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.