Christian piety toward the dead and living, but caring greatly for the Classics, and loving study. "The old man of Chartres (senex Carnotensis)," says John of Salisbury, meaning Bernard, "named wisdom's keys in a few lines, and though I am not taken with the sweetness of the metre, I approve the sense:
'Mens humilis, studium quaerendi, vita quieta,
Scrutinium taciturn, paupertas, terra aliena.…'"[1]
Bernard, Thierry, and other masters and scholars of their school, as the advocates of classical education, detested the men called by John of Salisbury Cornificiani, who were for shortening the academic course, as one would say to-day, so that the student might finish it up in two or three years, and proceed to the business of life. A good many in the twelfth century adopted this notion, and turned from the pagan classics, not as impious, but as a waste of time. Some of the good scholars of Chartres lost heart, among them William of Conches and a certain Richard, both teachers of John of Salisbury. They had followed Bernard's methods; "but when the time came that so many men, to the great prejudice of truth, preferred to seem, rather than be, philosophers and professors of the arts, engaging to impart the whole of philosophy in less than three years, or even two, then my masters vanquished by the clamour of the ignorant crowd, stopped. Since then, less time has been given to grammar. So it has come about that those who profess to teach all the arts, both liberal and mechanical, are ignorant of the first of them, without which vainly will one try to get the rest."[2]
Upon these people who seemed charlatans, and yet may have represented tendencies of the coming time, Thierry, Gilbert de la Porrèe,[3] and John of Salisbury poured their sarcasms. The controversy may have clarified Bernard's consciousness of the value of classical studies and deepened his sense of obligation to the ancients, until it drew from him perhaps the finest of mediaeval utterances touching the
