came to see that there was this justice in the objections raised against him on the score of orthodoxy, that even though every doctrine he maintained was capable of defence, he had erred in the novelty of the terms in which he had stated them. Some time after John of Salisbury had quitted Chartres, William of Saint Thierry, the prime mover in the final attack on Abailard, u detected the danger that lurked under the innocent form of Conches's Philosophy. It was enough, he said, to have had a new theology to extirpate in the case of Abailard, without the addition of a new philosophy.[1] He wrote a strenuous letter on the subject to Bernard of Clairvaux; and the influence of the autocratic saint conspired, it seems, with the hostility which William of Conches had excited among rival teachers, to determine the latter to withdraw from the wrangle of the schools. His Norman birth perhaps helped to find him protection in the household of x Geoffrey the Fair, count of Anjou, who was now in occupation of Normandy, and who had himself endured the edge of saint Bernard's vigorous denunciation.[2]
To this prince William addressed a new edition of his Philosophy, rewritten in a more docile spirit, and distinguished from the earlier book by its dialogue form. He confesses in it y the errors and omissions which experience had discovered to him in the work of his youth, imperfectum, utpote imperfecti, and is resolved to make ample amends by striking out not only things contrary to the catholic faith, but also everything at all connected with it which, though capable of defence, might savour dangerously of novelty. It was better, he felt, to be silent than to risk the possibility of falsehood. His former work, therefore, he suppressed, and begged everyone who possessed the book to join him in condemning
- ↑ Etenim post Theologiam Petri Abäelardi Guillelmus de Conchis novam affert Philosophiam, confirmans et multiplicans quaecunque ille dixit: Epist., ubi supra, p. 127.
- ↑ 'Comes Andegavensis, malleus bonorum, oppressor pacis et libertatis ecclesiae,' says Bernard in a letter assigned to the year 1141: Ep. cccxlviii. 2, Opp. 1. 317.
