Peter Abelard

*Preached at Grace North Church August 27th, 2000.*

In preparation for this sermon, I not only scoured many books, but also went in search of a film I had seen a little over ten years ago, titled "Stealing Heaven," which is a drama portraying the relationship between Abelard and his great love Heloise. Walking in to a video store, I decided the quickest way to discern whether the video was in stock was to inquire at the desk. I was quite surprised when the clerk on duty directed me to the Erotic FilAm section. "Are you sure?" I asked. "Only movie called 'Stealing Heaven' we have, dude," he replied. I quickly glanced around to see if anyone that mattered might see me making for the Erotic Film section. But I remembered what Martin Luther had said, "If you are going to sin, sin boldly." Boldly, then, I marched to the Erotic Film section. And sure enough, nestled in between Playboy Bunnies in the Snow and the Red Shoe Diaries was a purple video with a steamy scene on the front cover; a cover which read "Stealing Heaven." I mused on the irony of finding a religious video in the Erotic Film section and I wondered whether perhaps I had misremembered the film.

Well, it was a good deal steamier than I remembered. This may be due to the fact that the copy this particular video store had was the unreleased "director's cut." Definitely not fare for your average religious prude. Not being much of a prude myself, I loved the film, and it seemed to be the perfect jumping off point for understanding the complex and intimate relationship between these two extraordinary individuals.

Even though Martin Luther lived nearly five hundred years after Abelard, our hero for the day would have appreciated and agreed with his words about sinning boldly. Abelard did not in fact shrink from acknowledging his own transgressions, and made them with full and conscious intent. Abelard was a man of passion who did nothing halfway. Even when he sinned, he went all the way, in more ways than one.

Peter Abelard was, first and foremost, a brilliant philosopher. Born in the late eleventh century, he was well-studied in the sciences and philosophy, and there wasn't a teacher in the land who could touch him. Partly this was because of his formidable native talent for debate, but it was also because he wasn't afraid to push the boundaries and even sin if it got him what he wanted.

As far as philosophy goes, this means he willingly thought out of the box, even though he knew he may risk damnation to do so. Since none of his teachers were willing to make such a sacrifice, he had an astounding edge on them in that he permitted himself to think creatively when it came to theological and philosophical questions. If the dictionary definition of a heretic is "one who questions" and that IS the dictionary definition, then Abelard is the very platonic ideal of the heretic. He dared to question because he saw that only through questioning may the truth be discerned. And he was most certainly more interested in truth than in dogma.

He was a wild bachelor-teacher, arrogant about his intellectual prowess and what he himself refers to as his "exceptional good looks." Abelard says of himself, "I possessed such advantages of youth and comeliness, that no matter what woman I might favor with my love, I dreaded the rejection of none."

By incredible good fortune, Abelard had scored quite a coup, and had won for himself a coveted chair at the Cathedral school in Paris. He was the envy of all the other teachers, dangerously so, as it turns out. But in fact, Abelard's greatest enemy would turn out to be his own formidable passions, for he soon spied the niece of the cathedral's canon, and fell instantly and head over heels in love with her. It was, of course, Heloise, who had encountered no little bit of trouble herself because of her own sharp intellect. It may be fair to say that she was Abelard's equal in many ways: she was certainly one of the most educated women in Europe, and the closest to being his intellectual peer that Abelard had ever encountered. Thus he says of her "Of no mean beauty, she stood out above all by reason of her abundant knowledge of letters."

A woman with a good body was of little interest to a man so ambitious as Abelard, but a woman with a good mind? Now that was a rare treasure indeed in the Dark Ages. Abelard says that he set about pursuing her as a hunter does his prey. He made a deal with her uncle that he would tutor her in exchange for lodgings in their house. Now, for the canon, this was a deal he simply couldn't pass up. To have the honor of hosting the most acclaimed professor of the age, and to have him teach his niece to boot! He immediately agreed, and Abelard had gained his opening. Abelard spends a lot of time in his memoirs recounting how he tricked Heloise's uncle, but almost no time describing his seduction of her. He leaps almost immediately from gaining entrance to her house to gaining her love, as if winning her was the easiest part of his plan.

