of his master, he practically reproduced the old heresy of Sabellius
which reduced the Trinity to three aspects or attributes of the Divine
Being--power, wisdom, and love. "A doctrine is to be believed," he
held, "not because God has said it, but because we are convinced by
reason that it is so." His whole attitude was that of the free, if
reverent, enquirer. "By doubt," he says, "we come to enquiry; by
enquiry we reach the truth." His book _Sic et Non_, a collection
of conflicting opinions of the Christian Fathers on the chief tenets
of the faith, was to be the first step towards arriving at the truth.

[Sidenote: Mysticism.]

He was condemned twice--his doctrine of the Trinity at Soissons in
1121, his whole position at Sens in 1141. The leaders of orthodoxy met
him not with argument but with a demand for recantation. St. Norbert
during the early part of his life, and St. Bernard both early and
late, pursued him with their enmity. Their objection was not to his
particular views, but to his whole attitude towards divine revelation;
and the conclusions in which the use of the scholastic method landed
its advocates perhaps justified the rigid theologians in the general
distrust of the exercise of reason on such subjects. St. Bernard did
not hesitate to attack even Gilbert de la Porree, Bishop of Poictiers,
an avowed Realist, who attempted to explain the Trinity. In fact, St.
Bernard represents the reaction from Scholasticism, which took the
form of Mysticism, that is, the purely contemplative attitude towards
the verities of the Christian creed. In this he was followed with much
greater extravagance by the school which found its home in the great
abbey of St. Victor--Hugh (1097-1143), who formulated the sentence
"Knowledge is belief, and belief is love," and Richard (died in 1173),
who applied to the intuitive perception of spiritual things and to the