism, a theory which Dronke forcefully counters in Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies. Muckle, Heloise's editor, is suspicious of the authenticity of parts of Heloise's first two letters primarily because of the split they suggest between ‘a religious superior bound by religious vows, and … a woman of sensual mind, serving Abelard and not God’ (‘Personal Letters’, 59). On the ‘myth of Heloise’ tragically bound to her love for Abelard see von Moos, ‘Le silence d'Héloïse’, 425-30 and passim, who calls this romantic myth ‘a vulgarization’ of the more complex story that the letters tell.

9. Radice, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, uses these titles. Muckle's edition distinguishes similarly between ‘The Personal Letters’ and those ‘on Religious Life’. Muckle is so concerned to keep the ‘personal’ material intact that he prints the opening of Heloise's third letter twice, at the end of the so-called personal letters and again at the beginning of the so-called religious letters, because he judges it to be ‘of a personal character’ (‘Letter of Heloise’, 240).

10. For discussions or descriptions of this letter see: Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 134-40; Charrier, Héloïse dans l'histoire et la légende, pp. 220-29; Peter M. Dronke, ‘Heloise and Marianne: Some Reconsiderations’, Romanische Forschungen 72 (1960) 236-40 and ‘Heloise’ in Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 127-34.

11. ‘The Letters of Abelard and Heloise’ in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (New York, 1970), p. 101.

12. See, for example, Peggy Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln, Neb., 1982). In her perceptive study of Heloise's first two letters, she dismisses the third letter as evidence that Heloise ‘capitulates to Abelard's consistent substitution of the Christian symbolic context for the personal, erotic one’, and incorrectly identifies Heloise's tone in the opening of her third letter as ‘almost cynical’ (pp. 8-9).

13. Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 134-43.

14. ‘Heloise and Marianne: Some Reconsiderations’, 236-40, and especially ‘Heloise’, 127-34.

15. On the exemplary nature of the correspondence see: Robertson, Abelard and Heloise, pp. 119-35; Benton, ‘Fraud, Fiction and Borrowing’, 473; von Moos, ‘Le silence d'Héloïse’, 431 n. 12 and 456-68; and Luscombe's review of the issue in ‘Letters of Heloise and Abelard’, 25-31. On many points, my views are in sympathy with those of von Moos, and I am frequently indebted to his discursive essay. Yet I am finally confused by von Moos's so-called method, the elaboration of which takes up much of his lengthy article. On the one hand, he deplores ‘the method of interpreting works according to the norms of our own times’, yet he never does tell us just how we are to arrive at the sought after ‘objective’ view. He suggests, following Jauss, that we attend carefully to the earliest reception of Heloise's works, but factual evidence in this area is thin, as von Moos admits, and seems contradictory. Such evidence requires as much interpretation as the letters themselves. Finally, von Moos acknowledges that none of us can be ‘pure medievalists’ (p. 463). The distinction between the ‘impure’ medievalist who, like von Moos himself, ‘leaves traces of the values which are interesting to him’ and the apparently ‘naive’ medievalist who interprets ‘according to the norms of his own times’ remains unclear. Perhaps it is simply that the one, like Heloise herself, confesses his true position, while the other conceals it. The question then becomes the extent to which the ‘confusion’ should be the central focus of literary criticism.

16. Dronke, ‘Heloise’, 130 makes a similar point. On the absence of a traditional conversion experience, see also Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 95-97.

17. Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century. Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago, 1968), especially ‘Monks, Canons, and Laymen in Search of the Apostolic Life’, pp. 202-38, and ‘The Evangelical Awakening’, pp. 239-69.

18. For somewhat differing but often sympathetic views of the structure of Heloise's letters seen as a whole, see: Monfrin, ‘Le problème de l'authenticité’, 419-21; von Moos, ‘Le silence d'Héloïse’, 425-68 and Dronke, ‘Heloise’, 127-39.

