Theologizing Friendship. Nathan Sumner Lefler
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heart, no matter how frequent and great have been my own mistrust of both. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my wife, Annie, for whom this work in many ways has been principally executed, and without whom it would never have taken the shape it has.
Abbreviations
DDN In Librum Beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus
De am. De amicitia
Eth. Sententia Libri Ethicorum
Iesu puero De Iesu puero duodenni
Ioannis Super evangelium S. Ioannis lectura
NE Nichomachean Ethics
O. past. Oratio pastoralis
RB The Rule of St. Benedict
SA De spiritali amicitia
SC Speculum caritatis
SCG Summa contra Gentiles
Sent. Scriptum Super libros Sententiarum
ST Summa Theologiae
Introduction
Amare et amari: these lapidary words of St. Augustine’s haunted the high Middle Ages and its theologians, both in the monasteries and in the Schools.1 The phrase not only captured Augustine’s romantic pre-Christian notion of friendship, thereby bearing importantly on humanistic questions of an anthropological or psychological cast; since “God is love,” according to St. John, “to love and to be loved” must in some way pertain to the heart of theology as well.2 But if amor describes in the most general terms an action or disposition that could be further specified as one of either amicitia or caritas, what, in turn, is the relationship between these latter two notions? In one way or another, both monks and schoolmen came to be exercised by these questions, and the revival of the Roman rhetorical tradition in the twelfth century, including crucially Cicero’s De Amicitia, along with the translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the following century, only added fuel to the flame. Among those who became keenly interested in the issue were the Cistercian abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx, and the Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas.
Not surprisingly, the theological treatments of friendship produced by these two authors—the twelfth-century monk on the one hand, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian on the other—differ in many significant ways. It is precisely the central thesis of the following dissertation that the differences between these two accounts of friendship exhibit a certain congruence with fundamental differences between monastic and scholastic theology tout court. However, this thesis may be further subdivided, inasmuch as we will argue that the correspondence asserted is not merely formal, limited, for example, to ways in which each of our two authors’ accounts of friendship respectively instantiates monastic or scholastic theological method per se. Rather, we contend that the discovered correspondence touches also the particular subject matter in question, namely, friendship under its Christian theological aspect. What is true, therefore, about the monastic notion of friendship can be seen to characterize the monastic theological project as well, and the same reasoning applies, mutatis mutandis, to the scholastic notion and enterprise. In order, then, to facilitate the reader’s progress through the dissertation, we will now briefly outline the procedure whereby we arrive at these conclusions.
In chapter 1, we undertake a preliminary survey of the distinguishing features of monastic and scholastic theology in the period spanned by the lives of our two authors. The aim of this preparatory chapter is twofold: first, to provide ourselves with a general sense of the very different cultural and theological milieux within which Aelred and Thomas lived and wrote;3 second, to delineate a number of more particular criteria, drawn from our assessment of these milieux, by which we may gauge the theological projects of Aelred and Thomas in the ensuing chapters.4 It is here that we find reasons for our expectations of significantly different approaches on the parts of our two authors. The chapter also contains a brief survey of the typical sources employed by the two milieux in their theological endeavors, noting both the commonalities and some significant differences.5 On all of these points, our principal guidance comes from the lifework of Dom Jean Leclercq, whose defense of monastic theology provides one of the seminal impulses behind our own inquiry. In the final major section of the chapter the choice of Aelred and Thomas, as both typical and at the same time outstanding representatives of their respective milieux, is defended.6 A brief argument is also made for the choice of friendship as the theological topos for investigation.7
Chapters 2 and 3 comprise the bulk of our investigation of primary sources, namely, the writings of Aelred of Rievaulx and Thomas Aquinas. We begin each of these chapters with a summary of contemporary scholarship,8 followed by a sketch of the author’s own major sources.9 Having surveyed each author’s corpus as a whole, we train our attention on those works in which are to be found their most trenchant and comprehensive theological treatments of friendship: Aelred’s Speculum caritatis (hereafter referred to as SC) and De spiritali amicitia (hereafter referred to as SA), on the one hand, and the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae (hereafter referred to as ST) of Thomas on the other.
The principal task of chapter 2 is to provide a close analysis of the two major works by Aelred that bear significantly on the subject of friendship.10 In addition to elucidating the content of each work in detail, the chapter gives careful consideration to the relationship between them, with respect not only to their theological content, but also to the formal and historical relations between the texts themselves. In the course of the textual analysis of these works, the distinctive features of Aelred’s theological account of friendship are delineated. A brief treatment of Aelred’s approach to Scriptural exegesis is appended to the main discussion, in consequence of our conviction of the impact of one’s mode of reading—especially the Bible—on the way one does theology.11 In conclusion of the investigation of our first major author, we argue that Aelred presents a splendid spiritual vision of holy friendship and its eschatological telos, in the idiom of medieval monastic theology.12 Neither argumentative nor systematic, Aelred’s account bespeaks his own innocence and purity of heart. Thus, his theology of friendship proves to be an integral and harmonious expression of his monastic life, a life defined by prayer, both in solitude and in choir, and by the virtually unceasing practice of lectio divina.
In chapter 3 an analysis of Thomas Aquinas’s theological account of friendship is carried out, in deliberate parallel with the analysis of Aelred’s account in chapter 2.13 Thomas’s most mature and thorough treatment of friendship is discovered to transpire wholly within the bounds of what is technically a single work, the Summa theologiae.14 Nevertheless, we find that this treatment is readily parsed out between two subsections of that work, namely, the Prima Secundae, where Thomas first deals with love and friendship in the natural realm, and the Secunda Secundae, in which he brings his previous explanation of friendship to bear on the subject of supernatural charity.15 Thus, we find an immediate parallel with Aelred, in terms of both the structure and the constitutive elements of the two authors’ accounts: on the one hand, each of the accounts spans two major textual loci; on the other hand, each of these loci, in turn, is preoccupied