In the first installment of her column Sacred Texts, Lamorna Ash considers Héloïse and Abelard, Marina Abramović and Ulay, and love’s eternal missals.

Close to midnight, on the final day of 2024 I destroyed my most sacred texts. Delete all chats? My phone asked me. And then again, to be sure I was sure, Delete chats? In an instant, the record of a two-year romantic correspondence in the form of a thousand tiny speeches carved onto fingerprint-sized green and white tombstones vanished. I’d done this several times before: the anticlimactic twenty-first century rendition of burning your love letters after a breakup. Each time, it felt too awful to imagine them preserved forever in my phone, fragments of a former me and a former them who used to say such passionate, easily meant things to one another. And, while Jesus Christ commanded his followers to “let the dead bury the dead” in the “official” sacred text with which I am most familiar, he had a stronger spirit than most and, really, he only said it because he urgently believed this mortal world was destined to end before the first century was out. I wanted my dead love texts buried.

This column is entitled Sacred Texts, but I doubt any of you expect me to take that altogether literally. And I’m not going to—beyond the next two paragraphs. But if I were to ask you for the texts that mean the most to you personally, that you might go so far as to designate “sacred,” I’d take a gamble that at least some of you would produce an email, a text message, a voice note, a letter (if you’re lucky) from a person you love or once loved.

How then, do we establish what renders a text “sacred” in our modern era? (On the “List of religious texts” Wikipedia page, included as sacred texts within the category “new religious movements” are: A Course in Miracles (1976, a text that the author, psychologist Helen Schucman, said was first dictated to her word for word by Christ); The Dude de Ching (2009, the holy book of Dude-ism, a movement inspired by The Big Lebowski); and The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (the holy book of Pastafarianism, 2006). Some of these contemporary sacred texts are mere parody; others are taken just as seriously as the holy books of world religions. When the writer Sheila Heti read A Course in Miracles for the first time, it made her feel “almost radiantly lit up with spiritual purpose.” To my mind, this is the hallmark of a text’s sacred quality: through these writings you are transformed, made ever so slightly different—maybe for a moment, perhaps for a lifetime. As you read, you can almost see them working on you: a glow, a shimmer that seems to emanate from the words themselves. Sacred texts are those which live beyond the moment and context of their composition in order to become a source of wonder to others. I am certain my deleted romantic texts could never have had such an effect on anyone else, but I also believe that we cannot predict in advance which phrases or lines of poetry might crack us open, cause in us some kind of numinous response, and in so doing join the great Alexandrian library of sacred texts. When we encounter such works, previously unrecognised truths about the world and our lives are revealed to us. New doors open up; behind them more life.

That’s how I felt reading about the twelfth century love affair between Héloïse and Abelard, whose personal correspondence, collected as The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse, translated by Betty Radice and published in 1974. In medieval France, Abelard was a renowned teacher of philosophy by the time he was thirty. “But success always puffs up fools with pride, and worldly security weakens the spirit’s resolution and easily destroys it through carnal temptations,” he writes in the first letter. “I began to think myself the only philosopher in the world, with nothing to fear from anyone, and so I yielded to the lusts of the flesh.” Enter Héloïse. “In looks she did not rank lowest, while in the extent of her learning she stood supreme,” he suggests, (a backhanded compliment if ever there was one). Of himself, he declares, “I had youth and exceptional good looks as well as my great reputation to recommend me.” How immediately lifelike Abelard seemed to me when I first read this—none of the letters are inert, they each have a strong pulse.

Around 1115 CE, the intellectually gifted Héloïse became his pupil. But their studying was just the pretext. “With our books open before us,” Abelard writes in Letter 1, “more words of love than of our reading passed between us, and more kissing than teaching. My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts.” It’s so far removed from the restrained, mechanical expressions of courtly love. I read it, and think: I don’t believe Abelard yielded to love because his esteemed reputation made him reckless; I believe he had traveled far enough in thought to realize there are some things the intellect cannot satisfy, which can only be discovered through the body, through love. In this way, perhaps a person can be called a sacred text, through whom we receive all kinds of revelations, should we pay them sufficient attention.

Certainly Héloïse’s love for Abelard changed her life. In secret, she bore their child. In secret, and after much hand-wringing, they married. But she knew their happiness could not last. “We shall both be destroyed,” she told him. “All that is left us is suffering as great as love had been.” When Héloïse’s uncle discovered they had committed themselves to one another without his permission, he sent men to Abelard’s room in the night to castrate him. After this humiliation, Abelard fled to a monastery to become a monk. Obeying his wishes, Héloïse agreed to take the veil herself. It is out of these circumstances that their letters begin, with the former lovers sequestered in holy houses for the rest of their days.

