Medieval Monastic Ideas of the Compatibility Between the Individual and the Common Good

Abstract

The discussion about the compatibility of the common good and individual good was a pressing theme in medieval monastic texts and moral philosophy. Monastic authors typically relied on the premises of ethical eudaimonism, which stresses the idea that the virtuous agent’s good is maximized and the individual and common good are in harmony. This chapter argues that rather than constructing a concise theory of the common good and individual good, theologians elaborated on related themes such as the problem of achieving the common good, common utility, self-interest, self-love, or individual needs and their role in communal life. Moreover, the vocabulary was undetermined since the common good and individual good could refer either to metaphysical and theological ideas or to more limited material welfare and utility. By analysing samples from the monastic rules of common living and from the individual authors (Peter Abelard, Hugh of St Victor and Aelred of Rievaulx), the chapter will systematically discuss scattered but original developments that contributed to later theoretical analyses of the common good and individual good.

1 Introduction

This chapter explores twelfth-century monastic moral philosophy and theology in terms of the compatibility between the individual and the common good.¹ The main presumption is that monastic texts and consequential religious practices rested on ethical views, which relied on eudaemonist principles, that is, on the ideas that (1) the virtuous agent’s good is maximized and (2) the good of an individual unites with the good of the community. Even though the goodness and the unity of people self-evidently converge in this model, theologians of the time articulated and argued variously about the nature of this association and how to achieve it. They also recognized and explained the possibility of apparent conflicts between the common good and individual good by referring to the sinful state of mankind, proposing means for maintaining balance in communal life.

The standard theological justification for the compatibility model of the individual and common good in the Middle Ages comes from the Augustinian notion of ordo caritatis/amoris, the order of charity, which means that the individual good and common good participate in the same ultimate good that derives from God. Famously formulated in Augustine’s De civitate Dei, true virtue is a rightly ordered love in which God is loved above all things.² While all goods have the same source, the common good is higher on the scale of goodness than the individual good, demanding that one love the common good above the individual good. In religious communal life, this means that the individual should be ready to abandon individual good for the sake of the common good because a higher object calls for greater love.³

However, both the idea of the order of charity and the theory of the common good were open to different interpretations. First, the meaning of the order of charity attracted several different understandings.⁴ Second, as Matthew Kempshall has shown, medieval authors did not use or understand the notion of the common good uniformly. In strict terms, it referred to peace and harmony, resulting from the correctly ordered love between individuals and oriented towards a virtuous life, happiness and God. In the loose sense, however, the common good represented “the qualified agreement of wills”, that is, a compromise constituting the best possible remedy against the terrible consequences of sinful human behaviour in an imperfect society. This kind of “common good” referred to a material utility of peace and stability or just to the common things that can belong to more than one person.⁵ Hence in medieval texts, the common good does not refer necessarily to the metaphysical common good, that is, God and the ultimate source of all beings, but it may also mean a more limited welfare of the community. This distinction between ways of understanding the common good and how it is justified is a central structuring principle in my analysis. The diversity of discussions analysed in this chapter shows the different understandings of the common good and illustrates the variety of theoretical approaches to reasoning on the compatibility of the common good and individual good.

I will focus on twelfth-century theories of the common good and individual good, exploring how the prevailing ethical paradigms of the common good and order of love were adapted in a pre-scholastic setting dominated by flourishing monastic thinking and culture. I wish to demonstrate that medieval intellectuals were sensitive towards the different Augustinian understandings of the order of charity and the common good, which they fitted into their own models and ideas of social life. Moreover, they also utilised a variety of Classical and patristic materials. In terms of philosophical materials, the twelfth century is exceptional. Some of Aristotle’s logical works were available, but most of his central philosophical texts, such as On the Soul, Physics, Metaphysics, Politics and Nicomachean Ethics were still unknown in the Latin West. Only a few of Plato’s texts were available, such as the partial translation of Timaeus. Platonist philosophy dominated through the texts of Augustine and other Christian theologians, who were mostly heirs of Neoplatonism.⁶ Stoic ideas were widely spread through Ciceronian and Senecan sources, and twelfth-century thinkers readily assimilated the Stoic idea of virtue as the highest good into Christian theology.⁷ This unique combination of texts and ideas at the height of monastic theology just before the Aristotelian reception and the commentary literature provides important background for later discussions of the common good and individual good.

Surveying a selection of medieval texts created in the monasteries allows the examination of the emerging interest in the relation between the individual and the common good as well as their different interpretations. Notions like ‘the order of love’ directly addressed the compatibility between the common good and the individual good. However, rather than constructing a concise theory, theologians also typically commented on related themes such as the problem of achieving the common good, common utility, self-interest, self-love, or individual needs as part of their overall practical and theoretical deliberations on the Christian life. In the following, I systematically deliberate these scattered but original developments that contribute to later theoretical analyses of the common good and individual good.

