Jean Leclercq (1911-1993)

Jean Leclercq was born on 31 January 1911 at Avesnes-sur-Helpe, a small town in the Nord département, the second of four children in a family whose moves followed the uncertainties of the First World War^[5]. After studying at the Collège Saint-Pierre in Fourmies from 1920 to 1928, the young man felt drawn to monastic life and sought admission to the Abbey of Saint-Maurice-et-Saint-Maur of Clervaux, in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a house of the Benedictine congregation of Solesmes^[6].

His vocation was not, however, straightforward: Leclercq met with two successive refusals when he asked to enter as a lay brother, before finally being admitted as a postulant with a view to the priesthood^[7]. He was received as a postulant on 22 September 1928, as a novice on 24 June 1929, and pronounced his simple vows on 29 June 1930^[8]. After two years of philosophy in the monastery itself, he was sent to Rome for theology and was ordained priest on 19 September 1936, even before completing his theological course — a common practice in monastic formation at the time^[9].

Key dates

Sant'Anselmo and Father Anselm Stolz

From October 1933 to June 1937, Leclercq pursued his theological studies at the Collegio Sant'Anselmo, the Benedictine pontifical athenaeum in Rome^[10]. There he notably followed the teaching of the German monk Anselm Stolz, whose work Theologie der Mystik develops themes — mystical union as the fulfilment of baptismal life, theology lived rather than merely reasoned — which Leclercq would later take up and bring to a wide audience^[11]. His final year of theological formation took place at the Institut catholique de Paris, where he obtained his licentiate in 1939^[12].

Étienne Gilson and the turn toward monastic authors

In Paris, Leclercq completed his formation at the École pratique des hautes études (4th section), where he was taught by Mgr Henri-Xavier Arquillière, Charles Samaran, Louis Halphen and Étienne Gilson^[13]. It was precisely the encouragement of Gilson, already the most recognised historian of medieval philosophy, that turned the young monk away from the scholastic theologians and toward the monastic authors — Peter of Celle, Peter the Venerable, John of Fécamp — still largely unexplored by the academic research of the time^[14].

His doctoral thesis, defended in 1940 and published in 1942 under the title Jean de Paris et l'ecclésiologie du XIIIe siècle, in the "L'Église et l'État au Moyen Âge" series directed by Arquillière, deals with the ecclesiology of the Dominican Jean Quidort of Paris, theorist of royal and pontifical power at the turn of the 13th-14th century^[15]. This early work, still scholastic and political in style, paradoxically marks the starting point of a career devoted almost entirely, thereafter, to a quite different object: monastic culture itself.

The Second World War interrupted and redirected the young religious's path. Mobilised, he served a year as a second gunner in the artillery at Metz, then, recalled in September 1939, joined the anti-aircraft defence^[16]. After the French defeat, Leclercq devoted himself, from 1941 to 1944, to cataloguing the Latin manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, before being welcomed as a member of the École française de Rome in 1943-1944^[17].

It was just after the war that the event occurred which would seal the rest of his scholarly life. During the winter of 1945-1946, while exploring the manuscript collections of the Benedictine abbey of Engelberg in Switzerland, Leclercq laid hands on unpublished texts of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux^[18]. The discovery was momentous: it revealed that no existing edition of the works of the Mellifluous Doctor was reliable, and that a large-scale critical enterprise remained to be undertaken. The year 1946 alone was of staggering productivity — twenty-nine articles and three books, out of the roughly one thousand titles his scholarly bibliography would eventually total^[19].

Saint Bernard mystique and the beginnings of Analecta monastica

As early as 1948, Leclercq published Saint Bernard mystique, the first synthesis of his work on the great 12th-century Cistercian^[20]. That same year he launched the Analecta monastica series, in the Studia Anselmiana collection, devoted to the edition of texts and studies on medieval monastic life — a series he would add to with successive instalments over the following decades^[21]. It was also in 1948 that the Cistercian order officially entrusted him with the mission of preparing a complete critical edition of Saint Bernard's works^[22].

Sancti Bernardi Opera (1957-1977)

The project, carried out in collaboration with two confrères, Dom Henri Rochais and the Englishman Charles Hugh Talbot, led to the publication, between 1957 and 1977, of the Sancti Bernardi Opera by the Editiones Cistercienses in Rome — eight volumes in nine tomes, completed in 1998 with an index volume^[23]. The enterprise involved years of travel through Europe's libraries to collate manuscripts, compare readings and reconstruct, text by text, the authentic manuscript tradition of the Abbot of Clairvaux^[24]. It is the reference edition still used today by all Saint Bernard specialists, and the foundation on which modern translations of his work rest, notably those published in the Sources chrétiennes series.

