Letters of Peter Abelard, Beyond the Personal

5. Letter Ten. To Bernard of Clairvaux

5 letter ten. To Bernard of Clairvaux In the last two years of his life Abelard found himself under mounting criticism from Bernard of Clairvaux and his allies for allegedly heretical writings and teachings. The aspersions escalated rapidly into full-scale attacks. Both of them egged on by their respective camps, Abelard and Bernard engaged in a bitterly polemic campaign of letter writing and political maneuvering. The skirmish between them peaked at the Council of Sens in 1141, which condemned Abelard as a heretic and prompted the pope to place him under a sentence of perpetual silence. The excommunication and ban of silence were not lifted formally until after a reconciliation was arranged by Peter the Venerable shortly before Abelard’s death about 1142. Had there been bad blood between Abelard and Bernard before the Council of Sens, or, to put the question less cagily, for how many years had there been bad blood between them? Many circumstances could have set the two on a collision course. One is ideological . Abelard embodied a new outlook that is often summed up in the word “Scholasticism,” as opposed to the monasticism of Bernard.1 According to this dichotomy, Abelard could be seen to represent the  1. For fuller context, see Ferruolo, Origins of the Universities, 47–92, and Matthew A. Doyle, Bernard of Clairvaux and the Schools: The Formation of an Intellectual Milieu in the First Half of the Twelfth Century, Studi 11 (Spoleto, Italy: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2005). schools, teaching, reason, and logic, Bernard the cloisters, preaching, authority, and faith. Another dimension to the conflict was political, in that some key supporters of Bernard were rivals or opponents of Abelard, and vice versa. Thus William of Champeaux, whom Abelard’s pressure had encouraged to leave Notre Dame for St. Victor, was not merely the bishop who had installed Bernard as abbot of Clairvaux but also the teacher and personal counsellor who had saved Bernard’s life by persuading him to moderate the harsh asceticism that had nearly killed him. Later Bernard lashed out against the royal chaplain and chancellor Stephen of Garlande, who backed Abelard at key moments in his life. Beyond these two celebrities, lesser figures whom Abelard had antagonized tended to gravitate toward Bernard.2 In the end, the patrons and clients of both Bernard and Abelard may have been spoiling for them to fight more than they were themselves—but the operative verb is may, since the evidence permits speculation but not conclusion. Years before Sens Abelard may have disliked Bernard and his loyalists or at least rejected their conception of an apostolic life, if the anti-Cistercian diatribe-sermon (dated tentatively 1127–1128) known after its incipit as “Adtendite a falsis prophetis” is indeed Abelard’s.3 Five years later, Abelard still refrained from naming names, but he came closer to revealing personal disregard for Bernard. In the Historia calamitatum (dated 1132–1133) he referred to “new apostles,” one of whom “boasted that he had reformed . . . the life of the monks.”4 And what of Bernard’s views on Abelard and pronouncements about him prior to Sens? Bernard’s Apologia for Abbot William (1124 or 2. Peter Dinzelbacher, Bernhard von Clairvaux. Leben und Werk des berühmten Zisterziensers (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 102 and 236–37. 3. Smits, Letters IX–XIV , 127–28. For the text and an introduction to it, see L. J. Engels, “‘Adtendite a falsis prophetis,’” 195–228. For a translation and study, see ChrysogonusWaddell, “Adtendite a falsis prophetis: Abaelard’s Earliest Known AntiCistercian Diatribe,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly: An International Review of the Monastic and Contemplative Spiritual Tradition 39 (2004): 371–98. 4. “novos apostolos . . . quorum . . . alter monachorum se resuscitasse gloriabatur ”: ed. Monfrin, p. 97, lines 1201–4; trans. Radice, p. 32. For fuller discussion, see the introduction to Letter Twelve.    bernard of clairvaux 1125), a text esteemed among historians of medieval art for the light it casts on attitudes toward images during the Middle Ages, was addressed to none other thanWilliam of St.Thierry, a close intimate of Bernard’s and a onetime friend of Abelard’s as well, who had been involved in the Council of Soissons and who spearheaded the later one at Sens.5 The Apologia launched a frontal assault on non-Cistercian monks for their failings—but although Abelard could have imagined that it was inspired at least in part by...