Before the death of Innocent, Bernard was called away from his peaceful retirement at Clairvaux, to make war against a new enemy of the church in the person of Peter Abelard. This new conflict arose out of the intellectual movements of the age, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of the church, of literature, of spiritual and of civil freedom. We will briefly notice what led to it.
Most of our readers are aware that the learning which had been accumulated in the Latin and Greek languages was almost entirely destroyed by the barbarians in the fifth century. What is called the literature of the ancients was almost wholly lost when the barbarous nations were established on the ruins of the Roman empire. For fully five hundred years gross ignorance prevailed. Any knowledge that remained was confined to the ecclesiastic.,; and they, during that period, were forbidden to study or copy secular learning. Nevertheless some of the monks, especially of the Benedictine order, collected and copied ancient manuscripts; and, says Hallam, "It is never to be forgotten that but for them the records of that very literature would have perished. If they had been less tenacious of their Latin liturgy, of the vulgate translation of scripture, and of the authority of the Fathers, it is very doubtful whether less superstition would have grown up; but we cannot hesitate to pronounce that all grammatical learning would have been laid aside. But among them, though instances of gross ignorance were exceedingly frequent, the necessity of preserving the Latin language, in which the scriptures, the canons, and other authorities of the church, and the regular liturgies were written, and in which alone the correspondence of their hierarchy could be conducted, kept flowing, in the worst seasons, a slender but living stream."
Among these monks there must have been every variety of mind: some, no doubt, coarse, sluggish and mechanical; others, refined, active, inquiring, which could not be confined within the barriers of the established catholic doctrine, or submit to the power of the sacerdotal order. So it was; so it proved to be. The Reformer, the Protestant, sprang from the monastic order. There were many premature Luthers. In every insurrection, it has been said, whether religious or more philosophical, against the dominant dogmatic system, a monk was the leader, and there had been three or four of these insurrections before the time of Abelard. Gotschalk in the ninth century was scourged and imprisoned for his stubborn confidence in what was called predestinarianism. John Scot Erigena, a most learned monk from Ireland or the Scottish islands, was invited by Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, to oppose Gotschalk; but he alarmed the church no less than his antagonist, by appealing to a new power above catholic authority, human reason. He was a strong rationalist, but speculated largely in scholastic theology. Under the censure of the church he fled to England, and found a refuge, it is said, in Alfred's new university of Oxford.