Jean Khoury
Summary: This article revisits the classic opposition between Bernard of Clairvaux and the emerging cathedral schools of the twelfth century — a confrontation Étienne Gilson famously described as “schools against schools.” Drawing on Bernard’s Sermones super Cantica Canticorum (especially Sermon 36), his De consideratione and De diligendo Deo, and on Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Didascalicon, it argues that the real issue at stake was never knowledge itself but the ordo scientiae: the order, motive and end according to which knowledge is pursued. Bernard and Hugh, far from being simple opponents, converge on a diagnosis — that knowledge untethered from humility and charity becomes spiritually disordered — while proposing complementary remedies, one ascetical, the other pedagogical. The article then draws out a structural parallel with the twentieth century, when modern science acquired unprecedented power, authority and cultural prestige, provoking an analogous crisis about the proper ordering of knowledge. It closes by considering what this medieval debate can still teach the Church today, particularly in the formation of priests, where the recovery of the ordo scientiae has direct bearing on refocusing priestly identity on its essential end: the cura animarum, the life of prayer, spiritual growth, and spiritual direction.
Introduction
In the twelfth century, the schools of Chartres, Laon, Paris and the emerging discipline of theology as a rational science stood, in Gilson’s phrase, against the schools of Cîteaux, Clairvaux and Signy. It has become a commonplace to read this confrontation as a clash between “reason” and “spirituality,” between the new dialectical, philosophical culture of the cathedral schools and the older monastic culture of lectio divina and contemplative prayer. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian abbot, is remembered above all as the adversary of Abelard, the man who distrusted the new learning.
A close reading of the primary texts, however, dissolves this simple opposition. Bernard does not condemn knowledge as such. Hugh of Saint-Victor, writing from within the very intellectual culture Bernard is supposed to be resisting, insists just as strongly that knowledge divorced from humility is worthless. What actually divides — and what actually unites — these two figures is a much more precise question than “knowledge versus spirituality.” It is the question of the ordo scientiae: in what order, for what purpose, and by what mode a thing ought to be known, and what kind of transformation that knowledge is meant to produce in the one who knows.
This article traces that argument through the primary sources, shows why it is a more defensible account of the twelfth-century crisis than the usual “scholasticism versus mysticism” narrative, and then asks a further question: does this medieval debate illuminate anything about our own age, in which science and technical knowledge have achieved a cultural authority the twelfth century could scarcely have imagined? The final section considers the practical consequences of this recovered ordo scientiae for priestly formation today.
I. Gilson’s “Schools Against Schools”: A Conflict Within Christian Education, Not Against It
Étienne Gilson’s formulation — Cîteaux, Clairvaux and Signy against Reims, Laon, Paris and Chartres — is often misunderstood as pitting monastic anti-intellectualism against a rising rational culture. But Gilson’s own point is more subtle: Bernard and the Cistercian reform were not rejecting Christian education, they were claiming the right to offer a different kind of it. Bernard himself forecloses the anti-intellectualist reading. In Sermon 36 on the Song of Songs he writes with striking directness: “Videar forsitan nimius in suggillatione scientiae, et quasi reprehendere doctos, ac prohibere studia litterarum. Absit!” “I may perhaps seem too severe in censuring knowledge, and as though I were condemning the learned and forbidding the study of letters. Far from it!”
He goes on to acknowledge how much the learned contribute to the Church, both in refuting her adversaries and in instructing the simple. Bernard’s target, then, is not scientia as such but scientia detached from its proper order and purpose.
II. Sermon 36: Bernard’s Epistemology of the Modus Sciendi
Sermon 36 is arguably the single most important Bernardine text for understanding what is really at stake. Bernard begins from two kinds of ignorance — ignorance of oneself and ignorance of God — and then asks not what should be known but how one ought to know: “Vides quoniam non probat multa scientem, si sciendi modum nescierit.” “You see that he does not approve the man who knows many things, if he does not know how he ought to know.” He specifies this modus sciendi under three headings — order, zeal and purpose: “Quo ordine, quo studio, quo fine quaeque nosse oporteat?” “In what order, with what zeal, and for what purpose each thing ought to be known.”
From this Bernard derives his celebrated threefold — in fact fivefold — classification of the motives for seeking knowledge. Some seek to know simply in order to know, which is base curiosity (turpis curiositas); others seek to know in order to be edified themselves, which is prudence; and others still seek to know in order to edify their neighbour, which is charity. Knowledge, in other words, becomes spiritually legitimate only when it is taken up into the order of charity. Bernard is not building a hierarchy of subject matter but a hierarchy of intention.
