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Page iii The Love of Learning and the Desire for God A Study of Monastic Culture Jean Leclercq, O.S.B. Translated by Catharine Misrahi Page iv Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 8859­1 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 8859­1 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. © Copyright 1961, 1974, 1982 by FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS All rights reserved LC 60­53004 ISBN 0­8232­0407­3 A translation of L'Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du moyen áge (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1957) PRINTING HISTORY: First Edition, 1961 Mentor Omega, paperback, 1962 Second Edition, 1974 Reprinted, 1977 Third Edition, 1982 Reprinted, 1985 Reprinted, 1988 Reprinted, 1993 Reprinted, 1994 Reprinted, 1996 Reprinted, 1998 Leclercq, Jean, 1911— The love of learning and the desire for God; a study of monastic culture. Translated by Catherine Misrahi. 415 p. 23. Translation of Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu. Includes bibliography. 1. Monasticism and religious orders—Middle Ages. 2. Christian literature, Early—Hist. & crit. 3. Theology—Middle Ages. I. Title. BX2470.L413 271.0902 60­53004 Printed in the United States of America Page v CONTENTS Abbreviations vi Preface vii Introduction: Learning and Spirituality 1 The Formation of Monastic Culture 1 11 The Conversion of St. Benedict 2 25 St. Gregory, Doctor of Desire 3 37 Cult and Culture The Sources of Monastic Culture 4 53 Devotion to Heaven 5 71 Sacred Learning 6 89 The Ancient Traditional Spirituality 7 112 Liberal Studies The Fruits of Monastic Culture 8 153 Literary Genres 9 191 Monastic Theology 10 236 The Poem of the Liturgy Epilogue: Literature and the Mystical Life 255 Appendices I. The Rule of St. Benedict and the Canticle of Canticles 273 II. The Monk who Slept during the Office 274 III. The Speculative Theology of Dom Bertrand 275 IV. Monastic Theology 276 V. St. Anselm 277 Index 279 Page vi ABBREVIATIONS CCL Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina CSEL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum DHGE Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique Du Cange Du Cange, Favre, Henschel, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis MGH Monumenta Germaniae historica PG Migne, Patrologia graeca PL Migne, Patrologia latina RB Revue bénédictine RHE Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique RTAM Revue de théologie ancienne et médiévale TLL Thesaurus linguae latinae ZKT Zeitschrift für Kirche und Theologie Page vii PREFACE This book is composed of a series of lectures given to young monks at the Institute of Monastic Studies at Sant'Anselmo in Rome during the winter of 1955­56. It is published at their request and dedicated to them. It is an introductory work and therefore not intended for specialists, for already well­informed scholars. They would, with justice, find fault with it for generalizations which can hardly be avoided in a comprehensive work. Hence, it is desirable at the very beginning that its scope be defined. Its purpose is not to offer a synthesis that would be premature, nor to provide a bibliography which can be found elsewhere, but to draw attention to subjects for further investigation and to suggest partial and provisional solutions. The sources used will be, primarily, written documents, particularly those of doctrinal or spiritual character; treatises on geography, medicine, or law will not be under consideration. In fact, religious writings are the most numerous and most fully represented in the manuscripts. No complete listing will be given nor will all those which have been used be mentioned. Those which are, will be cited merely as examples. They will rarely be taken from authors later than the beginning of the thirteenth century. Within these limits and with such reservations, the work will still necessarily involve simplifications and broad generalizations which would call for supporting arguments, shading, and further definition. This has occasionally been done in special studies where evidence is supplied which is not provided in this exposition. We shall not here attempt to shed any new light on the subject but in the main to summarize works whose results have not been brought together in focus. Scholars such as C.H. Haskins, J. de Ghellinck, Paul Lehmann, Bernhard Bischoff, and others have undertaken patient and fruithful research on medieval culture in general. In relation to their findings, perhaps the time has come to ask whether monastic culture has its own identifying characteristics and what they are. This is difficult to decide: there are certain aspects of monastic history to which non­monastic scholars may not have paid enough attention and to which a monk risks