To his most beloved Ivo, by the grace of God cardinal priest of the holy Roman Church, Bernard, styled abbot of Clairvaux, ‘to love justice and hate iniquity’.

Master Peter Abelard, monk without a rule, prelate without responsibility, neither holds an order nor is held by an order. He is a man unlike himself: a Herod within, a John without; double through and through, having nothing of a monk about him except the name and the habit. But what is that to me? ‘Everyone shall bear his own burden.’ It is something else that I cannot hide, something that concerns all who love the name of Christ. ‘He speaks iniquity on high’, he corrupts the purity of the faith and the chastity of the Church. ‘He is passing beyond the bounds which our fathers have set.’ Disputing and writing of the faith, of the sacraments, of the holy Trinity, he changes, increases and diminishes individual details to suit his own pleasure. In his books and works he shows himself to be a fabricator of falsehood and a cultivator of perverse doctrines, proving himself a heretic not so much in error as in obstinate defence of error. He is a man going beyond his own measure, in wisdom of speech making void the virtue of the cross of Christ. He knows everything that is in heaven and earth, except himself. He was condemned at Soissons, together with his work, in the presence of a legate of the Church of Rome. But as if that condemnation was not enough for him, he is doing for a second time something to merit a second condemnation; and now ‘the last error is worse than the first’. He has no worries, all the same, for he boasts of having cardinals and clerks of the curia as his old pupils, and he takes on to defend his past and present error those at whose hands he ought to fear judgement and condemnation. If anyone has the spirit of God, let him remember the verse: ‘Have I not hated them, O Lord, that hated thee: and pined away because of thy enemies?’ May God through you and the rest of his sons deliver His Church ‘from wicked lips and a deceitful tongue’.