III. Two Kinds of Scientia: Knowledge That Puffs Up and Knowledge That Wounds
Earlier in the same sermon, Bernard draws a distinction that is easy to miss but decisive for his whole argument: “Vides quia differentia est scientiarum, quando alia inflans, alia contristans est.” “You see that there is a difference between kinds of knowledge, since one kind puffs up while another causes sorrow.”
This is not merely rhetorical flourish. Bernard is distinguishing between knowledge that inflates the ego with pride and knowledge that produces compunction and humility — and he asks which of the two is more useful for salvation. His conclusion follows immediately: the soul should know itself first, “since both reason and utility require this, and so does order” (quod id postulet ratio et utilitatis et ordinis). Self-knowledge is not one subject among others; it is the epistemological precondition for every other kind of knowing to be rightly ordered.
IV. De consideratione: Building Without Foundations
The same principle reappears, sharpened, in De consideratione, Bernard’s late treatise of counsel to Pope Eugenius III. There he writes: “A te tua consideratio inchoet, ne frustra extendaris in alia, te neglecto.” “Let your consideration begin with yourself, lest you extend it fruitlessly to other things while neglecting yourself.” And then, in one of the most arresting sentences in all of Bernard’s writing: “Noveris licet omnia mysteria, noveris lata terrae, alta coeli, profunda maris; si te nescieris, eris similis aedificanti sine fundamento.” “You may know all mysteries, know the breadth of the earth, the heights of heaven and the depths of the sea; but if you do not know yourself, you will be like a man building without foundations.”
Notice what this sentence does not say. Bernard does not say that knowledge of the earth, the heavens or the sea is worthless. He names it precisely, and at length, because he grants its value. His claim is more exact: such knowledge is epistemologically incomplete — indeed unstable — when it is not grounded in self-knowledge. Cosmological knowledge without self-knowledge is a house without a foundation. Nor is Bernard hostile to rational inquiry as an activity. He gives consideratio itself a strikingly positive definition: “Haec est quae confusa disterminat, hiantia cogit, sparsa colligit, secreta rimatur, vera vestigat, verisimilia examinat, ficta et fucata explorat.” It is the activity that distinguishes what is confused, brings together what is fragmented, gathers what is scattered, searches out what is hidden, investigates what is true, examines what is probable, and exposes what is false.
This is a description of disciplined rational investigation that any twelfth-century master at Chartres or Paris could have accepted. Bernard even grants a legitimate, if subordinate, place to philosophy: investigating what man is — “a rational, mortal animal” — he calls “more philosophical than apostolic” (philosophicum magis quam apostolicum), yet immediately adds that such philosophical inquiry is legitimate precisely because it can serve salvation. The point is not prohibition but subordination: philosophical knowledge must be ordered to the knowledge necessary for salvation, not treated as autonomous.
Bernard even offers an ascending epistemological sequence — dispensative, estimative and speculative consideration — corresponding to sensible things, rational inquiry in search of God, and the contemplation of God himself: “what the first prepares, the second smells, the third tastes” (quod prima aptat, secunda odorat, tertia gustat). Knowledge of the created world is not rejected; it is placed within a hierarchy whose summit is God.
V. Hugh of Saint-Victor: Integrating the Whole Field of Knowledge
If Bernard supplies the ascetical critique of disordered knowledge, Hugh of Saint-Victor supplies its pedagogical and architectural counterpart. The Didascalicon opens with a definition that already announces its programme: “Philosophia est amor sapientiae.” “Philosophy is the love of wisdom.” For Hugh, every art — grammar, logic, mathematics, the mechanical arts, theology itself — serves one ultimate purpose: “that the divine likeness may be restored in us” (ut divina similitudo in nobis reparetur). Unlike Bernard, Hugh attempts something systematic: he classifies the whole of human knowledge — theoretical, practical, mechanical and logical — as a single ordered economy of restoration, with theology, mathematics and physics forming the theoretical sciences at its summit.
Hugh’s famous ladder — lectio, meditatio, oratio, operatio, contemplatio — reading, meditation, prayer, action, contemplation — culminates, like Bernard’s threefold consideration, in the vision of God. And Hugh strikes an almost identical note to Bernard when he warns: “Many possess knowledge, but few know how they ought to know” (multi enim scientiam habent, sed pauci sunt qui noverunt qualiter scire oporteat). His insistence that “the beginning of learning is humility” (principium autem disciplinae humilitas est) could have been written by Bernard himself.