I first briefly discuss, in section two, the monastic rules for communal life and the moral psychological and theological foundation of the quest for the common and individual good. Next, in section three, I examine Peter Abelard’s (1079–1142) idea of the classical philosophers’ guild as an exemplary community and prefiguration of Christian monastic lifestyle. In section four, I examine Hugh of St Victor’s (1096–1141) perspective on communal life through his idea of ethics as part of liberal arts as well as his theory of self-interested love, and I conclude by briefly referring to Aelred of Rievaulx’s (1110–1167) account of types of friendship. In addition to the common good and individual good, I comment on the monastic discussions on love (caritas, amor), the issue of altruism vs. egoism, and the problem that individual needs, both emotional and physical, pose in shared religious life.

2 The Rules of Communal Life: Shared Ownership, Individual Needs

While many early Christians thought solitude was the only way to devote one’s life to God and prepare the soul for eternal beatitude, several theologians sought to place the individual in a community. Augustine of Hippo, among others, acknowledged people’s fundamentally social nature, thinking that individual perfection interacts with the perfection of the community.⁸ Psalm 132 (133) expresses the ethos of the communal life: “Behold how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity.”⁹ Such pleasant dwelling in the community is not easily attainable, however, because it requires strong individual commitment and striving for common goals. Moreover, monastic practical philosophy arises from the idea that balancing and moderation of one’s conduct is essential not only for individual salvation but also for the well-being of the whole community. Seen in communal terms, good is equal to peace, concord and unity, both internal and external, which enable moral perfection and virtuous behaviour. Unsurprisingly, Christian monasticism faces an intriguing dilemma between the aspirations of an individual Christian seeking personal salvation and the rules and objectives of the communal life aiming to sustain shared standards of living: How exactly do the well-being and happiness of an individual and his community interconnect? Should individuals focus on caring for their own souls or for the well-being of the community? How do the requirements of communal life meet individual needs?

Underlying every monastic rule and ethical theory is the theological idea of fallen humankind that is unable to transcend self-love without grace. Without God’s help, people are unable to love God, their neighbours and the common good of all more than themselves. Individual moral flaws hurt not only oneself, but they can also seriously damage the community and its search for the good of the whole community. Moral recklessness in the religious community is dangerous, especially when unruliness emerges in the individual pursuit of personal glory at the expense of community demands. Consequently, several medieval monastic texts consider pride to be the original vice and the most terrible enemy of the common good.

The inevitable disturbances of shared life and the requirement to cherish inner and outer peace created a need for formal and informal guidelines for religious communities. From late Antiquity onwards, the ideal monastic communal life was strictly ordered and moderated by religious rules (regulae), establishing the plan of life and discipline under which religious individuals lived in order to grow in Christian perfection and perform the works proper to their community. Augustine wrote his short but influential rule around the year 400.¹⁰ Augustine admonishes people who have gathered to live together peacefully in the house of God, sharing the Christian life and religious doctrines. The rule emphasises communal aspects of life, welfare and religious observance, but recognizes the differences between people from various socio-economic backgrounds. This dual aspect appears in rules that require all things to be common and shared according to individual needs. Hence, the first line of the rule of Saint Augustine demonstrates the order of love (ordo caritatis) working in a monastic context: “Before all things, dearly beloved brothers, love God and then your neighbour, because those were the first commandments given to us.”¹¹ From the outset, however, it becomes equally clear that monastic life and its guiding principles cannot neglect the fact that members of the community and their needs differ. Hence the rule continues:

Let food and clothing be distributed by your prior to each of you, but not equally because you are not all equally robust, but rather to each as each has need. Thus you read in the Acts of the Apostles that they held all things in common and distribution was made to each as each needed.¹²

The more encompassing sixth-century rule of Saint Benedict utilizes and expands the rule of Saint Augustine and includes material from John Cassian and other desert fathers who were keener to stress isolation and private meditation. The influential and widespread rule of Saint Benedict integrated elements that emphasised individual eremitic ideals such as isolation from the communal life with a more communitarian attitude, which it derived from Augustine’s writings.¹³ The Benedictine rule presents the three main classical monastic virtues of obedience, silence, and humility, all of which support the hierarchical social system of cloistered life and diminish the use of individual deliberation.¹⁴ The rule promises that by practising these virtues, members of the community can combat pride and its subspecies, the main enemies of the Christian life. The master vice is pride, which means exalting oneself above others. The extreme communitarian ideal is manifest in rule number 33, which includes the rejection of personal ownership, stating that the monks are allowed to have neither their bodies nor their wills in their own power.¹⁵ Rejecting personal property is an external sign of inner submission to the community. In general, the rule of Saint Benedict considers it rational to pursue everlasting and pure happiness in heaven instead of desiring a plenitude of goods, bodily pleasures or earthly happiness. However, it also reiterates that monks have individual needs, which entails the unequal distribution of goods, also found in the rule of Saint Augustine.¹⁶

While monastic rules were considered essential guides for a communal way of living, it is surprising how marginal references to the theory of community and social life were, allowing various theoretical speculations about how the common good and individual good align. The lack of a strong theory of communal life, the difficulty of giving exact guidelines for each situation and the elusiveness of the rules themselves indicate that giving detailed practical instructions and examples built on the compatibility model of the common good and individual good was a considerable challenge.¹⁷

To illustrate the theory and praxis of twelfth-century moral philosophy and theology, I will next proceed to individual authors. The topics of discussion include the possible compatibility of the common good and individual good in (1) the distribution of justice and jurisprudence, (2) our natural inclination to self-love, and (3) the need for exclusive relationships within the community. These topics represent diverse perspectives on the same dilemma of reconciling seemingly disparate individual interests with those of the community.

