[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
