Council of Sens, 1140, at which Bernard of Clairvaux had Peter Abelard’s doctrine condemned
One more snippet on theology from my forthcoming Getting Medieval with C S Lewis. Here’s a cardinal truth about reading history: just because you hear a story again and again doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact, it may indicate that a legend has taken on the aura of truth and is no longer being examined. That’s something like what I think has happened in the common “monasticism vs scholasticism” narrative you will often see in textbooks and hear in classrooms:
The “warfare thesis” projected backward
Now there is a modern scholarly narrative about scholasticism that you may have run across – it still seems quite popular. That narrative takes the politicized struggle between two strong personalities—Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard—and derives from it a thesis about the relationship between monastic and scholastic thinking: that the world of medieval theology was divided into obscurantist, fideist monastics who were afraid of using reason and dialectic and wanted to protect mystery, and intelligent, rational scholastics who didn’t care which sacred cows they slaughtered en route to a more “systematic” theology. In this story, Bernard of Clairvaux leads the charge against logic as the arch-monastic, and Abelard stands as the champion of logic and systematization. Continue reading
Posted in Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants
Tagged Abelard, Andrew Dickson White, Bernard, Bernard of Clairvaux, CS Lewis, faith and reason, monasticism, Peter Abelard, scholasticism, universities, university
A manuscript of the Venerable Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum
Trolling through some old material from my days as a Duke preceptor (teaching assistant), I find the following advice on papers I gave to Susan Keefe’s CH13 one year. Re-reading it now, some 15 years later, I find that students still have much the same issues when writing history papers, and I still recommend the same solutions. Some of these problems and solutions apply to any humanities paper, or any paper at all. Some are more specific to history.
[Point 1 of my notes had to do with a specific paper they were working on, so I’ve deleted it]:
2. Key issues in papers.
a. A certain distractedness; a tendency to drift from the question asked, or the topic at hand. Given an assigned question—or in the case of your research paper, once you have established your own topic, question or thesis statement, make sure that everything you write relates to that question. Cut everything out that doesn’t. Don’t worry about running out of things to say; any given historical question—at least at the level we’re working—has had countless books written about it. There’s far more than enough material for a single paper.
—Watch out for getting caught up in the vivid details about the lives of those you write about; details that are compelling and fascinating, but don’t relate to the question.
—Look with particular suspicion at your first page. Often “huffing and puffing,” getting the engine going, giving background material that only vaguely relates to the topic. Continue reading