3 Peter Abelard: The Perfect Community, Self-Knowledge, and Self-Love

Peter Abelard was a famous twelfth-century intellectual who was known for his theory of universals, Trinitarian theology and moral philosophy. His writings demonstrate his substantial knowledge of Classical texts and ideas, including philosophical discussions concerning the common and individual good. Abelard’s personal career involved a combination of freelance teaching and living in hermitages as well as four abbeys: Saint-Denis, Saint-Médard, Saint-Gildas and Cluny. While several of his treatises focus on logical issues, he also wrote works tailored for religious people. As David Luscombe has convincingly argued, Abelard insisted that people have an instinct for monastic life, which appeared in the pre-Christian settings of Jewish people and even among the Gentiles. Plato, Socrates, Seneca, and John the Baptist equally illustrate the universal drive towards religious isolation from the world and the framework of monasticism. Abelard criticised the reformed monks of his time harshly, but he hailed the idea of an eremitical life, seeing good monks as philosophers who focused on the contemplation of wisdom. The private and communal life converge in Abelard’s works since the solitary life can be best practised in the monastic social life. His practical approach to monastic life was best articulated in his guidance for feminine monasticism designed for the abbey of Paraclete, founded by Abelard’s partner Heloise.¹⁸

In his Theologica Christiana, Abelard construes an original political theory that addresses virtuous religious life in the community. He comments on Plato’s ideas in Republic, familiar to him through the partial translation of Timaeus. At the beginning of the cosmological treatise, Socrates mentions the prominent discussion of the perfect state in Republic, repeating some of its tenets. This short textual reference led Abelard to maintain that Plato’s treatise on the ideal state advocated a rule that promoted the common good of the community and shared ownership of property.¹⁹

Even if Abelard could not accept some of Plato’s ideas in Republic, he generally speaks highly of the communal lifestyle of ancient philosophers. Unlike Plato, Abelard found the perfect city not to be an impossible ideal but a real exemplification of the ancient philosophers’ standard of living. While Abelard was aware of Augustine’s negative attitude towards the idea of a virtuous and true republic among pagans, he believed that the pagan city-states that Plato described could be communities united by law and common utility. Then, exploiting Cicero’s writings, and his virtue theory in particular, Abelard proposes how a philosophers’ state builds on justice, courage, and temperance.²⁰

Abelard presents several sophisticated examinations of ancient philosophy, but he also has practical issues of current social life in mind. The philosophers’ city-state has its contemporary counterpart in medieval monasteries. Abelard claims that the communities of ancient philosophers prefigured Christian communal life manifested in cloisters. Remarkably, he notes that the monastic life has failed to follow its ancient model of philosopher communities, monks of his time being drawn into carelessness.²¹ As John Marenbon suggests, the changes in Abelard’s immediate surroundings may have affected the way he describes and commends communal life, both in ancient and in his own twelfth-century contexts. Abelard’s own experiences of religious social life were multifarious. While he joined the eager company of students and philosophers in Paris, he also had some unfavourable experiences of communal life later, perhaps affecting his subsequent views. These experiences may explain why he often praises the political virtues of the philosophers, like justice, but later recommends following their supreme abilities of abstinence and solitary living.²²

Abelard’s analysis of the ideal community and justice is noteworthy in terms of the Ciceronian idea of the common good. Abelard knew Cicero’s definition of justice in his De inventione, which claims that justice gives each man what is due to him provided that the common good is preserved. He interprets the dictum ‘common good’ strictly by asserting that everything should be distributed with the sole object of the common safety of the city. In his Collationes, a fictional dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian, Abelard repeats Cicero’s idea of justice, but he emphasizes the qualification of justice that recalls the preservation of common utility. The Philosopher of Collationes states:

For it often happens that, when we give someone […] his due on account of his merits, what we do for one individual brings common harm. Therefore, in order to prevent the part being put before the whole, the individual before the community, to the definition [of justice] there is added “provided that the common utility is preserved”. We should do all things so that we each seek not our own, but the common good, and provide for the public welfare rather than that of our families and live not for ourselves but our fatherland.²³

Even though Abelard speaks through the Philosopher’s voice (that is, one of the characters of the dialogue), he clearly advocates the importance of the common good and diminishes the role of individual needs and interests.

