A pupil of Abélard’s, coming down from Paris, brought him word that Roscelin had lodged an accusation of heresy against him with the bishop. As a monk of St. Denis, Abélard still belonged to Bishop Girbert’s jurisdiction. Roscelin had himself been condemned for heresy on the Trinity at Soissons in 1092, but his was an accommodating rationalism; he was now an important member of the chapter of St. Martin at Tours. Report stated that he had discovered heresy in Abélard’s new work, and was awaiting the return of Girbert to Paris in order to submit it to him. Abélard immediately grasped the pen, and forwarded to Girbert a letter which is a sad exhibition of ‘nerves.’ ‘I have heard,’ he says, after an ornate salutation of the bishop and his clergy, ‘that that ever inflated and long-standing enemy of the Catholic faith, whose manner of life and teaching are notorious, and whose detestable heresy was proved by the fathers of the Council of Soissons, and punished with exile, has vomited forth many calumnies and threats against me, on account of the work I have written, which was chiefly directed against his heresy.’ And so the violent and exaggerated account of Roscelin’s misdeeds continues. The practical point of the epistle is that Abélard requests the bishop to appoint a place and time for him to meet Roscelin face to face and defend his work. The whole letter is marred by nervous passion of the most pitiful kind. It terminates with a ridiculous, but characteristic, dialectical thrust at the nominalist: ‘in that passage of Scripture where the Lord is said to have eaten a bit of broiled fish, he [Roscelin] is compelled to say that Christ ate, not a part of the reality, but a part of the term “broiled fish.”’