To the revered lord and dearest father Stephen by the grace of God bishop of Praeneste, brother Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, ‘to do manfully and be of good heart’ in the Lord.

I announce to you the straits and groans of the Bride of Christ the more confidingly because I know you to be the friend of the Bridegroom and ‘to rejoice with joy because of the Bridegroom's voice’. For ‘I have confidence in you in the Lord’, if I know well your ‘inward man’, that you seek not the things that are yours but those that are Christ Jesus’s. Peter Abelard is proved a persecutor of the Catholic faith and an enemy of the cross of Christ by his life and behaviour and by the books that are now coming forth from darkness into light. He shows himself a monk without, a heretic within, having nothing of a monk except the name and habit. He opens old pits and broken cisterns of heretics so that an ox and an ass may fall in. He had lately been silent for many days; but when he was silent in Brittany ‘he conceived sorrow, and’ now in France ‘he has brought forth iniquity’. There has issued from its cavern ‘a winding serpent’, and like a hydra, when one head was cut off, it produced seven heads instead of the one. One heresy of his was cut off at Soissons; but now in its place seven and more heresies have emerged, of which we took a copy and sent it to you. Raw and naive hearers, far removed from the milk of dialectic, and those who (so to speak) can scarce bear the first elements of the faith, he introduces to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, to the holy of holies, ‘to the king's chamber’, and to him who ‘made darkness his covert’. For example, our theologue joins Arius in subjecting the Trinity to degrees and balances, Pelagius in putting free will before grace, Nestorius in dividing Christ and excluding the man He took on from the fellowship of the Trinity