Theologizing Friendship. Nathan Sumner Lefler
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comparisons are sufficient for exegesis. In scholasticism, on the contrary, much use is made of these Distinctiones, where, in alphabetical order, each word is placed opposite references to all the texts in which it is used; these written concordances can be used to replace, but only in a bookish and artificial manner, the spontaneous phenomenon of reminiscence.40
With reminiscence, in contrast with the Distinctiones, “one becomes a sort of living concordance.”41
Ways and Kinds of Writing
Style
In their writing, too, the monks and the schoolmen differ significantly, both in style and in preferred genres, as well as in the uses they make of those genres they have in common. Leclercq identifies three distinct humanisms, those of monasticism and scholasticism, and a third “neo-classic” humanism represented by such “worldly clerics” as Peter of Blois and John of Salisbury, who belong neither to the university nor to the cloister. Comparing the writing styles that emerge from these three humanisms, Leclercq observes that
Monastic style keeps equally distant from the clear but graceless style of the scholastic quaestiones and the neo-classic style of these humanists. . . . In this sense, one can rightly speak, with regard to the most representative types of monastic culture . . . of a ‘monastic style.’ The literary heritage of all of antiquity, secular and patristic, can be found in it, yet less under the form of imitation or reminiscences of ancient authors than in a certain resonance which discloses a familiarity, acquired by long association, with their literary practices. . . . This was both a way of thinking and a way of expressing oneself. Thus the lectio divina complemented harmoniously the grammar that was learned in school.42
Leaving aside the neo-classic category, the monastic and scholastic styles tend to express their respective cultural biases, the one more literary, the other more speculative. Where the monks embrace grammar, music and rhetoric, the schoolmen prefer dialectics, to the detriment of the rest of the seven liberal arts; they forfeit “artistry of expression,” in favor of “clarity of thought” at all costs. For the monks’ genuine concern for beauty of expression, the schoolmen substitute “words originating in a sort of unaesthetic jargon, provided only that they be specific.” Consequently, “the language of orators and poets gives place to that of metaphysicians and logicians.”43 Simply put, “the modes of expression and the processes of thought [of monastic theology] are linked with a style and with literary genres which conform to the classical and patristic tradition.”44 With the masters of the urban schools, on the other hand,
the accent is no longer placed on grammar, the littera, but on logic. Just as they are no longer satisfied with the auctoritas of Holy Scripture and the Fathers and invoke that of the philosophers, so clarity is what is sought in everything. Hence the fundamental difference between scholastic style and monastic style. The monks speak in images and comparisons borrowed from the Bible and possessing both a richness and an obscurity in keeping with the mystery to be expressed.45
Leclercq proceeds with a revealing contrast between St. Bernard’s understanding of “biblical language,” as the essential mode appropriate for theological activity, and the burgeoning new scholastic terminology:
St. Bernard sees in the biblical tongue a certain modesty which respects God’s mysteries; he admires the tact and discretion God used in speaking to men. Hence, he says: Geramus morem Scripturae. The scholastics are concerned with achieving clarity; consequently they readily make use of abstract terms, and they never hesitate to forge new words. . . . For [Bernard], this terminology is never more than a vocabulary for emergency use and it does not supplant the biblical vocabulary. The one he customarily uses remains, like the Bible’s, essentially poetic; his language is consistently more literary than that of the School. . . . In answering doctrinal questions put to him by Hugh of St. Victor . . . he transposes into the biblical mode what his correspondent had said to him in the school language.46
In general, then, the monastic style tends to be biblical, literary, aesthetically self-aware, even poetic, whereas the scholastic style is dialectical, logical, technical and abstract.
Apropos of Leclercq’s observation of the fundamental dichotomy between rhetoric in the monasteries and logic in the schools, R. W. Southern describes the basic distinction between rhetoric and logic and the gradual shift in emphasis from the one to the other in the period spanning the late tenth to the early thirteenth century. He begins his historical account of this transition with a discussion of the revolutionary teaching career of Gerbert of Rheims, later to become Pope Silvester II. Southern writes:
it is a striking thing that though this impulse to the study of logic was probably Gerbert’s most important contribution to medieval learning, he did not allow it that pride of place among the arts which it later attained. Gerbert aimed at restoring the classical past, and nowhere was he more faithful to this aim than in the pre-eminence which he gave to the art of rhetoric. He had no room for the forward-reaching spirit of enquiry which animated the study of logic in the twelfth century. His energies were concentrated on the task of conservation, and on the worthy presentation of long-acquired, and sometimes long-lost, truths. Hence he was drawn to the art of rhetoric by a double chain: first because it was the chief literary science of the ancient world; secondly because it was congenial to his own spirit of conservatism. Rhetoric is static; logic dynamic. The one aims at making old truths palatable, the other at searching out new, even unpalatable truths—like the invidiosi veri, syllogized, in Dante’s phrase, by Siger of Brabant [Paradiso, x, 138]. Rhetoric is persuasive, logic compulsive. The former smooths away divisions, the latter brings them into the open. The one is a healing art, an art of government; the other is surgical, and challenges the foundations of conduct and belief. To persuade, to preserve, to heal the divisions between past and present—these were Gerbert’s aims, and in this work rhetoric and statesmanship went hand in hand, with logic as their servant. . . . Hence for Gerbert rhetoric, not logic, was the queen of the arts.47
Though Southern’s point in this particular context is not to distinguish monasticism from scholasticism—Gerbert was not even a monk, but one of the itinerant masters that became such a common phenomenon in the tenth and eleventh centuries—nevertheless, the fundamental distinction between rhetoric and logic provides an important lens for appreciating the gap, ever-widening from Gerbert’s day onward, between monastic and scholastic formation and sensibilities. Indeed, the above characterizations of Gerbert’s outlook could virtually be applied wholesale to the monastic point of view, possibly excepting the specifically political orientation noted in the penultimate sentence of the passage cited.
Genre
In addition to stylistic differences in their approaches to writing in general, the two milieux vary in their preferences for particular forms, or genres, of writing, as well as in the ways they use genres they have in common. Thus, “the monks prefer the genres which might be called concrete,”48 including especially history and hagiography. Whereas the interest of the schoolmen
goes chiefly to the quaestio, the disputatio, or the lectio taken as a basis for formulating quaestiones, the monks prefer writings dealing with actual happenings and experiences rather than with ideas, and which, instead of being a teacher’s instruction for a universal and anonymous public, are addressed to a specific audience, to a public chosen by and known to the author.49
Furthermore, the monastic genres, like the cloisters themselves, remain essentially stable over centuries, while