paying too much. A margin of error will therefore always exist in evaluations and even in the findings themselves Page viii and it is best to admit this at the outset. Accordingly, the point here is less to pass judgment than to understand. Judgment is God's province; the historian must be satisfied to learn why men and events were what the texts tell him they were. No doubt it is an illusion to think that men can be known—the throngs of men, of monks who have lived over the centuries—by means of written documents or pictures, and yet they are the only sources we have. These are the work of only a few of their number and cannot show them to us completely even if the testimony of ordinary and often unknown men is enlisted to round out the testimony of the great authors and exceptional geniuses. There were weaknesses in monasticism; there are lies and falsifications in its literature. But that is not all there was. And, after all, the monks' truest self, the self they wished to be, is what was best in them. Page 1 INTRODUCTION "Prescholastic" and Monastic Literature During the past few years "monastic" theology has become a subject for discussion. Is there any reality behind this expression? Is there any form of intellectuality which is a theology on the one hand, and monastic and nothing but monastic on the other? In order to introduce the subject, and to postulate the existence of a monastic theology, let us consider it at its height, at the time when, having reached its culmination, it is most distinct from any other theology: that is to say, in the twelfth century. The importance of the twelfth century in the doctrinal history of the Middle Ages need no longer be established. That was discovered fairly recently, in the present century, during the years which preceded the First World War, by C. Baeumker, J. de Ghellinck, M. Grabmann, and others, and has attracted more and more attention through the efforts of masters like E. Gilson, A. Landgraf, P. Lottin, and many more. It is now generally accepted that this period played a capital role in laying the foundations for the scholastic theology of the thirteenth century. The term pre­scholastic (in German Vorscholastik or Frühscholastik) is given to all doctrinal writings of the period immediately preceding the great expansion of the thirteenth century, the "great scholasticism" (Hochscholastik) which in turn preceded "late scholasticism" (Spätscholastik). And it is true that all the twelfth­century writings paved the way for those of the thirteenth century. This they did in different ways, since they were themselves different in character. Some were scholastic in character and entitled, on this account, to be called pre­scholastic. Others were not at all scholastic; and it is these that will be treated here. They exist and deserve to be taken into account in the doctrinal and literary history of the twelfth century. Their individuality should be respected and they should not be confused with scholastic writings. These are the ''non­scholastic" (ausserscholastische) texts. Here, of course, a dispute over terminology may arise. Some would say that, first, a definition of scholasticism would have to be agreed upon. It happens that on this point there is a difference of opinion; no definite Page 2 agreement has been reached. For de Wulf, for example, "scholastic" meant a body of doctrine—orthodox doctrine. 1 Consequently, Siger of Brabant and the Latin Averroists could not carry this title. De Wulf later abandoned this interpretation. Grabmann, on the contrary, held that "scholastic" should be applied, not to a doctrine, but to a method, and for that reason he entitled his great work History of the Scholastic Method.2 For some, however, the scholastic method itself consists in the adoption of Aristotle's theses—in which case there is no scholasticism, really, before the thirteenth century. For others, it lay in the use of Aristotle's logic as transmitted to the Middle Ages through writings like Boethius'—and according to this view St. Anselm or Abailard can be described as already scholastics. Today, it is more generally agreed that the scholastic method is characterized not by the use of Aristotle but by the teaching procedures, principally the quaestio applied to the sacra pagina; in this sense the writings of the school of Laon at the beginning of the twelfth century were already scholastic, as were, even earlier, the quaestiones on sacred doctrine which were deliberated from the time of the renaissance of ancient pedagogy beginning with the Carolingian age.3 It is in this sense that scholasticism will be used in this work. For it alone corresponds to the obvious meaning of the word, and besides, it makes possible a clear distinction between what is "scholastic" and what is not.

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