A very different example of what is good for a community and what is good for an individual and the roles they play in a theory of justice can be found in Scito te ipsum or Ethica, where Abelard presents his well-known deliberation about the difference between external deeds and intentions. He claims that the actual intention of the agent makes their deeds either morally sound or flawed, whereas the external deeds per se are morally indifferent. However, a judge should not try to evaluate whether an accused person really had an evil intention (e.g., contempt for God) or whether they actually sinned when they committed a crime, but the judge should judge according to the external actions of the accused.²⁴ Astonishingly, even if it is clear that the person did not know that they had sinned, and the judge knows that the accused person did not have bad intentions (and thus their action was not morally wrong), the accused should be punished anyway if that serves the good of the community. Abelard’s example concerns a mother who accidentally smothers her baby in her sleep. Even though the mother did nothing wrong and wanted to keep her baby warm, she should be punished in order to warn other mothers.²⁵

Abelard claims that according to the human system of justice, it may sometimes be just to punish an agent who we strongly believe had no evil intentions. Punishments are practicalities of the government for ensuring what is useful for the community since they prevent public injuries.²⁶ Abelard’s argument hails the importance of what is good for the secular society despite the fact that it seems to completely override the individual good of the mother. This extreme example challenges the possible compatibility of the individual good and the common good in terms of justice. However, Abelard does not take the judge’s decision to pose an ethical problem. His own solution is more theological than philosophical: before the eyes of God, the mother is innocent because of her pure intentions.²⁷ As Peter King has remarked, Abelard revises the Stoic equation of virtue with happiness by allowing for the moral role played by God and the afterlife, both of which are constituent elements of the supreme good.²⁸ As regards the afterlife, the mother’s individual good aligns perfectly with the common good. Only God has the right to pass the Final Judgement, and He has access to internal mental states. In this sense, morally right action is not opposed to the individual good after all, and morality is in one’s self-interest as well. Nevertheless, the example raises difficult questions about the loss of bodily life and freedom and their goodness since the mother’s conviction and loss of freedom does not contribute to her final beatitude in any way. Would it be better for her to both be acquitted by the judge and get to heaven later?

In understanding Abelard’s reasoning, it is important to note that he frequently identifies justice with true love (caritas), not only in people but even with God. To be righteous is to love God for His own sake not because of fear of punishment or hope for a future reward. Someone who obeys God’s laws for these reasons cannot be said to truly love God because they are only concerned with their own good.²⁹ Abelard claims that true love has an altruistic intention, whereas false love is selfish cupidity. By adopting and remodelling his predecessors’ ideas, he claims that true charity always requires more than one person and is thus reciprocal. In his Theologia scholarium, Abelard posits that love is good will (uoluntas) towards another for their own sake (bona erga alterum propter ipsum uoluntas).³⁰ While Abelard’s definition is based on Cicero’s characterisation of friendship in De inventione, Abelard makes an important omission. Cicero wrote that friendship is a “will for good things for someone whom one loves, for his own sake, with the same will on his part [toward oneself]”,³¹ stressing the reciprocity between human relations. Abelard bases his definition of friendship and love on ideal altruism instead. His idea is clear: the will that constitutes love is one “by which we choose [to act] so that what happens to [another] is what we believe is for his good, and we desire this for his sake rather than for our own”.³²

Abelard’s sometimes extreme arguments about the role of intentions in our behaviour and moral conduct, his emphasis on the common good and altruism as well as his ideas of the perfect community become even more fascinating when we consider his personal life, particularly his difficult relations with other theologians and members of the religious and intellectual communities. He himself quarrelled with several communities, and his monastic career provoked many reservations. He even asked for permission to live as a monk wherever he chose.³³ One of the most provocative and original intellectuals of medieval times still believed that the good of the community, both in the metaphysical and secular spheres of utility, should always come first.

4 Hugh of St Victor: The Ethics of Self-Interest

I now turn to another famous twelfth-century Parisian author, Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141).³⁴ As master in the school of St Victor, he developed an educational program and pedagogical theories, taught liberal arts and wrote systematizations of theological questions and spiritual issues.³⁵ The monastery of St Victor followed the Augustinian rule but was also influenced by the Benedictine rule. Using their own guide for daily monastic life, Liber ordinis, and its commentaries, the Victorines established their original form of cloistered lifestyle within the immediate vicinity of the vibrant city centre of Paris. Unlike Abelard, Hugh devoted his whole life to serving his community. Hugh’s original De insitutione novitiorum, which teaches the basic social conventions and monastic behaviour to novices, makes this monastic thinking and lifestyle clear. Communal peace and love are primary, but Hugh also acknowledges the differentiation between ranks and social hierarchies, advising novices to practise discretion in distinguishing people and their merits in relation to love, age, and office.³⁶

