Theologizing Friendship. Nathan Sumner Lefler
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see the sections entitled: “Common Culture” and “Cautionary Paragraph ” from chapter 1 and “Conclusions, Challenges, Possible Avenues for Further Exploration” from chapter 4.
4. See especially the conclusion of the section entitled: “Differences between Monastic and Scholastic Theology” in chapter 1, below.
5. See the section on “Sources” in chapter 1, below.
6. See sections “Aelred: How Typical; How Understanding” and “Thomas: How Typical; How Understanding” in chapter 1, below.
7. See the section “Why Their Accounts of Friendship” in chapter 1, below.
8. See the sections in chapter 2 and 3 on “Contemporary Scholarship,” below.
9. See section “Aelred’s Sources” in chapter 2 and “Thomas’s Sources” in chapter 3, below.
10. See the section entitled “Aelred’s ‘Synthesis’ and Original Position” in chapter 2, below.
11. See the section “Aelred’s Friendly Exegesis” in chapter 2, below.
12. See the section “Conclusion: Aelred’s Monastic Theology of Friendship” in chapter 2, below.
13. See the section “Thomas’s Synthesis and Original Position” in chapter 3, below.
14. See the section “Rousselot’s ‘Problem of Love’ and Vansteenberghe’s ‘Amitié’” in chapter 3, below.
15. See the section “Thomas’s Sources” in chapter 3.
16. See the section “Thomas’s Synthesis and Original Position” in chapter 3, below.
17. See the section “Thomas’s Exegesis: Lectio utilis?” in chapter 3, below.
18. See the section “”Conclusion: Thomas’s Scholastic Theology of Friendship” in chapter 3, below.
19. See the section “Content of the Two Accounts Compared” in chapter 4, below.
20. See the section “Form of the Two Accounts Compared” in chapter 4, below.
21. See the section “The Analogy of Friendship” in chapter 4, below.
22. See the sections “Aelred and Monastic Friendship” and “Thomas and Scholastic Friendship” in chapter 4, below.
23. See the section “Challenges: Evaluations of the Two Analogies and Beyond” in chapter 4, below.
24. See the section “Speculative Suggestion for Further Inquiry” in chapter 4, below.
25. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s classical treatment of this complex process in Truth and Method, especially 171–379.
1
Differences between the More Experiential Approach of Monastic Theology and the More Conceptual Approach of Scholastic Theology
Contemporary Scholarship
In service of our comparison between the particular theological accounts of friendship given by St. Aelred of Rievaulx and St. Thomas Aquinas, a preliminary description of the relationship between monastic and scholastic theological approaches per se will provide the most helpful point of departure. In this preparatory chapter, our preeminent guide will be the great twentieth-century Benedictine scholar, Jean Leclercq. The conclusions of Leclercq’s extensive and profound researches will be supplemented principally by the work of R. W. Southern, Beryl Smalley, David Knowles and Ivan Illich.
Common Culture
Between the birth of Aelred of Rievaulx in 1110 and the death of Thomas Aquinas in 1274, a substantial homogeneity of culture obtained throughout Western Europe. David Knowles comments that “For three hundred years, from 1050 to 1350, and above all in the century between 1070 and 1170, the whole of educated Western Europe formed a single undifferentiated cultural unit.”26 Jean Leclercq, who tends to insist on the non-monolithic character of medieval life and culture, nevertheless confirms Knowles’s assertion in a somewhat peculiar way when he argues that, “jusqu’alors [xiie siècle], toute la culture médiévale porte l’empreinte monastique, et qu’en ce sens et dans cette mesure elle est une culture monastique.”27 To the extent, then, that medieval culture, at least up until the twelfth century, can be said to be monastic, it necessarily maintains a certain uniformity of character. Moreover, as Knowles’s chronologically broader claim suggests, such a deeply ingrained uniformity of Christian worldview and practice was by no means easily shed, even through Aquinas’s lifetime and well beyond. In The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, Leclercq is furthermore earnestly concerned to stress the fundamental unicity of the Church’s theology, however divergent or even disparate may appear its sundry expressions 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