Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 208 - Get Thee to a Nunnery - Heloise and Abelard.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.com. Today's episode, Get Thee to a Nunnery, Heloise and Abelard. Some listeners will be relieved to know that in this episode I'm going to skip the usual opening, attention-grabbing example, humorous anecdote, or tribute to classic film. The story I have to tell needs no introduction, being itself a classic tale of star-crossed love. Its protagonists are Peter Abelard and Heloise, who fell desperately in love, produced a child, and married in secret. On the orders of Heloise's outraged uncle, Abelard was attacked and castrated, and he and Heloise both took up a monastic life. From Abelard's own account of this disastrous sequence of events, and from the moving and intellectually high-powered letters the two sent to one another, we know the whole story and also something of what happened next. Abelard set up a religious retreat called the Paraclete in honor of the Holy Spirit. The word is derived from Greek and means comforter. He invited Heloise and some of her fellow nuns to live there and advised them on religious questions. The two are now buried together in a Paris cemetery, which, appropriately to Abelard's role in medieval culture, is the resting place of both other philosophers like Lyotard and Mélo Ponty and a rock star, Jim Morrison. It's a story that has been exciting the romantic imagination since the 13th century, when Jean de Meun worked the couple into his consummate work of courtly love, The Romance of the Rose. Jean also translated into French several letters exchanged between the two, as well as Abelard's autobiographical account, melodramatically but not inaccurately, entitled Historia Calamitatum, or Story of Calamities. Ever since, Abelard and Heloise have gone down in history as something like a real-life Romeo and Juliet. There is even a legend that when Abelard's grave was opened so that Heloise could be buried with him, his skeleton opened its arms to embrace her corpse. Modern-day scholars have responded with the attitude we would expect from them, skepticism. They have even raised doubts as to whether the documents used by Jean de Meun are genuine. Now though, their authenticity is widely accepted, which is a good thing, since they offer a fascinating window onto Abelard's intellectual development and onto the personality of the brilliant Heloise. One reason scholars have doubted the authenticity of her letters is that they are not what we would expect from a 12th century nun. They are astonishing in their frank and open descriptions of her own state of mind, and her refusal to accept Abelard's moralizing account of the tragedy that befell them. For some, they also suggest that Abelard's philosophy was powerfully influenced by Heloise's concerns, ideas and interests. Even before the two men, both had established a reputation. In The Story of Calamities, Abelard tells us that he decided to seduce Heloise, in large part because of her widely admired intellect. In looks, she did not rank lowest, he remarks, while in the extent of her learning she stood supreme. He was rightly confident of his ability to win her affections, since he himself was good looking and was already established as a scholarly celebrity for his expertise in dialectic. John of Salisbury, who would later briefly study with Abelard, wrote that he was so eminent in logic that he alone was thought to converse with Aristotle. Exploiting his renown, Abelard arranged to become Heloise's teacher, and the rest is, quite literally, history. Of course, even today it remains true that skill in philosophy is a sure-fire way of picking up dates. No doubt many listeners will have noticed the improvement in their own love lives since they began following the podcast. But in the 12th century, such skill could also attract envy and rivalry. Abelard's account of his life story does not tell only of his relationship with Heloise and his consequences. It also recounts his numerous conflicts with other leading intellectuals of the day. His enemies included the leading theologian and political operator Bernard of Clavo, and no fewer than three of Abelard's own teachers, Rosalind, William of Champo, and Anselm of Léon, who was not to be confused with Anselm of Canterbury. It would be putting it mildly to say that Abelard does not emphasize his intellectual debt to these figures. To the contrary, he portrays William of Champo and Anselm of Léon as jealous and incompetent. He takes evident relish in explaining how he demolished William's theory of universals not once, but twice, and says that Anselm's reputation was, "...owed more to long practice than to intelligence or memory," adding the mocking comment that his visitors left him more confused than they had arrived. Then again, that was also true of Socrates. The case of Rosalind is more complicated. Abelard subjects him to no similar character assassination in The Story of Calamities, and we know from other sources that he was powerfully influenced by Rosalind's approach to logic. Modern-day scholars have called this approach vocalism, alluding to Rosalind's insistence that dialectic deals with words and not things. With this, Rosalind paved the way for Abelard's nominalism. However, Rosalind's vocalism was offered not as a solution to the problem of universals, but as the key to interpreting the works of logic that were being studied with such intensity at this time. For Rosalind, Porphyry's introduction and Aristotle's categories were about words, not things. This reading of the texts was anticipated already in antiquity, when it was suggested as a way of defusing potential conflict between Plato and Aristotle. If Aristotle was only talking about words in his logical writings and not making any claims about things, then it was no problem that he acknowledged only everyday