PREDATOR TEACHER ABELARD CASTRATED BY SCHOOLGIRL’S UNCLE

DAUGHTERS SAFE NOW

1118 A.D.

Paris, France

 

Let this be a lesson to fathers all over Paris.

Don’t allow your daughters to be tutored by philosophers.

The well-respected canon, Fulbert, made the mistake of trusting Peter Abelard with the instruction of his niece, Heloise, whom he had raised as his own daughter. Swayed by his flattering words, he allowed this viper to stay under his own roof.

The result was the seduction of his innocent niece, and the birth of a child, whom the philosopher impiously named Astralabe.

Fulbert did what any protective father or uncle would do: he rendered the predator no longer dangerous to wide-eyed schoolgirls in his charge.

 

But seriously…

April 15, 2024

 

Héloïse and Abélard.

He was an older man, a respected teacher; at one time he ran his own school.

She was an impressionable schoolgirl.

He exploited his position of responsibility to gain her trust.

He took advantage of her naivete and stole her innocence.

And this is one of the great love affairs of history.

How?

Because of what happened afterwards.

 

Abelard

Peter Abelard lived from 1079 to 1142. He was a philosopher; he would become the greatest logician of the age, known for his verbal combativeness. He also had a strong sense of self-promotion. This was a guy looking to make an impression.

This was a period of “wandering scholars.” (The first university would not be founded until 1150, in Bologna, Italy.)

“Abelard” was a sort of a stage name, the kind adopted by troubadours, not philosophers. The troubadours were wandering poets, like folk singers.

So Peter was an itinerant teacher of philosophy.

With a guitar.

He would win over Heloise with his songs.

She was maybe sixteen or seventeen when they met.

He leveraged his prestige to win over her uncle and guardian, Fulbert, convincing him first to let him teach the girl, then to allow him to live under the same roof with the object of his affections.

Somewhere between the catchy tunes he strummed and sang for her between lessons, and the stolen moments of forbidden love in his room, he won her heart.

A schoolgirl’s crush.

A father’s nightmare.

 

Caught in the Act

Inevitably they were found out, and Fulbert, not wanting a scandal, forced them to separate. But, inevitably, they didn’t, and she ended up pregnant.

Now Fulbert demanded they marry, but Heloise refused. She thought marriage would hinder his promising career.

Heloise put his ambition over her own reputation.

In his autobiography, he seemed to endorse her decision:

“What honor could she win, she protested, from a marriage that would dishonor me and humiliate us both? The world would justly exact punishment from her if she removed such a light from its midst … Nature had created me for all mankind …”

Uncle insisted, and they were married secretly. Then uncle started talking- maybe for the sake of her reputation, maybe for his own.

Heloise, thinking of Abelard, was furious. Abelard, thinking of himself, made a fatal mistake. Fulbert, thinking of revenge, would take things to an extreme and bloody level.

 

Castration

Abelard sent Heloise away to a monastery. Secretly.

He also made her wear a postulant’s habit; she could have lived there without wearing it, and Fulbert assumed that Abelard was trying to get rid of her by making her a nun.

So he offended this already angry, powerful, protective man again.

Fulbert was prone to rages.

At this point, his anger would not be mollified. Abelard had stolen his niece’s virtue, refused to publicly marry her, then had sent her away. And they continued to engage in secret rendezvous.

So, he sent his men to castrate him. They bribed Abelard’s servant to let them in while he was sleeping.

Abelard describes the horrific act in genteel words:

“They cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.”

The community was outraged. They retaliated against this retaliation, in kind. The servant and one of the perpetrators were caught and castrated. And then blinded.

 

Vows

She dutifully took her vows, but outraged the nuns by doing something which was not in keeping with the spirit of the ceremony. She quoted a secular poet.

To the nuns this must have been seen as defiance; by Heloise it must have felt as devotion.

During the ceremony she quoted aloud (through tears and sobs) from Lucan’s Pharsalia, the story of a Roman civil war, in which Pompey’s wife, Cornelia, blames herself for her husband’s defeat in battle. She greets him with these words:

“O noble husband, too great for me to wed, was it my fate to bend that lofty head?

Why did I marry you and bring about your fall?

Now accept the penalty and see me gladly pay.”

Her devotion, at least at this point, was not to God, but to Abelard.

 

Love Letters

The monastic movement in Medieval Europe provides numerous accounts of faithful men and women giving their lives to God. In most cases, whatever zeal they felt for their creator was never expressed in writing for posterity. Whatever fervent stirrings of worship they may have verbally shared with each other have not been documented.

But one lonely Abbess toiling in an obscure religious house set her feelings to paper. Her graceful musing words – her letters to her true love – mythologized what had been a furtive, botched tryst, setting it for posterity as the great all-consuming, tragic love affair of the middle ages.

Some of her words:

“For I often come with parched throat longing to be refreshed by the nectar of your delightful mouth and to drink thirstily the riches scattered in your heart.”

He was

“Half my heart and part of my soul.”

“You who were made my partner in guilt and in grace.”

But she also rebuked him for sending her away:

“I, who have not refused to be the victim of pleasure in order to gratify him, can he think I would refuse to be a sacrifice of honor when he desired it?”

“Has vice such charms to refined natures, that when once we have drunk of the cup of sinners it is with such difficulty we accept the chalice of saints? Or did you believe yourself to be more competent to teach vice than virtue, or me more ready to learn the first than the latter? No; this suspicion would be injurious to us both: Virtue is too beautiful not to be embraced when you reveal her charms, and Vice too hideous not to be abhorred when you display her deformities.”

 

Heloise’s devotion was to the man who inspired her to love foolishly, fully, tragically. And that love was expressed for the ages in profound and poetic epistles that still echo with yearning for something that could not last.

Heloise gets the last word:

“All that is left us is suffering as great as our love has been.”

 

Sources

Heloise and Abelard: a New Biography, James Burge

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

Abélard: a Medieval Life, M.T. Clanchy

Abelard and Heloise, D.W. Robertson, Jr.