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Contemporary Scholarship

In service of our comparison between the particular theological accounts of friendship given by St. Aelred of Rievaulx and St. Thomas Aquinas, a preliminary description of the relationship between monastic and scholastic theological approaches per se will provide the most helpful point of departure. In this preparatory chapter, our preeminent guide will be the great twentieth-century Benedictine scholar, Jean Leclercq. The conclusions of Leclercq’s extensive and profound researches will be supplemented principally by the work of R. W. Southern, Beryl Smalley, David Knowles and Ivan Illich.

Common Culture

Between the birth of Aelred of Rievaulx in 1110 and the death of Thomas Aquinas in 1274, a substantial homogeneity of culture obtained throughout Western Europe. David Knowles comments that “For three hundred years, from 1050 to 1350, and above all in the century between 1070 and 1170, the whole of educated Western Europe formed a single undifferentiated cultural unit.”26 Jean Leclercq, who tends to insist on the non-monolithic character of medieval life and culture, nevertheless confirms Knowles’s assertion in a somewhat peculiar way when he argues that, “jusqu’alors [xiie siècle], toute la culture médiévale porte l’empreinte monastique, et qu’en ce sens et dans cette mesure elle est une culture monastique.”27 To the extent, then, that medieval culture, at least up until the twelfth century, can be said to be monastic, it necessarily maintains a certain uniformity of character. Moreover, as Knowles’s chronologically broader claim suggests, such a deeply ingrained uniformity of Christian worldview and practice was by no means easily shed, even through Aquinas’s lifetime and well beyond. In The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, Leclercq is furthermore earnestly concerned to stress the fundamental unicity of the Church’s theology, however divergent or even disparate may appear its sundry expressions from one era, or nation, or school, to another:

Fundamentally, as there is but one Church, one faith, one Scripture, one tradition, and one authority, there is but one theology. Theology cannot be the specialty of any one milieu, where it would be, as it were, imprisoned. Like every great personality, every culture, and even more, necessarily, every reflection on the Catholic faith, every theology is, by its essence, universal and overflows the confines of specialization. It is only within the great cultural entities which have succeeded one another in the life of the Church that different currents can be observed; but they cannot be separated.28

In this dissertation, we will be very much concerned with a number of significant differences between monastic and scholastic theology. Precisely for this reason, we must heed attentively Leclercq’s salutary reminder concerning theology, along with the generally acknowledged evidence of broad cultural homogeneity spanning the lifetimes of Aelred and Thomas and the years in between.

Differences between Monastic and Scholastic Theology

Midway through his project of delineating a true “monastic theology,” Leclercq affirms “real continuity between the patristic age and the medieval monastic centuries, and between patristic culture and medieval culture.” He continues:

And it is this continuity which gives medieval monastic culture its specific character: it is a patristic culture, the prolongation of patristic culture in another age and in another civilization. From this point of view, it seems possible to distinguish, from the eighth to the twelfth centuries in the West, something like two Middle Ages. The monastic Middle Ages, while profoundly Western and profoundly Latin, seems closer to the East than to the other, the scholastic Middle Ages which flourished at the same time and on the same soil. Our intention here is by no means to deny that scholasticism represents a legitimate evolution and a real progress in Christian thought, but rather to point out this coexistence of two Middle Ages. To be sure, the culture developed in the monastic Middle Ages differs from that developed in scholastic circles. The monastic Middle Ages is essentially patristic because it is thoroughly penetrated by ancient sources and, under their influence, centered on the great realities which are at the very heart of Christianity and give it its life. It is not dispersed in the occasionally secondary problems discussed in the schools. Above all, it is based on biblical interpretation similar to the Fathers’ and, like theirs, founded on reminiscence, the spontaneous recall of texts taken from Scripture itself with all the consequences which follow from this procedure, notably the use of allegory.29

Bearing in mind Leclercq’s provocative notion of “two Middle Ages,” let us proceed to consider more carefully some of the significant ways in which monastic and scholastic theology diverge, in keeping with the differences between their respective milieux.30

If we begin at the most generic level, already we discover a striking contrast between the metaphors employed by monks and schoolmen to describe their respective theological activities. Thus, R. W. Southern says of the monks that “they liked to think of themselves as bees gathering nectar far and wide, and storing it in the secret cells of the mind.”31 Leclercq recalls St. Bernard’s description of himself and his fellow-monks as “lowly gleaners,” in comparison with those great reapers, Sts. Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory, not to mention the other Fathers.32 And Ivan Illich highlights the medieval characterizations of monks, by themselves and others, as “mumblers and munchers,” ruminating, or chewing, on the divine words of Scripture.33 The scholastics, on the other hand, when compared with the great thinkers of antiquity in the memorable description of Bernard of Chartres, were like “dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants,” able to see a little farther, however much lesser their stature, than those by whose accomplishments they hoisted themselves up.34 Even more significantly, it was the schoolmen for whom the most compelling image of Heaven came to be the Beatific Vision. We find, then, that whereas the theological enterprise of the monks is depicted by various metaphors of eating, the work of the schools is chiefly conceived under the metaphorical rubric of sight, or vision. The evident privileging of different senses here—the highly concrete sense of taste, and by extension, touch and smell, on the one hand; the most spiritual of the senses, sight, on the other—is not arbitrary. Rather, it proves to be congruent with the contrast between the fundamentally more experiential, tactile, aesthetic mode of being and thinking embraced by the monks, and the more strictly conceptual, abstract mode of thought cultivated in the scholastic milieu.

Ways of Reading

These metaphorical differences are expressive in imaginative terms of a whole range of more empirically verifiable differences embodied in the practices of reading, writing and theological inquiry typically employed by monks and schoolmen respectively. The most foundational of all such activities, the one without which would-be practitioners of the others cannot venture the first step, is reading. Though an authentically secular meaning of the word is inevitably promoted by the pursuit of the strictly non-ecclesial disciplines of medicine and secular law, lectio, for the medieval churchman, whether monk, friar, or secular cleric, means above all else the reading of Scripture. Leclercq explains the profound divergence between monastic and scholastic lectio in the following illuminating passage:

Since Scripture is a book, one must know how to read it, and learn how to read it just as one learns how to read any other book. . . . However, this application of grammar to Scripture has been practiced in monasticism in a way which is entirely its own because it is linked with the fundamental observances of monastic life. The basic method is different from that of non-monastic circles where Scripture is read—namely, the schools. Originally, lectio divina and sacra pagina are equivalent expressions. For St. Jerome as for St. Benedict, the lectio divina is the text itself which is being read, a selected passage or a ‘lesson’ taken from Scripture. During the Middle Ages, this expression was to be reserved more and more for the act of reading, ‘the reading of Holy Scripture.’ In the school it refers most often to the page itself, the text which is under study, taken objectively. Scripture is studied for its own sake. In the cloister, however, it is rather the reader and the benefit that he derives from Holy Scripture which are given consideration. In both instances an activity is meant which is ‘holy,’ sacra, divina; but in the two milieux, the accent is put on two different aspects of the same activity. The orientation differs, and, consequently, so does the procedure. The scholastic lectio takes the direction of the quaestio and the disputatio. The reader puts questions to the text and then questions himself on the subject matter: quaeri solet. The monastic lectio is oriented toward the meditatio and the oratio. The objective of the first is science and knowledge; of the second, wisdom and appreciation. In the monastery, the lectio divina, which begins with grammar, terminates in compunction, in desire of heaven.35

The monastic emphasis on compunction, with its correlative spiritual desire,36 ultimately has important eschatological implications, which will be taken up below. It also tends inevitably to entail a certain privileging of the will. The particular point at stake here is that the relative weights accorded intellect and will have implications even for the ways in which readers engage texts.

