ABELARD'S BLISSFUL CASTRATION

Yves Ferroul

Where is the wise and learned Heloise,

On whose account once Peter Abelard

Was castrated, then monk at Saint-Denis?

Because of love he knew pain.

Francois Villon

Ballade des dames du temps jadis

In this essay I view the story of Abelard as a rarity: a medieval example of how a man experienced and expressed his understanding of his gender through sexuality, marriage, and sexual mutilation. In addition, I propose that the reception of this story from Abelard's time to our own has tended to misrepresent the nature both of Abelard's castration and of his claustration. [claustration is from the same root as cloister]

To defuse the scandal of his affair with Heloise and her pregnancy, Abelard insisted upon marrying her but did so secretly. Heloise's uncle Fulbert attended the ceremony. When Fulbert divulged this secret to others, Heloise, who then lived in his house, denied the fact of the marriage. The infuriated uncle then mistreated his niece so terribly that Abelard removed his wife to the convent of Argenteuil, where she was "disguised" in a nun's habit. Since Fulbert and his family though Abelard was trying to reject his marital relation to Heloise, Fulbert decided to punish the seducer by mutilating him. Abelard presented the circumstances leading to his castration later in his Historia clamitatum. He concluded: "overwhelmed with such woes, shame (confusio pudoris), I must confess - rather than a true vocation - pushed me into the shade of a cloister." Abelard thus established a causal connection: his castration caused him to forego his marital relationship with Heloise in order to become a monk.

Commentators - chroniclers, theologians, historians, encyclopedists, and even poets like Villon, quoted above - have persistently regarded this connection as self-evidently natural. One of Ablard's contemporaries, Otto Freising, gave an account of the phioloper's adventures in his Gesta Friderici imperatoria: "Ill-treated in a well-known circumstance, Abelard became a monk in the monatery of Saint-Denis." Garbiel Peignot observed in his Dictionnaire biographique in 1813 that "they mutilated him in an inhumane way. This unfortunate husband concealed his shame and sorrow in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, where he entered into religion." "There was no alternative," concludes Charles de Rémusat in his drama Abelard. Joseph McCabe, in Peter Abelard, was certain that Abelard only indirectly connects his conversion to his mutilation because of modesty:

It is a pious theory of the autobiographer himself that this mutilation led indirectly to his 'conversion.' There is undoubtedly much truth in this notion of an indirect influence being cast on his mind of life. Yet we of a later age, holding truer view of the unity of human nature and of the place that sex influence occupies in its life, can see that the 'conversion' was largely a direct physical process.

Charlotte Charrier, in her thesis on Heloise, was equally clear: "If we approve of Abelard's decsion to embrace a monastic life - and was it not the only acceptable decsion? Wasn't he bound to do so?" Etienne Gilson shared her opinion, the received and common opinion: "The reason he entered into religion is quite clear. Nothing allows anyone to suppose he would have become a monk had he not been covered with shame by his ordeal." Gilson goes so far as to assert that Abelard immediately and totally accepted this expiation as a divine command. He therefore also connects castration to monastic life. Recent interpretations of this episode are similar. According to Régine Pernoud,

It is therefore Abelard himself who imagined and imposed this solution. He may have thought there was no other way out: Heloise was his wife before God and Man, but he could no longer be her husband after the flesh. The bond that subsisted could be dissolved in no other way than by their joint entry to the monastery

In the Regard sur les Françaises, Michèle Sarde validates Abelard's behavior:

Love cannot ignore the sanctions of marriage with impunity; or otherwise it would be doomed to impotence. Nevertheless, the Word is a possible substitute. Halted in full swing by castration, Abelard froze. He turned away from Heloise and fixed his eyes upon heaven.

The unanimous view is that Abelard's entry into monastic life was justified, but this traditional notion assumes that the couple had to dissolve. At least one other option is ignored: Abelard could have shared his misfortune with the woman he had wedded before God. What motivated Abelard's separation from his wife? Might not the couple's marriage have been maintained?

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARITAL LIFE

It is usually thought that once Abelard could no longer be Heloise's sexually whole husband, he inevitably sought shelter in a monastery, which affirms Abelard's right to dissolve his marriage since he had been castrated. Ecclesiastical law cites castration as one form of impotence, defined as the inability to implant semen. In the twelfth century, impotence conferred the right to nullify a marriage if it occurs after the ceremony. It was an undeniable impediment if known before. However, this definition did not apply to Abelard because his marriage was consummated: after that point, impotence did not consitute legal nullity.