The following examples concerning the common good, individual good and self-interest demonstrate both the variety of Hugh’s literary production and the scope of his intellectual vitality. In particular, his Didascalicon includes numerous snippets of classical teaching, further re-formulated to suit the pedagogical needs of the monastery of St Victor. Hugh’s analysis of the seven liberal arts regarded ethics as the part of practical philosophy that lies between the study of logic and theoretical philosophy.³⁷ Once students finished their basic courses in logic, they should continue to study practical philosophy, which has three subdivisions: solitary, private, and public or, as he explains later, ethics, economics, and politics.³⁸

Hugh explains that the solitary aspect of practical philosophy (that is, ethics) refers to the ethical conduct of an individual and focuses on how individuals should exercise care for themselves. They should not allow anything in life that will not bring joy or anything that will cause regret. The private aspect of practical philosophy, economics, in turn includes the householder’s tasks. Representing the broadest framework of practical philosophy, politics sees to public matters, serving welfare through its concern for provisions, its balancing of justice, and observance of moderation. Hence, ethics concern individuals, economics households, and politics the governors of states.³⁹ Even though this discussion concerns the division of arts and their brief definitions, it is striking that Hugh describes ethics as a solitary exercise in caring for oneself, even feelings of joy, as the opposite to public care, which manages public tasks. It is certainly possible that individual interests are in complete unison with public interests and utility, but Hugh omits this aspect in his definitions of three ethical subdivisions.

Hugh’s Didascalicon includes another discussion of the common good and individual good. A few pages after his previous example, he lists the seven mechanical arts (that is, manufacturing fabric, armaments, etc.) as an appendix to his detailed account of the liberal arts. The third mechanical art is navigation (nauigatio), by which Hugh clearly understands navigation for the sake of commerce with distant cities.⁴⁰ Here we find Hugh’s short but highly relevant comment on the common good and how it relates to activities like purchasing, selling and exchanging domestic and foreign goods. Hugh describes the essence of commerce as an attempt to enter unknown places of the earth and to learn unknown languages to carry on humankind’s trade. He claims that the pursuit of commerce reconciles nations, calms wars and strengthens peace, all of which promote the common good. Commerce commutes the private good of individuals to the common benefit of all. Again, the common good and individual good seem compatible with each other, yet in an exceptional way. Foreshadowing pre-capitalist theories, Hugh presents the pursuit of individual profit as a commendable act in terms of the common good.⁴¹ Both of these examples from Didascalicon presuppose an important differentiation between the common good as a virtue and as material utility (communis utilitas), a distinction that became prominent through a readaptation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics during the thirteenth century. For Hugh and his followers, the common good does not always necessarily mean a metaphysical common good, but the more limited and material welfare of the community.⁴²

In addition to practical life and its moral deliberations, as well as references to trade, Hugh also offers a theological analysis of the potential for self-interest and individual good in his systematic works, and he continues to explore the topic in his spiritual treatises as well. Due to the paradigm shift, he focuses on the metaphysical (or theological) common good without explicitly referring to utility or the common secular good. Drawing from Augustine’s theory of the order of charity, Hugh addresses in detail the basic problem in medieval theories of love: the proper relationship between the love of oneself, the love of another person and the love of God. The main questions are (1) whether people naturally love God more than they love themselves, and (2) whether it is possible to combine self-love with the love of others. These questions directly rise from the idea of the compatibility of the common good and individual good since the goal of the common good seems to entail disinterested love where one disregards one’s own good in loving others. The emphasis of the common good seems to require that the individual willingly sacrifices their own good and happiness for others. Moreover, such disinterested love is, by definition, egalitarian as it overlooks the differences between individuals. How does this model account for the individual needs, characteristics features, and abilities of each member of a given community?

Hugh answers this challenge by developing an original theory of love that emphasizes the natural propensity to seek one’s own good while connecting it to the idea that the individual finds the greatest good in God. In the twelfth-century context, love for God (“charity”, caritas) was generally thought to be selfless and altruistic. Hugh’s theory partly contests this standard idea. In his theological treatise On the Sacraments, he explains that there is no need to command human beings to love themselves since they do so naturally by loving both their flesh and their soul – they did this even before the Fall. While the soul should be loved more, one is not able to hate oneself, and by the affection of nature (per naturae affectum), one loves the flesh as well.⁴³ Moreover, it is within one’s self-interest to tend spontaneously toward the good of God. Hugh elucidates how self-love, the love of one’s neighbour and the love of God intermingle: first, the love directed to other people is based on the principle of self-love; second, if one loves the good, one wants God to themself:

For if one loves one’s neighbour as oneself, how does one love one’s neighbour when one does not love oneself? […] Thus one should first love oneself well so that afterwards, according to oneself, one may love one’s neighbour well also […] you should not love the whole world against your own soul […]. The order of love is not such that man loves his neighbour before himself. Love your neighbour as yourself […]. One desires the good first indeed for oneself, then for another. For one does not love another as oneself, unless one first loves oneself […]. For one owes nothing to one’s neighbour except after that and according to that which one owes to oneself.⁴⁴