Héloïse’s early letters—beginning a decade after they were parted—are agonizing to read. Since they had taken holy orders, she has felt entirely abandoned by him. And yet she continues to ache with longing. “To her husband, or rather brother,” begins her first letter (collected as The Personal Letters), “from his wife, or rather sister: to Abelard, from Héloïse.” It feels like a gut-punch to me every time I read their new addresses to one another, which contain, nevertheless, the shadow of whom they had been to one another before. She writes that she joined the convent at his command for love of Abelard, “not love of God.” She fears that it was not love but lust which fueled his own desire, that this is why he’s able to treat her with such cool courtesy now. For Héloïse, after twelve years at the convent, still her love for Abelard has not run cold; this is how she knows it’s true. “My heart was not in me but with you, and now, even more, if it is not with you it is nowhere; truly, without you it cannot exist,” she writes. She wonders if such steadfastness in her feelings renders null her agreement to take up a life of prayer at the convent: “How can it be called repentance for sins, if the mind still retains the will to sin and is on fire with its old desires?” With each passing generation, the medieval academic M.T. Clanchy argues, Héloïse and Abelard’s letters will inspire less recognition, and so passionate response, in its readers; we will only think of them as “ludicrous figures who could not get a grip on their lives.” He was so completely wrong. Héloïse’s letters remain sacred texts because they contain as much interior life – intense passion and suffering – as any flesh-and-blood person opposite us today. This is why they are sacred.

Abelard’s response is as resolute as it is devastating. He declares that they are now bound by spiritual rather than physical love, that actually “it was a fortunate trading of your married state: as you were previously the wife of a poor mortal and now you are raised to the bed of the high king.” Imagine receiving this from the person you loved, how little consolation it would be, how hard it would feel thereafter to continue believing in a faith where human love had to be given up for love of God. For, should we believe in a God, I think the only place we might ever see such an entity would be reflected or refracted through our own human, all too human relationships. This is why every true sacred text is first and foremost a portrait of humanity.

The next set of letters are grouped as “The Letters of Direction.” From this point on, Héloïse responds with the same control and reserve as her once-husband and now-brother in God. “Nothing is less under our control than the heart—having no power to command it we are forced to obey,” she declares. “I will therefore hold my hand from writing words which I cannot restrain my tongue from speaking.” In her introduction to the letters, Radice speculates that “human love such as hers does not end with separation.” But she hopes that their continued correspondence in its new more formal register (mostly discussing her and her order’s spiritual direction) “made it possible for her to love him on a different plane.” I don’t know. I read the change in her tone as an act of great and difficult bravery, because she knew it was the only way to keep him close.

Whenever I read The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse I have in mind another, more contemporary couple, whose collaborative work I have come to think of as sacred, too. As soon as the performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay met in the 1970s, they fell hard in love and began making performance art together. They called this work a “third energy,” their souls combined, a kind of artistic procreation (we don’t know what happened to Héloïse and Abelard’s child—only that she called him Astrolabe, after the astronomical instrument for reckoning with time and observing the stars. Astrolabe as the one instrument that could point up to the star-crossed lovers who made him and prove that their love had been real). The idea for “The Lovers” came to Abramović as a vision in a dream. They would walk from either end of the Great Wall of China to finally meet in the middle where they would marry, documenting the whole expedition on film—the kind of exaggeratedly cinematic, romantic scheme that is destined to go wrong. In the time it took to secure their visas—several years—the relationship had already begun to fall apart. Five years later, they set out at last to make “The Lovers.” After almost 90 days of walking, each covering over two thousand kilometres alone, they reunited on the wall, not to marry, but to break up. Watching the footage of “The Lovers,” I imagine they are actually Héloïse and Abelard, setting out on their private pilgrimages through life in the wake of their painful estrangement, then meeting in the middle again through the form of letters.

After “The Lovers,” Abramović and Ulay did not see each other for twenty-two years. Their reunion took the form of another performance piece—how else could they have reconciled, when art was the language for their love? In 2010, Abramović, in a now epoch-defining retrospective at the MOMA, performed “The Artist is Present,” during which she would sit motionless in the centre of a gallery, with an empty chair opposite her where audience members could sit and engage in the silence with her. While Abramović waited for the next audience member to take their seat, she would close her eyes. On YouTube, you can watch a clip of the night Ulay came. He walks up and sits down opposite her, dressed all in black but for a pair of bright red lapels which match her dress. Upon opening her eyes and seeing him after all those years, Abramović starts to cry, then leans forwards to take his hands, at which point the audience applauds. When I watch the clip, I can’t help but cry too: their collaboration as a sacred text which seems to draw me momentarily into the ineffable whole of the world. After their separation, Héloïse and Abelard occasionally met again at her convent. I wonder what those reunions were like, whether there was ever a moment during which they were able to reach out their hands to hold one other again, just for that moment for time to fall away and their love become visible once more. Sacred texts are this: a glimpse of love’s eternality.