ABSTRACT
For Guibert, life's only happy ending was contemplation—Intellect, or intellectualities. The Christian could live in the world as Joseph lay dead in Egypt, surrounded by sins and sinners but with mind focused on heaven. The concept is not unique to Guibert. It is instead central to what Jean Leclercq calls “monastic theology.” It is the contemplative side of monastic thought, according to Leclercq, that most differentiates it from scholasticism. The theology of Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable, and Rupert of Deutz springs not from dialectic and disputation but from meditation upon Scripture and an actual experience of divine love. 1 Guibert's writings thus did more than simply set contemplation as their goal. They also based their claim to authority upon Guibert's own experience of it. For this reason it is not at all inappropriate to ask, as we approach the end of Guibert's life, how successful he was in attaining this objective. Did he ever return to the sense of mystical peace of which he had enjoyed a foretaste before his election as abbot? How closely did the actual narrative of his life resemble the moral narrative he locates in Genesis—disastrous fall into Affection, struggle, slow ascent, and, at the end, Understanding, however imperfect it might be?