The difference between the two is one of strategy, not of principle. Bernard asks, polemically, how knowledge becomes spiritually disordered and blocks restoration. Hugh asks, constructively, how the entire field of knowledge can be ordered so as to serve that same restoration. Both agree on the pathology — knowledge becomes dangerous when it breeds pride, curiosity, vanity or self-sufficiency. They differ only in the shape of the remedy: Bernard’s is ascetical and affective, purifying the desire to know; Hugh’s is pedagogical and synthetic, ordering the whole curriculum of learning as an instrument of restoration.
VI. From Scientia to Sapientia
The upshot is that it would misrepresent both men to cast Bernard as the champion of sapientia and Hugh as the champion of scientia. Hugh explicitly defines philosophy as love of wisdom and orders his entire curriculum toward contemplation; Bernard, for his part, possesses a substantial and positive epistemology and nowhere rejects learning as such. The sharper and more defensible formulation is this: Bernard asks how scientia becomes sapientia; Hugh asks how scientia, in its full breadth, can be ordered toward sapientia as its final end.
Bernard’s treatise De diligendo Deo supplies the anthropological ground for this convergence. There he distinguishes dignitas, scientia and virtus: human dignity is free will; scientia is the knowledge by which one recognises this dignity while knowing one did not confer it on oneself; virtus is the active seeking of, and holding fast to, the One from whom one comes. Scientia, on this account, is intrinsically bound up with self-knowledge, with God, and with the movement of the will toward God. The real antithesis, then, is not scientia versus sapientia, but scientia closed in upon itself versus scientia ordered toward God and transfigured into sapientia.
This reframing changes how we should read the twelfth-century conflict as a whole. It is not Cîteaux against learning, nor Bernard against philosophy, but two complementary strategies for the same underlying goal: an enlarged intellectual horizon that must still answer to the ordo amoris, the right ordering of love. Bernard interrogates whether the new learning has kept that order intact; Hugh attempts to build an entire architecture of study that preserves it from the ground up.
VII. A Twentieth-Century Parallel: The Power, Authority and Seduction of Modern Science
The structure of this medieval debate is worth holding up against a much later moment in the history of knowledge: the extraordinary expansion of modern natural science over the course of the twentieth century. Between roughly 1900 and 2000, the physical, biological and technical sciences achieved a scope, precision and practical power without precedent in human history — relativity and quantum mechanics, the mapping of the genome, antibiotics and vaccination, nuclear energy, computing, space flight. This was not only an intellectual achievement; it became a new form of cultural authority. Science increasingly presented itself, and was received by much of Western culture, not merely as one mode of knowing among others but as the paradigm of knowledge itself — the measure against which every other claim to truth, including theological and moral claims, was implicitly judged. Its successes were real, its prestige immense, and its seductions correspondingly powerful: the same century that produced penicillin and moon landings also produced totalising ideologies that invoked the authority of “science” to justify eugenics, social engineering and technocratic control detached from any deeper ordo of ends.
The parallel with the twelfth century is not exact, but it is structurally illuminating. In both cases, an expansion of scientia— real, fruitful, and in itself good — generated a crisis precisely because the order, motive and end of that knowledge were not expanding at the same pace as its power. Bernard’s three questions to the twelfth-century schools — in what order, with what zeal, and for what purpose should this be known? — are exactly the questions the twentieth century largely failed to ask of its own scientific revolution until its consequences (nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, biomedical dilemmas, the technocratic reduction of the human person) forced the question back upon it, often too late to prevent real harm.
Where Hugh of Saint-Victor sought to integrate an expanding field of knowledge into a single economy of restoration ordered to God, the twentieth century largely lacked, or actively rejected, any such integrating wisdom tradition capable of receiving its scientific power without distortion. Where Bernard asked whether new learning had retained a sound ordo amoris, the modern West too often treated that question as either irrelevant or itself a symptom of backwardness. The result, in both centuries, is the same pathology Bernard diagnosed with precision: scientia that “puffs up” rather than one that builds — knowledge detached from the humility, self-knowledge and charity that alone make it safe to hold.
VIII. What This Still Teaches Us Today
The lesson is not that science, medieval or modern, should be restrained or feared. Both Bernard and Hugh are emphatic on this point, and it remains true: the expansion of knowledge is a genuine good, and refusing it in the name of piety is not humility but a different kind of disorder. What both centuries teach, rather, is that power of knowledge and rightness of its ordering are two different variables, and that a civilisation — or a Church, or a single soul — can allow the first to grow while neglecting the second, with real spiritual and human cost.
