date at Saint Denis. The motion was agreed to, and for
an instant Abailard had hope. But the legate was soon
persuaded that a postponement would be a virtual admis
sion of weakness. It was represented to him that Abailard s book was condemned by the very fact of his having
presumed publicly to lecture upon it without its having been
authorised by the Roman pontiff or by the church[1] ; it must
therefore be officially consigned to the flames as a warning
to others. Bishop Geoffrey made stand no longer. He
sorrowfully advised Abailard to yield : this violence, he
said, could only recoil on the heads of its authors and
assist the cause which it was intended to destroy. The
book was burnt and its author was committed to the
custody of the abbat of Saint Medard.
Abailard was not long held in confinement. His sentence had become, he says, a public scandal; and his restoration to Saint Denis was less an act of grace than a device for burying the consequences of the trial. But Abailard’s second stay in his own monastery was as distasteful to him as the first. His unlucky discovery in the pages of the Venerable Bede that saint Denis, the Areopagite, the patron of the foundation, was bishop of Corinth and not of Athens, as maintained by the tradition of the abbey,[2] brought matters to a crisis. The brethren assembled in chapter, denounced the audacious statement, and threatened its perpetrator with further proceedings before the king. Abailard deemed it wise to flee ; he made his way by night into the country of Champagne. But he could not always be a fugitive ; he desired in no
- ↑ [The text as printed is cor- rupt. The. true reading is cited by Denifle, Universitaten, i. 765 n. 31, from two French manu- scripts, which are supported by the Bodleian MS. Add. C. 271 f. 92 A.]
- ↑ Saint Denis was no doubt bishop neither of the one place nor of the other, but of Paris ; but this Denis was not the Areo- pagite. Abailard’s critical saga- city led him to discredit the popular story, and he gladly accepted the first alternative he found. Still that the question arising with re gard to the various persons who bore the name of Dionysius, can by no means be considered as settled may be gathered from the different articles in Smith and Waco s Dictionary of Christian Biography 1. 841 b, 842 a, 848 b, 849.