19. 5.241-42: ‘Ne me forte in aliquo de inobedientia causari queas, verbis etiam immoderati doloris tuae frenum impositum est iussionis ut ab his mihi saltem in scribendo temperem a quibus in sermone non tam difficile quam impossibile est providere. Nihil enim minus in nostra est potestate quam animus, eique magis obedire cogimur quam imperare possimus. Unde et cum nos eius affectiones stimulant, nemo earum subitos impulsus ita repulerit ut non in effecta facile prorumpant, et se per verba facilius effluant quae promptiores animi passionum sunt notae, secundum quod scriptum est: Ex abundantia enim cordis os loquitur. Revocabo itaque manum a scripto in quibus linguam a verbis temperare non valeo. Utinam sic animus dolentis parere promptus sit quemadmodum dextra scribentis.’

    Aliquod tamen dolori remedium vales conferre si non hunc omnino possis auferre. Ut enim insertum clavum alius expellit, sic cogitatio nova priorem excludit cum alias intentus animus priorum memoriam dimittere cogitur aut intermittere. Tanto vero amplius cogitatio quaelibet animum occupat, et ab aliis deducit, quanto quod cogitatur honestius aestimatur, et quo intendimus animum magis videtur necessarium.’ Translations from the Latin are my own, although they are often indebted to the excellent translation of Radice, Letters of Abelard and Heloise. I have also consulted the translation of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (London, 1925).

20. Abelard and Heloise, pp. 134-35. It is difficult to see how anything in Heloise's previous letters can be interpreted as ‘talk about abandoning the Paraclete’. On the contrary, Heloise's loyalty to the Paraclete and to her responsibilities as fosterer of the abbey's interests are evident throughout the correspondence. On Heloise as an effective patroness of the Paraclete, see Luscombe, ‘The Letters of Heloise and Abelard’, 22-23.

21. Robertson's description of Heloise's turn as ‘whole-hearted’ is particularly unfortunate given what Heloise says here about her heart.

22. See ‘Heloise’, 129. For a useful account of the popular conversion narrative see Jean-Charles Payen, Le motif du repentir dans la littérature française médiévale (des origines à 1230) (Geneva, 1967), pp. 33-44.

23. Lester K. Little, ‘Intellectual Training and Attitudes toward Reform, 1075-1150’ in Colloque, p. 245 notes ‘an obvious and great need for a study of medieval conversion experience.’ In the twelfth century, the term ‘conversio’ (literally ‘turning’) could refer to several quite different events or states: the dramatic and often sudden change of heart so often described in conversion stories; the less dramatic change marked by one's entry to life in a monastery; or, simply, the monastic life itself. Abelard and Heloise frequently use the term (they use conversio and conversatio interchangeably) to refer to their entrance into religious life, and both make clear that this original ‘conversio’ bore no relationship to true spiritual conversion or change of heart, because, as Abelard says, their change of life was instigated by shame alone rather than by grace (see Monfrin, Historia calamitatum, ll. 623-625). While in his later letters Abelard prefers to gloss over the differences between the two kinds of conversion, implying that spiritual conversion inevitably follows upon entrance to monastic life, Heloise almost always follows her use of the term ‘conversio’ with some ironic reminder of the gap she continues to perceive between true conversion and her hasty entrance into religious life at Abelard's command.

24. For abundant evidence of the tendency by critics to ‘read’ Heloise's silence as the sign of her heroic passion, see von Moos, ‘Le silence d'Héloïse’, 425-30.

25. Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 101-102.

26. Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire, p. 17 discusses ‘the pretext of submission’, arguing that Heloise's strategy is always to ‘keep alive the possibility of an erotic subtext’. See also Dronke, ‘Heloise’, 134.

27. Dronke, in a stylistic analysis of Heloise's letters, notes frequent examples of the same ‘highly-wrought diction’ in her third letter as that which predominates in her previous letters; see ‘Heloise's Problemata and Letters: Some Question of Form and Content’ in Trier 1980, p. 55.