A theology of lectio divina

In 1957, published by Éditions du Cerf, appeared the book that would make Leclercq famous far beyond the circle of medievalists: The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. An Initiation into Monastic Authors of the Middle Ages, translated into English as early as 1961 under the title The Love of Learning and the Desire for God^[25]. The work starts from the figure of Saint Bernard, "the most ardent defender and the most prestigious representative of monastic culture", in order to bring out the distinctive traits of a theology born in the cloister, distinct from that of the cathedral schools and the nascent universities^[26].

The central thesis of the book can be summed up in a formula that has become classic in the history of medieval theology: monks practise a monastic theology, founded on lectio divina — the meditated, prayerful and physical reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers — while the masters of the schools elaborate a scholastic theology, organised around the quaestio, rational debate and the construction of systematic syntheses, the great summae^[27]. Pope Benedict XVI, in his general audience of 28 October 2009, thus summarised Leclercq's contribution:

"The Benedictine scholar of the last century, Jean Leclercq, thus entitled the essay in which he presents the characteristics of monastic theology: The Love of Learning and the Desire for God." — Benedict XVI, general audience of 28 October 2009^[28]

Far from opposing these two paths in a value judgement, Leclercq shows that they proceed from one and the same quest: the understanding of faith enlightened by the love of God^[29]. The Magisterium would faithfully take up this balanced reading, refusing to erect either theology as the sole model at the expense of the other.

The reception by Benedict XVI

The most spectacular recognition of Leclercq's work came with the address Benedict XVI delivered on 12 September 2008 before the world of culture, at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris — a college founded in the 13th century precisely for the formation of Cistercian monks. There the Pope cited The Love of Learning and the Desire for God three times, with exact page references, to explain what founds, in his view, the Western search for God through culture:

"Eschatology and grammar are inseparable from one another in Western monasticism." — Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, p. 14, cited by Benedict XVI, address to the world of culture, Collège des Bernardins, 12 September 2008^[30]

A little further on, describing how medieval monks read the Scriptures with their whole being, body and mind united in the very act of reading, Benedict XVI cited again:

"Most often, when legere and lectio are used without qualification, they designate an activity which, like singing and writing, engages the whole body and the whole mind." — Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, p. 21, cited by Benedict XVI, address to the world of culture, Collège des Bernardins, 12 September 2008^[31]

And, on liturgical chant as the expression of the believer's assent to the mystery celebrated:

"The monks had to find accents that express redeemed man's assent to the mysteries he celebrates." — Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, p. 229, cited by Benedict XVI, address to the world of culture, Collège des Bernardins, 12 September 2008^[32]

That a theologian Pope of Benedict XVI's stature should rely, fifty years after its publication, on this book to set out at the Collège des Bernardins what founds the Western search for God through culture, says enough about the solidity and enduring fruitfulness of Leclercq's intuition.

Leclercq corresponded with the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, already famous since the publication of his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), from 1950 onward; their personal meeting in 1959, during one of Leclercq's journeys to the United States, sealed a friendship that lasted until Merton's death in 1968^[33]. American publishers would release their one hundred and twenty letters under the title Survival or Prophecy? The Correspondence of Jean Leclercq and Thomas Merton, with a foreword by Rembert Weakland and an afterword by Michael Casey^[34].

Their correspondence constantly returns to one simple and demanding question: what is a monk? It deals with the relationship between ancient texts and modern conveniences, eremitical life versus community life, and the progressive opening of Catholic monasticism to the contemplative traditions of other religions^[35]. This last concern took a decisive turn in the autumn of 1968: it was at Leclercq's suggestion that the Aid to Monastic Implantation (AIM) invited Merton to address a congress of Asian monastic superiors gathered near Bangkok^[36]. There Merton delivered his final lecture, "Marxism and Monastic Perspectives", on 10 December 1968, before dying accidentally, electrocuted, that same evening in his room at the conference centre^[37].

The brutal loss of his friend struck Leclercq hard, yet he remained faithful until his own death to the intuition they had shared: the Western monastic renewal could not do without a genuine dialogue with the contemplative traditions of the East, without thereby relativising the specificity of the Christian vocation to life in Christ.

