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.
Leclercq says that “The monks loved history very much. More than any other writers, they concentrated on it, and sometimes they were almost the only ones to do so.”51 In contrast, “not one of the masters of the schools of Chartres, Poitiers, Tours, Rheims, Laon, or Paris, in spite of the renown of their teaching, had any concern for historical work.” In England also, the historians are almost always monks.”52 Accordingly, Aelred of Rievaulx himself produced an impressive corpus of historical and hagiographical works, following in the footsteps of his great English monastic forebear, Bede the Venerable. In tentative explanation of the monastic interest in history, Leclercq ventures only to point out the genre’s antiquity and its inherent conservatism, both characteristics perennially appealing to the traditionalist tendencies of the monastic enterprise per se. Commenting further on the monks’ use of the genre, he observes that
The manner of presentation is determined by the end in view; to incite to the practice of virtue and promote praise of God, the events once recorded must, to a certain extent, be interpreted. Above all they must be situated in a vast context; the individual story is always inserted in the history of salvation. Events are directed by God who desires the salvation of the elect. The monks devote to the interests of this conviction a comprehension of the Church which was developed in them by the reading of the Fathers and the observance of the liturgy. They feel they are members of a universal communion. The saints, whose cult they celebrate, are, for them, intimate friends and living examples. In similar fashion, thinking about the angels comes naturally to them. Liturgical themes permeate their entire conception of what takes place in time.53
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
the importance the monks attribute to history also explains the great weight they give to considerations of eschatology: for the work of salvation, begun in the Old Testament and realized in the New, is brought to completion only in the next world. Christian knowledge here below is only the first step toward the knowledge that belongs to the life of beatitude. Theology, here below, demands that we be detached from it, that we remain oriented toward something else beyond it, toward a fulfillment of which it is merely the beginning. This is yet another of the differences which distinguish the monks’ intellectual attitude from that of the scholastics. As has been correctly observed, eschatology occupies practically no place in the teaching of Abailard.54
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.
Unlike the genre of history, the genre of the sermon was necessarily employed by all clerics who had pastoral responsibilities, whether in the cloister, the cathedral, or the academic hall. The differences, however, between style, method, and even content of the preaching done in the monasteries and that done elsewhere, were great, and only increased as the Middle Ages progressed. The monastic sermon is fundamentally patristic in tone and style, and pastoral in intention. It takes place within the context of a “rite” which was both “solemn” and “intimate,” sometimes in the cloister, sometimes, after the day’s work was over, “at the very spot where the work was being done, for example under a tree or some other spot where all could sit around the superior.”55 In stark contrast, the preaching of the schools
came to be governed as much by dialectics as by rhetoric. Sermons were composed which were rigidly logical, but which bear a much closer resemblance to quaestiones disputatae than they do to homilies, and the laws which govern them are codified in the vast literature of the artes praedicandi. In scholasticism, the technique of the sermon becomes more and more subtle and complicated: one manual on the art of preaching teaches, for example, eighteen ways to ‘lengthen a sermon.’ The end result is a very clear, very logical oration which may be doctrinal and occasionally not devoid of stylistic or theological merit; but from this category, there is not in existence today one work of genius still worth reading.56
Here Leclercq records the telling comment of M. D. Chenu, that “The scholastics are professors. . . . Their sermons, like St. Thomas’s, will themselves be scholastic. And the Church will consider the greatest of them as ‘doctors,’ no longer as its ‘Fathers.’”57 That the schoolmen took seriously their roles as teachers does not necessarily entail that they denigrated their pastoral responsibilities to their students and religious communities. Nonetheless, it is fair to affirm Leclercq’s assertion that “to say the least, it was not in their sermons that they gave the best they had to offer.”58 In brief, then, the two ways of preaching correspond to their respective milieux: where the monastic sermon tends to be pastoral and biblical, the scholastic sermon is professorial and dialectical.
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:
The grammar schools had collections of examples taken from the authors. These collections of excerpts, either from the classics or, more frequently, from the Fathers and the councils, were used by the urban schools in particular as a veritable arsenal of auctoritates. They were seeking important, concise, and interesting extracts for doctrinal studies, something of value for the quaestio and the disputatio. . . . Always conveniently ready for use . . . , these collections facilitated research; they eliminated the necessity of handling numbers of manuscripts. Consequently, they were primarily working tools for the intellectuals.59