The emphasis on self-love expands to a discussion of corporeal goods and their distribution. Hugh claims that corporeal goods can sometimes be possessed by one person only and cannot be passed to another. The individual is not obliged to expend anything on his neighbour, which is due without necessity. If someone cannot provide for themselves and for their neighbour at the same time, they should take care of themself first.⁴⁵

Hugh admits that the emphasis on self-love introduces a theological problem that needs to be carefully investigated, namely, the question of the primacy of the salvation of one’s own soul in comparison to the souls of others. Someone could claim that the greater good must be loved more and, accordingly, that the greater good is that two people should be saved rather than one. However, the Bible’s command to love one’s neighbour as oneself does not mean that a person should love every single person as much as themself and two or three or four others more than themself. Hugh argues that the greater good for the person themself must be loved more by them since loving their own true good first is innate in human beings (insitum est), and only after this are they able to love the good of their neighbour. Since the love of one’s own good comes before loving others, it is not possible for a person to simultaneously both hate oneself and love others.⁴⁶

The difficulty in Hugh’s theory of love is its assumption that humans are inclined to love God as naturally and directly as they tend towards their own good. Moreover, this argumentation might lead directly to the assumption that Hugh argues for an egocentric model of love. However, Hugh suggests that the individual should order and moderate self-love in a way that they do not violate the initial principle of self-love, which pursues the good for one’s own self. For instance, if someone performs iniquity, they hate themself or do not love themself enough, failing to love God and their neighbour as well. One has a duty to first love oneself, but it extends to the duty to love others and God.⁴⁷

Whereas Abelard explicitly referred to Cicero and Stoic ideas, Hugh’s theoretical background here, and in Didascalicon, is also strikingly similar to the Stoic oikeiōsis principle, defined by Julia Annas as the tendency that people have both towards developing self-concern and towards developing other-concern.⁴⁸ While Hugh does not explicitly mention the concept of oikeiōsis or its Latin translations (commendatio, conciliatio), the idea is still similar. This theory posits that individuals have a natural tendency for self-preservation, which gradually develops through practice into a care for others as the individual’s reason grows. Virtuous people tend to preserve themselves and then others, rationally considering their actions. The Stoic theory of natural affinity towards oneself and its extension to others is concomitant with the Christian idea of caritas. Both Greek and Latin patristic authors knew and exploited Cicero’s treatises that develop the theory of oikeiōsis and its applications in societal life, reformulating the theory in the Christian framework.⁴⁹ Moreover, during the twelfth century, authors knew Cicero’s De officiis and fragments from his other texts as well.⁵⁰ As Cary Nederman has recently argued, while twelfth-century authors were prone to accommodate Cicero’s texts to their own needs, his texts remained highly useful and an easily accessible resource.⁵¹ In his De finibus bonorum et malorum, Cicero writes:

[…] a living creature feels an attachment for itself, and an impulse to preserve itself and to feel affection towards its own constitution and for those things which tend to preserve that constitution […]. This leads to the conclusion that it is love of self which supplies the primary impulse to action.⁵²

De officiis repeats this idea but places more emphasis on the individual’s obligations towards themself, their families and society at large.⁵³ Ilaria Ramelli has noted that Christian reception history of oikeiōsis is mostly modelled on Stoic doctrine, which emphasizes people’s orientation to the social sphere. In patristic sources, the appropriation process takes a distinctly Christian form in which concern for others prevails over self-interest, whereas Cicero had argued that it is natural and morally acceptable to be self-interested and to pursue one’s own intentions if one acts within the limits of justice.⁵⁴ Irene O’Daly, in turn, in considering the theory of oikeiōsis in John of Salisbury’s writings, notes both the direct and indirect presence of Cicero’s views on familiarization and duties in the twelfth-century milieu.⁵⁵ However, the direct and indirect influence of Stoic oikeiōsis theory on Hugh and his contemporaries still needs more research.

In addition to discussing the self-interested nature of love, Hugh acknowledges the basic human desire to be exclusively and personally loved. This can be seen as an extension of self-interest in human relationships. In the community of others, inevitably, this desire presents a dilemma. Hugh’s small treatise on love, De arrha animae (“Soliloquy on the Betrothal-Gift of the Soul”), unravels Hugh’s interest in the topic.⁵⁶ He speculates about the different ranks of ordered love and formulates questions about the possibility of the limited nature of love, contesting some of the conventional premises about the compatibility of the common good and individual good in the medieval context.⁵⁷

The genre of Hugh’s treatise, an inner dialogue between the Soul and the Self, provides an opportunity to explore individual aspirations explicitly. The Soul asks difficult and delicate questions, whereas the Self offers answers and guidance. While the Soul of the dialogue is generally insecure and in need of love, the Self is a wise teacher who provides advice and consolation for the Soul. The Self speaks on behalf of natural human sociability, orientation toward participation in communal life, and the primacy of the common good. The Soul, meanwhile, is more interested in private good, confessing that it desires to be uniquely loved and individually noticed. This does not mean that the Soul is not aware and does not understand how, in creation, everyone has received common love and gifts, sharing them with other people and even with beasts. These common goods, perceptible in the visible world, are granted to all creatures. They include supplies, food, drink, light, warmth, the changing seasons and other pleasurable things. The problem is that these common goods do not include qualities that would inflame the Soul to love the giver of the gift individually.⁵⁸

