Theologizing Friendship. Nathan Sumner Lefler

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Theologizing Friendship - Nathan Sumner Lefler


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Sitze im Leben: from schools in small towns, to the cathedrals of cities, to the classrooms of academic consortia that then become universities. Soon, “the quaestio will give birth to the quaestio disputata, the quaestiuncula, the articulus, and the quodlibet; to the lectio will be added a reportatio, and each of these genres, as well as the sermon itself, will obey a more and more precise plan and a more and more complicated technique.”50 Over against these distinctively scholastic genres, we must now look briefly at the genres of history, sermon, and florilegium and their respective relations to the monastic and scholastic milieux.

      Here, Leclercq verges on an insight that he only makes explicit much later in The Love of Learning, namely, the link between history and eschatology and the corresponding monastic concern with both. In his climactic chapter on “Monastic Theology” he argues that

      On the other hand, Leclercq offers no corresponding explanation for the lack of interest in history—or, for that matter, the relative lack of interest in eschatology—on the part of the schoolmen. In the first instance, the best explanation is probably to be found precisely by inverting the argument Leclercq offers for the monks’ striking propensity for the genre. In their relentless search for clarity and scientific knowledge, the schools accord no special authority to any literary form, however ancient. The same motives militate against traditionalism and conservatism, whenever authority is perceived as a tool, willful or not, of obfuscation. There are also important philosophical issues to be considered here, namely, the matters of time, contingency and particularity. In their increasingly programmatic concern to reduce the bewildering complexity of the universe to a series of demonstrable propositions, the schoolmen inevitably attempted to abstract from time and the particularity and contingency of individual historical persons and events, whenever possible. In the case of eschatology, we must be even more cautious in our speculations. Nevertheless, it is quite reasonable, given the homogenizing tendencies of scholastic method with respect to the multiplicity of disciplines, to expect a certain indisposition in the realm of theology analogous to the one just described in the anthropological order, given the intrinsic relationship between history and eschatology. The reasons for such a disinclination to eschatological inquiry, like the disinclination itself, are analogous to the prior indisposition to the genre of history, whether or not these reasons were ever sufficiently examined.

      Another important genre employed in both the monasteries and the urban schools, though like the sermon, in remarkably different ways, was the florilegium. According to Leclercq, the fundamental distinction between the two uses amounts to that between a spiritual and an intellectual tool. Thus:


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