Procreation, as one of the goals of marriage, must be possible for a true marriage. After its consummation, a marriage becomes indissoluble: "indissolubility is attached to marriage by divine law after consummation." The philosopher and his disciple-wife were fecund, and thus the couple was indissoluble. An accident after that point could not alter their union. Legally, an impotentia coeundi, even if it is anterior and perpetual, cannot compel the spouses to separate. Why then did Abelard use nullity as a cause, since his impotence was posterior to the marriage, consummation, and the birth of a child? Castration alone cannot explain Abelard's behavior, since it did not bind him to separate from his wife. Abelard's rationale is typically explained as a desire to attain the ideal of chastity promulgated by the church, which ranked celibacy above marriage. The church venerated couples who separated to remain chaste. St. Alexis, for example, pled with his young wife on their wedding night to prefer heavenly to mortal life and to regard Jesus as her sole spouse. St. Simon (d. circa 1080) similarly exhorted his new wife to retain her chastity and to take a vow of virginity, and then he sent her to a monastery and donned the habit himself. But these examples are irrelevant to Abelard's situation,, since the most ideally chaste of couples did not consummate their marriages.

In the twelfth century, once their children were independent and inheritance problems were resolved, many couples separated after living together for a long time in order to devote the rest of their lives to God - as did Abelard's parents. Many couples did not wait for old age, and "is is noticeable how easy it was, for those who wanted to lead a monastic life, to annul their marriages, to divorce, or to separate." Monastic life was privileged; recruitment to its ranks was eased. Yet the desire for devoted monastic relusiveness was not the exclusive reason for such couples' separation. The possiblity of an ecclesiastical career constituted another important incentive. Leclercq cites the example of the twelfth-century knight Ansoud de Maule, who asked his wife's permission to become a monk: "The decision after marriage to become a monk or a nun was often grounds for separation, provided it was by mutual consent." Leclercq argues that Abelard and Heloise's behavior was thus not atypical:

The favours bestowed on them by the wealthy, who helped them in founding and sustaining the paraclete, as well as the spiritual support granted by St. Bernard, Peter the Venerable, and Innocent II: all this proves they had not been misunderstood nor banished."

One should not conclude quickly that Abelard and Heloise followed this pattern. First, their move to monastic life did not occur by "mutual assent." Abelard says that "abnegating her own will, Heloise had already, as I ordered her, taken the veil and her vows," while Heloise recounts that "your order made me undergo the rigors of monastic life." Next, no decision to be chaste requires a determination to enter a monastery. By 1200, The Life of St. Cunegunda (d. 1040) reports that she devoted her virginity to the king of heaven with her chaste husband's assent. Before dying, the latter told his parents-in-law: "I give her back to you just as you entrusted me with her. You gave me a virgin, and a virgin I return to you." So, too, the story of the Count of Hainaut, who respected his bride's wish to remain a virgin and, "despite all other women, she became his sole passionate love." Though Abelard chose monastic life for himself, why did he choose it also for Heloise? Mutual consent to separate does not require that both spouses must enter religious life. Gabriel Le Bras refers to the Decretals of Gregory IX that queries separations "unless one of the spouses enters religious life." Abelard could have permitted his wife to remain a laywoman without asking her to enter a convent.

Despite the virulent anti-matrimonialism of Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum, intensified by Gregory the Great, the church professed that it regarded marriage as one way to attain sainthood. Abelard frequently cites biblical quotations to voice his awareness that marriage is no impediment to salvation. Heloise is equally sure that the quest for salvation is not shackled by marriage. God has not destined only monks for beatitute: "Et quomodo honorabiles sunt nuptiae, quae nobis tantu impediunt?" (And how can marriage be regarded as honorable if it is seen as mere shackles?) Heloise is futhermore sure of the strength of her relationship with Abelard: "You know what bond binds us and obliges you, and that the nuptual sacrament unites you to me all the more tightly as my love has always been overt and boundless." The couple could have lived together and benefitted from "all these marital tokens of affection" that Heloise misses. In light of Heloise's desire, Abelard's insistence upon her claustration cannot be justified, since their conjugal status was not affected by castration after conummation. Hugh of Saint Victor writes that the union of two bodies legitimates and sanctifies marriage and that the union of souls provides "the sign and symbol of the great mystery of the union of Christ and Church."