28. See ‘Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women’ (cited above, n. 7).

29. See also Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 134-40 on the ironies of Heloise's apparently ‘harmless’ request. In seeming to disguise her intent, Heloise is by no means being coy. Instead she may find herself caught between two conflicting ideologies recently described by Penny Shine Gold as follows: ‘The Christian monastic experience for women was characterized by a basic contradiction entirely absent from the male experience. On the one hand, monastic life offered one of the few non-domestic outlets for women's capabilities and talents and provided for both education and a certain degree of autonomy. … On the other hand, female religious in the Christian tradition rarely, if ever, were able to achieve full autonomy or independence from male scrutiny, and women's ability to enter and enjoy the religious life was circumscribed by an ideology of feminine weakness that implied that female religious were unable to manage their own affairs’ (The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France [Chicago, 1985], p. 76).

30. 5.242; see above, n. 15.

31. Muckle cites Cicero, Tusc. disp. 4.35.75 for this passage (5.242 n. 12), but both Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, p. 188 n. 21 and Dronke, ‘Heloise’, 305 n. 39 suggest that Heloise's wording more closely resembles Jerome, Epist. 125.14, which Heloise also cites in the Problemata.

32. See above, n. 12.

33. The best recent studies of the Cluniac-Cistercian debate are: Louis J. Lekai, The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality ([Kent, Ohio], 1977), pp. 21-32; David Knowles, ‘Cistercians and Cluniacs: The Controversy between St Bernard and Peter the Venerable’ in The Historian and Character and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 50-75; Adriaan H. Bredero, ‘Cluny et Cîteaux au XII^eme siècle: les origines de la controverse’, Studi medievali, 3rd Ser., 12 (1971) 135-75. See also the lucid account of R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 230-72 and the somewhat opposing view of Cistercian ideals in Jean Leclercq, ‘Profession according to the Rule of St Benedict’ in Rule and Life: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, ed. M. Basil Pennington (Spencer, Mass., 1971), pp. 117-49. For the early history of the Augustinians and their quarrel with the Rule of St. Benedict, see J. C. Dickinson, The Origins of the Austin Canons and Their Introduction into England (London, 1950), pp. 49-72. For an excellent recent overview of the larger context of the religious reform movement of the twelfth century, especially its rhetorical component, see Giles Constable, ‘Renewal and Reform in Religious Life: Concepts and Realities’ in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 37-67.

34. On the evangelical movement, see Chenu as cited above, n. 13.

35. Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, p. 111 refers to the Cluniac-Cistercian debate as a ‘little monastic quarrel’, and, if we consider some of its more extreme polemics, his is not an entirely unfair characterization. Nearly a century after the debate had begun, this parochial element in the debate was still prominent enough to arouse the indignation of the anonymous author of Ancrene Wisse: ‘Yef ei unweote easkeð ow of hwet ordre ȝe beon, as summe doð, þe telleð me, þe siheð þe gneat & swolheð þ flehe, ondswerieð of Seín Iames, þe wes godes apostel. … Yef him puncheð wunder & sullich of swuch ondswere, easkið him hwet beo ordre, & hwer he funde in hali writ religiun openlukest descríueþ & isutelet þen is i Seín Iames canonial epistel. He … descriueð religiun nowðer hwit ne blac, ne nempneð he in his ordre. Ah moni siheð þe gneat ant swolheð þe flehe, þet is, makeð muche strengðe þer as is þe leaste. Pawel þe earste ancre, Antoníe & Arsenie, Makarie & te oþre neren ha religiuse & of Seín Iames ordre? … wið hare greate matten & hare hearde heren neren ha of god ordre, & hweðer hwite oðer blake as unwise ow easkið þe weneð þet ordre sitte i þe curtel’ (Ancrene Wisse. Edited from ms. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien [EETS ES 249; London, 1962], pp. 9-10).

36. Little, ‘Intellectual Training and Attitudes’, 235-49 speaks generally of what could be called a dialectical or urban style which arises in the twelfth-century urban schools, and which is often described in terms of the opposing monastic habit of perception. On the monastic style, see the classic study of Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York, 1961), pp. 233-86 and Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, pp. 300-309. It would be useful if more literary critics joined historians in studying this important difference in styles.

