Saint Aelred of Rievaulx (1110-1167)

A line of priests of Hexham

Aelred — from his Anglo-Saxon name Æthelred, "noble counsel" — was born in 1110 at Hexham, in Northumbria, the rugged land of the frontier between England and Scotland.^[1] His family was no ordinary one: it belonged to the old Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical elite. His father, Eilaf, was the last of a line of hereditary priests serving the church of Saint Andrew at Hexham; his grandfather, also named Eilaf, had been treasurer of Durham Cathedral and keeper of the relics of Saint Cuthbert.^[2] That English clerics should still be married and pass on their office from father to son was nothing exceptional in England before the full implementation of the Gregorian reform.^[3]

This ancestry marked Aelred deeply. He grew up in the memory of the saints of the North — Cuthbert, Wilfrid, the bishops of Hexham — and kept all his life the love of this tradition: having become abbot, he himself wrote a treatise On the saints of the church of Hexham.^[4]

A land between two kingdoms

The context matters for understanding the man. Northern England, at the beginning of the twelfth century, was a disputed zone between the Norman English crown and that of Scotland. Aelred was, by his very birth, a man of both worlds: Anglo-Saxon by stock, formed in the Scottish manner, writing in Latin for all Christendom. This position as a go-between partly explains the influence of his historical work, in which he endeavoured to link the old Saxon kingship, the house of Scotland and the new Norman masters.

The young steward

At about the age of fourteen, Aelred was sent to the court of David I, King of Scots (1124-1153), one of the most devout and reforming princes of his time, son of Saint Margaret of Scotland.^[5] The boy was raised alongside Henry of Northumberland, the king's son, and Waldef (the future Saint Waltheof, abbot of Melrose), David's stepson. Noticed for his gentleness and intelligence, he rose through the ranks until he became echonomus — steward, seneschal, master of the royal household — an office of trust placing him at the heart of government.^[6]

Cicero and the desire for friendship

It was at court that the future writer was formed. There Aelred read the classics, and above all Cicero's De amicitia ("On Friendship"), which overwhelmed him.^[7] The young man discovered in it an analysis of friendship that answered a thirst already present in him. But he would later sense what this book, beautiful as it was, could not give: the true source of friendship. Having become a monk, he would judge the enthusiasm of his youth with lucidity.

"Cicero knew nothing of the virtue of true friendship, since he was wholly ignorant of its source and its end, which is Christ." — Saint Aelred, Spiritual Friendship^[8]

The trial of the court and the turning point

The court was not only a school of letters; it was a place of ambition, pleasures and disordered attachments. Aelred himself, in the Mirror of Charity, would later confess the disordered affections of his youth, those human loves in which he sought happiness without finding it.^[9] He was also, according to his biographer, exposed to the hostility of a knight of the court — a trial of humiliation that inwardly prepared his break.^[10]

The turning point came in 1134. Sent by the king on a mission to the north of England, Aelred heard of a new abbey, founded three years earlier in a wild Yorkshire valley: Rievaulx. He went there, was seized by it, and chose to leave everything. The account of his discovery of the cloister remains one of the most moving testimonies of conversion of the Middle Ages.

Rievaulx, daughter of Clairvaux

The abbey of Rievaulx had been founded in 1132 in the valley of the Rye, by monks sent directly from Clairvaux by Saint Bernard: it was the first lasting Cistercian foundation in the north of England, under the leadership of Abbot William, Bernard's former secretary.^[11] The ideal there was that of Cîteaux in all its primitive rigour: silence, manual labour, poverty, stripped-down liturgy, return to the letter of the Rule of Saint Benedict as Saint Stephen Harding and the founders of the order had willed it.

The leap into the cloister

Aelred entered Rievaulx in 1134, at about twenty-four, abandoning honours and prospects.^[12] The contrast was total: from the palace of Roxburgh to the damp huts of a northern valley, from the royal table to the black bread of the Cistercians. Yet he at once found there what he had vainly sought at court: a love that does not disappoint. His description of the cloister of Rievaulx has remained famous.

Aelred later confided that at Rievaulx he had found no one whom he did not love, feeling himself loved by all — so Walter Daniel reports.^[13]

This testimony says everything about Aelred's genius: he made the very experience of Cistercian common life — where very different men live together for God — the laboratory of his doctrine of fraternal charity.

Master of novices, then abbot of Revesby (1143)

His worth was soon recognised. After a journey to Rome (about 1142) on the order's business, Aelred was appointed master of novices at Rievaulx — a decisive office, consisting in forming young monks in the interior life.^[14] It was in these years that he composed, at the command of Saint Bernard himself, his first great treatise, the Speculum caritatis (about 1142-1143).

In 1143, he was entrusted with the foundation of a new abbey, daughter of Rievaulx: Revesby, in Lincolnshire, of which he was the first abbot.^[15] He led twelve monks there according to Cistercian custom — an image of the twelve apostles around Christ — and governed this young house for four years, until the death of Abbot Maurice recalled him to the mother house.