His opponent Roscelin, who knew that Abelard chose the monastery "in an overwhelming plight of misery and shame," found the decision dishonorable. But - though embarrassed by his abuse of power - Charlotte Charrier is not alone in attempting to exonerate Abelard. Since Heloise was young, beautiful, and passionate, she argues, could Abelard have left her prey to temptation? Heloise "should be regarded as a lover rather than a mother," who "surrendered as an expiatory victim and relished the bitter joy of sacrifice." This reasoning is convoluted if not bizarre: how can one assert that Heloise loved Abelard so absolutely that she would always have remained faithful to him but simultaneously argue that she had to be locked in a convent to protect herself from adultery? Or that she was a loving and passionate mother but that she could not be allowed to rejoin her son? Or that she was forced to enter a convent but that she aspired to play the part of a victim? What can be said of Charrier's representation of an aging Abelard who is fed up with his wife's smothering love, embittered by imposed mediocrity, an unfaithful, deplorable husband and father. This portrait stands in contrast to typical twelfth-century examples of marital love and mutual tenderness. My analysis suggests instead that Abelard was spurred by a complex of motives combining need to exact revenge on Fulbert with possessive jealousy and frantic selfishness.

THE FANTASMS OF SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP

What exactly was Abelard's situation? Commentators from his day until ours assert that they "know what sort of mutilation was inflicted on him." Abelard himself says "...eis videlicet corporis mei partibus amputatis quibus id quod plangebant commiseram" so that "the means to achieve fleshly depravity has been taken from me." In Letter Five, he tries to convince Heloise that this mutilation was beneficial: "I have been deprived of the part of my body that was the centre of voluptuous desires, the prime cause of the lusts of the flesh," so that "I can no longer be contaminated by the flesh."

The radical end of Abelard's sexuality is underscored by his contemporaries. According to the prior Fulk of Deuil, Abelard is fortunate: his meditation will no longer be impeded by movements of the flesh. He will be able to meet with indifference beautiful women (who usually excite even the most insensitive old men), and husbands will no longer fear him. Roscelin gloats over the humilation of the arrogant philosopher: "What name can one apply to you? I am not clever enough to answer.... For since you have lost the characteristic of a man, you can no longer be called Peter but incomplete Peter." At the end of the seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle expresses the Enlightenment view. He states that "to take their revenge, the girl's parents struck the root of the evil and tore it off, so that the offender could not relapse" though Heloise had not renounced "the possession of which her husband had been deprived." So even "though the record does not say that she would have risked her life to save her husband's sex and that her shouts could have protected this precious jewel from the muderer's hand, she must have said so." The revenge fo Fulbert's men becomes: "they took him unaware as he was asleep and cut of his membrum virile."

This representation of the castration still persists. Gonzaque Truc presumes that "the agressors left this throbbing flesh and fled," and that Abelard "cheered the mutilation removing the root of the sin he would never commit again." According to Etienne Gilson, Heloise's sole concern was her husband's happiness, because "though she has been deprived of carnal delights, she still loved Abelard." Her reproaches are naïve, since "after Abelard's mutilation, their respective situations were not comparable, for Heloise's sensitivity could still benefit from solace unavailable to Abelard." Gilson admires the Abelard who becomes a passionate defender of monastic continence, and who "totally forgot how easy had been his pride in a perfection that cost him so little." Michèle Sarde is just as categorical: "His desire vanished with his membrum.... Facing his frustrated lover, Abelard has no longer a body of his own... once this organ, the source of sexual desire, was severed." These dramatic views collectively assume that Abelard's testicles and penis had been severed and that he had thus been deprived of the means whereby he could satisfy carnal desire.

A complete mutilation has brutish and permanent physiological and psychological consequences. The amputation of an arm or a leg does not ipso facto wipe it out from our corporeal consciousness: our mind retains the phantom presence of limbs. It is surely even more difficult to erase from memory an organ that visibly identifies one's male sexuality.

