Epistolæ

• Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete

• Peter Abelard

With what proclamations of praise St. Jerome extolled holy Marcella, encouraging her in the study for which she was ardent, vehemently approving questions particularly about sacred letters [Scripture], your prudence knows better than my simplicity. When he wrote the commentaries on the epistle of Paul to the Galatians, he remembered her thus in the first book: "I know her ardor well, I know her faith, what a flame she has in her chest, to surpass her sex, to forget men and resound with the drum of divine volumes, to cross the Red Sea of this world. Certainly when I was at Rome, never did she see me, no matter how often, that she did not ask something about Scripture. And not, truly, in the Pythagorean way, accepting whatever I answered as right — authority did not carry with her unless [her] reason passed sentence — but she examined all things and weighed everything with a sagacious mind so that I felt I had not so much a disciple as a judge."
In those studies, certainly, he knew her to have advanced so far that he placed her above others who burned with the same zeal for learning. Whence, writing to the virgin Principia, among other documents, he remembered her thus: "You have there in the study of Scriptures and holiness of mind and body Marcella and Asella; of whom either might lead you through the blooming fields and various flowers of divine volumes to him who says in the Canticles: ‘I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys;’ she is that other flower of the Lord who might deserve to hear with you: ‘As a lily in the midst of thorns, so my near one in the midst of my daughters.’"
Why these things, o beloved to many but most beloved to us? These are not lessons but admonitions: that you might remember from them what you owe us and not delay to pay the debt. You gathered the handmaids of Christ, your spiritual daughters, in your own oratory and delivered them to divine obedience. You were always accustomed to exhort us to give our attention mainly to understanding divine words and give our labor to sacred readings. You frequently commended the teaching of holy Scripture to us, saying it was a mirror of the soul, by which the soul could recognize its beauty or deformity. You permitted no spouse of Christ to lack this mirror, if she were zealous to please him to whom she had dedicated herself. You added moreover to this exhortation that a reading of Scripture not understood was like a mirror set before unseeing eyes.
I was as much incited by such counsels as our sisters, obeying you in this as much as we can, giving our labor to this study, driven by the love of letters about which the aforementioned doctor said in a certain place: "Love the knowledge of Scripture and you will not love the vices of the flesh." But we are perturbed by so many questions that we become hesitant/lazy in our reading; and the more ignorant we are in sacred words, the less we are compelled to love them while we feel our labor fruitless. Therefore, we are sending certain little questions as the disciples to the doctor, daughters to the father; we ask begging, we beg asking, that you by whose exhortation and order we have particularly entered on this study not disdain to explain. We put these questions not keeping to the order of Scripture, but as they daily occur to us and direct them to be so answered.
(For the full text of questions and answers, I will cite Mary McLaughlin's translation from her forthcoming book.)

The letter introduces 42 questions that have arisen from the daily biblical readings Heloise and her nuns do. The questions involve issues of sin and judgment, intention versus action, law and punishment, damnation and repentance, as well as contradictions or odd references in the Bible. Heloise does not hesitate to draw an analogy between herself and Marcella, Jerome’s celebrated and very learned colleague and correspondent.

Opera Petri Abaelardi ed. V. Cousin, 2v (Paris: A Durand, 1849, 1859), Problemata, 1.237-294; also in PL178 c.678 ff.