37. See, for example, 5.242 where Heloise sets side by side quotations from Jerome's letters to holy women and Ovid's Ars amatoria, and later (5.251) Heloise daringly juxtaposes a phrase from a psalm with a line from Persius' satires on the necessity of self-knowledge. Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, p. 135 finds particularly ironic Heloise's use of Ovid, whom Heloise calls ‘the doctor of sensuality and shame’ to support highly ascetic St. Jerome.

38. Although the subject was widely discussed in the monastic context beginning in the eleventh-century monastic reform movement, Chenu's earliest examples of academic interest in the vita apostolica occur in the last decade of the twelfth century. See Nature, Man, and Society, p. 250, and Constable, ‘Renewal and Reform in Religious Life’, 53-56. Heloise's letter on monastic life was written sometime after 1132, the approximate date of Abelard's Historia calamitatum, and before Abelard's death in 1142. The correspondence as a whole is usually dated 1132-35 (see Muckle's introduction, ‘Personal Letters’, 47-48).

39. St. Bernard's best known attack upon traditional Black monks, the Apology, has been translated by Michael Casey in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 1: Treatises I, edited M. Basil Pennington, 2 vols. (Spencer, Mass., 1970). Abelard, in a letter to Bernard, describes the latter's visit to the Paraclete as related to Abelard by Heloise (PL 178.335-40); see also Radice, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, pp. 37-38. For Peter's famous encomium to Heloise, see Letter 115 in The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 1.303-308 and the translation by Radice, pp. 277-84.

40. See 5.246-47, the paragraph beginning ‘Cuius quidem discretionis’. Later (5.248) Heloise analyzes a brief passage from chapter 40 of the Rule as evidence of Benedict's concessions to the times and speculates that Benedict was probably referring in the passage to a section of the Lives of the Fathers, which she quotes for comparison.

41. References abound to Benedict's ‘discretion’, to his sensitivity both to the needs of individual monks and to the particular times in which he lives. See especially 5.244, 246-47, 248.

42. See [Pranger, M. B. “Reading Anselm.” In The Artificiality of Christianity: Essays on the Poetics of Monasticism, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003], p. 237.

43. 5.246: ‘Quod quidem hoc tempore multi monasticae religionis temerarii professores, si diligentius attenderent, et in quam professionem iurarent antea providerent, atque ipsum Regulae tenorem studiose perscrutarentur, minus per ignorantiam offenderent, et per negligentiam peccarent. Nunc vero indiscrete omnes fere pariter ad monasticam conversionem currentes, inordinate suscepti, inordinatius vivunt, et eadem facilitate qua ignotam Regulam profitentur eam contemnentes, consuetudines quas volunt pro lege statuunt.’

44. On the Cistercian impulse to follow or even outdo St. Benedict in regulating every detail of daily life, see the opposing views of Southern, Western Society and the Church, pp. 251-59 and Leclercq, ‘Profession according to the Rule’, 138-39, and the balanced compromise of Giles Constable, ‘Renewal and Reform in Religious Life’, 57-59. Many of the relevant early Cistercian documents have been translated by Bede K. Lachner as an appendix in Lekai's The Cistercians: Ideal and Reality, pp. 442-66.

45. See especially Peter the Venerable's famous letter to St. Bernard in Constable's edition, 1.52-101.

46. Although there were numerous exceptions including, of course, Heloise herself, women who entered the convent were generally less well-trained in the trivium than their male counterparts. They thus came to the Rule less well-prepared to study it with the rigor Heloise seems to demand. On female education in the Middle Ages, see Joan M. Ferrante. ‘The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact, and Fantasy’ in Beyond Their Sex. Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia A. Labalme (New York, 1980), pp. 9-42.

47. On the ‘ideology of feminine weakness’ in monastic literature, see Gold, The Lady and the Virgin, pp. 76-115.

48. Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire, pp. 10-43 is especially sensitive to the sexual dialectics of the letters, the rhetorical strategies used by both Heloise and Abelard to gain the upper hand in the ongoing debate that runs through the correspondence. In Kamuf's view, Heloise consistently tries to reestablish ‘the destabilizing experience of the erotic’ (p. 19) while Abelard ‘adopts the aim of bringing Heloise to embrace castration—her own as well as his’ (p. 36).

