New Dissertation: Geoffrey of Auxerre on the Song of Songs

Here is Joseph Mathew Van House’s abstract of his dissertation titled: “The Cistercian Theology of Geoffrey of Auxerre’s Expositio in Cantica Canticorum” (Catholic University of America, advisor: Mark J. Clark).

Geoffrey of Auxerre, also known as Geoffrey of Clairvaux and Gaufridus Autissiodorensis, had extensive interactions with many of the most important personages of his age. Most significantly, as a youth he studied under Peter Abelard in Paris, then became a Cistercian and eventually the main protégé and successor to Bernard of Clairvaux. Decades later, in his own old age, Geoffrey undertook the task of completing Bernard’s beloved, unfinished work, the Sermones super Cantica Canticorum. Geoffrey’s resulting masterwork, his Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, is almost completely unstudied.
This dissertation unfolds in four chapters. The first presents a portrait of available scholarship about the theology of Bernard, Geoffrey, and the Cistercians generally. It notes in particular several related strains of thought in which scholars treat representatives of “monastic theology” like Bernard and Geoffrey as methodologically indifferent or opposed to contemporary representatives of “scholastic theology” like Abelard and Peter Lombard. The second chapter introduces Geoffrey’s text by studying its relation to Bernard’s relevant writings. It finds that Geoffrey is both extremely loyal to Bernard’s textual legacy and, at the same time, notably prepared to innovate on it. The third chapter turns specifically to the Expositio’s theological positions. It finds that they reflect a very high level of education, one that includes a technical knowledge of traditional philosophy and theology along with sensitivity to twelfth-century theological debates over, for example, original sin and moral agency. Geoffrey’s Mariology is astonishingly robust, even anticipating the dogmas of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and bodily Assumption. The dissertation’s fourth chapter turns to Geoffrey’s relationship with contemporary scholasticism in his later years, finding that a number of the stylistic innovations in his Expositio reflect a significant influence coming from the (recently-discovered) Parisian Biblical lectures of Peter Lombard and Stephen Langton.
Geoffrey of Auxerre was thoroughly Cistercian and monastic. He was also constructively engaged, from his youth to his retirement, in the theological developments occurring in scholastic Paris. This dissertation’s discoveries about his influences and innovations suggest a need to reevaluate widespread narratives about twelfth-century theology that revolve around a supposed mutual alienation between monastery and school.