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The period in the life of the Church during which one and the same tradition flourished throughout the Christian world, in East and West alike, is generally supposed to be the first five centuries, or, in other words, the period before and up to the medieval. The Middle Ages, and especially what may be called the Latin Middle Ages, are either discounted altogether or else mentioned only in order to eliminate them from the field of investigation; three charges in particular being levelled against them.
To begin with, the Middle Ages in the West are held to have been juridical and institutional, fenced about by an intricate system of legislation; they were the Golden Age of Canon Law and thus opposed to the spontaneous developments characterising the Eastern Church over the same period of time. The medieval West was also marked by moral and psychological trends of thought in contrast with the mysticism of Eastern Christianity, and religious life tended to be more practical than contemplative in spirit. The immediate present and its concerns bulked larger than the disinterested pursuit of eternal life, and the temporal preponderated over the eschatological in importance. There is, moreover, a noticeably psychological bent in the writings of the men most representative of the centuries in question; to quote examples from either extremity of the period, we find St Gregory the Great pre-eminently the moralist of Scriptural exegesis, and St Bernard’s conscious fervour far removed from the ancient spirituality of the Charisma.
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- Copyright © 1948 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
1
French of Dom Jean Leelereq. A monk of Clervaux aud one of France’s leading authorities in matters medieval, he has already published important works on the ecclesiology of John of Paris, on the spirituality of Petrus Cellensis, on John of Fécamp and on Peter the Venerable, as well as numerous articles in reviews, having now in preparation a book on St Bernard and a critical edition of the Letters of Ivo of Chartres. The field in which he pursues his researches is very similar to the one tilled so fruitfully in the past by Dom Wilmart, but his approach is rather different from that of his well-known predecessor. Although by no means incapable or impatient of the minutiae of erudition, his works abound in general ideas, such as do undeniably exist but need looking for in the exhaustive contributions of Dom Wilmart to medieval studies. m’intéressent.
The pages which follow are an adaptation rather than a literal translation of a notable article which he published in volume 19 (1946) of Irénikon propounding his theory of the two parallel (not successive) trends in medieval religious literature. Its main ideas were lately discussed at length with the present writer in the course of work pursued in common and full permission was given for the adaptation: an English version of the text being made by Miss G. M. Durnford.
Even with his careful provisos some may not agree with all that Dom Leclercq has to say—in the opinion of the present writer the dominating figures of both the scholastic and the monastic worlds have the greatest things in common—yet, his main contention is sound: that both trends co-exist, and that to recognise this fact is to be provided with a key to the understanding of the spiritual writers of the Middle Ages. Such a key seems to be particularly desireble now that many of the lesser-known religious works, both of the early Eastern Church and of the medieval West, are being happily brought to light and put at our disposal in various series of texts and translations. The few references to booke and the footnotes in these pages are peculiar to the English version.
References
2 J.-M. Déchanet, Guillaume de Saint-Thierry (Bruges, 1942), pp. 206-7.
3 La Théologie mystique de Saint Bernard (Paris, 1934), pp. 27, 45.