The Claremont Institute has published a nice piece about the greatest love affair of the Middle Ages. Link. Excerpt:
Abelard and Heloise inhabited a world that, like our own, was changing rapidly. They saw themselves and their times as modern. The 12th century, rather than a "middle" age between times of greater cultural achievement, was in fact a time of fantastic intellectual and cultural ferment.
"Abelard and Heloise saw the age in which they lived as almost bewilderingly modern," writes Burge, "a time when new ideas and new things were changing the world at a dizzying speed. They were at the beginning of something, not the middle." Indeed, there is no better proof of their awareness than the unusual name they chose for their son: Astralabe. The latest in scientific technology at the time, the astrolabe was used to follow the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. "They prided themselves on their rational understanding of the world," explains Burge. "Just as the astrolabe was a physical sign of the possibility of understanding through reason, the child was a physical expression of their love."
With so much possibility in the offing–only years after Abelard's death, the trickle of Greek scientific and philosophical texts into France on which he subsisted would grow to a veritable torrent–the authorities of the old order inevitably grew anxious. The sacred now faced serious competition from the profane, a rivalry that remains at the heart of the Western tradition.
Abelard didn't see the conflict in this way, however. Finding much truth in Greek philosophy, he civilized or Christianized it, arguing for instance that Plato was a proto-Christian. (The reader will recall that Dante placed the pagan philosophers Plato and Aristotle not in hell but in Limbo, the benign first circle.) Philosophy and religion share a common goal, he believed, and a religion that shied away from rational inquiry in favor of fideism was in danger of straying from Truth.
For this, and for treating the Scriptures and Church Fathers with the disinterested eye of the logician rather than the reverence of the believer (which he was), Abelard earned the enmity of some prominent Church leaders.
Many admirers idealize Abelard and Heloise's fearless flouting of convention. But surely the suffering they endured counsels a more modest moral to their story. Although we cannot know what befell them in the afterlife, they certainly didn't get away with their scandalous behavior–which included making love in a convent refectory–on this side of paradise. Heloise, it is true, was unrepentant to the end, but Abelard seems to have understood his "calamities" as just punishment for his sins.