Concretely, the twelfth-century synthesis suggests three durable criteria that remain fully applicable to the sciences, technologies and information environments of our own day:
- Order (ordo): does this knowledge take its rightful place within a larger hierarchy of ends, or has it been allowed to become the highest good, displacing self-knowledge, the knowledge of God, and the formation of conscience?
- Motive (studium): is this knowledge sought out of curiosity for its own sake (or worse, for vanity, gain or domination), or is it sought in order to build up — oneself in prudence, or one’s neighbour in charity?
- End (finis): does the pursuit of this knowledge terminate in humility and love, or does it “puff up,” producing intellectual pride, self-sufficiency, and the illusion of building without foundations?
These three questions are as applicable to a research laboratory, a doctoral seminar, or an information feed today as they were to the cathedral schools of the twelfth century.
But there is a further point which becomes particularly important when we look at the development of theology itself. Theology, too, has undergone an immense scientific development. There is nothing wrong with this development; on the contrary, the critical study of texts, the examination of historical contexts, the return to original sources, the discovery and comparison of manuscripts, the development of philology, exegesis and historical criticism have given theology an extraordinary wealth of information and have corrected many errors. The difficulty lies elsewhere. Scientific development is essentially analytical: it distinguishes, separates, compares, classifies and establishes relationships between an ever-increasing number of elements. The greater its success, the greater the quantity of material placed before the theologian. And this very success can produce an unexpected danger: multiplication can become fragmentation, analysis can become dispersion, and an abundance of knowledge can make it increasingly difficult to see the whole.
This difficulty has become still more acute in modern theology because theology has received powerful contributions from psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, the human sciences and many other disciplines. Each of these sciences can illuminate a genuine dimension of human existence, and theology has much to learn from them when they are used critically and appropriately. Yet each discipline also brings its own method, its own object and its own conceptual categories. The result can be an extraordinary multiplication of perspectives without a corresponding principle capable of integrating them. The theologian may therefore become increasingly informed while becoming less capable of seeing how the different elements belong together.
This is where the need for a sapiential method becomes evident. Science gives us powerful instruments of analysis, but analysis is not synthesis; information is not understanding; knowledge of the sources is not yet an integrated theological vision. The more abundant the material becomes, the more necessary is a method capable of ordering it. Without such a method, the learner can find himself standing before an immense theological library without an intellectual and spiritual architecture by which to inhabit it. The abundance that should have enlarged his vision can instead overwhelm it.
The answer, however, is not to oppose science to wisdom, as though one had to choose between accurate knowledge and spiritual vision. The deeper task is to unite them: to allow scientia to serve sapientia, and to allow sapiential knowledge to order, integrate and elevate what scientific investigation discovers. Theology therefore needs not fewer sources, less historical criticism or less scientific precision, but a principle of integration capable of gathering these many forms of knowledge into a unified vision, from above, ordered towards God and ultimately towards the transformation of the person.
In this respect, the twelfth-century debate remains remarkably contemporary. Bernard’s question, quo ordine, quo studio, quo fine quaeque nosse oporteat? — in what order, with what application, and for what end ought each thing to be known? — is not a rejection of knowledge. It is a demand that knowledge recover its proper place. Hugh’s great synthesis makes the same point in another way: knowledge must move beyond information towards understanding, beyond understanding towards prayer, beyond prayer towards operation, and beyond operation towards contemplation. The goal is not less knowledge, but knowledge rightly ordered and finally transformed into a vision capable of leading the person towards God.
IX. Implications for Priestly Formation: Recovering the Ordo Scientiae
This recovered framework has a particularly direct and practical application to the formation of priests, where it can help correct a real and recurring temptation: the drift toward an intellectualised or managerial conception of priesthood in which theological, canonical, pastoral or administrative competence quietly becomes an end in itself, rather than an instrument ordered to the priest’s essential task.
Bernard’s question — quo ordine, quo studio, quo fine — translates almost directly into a question for seminary formation and ongoing priestly life: in what order, with what zeal, and for what purpose is theological and pastoral knowledge to be acquired? His answer applies without modification: such knowledge is legitimate to the degree that it serves either the priest’s own edification (prudence) or that of the souls entrusted to him (charity), and it becomes disordered — however academically impressive — when it is sought merely to be known, mastered, or displayed.