Ivan Illich, in his treatment of Hugh of St. Victor’s great work, the Didascalicon, articulates the distinction between monastic and scholastic reading in equally stark terms, though he arrives at his conclusions via an entirely different mode of inquiry from that of Leclercq. Illich advances the thesis that “By emphasizing exemplum as the task of the teacher, and aedificatio as its result in the town community at large, Hugh recognizes that the new Canons Regular, and not just he as a person, stand on a watershed between monastic and scholastic reading.”37 He goes on to argue that this exemplary and edifying role does not persist in the schools: rather, the Canons occupy what proves shortly to have been an anomalous position, atop the watershed, as it were, where reading has not yet lost

its analogy to the bell which is heard and remembered by all the townsfolk, though it principally regulates the hours of canonical prayer for the cloister. Scholastic reading then becomes a professional task for scholars—and scholars who, by their definition as clerical professionals, are not an edifying example for the man in the street. They define themselves as people who do something special that excludes the layman.38

Illich’s haunting image of remembered tintinnabulation points to another characteristic difference between monastic and scholastic modes of reading, one which leads to a watershed in exegetical technique between the two milieux. This is the way memory functions in the two environments. Reminiscences, according to Leclercq, “are not quotations, elements of phrases borrowed from another. They are the words of the person using them; they belong to him.”39 So highly developed, in fact, was the monks’ aptitude for graphic recollection of texts that

The monastic Middle Ages made little use of the written concordance; the spontaneous play of associations, similarities, and comparisons are sufficient for exegesis. In scholasticism, on the contrary, much use is made of these Distinctiones, where, in alphabetical order, each word is placed opposite references to all the texts in which it is used; these written concordances can be used to replace, but only in a bookish and artificial manner, the spontaneous phenomenon of reminiscence.40

With reminiscence, in contrast with the Distinctiones, “one becomes a sort of living concordance.”41

Ways and Kinds of Writing

Style

In their writing, too, the monks and the schoolmen differ significantly, both in style and in preferred genres, as well as in the uses they make of those genres they have in common. Leclercq identifies three distinct humanisms, those of monasticism and scholasticism, and a third “neo-classic” humanism represented by such “worldly clerics” as Peter of Blois and John of Salisbury, who belong neither to the university nor to the cloister. Comparing the writing styles that emerge from these three humanisms, Leclercq observes that

Monastic style keeps equally distant from the clear but graceless style of the scholastic quaestiones and the neo-classic style of these humanists. . . . In this sense, one can rightly speak, with regard to the most representative types of monastic culture . . . of a ‘monastic style.’ The literary heritage of all of antiquity, secular and patristic, can be found in it, yet less under the form of imitation or reminiscences of ancient authors than in a certain resonance which discloses a familiarity, acquired by long association, with their literary practices. . . . This was both a way of thinking and a way of expressing oneself. Thus the lectio divina complemented harmoniously the grammar that was learned in school.42

Leaving aside the neo-classic category, the monastic and scholastic styles tend to express their respective cultural biases, the one more literary, the other more speculative. Where the monks embrace grammar, music and rhetoric, the schoolmen prefer dialectics, to the detriment of the rest of the seven liberal arts; they forfeit “artistry of expression,” in favor of “clarity of thought” at all costs. For the monks’ genuine concern for beauty of expression, the schoolmen substitute “words originating in a sort of unaesthetic jargon, provided only that they be specific.” Consequently, “the language of orators and poets gives place to that of metaphysicians and logicians.”43 Simply put, “the modes of expression and the processes of thought [of monastic theology] are linked with a style and with literary genres which conform to the classical and patristic tradition.”44 With the masters of the urban schools, on the other hand,

the accent is no longer placed on grammar, the littera, but on logic. Just as they are no longer satisfied with the auctoritas of Holy Scripture and the Fathers and invoke that of the philosophers, so clarity is what is sought in everything. Hence the fundamental difference between scholastic style and monastic style. The monks speak in images and comparisons borrowed from the Bible and possessing both a richness and an obscurity in keeping with the mystery to be expressed.45

Leclercq proceeds with a revealing contrast between St. Bernard’s understanding of “biblical language,” as the essential mode appropriate for theological activity, and the burgeoning new scholastic terminology:

St. Bernard sees in the biblical tongue a certain modesty which respects God’s mysteries; he admires the tact and discretion God used in speaking to men. Hence, he says: Geramus morem Scripturae. The scholastics are concerned with achieving clarity; consequently they readily make use of abstract terms, and they never hesitate to forge new words. . . . For [Bernard], this terminology is never more than a vocabulary for emergency use and it does not supplant the biblical vocabulary. The one he customarily uses remains, like the Bible’s, essentially poetic; his language is consistently more literary than that of the School. . . . In answering doctrinal questions put to him by Hugh of St. Victor . . . he transposes into the biblical mode what his correspondent had said to him in the school language.46

In general, then, the monastic style tends to be biblical, literary, aesthetically self-aware, even poetic, whereas the scholastic style is dialectical, logical, technical and abstract.

Apropos of Leclercq’s observation of the fundamental dichotomy between rhetoric in the monasteries and logic in the schools, R. W. Southern describes the basic distinction between rhetoric and logic and the gradual shift in emphasis from the one to the other in the period spanning the late tenth to the early thirteenth century. He begins his historical account of this transition with a discussion of the revolutionary teaching career of Gerbert of Rheims, later to become Pope Silvester II. Southern writes:

it is a striking thing that though this impulse to the study of logic was probably Gerbert’s most important contribution to medieval learning, he did not allow it that pride of place among the arts which it later attained. Gerbert aimed at restoring the classical past, and nowhere was he more faithful to this aim than in the pre-eminence which he gave to the art of rhetoric. He had no room for the forward-reaching spirit of enquiry which animated the study of logic in the twelfth century. His energies were concentrated on the task of conservation, and on the worthy presentation of long-acquired, and sometimes long-lost, truths. Hence he was drawn to the art of rhetoric by a double chain: first because it was the chief literary science of the ancient world; secondly because it was congenial to his own spirit of conservatism. Rhetoric is static; logic dynamic. The one aims at making old truths palatable, the other at searching out new, even unpalatable truths—like the invidiosi veri, syllogized, in Dante’s phrase, by Siger of Brabant [Paradiso, x, 138]. Rhetoric is persuasive, logic compulsive. The former smooths away divisions, the latter brings them into the open. The one is a healing art, an art of government; the other is surgical, and challenges the foundations of conduct and belief. To persuade, to preserve, to heal the divisions between past and present—these were Gerbert’s aims, and in this work rhetoric and statesmanship went hand in hand, with logic as their servant. . . . Hence for Gerbert rhetoric, not logic, was the queen of the arts.47

Though Southern’s point in this particular context is not to distinguish monasticism from scholasticism—Gerbert was not even a monk, but one of the itinerant masters that became such a common phenomenon in the tenth and eleventh centuries—nevertheless, the fundamental distinction between rhetoric and logic provides an important lens for appreciating the gap, ever-widening from Gerbert’s day onward, between monastic and scholastic formation and sensibilities. Indeed, the above characterizations of Gerbert’s outlook could virtually be applied wholesale to the monastic point of view, possibly excepting the specifically political orientation noted in the penultimate sentence of the passage cited.

