Paraclete, A Novel by Stan Rice, part one. A Story as Old as Humankind

 

Stan Rice has just published another novel, Paraclete, which is number three in the series Under the Sun. It is the timeless love story of Heloïse and Abélard in medieval France. This historical event has been fictionalized many times, but Rice puts an interesting twist to it.

Here is the Amazon summary of the novel:

The story of Heloïse and Abélard may be the most intense love story in all of history, but it was also the focus of how humans understand—or fail to understand—the work of God—if any—in the world of nature, or man, under the sun. 

After an adventurous youth in the eleventh century, Peter Abélard becomes a philosopher, the closest any medieval person could be to a scientist. So sharp and delightful is his mind that, after joining the priesthood, he becomes Magister of Notre Dame in Paris. His dedication to fearless inquiry gets him in a lot of trouble, especially with his rival cleric Bernard of Clairvaux, who spends his life trying to undermine Abélard. But Abélard is so popular that it takes decades to silence him.

When Abélard meets Heloïse, a young woman whose mind is even sharper than his, they fall deeply in love and take every increasingly heedless risk to have sexual intimacy. When Heloïse’s uncle Fulbert discovers this, he gets Abélard fired, then plots to have him castrated. Their love child, Astralabe, is taken from them.

Abélard lives out his years in a run-down country abbey, Paraclete, directed by Heloïse, but even here the Church will not leave him at peace.

 

This story is as old as humankind because humans have always had religious leaders (usually male) with power, whether intellectual or political; and these leaders have frequently considered themselves to be free to violate moral laws, and have sex with their (usually female) followers. Moreover, he was 35 and she was 19. Sounds like clergy abuse? What is frequently absent from the fictional retellings of the story of Heloïse and Abélard is that Heloïse was at least the intellectual equal of Abélard, if not his superior. Though the sex was not necessary, a profound friendship was unavoidable. The fact that Heloïse’s clueless uncle Fulbert had Abélard castrated makes the story anything but run of the mill. This story is a hyper-charged romance between two super-nerds.

Abélard probably shared the prevailing view of his time that women could not be as smart as men. He learned differently. He also learned that intellectual love was more satisfying than carnal love, of which he was no longer capable.

The letters that Heloïse and Abélard exchanged, especially after their forced separation, have been lost. Then a scholar recognized certain passages in a book about literary form that seemed to resemble what the exchanges between Heloïse and Abélard would probably have been like.

In the next essay, I will analyze what the intellectual bombshell of Abélard’s thoughts may have represented to medieval scholars.