youths shamelessly possess themselves of the offices in these Faculties, and beardless boys sit in the seat of the Elders, and those who do not yet know how to be pupils strive to be named Doctors.  And they themselves compile their own summaries, reeking and wet with [their own] further drivellings, and not even seasoned with the salt of the philosophers.  Neglecting the rules of the Arts and throwing away the standard works of the Makers of the Arts, they catch in their sophisms, as in spiders’ webs, the midges of their empty trifling phrases.  Philosophy cries out that her garments are rent and torn asunder; she modestly covers her nakedness with certain carefully prepared remnants [but] she is neither consulted by the good man nor does she console the good woman.

These things, O Father, demand the hand of Apostolic correction, that the present unseemliness of teaching, learning, and debating may by your authority be reduced to definite form, that the Divine Word may not be cheapened by vulgar attrition; that it may not be said on the corners, Lo!  Here is Christ, or Lo!  He is there! that sacred things may not be cast before dogs or pearls before swine to be trampled under their feet.[77]

(b) The Monastic View

To many of the monks of this period study and the search for truth through reason were repellent.  In their view the way to spiritual truth was through retirement from the world, and the observance of religious exercises.  This is the burden of a letter to John of Salisbury by Peter de la Celle, abbot of a monastery near Rheims, in 1164.  Incidentally it gives his view concerning Paris.

“Peter de la Celle to John of Salisbury concerning the perils that encompass souls at Paris and concerning the true school of truth.”

His own Abbot to his own clerk.  You have, my well-beloved, chosen a sufficiently delightful exile, where joys, though they be vain, are in superabundance, where the supply of bread and wine exceeds in richness that of your own land where there is the frequent access of friends, where the dwelling together of comrades is common.  Who else besides you is there beneath the sky who has not thought Paris the place of delights, the garden of plantations, the field of first fruits?

Yet, though smiling [at these things], you have said truly that where pleasure of the body is greater and fuller, there is the exile of the soul; and where luxury reigns there the soul is a wretched and afflicted hand-maid.  O Paris!  How well-suited art thou to captivate and deceive souls!  In thee are the nets of the vices, in thee the arrow of Hell transfixes the hearts of the foolish!  This my John has felt and therefore he has named it an exile.  Would that you were leaving behind that exile of yours just as it is, and were hastening to your native land not in word and tongue only but in very deed and truth!  There, in the book of life