Genre

In addition to stylistic differences in their approaches to writing in general, the two milieux vary in their preferences for particular forms, or genres, of writing, as well as in the ways they use genres they have in common. Thus, “the monks prefer the genres which might be called concrete,”48 including especially history and hagiography. Whereas the interest of the schoolmen

goes chiefly to the quaestio, the disputatio, or the lectio taken as a basis for formulating quaestiones, the monks prefer writings dealing with actual happenings and experiences rather than with ideas, and which, instead of being a teacher’s instruction for a universal and anonymous public, are addressed to a specific audience, to a public chosen by and known to the author.49

Furthermore, the monastic genres, like the cloisters themselves, remain essentially stable over centuries, while the basic scholastic genres multiply rapidly, keeping pace with their ever-changing Sitze im Leben: from schools in small towns, to the cathedrals of cities, to the classrooms of academic consortia that then become universities. Soon, “the quaestio will give birth to the quaestio disputata, the quaestiuncula, the articulus, and the quodlibet; to the lectio will be added a reportatio, and each of these genres, as well as the sermon itself, will obey a more and more precise plan and a more and more complicated technique.”50 Over against these distinctively scholastic genres, we must now look briefly at the genres of history, sermon, and florilegium and their respective relations to the monastic and scholastic milieux.

Leclercq says that “The monks loved history very much. More than any other writers, they concentrated on it, and sometimes they were almost the only ones to do so.”51 In contrast, “not one of the masters of the schools of Chartres, Poitiers, Tours, Rheims, Laon, or Paris, in spite of the renown of their teaching, had any concern for historical work.” In England also, the historians are almost always monks.”52 Accordingly, Aelred of Rievaulx himself produced an impressive corpus of historical and hagiographical works, following in the footsteps of his great English monastic forebear, Bede the Venerable. In tentative explanation of the monastic interest in history, Leclercq ventures only to point out the genre’s antiquity and its inherent conservatism, both characteristics perennially appealing to the traditionalist tendencies of the monastic enterprise per se. Commenting further on the monks’ use of the genre, he observes that

The manner of presentation is determined by the end in view; to incite to the practice of virtue and promote praise of God, the events once recorded must, to a certain extent, be interpreted. Above all they must be situated in a vast context; the individual story is always inserted in the history of salvation. Events are directed by God who desires the salvation of the elect. The monks devote to the interests of this conviction a comprehension of the Church which was developed in them by the reading of the Fathers and the observance of the liturgy. They feel they are members of a universal communion. The saints, whose cult they celebrate, are, for them, intimate friends and living examples. In similar fashion, thinking about the angels comes naturally to them. Liturgical themes permeate their entire conception of what takes place in time.53

Here, Leclercq verges on an insight that he only makes explicit much later in The Love of Learning, namely, the link between history and eschatology and the corresponding monastic concern with both. In his climactic chapter on “Monastic Theology” he argues that

the importance the monks attribute to history also explains the great weight they give to considerations of eschatology: for the work of salvation, begun in the Old Testament and realized in the New, is brought to completion only in the next world. Christian knowledge here below is only the first step toward the knowledge that belongs to the life of beatitude. Theology, here below, demands that we be detached from it, that we remain oriented toward something else beyond it, toward a fulfillment of which it is merely the beginning. This is yet another of the differences which distinguish the monks’ intellectual attitude from that of the scholastics. As has been correctly observed, eschatology occupies practically no place in the teaching of Abailard.54

On the other hand, Leclercq offers no corresponding explanation for the lack of interest in history—or, for that matter, the relative lack of interest in eschatology—on the part of the schoolmen. In the first instance, the best explanation is probably to be found precisely by inverting the argument Leclercq offers for the monks’ striking propensity for the genre. In their relentless search for clarity and scientific knowledge, the schools accord no special authority to any literary form, however ancient. The same motives militate against traditionalism and conservatism, whenever authority is perceived as a tool, willful or not, of obfuscation. There are also important philosophical issues to be considered here, namely, the matters of time, contingency and particularity. In their increasingly programmatic concern to reduce the bewildering complexity of the universe to a series of demonstrable propositions, the schoolmen inevitably attempted to abstract from time and the particularity and contingency of individual historical persons and events, whenever possible. In the case of eschatology, we must be even more cautious in our speculations. Nevertheless, it is quite reasonable, given the homogenizing tendencies of scholastic method with respect to the multiplicity of disciplines, to expect a certain indisposition in the realm of theology analogous to the one just described in the anthropological order, given the intrinsic relationship between history and eschatology. The reasons for such a disinclination to eschatological inquiry, like the disinclination itself, are analogous to the prior indisposition to the genre of history, whether or not these reasons were ever sufficiently examined.

Unlike the genre of history, the genre of the sermon was necessarily employed by all clerics who had pastoral responsibilities, whether in the cloister, the cathedral, or the academic hall. The differences, however, between style, method, and even content of the preaching done in the monasteries and that done elsewhere, were great, and only increased as the Middle Ages progressed. The monastic sermon is fundamentally patristic in tone and style, and pastoral in intention. It takes place within the context of a “rite” which was both “solemn” and “intimate,” sometimes in the cloister, sometimes, after the day’s work was over, “at the very spot where the work was being done, for example under a tree or some other spot where all could sit around the superior.”55 In stark contrast, the preaching of the schools

came to be governed as much by dialectics as by rhetoric. Sermons were composed which were rigidly logical, but which bear a much closer resemblance to quaestiones disputatae than they do to homilies, and the laws which govern them are codified in the vast literature of the artes praedicandi. In scholasticism, the technique of the sermon becomes more and more subtle and complicated: one manual on the art of preaching teaches, for example, eighteen ways to ‘lengthen a sermon.’ The end result is a very clear, very logical oration which may be doctrinal and occasionally not devoid of stylistic or theological merit; but from this category, there is not in existence today one work of genius still worth reading.56

Here Leclercq records the telling comment of M. D. Chenu, that “The scholastics are professors. . . . Their sermons, like St. Thomas’s, will themselves be scholastic. And the Church will consider the greatest of them as ‘doctors,’ no longer as its ‘Fathers.’”57 That the schoolmen took seriously their roles as teachers does not necessarily entail that they denigrated their pastoral responsibilities to their students and religious communities. Nonetheless, it is fair to affirm Leclercq’s assertion that “to say the least, it was not in their sermons that they gave the best they had to offer.”58 In brief, then, the two ways of preaching correspond to their respective milieux: where the monastic sermon tends to be pastoral and biblical, the scholastic sermon is professorial and dialectical.

Another important genre employed in both the monasteries and the urban schools, though like the sermon, in remarkably different ways, was the florilegium. According to Leclercq, the fundamental distinction between the two uses amounts to that between a spiritual and an intellectual tool. Thus:

The grammar schools had collections of examples taken from the authors. These collections of excerpts, either from the classics or, more frequently, from the Fathers and the councils, were used by the urban schools in particular as a veritable arsenal of auctoritates. They were seeking important, concise, and interesting extracts for doctrinal studies, something of value for the quaestio and the disputatio. . . . Always conveniently ready for use . . . , these collections facilitated research; they eliminated the necessity of handling numbers of manuscripts. Consequently, they were primarily working tools for the intellectuals.59

Pressing the point a step further, Southern contends that scholastic method per se was in fact

a development of the florilegium. In its simplest form, it was an attempt to solve by infinitely patient criticism and subtlety of distinction the problems posed by the juxtaposition of related but often divergent passages in the works of the great Christian writers. It was, one might say, the attempt of the intellect to discover and articulate the whole range of truth discoverable in, or hinted at in, the seminal works of Christianity.60

In the monasteries, on the other hand, the notion and its application are entirely different. There, the florilegium was the organic fruit of spiritual reading:

The monk would copy out texts he had enjoyed so as to savor them at leisure and use them anew as subjects for private meditation. The monastic florilegium not only originated in the monk’s spiritual reading but always remained closely associated with it. For this reason the texts selected were different from those required in the schools. . . .61

The monastic is almost certainly the older of the two forms of florilegia. Moreover, it did not cease to exist, nor was its spiritual function forgotten, with the ingenious recasting of the genre by the schools. Rather, it persisted alongside the scholastic version, at least into the thirteenth century.62

Though admittedly not so much itself a genre as an interpretive activity or tool, nevertheless exegesis is a specialized mode of writing, often embedded within wider contexts, though sometimes characterizing the whole of a particular work (most especially the commentary, but sometimes sermons as well). Differing significantly in style and application from the monastic to the scholastic milieu, it demands brief attention here.

