published the seat of his future lessons before he set out for it. At all events it was no sooner known where the master was than the story of his former sojourn in the same locality repeated itself. A concourse of students followed him, and the solitude was turned into an encampment. Abailard regained his old spirits. A school grew up about him, and the little oratory became the centre of a huddled mass of cabins and tents. Abailard rebuilt and enlarged it, and consecrated it afresh to the Paraclete, the Comforter of his hard-pressed life. He had the same learned ardour as ever; but more and more his secular teaching is becoming a necessity, not a chosen task; more and more he is growing absorbed in the study of spiritual things.
Was it this very fact, was it his presumed intrusion upon a field where only those who have not lifted up their mind unto vanity may dare to tread, that made this change in Abailard's life a signal for a renewal of suspicion against him? From this time, Abailard says, he had to fear the slanders, the machinations, of the two men who boasted themselves the reformers of the religious life; saint Norbert the new apostle of the regular canons, saint Bernard, of the monks;—the one the founder of the Premonstratensian order, the other of the abbey of Clairvaux. Abailard's fear is the only evidence of its cause. At the time when he dwelt upon it he had not to our knowledge come into personal conflict with either:[1] the day when Bernard should vanquish him at the council of Sens was yet far distant; in 1131 indeed he is found in friendly association with the abbat on the occasion of a high solemnity, in the presence of pope Innocent the Second at Morigny near
- ↑ Bishop Hefele, vol. 5. 401, thinks that Abailard's reference to Bernard is an error of memory, but the critic forgets that Abailard had, so far as we know, no more reason for thinking of him when he wrote the Historia calamitatum than at the time of which he speaks. At least there is no evidence of the date of the composition of Abailard's letter to saint Bernard, Opp. 1. 618-624, or of the latter's treatise De baptismo aliisque quaestionibus, of which Dr. Deutsch, pp. 466-472, seems to have proved that Abailard was the object.
