remained untouched by the suspicion of heresy, as little did their influence as teachers suffer on that account. In the letters calling upon the pope to ratify the sentence of the council of Sens, the argument which Bernard pressed as of prime urgency was that Abailard's teaching was being diffused over the whole world by a large and enthusiastic body of disciples: and if he had no one legitimate successor, at least his opinions were thought worthy of a detailed refutation nearly forty years after his death by Walter of Saint Victor, a man who presented in his day, though with less authority, the same attitude of defiant hostility to secular learning as saint Bernard had done before him. Nearly forty years too after the trial of Gilbert of La Porrée the number of his disciples was so considerable as to draw the vehement Geoffrey, now abbat of Clairvaux, once more into the fray, to denounce and to vituperate. The decision of the council of Rheims, he still found, was powerless to restrain the ardour of his disciples: in spite of it, Bernard himself had complained, the Commentary on Boëthius continued to be read and transcribed. It was repeatedly averred by writers of the Cistercian following, that the disciples of Abailard and Gilbert had used their trials as a handle for attacking Bernard and the order at large. But only fanatics could speak of either as having founded sects. Neither sought to remove himself out of the comity of catholic Christendom, nor, as we have seen, did the learned or popular opinion of their day so remove them. By the world at large they were still honoured as philosophers and divines.[1]
It is thus too that John of Salisbury, the pupil of both, regards them. In his historical work he has occasion to relate the proceedings against Gilbert; but in all his other writings he appears simply unconscious that that trial
- ↑ Compare the significant way in which John of Cornwall, a most correct writer, refers to an opinion of Gilbert's: 'Magister Gilebertus Porretanus, ut multi perhibent, ea docuit. . . Sed quia super iis aliquod eius scriptum non legi et auditores sui etiam a se invicem dissentiunt, ad alios transeo:' Ad Alex. pap. III. ap. Martene et Durand, Thesaur. nov. Anecd. 5. 1665 a; Paris 1717 folio. One hardly suspects heresy here; yet John was a contemporary.