Read this way, the Bernard–Hugh synthesis refocuses priestly identity on what both, from different angles, insist is the true foundation: not accumulated scientia but the cura animarum — the care of souls — which requires first of all, in Bernard’s phrase, that “consideration begin with yourself” (a te tua consideratio inchoet). A priest who knows theology, canon law, and pastoral technique thoroughly, but has neglected his own interior life, risks becoming precisely the man Bernard describes: one “building without foundations.” Hugh’s complementary insight — that the whole architecture of learning should serve the restoration of the divine likeness — likewise implies that seminary and continuing formation in Scripture, doctrine, and pastoral method finds its coherence only when integrated into, rather than substituted for, the priest’s own life of prayer, spiritual direction, and ongoing conversion.
Concretely, this suggests several practical emphases for priestly formation:
Intellectual formation (philosophy, theology, canon law, pastoral skills) should be explicitly and continually related back to its end — the salvation and sanctification of souls, beginning with the priest’s own — rather than pursued as an autonomous academic or professional competence.
Developing a Spiritual Theology and a Spiritual Formation capable of offering:
a) a theological method of work that integrates the scientific, sapiential and spiritual approaches, enabling the student not only to acquire knowledge, but also to integrate it, interiorise it and personally experience it within his own spiritual life;
b) a strong and academically rigorous Spiritual Theology that is itself oriented towards the transformation of the person, capable of leading the student, and those entrusted to his care, towards union with God and the fullness of love;
c) a complete and properly integrated spiritual formation, in which intellectual, spiritual, human, liturgical and pastoral formation are not treated as separate elements but are progressively united within the person;
d) given the importance of time, a judicious reduction and ordering of the vast amount of scientific, philosophical and theological material, so that what is taught serves the essential content and purpose of Spiritual Theology, rather than allowing an abundance of material to fragment the student’s attention and formation;
e) a Spiritual Theology that becomes the integrating principle — the cement — which brings together the intellectual, human, liturgical and pastoral dimensions of the seminarian’s formation, and subsequently of the priest’s life and ministry.
Self-knowledge, examined through regular spiritual direction and an ordered life of prayer, should be treated not as an optional complement to intellectual formation but, following Bernard, as its epistemological precondition: the foundation without which further building is unstable.
Formators can use Bernard’s threefold test — order, motive, end — as a discernment tool with seminarians and priests: is a given course of study, project, or specialisation sought out of curiosity, for prudent self-edification, or for the charitable edification of the people to be served?
Hugh’s integrative vision cautions against a fragmented formation in which academic subjects are taught in isolation from spiritual life; the Victorine model instead treats lectio, meditatio, oratio, operatio and contemplatioas a single continuous movement that intellectual formation should serve, not compete with.
In an ecclesial culture that, like the twentieth-century culture around it, can be tempted to measure priestly competence chiefly by academic credentials, administrative efficiency or pastoral technique, the Bernard–Hugh synthesis offers a corrective already tested by history: knowledge remains a genuine good and an important instrument of priestly ministry, but its value is measured entirely by whether it is ordered — in the classical, exacting sense Bernard gives that word — toward the care of souls, beginning with the priest’s own.
Conclusion
The twelfth-century confrontation between Bernard of Clairvaux and the new cathedral schools is best understood not as a battle between spirituality and reason but as a disagreement, within a shared commitment to Christian learning, about the ordo scientiae: the order, motive and end by which knowledge is to be pursued. Bernard’s sermons and treatises supply a rigorous ascetical epistemology — knowledge must build on self-knowledge, must be sought in charity, and must terminate in humility rather than pride. Hugh of Saint-Victor supplies the complementary pedagogical vision — an entire architecture of the arts and sciences ordered toward the restoration of the divine likeness. Between them, the twelfth century articulates a genuinely Christian epistemology of wisdom, in which the highest knowledge is not merely knowledge about God but knowledge ordered toward participation in God.
That same structure of crisis — real expansion of knowledge outpacing the ordering of that knowledge toward its proper end — recurs with striking clarity in the twentieth century’s experience of modern science, and it recurs again, in smaller and more intimate form, wherever a mind or an institution allows the sheer power of what it knows to outrun the humility and charity that alone make that power safe to hold. Recovering Bernard’s three questions — in what order, with what zeal, for what purpose? — offers no less practical a discipline today than it did eight centuries ago, not least in the formation of priests, whose learning finds its coherence only when it serves, rather than substitutes for, the cura animarum that remains the essence of their vocation.