Abelard the Great
In one of his letters to Heloise, Abelard discusses how he came to acquire a special affinity for his Logic classes. In doing so, he engages a simile comparing himself to Alexander the Great by writing “Furnished with the weapons of reasoning, I took pleasure in going to public disputations to win trophies; and wherever I heard that this art flourished, I ranged like another Alexander, from province to province, to seek new adversaries, with whom I might try my strength.” This comparison to Alexander is based upon the romantic myth of creating a tragedy out of his ability to invade and take over more of the world than he already had. It was said of Alexander that seeing no more worlds to conquer, the wept. Abelard’s metaphorical imagery compares his ability to conquer opponents in debate with Alexander’s laying waste through Europe.
His Disgrace
Abelard explicitly alludes to something he simply terms “my disgrace” several times in his letters to Abelard. Although he mentions explaining in detail what this disgrace constitutes, to Heloise it remains only ambiguously alluded to in the form of a seeming comprehensive metaphor covering all the multiple myriad unspoken details. “My disgrace” by virtue of his repetition becomes a metaphor of mystery that ironically only serve to intensify a reader’s imaginings of just how disgraceful this fall from grace was in reality.
Becoming a Monk
In his memoir, Historia Calamitatum: The Story of My Misfortunes, Abelard does go into much greater detail about events bringing disgrace and shame down upon him. Such is the extent of this miserable condition that he is moved to metaphor encased within a rhetorical question posed to the reader: “How could I ever again hold up my head among men, when every finger should be pointed at me in scorn, every tongue speak my blistering shame, and when I should be a monstrous spectacle to all eyes?” The cause of this finger-pointing toward a man who had come to be viewed as a bestial vessel of evil turns out to have been nothing more shocking than an illegitimate child borne from premarital sex and the subsequent secret marriage which directly led Abelard being castrated in revenge.
Loving Heloise
In one of his letters to Heloise, Abelard almost melancholically asserts “Love is incapable of being concealed; a word, a look, nay, silence, speaks it.” This metaphorical conclusion is ironically arrived at through a demonstration of a lack of love. Abelard explains how others around him realized his preoccupation with being in love directly as a result of his exhibiting a lack of love for everything else. It was through his melancholy disinterest in subjects that previously had enthralled him that he came to realize this inability of love to be hidden beneath a disguise.