Abelard was castrated and turned into a eunuch: "factus eunuchus." But what is castration? Castration is simply excision of the testicles: it has nothing to do with cutting off the penis [footnote 39] Abelard is precise about his mutilation and suffering. His castrators were "oculis et genitalibus privati." According to all authorities, the genitals or genitalia are the testicles alone. Du Cange translates the Latin genitalia as "testiculi, scrotum."[footnote 40] To accomplish this mutilation, appropriate for adulterers, the scrotum is tied up at the upper part of the testicles and then cut off. In his continuation of the Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun is explicit:

Fu la coille a Pierre tolue

A Paris en son lit de nuis (v. 8800-8801)

(His balls were taken from Peter

At Paris in his bed at night.)

As he recovered, Abelard remembered some biblical extracts relevant to his case, that is, to eunuchs: "tanta sit apud Deum eunuchorum abhominatio, ut homines amputatis vel attristis testiculis eunichizati intrare ecclesiam... prohibeantur" (God has so great an abhorrence of eunuchs that men made eunuchs by the amputation or attrition of testicles are forbidden to enter a church.) Jean de Meun translates "eunuchi" by "escoillez" in this passage and later in the poem, when Abelard recalls his visits to Heloise.

I think we should permit Abelard to keep his penis! He should also retain his sensuality, since a eunuch's sexuality is granted even in the Bible. Origen himself admits that "he had made a mistake describing the inconveniences and uselessness of a remedy that disturbs the body without appeasing the soul." St. Jean Chrysosthome says that castration "far from assuaging the lusts of the flesh, exacerbates them." According to St. Epiphanius, after castration, "more violent and no less immoderate passions" are triggered by lust. These statements relate not only to desire but also to sexual capacity.

One must distinguish the castration of a child from the castration of an adult through unequivocal scientific language without the learned use of Latin as an evasive filter: "cum me puduerit de obscoenis gallice dicere, satius visum est latino sermone uti." (Since I found it too shocking to use the French language in discussing such obscene matters, it seemed healthier to use Latin.) It is a medical certainty that before the age of puberty, missing testicles - the source of male hormones - make sexual maturity impossible. Therefore, physical appearance, voice (the famous voice of Italian castrati), and genital life remain infantile. But with post-pubertal castration, erections are possible as is ejaculation of a fluid normally assoicated with semen (formed by the spermatozoa), produced by the prostate and its related glands. Though the process of this sexual activity is controversial - some attribute a role of substitution in the production of male hormones to the adrenal glands; others argue that the nervous system acquires sufficient autonomy once it has fully developed and functions thanks to testicular hormonal action prior to excision [footnote 47] - there is no doubt about the product: "eunuchs whose testicles have been cut off but who kept their penis could still have erections, making them very attractive because of the unthreatening lack of consequence to such intercourse." Juvenal describes such intimacy ironically:

Some women are thrilled by puny eunuchs and their non-prickling kisses: they don't have to dread their beards, nor prepare abortions. Voluptuousness is complete, for the men are delivered to doctors only when they were blooming, when their organ-hairs had grown and the organs themselves were mature.... As for children in the hands of slave-traders, they suffer from a true and pitiful impotence.

Roman women who took eunuchs as lovers were the butt of Martial's jests: "Why is your dear Caelia served by eunuchs only? It is just because she wants to be serviced without having children."

Studying eh process of the ritual ablation of the testicles, Aline Rousselle concludes that:

The ancients must have distinguished fecundation, connected to the vasum deferens and the testicles, from sexual activity capable of independent ejaculation.... In the third century A.D., men knowingly and scientifically extinguished their fecundity (but not their desire or sexual activity) through a ritual ablation of the testicles.... Reproductive male power was sacrificed on a voluntary basis only, which implies sexual maturity and mental conviction: the true []Galli[/] thus cut off their testicles with the clear consciousness of adults retaining their sexual potency.

In the fourth century, Basil of Ancyra advises virgins to avoid consorting with eunuchs:

Those who achieve virility at an age when the penis is fit for copulation are said to be brutish in their sexual desires, not from ardor but in order to besmirch women without incurring nay risk.

The Pseudo-Basile:

mainly reproached these maimed men... because they maintained sensual passion and its source (i.e., lust) along with incontinence of will and spirit. It was more dramatic since they were less fit for it physiologically, increasingly becoming slaves of voluptiousness as they indulged in it with impunity and disgrace.

Although Piere Bayle was convinced that sexual relationships for Abelard and Heloise were imposible, he notices that "Father Theophile Raynaud... had read about many examples of lurid intercourse between women and mutilated men."