This rather eccentric dialogue permits Hugh to test the compatibility model and pose difficult questions, such as why would one love God individually if one was not loved the same in return?⁵⁹ Moreover, the context allows Hugh to make critical comments about the quality of communal life. The Soul is worried that in a community with others, it might lose its uniqueness and be contaminated by the bad or unwanted qualities of people that it comes into contact with. As the Soul notes, a community of people also includes criminals and unclean people.⁶⁰

The erudite Self defends the principle of common good by answering that even the lives of the wicked contribute to the good of the whole, challenging good people to seek the greater good, because by seeing their failures, the good learn to love virtue more passionately.⁶¹ The Self also comforts the Soul by reminding it that the unique, personal, and most intimate love is available to it in a special community of others. This special community consists of other Christians or of the brethren of the religious community. However, the Soul’s reply shows how this kind of love is unsatisfying without a personal experiential response.⁶² While the treatise ends somewhat flatly with the peaceful reconciliation of the Soul and the Self, the text as a whole demonstrates how profoundly Hugh understood the human being’s individual quest for love and the natural tendency of a self-interested disposition. This inclination should manifest itself by having the right kind of affection towards oneself and the recognition of one’s own dignity since only then can one avoid loving things that are beneath oneself and deleterious.⁶³ This idea is further supported by the anthropological premise that advocates turning to one’s inner depths and pursuing knowledge of oneself with the aim of restoring one’s lost image and likeness of God.

Hugh’s near contemporary Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx presented an interesting parallel discussion on unique relationships. By utilising Cicero, as well as Ambrose’s discussions on friendship, he argued persuasively for exclusive friendships within a religious community.⁶⁴ The ongoing question in Aelred’s treatises De spiritali amicitia (On Spiritual Friendship) and De speculo caritate (The Mirror of Charity) is the paradox of maintaining the elements of personal and communal interests in social relationships. Even more than Hugh, Aelred considers people to be inherently social creatures; in fact, all creation forms loving and supporting communities. Even irrational animals and insensible things, such as trees or stones, need to share life with their kind.⁶⁵ Nature has implanted in the human heart the desire for friendship and love.⁶⁶

In De spiritali amicitia, Aelred introduces his idea of three types of friendship. The first is carnal friendship, the second is worldly or interested friendship that begins with the affection of gratitude, and the third is the only true friendship, which is spiritual.⁶⁷ The inclination towards another person is natural and inevitable by itself, but consent to carnal love is a matter of moral responsibility.⁶⁸ While true friendship is based on attachment, it requires rationality, moral perfection and support from virtues.⁶⁹ Quoting Cicero’s definition, Aelred writes that true friendship is agreement in things human and divine, with good will and charity.⁷⁰ Love, the origin of friendship, develops either from nature or from duty, from reason alone or affection alone, or from both together (i.e. reason and affection). People are bound together by a natural affection as when parents love their children. The love of our enemies, in turn, does not stem from a spontaneous inclination but from reason and the constraint of the commandment.⁷¹

Aelred’s Christian interpretation is that mutual human friendship leads to union with Christ, which culminates in eternal beatitude. Friendship is a part of God’s creative plan. Experimenting with the Augustinian idea of the order of love, he proposes a new order that emphasizes self-love: first love of self, then of one’s neighbour, and finally of God. These loves interconnect and necessitate each other, and together they bring perfection (simul omnes perficiuntur).⁷² Remarkably, these steps are indispensable for one’s own happiness, not for the well-being of the other. Here Aelred proposes the idea that Hugh suggests in his De arrha: one desires a lover or a friend in order to satisfy one’s own longing and need for individual love. Aelred argues that the love of oneself makes one love one’s friends and that friendship is ultimately the love of self.

If you do not love yourself, how can you love another? For from the likeness of the love with which you are personally dear to yourself, you ought to direct your love for your neighbour.⁷³

This is that great and wonderful happiness we await. God himself acts to channel so much friendship and charity between himself and the creatures he sustains, and between the classes and orders he distinguishes, and between each and every one he elects, that in this way each one may love another as himself. By this means each may rejoice over his own happiness as he rejoices over his neighbor’s. Thus the bliss of all individually is the bliss of all collectively, and the sum of all individual beatitudes is the beatitude of all together.⁷⁴

Aelred declares that in loving God, we are concerned with ourselves. In the mutual love of friendship, however, people must have concern for each other’s interests. Aelred’s idea of self-interest and its role in communal life is an original contribution, a new understanding of ordered love directed to three objects like concentric circles: the self, one’s neighbour, and God. The first circle is the love of self, leading then to the love of one’s neighbour, until love reaches its apotheosis in mystical participation in God. The theoretical background implies, as does Hugh, the principles of the Stoic oikeiōsis doctrine, which maintains that the individual is always by nature inclined to do what is appropriate, only gradually coming to care for the interests of others as if her own. A person has a primary sense of duty towards oneself, from which the duties extend to other people. The process of appropriation begins at birth as an impulse to self-preservation, but it expands to include family members, one’s own community and country, and ideally the rest of humankind.⁷⁵