After the Second Vatican Council, without ever abandoning his scholarly research, Leclercq devoted most of his energy to monastic renewal on a worldwide scale^[38]. From 1962 onward, he multiplied journeys to young monastic foundations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, in the wake of the missionary impetus stirred by Pius XII's encyclical Fidei Donum (1957) and by the 1959 congress of Benedictine abbots, which would lead, on 15 December 1961, to the foundation of the Aid to Monastic Implantation (AIM)^[39].

Leclercq involved himself personally and lastingly in the work of the AIM, to the point of writing himself, decades later, its scholarly history under the title "Nouvelle page d'histoire monastique. Histoire de l'A.I.M. 1960-1985", published in the Revue d'histoire de l'Église de France in 1989^[40]. Through these journeys and writings, he helped make known, in the Western Benedictine and Cistercian world, the contemplative forms proper to Asian monastic traditions, without ever yielding to a syncretism that would have diluted the specificity of Christian monastic life: for him, it was a dialogue of contemplative experience between distinct traditions, not a doctrinal fusion.

This missionary and interreligious commitment went hand in hand with a continuous work of scholarly popularisation of lectio divina — the prayerful, meditated reading of Scripture — to whose 20th-century rediscovery his works largely contributed, a rediscovery which would then nourish the broader renewal of biblical prayer in the post-conciliar Church^[41].

Leclercq's scholarly productivity remained, in the eyes of his peers, quite staggering. The obituary devoted to him by the Cahiers de civilisation médiévale in 1994 describes him as the author of a bibliography of nearly a thousand titles, and recalls that he had been trained by some of the finest French medievalists of the interwar years — Mgr Arquillière, Charles Samaran, Louis Halphen, Étienne Gilson^[42]. The New Catholic Encyclopedia calls him the "most prolific medievalist of the second half of the 20th century"^[43].

This recognition took the form of a series of academic distinctions: honorary doctorates from the Catholic University of Milan (1950), the Catholic University of Louvain (1962), Western Michigan University (1974) and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto (1990); election as a corresponding member of the Medieval Academy of America (1976) and of the British Academy^[44]. In 1992, the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres awarded him the prix Lequeux^[45].

Over the course of his career, Leclercq published several more works extending and refining his founding thesis: Recueil d'études sur saint Bernard et ses écrits (several volumes from 1962), Otia monastica (1963), on the medieval vocabulary of contemplation, Nouveau visage de Bernard de Clairvaux (1976), Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France (1979) and Saint Bernard et l'esprit cistercien (1986)^[46]. Twenty years after his death, in 2020, the Pontifical Athenaeum of Saint Anselm in Rome — where he had himself studied and taught — founded in his honour the Jean Leclercq Centre, dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue on the questions he had spent his life exploring^[47].

Until a very advanced age, Leclercq continued to travel, write and teach. His last book, Regards monastiques sur le Christ au Moyen Âge, appeared in 1993, the very year of his death^[48]. He died on 27 October 1993, aged 82, at Clervaux Abbey, where he had been admitted sixty-five years earlier after two refusals, and where he is buried^[49].

Of this monk, long a simple religious of a small Luxembourg abbey, his peers retain a monumental oeuvre — the critical edition of Saint Bernard, the indispensable foundation of all subsequent Bernardine research — and a historiographical intuition that has become a classic of the history of medieval theology: monastic theology as a proper path of the understanding of faith, distinct from but not rival to scholastic theology. That the successor of Peter himself cited him, fifty years after its first publication, before representatives of the French intellectual world, says enough about how little force this intuition has lost.

• Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) — the historian of medieval philosophy who encouraged Leclercq to turn toward monastic rather than scholastic authors.
• Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895-1990) — another great historian of the 12th-13th century, Dominican of Le Saulchoir and architect of theological ressourcement.
• Yves Congar (1904-1995) — Dominican theologian of ressourcement and Vatican II, a contemporary of Leclercq.
• Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) — Jesuit of patristic ressourcement, whose work engages with the same rediscovery of ancient sources.
• Jean Daniélou (1905-1974) — patrologist and cardinal, another architect of the renewal of Christian sources.
• Benedict XVI (1927-2022) — the theologian Pope who quoted Leclercq at length in his 2008 address at the Collège des Bernardins.
• Cassiodorus (c. 485-c. 580) — ancient founder of the Vivarium monastery and forerunner of the learned monastic tradition Leclercq rediscovered.
• Louis Bouyer (1913-2004) — Oratorian theologian and historian of spirituality, another great architect of the 20th-century liturgical and monastic ressourcement.