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