Well, perhaps it was. Abelard says that "Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words. Our hands sough less the book than each others' bosoms-love drew our eyes together far more than the lesson drew them to the pages of our text."

"Now, what is so bad about that?" You might be asking. "Was he a priest or something?" Well, no. But he was a teacher, and even up until a hundred years ago professors were required to be celebate, as family life tended to distract one from one's books. So Abelard snuck around. They got away with it at first, but then, indeed, Abelard's teaching began to suffer. He started to rest on his laurels a little, and his students began to be suspicious. People began to talk. And of course, they talked to Heloise's uncle, who at first refused to believe it could be possible. But finally, he could ignore the signs no longer, and his grief was overwhelming.

Abelard stayed away for a while, but then he received a joyous letter from Heloise. She was pregnant, and wanted to know what Abelard would have her do. So one night while her uncle was away, Heloise and Abelard ran away to the house of Abelard's sister. While she was with child, Abelard returned to Paris and once more established himself as the greatest teacher of his age. When her uncle returned, Abelard went to see him, and asked both his forgiveness, and Heloise' hand in marriage. Of course this meant giving up his greatest love: teaching philosophy. But even though Heloise tried, she could not dissuade him from his intent to marry her. And so in a private ceremony attended only by her uncle and some of Abelard's closest students, they were wed. Heloise then returned to Abelard's sister's house, where she stayed until the baby was born. They named the child "Astrolab," an instrument, much like the mind, capable of measuring heaven.

Although Heloise's uncle seemed to be appeased, he was only biding his time until he could exact his revenge. And indeed, under the cover of night not long after, he did. Bribing Abelard's servant, thugs hired by the canon gained access to the secret sleeping chamber in which Abelard had taken to hiding himself in every night. It was a rude awakening indeed, as several of the men held him down, and one, wielding a sharp blade, castrated him.

Abelard is quite clear on the fact that when they made that cut, they took nearly everything. But, he says, the shame which was visited upon his soul was far greater than the pain borne by his body. He was convinced that his misfortune was well deserved, and God's punishment upon him just. He and Heloise agreed that they would both enter monastic life, and leave Astrolab to be raised by Abelard's sister.

So Abelard went to the monestary and took to teaching theology, which he had not really studied very much, and was most unqualified to teach. And yet it was that very ignorance of how theological issues had been handled in the past that freed him to come up with his own extremely creative solutions. Now, as you might expect, these were not always well received. Abelard bounced from monestary to monestary for some time, for he always seemed to be in hot water with his superiors. Are we surprised? Of course not.

One of the doctrines which Abelard criticized was the theory of the atonement. Augustine taught that Jesus' crucifixion was the payment God offered to the devil in exchange for the souls of humankind. Since, when a man sins, he becomes the devil's property, Jesus provided the ransom to "buy back" humanity from Satan's clutches. St. Anselm, who died when Abelard was only thirty, provided another theory, one based on feudalism. Anselm held that Christ's death could not be a ransom to the devil because the devil was a usurper of God's power who had no legitimate claim on the human soul. Instead, he said, human sin besmirches God's honor, and in order for God to "save face" and maintain his honor, justice must be had for sin. In Anselm's system, God is a feudal lord whose honor has been maligned by uppity underlings, and in Jesus God is provided the scapegoat to satisfy the justice his honor demands.

This absurd feudal reading of the atonement is, inexplicably, the one that caught on in the West, and is generally accepted by both the Roman Church and most Protestant churches as well, especially evangelical churches, even though we no longer live in a feudal society, and even though we often redicule cultures such as the Japanese or Chinese in which "saving face" is such an all-important consideration.