Amputation of the penis (emasculation) is a more recent tradition. Realizing that the eunuchs who direct the harem were not really reliable, for instance, sultans began to require full amputation that included the penis. According to Dr. Zambaco Pacha, however, its practice does not date farther back than the fifteenth century:

Knowing that the full or partial spadon (a eunuch whose penis was totally or partially retained) had not his virility, Amurat III, the conqueror of the Persians, is said to have been the first sultan to have employed complete eunuchs and to demand a full amputation.

The amputation of the penis is a delicate operation. Though the vessels of the testicles are thin, and the subsequent hemorrhage is easily stopped, the arteries of the penis from which blood floods out are more difficult to control. Dr. Ionel Rapaport recounts two amputation incidents, one of them fatal: "Attis snatched a fragment of a vase and withdrew under the pine-tree to deprive himself of the marks of his sex.... His blood drained away as his life withered." In another incident, however, "a young man who decided to become a Gallus stripped off his clothes, made his way to the assembly, shouted and seized a knife. With this, he castrated himself suddenly before running across the town holding what he had just cut off." The account of a castration in the Russian sect of the Skoptzy in the nineteenth century bears out the claim that the latter operation was done with relative facility:

Two adepts hold and carry the neophyte while the operating surgeon drops on one knee. He makes him bend his knees and part his legs. The root of the scrotum is bandaged quickly and tightly with a simple small string.... It is then severed with a razor.... The maimed person usually faints and hemostasis occurs naturally, even if the ligature is not perfect.... If necessary, the cruentous surface is cauterized with ferric-chloride and alum. The dressing is held by a bandage. The main drugs used to stop bleeding are ice and tar. From four to six weeks, dressings are applied with an unguent with unknown ingredients.

The amputation of the penis causes physical difficulties since the penis is also used for urination. Dr. Zambaco eloquently accounts the mutilation of children destined to serve in harems as eunuchs:

After tying their victims down to tables with straps on the arms, legs, and chests, they would bind both the penis and the scrotum and cut them off with a sharp instrument. To keep the spermatic cords from retracting into the abdomen, causing an intro-abdominal hemorrhage that was almost always deadly, these holy monks (Egyptian Coptic monks in the nineteenth century) used to apply a ligature to the cord. They would then pour boiling tar on the wound or cauterize it with a hot iron. After being mutilated, the poor little boys were buried waist-deep in the sand. A rod was inserted into the urethra to prevent its obstruction; they were left in this position for several days. Those who survived were taken out and tended with tow that had been dipped in an aromatic oil. The wound would heal only after two or three months. The pain at every urination was terrible. I was told all these details by eunuchs who sobbed as they remembered how they had suffered forty or fifty years before.... The mortality of complete eunuchs is very high... nine out of ten would die... most eunuchs inserted a silver tube so as to urinate standing without wetting their chlothes. Many suffered of chronic cystitis or from recurring inflammations.[footnote 57]

The ablation of Abelard's testicles, called castration, has nothing in common with these examples of penile amputation, called emasculation.[footnote 58] Thus Abelard could have sustained a physically affective if not a fully sexual relationship with Heloise. He strangely alludes to the perception of sexual capacity as the cause of one of his misfortunes:

I therefore visited them more often (i.e., the nuns) to support them as well as I could. This bred a lot of gossip: sincere charity from my part was shamefully interpreted by my wicked enemies who said that I was still under the influence of fleshly lust, since I could not bear the absence of my former lover in any way.

Pierre Bayle comments that "backbiting against this poor man was fierce although he was known to have been deprived of what could have contented his wife. They kept saying that he was still attached to his former mistress by a trace of sensual voluptuousness." Bayle distrusts Heloise a priori: "Heloise loved Abelard so passionately, even though he had been castrated, that his chasitity was at risk with her."

Given the intensity of Heloise's desire, as revealed by Letter Four - as well as the emerging notion in the church that conjugal sexual relationship should be maintained at the request of one's spouse - it is legitimate to ask whether Abelard should have been expected to stay with his wife. By the following century, this expectation was granted explicit theological acceptance. The Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique restates thirteenth-century opinon, asserting that a "man becoming a eunuch after a legal marriage is entitled, according to some authors, to have a conjugal sexual relationship" (art. "Mutilation," 2579).

