Theologizing Friendship. Nathan Sumner Lefler
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the point a step further, Southern contends that scholastic method per se was in fact
a development of the florilegium. In its simplest form, it was an attempt to solve by infinitely patient criticism and subtlety of distinction the problems posed by the juxtaposition of related but often divergent passages in the works of the great Christian writers. It was, one might say, the attempt of the intellect to discover and articulate the whole range of truth discoverable in, or hinted at in, the seminal works of Christianity.60
In the monasteries, on the other hand, the notion and its application are entirely different. There, the florilegium was the organic fruit of spiritual reading:
The monk would copy out texts he had enjoyed so as to savor them at leisure and use them anew as subjects for private meditation. The monastic florilegium not only originated in the monk’s spiritual reading but always remained closely associated with it. For this reason the texts selected were different from those required in the schools. . . .61
The monastic is almost certainly the older of the two forms of florilegia. Moreover, it did not cease to exist, nor was its spiritual function forgotten, with the ingenious recasting of the genre by the schools. Rather, it persisted alongside the scholastic version, at least into the thirteenth century.62
Though admittedly not so much itself a genre as an interpretive activity or tool, nevertheless exegesis is a specialized mode of writing, often embedded within wider contexts, though sometimes characterizing the whole of a particular work (most especially the commentary, but sometimes sermons as well). Differing significantly in style and application from the monastic to the scholastic milieu, it demands brief attention here.
In her great work, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Beryl Smalley writes:
Gradually in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries exegesis as a separate subject emerges. It had its own technical aids to study, and its auxiliary sciences of textual criticism and biblical languages. Even though the personnel of its teachers was still undifferentiated, a scholar distinguished between his work as a theologian and his work as an exegete.63
By contrast, “in the early part of our period [the whole of which is the eighth to the fourteenth century] sacred doctrine resembled secular government in being undifferentiated and unspecialized.”64 Though Smalley does not at this point advert to Leclercq’s fundamental distinction, it is clear that specialization in biblical studies, for better or for worse, is strongly associated with the rise of the schools. Moreover, says Smalley, “we are invited”—by the early medieval commentators, as by the Fathers themselves—“to look not at the text, but through it.”65 This somewhat obscure description Smalley intends as an aphorism for allegorical interpretation, the predominant ancient mode of “spiritual exposition” and the form of interpretation overwhelmingly favored in the monastic milieu. To “literal exposition,” on the other hand, belongs “what we should now call exegesis, which is based on the study of the text and of biblical history, in its widest sense.”66 In her juxtaposition of the monastic and cathedral schools, Smalley observes:
The innumerable problems arising from the reception of Aristotelian logic and the study of canon and civil law, the new possibilities of reasoning, the urgent need for speculation and discussion, all these produced an atmosphere of haste and excitement which was unfavourable to biblical scholarship. The masters of the cathedral schools had neither the time nor the training to specialize in a very technical branch of Bible study.67
All in all, Smalley’s appraisal of both monastic and scholastic exegesis is fairly negative.68 Leclercq’s estimation of monastic exegesis, on the other hand, is predictably far more positive. In addition to taking the letter of the Bible with the utmost seriousness, the monks read Scripture as
not primarily a source of knowledge, of scientific information; it is a means for salvation, its gift is the ‘science of salvation’: salutaris scientia. This is true of Scripture in its entirety. Each word it contains is thought of as a word addressed by God to each reader for his salvation. Everything then has a personal, immediate value for present life and for the obtaining of eternal life.69
Furthermore, the monastic theme of desire finds its biblical correlates first in the prophetic character of the Old Testament, in “desire for the Promised Land or desire for the Messiah,” then in the anticipation of eschatological fulfillment, as these desires get “interpreted spontaneously by the medieval monks as desire for Heaven and for Jesus contemplated in His glory.” As already noted, there is no comparable eschatological emphasis in the exegesis of the schools. Concerning scholastic exegesis generally, we cannot finally bypass Smalley’s authoritative censure:
the main tendency of the cathedral schools is clear; it leads away from old-fashioned Bible studies. St. Gregory had identified theology with exegesis. The eleventh- and early twelfth-century masters were inclined to identify exegesis with theology. Their work appears to be brilliant but one-sided, if we remember the promise of the eighth and ninth centuries. We find the theological questioning but not the biblical scholarship.70
Dialectics
We need now to take up more intentionally a subject already alluded to several times above, that of dialectics. Relevant to style and to genre but transcending both categories, it is a topic about which the monks and the schoolmen were much exercised and deeply divided.71 Leclercq deals with the problem of dialectics—the need for it and its inherent vulnerability to abuse—in a series of sections72 that highlight monasticism’s attentiveness to mystery and simplicity, and its inclination to draw learning and love so close together as almost to make an equation between them. The great monastic heroes here are St. Bernard and, behind him, St. Gregory the Great, whose dictum Leclercq reproduces as: “Love itself is knowledge: the more one loves, the more one knows.”73 Leclercq points out that dialectics was taught in the monastery schools, as the complement to grammar,74 but that when the monastic teachers or their students disputed a point, “it was almost always on the subject of the liberal arts.” In contrast, “in the town schools the same procedure was applied to sacred doctrine.”75 Granted the legitimacy in principle of the basic development of the back-and-forth activity of quaeritur and respondendum est,76 there was general recognition already by the early twelfth century of the possibility of abuse. Theology was at risk of becoming “one technique among the others,” and the academic disputatio “began to assume a value of its own.”77
In reaction to this mode of theological inquiry, the monks, with St. Bernard very much in the vanguard, came more and more to conceive of the monastery as
a ‘school of charity,’ a school for the service of God. They maintained a certain reserve toward any intellectual research carried on outside of this setting and without the guarantees it offers of sincerity and humility. They feared it would be wanting in respect