physical objects as substances and made no mention of the transcendent objects recognized in Platonism. After all, our words refer in the first instance to physical things, not to gods, immaterial souls, or forms. Still, even if Rosalind was not espousing nominalism, his proposal could naturally lead to a position like Abelard's. Universal species and genera play a major role in the logical treatises of Porphyry and Aristotle. So, if those treatises really are only about words and not things, it stands to reason that species and genera are nothing but words, as Abelard claimed. Despite Rosalind's importance in helping to shape Abelard's understanding of dialectic, Abelard turned against him as well, heavily criticizing Rosalind's teaching on the Trinity, of which more in a later episode. Rosalind returned the favor in a letter we have from him in which he excoriates Abelard's treatment of Heloise, writing, Abelard's own account makes it clear that he was a proud, even arrogant man, and one who remained fiercely concerned with his reputation even as he was later writing down his life He claims that when he was castrated, his loss of face bothered him more than the loss of other parts of his anatomy. Though this side of his personality is not particularly attractive, Abelard was right to be proud of his fame. It was certainly well deserved. His works represent the high point of the study of dialectic in the early medieval period, and not just because of his innovative nominalist account of universals. Another major contribution was his account of propositions. Indeed, it would be fair to say that Abelard actually discovered the idea of a proposition, more or less as it is used in philosophy today. Take a common everyday sentence like, When I say this, I am making an assertion, and there is something I am asserting, namely that there is indeed a giraffe in the kitchen cooking dinner. Abelard calls this the proposition's dictum, meaning that which is said, and compares the relationship between the proposition and the dictum to that between a name and the thing that it names. Nowadays, philosophers would call the dictum the proposition's content. Now remember Rosseland's and Abelard's point that differences at the level of words do not need to imply differences at the level of things. With this in mind, Abelard points out that the same content can be expressed in many different ways. If I say, The giraffe cooks dinner, or The giraffe is cooking dinner, there is no difference in content, just a difference in expression. The same goes for tense as we saw in the last episode. If I tomorrow say, The giraffe was cooking dinner, that could refer to exactly the same thing as my saying today, The giraffe is cooking dinner. And it goes for grammatical mood too, like if I said, The giraffe should be cooking dinner, instead of The giraffe is cooking dinner. Abelard makes another leap forward when it comes to the question of negating a proposition. For Boethius, the negation of the proposition, A giraffe is in the kitchen cooking dinner, would be, A giraffe is not in the kitchen cooking dinner, which looks reasonable enough, and not just because giraffes are notoriously bad cooks. But it has a disadvantage, which is that in stating this denial, I seem to be implying that there is indeed some giraffe I am talking about, it's just that the giraffe in question is not cooking dinner. What if I wanted to deny the proposition without suggesting this? Abelard gives us the tools to do so, by saying that there are, in fact, two ways to negate a proposition. In addition to saying, A giraffe is not in the kitchen cooking dinner, I could say, It is not the case that, A giraffe is in the kitchen cooking dinner. In the latter case, I am not committing myself to the notion that there is some giraffe who might be getting dinner ready if she weren't so lazy. Abelard calls the first kind of negation, separative, because it just denies that a predicate is connected to a subject. The second kind is called destructive, because what is being denied is the whole proposition, rather than the attachment of the predicate to the subject. If not for his encounter with Héloïse, Abelard might have continued to focus mostly on these sorts of logical issues, which dominated during his early career. Things changed once he became a monk, and devoted himself to his new pastoral duties and to theological issues. The religious life may have been thrust upon him, but he made it his own. Then again, as a monk, Abelard was still able to teach and engage in intellectual disputation, much as he had done before. Héloïse, by contrast, lamented piteously even as she took the habit, and never really reconciled herself to her new narrow, and quite literally cloistered life. It was an ironic fate, in that Héloïse had earlier disguised herself as a nun to get away from her overbearing uncle. Apparently, it was this that provoked the uncle into having Abelard attacked and mutilated, because he was under the impression that Abelard was forsaking her. Once she really was a nun, Héloïse was in a sense still in disguise, living a life of chastity but still consumed with her old desires. She tells Abelard so in letters she wrote to him in a correspondence provoked by her reading of his story of calamities. Abelard's message in that work was that the misfortunes that befell him were sent by God to punish his lustful sin and steer him towards a more righteous path. Héloïse was having none of this. In her letters, she points out that she and Abelard were actually separated, and thus chased, when disaster struck. In the aftermath of that disaster, Héloïse has continued to be chased in body, but not in her mind. She admits that she is not able to repent sincerely, as Abelard was apparently able to do. In her first letter responding to Abelard's account of their story, we find the following stunningly forthright passage. To