and destroying it. Not words, he protested, make a heretic, but their defence. It is a strange commentary on his judgement, and on the criticism of William of Saint Thierry, that the work thus disowned should have lived to be printed in three several editions as the production of the Venerable Bede, of saint Anselm's friend, William of Hirschau, and of Honorius of Autun; the taint of heresy plainly cannot have been long perceptible to medieval librarians. Nor, indeed, was the change that transformed the Philosophy into the Dragmaticon a very extensive one: substantially the two books are for the most part the same. To the ideology of Plato he had never committed himself: now he takes the opportunity of emphasising his correct position with respect to a pitfall into which, in fact, he had never stumbled;[1] in such matters, he says, Christianus sum, non academicus. He remained a Platonist so far as the external and rational elements of the philosophy were concerned, but he went to orthodox theology for the rest.
It is likely that the moderation with which he had learned to express his views restored his credit in the eyes of the stricter churchmen. Certainly his Dragmaticon enjoyed a remarkable popularity, and a wide diffusion attested by a multitude of manuscripts at Vienna, Munich, Paris, Oxford, and other places. The favour in which he was held by Geoffrey Plantagenet we know only from William's own scanty notices, and of his later years nothing is recorded. If it be true that he died at Paris about 1154,[2] we may find here a possible kernel of truth in the old tradition which has been constantly repeated from du Boulay, Oudin, and the other literary historians,
- ↑ The Dragmaticon, or Dailogus de Substantiis physicis, has been carefully analysed in an interesting paper by professor Karl Werner, in the seventy-fifth volume of the Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Classe der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1873. See especially pp. 400 sqq.
- ↑ The date is given among the notices of 1154, but with the prefix 'hoc tempore,' and only in the chronicle of Alberic, called of Trois Fontaines, who died nearly a century later: Bouquet 13. 703 D; 1786.