49. 5.242-46. Dronke, ‘Heloise’, 130 makes a similar point.

50. 3.81: ‘Nec solum quae egimus, sed loca pariter et tempora in quibus haec egimus, ita tecum nostro infixa sunt animo, ut in ipsis omnia tecum agam, …’

51. 1.68.

52. Domino appears in Troyes, Bibliothèque Municipale 802, the most reliable manuscript among the seven extant copies of this letter, but in the other manuscripts the more symmetrical suo is read. For varying interpretations of these superscriptions see: Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 102-103; Dronke, ‘Heloise and Marianne’, 236-37 and ‘Heloise’, 127-28; and Radice, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 159 and n. 1. Domino is a particularly interesting reading in light of Heloise's arguments concerning her relation to Abelard, because it is an ambiguous term whose confusion is compounded by its context. In his previous letter, Abelard had repeatedly used the terms Dominus referring to God and domina referring to Heloise, especially in the beginning of his letter, where he argues that Heloise was mistaken in thinking of Abelard as her domino (3.77) because she became his domina when she became the bride of Christ, her true Dominus (4.83). Again at the end of his letter, Abelard repeats the term Dominus no fewer than five times, always referring unmistakeably to Christ, whom he has asked Heloise to take instead of Abelard as her only lord. Thus, when Heloise responds with a letter addressed to her Domino, we cannot help but wonder whether she refers to God or to Abelard. One suspects that the ambiguity is intentional, but that her primary referent is still Abelard. Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 102-103 interprets Domino in the superscription to refer to God and suggests that the salutation signifies Heloise's acknowledgement that ‘in so far as concerns the logical species—the nun—she is the Lord's.’ Radice's translation follows Gilson's closely: ‘God's own in species, his own as individual’ (Letters of Abelard and Heloise, p. 159). However, this interpretation not only overlooks the previous play upon the term in the letters, as just outlined, but also would argue for a radical departure from Heloise's usual style of address. In all of her letters the first term of Heloise's salutation consists of some form of address to Abelard. In her first salutation, in fact, she addresses her letter ‘Domino suo’, but there she modifies that ambiguous phrase by further defining her addressee as her ‘master’, ‘father’, ‘husband’, and ‘brother’, a conundrum whose only solution could be Abelard, Heloise's earthly husband and master at the same time that he is her spiritual father and brother. Given Heloise's consistency in always addressing her letters to Abelard, however elliptically, it seems unlikely that suddenly in her third letter she would adopt a new form of salutation. It should also be added that at the very end of her third letter Heloise refers unambiguously to Abelard as her domino (5.253). It would seem, then, that in her superscription domino refers primarily to Abelard, although she is now willing to qualify what had previously been described as Abelard's absolute mastery. In all likelihood, however, Heloise would welcome any confusion on her reader's part between Abelard and God as the appropriate referent for the first term of her superscription, in that it might serve to remind Abelard of the profound differences in their respective frames of reference. On the form of Heloise's salutations, see also Muckle's introduction (‘Personal Letters’, 50-51).

53. This is especially true in the superscription of Heloise's first letter (1.68): ‘Domino suo immo patri, coniugi suo immo fratri, ancilla sua immo filia, ipsius uxor immo soror, Abaelardo, Heloisa.’ While Abelard had ended his letter of consolation to a friend with an orderly series of pious reflections on the nature of divine providence and the clear path of righteousness, Heloise, in her superscription, reminds Abelard of the less orderly human perspective, particularly how very confusing her circumstances are, now that Abelard is both her secular master and her spiritual father, her husband and her brother. Heloise continually scrambles what Abelard depicts as clear, logical relationships. On Heloise's tendency to undo Abelard's logical statements, both in her salutations and elsewhere, see Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire, pp. 9-19.

