According to the religious story-books the episode is very clear and highly honourable to Bernard. Abbot Abélard had rewritten, with what he thought to be emendations, the theological treatise which had been burnt at Soissons. Under the title of the Theologia Christiana, this rationalistic exposition and defence of the dogmas of the faith, especially of the Trinity, had ‘crossed the seas and leaped over the Alps,’ in Bernard’s vivid phraseology. With it travelled also an Introductio ad theologiam, which was written soon after it, and his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, of earlier date. The books we have previously mentioned, the Sic et Non, and the Ethics or Know Thyself, had a more limited and secluded circulation. The theological work which has the title of Epitome Theologiae Christianae or Sententiae Petri Abaelardi is considered by most experts to be a collection of his opinions drawn up by some other masters for scholastic use.[25]
The story runs that these works chanced to intrude on the pious meditations of a mystic theologian of the name of William of St. Thierry. William was very nearly a saint, and the new theology shocked him inexpressibly. He had been abbot of St. Thierry at Rheims, but had been elevated from the Benedictine level to the Cistercian under Bernard’s influence, and was peacefully composing a commentary on the highly mystical ‘Song of Songs,’ in the Cistercian monastery at Signy, when Abélard’s heresies reached him.[26] In his horror he selected thirteen definite heretical statements from the books, and sent them, with the treatises, to his pious and powerful friend, Bernard of Clairvaux, with a pressing request to examine them and take action. Bernard replied that a cursory perusal of the books seemed to justify his follower’s zeal. He would put the matter aside until after Holy Week, then talk it over with William. In the meantime William must bear patiently with his inactivity, since he ‘had hitherto known little or nothing of these things.’ Easter over, and the conference having presumably taken place, Bernard was convinced of Abélard’s errors. Faithful to Christ’s direction, he went up to Paris, and personally reproved his erring brother, without witnesses. Bernard’s biographer (and secretary-monk) assures that Abélard promised to amend his ways. The amendment not taking place, Bernard paid him a second brotherly visit, and, as he refused to comply, Bernard followed out the evangelical direction of reproving him before others. He attacked him in the presence of his students, warning the latter that they must burn his heretical writings forthwith. It is one of the scenes in Abélard’s career which it would have been interesting to have witnessed.
However, we must defer for a moment the continuation of the Bernardist version of the encounter, and examine the course of events more critically.
The theory that St. Bernard had not occupied himself with the errors of Abélard until William of St. Thierry drew his attention to them is a very poor and foolish composition. We could as well imagine that Newman knew ‘little or nothing’ of Dr. Arnold’s views in the early thirties. Bernard and Abélard had been for many years the supreme representatives of the new ‘High’ and ‘Broad’ movements of the twelfth century; and Bernard had a far more intense dread of rationalism than Newman. Scarcely an event of moderate importance occurred in Church, school, or state, in France at least, that escaped the eye of the abbot of Clairvaux in those days. He was ‘acting-Pope’ to the Church of Christ, and he felt all the responsibility. And, amongst the multitudinous cares of his office, none gave him greater concern than the purity of the faith and the purification of the disquieting scholastic activity of the day.
We have seen in a former chapter how largely antithetic his position was to that of Abélard, and that he was a man who could not doubt for a moment the truth of his own conception of religion. There was the same marked antithesis at the very bases of their theological conceptions, in the mental soil in which those conceptions took root. Bernard was more authoritative than Anselm of Laon, more mystic than Anselm of Canterbury. He had gone further than Anselm on the theory that ‘faith precedes reason’; Abélard had gone beyond Roscelin with the inverse proposition. Perhaps Bernard’s commentary on the ‘Song of Songs’ furnishes the best illustration of his frame of mind and his outlook. Towards the close of his life he devoted himself to long and profound meditation on that beautiful piece of Oriental literature. We must not forget, of course, that the Church is largely responsible for his extravagance on this point. It has indeed taken the civilisation of the West more than two thousand years to discover that its glowing verses are inspired only by the rounded limbs and sweet breath of a beautiful woman; and its most erotic passages are still solemnly applied to the Mother of Christ on her annual festivals. But Bernard revelled in its ‘mystic’ phrases. Day by day, for more than a year, he gathered his monks about him in the auditorium at Clairvaux, and expounded to them the profound spiritual meanings of the ‘Song.’ Eighty-three long sermons barely exhausted the first two chapters. In the end he devoted three lengthy discourses, on successive days, to the elucidation of the words: ‘In my bed at night I have longed for him whom my soul loveth.’