The "second Bernard" of England

In 1147, Aelred was elected abbot of Rievaulx, an office he kept until his death, twenty years later.^[16] Under his government, the abbey became the spiritual centre of English monasticism. Counsellor of bishops, abbots and kings, mediator in conflicts, sought-after preacher, writer admired even on the continent, Aelred earned the nickname of "second Bernard": what Bernard of Clairvaux had been for France and for the whole Church, Aelred was, in his measure, for England.^[17]

An abbey that "doubled everything"

The growth of Rievaulx under Aelred was spectacular. Walter Daniel, his biographer, states that the abbot "doubled everything": the buildings — church, chapter house, novices' quarters, infirmary, cloister —, the flocks, the revenues, and above all the men.^[18] At his death, the community numbered about one hundred and forty choir monks and nearly five hundred lay brothers and servants, that is about six hundred and forty souls: Rievaulx had become one of the greatest abbeys of England.^[19]

The cloister as a house of charity

The most characteristic feature of Aelred's government was neither numbers nor buildings, but a style of charity. Against a certain Cistercian rigour that could reject the weak, Aelred made Rievaulx a place of welcome for the fragile, the sick, the misfits.

According to Walter Daniel, the proper glory of the house of Rievaulx was to teach above all patience towards the weak and compassion, so that all — strong or weak — might find there a place of peace.^[20]

This mercy was the concrete application of his doctrine: a monastery is not a barracks of spiritual athletes, but a school of charity where the strong bears the weak. Aelred saw in it the very image of the Church and of Heaven.

A twofold genius: spirituality and history

Aelred leaves a considerable body of work, divided between spiritual treatises, historical writings and sermons. His Latin, nourished on Scripture, on Saint Augustine and on Cicero, is of great beauty. Often ill, he dictated to his secretaries — among them Walter Daniel.

The spiritual treatises

The heart of the work is spiritual. The Speculum caritatis ("Mirror of Charity"), written at Saint Bernard's request, is a great synthesis on love: the soul's rest in God, the "sabbath" of the heart, the healing of disordered affections.^[21] The De institutione inclusarum ("The Life of the Recluse"), written for his recluse sister, became one of the most widely circulated manuals of eremitical life in Europe, as far as France and Flanders.^[22] The De Iesu puero duodenni ("Jesus at Twelve") tenderly meditates on the episode of the Child Jesus found in the Temple. Lastly, the Oratio pastoralis ("Pastoral Prayer") is the supplication of an abbot who trembles for the souls entrusted to his charge — one of the finest texts of priestly spirituality of the Middle Ages.

In this prayer, the abbot confesses before God his desire to love the souls entrusted to his charge while fearing he does not love them enough, and asks to spend himself for them without counting the cost — such is the spirit of Saint Aelred's Oratio pastoralis.^[23]

The historical writings

Aelred was also a historian of the first rank. His Relatio de Standardo recounts the Battle of the Standard (1138), in which the English repelled the Scottish army; his Genealogia regum Anglorum traces the line of the English kings down to Henry II, whom he urges to embody continuity between the old Saxon kingship and the new dynasty; his Vita S. Eduardi regis, a life of Saint Edward the Confessor written for the translation of the king's relics to Westminster in 1163, fixed for centuries the image of the holy English king.^[24] Aelred thus placed his writer's talent at the service of the reconciliation of peoples and the sanctification of power.

The sermons

There remain, lastly, many liturgical sermons and a cycle of homilies on the prophecies of Isaiah (Homeliae de oneribus propheticis Isaiae), witnesses to his preaching as abbot.^[25]

The Mirror of Charity: the sabbath of the soul

All of Aelred's thought starts from one conviction: man was created for happiness, and this happiness is the love of God. Where other creatures received being, being good and being beautiful, man received in addition being happy — capable of knowing and loving his Creator.^[26]

According to Saint Aelred, in The Mirror of Charity, there is for the rational creature no true happiness but to adhere to God.^[27]

Sin shattered this rest by scattering the heart among disordered loves; charity restores it by gathering all affections towards God. Aelred calls this recovered rest the sabbath of the soul — a theme he develops as a threefold sabbath: love of self made right, love of neighbour, and love of God.

"God is friendship"

Aelred's masterpiece is the De spiritali amicitia ("Spiritual Friendship"), a dialogue written at the end of his life, in which he takes up and Christianises Cicero's treatise.^[28] Where antiquity saw in friendship a purely human summit, Aelred dares an audacious formula, placed in the mouth of the young monk Ivo and received by the abbot:

"May I dare to say of friendship what John, the friend of Jesus, says of charity: 'God is friendship'? […] What is true of charity, I do not hesitate to grant to friendship: he who abides in friendship abides in God, and God in him." — Saint Aelred, Spiritual Friendship, I, 69-70^[29]

Spiritual friendship is therefore not a mere feeling: for Aelred it is a participation in the very life of God, who is love. He carefully distinguishes three kinds of bonds: carnal friendship (born of complicity in vice), worldly friendship (born of self-interest), and spiritual friendship (born among the just through a likeness of life and desires), alone worthy of the name of true friendship.^[30]

From friend to Friend: friendship as a path to Christ

Aelred's originality lies in making friendship not a detour but a way of ascent to God. Truly to love a friend for Christ's sake is already to begin to love Christ; and from this love, the soul rises without break to friendship with God himself.

