Monastic theology is, in a way, a spiritual theology which completes speculative theology; it is the latter's completion, and fulfillment. It is the added something, the sursum in which speculative theology tends to transcend itself and become what St. Bernard calls an integral knowledge of God: integre cognoscere.

This is what endows monastic theology with both its limitations and its lasting value. The effort it represents is always necessary if theology, while remaining scientific, is to avoid becoming purely abstract (one might venture to say: devitalized); and, as Peter the Cantor expresses it, sacred doctrine is not to be manufactured like machinery.

leclercq, the love of learning, p.223-224