Theologizing Friendship. Nathan Sumner Lefler
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amicitia or caritas. As with Aelred, we proceed through a close analysis of Thomas’s texts to enumerate the signal features of his theological account of friendship,16 again ending with a brief look at his exegetical practice.17 In conclusion of our inquiry into his work, we contend that Thomas’s finely wrought definition of charity as man’s friendship for God embodies in nuce one of scholasticism’s most remarkable achievements: the harmonization of Christian revelation with Aristotelian philosophy.18 In anticipation of chapter 4, we also observe that Thomas’s theological account of friendship exhibits the major characteristics of scholastic theology in general, described in chapter 1.
The fourth and final chapter of the dissertation draws together the key findings from the three preceding chapters. More specifically, here our assessments of the two theological accounts of friendship are directly juxtaposed and compared point by point, with respect both to their material characteristics, and also to their form. That is to say, first, the distinctive features of the content of each of the two accounts, to which we have drawn attention in the two preceding chapters, are set side by side and each characteristic is evaluated relative to the parallel characteristic of the alternative account.19 The outcome of this comparative analysis is then supplemented by a formal comparison between the accounts, again based on the findings of chapters 2 and 3, only this time with further reference to the formal comparative framework established in chapter 1.20 Finally, the results of this stereoscopic analysis are distilled into a single formulation, articulated in terms of an analogy of friendship.21 This pithy conclusion is in turn elaborated in terms of an Aelredian and monastic expression on one side and a Thomistic and scholastic version on the other.22 In both cases it is asserted that the analogy spans three elements treated in the dissertation: the author’s notion of friendship itself, his way of reading, and ultimately the way he does theology. So, too, mutatis mutandis, with the two authors’ respective milieux. In light of this general conclusion, several challenges are proposed to each of our two authors’ accounts, either from the perspective of the alternative account, or independently.23 The dissertation ends with four brief speculative suggestions for further inquiry.24
Two further points are in order, which will prove in the final analysis to be complementary aspects of the same underlying reality. One point concerns the dissertation’s principal subject matter, the other the intellectual approach entertained by the author of the dissertation towards the dissertation itself. First, there is a mild degree of intellectual embarrassment, never adverted to explicitly in the dissertation, resulting from a profound asymmetry between the two notions of friendship treated by Aelred of Rievaulx and Thomas Aquinas, respectively. This is not to say that the two perspectives share no common ground, much less that they cannot be placed in counterpoint and conversation with each other. Nevertheless, such a project presents a dilemma likely to appear initially rather daunting, particularly—and precisely—when such a project is undertaken according to the constraints of the peculiarly modern genre called the doctoral dissertation. The dilemma is, in the words of the old but durable cliché, how to compare an apple with an orange. Furthermore, the fathers of the Enlightenment generated a ratiocinative apparatus that has often tempted its users, when faced with such a comparison, to begin by trying to turn the orange into an apple, or vice versa, in order to carry out the much easier comparison between two specimens of the same fruit. Originally erected in service of the so-called hard sciences, this apparatus gradually made its way into humanistic intellectual endeavors as well,25 influencing in the process all genres of academic writing—preeminent among them, the dissertation. And with the seductive tool came the besetting temptation noted. The effort by the current dissertation’s author to employ the tool judiciously while resisting the temptation brings us to the second point.
So far as was deemed compatible with the conventional scholarly requirements of the genre, we have attempted not to succumb to the occasional academic weakness for prestidigitation, touching either fruit or friendship. Consequently, the reader will find rather drastic disparities between the lengths of sections treating the same or parallel themes in our respective authors. Yet to have forced these sections into the same-sized outfits, as it were, would have falsified both positions, and thereby also necessarily undermined our comparison between them, ultimately rendering our conclusions and the whole enterprise intellectually suspect. Similarly, while the reader will find in the following pages a great deal of careful, logical argumentation, shored up by regular appeal to both primary and secondary sources, he will not find the presumption that the conclusions arrived at are to be received as indisputable, scientifically watertight propositions: quite the contrary. Moreover, we insist that this state of things, however unsatisfactory it may be to some, is no decoy for desultoriness on our part: rather, we believe we wander closer to the truth (often in spite of ourselves) when we allow it a certain amount of room to play. Consider, for example, such relatively recent oddities as Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem, chaos theory, or fuzzy mathematics: all essentially post-modern responses—now each more or less well-respected—to modern rationalism and its totalizing agenda. We engage our topic, then, deliberately in somewhat the mode of a juggler, or particle physicist, keeping elements of the discussion alive and in the air, knowing full-well that they are liable to change in bumping into one another. This is not sloppy science in a modern register: it is more like the highly rational yet non-restrictive activity of dancing, and dancing in a post-modern key. Indeed, if it is conceded that the dissertation is a thoroughly modern genre, we predict that the genre will eventually implode, if it cannot expand to allow the self-confrontation invited by the post-modern challenge to a rationalism ultimately imperiling the very search for truth it claims to champion.
In brief, the following dissertation seeks, as its title indicates, to shed further light on the relationship between monastic and scholastic theology, both historically and in se, through the high-filter lens of friendship, construed as a theological topos or category, focused narrowly on two personal subjects, Aelred and Thomas, both of whom had important things to say about the topic. As suggested above, we are also concerned to guard against the superficial and false homogenizing of the two accounts that would result if we reduced our analysis to questions of method. This would be, in our opinion, to cede the field of debate to one side, namely, that of scholasticism, before the discussion had even been joined. In this connection too, we may construe our own project as one that, loosely, employs both more monastic approaches—the existential and historical—and more scholastic approaches—the speculative and systematic—in order to elucidate the differences between Aelred and Thomas on friendship. More than this, we have sought to draw attention to some elements of a genuine monastic theology that have indeed been muted, if not even altogether lost, in the wake of the ascendancy of scholasticism and its continuous dominance of the Church’s professional theological enterprise until the present. Without, then, we trust, giving short shrift to the genuine benefits of the basic formalities of the academic dissertation, we have aimed at the same time for a modest transcendence of those long established boundaries. It is for the reader to judge whether, and to what extent, we have succeeded in our endeavor.
1. Augustine, Confessions, II, 2. For allusions by our own two authors, see Aelred of Rievaulx, SC I.25.71, SA Prologus.1, and Thomas Aquinas, Sent. distinction 27, question 2, article 1.
2. Deus caritas est. 1 Jn. 4:8 (Vulgate).
3. The monastic and scholastic milieux are, however, carved out of the