However, Aelred argues that God has implanted his own love of unity and society into the first humans as a desire for friendship. God wanted peace to guide all his creatures and society to unite them: He left no class of creatures isolated but linked each in a kind of society.⁷⁶ Withdrawal from social relations and from friendship is inhuman and unnatural:

Those who claim that their lives should be such as to console no one and to be a burden or the occasion of grief to no one, who derive no joy from others’ success and inflict no bitterness on others with their own perversity, I would call not human beings but beasts. They have only one goal: neither to love nor to be loved by anyone.⁷⁷

Aelred contends that Adam and Eve’s friendship and special bond demonstrates how nature teaches that all are equal and that neither superior nor inferior exist among people. After the Fall, however, private gain replaced the common good, after which avarice and envy corrupted friendship and charity by introducing contentions and rivalries.⁷⁸ Still, the need for social bonds has remained, and the community, as Aelred understands it in the everyday encounters with people, begins with personal friendships.⁷⁹ These friendships are exclusive bonds between individuals, and they entail a careful process during which the candidates for friendship are first chosen, then tested, and finally given admission to intimate and true friendship.⁸⁰ However, true friendship involves more than reciprocal self-interest, namely, union or communion with the third good of the shared common good in God.⁸¹

While Aelred speaks enthusiastically in favour of exclusive friendship between two individuals, he also recognizes that they may sometimes challenge the overall dynamic of the community and the common good. By exploiting Cicero’s text, he specifies that there are different views about the limits on the lengths to which friendship should go. One view is that the individual should favour a friend over loyalty and integrity and over either the common or the private good. Another is to think that loyalty should be excluded, but nothing else.⁸² If a friend harms other community members who should be equally loved, he should be chastised. In his De speculo caritate, Aelred writes that the love of friendship should not outweigh religion, loyalty, the love of fellow citizens or the safety of the people.⁸³ If the interests of private friendship and the common good conflict, the common good should always prevail. In De spiritali amicitia, Aelred gives straightforward advice:

But if he proves a menace to his father, his country, his fellow citizens, dependents, or friends, you must immediately sever the bond of familiarity and not prefer the love of one person to the love of many.⁸⁴

We should be very careful, however, not to let tender affection hinder the opportunities for greater good, by unwillingness either to send away or to burden those who are especially fond of us when it is clear that by doing so we could hope for a greater good. But well-ordered friendship is this, that reason should so rule affection that we respect not what the sweetness of friends suggests but what the common good demands.⁸⁵

5 Conclusion

While the twelfth century monastic paradigm exemplifies in many ways a well-balanced fusion of the good of an individual and the common good, the sources also reveal emerging concerns for potential conflicts between them and an urge to resolve such tension. In a context guided by strict rules of communal life, religious people needed to know how to prioritize the common good in social life without undercutting or alienating the recognized needs of individuals.

The different ways to understand the common good and individual good in the medieval context immediately challenge the interpretations of the sources. Obviously, the Christian framework of caritas and its permutations are essential for understanding medieval monastic theories of the good of an individual with respect to the good of the community. A more complex and theoretically interesting picture emerges, however, when we consider the Classical ideas of humanity, such as the dignity of an individual, and Stoic views of justice and oikeiōsis, which markedly impacted medieval theories. These two parallel strands of thought combined to create original explanations of human sociability, suggesting how communal life should be ordered. In addition to these partly overlapping schemes, medieval texts also reveal the paradigm of material common utility and safety without mentioning metaphysical or theological structures of reality directly. These complex notions were intertwined in twelfth-century discussions, and they variously manifested in ethical theories, theological systematizations, and the theory of emotions.

Peter Abelard and Hugh of St Victor, two prominent twelfth-century scholars who lived in religious communities, advanced ethical theorizing related to the compatibility of the the good of an individual and the good of a community. While Abelard’s and Hugh’s ideas of the common and individual good share the basic parameters of the Christian faith and the order of charity, it seems that Abelard is keener to emphasize the common good, both in the metaphysical as well as in the secular sense, above the individual good. Twelfth-century sources also reveal a growing concern for the individual good, self-interest, and the need for private relations with others. Hugh’s idea that love can be individual and yet common represents a novel articulation that differs from standard views, which ask the individual to be satisfied with a communal and more general love and fail to recognize the human basic need for unique love. He stresses the importance of self-love and of self-interest in both communal life and in relation to God. For him, self-love is essential to all true love, and one ultimately finds personal good in the love of other people and God. Aelred of Rievaulx’s examination of the types of friendship constitutes another attempt to reconcile self-interest, exclusive relationships, and communal life.