In her great work, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Beryl Smalley writes:

Gradually in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries exegesis as a separate subject emerges. It had its own technical aids to study, and its auxiliary sciences of textual criticism and biblical languages. Even though the personnel of its teachers was still undifferentiated, a scholar distinguished between his work as a theologian and his work as an exegete.63

By contrast, “in the early part of our period [the whole of which is the eighth to the fourteenth century] sacred doctrine resembled secular government in being undifferentiated and unspecialized.”64 Though Smalley does not at this point advert to Leclercq’s fundamental distinction, it is clear that specialization in biblical studies, for better or for worse, is strongly associated with the rise of the schools. Moreover, says Smalley, “we are invited”—by the early medieval commentators, as by the Fathers themselves—“to look not at the text, but through it.”65 This somewhat obscure description Smalley intends as an aphorism for allegorical interpretation, the predominant ancient mode of “spiritual exposition” and the form of interpretation overwhelmingly favored in the monastic milieu. To “literal exposition,” on the other hand, belongs “what we should now call exegesis, which is based on the study of the text and of biblical history, in its widest sense.”66 In her juxtaposition of the monastic and cathedral schools, Smalley observes:

The innumerable problems arising from the reception of Aristotelian logic and the study of canon and civil law, the new possibilities of reasoning, the urgent need for speculation and discussion, all these produced an atmosphere of haste and excitement which was unfavourable to biblical scholarship. The masters of the cathedral schools had neither the time nor the training to specialize in a very technical branch of Bible study.67

All in all, Smalley’s appraisal of both monastic and scholastic exegesis is fairly negative.68 Leclercq’s estimation of monastic exegesis, on the other hand, is predictably far more positive. In addition to taking the letter of the Bible with the utmost seriousness, the monks read Scripture as

not primarily a source of knowledge, of scientific information; it is a means for salvation, its gift is the ‘science of salvation’: salutaris scientia. This is true of Scripture in its entirety. Each word it contains is thought of as a word addressed by God to each reader for his salvation. Everything then has a personal, immediate value for present life and for the obtaining of eternal life.69

Furthermore, the monastic theme of desire finds its biblical correlates first in the prophetic character of the Old Testament, in “desire for the Promised Land or desire for the Messiah,” then in the anticipation of eschatological fulfillment, as these desires get “interpreted spontaneously by the medieval monks as desire for Heaven and for Jesus contemplated in His glory.” As already noted, there is no comparable eschatological emphasis in the exegesis of the schools. Concerning scholastic exegesis generally, we cannot finally bypass Smalley’s authoritative censure:

the main tendency of the cathedral schools is clear; it leads away from old-fashioned Bible studies. St. Gregory had identified theology with exegesis. The eleventh- and early twelfth-century masters were inclined to identify exegesis with theology. Their work appears to be brilliant but one-sided, if we remember the promise of the eighth and ninth centuries. We find the theological questioning but not the biblical scholarship.70

Dialectics

We need now to take up more intentionally a subject already alluded to several times above, that of dialectics. Relevant to style and to genre but transcending both categories, it is a topic about which the monks and the schoolmen were much exercised and deeply divided.71 Leclercq deals with the problem of dialectics—the need for it and its inherent vulnerability to abuse—in a series of sections72 that highlight monasticism’s attentiveness to mystery and simplicity, and its inclination to draw learning and love so close together as almost to make an equation between them. The great monastic heroes here are St. Bernard and, behind him, St. Gregory the Great, whose dictum Leclercq reproduces as: “Love itself is knowledge: the more one loves, the more one knows.”73 Leclercq points out that dialectics was taught in the monastery schools, as the complement to grammar,74 but that when the monastic teachers or their students disputed a point, “it was almost always on the subject of the liberal arts.” In contrast, “in the town schools the same procedure was applied to sacred doctrine.”75 Granted the legitimacy in principle of the basic development of the back-and-forth activity of quaeritur and respondendum est,76 there was general recognition already by the early twelfth century of the possibility of abuse. Theology was at risk of becoming “one technique among the others,” and the academic disputatio “began to assume a value of its own.”77

In reaction to this mode of theological inquiry, the monks, with St. Bernard very much in the vanguard, came more and more to conceive of the monastery as

a ‘school of charity,’ a school for the service of God. They maintained a certain reserve toward any intellectual research carried on outside of this setting and without the guarantees it offers of sincerity and humility. They feared it would be wanting in respect for divine truth to attempt to penetrate it as if by forcible entry after breaking the seal of mystery.78

Leclercq notes here also an important and long-standing prejudice in the monasteries, concerning the Greeks:

[Plato], more than others, was considered a religious man. The few writings of his they possessed and those which showed his influence were represented in monastic libraries. More than one monastic author felt a sort of secret sympathy for what Plato, in their belief, said about God and the good. Aristotle, on the other hand, who was known only through his works on logic,79 passed for being the master par excellence of the very dialectics whose abuses they feared.80

Indeed, the monks quoted St. Paul against the scholastic abuse of dialectics: Scientia inflat (1 Cor 8:1). The problem is that knowledge not deliberately linked with the pursuit of holiness tends to a puffing up, a self-inflation

both psychological and moral. In the domain of psychology, it is that complexity which is the characteristic of a mind attracted to multiple and varied objects. It incurs the risk of giving rise to a sort of agitation hardly compatible with ‘contemplative repose’ or pure prayer. It also risks distracting the spirit from the undivided search for God and diverting its attention to numerous and superfluous problems. Questions, objections, argumentations rapidly lead into an inextricable forest: nemus aristotelicum; like a deer, one laboriously makes one’s way through it.81

In the moral domain, the same unnecessary complexity “jeopardizes humility,” the titular virtue of the famous seventh chapter of St. Benedict’s Rule, and not coincidentally the signal quality of the Benedictine ideal. The alternative to both the moral and the more strictly spiritual dilemmas, for which Bernard and his fellow monks constantly strive, is holy simplicity.

In general, the monk-scholars, adhering to the mystical doctrine of their own beloved St. Gregory the Great, cited above, counsel a knowledge bound up inextricably with Christian charity. Gregory’s equation between love and knowledge contrasts strikingly even with such a sympathetic figure as Hugh of St. Victor, who, in spite of his appreciation for the monastic tradition and ethos,82 already grants a clear division between the intellectual habits, or virtues, and those belonging to the will. Thus, for Hugh there is a strict distinction between science on the one hand and moral action on the other.83 Such a division is inevitably at odds with Gregory’s statement, and not less with the Bernardine programme built upon it, however much one should insist that the difference is one of emphasis, rather than of absolute opposition.

