Note 212 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

How far the stir set up in Europe by his personal magnetism and his personal record may have made for rational culture, it is impossible to estimate; but some consequence there must have been. John of Salisbury was one of Abailard’s disciples and admirers; and, as we saw, he not only noted skepticism in others but indicated an infusion of it in his own mind—enough to earn for him from a modern historian the praise of being a sincere skeptic, as against those false skeptics who put forward universal doubt as a stalking horse for their mysticism.212 But he was certainly not a universal skeptic213; and his denunciation of doubt as to the goodness and power of God214 sounds orthodox enough. What he gained from Abailard was a concern for earnest dialectic.