Instead, Abelard held that God has already forgiven humankind. The cross for Abelard was not a sacrifice to pay some price for sin, but instead it was a demonstration of God's love, that he has wedded himself to humankind, even unto death. The only thing Jesus' death does for us, Abelard said, was that by such an example "our hearts should be enflamed by such a gift of divine grace and true love" that we would do anything to see that this kind of injustice could not occur again, that our hearts would be reformed, and we would be made into new creatures.

Abelard also denied Original Sin, and predestination, which puts him in the company of many of the heretics we have been studying recently. His method of teaching philosophy is attested to by a textbook of his that survives, titled Sic et Non, "Yes and No," in which he raises a series of theological delimmas, and lists quotations from the writings of the church fathers which contradict each other. These contradictions in the writings of the church's authorities provided the jumping-off point of his lectures, and Sic et Non remains a much-studied text even today.

But the book which got him into the most trouble was called On the Trinity, in which he sought to clarify the thorny issue of how three persons could be one God. His arguments were so subtle and complex that his enemies decided it was the perfect vehicle to use to accuse him of heresy. And so in 1121 he was brought to trial in the local ecclesiastical court. His enemies had a hard time making their case from his book, and in fact, when finally allowed to speak in his defense, Abelard opened his book to the offending passage and pointed out that not only was the passage not his own opinion, but he was in fact merely quoting St. Augustine, and wouldn't they like to condemn him as well?

Unfortunately for Abelard, his enemies were well connected politically, and his book was formally condemned. Abelard's heart broke as he watched his work publicly denounced and then burned.

But Abelard was not himself excommunicated, not yet at least. He was allowed to return to the monestary, and the school he founded continued to flourish, drawing students from all over Europe to the study of theology.

Abelard also continued to write. We know so much about his history, and of his extraordinarily high opinion of himself from his autobiography titled "The History of My Calamities," which is some fun indeed. The full text is available on the World Wide Web (www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/abelard-histcal.html) and is well worth reading. The letters that he exchanged with Heloise during their monastic lives also still survive and continue to enjoy a wide readership.

Abelard was one of the most successful heretics, reaching even the rank of bishop as an abbot of his own monestary, but his luck in this regard did not hold, I'm afraid. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who favored mysticism to philosophy, found his teachings to be subversive to the faith and brought him to trial in 1140, nearly twenty years after his first heresy trial. This time, his enemies were more successful. He was condemned, and when Abelard appealed to Rome, the pope upheld the condemnation and excommunicated him. And yet, despite his condemnation, Abelard found refuge with the gentle monks of Cluny. Shortly before his death in 1142, Abelard and Bernard were reconciled. When Heloise died, they once again shared a bed, even if it was in death. They were buried together, and they remain together to this very day in their tomb in a cemetery in Paris.

So was Abelard really a heretic? Well, he held some unique opinions, and he certainly thought for himself. But Abelard's real undoing was not his ideas, but his passion. He was passionate about everything in his life: philosophy, teaching, fame, monasticism, and most especially, Heloise. Is that heresy? No. Is it sin? It certainly wouldn't be today. Today we would say Abelard was a brilliant idealist, a type-A personality, a passionate lover, and an arrogant snit. These are not crimes. But he was not a product of our time. He knew only the middle ages, and the modernity of his thought would surely have been considered sin in his day. But his greatest misfortunes ultimately were not caused by his questionable morality, but by the sheer force of his brilliance, and the envy it aroused in the hearts of those who were not blessed with his talent for thinking creatively, nor the courage to do so. Let us pray.

God of the body, God of the mind, your servant Abelard dared to sin boldy, to love boldly, and to think boldly. Grant us a measure of his courage, and save us from his portion of misfortunes, even as we learn from his brilliance and his folly. For we ask this in the name of the one who was not afraid to live human life to the fullest, and calls us to do the same, even Jesus Christ. Amen.