Positive Correlatives to Dialectics

The monks’ generally critical relationship to dialectics, then, constitutes in important part a negative, because reactive, element of the monastic approach to theological activity. Yet alongside and even within the conscious tension felt by monastic thinkers between their own use of dialectics and its employment by the schools, there developed numerous positive bases for furthering the Church’s theological enterprise as well. We have already noted the powerful Gregorian-Bernardine intuition that knowledge and love, intellect and will, ought to be kept closely allied and aligned by every practicing, praying Christian. In addition to this influential perspective, Leclercq remarks that monastic traditionalism, whatever impetus it undoubtedly receives from the instinctive reaction to scholastic novelty, at times unquestionably facilitates theological advance. Leclercq’s favorite example is that of St. Anselm’s disciple, Eadmer, whom a number of scholars now credit with anticipating Scotus in providing a theological articulation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—albeit one much less expressly worked-out than that of Scotus.84

Finally, the monastic stress on personal experience, in the forms of both contemplation and charity, diffuses itself throughout monastic theological work and shapes it in ways that elude scholasticism’s generally detached, scientific approach to research and argumentation. According to Leclercq, “altogether the great difference between the theology of the schools and that of the monasteries resides in the importance which the latter accord the experience of union with God.”85 This experience is one of “lived faith;”86 it is both profoundly communal87 and biblical,88 and ultimately, in consequence of these characteristics also spiritual, pastoral, and sapiential.89 In these ways it stands over against a scholastic ethos always running the risk, albeit in the laudable name of science, of incautiously embracing an arid intellectualism.

Conclusion

Drawing together the many strands of the preceding discussion, we may appeal to one more pithy formulation by Jean Leclercq:

The difference between scholastic theology and monastic theology corresponds to the differences between the two states of life: the state of Christian life in the world and the state of Christian life in the religious life. The latter was what was, in fact, until the end of the twelfth century, unanimously called the “contemplative life.90

Leclercq further notes the universal awareness at the time “of a profound difference between scholastic and monastic milieux, and, consequently, between the kinds of religious knowledge to be acquired in each. Monastic knowledge is determined by the end of monastic life: the search for God.”91 He concludes:

Thus in the opinion of medieval men, monks or not, a contrast exists between the two milieux where Christian thought flourishes. In the cloister, theology is studied in relation to monastic experience, a life of faith led in the monastery where religious thought and spiritual life, the pursuit of truth and the quest for perfection, must go hand in hand and permeate each other. This orientation, proper to the cloistered life, was to affect the methodology used in Christian reflection and the subject matter of this reflection.”92

We ought particularly to note here Leclercq’s typically conscientious affirmation of the flourishing of Christian thought in the scholastic context, notwithstanding his pardonable tendency, in keeping with his subject-matter and his thesis, not to mention his own vocation, to favor the monastic approach to theological activity.93

Our findings may be usefully recapitulated in terms of the following criteria: First, we have discovered that monastic theology tends to have a biblical ‘flavor,’ whereas scholastic theology, while still permeated with Scripture and oriented towards its explication, has deliberately departed from what can be characterized as the “biblical style”94 of monastic writing. Second, monastic theology tends to be poetic; more broadly, we might say that the monks are acutely attentive to aesthetic considerations.95 Scholastic theology, on the other hand, self-consciously eschews all literary artistry in favor of clarity, characteristically producing not theologically informed “poems,” but disquisitions on theological topoi.96 Third, monastic theology is erotic: in a tradition indelibly stamped by the personality and writing of St. Gregory the Great, it is not only concerned with, but fundamentally shaped by, desire—essentially, the desire for God, fueled by compunctio.97 In contrast, the whole scholastic enterprise is predicated upon the ideal of a scientific neutrality which must check the motion of the inquirer’s will at all costs: the goal is the static, indisputable (because demonstrable) proposition, not a moving target.98 Fourth, we have noted the typically “personal” character of monastic theology, where that term is to be taken in both the psychological and in the grammatical sense. Thus, the deep personal investment of the monastic author in his subject, as well as his earnest concern for the spiritual well-being of his readers, both evident in so many stylistic nuances, are made transparent through the frequent use of the first and second grammatical persons. The master of the school, on the other hand, meticulously distances himself from his text, both emotionally and linguistically speaking. Here the third person is the predominant grammatical form employed. Finally, to what has been already explicitly adduced we may add that monastic theology is characteristically “sweet,” where we understand that English word as translating at least two different Latin words: suavis and dulcis. Both of these terms, though especially the latter, can connote the most ordinary, concrete sense of sweetness to the physical palate, as well as a metaphorical spiritual sense deriving from the physical. The first term, however, has a further resonance, highly amenable to the monastic theological sensibility: this arises from its obvious etymological connection to suasion, or persuasion.99 In a connection that can be traced back to Augustine, the sweetness of God’s Word, especially his Incarnate Word, Jesus, has the ultimate power to persuade, and so to win man’s wayward heart to himself.100 By christological extension, the words (both spoken and written) produced by a member of Christ’s Body ought always, sweetly, to urge the sinner to conversion. The schoolmen, in striking contrast, seek not to sway men’s hearts with rhetoric, but through the application of logic to change men’s minds.101 The preceding criteria are intended less as an exhaustive list than as a kind of level, analogous to the carpenter’s tool, whereby, in the ensuing chapters of this dissertation, we may gauge within a single horizon, so to speak, the respective theological projects of St. Aelred of Rievaulx and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Sources

To the above framing observations, we must now add some brief notes on the use of sources by monks and schoolmen between 1110 and 1274. What follows is intended only to provide a general picture; certain precisions will need to be made in subsequent chapters, in reference to the sources used specifically by Aelred and Thomas.

Biblical

The Bible was far and away the most important source for monastic theology and remained the guiding force for scholastic theology as well, at least through the high Middle Ages, in spite of the increasing importance of Aristotle. In general, both monks and schoolmen show a thorough familiarity with the biblical text, from beginning to end, though each milieu reveals certain clear preferences for particular books or types of biblical material. Thus, the Song of Songs is perennially and by far the favorite book of the monks,102 whereas the schoolmen of the thirteenth century prefer other sapiential literature, especially Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.103 Considering the canon in its entirety, Smalley records the following order of preferences among commentators in the schools during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries:

the two favourite books for commentators were the Psalter and the Pauline Epistles, their creative energy being centred in the latter; St. Paul provided the richest nourishment to the theologian and logician. Next came the Hexaemeron, because it provided an opportunity to discuss the questions of Creation and angelology. Original work on the Law, the historical books of the Old Testaments, the Prophets, the Gospels, and the Acts seems to be lacking.104

By contrast, the monks make much of both the historical and the prophetic materials, in part, at least, for reasons already discussed. As for two of the greatest Cistercians, Bernard and Aelred, they incorporate Scripture effortlessly into everything they write, skillfully interweaving passages from every book in both Testaments.105

Patristic

After the Bible, the next most-read texts in the Middle Ages are the collective works of the Church Fathers. As should be expected, availability, and hence knowledge, of the works of the Latin Fathers exceeds that of the Greek works. Nevertheless, Leclercq notes that

In the twelfth century, Latin monks took the initiative of having Greek texts translated whenever it was possible. But a considerable part of the patristic legacy inherited from the Greeks had already been translated: it was preserved and handed on, as was all that remained of ancient culture, especially in Italy and in England.106

In the peculiarly significant case of Origen, Leclercq makes the following interesting observation:

If we read the introductions to the different volumes of the critical edition of the Latin Origen, we note that almost all the manuscripts are of monastic origin and that most date from the ninth and the twelfth centuries. Other indications point to the conclusion that in every period or place where there was a monastic renewal, there was a revival of Origen. It is true of the Carolingian reform; it is even more . . . readily apparent in the monastic revival of the twelfth century.107

In contrast with this strong evidence of Origen’s influence on the monasteries, “Origen is less frequently represented in the libraries of the cathedral churches.”108 In general, however, it is reasonable to assume that such manuscripts as were at the disposal of the monasteries were at least accessible to the masters of the schools as well, and in time, the more important works inevitably became part of the universal intellectual patrimony.

