[33] The reference is to the anti-pope, a Pierleone. It is a subtle reminder of what Pope Innocent owes to Bernard.
[34] Recalling some of the zoology of the Old Testament.
The second letter runs so largely on the same lines that it is thought by some to have been sent to the pope instead of the preceding, in which the reference to Hyacinth and the curia may have been impolitic. ‘Weeping has the spouse of Christ wept in the night,’ it begins, ‘and tears are upon her cheeks; there is none to console her out of all her friends. And in the delaying of the spouse, to thee, my lord, is committed the care of the Shunammite in this land of her pilgrimage.’ Abélard is a ‘domestic enemy,’ an Absalom, a Judas. There is the same play upon the lion and the dragon, and upon the scaly monster formed of Abélard and Arnold. ‘They have become corrupt and abominable in their aims, and from the ferment of their corruptions they pervert the faith of the simple, disturb the order of morals, and defile the chastity of the Church.’ Moreover Abélard ‘boasts that he has opened the founts of knowledge to the cardinals and priests of the Roman curia, and that he has lodged his books and his opinions in the hands and hearts of the Romans; and he adduces as patrons of his error those who should judge and condemn him.’ He concludes with an apostrophe to Abélard, which was well calculated to expel the last lingering doubt from the mind of the pope. ‘With what thoughts, what conscience, canst thou have recourse to the defender of the faith—thou, its persecutor? With what eyes, what brow, wilt thou meet the gaze of the friend of the Spouse—thou, the violator of His bride? Oh, if the care of the brethren did not detain me! If bodily infirmity did not prevent it! How I should love to see the friend of the Spouse defending the bride in His absence!’
The third letter, a kind of preface to Bernard’s list of errors and commentary thereon, is of the same unworthy temper, tortuous, diplomatic, misleading, and vituperative. It is not apparent on what ground Hausrath says this commentary represents Bernard’s speech at Sens; if it does so, we have another curious commentary on Bernard’s affirmation that he went to the synod unprepared. However that may be, the letter is a singular composition, when we remember that it accompanied an appeal to a higher court, to which the case had been reserved. It opens with a declaration that ‘the see of Peter’ is the due and natural tribunal to which to refer ‘all scandals that arise in the Kingdom of God’; a declaration which is hardly consistent with the assurance, when it is necessary to defend their condemnation of Abélard, that his appeal ‘seems to us wonderful.’ Then follows the familiar caricature. ‘We have here in France an old master who has just turned theologian, who has played with the art of rhetoric from his earliest years and now raves about the Holy Scriptures [Abélard had been teaching Scripture and theology for the last twenty-six years]. He is endeavouring to resuscitate doctrines that were condemned and buried long ago, and to these he adds new errors of his own. A man who, in his inquiries into all there is in heaven above or earth below, is ignorant of nothing save the word “I do not know.” He lifts his eyes to the heavens, and peers into the hidden things of God, then returns to us with discourse of things that man is not permitted to discuss.’ This last sentence, considered as a charge by Bernard of Clairvaux against others, is amusing. Bernard spent half his time in searching the hidden things of God, and the other half in discoursing of them. But Abélard conceived them otherwise than he.