This mystic and unreasoning attitude brought him into fundamental antagonism with Abélard. To him faith was the soul’s first duty; reason might think itself fortunate if there were crumbs of knowledge in the accepted writings which it could digest. To reason, to ask a question, was honestly incomprehensible and abhorrent to him. He insisted that the rationalist told God he would not accept what he could not understand; whereas the rationalist was prevented by his own logic from questioning the veracity of the Infinite, and merely insisted that, in a world of hallucination and false pretence, it were well to make sure that the proposition in question really did come from God. Bernard thought reasoning about the Trinity implied irreverence or incredulity; Abélard felt it to be a high service to divine truth, in preparing it for minds which were not blessed with the mystic sense. Bernard believed Christ died purely and crudely to make amends to the Father; Abélard thought this would impute vindictiveness to God. And so on through a long list of dogmatic points which were of unspeakable importance in the eyes of the twelfth century.
A conflict was inevitable. In Bernard’s thought Abélard was employing an extraordinary ability to the grave prejudice of the honour of God, the safety of the Church, and the supreme interest of humanity. Bernard would have deserted his principles and his clear subjective duty if he had remained silent. If he had ‘a quick ear’ to catch ‘the distant thunder roll of free inquiry,’ as Cotter Morison says, and no one questions, he must have turned his zealous attention to Abélard long ago, as we have already seen. But the rationalist had been rendered powerless in Brittany for some years. Now that he was teaching with great effectiveness at Paris once more, Bernard could not but take action.
However, it is a task of extreme difficulty for an impartial student to trace with confidence the early stages of that memorable conflict. We have seen the Bernardist version; the version of some of the recent biographers of Abélard is very different. Deutsch and Hausrath, able and critical scholars, believe that the letter from William of St. Thierry had been written, wholly or in part, by Bernard himself; that Bernard’s reply was part of a comedy of intrigue; that a timid and treacherous conventicle of the Cistercian monks, including Bernard, had deliberately drawn up in advance this equivocal plan of campaign. Now, if the Catholic enthusiast is incapable of dealing quite impartially with such a problem, it is equally certain that the heretic has a similar disturbing element in his natural predilection for picking holes in the coats of the canonised. The evidence must be examined very carefully. The presumption is that a man of the exalted idealism and stern self-discipline of St. Bernard would not lend himself to such manœuvres. Yet these things are not inconsistent with the dignity of canonisation; moreover, the object was a great and holy one—and Bernard had a mortal dread of the dialectician.
In the first place, then, it is impossible to credit Bernard with the whole of the letter which bears the name of William of St. Thierry. Much of it is by no means Bernardesque in style and manner; and there are passages which it is quite impossible, on moral grounds, to conceive as having been written by Bernard himself. At the same time much of it does certainly seem to have been written by Bernard. There are few better judges of such a point than Deutsch. The contention that William would not have dared to address such a demand simultaneously to Bernard and Geoffrey without instructions is more precarious.
On the other hand, the letter seems in many respects to support the idea of a diplomatic arrangement. It is addressed to Bernard and to Geoffrey of Chartres, and opens as follows: ‘God knows that I am filled with confusion, my lords and fathers, when I am constrained to address you, insignificant as I am, on a matter of grave urgency, since you and others whose duty it is to speak remain silent.’ After a little of this strain he recounts how he ‘lately chanced to read a certain work’ of the dreadful heretic he has named—the Theology of Peter Abélard. From it he selects thirteen heretical propositions (we shall meet them later), which he submits to their judgment. If they also condemn, he calls for prompt and effective action. ‘God knows that I too have loved him’ [Abélard], he says, ‘and would remain in charity with him, but in such a cause as this I know no friend or acquaintance.’ Finally, he says: ‘There are, I am told, other works of his, the Sic et Non and the Scito te Ipsum, and others ... but I am told that they shun the light, and cannot be found.’