As for the Western Fathers, the Latin patristic corpus diffused among the medieval monasteries is virtually complete.109 The Fathers whose works are most frequently copied, and the widest range of whose works are represented, are Sts. Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine. In the case of the Latins, the thorough familiarity of the schoolmen would not have varied substantially from that of the monks. Leclercq observes, however, that the uses made of patristic sources, and consequently the parts of works given most attention, differed significantly between the two milieux.110

Finally, in addition to complete works by particular authors, by about 1130, medieval churchmen had also at their disposal the massive biblical Glossa Ordinaria, a six-volume digest of patristic commentary on the Scriptures, organized into an elaborate series of interlinear and marginal glosses, superimposed on the biblical text itself. Of this “tremendous work” Beryl Smalley notes that “the range of authors quoted in the Gloss is wide. The better known of the Latin Fathers down to Bede, Origen and Hesychius in translation, Raban, Strabo, Paschasius, John the Scot, Haimo, Lanfranc, Berengar have all been laid under contribution.”111

Pagan

The humanist renaissance that swept across Europe in the twelfth century entailed a renewed interest in the classics of antiquity, especially in the monasteries. Within this variegated body of literature, the Roman rhetorical tradition undoubtedly had pride of place. Thus, alongside their reading in the Church Fathers, the monks became well acquainted with Virgil, Horace, Terence, Statius, Lucan, and above all others, Cicero. However paradoxical in its superficial aspect, there was at bottom nothing revolutionary about the cloister’s integration of these pagan works into their own living literary tradition: Cicero’s moral, aesthetic and rhetorical concerns the monks easily recognized as profoundly congruent, if not always perfectly identical, with their own. It was rather in the schools that pagan literature provoked a real and lasting revolution, as Latin translations of the entirety of Aristotle’s work became available in the West, the better part of it for the first time. How truly seismic the change was can be glimpsed in R. W. Southern’s juxtaposing of the pattern of citation in Peter Lombard’s Sentences, written in the mid-twelfth century, with that of Aquinas’s ST, a century later. The former work contains “thousands of quotations from the Church Fathers, . . . only three from secular philosophy, and all these were borrowed from St. Ambrose or St. Augustine.” In contrast, “the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas contains about 3500 quotations from Aristotle, of which 1500 come from the Nichomachean Ethics and 800 from the Meteorology or Metaphysics, works wholly unknown a century earlier.”112 Moreover,

by 1250 virtually the whole corpus of Greek science was accessible to the western world, and scholars groaned under its weight as they strove to master it all. The days had gone when two large volumes could hold all that was essential for the study of the liberal arts. There was no time for artistic presentation and literary eloquence. This was a grave loss, but the achievement was there all the same. The main ideas of the earlier masters—the dignity of man, the intelligibility of the universe, the nobility of nature—not only remained intact, but were fundamental concepts in the intellectual structures of the thirteenth century.113

Yet the Bible refused to go away, or even to be ignored. In Southern’s words, “medieval thought became a dialogue between Aristotle and the Bible.”114 Elaborating on this lapidary formulation, he continues: “here lay the main tension which transformed the thought of Europe in the two centuries after 1150. Paradoxical though it may seem, it was the Bible that did most for humanism in its medieval form simply because it provided the most difficult problems.”115 Recalling the monastic prejudice against Aristotle, we may note that Southern’s comments here pertain first and foremost to the schools, though the “transformation of thought” taking place there could not help but spill over eventually into the cloister. In further explanation of his insight, Southern maintains that “Men learn after all by being puzzled and excited, not by being told.” Thus:

Aristotle standing alone had no power to excite thought: at best, like alcohol, he first stimulated and then stupefied. What he said was so complete, so incontrovertible, so far beyond the range of conflicting authorities, that he hammered reason into submission. Curiously enough, therefore, the paradoxes of the Bible did more for rational argument by stimulating discussion than all the reasons of Aristotle which were swallowed whole.116

In the end, then, Southern’s observations regarding the scholastic engagement with Aristotle have brought us back to the fundamental significance of Scripture for the medieval scholar, a significance of which the medieval monasteries never lost sight.

Aelred of Rievaulx and Thomas Aquinas

In this preparatory chapter, there remains only the task of saying something briefly about the choice of Aelred and Thomas as representatives of their respective milieux, in a comparison between theological accounts of friendship. Why them? Why their accounts of friendship? Finally, why their accounts of friendship? Of the many theological topoi taken up by monks and schoolmen alike, why focus on a subject seemingly far removed from such central dogmatic issues as the Trinity, Christology, or ecclesiology?

Why Them? (Why Their Accounts of Friendship?)

Aelred: How Typical; How Outstanding

Aelred of Rievaulx is ideally suited to represent the monastic theological enterprise, as an outstanding example, but one nonetheless typical, of monastic life and thought throughout the ages. Thus, Amédée Hallier speaks in general terms of the “penetrating originality of Aelred’s theology.”117 In a more specific delineation of Aelred’s theological contribution, Charles Dumont observes that it was Aelred who took Bernard’s synthesis of “the spiritual doctrine of the school of charity” and gave its principles “a new attractiveness by a pedagogical and even systematic application, particularly in the practice of meditation on the Gospels.”118 Commenting on Aelred’s longest and most significant work, SC, Aelred Squire asserts that Aelred arrived through his reflections “at a valuable, original insight. At least there appears to be no other patristic or medieval writer who explores these matters quite in Aelred’s way.”119 Furthermore, referring to the same work, Dumont contends that “Aelred’s scriptural argumentation is remarkable enough to be considered unique, both in its scope and in its precision.”120

On the other hand, Dumont also reminds us that Aelred “had never attended the schools and so received his formation in both theology and monastic life at the same time within the monastic tradition.”121 Aelred differed, then, from Lanfranc and St. Bruno, both of whom turned aside from established academic careers in favor of monachism. Rather, Aelred’s entire spiritual and intellectual formation was thoroughly monastic. Consequently, while many of his writings are of exceptional quality, they are in kind precisely the sorts of works to be found ubiquitously in the medieval monastic milieu: histories, hagiographies, prayers, a De Anima, a Speculum, liturgical sermons. So, too, his skill as a biblical exegete should not divert us from recognizing the sources for his basic principles of interpretation.122 These are, first, the patristic tradition, and second, the virtually ceaseless practice of lectio divina: both integral elements of the common patrimony of European monasticism. In short, Aelred of Rievaulx is a true monk, and while the quality of his thought in its own right justifies scholarly attention, that thought always possesses a genuinely monastic character. So, too, Aelred’s thinking and writing about friendship, for all their universal worth and application, are stamped indelibly with the spirit of the cloister.123

Thomas: How Typical; How Outstanding

To some extent attempts to justify the choice of Thomas Aquinas as our representative scholastic theologian risk degenerating into embarrassing commonplaces: widely accepted as the most complete synthesis of Christian theology ever executed, his work must in the same fora be recognized a fortiori as the high-water mark of medieval scholastic theology. In terms more specific and relevant to our own purposes, R. W. Southern writes:

The work of Thomas Aquinas is full of illustrations of the supremacy of reason and nature. . . . He reversed the ancient opinion that the body is the ruined habitation of the soul, and held with Aristotle that it is the basis of the soul’s being. Everywhere he points to the natural perfection of man, his natural rights, and the power of his natural reason. The dignity of human nature is not simply a poetic vision; it has become a central truth of philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas died in 1274, and it is probably true that man has never appeared so important a being in so well-ordered and intelligible a universe as in his works. Man was important because he was the link between the created universe and the divine intelligence. He alone in the world of nature could understand nature. He alone in nature could understand the nature of God. He alone could use and perfect nature in accordance with the will of God, and thus achieve his full nobility.124

