Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

50 DENNIS J. BILLY
were the focal point of the act of “faith seeking understanding”
and provided the believer with the opportunity to delve beneath
the literal crust of the text and nourish him or herself on the rich
spiritual senses beneath it. In this way, not only morality but the
whole of theology was integrated into the spiritual life of the
believer. 4
High scholastic theology, by way of contrast, tended to be
more speculative in orientation, and to emphasize the power of
human reason to clarify the content of divine revelation. It
valued Augustine’s synthesis, but leaned even more heavily on
the recently retrieved Aristotelian corpus made available to it
through Jewish and Arab translators. It used dialectics and
syllogistic reasoning as hermeneutical tools for arriving at the
truth. It also stayed with the literal meaning of the text in its
exposition of the Scriptures and was not afraid to depart from
the text in order to dispute whatever tensions it was able to
uncover in the tradition. If its emphasis on the objective content
of revelation placed theology one step away from the actual
experience of the believer and if it degenerated in later years to
elaborate (some would say “needless”) speculations with
seemingly nothing to do with the faith, the great masters of its
Golden Age (especially Bonaventure and Aquinas) were able to
integrate doctrine, morality, and spiritual teaching in the one
subalternated science of theology. The close structural
connection in Aquinas’ treatment of the acquired and infused
virtues and his discussion of the gifts of the Spirit and the New
Law is a prime example of the type of integration scholastic
thought was capable of. In his thinking, the life of the virtues is
closely integrated with the life of grace and finds its most
4
The classical presentation of monastic theology appears in JEAN
LECLERCQ, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic
Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press,
1982), 191-235, 276; For the importance of allegory for the medieval
interpretation of texts, see STEPHEN L. WAILES, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’
Parables (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press,
1987), 9-21. See also HENEI DE LUBAC, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sense de
l’écriture, vol. 2 (Aubier: Editions Montaigne, 1959), 643-56.