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Spiritual Friendship
Spiritual Friendship is today the best known and perhaps most influential of the thirteen surviving works of Aelred, abbot of the great English Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx from 1147 '1167. During his abbacy he built Rievaulx into a place of spiritual welcome and physical prosperity, desiring to make it a mother of mercy" to those in need. In a three-book Ciceronian dialogue Aelred defines human friendship as sacramental, beginning in creation, as God sought to place his own love of society in all his creatures, linking friends to Christ in this life and culminating in friendship with God in beatitude. This fresh new translation makes the work crisply readable, allowing the intellectual and Christian insight of this great Cistercian teacher and writer to speak clearly to today's seekers of love, wisdom, and truth.
Aelred the Peacemaker
In addition to being a prolific spiritual writer and the abbot of the premier Cistercian monastery in northern England, Aelred of Rievaulx somehow found the time and the stamina to travel extensively throughout the Anglo-Norman realm, acting as a mediator, a problem solver, and an adviser to kings. His career spanned the troubled years of the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda and reached its zenith during the early years of the reign of Henry II. In this work, Jean Truax focuses on the public career of Aelred of Rievaulx, placing him in his historical context, deepening the reader’s understanding of his work, and casting additional light on his underappreciated role as politician, mediator, and negotiator outside his abbey’s walls.
Homilies on the Prophetic Burdens of Isaiah
During his twenty years as abbot of the Yorkshire monastery of Rievaulx, Aelred preached many sermons: to his own monks, in other monasteries, and at significant gatherings outside the cloister. In these thirty-one homilies on Isaiah chapters 13–16, together with an introductory Advent sermon, Aelred interprets the burdens that Isaiah prophesied against the nations according to their literal, allegorical, and moral senses. He sees these burdens as playing a role both in the history of the church and in the progress of the individual soul. This collection of homilies is an ambitious, unified work of a mature monk, synthesizing biblical exegesis, ascetical teaching, spiritual exhortation, and a theory of history.
Life Inside the Cloister
Sacred architecture as reality and metaphor in secularised Western society Christian monasteries and convents, built throughout Europe for the best part of 1,500 years, are now at a crossroads. This study attempts to understand the sacred architecture of monasteries as a process of the tangible and symbolic organisation of space and time for religious communities. Despite the weight of seemingly immutable monastic tradition, architecture has contributed to developing specific religious identities and played a fundamental part in the reformation of different forms of religious life according to the changing needs of society. The cloister is the focal point of this book because it is both architecture, a physically built reality, and a metaphor for the religious life that takes place within it. Life Inside the Cloister also addresses the afterlife and heritagisation of monastic architecture in secularised Western society.
The Liturgical Sermons
Aelred, abbot of the Yorkshire Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx from 1147 to 1167, wrote six spiritual treatises, seven historical treatises, and 182 liturgical sermons, most of which he delivered as chapter talks to his monks. Translations of the first twenty-eight of these sermons appeared in The First Clairvaux Collection, Advent-All Saints, published in 2001. The current volume contains eighteen sermons given on feasts beginning with the Nativity and concluding with a sermon for All Saints.
A Companion to Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167)
Brill's Companion to Aelred of Rievaulx explores the life, works, and thought of Aelred, Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx Abbey from 1147 to 1167. As well as introducing the three genres of his works —sermons, spiritual teaching, and history— scholars survey such central topics as Marian devotion, love and friendship, the sacramental nature of community, lay spirituality, and saints’ lives. The work also includes the first supplement to the Bibliotheca aelrediana secunda, listing publications by and about Aelred from between 1996 and 2015. Aelred is rapidly becoming one of the best-known and most loved of the 12th-century Cistercians; this book provides welcome new insights into his contributions to the spiritual and political concerns of his place and time. Contributors are Damien Boquet, Pierre-André Burton, Marsha L. Dutton, Elizabeth Freeman, Daniel M. La Corte, Marie Anne Mayeski, Domenico Pezzini, John R. Sommerfeldt, and Katherine Yohe.
Aelred of Rievaulx on Love and Order in the World and the Church
"The universe is a product of God's infinite love, according to the expansive thinking of Aelred of Rievaulx, a Cistercian abbot of the Middle Ages. Aelred sees human existence, order, and action as reflections of God's love. But Aelred knows that, although they have been created for happiness, humans are neither perfect nor happy. At the same time, however, he is sure that the flood of God's love can overwhelm people who do not reject this divine gift. Because Aelred knows that humans exist only in relationship, he searches out the social order necessary for happiness. So he explores the nature of the church as a community and the support that each social group or calling gives to the whole of existence." "This study examines how Aelred sees God informing the cosmos, and the humans who inhabit it, according to the divine order and principle of love. It follows Aelred's analysis of the disordering sources of human unhappiness, which happens when humans reject God's love, and then investigates Aelred's understanding of God's re-ordering of the human condition through the gifts and graces flowing from his greatest gift: his son, Jesus."--BOOK JACKET.
Love and Friendship in the Western Tradition
Love and Friendship in the Western Tradition comprises a collection of essays written over a 25 year period by the late Rev. Professor James McEvoy on the theme of friendship. The book traces the genesis and development of philosophical treatments of friendship from Greek philosophy, through the Middle Ages, to modern and postmodern philosophy. The collection’s three major concerns are: (1) the history of philosophical discussions of friendship; (2) the role of friendship in the cultivation of the philosophical life; (3) the marginalization of friendship as a theme for philosophical reflection and practice in the modern period. As the author was primarily a medievalist, a great deal of the...
Ethical Personalism
Ethical Personalism proposes to reflect on the person from at least three levels: ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Articulating from various philosophical and religious angles and traditions the ontological and inalienable value of the human person, i.e., her dignity, the contributors to this volume show not just what it means to be a human person, but also what it takes to live accordingly. Hence, beyond the purely theoretical elaboration on ethical personalism that reposes the crucial debates between relativism and realism on the one hand, and consequentialism and deontology on the other hand, this volume offers a range of insights useful for addressing concrete and practical matters that we, as humans, are confronted in our everyday life. With the call “back to the person!” which takes roots from a deep conviction to bring into light the value of the person, Ethical Personalism unequivocally affirms the necessity of (re)placing the person in the centre of our project of society, economic plans, political settings, and environment policies.
Aelred of Rievaulx
For the medieval Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx, human beings are capable of happiness because human nature is good-but the self-defeating choices of humans have led to their misery. A loving God leads humans to happiness by nudging their free wills toward choosing the good and then, if they respond positively, giving them the power to realize that good. The power, or virtue, which perfects the human intellect is humility, which is not meekness but self-knowledge, gained through introspection and meditation on and through nature and Scripture. The will is perfected through love, without which no human act is good. Love for oneself, for others, and for God are complementary, not competing acts of the will. A special way of loving is firiendship, on which Aelred's teaching is perhaps the most complete and most sophisticated in the history of Christian thought. Perfection is, for Aelred, attainable in this life, since he sees perfection as a process, not a static condition. That condition will be attained in the total fulfillment of the afterlife.