To this eloquent tribute to Aquinas’s towering achievement, we may add the authoritative voices of two great Dominican scholars: James Weisheipl, who speaks of the “transcendent significance” of Thomas’s thought,125 and Jean-Pierre Torrell, who refers to Thomas from the vantage point of the late twentieth century simply as “the Master.”126

That Thomas’s thought, superlative as it is in every respect, is also thoroughly characteristic of the scholastic milieu, is formally self-evident: in his massive corpus, the genre and fundamental structure of every one of his major works find more or less exact parallels in the works of innumerable other schoolmen. Moreover, the various subjects that most absorbed him were those that occupied universities all across the Europe of his day—above all Scripture, dogmatic and moral theology, and the philosophical and scientific work of Aristotle. It may fairly be asked what impact his early years in the abbey of Monte Cassino, from about the age of six until he was fifteen, would have had on his intellectual and spiritual development.127 Here it is sufficient to note with Torrell that at this time “the abbey was in a period of decadence,”128 and as such, “would not have much attracted a young man taken with the absolute.”129 No doubt Thomas did receive his first training in reading and writing at the hands of the Cassinese monks130 and even conceived during this period what would become a lifelong “esteem for the Benedictine ideal.”131 Nevertheless, his spiritual and intellectual formation took place substantially at the hands of the Dominicans, whose studium in Naples he had joined upon leaving the abbey. Five years later, at the age of twenty, Thomas took the habit of the Order of Preachers. From these facts we may rest assured that St. Thomas’s singular theological insights into the subject of friendship have been profoundly shaped by the scholastic milieu and will be articulated in the finest expressions possible in that mode.

Cautionary Paragraph: Distinction between the

Two Milieux Semi-Permeable

These reminders of St. Thomas’s youthful experience of monastic life suggest a salutary caution to anyone seeking to understand better the complex relationship between the monastic and the scholastic milieux, and consequently between their respective theological approaches. As Jean Leclercq warns repeatedly in The Love of Learning, the commerce between monastery and school, if erratic and occasionally contentious, was not slight. Thus, we know, for example, that by the ninth century, abbots were sending a few of their monks to the town schools to be educated,132 while schoolmen sometimes left the world permanently to become monks.133 And lest we suppose that Aelred, at least, at the far reaches of civilized Europe, must have lived in splendid monachistic isolation, C. H. Talbot observes that

for the greater part of his twenty years in office at Rievaulx he was a constant visitor to France and must have been aware of the controversies in which Saint Bernard was involved. The possibility that he may have met on these occasions John of Salisbury, Robert Pullus and Robert of Melun cannot be ruled out.134

In short, though the differences between the monastic and scholastic milieux in our period are real and significant, we must be alert not to envision too radical a cultural or ideological partition between the two. The distance between medieval monastery and school is by no means negligible, but it is probably far smaller than the distance between either of these institutions and its twenty-first century counterpart.

Why Their Accounts of Friendship?

Regarding our final important question—Why these two theologians’ accounts of friendship?—a few comments are in order. R. W. Southern’s acute analysis of the respective roles of the monasteries and schools in the twelfth-century renaissance provides a useful point of departure. Southern believes the period from 1100 to 1320 “to have been one of the greatest ages of humanism in the history of Europe.”135 The change that marks the beginning of this period “took the form of a greater concentration on man and on human experience as a means of knowing God.”136 But

if self-knowledge is the first step in the rehabilitation of man, friendship—which is the sharing of this knowledge with someone else—is an important auxiliary. This was understood by the humanists of the Renaissance; but the discovery was made in the monasteries of the late 11th century.137

Moreover, “the experience of friendship lay along the road to God. . . . So here again we start with nature and end with God.”138 In fact, “of all the forms of friendship rediscovered in the twelfth century, there was none more eagerly sought than the friendship between God and man.”139 Such influential monastic thinkers as St. Anselm, St. Bernard and St. Aelred helped to realize this theological and spiritual epiphany. Popularly, too, for a multitude of reasons difficult to isolate one from the other, Christian piety and thought began to shift in focus from averting and appeasing God’s anger, to relating to God as a friend. Southern notes the plethora of prayers and poems from this time onward dominated by the theme of “the humanity of God.”140 He makes as well the astute and original point that the “sentimentality” of much of this poetry is itself an expression and form of “humanism in religion”—a form “that has survived all the religious divisions of Europe. . . . Popular piety has never lost this sentimental familiarity.”141 Indeed, “The greatest triumph of medieval humanism was to make God seem human. The Ruler of the Universe, who had seemed so terrifying and remote, took on the appearance of a familiar friend.”142

If the monasteries rediscovered friendship and gradually cultivated the revolutionary notion of a friendly God, then the complementary scholastic feat was, according to Southern,

to make the universe itself friendly, familiar, and intelligible. This is an essential part of the heritage of western Europe which we owe to the scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The experience of earlier centuries had suggested that so far as man could see, the universe was a scene of chaos and mystery, and that renunciation, submission to the supernatural, and a grateful acceptance of miraculous aid were the best that men could aim at. But in the late eleventh century, secular schools began to multiply which were dedicated to the task of extending the area of intelligibility and order in the world in a systematic way. . . .

The importance of these schools for the intellectual development of Europe is very great. They provided permanent centres of learning which faced the world instead of facing away from it.143

Friendliness, then, was everywhere, it seems, in the period spanning the birth of St. Aelred and the death of St. Thomas, on both the theological and the cosmological scenes, and in a way that it had probably never been before. It was therefore inevitable that friendship should become a conscious part of theological discussion in both monastic and scholastic settings. We should reasonably expect to find many of the underlying differences discussed in this chapter reflected in the two theologians’ accounts of friendship, and we will not be disappointed. A more elusive, and surprising discovery is that the different ways Aelred and Thomas engage the topic of friendship have significant implications for the approaches to theology per se engaged by their respective institutions.

26. Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 80.

27. Leclercq, Aux Sources de la Spiritualité Occidentale, 283.

28. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 193.

29. Ibid., 106–7.

30. In The Monastic Order in England, David Knowles observes that “from 1150 onwards an ever-increasing number of monks, and those the intellectual elite, owed their training to the schools, not to the cloister” (502). Notwithstanding the usefulness of Leclercq’s schema, we are continually, and rightly, reminded of the semi-permeability of the boundary between the medieval monastery and the non-monastic clerical world of the day.

31. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, 190.

32. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 202.

33. Illich, In the Vineyard, 54–57; citation at 54.

34. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 202; cf. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, 203.

35. Ibid., 72.

36. The most important literary roots of the monastic notion of compunctio are in the writings of St. Gregory the Great and receive a new infusion from St. Bernard. See ibid., 25–34, 67–68, passim.

37. Illich, In the Vineyard, 79. For a recent, lucid distillation of the work of Illich, Leclecq and others on the transition from monastic to scholastic reading, see Studzinski, Reading to Live, 12–17 and 140–76, especially 141–46, 149, 161–66, 172–76.

38. Ibid., 81.

39. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 75.

40. Ibid., 77.

41. Ibid. The distinction between the living and the written concordance corresponds as well with Illich’s fascinating theory of the place of “alphabetic technologies” in the transition in medieval Europe from an essentially monastic to an essentially scholastic way of reading. Cf. especially the sixth chapter of Illich, In the Vineyard, 93–114.

42. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 143.

43. Hubert, “Aspects du latin philosophique,” 227–31, cited by Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 142 n. 130. The previous brief citations are from the same passage in Leclercq.

44. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 199.

45. Ibid., 200.

46. Ibid., 200–201.

47. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, 176.

48. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 153.

49. Ibid., 153.

50. Ibid., 155.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid. For Leclercq’s citation (J. de Ghellinck) see 185 n. 10.