THE FANTASMS OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE AND SEMEN

Abelard's mutilation affected his behavior in different ways. Consequently, his decision to enter religious life is not as self-evident as has been presupposed. Nevertheless, his choice was freely made and was culturally valorized. Like his contemporaries, Abelard thought religious life embodied the path of perfection; he himself wanted to attempt the most heroic road. Full of this conviction, he tried to persuade Heloise of the advantages of this life.

Abelard was confident of his intellectual acumen, and he was well versed in the scientific thought of his day. He may have been persuaded by contemporary scientific authority that his intelligence was directly related to the retention or the emission of semen:

According to Pythagoras, the semen is 'the foam of our purest blood.' Plato regards it as 'the mellow discharge of the spine marrow,' and Alcmeon as 'the purest and the most delicate part of our brain.' Democritus thinks the semen is a 'substance of our whole body.' Epicure names it 'elixir, extract or eptome of our soul and body.' Galen also thinks that 'this fluid is produced by the whole body and drains into the testicles by its specific veins and nerves. If one loses his semen, he also loses his vitality. No wonder excessive coitus is enervating, since the body is then deprived of its purest substance.' If the semen is produced by the brain, it is already white. In fact, the veins linking the brain to the testicles carry the blood alread bleached, to feed the brain, reads the Anatomis Ricardi Anglici. The Liber al-Mansure (of Rhazes) also expresses this opinon: vessels branching out in the testicles coil into a series of loops coated by a white glandulous flesh that bleaches the blood it contains. From there, this white blood is then carried to the testicles where it is dramatically processed and turned into perfect semen.... Following Avicenna, Albert the great's teaching reckoned and established an equivalence between blood and semen - the weakening of the system following the discharge of semen, the fruit of the fouth digestion, amounts to a loss of a quantity of blood that is forty times the quantity of semen.

According to Isidore of Seville, the semen always emerges from bone marrow. The convolutions of the seminiferous vessels are compared to an alembic. Henri de Mondeville, Philip the Fair's surgeon, sums up the prevailing common opinion: "The excess of the good nutritive blood of all the organs is carried to the testicles and the spermatic vessels, it constitutes semen." According to Vesalius, semen will always be produced in this way. He tries to prove that it is neither in the accessory glands (since castration makes people sterile) nor in the testicles that semen is produced (since the ligature of the seminal veins and arteries also leads to sterility). As a consequence, the vessels carry semen from another source. Obviously, this other source is the cerebrum. Arnold of Villanova reflects the prevailing opinion of Abelard's time:

a certain humor in the brain is liquified by heat; once liquified it is conducted through the veins behind the ears to the testicles... semen is conducted downwards from the brain by the veins which are behind the ears, and from them to the spinal medulla, and from the medulla to the loins, and from the loins into the testicles.... The Ancients affirmed that the testicles were the most important organs... because they supply the virtus [manliness, manly force] of the whole body.

From this perspective, the "virtus" released by the testicles to inform the whole body is the seed that patterns behavior and therefore determines masculinity as gender. Aline Rousselle states that the castrate oscillates between two meanings of his mutilation: "his regained childhood that makes him a perfect victim of Saturn, and the adulthood whose 'pneuma' can be exclusively psychic, since the waste of the semen disappeared."

Sects that proliferated in the Greco-Roman world early in the Christian era practiced castration to spiritualize the total being. For Cybele's worshippers, the Galli, "the essential was giving up procreation through semen, conservation of the vital force,a nd its transformation into a psychic force. The mother of God mutilated Attis, thoug he was her lover, because the superior and eternal beings want to make masculine virtue come up to heaven." Medical science proved that:

the amputation of the vas deferens did not allow the purest blood to be released into the penis for fertilization and the seat of the vital force was not located in the genitals. The vital force is transmitted by the latter by fertilizing a woman and begetting a child.... But this force can be sustained and become a psychic force for the superior man.... One can locate the elements of understanding and apprehension of the positive aspect of emascuation in the physiology of the vital force and in physical pneumatology.

Such was the understanding of Abelard and his contemporaries. The philosopher himself voices his awareness that at the peak of his sexual activity, his intellectual life had declined almost to non-existence; he was unable to devote his considerable energies to thinking; his teaching so bored and exhausted him that he became neglectful and repetitive. Castration then suddenly plugged this huge waste of psychic energy. He regarded it as an evident intervention of God, a sign of God to his creature to make him collect his wits and devote all this "virtus" to his intellectual life.