get the full sense of what that quotation tells us about Héloïse, we need to notice that it turns on a pun. The Latin word for empress is emperatrix, while the word for whore is meritrix. This was a woman who could call on classical learning and do rhetorical tricks even in the midst of impassioned lament. The same is clear from Abelard's presentation of Héloïse in The Story of Calamities. At first he writes about her as if she was simply an instrument of temptation, sent by God to bring about Abelard's well-deserved downfall. But he goes on to repeat the argument she made at the time, against the idea of marrying in secret to mollify her uncle. It was a bad idea on practical grounds for one thing. It would not make the uncle happy, and would tarnish Abelard's name. She was right on both counts, of course. She also gave more principled reasons, quoting classical objections to marriage as inimical to the scholarly life. Seneca, for instance, cautioning that philosophy is a serious and all-consuming activity which allows no room for family entanglements. Héloïse's honest self-appraisal, her refusal to renounce the value of the love she shared with Abelard, and her literary taste do not only make her an intriguing and sympathetic historical character, they also allowed her to play a role in shaping Abelard's intellectual career. Her broad reading in classical literature, including authors like Seneca, whom she cited in her diatribe against marriage, seems to have rubbed off on Abelard. Some scholars also give her a role in the development of Abelard's revolutionary approach to ethics. We'll have an opportunity to test this hypothesis in the next episode. Furthermore, after taking up residence at the Paraclete with her fellow nuns, Héloïse requested pastoral guidance from Abelard. He composed hymns at her request, sent her letters offering rules for the sisters' conduct, and answered a set of detailed questions she posed to him concerning difficulties of scriptural interpretation. Constance Meuse, who has written extensively about their relationship, has commented that these questions are so insightfully posed that it's clear Héloïse could have answered them herself. Meuse also suspects her to be the author of a poem which mocks the idea that the liberal arts are an inappropriate activity for women. She and Abelard shared not only a passion for one another, but also for such intellectual pursuits. Once they were committed to their new monastic lives, they also became committed to the more religious disciplines of theology and biblical exegesis. Héloïse was a devoted enough student of the Bible that she learned some Hebrew in addition to her Greek and Latin—a rare attainment for anyone at this time, let alone for a female scholar. The questions on scripture she sent to Abelard also represent this part of her intellectual life. As for Abelard, he is often seen as a champion of dialectic and as a devotee of the pagan philosophers, and he was indeed both of these. Yet he devoted much of his life to theological problems. Abelard's characteristic self-confidence convinced him that he could outdo scholars with long training in church doctrine and exegesis. In one of his more self-congratulatory anecdotes, he relates how, as a younger man who was still a complete neophyte in the field of scriptural exegesis, he took up an obscure biblical passage and produced such marvelously insightful commentary on it that students flocked to him. This does not mean that Abelard paid no heed to the authoritative tradition. When his theological proposals met with condemnation and he was forced to burn his writings on the subject, he did not change his mind, but did change his method, seeking support for his views in the Church Fathers. One product of this renewed interest in the tradition was his treatise Sic et Non, which one might loosely, if verbosely, render as on the one hand and on the other hand. The book consists of textual quotations, mostly from patristic authorities, which take contradictory views on a variety of questions. This may sound like an irreverent, even subversive, project, reminiscent of the ancient skeptics' practice of piling off arguments on both sides of a philosophical debate in order to induce uncertainty and suspension of judgment. But for Abelard, the compilation of disagreements was just a preliminary step towards resolving those disagreements by showing them to be merely apparent. In another example of his sensitivity to the way that language can mislead, he cautioned against taking patristic or scriptural texts at face value. The same moral is taught by another of his triumphant anecdotes, which in this case pits him directly against his enemy Anselm of Léon. The story goes that Anselm was outraged at a supposed heresy uttered by Abelard. Abelard said he could explain his view, but Anselm demanded that he offer authoritative support and not try to confuse the issue with rational argumentation. In response, Abelard immediately, and no doubt gleefully, produced a quotation from Augustine which confirmed his own view verbatim. Flustered, Anselm said weakly that the passage in Augustine needed to be treated with care and that despite appearances it did not really confirm Abelard's view, to which Abelard triumphantly replied that this was irrelevant at the moment as he was looking only for words, not interpretation. You can see why Anselm of Léon was bound to despise him, and at the same time why Heloise was bound to love him. I can't help agreeing with her, and I have a lot more to say about him. Unfortunately, Hiawatha says that dinner is ready now. So, like the romance of Heloise and Abelard, our look at this great medieval thinker will have to be interrupted, but considerably less violently, as you'll only have to wait one more week to hear about the revolutionary ethical theory of Peter Abelard, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.