53. Ibid., 158. As we shall see, the theme of the universality of friendship, with men and angels, in the glorified communion of saints, is one of the hallmarks of Aelred’s theological enterprise.

54. Ibid., 220.

55. Ibid., 167.

56. Ibid., 173.

57. Chenu, Introduction à l’étude, cited in Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 173.

58. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 173.

59. Ibid., 182.

60. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, 191.

61. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 182.

62. Cf. ibid., where Leclercq cites a work of Helinand of Froidmont as an example from the early thirteenth century.

63. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, xv.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 2.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., 54.

68. In fact, it is Smalley’s thesis that only the Victorines, particularly in the person of Hugh, conceived of a comprehensive program of biblical scholarship informed by lectio divina, a program that might have realized a kind of via media between monasticism and scholasticism—precisely congruent with their hybridized form of religious life. We have already noted a similar conviction on the part of Ivan Illich. For all its grandeur, the program was ultimately destined for failure, as Smalley recounts in her trenchant chapter, “The Victorines” (58–85; see especially, 80).

69. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 79–80.

70. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 54.

71. Prior even to other ideological concerns, David Knowles suggests that the response to dialectics was determined by a fundamental divide between the monasteries’ otherworldly concerns and the generally more utilitarian perspective of the schools. Thus: “By the second half of the eleventh century [dialectic] was becoming increasingly the province of the cathedral schools, and canon law was finding a natural home in the entourage of the bishops, and with the gradual emergence of dialectic and law, canon and civil, as the higher education of Europe and the corresponding development of the career of the professional master, the gulf grew ever wider between the meditative, literary culture of the Norman monasteries and the speculative and practical learning of the schools, which were dependent in a peculiar degree upon the personality of the master and the free play of debate among the students” (Knowles, The Monastic Order in England, 98). What is true for Normandy may be accepted as essentially valid for Europe as a whole. Note that “schools” here means cathedral schools, not the universities, which do not take clear shape for another century.

72. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 202–9.

73. Ibid., 208. The precise Gregorian source for the whole reference appears somewhat elusive, though the first half, at least, can be found in In Evangelia, 27.4. See 32, along with the corresponding nn. 51 and 52, as well as 208 n. 99.

74. Ibid., 202.

75. Ibid., 203.

76. Cf. David Knowles’s comment that “the term ‘scholastic’ cannot rightly be applied to the content, as opposed to the method, of medieval philosophy; it is essentially a term of method. If by a scholastic method we understand a method of discovering and illustrating philosophical truth by means of a dialectic based on Aristotelian logic, then ‘scholastic’ is a useful and significant term” (Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 87).

77. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 203.

78. Ibid., 204.

79. Prior, that is, to the thirteenth century.

80. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 204.

81. Ibid., 205.

82. Ivan Illich points out that Hugh is in fact still writing for an essentially monastic audience: see Illich, In the Vineyard, 54, 66–67, and 74–92, especially 84.

83. Accordingly, Hugh says of his book, “in the first part, it instructs the reader of the arts, in the second, the reader of the Sacred Scripture” (Didascalicon, preface): hence, two different readers. Again: “The integrity of human nature, however, is attained in two things—in knowledge and in virtue and in these lies our sole likeness to the supernal and divine substance” (ibid., chapter 5). However ancient may be the distinctions between intellect and will, and between knowledge and virtue, the latter has become conspicuous by the early twelfth century, particularly in the schools—so much so that the two habits would appear to be quite separable (See, e.g., Aquinas, ST, I–II, q. 12, a. 1, to cite only one of many significant contexts.). If the grounds for this separation are already present in Aristotle, the chasm has undoubtedly deepened by the High Middle Ages.

84. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 209–11, 218–20.

85. Ibid., 212.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid., 213.

88. Ibid.

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid., 196.

91. Ibid., 197.

92. Ibid., 199.

93. It was, after all, precisely the egregious imbalance of scholarly attention, in conspicuous favor of scholastic theology, that propelled Leclercq into his life’s work in the first place. Should the suspicion lurk that a similar bias informs the current author’s perspective, it is sufficient to observe that, in that author’s opinion, Leclercq’s corrective enterprise, salutary and inspiring though it was, by no means accomplished a full righting of the vessel. There is, moreover, the gravest need in the academy for intellectual—and psychological—honesty with respect to one’s own presuppositions, notwithstanding the perennial need for such an “objectivity” as may adequately, one hopes, correct for one’s overweening prejudices.

94. I.e., “style biblique”: Leclercq, Aux Sources de la Spiritualité Occidentale, 276. Cf. also Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 62, as well as the whole of chapter 5 (“Sacred Learning”), 71–88.

95. “And, just as in music and in poetry, art consists in making ‘variations’ on simple yet rich themes, so the true worth of monastic language lies in its evocative powers. This could not be otherwise, since it is a biblical language, concrete, full of imagery, and consequently poetic in essence. But, although not abstract, these modes of expression must not be taken any the less seriously” (Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 54–55). Cf. also, e.g., 55, 59, 75, 134, 173, etc.

96. See ibid., 142, 175, 200, etc. We ought also to note here that monastic theology is profoundly liturgical, while scholastic theology is not. Of the monastic liturgy, Leclercq writes that “the liturgy . . . is the medium through which the Bible and the patristic tradition are received, and it is the liturgy that gives unity to all the manifestations of monastic culture” (Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 71). Leclercq’s complete silence regarding liturgy in the scholastic milieu, in a chapter entitled “The Poem of the Liturgy” (ibid., 236–54), is fairly deafening. Further inquiry into this elusive, yet enormously important distinction is beyond the scope of this dissertation. It warrants a study all to itself.

97. See ibid., 29–32, 67–68. Note that Leclercq does not use the term “erotic,” in this context, though there is no reason to avoid it in its strict denotation. Indeed, the monastic debt to Augustine, and through him, to Plato, argues strongly in favor of explicit scholarly consideration of the “erotics” of the Christian theological enterprise.

98. One need only thumb through the ST of St. Thomas to demolish the curious notion that the methodological hypothesis of scientific neutrality is invented by the thinkers of the seventeenth-century Enlightenment. This is not at all to deny that Thomas clearly acknowledges his own Christian presuppositions: on the contrary. Yet the methodological stance assumed at every stage of inquiry is one of a strict logical relationship between the various propositions adduced in constructing an argument.

99. Cf. the Latin verb forms suadeo and persuadeo, as well as the related noun forms suasio and persuasio.

100. For a thorough treatment of the argument from the Augustinian side, see Cavadini, “The Sweetness of the Word,” 164–81.

101. Leclercq offers a comparable, though not identical, set of criteria for “monastic culture” in Aux Sources de la Spiritualité Occidentale: “Tout d’abord, il y a des constantes culturelles monastiques. Lesquelles? Quels sont ces caractère déterminants et intrinsèques au monachisme? Il suffira ici de les énumérer. Il faut citer d’abord la liturgie, qui exerça une influence capitale sur le style de vie des moines de partout, par conséquent sur leurs préoccupations et sur leur style littéraire. Il faut nommer ensuite le culte de la Bible: la lectio divina est pratiquée dans les monastères plus qu’ailleurs et y fait apparaître un certain ‘style biblique.’ De plus un certain sens traditionnel fait que les moines se tournent spontanément vers le passé du monachisme, y compris celui de l’Orient, vers le passé de l’Eglise et les écrits des Pères: d’où un certain ‘style patristique.’ Enfin une certaine tendance ascétique et spirituelle, plus accentuée que dans les milieux de laïcs ou de clercs séculiers, se manifeste, par exemple, en une production poétique plus exclusivement religieuse, moins ‘mondaine’” (276–77).