In this context, disbanding his marital life held minor significance. What really mattered to Abelard was the new opportunity to elevate himself:

Deprived of this part of my body which was the seat

JesusA (imported) wrote: Wed Mar 05, 2003 9:00 pm of voluptuous desires, the prim

al cause of the lusts of the flesh, I was able to advance in many other ways.... Pulled out of the filth into which I jumped as into muck, I was physically and spiritually circumcised. I became more fit for church service since carnal contagion could no longer reach me and spoil me.... I was purified rather than mutilated by divine grace.... Didn't it expel vice to preserve my spiritual innocence?

Like a well-pruned tree, he will bear good fruit. Freed from the burden of the flesh, his spiritual needs will no longer be limited. He sees castration as the root of his real fecundity:

Remember how God took care of us: He seemed to have destined us to some grand work and to have been outraged to see that the treasures of semen he had entrusted us with were not applied to the honor of his name.

God entrusted him with the treasures of science because He had intended him for some grand achievement. That is why Abelard was more upset when his enemies tried to wound him in his intellectual fatherhood by burning his books than when his physical fatherhood was affected:

I compare the turture I had to undergo formerly to the ordeals I had now to go through. I thought I was the most miserable man in the world. The attack Fulbert had perpetrated seems of no importance compared to this new injustice, and I grieved more over my soiled name than over my soiled body.

He is all the more desperate when he proves spiritually sterile as the abbot of a monastery of ruffians:

I considered with sorrow the pitiful and useless life I was to lead, sterile for me and others. My life among students used to be so fertile, but I had forsaken my disciples to live with these monks, bringing no fruit to anybody.

Critics have been sensitive to the passion for glory Abelard developed after his castration. Charles de Rémusat alludes to a letter he imagines Abelard wrote Heloise:

I think that religious life only can pave the way for activity, honor, and success. I remember the prospect of ecclesiastical dignities and the spiritual glory your ambition dreamt for me in happier days. All these prospects are still mine if I am able to make them happen. This is perhaps the first time my power has ever been so great.

"From this moment, Abelard's grandeur increases," remarks Etienne Gilson, who is convinced that Abelard's mutilation enabled him to benefit from the sole life fit for a son of God: spiritual life. Abelard shows gratitude to this Father-God who saved his life instead of condemning him: "Corpus vulnerat, et animam sanat. Occidere debuerat, et vivificat. Immunditiam resecat, ut mundum relinquat" (He wounds the body, and heals the soul. He gives life to those who deserve to be killed. He prunes the soiled man, so that he might leave the world).

Abelard's decision to enter monastic life erased the possibility that he and Heloise might provide their culture a new ideal: a union of married passionate lovers, loving parents, and admired intellectuals. Though Abelard was driven by his need to perform his maleness, his post-castration life was marked by the brilliance of his discourse. In the end, he earned accolades from, among others, Peter the Venerable, who when "informing Heloise of his death even compares him to St. Martin and St. Germanus, two models he equalled: the former by his profund humility, the latter by his extreme pverty. His soul mediated over, his mouth uttered, his behavior heraled divine, learned and real philosophical works only."

His blissful castration enabled Abelard to become what he really wanted to be: a paragon of a Christian and the greatest of philosophers, "the one that should be called the servant and the philosopher of Christ," says Peter the Venerable, "the only one that really knew what can be known," as his epitaph concluded.

FOOTNOTES:

The original article has 77 footnotes covering 6 pages of text. I have retained the original numbering for the few that I have included in this version.

39. Actually, the ablation is not the only way to castrate (disrupting the process between generative organs and vascular or nerve centres or neutralizing the testicles as generative organs by ligating, crushing, or twisting).

40. For Du Cange (genitalia: unde vir generat) the source is the semen and not the generative organ. In the singular "genitale" means the penis (cf. Apulée, Met., 10, 22). In the plural "genitalia" means testicles. Cf. Colummelle, 7, 11, 2: "cutes quae intervenit duobus membris gentalibus" (the septum between the testicles). Furetière, "genitoires": "the testicles or male generative sex-glands"; testicules. "c'est ce qu'on appelle proprement génitoires"; eunuques: "ceux a qui on a retranché les testicules." Cf. Also Littreé. The chastisement undergone by Abelard's aggressors is not unusual in the twelfth century: Pierre Bayle quotes Suger who reported that in the rign of Louis VI a traitor was blinded and his genitals cut off.