54. ‘Heloise and Marianne’, 237. There Dronke states without further explanation that ‘the philosophical sense of “specialiter” would seem forced’ and prefers to translate the term simply as ‘especially’. But recently Dronke has revised his view; see ‘Heloise’, 127-28 for his new interpretation which agrees with the argument presented here. Indeed, it seems that Heloise, in juxtaposing ‘specialiter’ and ‘singulariter’, is precisely forcing a distinction upon the reader which can best be explained with reference to the philosophical distinction between species and individuals. This issue was, of course, of more than passing interest to Abelard, who not only treats the issue thoroughly in his philosophical writings but also builds the whole structure of his autobiographical letter upon the debate with his teacher, William of Champeaux, over the relation between individual things and universals. Abelard portrays himself as the winner of the debate and champion of the integrity of individual things as quite distinct from universals. Here Heloise, addressing her teacher, is perhaps subtly replaying that debate with herself in the starring role of defender of singulars, while Abelard is identified with William's old position. I am indebted to Mary Bartholemy, a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, for pointing out to me the various ways in which Heloise, more than Abelard, could appropriately be called a ‘nominalist’.

55. I would interpret what Abelard calls ‘Heloise's old complaint’ rather broadly. Abelard refers twice in Letter 4 to Heloise's ‘veteram illam et assiduam querelam’ (4.83,87). In both cases, he interprets the complaint as being directed against God's justice, and as having to do with Heloise's questioning of the divine order of things. Heloise does specifically complain that God treated Abelard unjustly, but her complaint is directed more toward the human rather than the divine order, for the human order, from her point of view at least, is full of incongruous details. Abelard's letters suggest that it is much easier for him than for Heloise to ascend to the eighth sphere, as it were, ignoring details in order to concentrate on God's grand scheme. Yet, in the story of his own calamities, Abelard is continually torn between the providential view of his history and a more limited, less idealistic view embodied in the figure of Fortune. This difference in the attitude of Heloise and Abelard in reading their own histories is the subject of a study in progress.

56. See Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 134-40 for an illuminating discussion of Heloise's critique of monastic rules in light of the Renaissance emphasis on reason in religion.

57. 5.245: ‘Ex quibus quidem verbis aperte colligitur quod quisquis evangelicis praeceptis continentiae virtutem addiderit, monasticam perfectionem implebit.

    Atque utinam ad hoc nostra religio conscendere posset ut Evangelium impleret, non transcenderet, nec plusquam christianae appeteremus esse. Hinc profecto, ni fallor, sancti decreverunt Patres non ita nobis sicut viris generalem aliquam regulam quasi novam legem praefigere, nec magnitudine votorum nostram infirmitatem onerare, …’

58. Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 137-38 makes a similar point, but views Heloise's remarks in light of Erasmus and other Renaissance thinkers. We need not look so far ahead to find strongly worded objections to overly exclusive man-made rules for religious life. See Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, pp. 221-22, and especially his analysis of the views of Peter the Chanter, pp. 256-57; Jean Leclercq, François Vandenbrouke, and Louis Bouyer, A History of Christian Spirituality, vol. 2: The Spirituality of the Middle Ages (London, 1968), pp. 257-58; and Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self. Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 15-18.

59. See 5.249-50,252.

60. 5.245.

61. 5.246: ‘Providendum itaque nobis est ne id oneris feminae praesumamus in quo viros fere iam universos succumbere videmus, immo et deficere. Senuisse iam mundum conspicimus hominesque ipsos cum ceteris quae mundi sunt pristinum naturae vigorem amisisse, et iuxta illud Veritatis ipsam caritatem non tam multorum quam fere omnium refriguisse ut iam videlicet pro qualitate hominum ipsas propter homines scriptas vel mutari vel temperari necesse sit Regulas.’

62. See 5.248. Heloise's tone grows quite indignant as she asks: ‘Ubi umquam, quaeso, carnes a Deo damnatae sunt vel monachis interdictae?’

