Learning and Spirituality

 Is there a "monastic theology"?  

Is there any form of intellectuality which is a theology on the one hand, and monastic and nothing but monastic on the other?

It is a question, Jean Leclercq says, that has come up in recent times (meaning the late 50's, when he was addressing young monks, and writing his book).

The basic purpose of his Introduction seems to be to sketch an answer to this question.  This he does by focusing on the 12th century flowering of theological writings, pointing to a divergence between what is called "prescholastic" and "monastic" theology.   Specifically, he briefly compares writings by two notable theologians of the time.  Peter Lombard represents early scholasticism and St Bernard of Clairvaux, a monastic theology which can be distinguished in style and goal.     So here are the subheadings:

• "Prescholastic" and Monastic Literature
• Peter Lombard's Prologue on St Paul
• Prologue of St Bernard to his Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles
• Literature and Eternal Life

Interestingly, from what I have read elsewhere,  it was notable Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson, who Leclercq studied under, who encouraged Leclercq to expand on the idea of a specifically monastic theology.    

Leclercq's intention is not to dismiss scholasticism, or to put the two approaches in opposition to each other.   If his introduction only briefly describes the scholastic method, it is because the method and its history has its own group of scholars.    If he lays out a contrast between the two methods, it is not to exclude their considerable common ground.   After all, they are both approaches to truth; they are both theologies; they are both intellectual.   

One might wonder if even if this is true, why it matters to ordinary people, ordinary Catholics, today.   Pope Benedict XVI explained this eloquently, speaking at the College de Bernadins in Paris:

We are in a place that is associated with the culture of monasticism.  Does this still have something to say to us today, or are we merely encountering the world of the past?  In order to answer this question, we must consider for a moment the nature of Western monasticism itself.  What was it about?  From the perspective of monasticism’s historical influence, we could say that, amid the great cultural upheaval resulting from migrations of peoples and the emerging new political configurations, the monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived, and where at the same time a new culture slowly took shape out of the old.  But how did it happen?  What motivated men to come together to these places?  What did they want?  How did they live?

First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past.  Their motivation was much more basic.  Their goal was: quaerere Deum.  Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself.  They were searching for God.  They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.  It is sometimes said that they were “eschatologically” oriented.  But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional.  Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading them into total darkness.  God himself had provided signposts, indeed he had marked out a path which was theirs to find and to follow.  

We live in a culture marked by dissonance and formlessness, as Margaret Mooney points out.    The Church, Pilgrim People of God as it might be, does not need to wander in trackless wildernesses forever.    The monastic "Quaerere Deum", as well as the scholastic one, is the search for meaning, for the definitive, for the ultimate.   Again, Pope Benedict:

Quaerere Deum — to seek God and to let oneself be found by Him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation — the search for God and the readiness to listen to Him — remains today the basis of any genuine culture.

I think I will leave it there for now-- the difficulty for me in studying a book of this sort is that, as Leclercq says in his Preface, it is a composite of many things that in themselves are worthy of vast amounts of study.    It is rather a distillation; but one more answer to the question of "why does monasticic theology matter to ordinary folk today?" might be that it can help us with living and thinking in the wake of Vatican II, which was in important ways motivated by the desire to return to the same sources that the monks pondered and lived:  the Scriptures and the Church Fathers.