The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

In The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Abelard and Heloise’s faith and morals are justified solely by the Church and society. This discussion of virginity, sex, punishment, society, religion and ethnical views are all tied together into one autobiography written by Pierre Abelard himself.
Pierre Abelard was born in 1079 B.C in France. Abelard was born into a minor noble family where he learned quickly and excelled in the art of dialect, a branch of physiology, which at the time consisted solely on the logic of Aristotle. Unlike his father, Abelard decided to receive an academic career rather than a military career. With his academic career Abelard traveled through France and created a name for him and eventually his travels led him to Paris where he became the master or Notre Dame. The journey through Abelard’s academics was a rough one because Abelard was always at ends with the Church and juggled a romantic career with his wife, Heloise.
The Church in Abelard’s society was very strict. The Church believed that anyone with intellectual knowledge was to use it to glorify God’s name and people had to take the Bible literally and act accordingly. According to Heloise she believes that in Heaven, “no one will envy another… and what each one has will suffice,” (136). This suggests that envy is one of the biggest flaws in the Church. Following this, indeed, one of Abelard’s greatest hindrances is his peer’s jealousy. And the clergy of the Church ignore the modest words of the Bible and conform to the desires of society. The Church in the twelfth century is full of clergy men who are secretly envious of Abelard and in that sense the Church is corrupt.
While the Church plays an important role in The Letters of Abelard and Helois...

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... to get him to feel pitiful towards her and her struggles. And so their communication stops after the twelfth and final letter. Little did they realize that their letters would make history and become as important as they are today.
The love stories that touch us most deeply are punctuated by human frailty. Look at them up close and you see the fault lines, compromises and anticlimaxes. At the beginning of Shakespeare's play, Romeo is just as intemperately in love with a girl called Rosaline as he is later with Juliet. And Abelard and Heloise? They weren't equally strong or passionate or generous. Still, they put their frailties together and created a perfect myth, as well as something perhaps even more precious -- a surprising, splendid, fractured reality. ''There is a crack,'' the Leonard Cohen lyric goes, ''a crack in everything: that's how the light gets in.''