But such popular forms of unbelief were merely the outcome of the
speculations of subtler minds, which it was necessary to stop at the
fountain-head. The arch-heretic of the time was Peter Abailard, who
routed in succession two great teachers--William of Champeaux in
dialectic in the great cathedral school of Paris, and Anselm of Laon,
a pupil of Anselm of Canterbury, in theology. He gathered round him on
the Mount of Ste. Genevieve, just outside Paris, a large band of
students, in whom he inculcated his rationalistic methods. For his was
a definite attempt to obtain by reason a basis for his faith. How
could such teaching be allowed to continue unreproved by Bernard, who
held that the sole office of the reason was to lead the mind astray?
But in the height of his fame Abailard, still quite young, loved the
beautiful and erudite Heloise. He abused her trust, and when she in
her infatuation for his genius refused to monopolise for herself by
marriage the talents which were for the service of the world, she and
he both entered the monastic life. Abailard passed through several
phases of this--a monk at St. Denys; a hermit gradually gathering a
band of admirers round a church which they built and he dedicated to
the Third Person of the Trinity, the Paraclete; and finally the abbot
of a poor monastery in his own native Brittany. While an inmate of St.
Denys a work of his on the Trinity was condemned at a Council at
Soissons presided over by the papal legate (1121). It was twenty years
before he was again subjected to the censures of the Church. But,
meanwhile, he had more than once fallen foul of Bernard, and had not
hesitated to flout with his gibes the one man before whom the whole of
Catholic Europe bent in awestruck reverence. But the time came when
Bernard, noting the spread of the Petrobrusian heresy, determined to
strike at the source of these errors. He appealed for assistance to
the friends of orthodoxy from the Pope downwards. Abailard determined