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Letter CCLXXXIV. To Pope Eugenius, on Behalf of the Archbishop of Rheims and Other Persons

(Circa A.D. 1151.)

My lord, Samson, Archbishop of Rheims, lives in the house of the great Father as a vessel made to honour. If you know this, preserve his honour, and the honour of his church. If I know the man well, the more you honour him, the more by him and in him will God be honoured. The Bishop of Arras1 is a simple and upright man, and one who up to the present has refused promotion, so that there is no need for him to be humbled by another, lest he lose his authority, and so his usefulness. If you think him worthy, give him this authority, because he will never have it of his own seeking, being one who is, as far as he is concerned, content with his lowly position. There is one who opposes himself, and is puffed up, and there is need of a Bishop to humble him, and it will be not less beneficial to the man himself. To resist the proud and to give grace to the humble is what your Lord delights to do, and you have heard Him saying: If any man serve Me, let him follow Me (S. John xii. 26). The Abbot of Ancourt2 is a good man, let him be rewarded according to his goodness. Let him be listened to when speaking of his necessities, and let not an apostate be heard against him. The Dean of Bethune, by the wish of his Bishop, and the assent of the advocate for his church, has determined to set on foot a good work in the same church, and it is well that it should be confirmed by your authority. In the same way I plead for the Deans of Soissons and Cambray, that they may obtain their requests. I have been in perils amongst false brethren, and many letters have been forged, and fraudulently sealed with my seal, and have gone forth into many different hands, and my chief fear is that this treachery may have reached even to you. This is why I am forced to discontinue the use of my former seal,3 and to use this new one, which you notice is fresh, containing both my device and my name. Do not accept the other seal as mine for the future, except in the case of the Bishop of Claremont, to whom I gave a letter sealed with that seal before I had this one made.

Footnotes

  1. Godeschalc (see epp. 214 and 253) succeeded, A.D. 1 150, Alvisus, mentioned in epp. 6^ and 395. The dispute alluded to here seems to have been with Guerric, Abbot of S. Vedast, to whom Eugenius wrote "that he should promise in writing obedience to Godeschalc for those things which he held from the church of Arras." ↩

  2. This was a house of regular Canons of S. Augustine, near Bapaume. It is variously written in the MSS. ↩

  3. From this it is plain that what William, the third Cistercian Abbot of the name, says in a Letter to Theobald, Count of Champagne, is not true, viz., that a seal of the Abbot of Buzay, recently discovered, was spurious, because on it was engraved the name of the Abbot, when, as he said, no Order ever had its Abbot's name engraved on its seal. Certainly, in a document of Bernard himself, written to settle a strife between the monasteries of S. Genevieve and S. Victor, the seal of Bernard was appended with his name and effigy, holding in his right hand a book and in his left a pastoral staff. See Letter of M. Deville (Vol. ii. p. 457.) ↩

Chapter 284 of 491