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
