Love as License: Where Héloïse Gets It Right, and Where She Goes Wrong

The claim and its appeal

Abigail Tulenko, writing for Aeon, presents Héloïse's central thesis this way: 'there can be no sin in an action done out of love.' The line comes from Héloïse's own letters, written after she had been placed in a convent not by vocation but by the wreckage of an affair — a pregnancy out of wedlock, a vengeful uncle, and Abelard's castration and flight to a monastery. Tulenko frames this as 'intentionalist ethics,' the position that 'an action's morality should be evaluated by the intentions behind it, and not its ultimate consequences or public perception.'

There is something genuinely worth rescuing here. Héloïse's insistence that intention is morally relevant represents a real correction to a purely legalistic account of sin. That correction has Catholic roots. The question is whether Héloïse takes it far enough — or far too far.

What Héloïse gets right

Aquinas was clear that the interior act of the will is constitutive of the moral act, not merely a mitigating footnote. In the Summa Theologiae I-II, he treats intention, object, and circumstance as the three determinants of a moral act's species, with intention doing genuine work rather than simply excusing what the object has already condemned. [^1] An act done under compulsion, ignorance, or malformed desire is judged differently from the same external act done with full deliberation and consent.

Héloïse's intuition that culpability is 'deeply personal rather than institutional,' as Tulenko puts it, touches something real. Canon law and civil convention can misname actions, and social shame is not the same as moral guilt. The Church has always maintained that interior dispositions matter, that a merely external conformity to rules is not virtue, and that the movements of the heart — what Aquinas calls the passions — are morally relevant precisely because they inform the will.

So far, so orthodox.

Where the argument breaks

The problem is that Héloïse does not merely say intention matters. She says love-as-intention dissolves the moral character of the act entirely. This is the move that cannot be sustained.

To see why, it helps to notice what kind of love she is describing. The affair between Héloïse and Abelard began as a secret relationship arranged by her uncle so that Abelard could tutor her — and Abelard, as Tulenko acknowledges, 'was immediately enthralled by his new student's intellect.' What followed was characterized by clandestine meetings, concealment from her family, and a pregnancy that both parties knew would be socially catastrophic. This is eros in the sense that C.S. Lewis described: powerful, personal, and entirely capable of generating the subjective experience of absolute devotion while simultaneously overriding every other moral consideration. The feeling of eros is not a lie. But eros is not caritas.

Caritas, as Aquinas treats it in Summa Theologiae II-II, is ordered love — love directed toward the genuine good of the other and ultimately toward God as the highest good. [^1] It is the form of all the virtues precisely because it directs them to their proper end. Eros, by contrast, is desire for union with the beloved as perceived, and it is fully compatible with actions that harm both the beloved and third parties. Abelard's tutorial arrangement exploited his position of authority. The affair harmed Héloïse's uncle, however violently he responded. It placed a child in a precarious social position. Intense subjective experience of love accompanied every one of these consequences, and caused none of them to disappear.

When Héloïse writes, as Tulenko quotes, 'wholly guilty though I am, I am also, as you know, wholly innocent,' she is registering a genuine phenomenological truth: she did not intend harm. But the Thomistic account distinguishes between culpability (which intention modulates) and the objective moral character of an act (which it does not erase). The act of adultery — or in this case, fornication followed by concealment — does not become something other than what it is because the agent experienced it as love.

John Paul II's Theology of the Body offers the more developed account here. He argues that disordered sexual union is not simply a transgression of an arbitrary rule but a failure to image the self-donating love of the Trinity in the body. [^2] The body is not a vessel for eros that the soul supervises from a safe distance; body and soul together constitute the person, and sexual union has an inherent language that speaks of total, faithful, fruitful self-gift. Eros can authentically orient toward that meaning — and when it does, it participates in something genuinely sacred. But eros can also, without ceasing to feel like love, contract that language to mean only 'I desire you intensely,' which is a different claim entirely.