63. See especially 5.251: ‘Non itaque magnopere quae fiunt sed quo animo fiant pensandum est, si illi placere studemus, qui cordis et renum probator est, et in abscondito videt …’, and Muckle's introduction (‘Personal Letters’, 55-56). While Muckle cites Abelard's Rule for the Paraclete as the closest approximation of Heloise's wording, Abelard's Ethics may provide an even closer parallel, in that it repeats even the same biblical quotations in support of the notion of intentionality: ‘Deus uero solus qui non tam quae fiunt, quam quo animo fiant adtendit, ueraciter in intentione nostra reatum pensat et uero iudicio culpam examinat. Vnde et probator cordis et renum dicitur, et in abscondito uidere’ (Peter Abelard's Ethics, ed. D. E. Luscombe [Oxford, 1971], p. 40.9-12; see also p. 28.9-11 for very similar phrasing of the same idea). For a thorough discussion of Abelard's theory of intentionality, see Robert Blomme, La doctrine du péché dans les écoles théologiques de la première moitié du XII^e siècle (Louvain, 1958), pp. 115-44.

64. 5.250: ‘Unde quicumque sunt vere Christiani sic toti circa interiorem hominem sunt occupati. …’

65. 5.248.

66. 5.251.

67. 5.252.

68. On the often hostile relations between male and female Cistercian houses see: Lekai, The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality, pp. 347-63; Gold, The Lady and the Virgin, pp. 76-115; Southern, Western Society and the Church, pp. 314-18; and Sally Thompson, ‘The Problem of Cistercian Nuns in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries’ in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford, 1978), pp. 227-52.

69. 5.252.

70. 5.252-53.

71. Abelard prefaces Peter Abelard's Hymnarius paraclitensis (ed. Joseph Szövérffy, 2 vols. [Albany, N. Y., 1975]) with a typical note of urgency: ‘Ad tuarum precum instantiam, soror mihi Heloisa …’ (2.9). See also Radice, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, pp. 32-34.

72. 5.246: ‘Satis nostrae esse infirmitati et maximum imputari debet, si continenter ac sine proprietate viventes et, officiis occupatae divinis, ipsos Ecclesiae duces vel religiosos laicos in victu adaequemus, vel eos denique qui regulares canonici dicuntur et se praecipue vitam apostolicam sequi profitentur.’ Note how quickly Heloise moves from women's ‘infirmity’ to their ability to equal the new canons and the very leaders of the Church in their religious practice.

73. For the text of Aelred's rule, see Charles Dumont, ed., La vie de recluse. La prière pastorale (Sources chrétiennes 76; Paris, 1961). On Aelred's meditations, see Dumont, pp. 29-39 (introduction).

74. On the form of Aelred's rule, see Georgianna, Solitary Self, pp. 42-49.

75. 5.251.

76. 3.81.

77. On the Ancrene Wisse as a religious rule, see Georgianna, Solitary Self, pp. 18-31.

78. PL 77.72b. In a section on guarding one's thoughts and keeping silence, Gregory writes: ‘Nil quippe in nobis est corde fugacius, quod a nobis toties recedit, quoties per pravas cogitationes defluit.’

79. Gilson, highly sensitive to Heloise's use of classical models and texts, speaks frequently of Heloise as a Roman heroine, characterizing the sentiments motivating her to take the veil at Abelard's command as ‘not Christian [but] completely Roman’ (Héloïse and Abélard, p. 91). Earlier Gilson opposes ‘Abélard's Christian submission to Providence’ to ‘Héloïse's acceptance of Stoic principles which she found in Seneca and Lucan’ (p. 86). However, Gilson also writes what remains the most illuminating study of Heloise's Christian crisis in his chapter called ‘The Mystery of Heloise’. He perhaps comes closest to the truth when he describes Heloise as ‘haunted by the double ideal of Roman and Christian greatness’ (p. 141).

80. On the rigor and idealism of Abelard's moral theology, especially in terms of human responsibility and accountability, see Richard E. Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love: A Critical Analysis of the Soteriology of Peter Abailard (Oxford, 1970), pp. 169-184 and Paul L. Williams, The Moral Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Lanham, Md., 1980). Williams argues throughout his study that Abelard's logic grows out of his moral theology (and not vice versa) and that in both areas Abelard remained throughout his life the moral ‘perfectionist—uncompromising in his demands and single-minded in his purpose’ (p. 37).