47. Cf. Henri Bricaire and J. Dreyfus-Moreau, Les impuissances sexuelles et leur traitement (Paris: Flammarion, 1964), esp. p. 15, 17, 29. J.P. Sarramon et al., eds,. Chirurgie de l'impuissance, Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale (Paris: Rein, 1978), Organes Génito-urinaires, 18395 A 20, 3-1984. The complete amputation of the testicles and the penis prevents neither ejaculation nor orgasm. A recent French television program on the sexuality of eunuchs concentrated on contemporary Indian eunuchs (50,000 to 100,000 in number) whose external genitals had been cut off and who lived on the profits of rackets and prostitution. A twenty-year-old man who was amputated by force when he was fourteen said he still desired women: "When I see a girl on the street, I dream of her. I can't help it and I feel as if I am ejaculating. Then I get up, wash, and change my clothes." Transsexuals often have orgasms after being amputated.

57. Zambaco Pacha, pp. 99-102. The Chinese seem to have used a less expensive method:

the patient is laid on a bed, his abdomen and thighs are tied up. Two assistants fastenhis legs. The surgeon cuts off both the scrotum and the penis. He then sets a peg into the urethra, washes the wound with peppered water, then lays sheets of paper that had been previously dipped in cold water and covers them with a bandage. It is left so for three days and the patient can neither drink nor urinate. If he cannot urinate after the bandage has been removed, he dies undergoing terrible pain. Usually it heals up after three months. Nevertheless themortaility rate is said not to exceed 4% Death is due to hemorrhages or infection (Zambaco, p. 213)

The skoptzy wishing to attain perfection do not approve of castration, but they practice it: "The organ is placed on a block. A knife is laid on it and it is struck with the fist. A lead or think nail is then set in the urethra to make sure the vessel is permeable, but some Skopzy do not take this precaution.... One must stress the fact that mortal accidents are rare or kept secret" (Rapaport, p. 107)

58. Abelard's statement: "nichil pene fere sentiebam" (HC, p. 102) confims my argument. When contemporary medicine counts the cases of impotence "it holds that there are three main types of organic impotence factors: the lesion of the rectile tissue, the perturbation of the nerve control and the alteration of the vascular system as well as some endocrine diseases." Surgical castration is not regarded as the cause of the perturbation of nerve control. Cf. Giblod L. Boccon, "Impuissance sexuelle organique," Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale (Paris: Rein, 1978) 18395 A 10. But it is true that attitude has an important part to play: surgeons have noticed that two out of three men who have gone through a bilateral castration without having the details of the operation explained to them are impotent, which is not actually the case for one in three of them. This proportion is quite different if the patient understands the operation. The loss of virility is a fantasm that assimilates castration to a voluntary homicide - which is not the case as far as other amputations are concerned (Grande encyclopédie, "Castration," p. 776). The contemporary phallic cult of psychoanalysts muddles everything, even when it is based on the Porporino by Dominique Fernandez (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1974), in which several castrates have sexual relationships (Eugenie Lemoine Luccioni, Partage des femmes [Paris: Points-Suil, 1976], p. 164). We are therefore as surprised as Aline Rousselle: "In Antiquity and now, the sexual faculties of men deprived of their testicles are still ignored because we refuse to stick to realities" (p. 159, n. 54, and p. 162, n. 59). Note that Aermican judges have asked rapists to choose either prison or castration (Le Monde, December 8, 1983), whereas the Dict. Théol. cath. had already noted "castration would only arouse adult criminals' desires and entice them to relapse" ("Mutilation," col. 2577).

FROM:

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome & Bonnie Wheeler (eds.), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997), pp. 129-150.

The volume includes two additional articles on Peter Abelard, as well as one titled Eunuchs Who Keep the Sabbath: Becoming Male and the Ascetic Ideal in Thirteenth-Century Jewish Mysticism. There are also fascinating articles on the proper penence for children who are sexually active, the frequency of transvestite knights in the Middle Ages, Outlaw Masculinities: Drag, Blackface, and Late Medieval Laboring-Class Festivities, and a number of other topics. Written in pure Academic, but the fascinating topics will pull you through.

I wanted to bring this discussion forward. I have found Abelard's autobiography and thought that it is not in full agreement with the literature presented in this thread.

Jesus, thank you very much for this special article. It means a lot to me.