Intention and the structure of the person

Tulenko presents Héloïse's ethics as engaging 'the person in their wholeness.' That phrase deserves examination. The Catholic Christian anthropology articulated by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus understands the person as a created, fallen, and redeemable unity of body, soul, intellect, and will — and the fall means that felt interior states are not reliable guides to the objective order of goods. Concupiscence is precisely the condition in which desire presents itself as compelling and good while leading away from the person's genuine end. This is not a counsel of distrust toward all feeling; the Carmelite tradition, from John of the Cross onward, works carefully with affective experience as a site of divine encounter. [^3] But it insists that affective experience must be ordered, not simply affirmed.

Héloïse's model, by contrast, grants the feeling of love an authority it cannot bear. She writes, as Tulenko notes, that 'any external notion of innocence or sin is secondary to the internal moral mandate of love itself.' But if the internal experience of love is self-validating, then the person has no recourse against the well-documented human capacity to confuse passionate attachment with ordered love. The resulting ethics is not more personal — it is less, because it leaves the person alone with an experience that cannot question itself.

Thérèse of Lisieux, writing from a convent she entered freely and with full understanding of what she was renouncing, offers a telling contrast. In her letters, the love she describes is one that has been handed over entirely to Christ — not because human affection is worthless, but because it finds its truth when surrendered rather than grasped. Where Héloïse writes 'I am devoted to Abelard only,' [^4] Thérèse understands the logic of devotion redirected toward its proper ground. This is not a denial of feeling but its transformation, which is the arc of the spiritual life as John of the Cross charts it in the Ascent of Mount Carmel — from attachment to ordered love through the active and passive purifications that the soul requires. [^3]

Francis, in Dilexit Nos, returns to this logic when he cites Thérèse's letters on the heart of Christ as the place where mercy expels fear and the memory of one's own faults no longer leads to despair but to trust. [^5] The movement is not self-exculpation through appeal to good intentions but the transformation of the self by encounter with a love that is objectively ordered to the person's good. That is categorically different from Héloïse's claim.

What remains

Tulenko's animation does real philosophical work in recovering Héloïse from the role of tragic heroine and presenting her as a thinker. The insistence that intention is constitutive of moral acts, and that conformity to law is not equivalent to virtue, deserves to be heard. There is nothing incompatible between that claim and the Catholic tradition — in fact, the Catholic tradition developed it more rigorously than Héloïse could, precisely because it had the resources to distinguish intention from self-justification.

What Héloïse's letters cannot sustain is the stronger claim: that love is self-authorizing, that its felt presence is sufficient to determine the moral character of any act done in its name. That position collapses eros into caritas, conflates the experience of passion with the ordered gift of self, and ultimately leaves the person more isolated rather than more free — because it removes the only framework capable of distinguishing love that genuinely seeks the good of the other from love that pursues the beloved as an extension of the self.

The most important thing Tulenko says, almost in passing, is that Héloïse's affair had 'harmful results.' That admission is the one her ethics cannot accommodate — and it is the place where a more adequate account of love must begin.

References

Aquinas, T. (1265-1274). Summa Theologiae I-II, qq. 18-20; II-II, qq. 23-27. Benziger Bros. (1947 trans.). [^1]

John Paul II. (1979-1984/2006). Man and woman he created them: A theology of the body (M. Waldstein, Trans.). Pauline Books & Media. [^2]

John of the Cross. (1579/1991). The ascent of Mount Carmel. In K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez (Trans.), The collected works of St. John of the Cross. ICS Publications. [^3]

Thérèse of Lisieux. (1895/1957). Story of a soul: The autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (J. Clarke, Trans.). ICS Publications. [^4]

Francis. (2024). Dilexit Nos: Encyclical letter on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ. Dicastery for Communication. [^5]

Tulenko, A. (Writer). (2025). There can be no sin committed from love: The radical ethics of Heloise [Video essay]. Aeon. https://aeon.co/videos/there-can-be-no-sin-committed-from-love-the-radical-ethics-of-heloise

Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (Eds.). (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and mental health practice. Divine Mercy University Press.