81. Compare 3.80-81 with Abelard's Ethics, especially pp. 4-21 where Abelard repeatedly distinguishes between desire—or will—and consent. In order to ‘win a crown’, as Abelard puts it, one must ‘restrain’ or ‘resist’ desire, not ‘extinguish’ it (p. 6). If Heloise's confusion of desire and consent is not Abelard's legacy, her constant self-searching is. Williams notes that above all ‘Thus Abelard stressed the importance of knowing one's self in regard to the quality and rightness of one's intentions. This constant self-scrutiny, this hounding search for self-knowledge, was the legacy of Abelard's ethics …’ (ibid., p. 145).

82. Most of Abelard's teaching on the Incarnation and Redemption is found in his Commentaria in epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, recently edited by E. M. Buytaert in Petri Abaelardi Opera theologica (CCM 11; Turnhout, 1969). See also the analysis of Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love, pp. 66-96. On Abelard's definition of disinterested love and Heloise's understanding of it, see Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 47-65 and The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, trans. A. H. C. Downes (London, 1940), pp. 158-66; Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love, pp. 169-76; and Williams, ibid., pp. 159-63.

83. 3.81; see Gilson, Héloïse and Abélard, pp. 95-96, especially n. 7.

84. ibid.

85. Ethics, pp. 76 ff. See also the analysis of Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love, pp. 196-200, and Williams, The Moral Theology of Peter Abelard, pp. 145-60.

86. 3.80. On the concepts of perfect and imperfect contrition, see Payen, Le motif du repentir, pp. 81-83 and Amédée Teetaert, La confession aux laïques dans l'église latine depuis le VIII^e jusqu'au XIV^e siècle (Paris, 1926), pp. 258-60.

87. 3.81.

88. 4.93.

89. Abelard relies on heroic imagery throughout his letters, beginning with the Historia calamitatum, and is especially drawn to classical and biblical quotations which employ battle imagery. Heroic language is such an indispensable habit of mind for Abelard that, even after Heloise's rejection of it, he continues to describe her spiritual state in heroic terms. See especially 4.92-93, beginning with Abelard's allusion to Pompey's reproach to Cornelia after his defeat at Pharsalia. Since according to Abelard, Heloise had recalled Cornelia's lament to Pompey when she (Heloise) entered the convent of Argenteuil (Historia calamitatum, ll. 632-638), he probably felt it appropriate to quote a nearby passage from the same work (Lucan's Bellum civile). But as I argue here, Heloise ultimately rejects such heroic portrayals of her situation. St. Benedict's Rule also relies often on battle imagery to describe the spiritual life, especially in the prologue, which is addressed to ‘you …, whoever you may be, who are renouncing your own will to do battle under the Lord Christ, the true King, and are taking up the strong, bright weapons of obedience.’ The translation is that of Leonard Doyle, St. Benedict's Rule for Monasteries (Collegeville, Minn., 1948), p. 1.

90. 3.82: ‘Nolo, me ad virtutem exhortans, et ad pugnam provocans, dicas: Nam virtus in infirmitate perficitur; et: Non coronabitur nisi qui legitime certaverit. Non quaero coronam victoriae. Satis est mihi periculum vitare. Tutius evitatur periculum, quam committitur bellum. Quocumque me angulo coeli Deus collocet, satis mihi faciet. Nullus ibi cuiquam invidebit, cum singulis quod habebunt suffecerit.’

91. 3.82: ‘Fateor imbecillitatem meam; nolo spe victoriae pugnare ne perdam aliquando victoriam. … Quid necesse est certa dimittere, et incerta sectari?’ (Adversus Vigilantium [PL 23.367b]).

92. 5.251: ‘Ne te quaesiveris extra’ (Sat. 1.7).

93. 5.252: ‘… invoca me in die tribulationis; et eruam te, et honorificabis me’ (Ps 49:12-15).