Letters331 Letter CCCXXXI. To Cardinal Stephen, bishop of Palestrina. (A.D. 1140)

On the Same Subject.

To the venerable lord and very dear father S..., by the grace of God Bishop of Palestrina, Brother BERNARD, Abbot of Clairvaux, health and that he may be strengthened to act firmly in the Lord.

I impart to you the distresses and complaints of the Spouse of Christ with the more confidence, because I am well aware that you are the friend of the Bridegroom, and rejoice greatly because of his voice. If I have rightly known your inward disposition, I am confident that the Lord may count on you, since you seek not your own interests, but those of Jesus Christ.

The life, the character, and the books already published of Peter Abaelard show him to be a persecutor of the Catholic faith and the enemy of the cross of Christ. He is a monk in outward appearance, but within he is a heretic, having nothing of the monk beyond the name and the habit. He opens the old cisterns and the dried-up pools of the heretics that the ox and the ass may fall therein. He had been long silent, but while he kept silence in Brittany he conceived sorrow, and now in France he has brought forth iniquity. The serpent of many coils has come forth from his cavern, and, like the Hydra, produces seven heads for one that has been struck off. A single one was lopped off, a single heresy of that man, at Soissons, but in its place seven, or it may be more, heresies have appeared, of which I have and send you a copy. Scarcely has he separated his young and unskilled scholars from the rudiments of dialectic than he introduces them, who are as yet barely able to comprehend the first elements of the faith, to the mystery of the holy Trinity, the holy of holies, the very chamber of the King, and even to Him who makes darkness His dwelling-place. In short, our new theologian distinguishes with Arius degrees and inequalities in the Trinity, with Pelagius prefers free will to grace, with Nestorius he divides Christ in excluding His Humanity from union with the Trinity. Proceeding thus through almost all the Sacraments and sacred doctrines, he touches on each with the utmost boldness, and treats each in a most blameable manner. Besides this, he boasts that he has imbued the Curia at Rome with the infection of his novelties; that his books and his opinions have made their way into the hands and the minds of Romans, and that those by whom he ought to be judged and condemned are the protectors of his erroneous teaching. May God keep guard over His Church, for which He gave His life, so as to present her to Himself without spot or wrinkle; and may He so order that perpetual silence may be imposed upon that man, whose mouth is filled only with cursing, and bitterness, and woe.