"The ascent appears neither too steep nor unnatural, from Christ inspiring the love with which we love our friend, to Christ giving himself to us as our Friend." — Saint Aelred, Spiritual Friendship, III^[31]

This doctrine culminates in Aelred's most famous sentence, opening his dialogue, where two friends conversing about God discover a presence:

"Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, in our midst." — Saint Aelred, Spiritual Friendship, I, 1^[32]

For Aelred, Christ is the living centre of all true friendship: not one too many, but the common good uniting friends and drawing them closer to one another as they draw nearer to him — an echo of the Gospel promise: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of them" (Mt 18:20).

A chaste and Christ-centred friendship, not sentimental

The warmth of Aelred's language, his avowal of youthful attachments and the intensity of his monastic affections have led, in contemporary times, to anachronistic readings that would make him the patron of a sexuality his doctrine expressly condemns.^[33] Yet nothing is more contrary to his thought. Aelred wrote precisely to purify human affection, not to flatter it: he confesses the disordered loves of his youth as faults, exalts chastity as the condition of true friendship, and subordinates all feeling to Christ and to charity.

Spiritual friendship, in his view, is demanding: it presupposes virtue, excludes sin, and makes sense only if it leads to God. "I confess I am convinced," he writes, "that true friendship cannot exist among those who live without Christ."^[34] To read Aelred as a herald of disordered passions is exactly to invert his purpose: he was the physician of affections, not their accomplice. His tenderness is never sensuality; it is the blossoming, in grace, of a heart wholly turned towards God.

A broken body, a radiant soul

Aelred's last ten years were a long physical martyrdom. He suffered from arthritis, kidney stones, gout, and grave pulmonary complaints; in 1157, the Cistercian general chapter exceptionally authorised him to live in the infirmary and to eat there, against the ordinary rule, so grave was his condition.^[35] Walter Daniel, who nursed him, left a striking testimony of it.

Walter Daniel, who nursed him, tells of seeing him, so stricken was he, suspended in a linen sheet held at its four corners to relieve his sufferings.^[36]

Yet in this ruined body, the soul radiated. The monks came to sit around his bed; it is said that sometimes some twenty of them surrounded him, touched him, spoke freely, so much did the gentleness of their father draw them. The sick abbot governed by love.

Death (12 January 1167)

Shortly before his death, according to Walter Daniel's account, a monk seized with madness attacked the aged, impotent abbot and threw him into the hearth fire. Far from complaining, Aelred excused and blessed his assailant.

According to Walter Daniel, Aelred begged his sons not to deprive him of this garment of suffering, assuring them that he was well and that the one who had thrown him into the fire had purified rather than destroyed him.^[37]

He died at Rievaulx on 12 January 1167, surrounded by his monks, after twenty years as abbot and about fifty-seven years of life.^[38] Walter Daniel relates that, when the body was washed, the monks had never seen the beloved abbot so at peace in his last rest.^[39]

Walter Daniel's Vita

All that we know of Aelred in detail comes from the Vita Aelredi written, shortly after his death, by Walter Daniel, the monk of Rievaulx who was his secretary and nurse for some ten years.^[40] This Life, completed by a Letter to Maurice in which the author answers critics, is a primary source of the first order: an intimate, tender and precise portrait of a saint the author had known and loved. It is this Life that fixed the lasting image of Aelred — the gentle father, the tried ascetic, the master of friendship.

A Cistercian cult

Aelred knew no canonisation process in the sense later law would understand; like many saints of the early Middle Ages, his cult imposed itself through the veneration of the faithful and of his order. The Cistercians held him for a saint very early, and the order officially confirmed his cult in 1476.^[41] His name is inscribed in the Roman Martyrology on 12 January, the day on which the Catholic Church keeps his memory; the calendars of the Anglican Communion and of the Episcopal Church also celebrate him on that date.^[42]

"Doctor of charity and friendship"

Posterity has retained Aelred as the great doctor of charity and friendship of the Western tradition. His Spiritual Friendship has never ceased to be read, translated and meditated upon, to the point of knowing a considerable renewal of interest in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His lesson crosses the centuries: there is a way of loving creatures that does not turn away from God but leads to him, provided Christ is "in the midst".

In a world that talks endlessly about relationships while suffering an unprecedented loneliness, Saint Aelred is strikingly relevant. He teaches first that friendship is serious: not a pastime, but a spiritual reality engaging the soul, which can be a path of sanctity. He then recalls that every affection needs purifying: we truly love only by loving for Christ and in him. He shows lastly that weakness does not exclude from grace — he himself, a sick abbot carried in a sheet, governed by gentleness alone, and made of his monastery a house where the fragile found a place.

"Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, in our midst." — such could be, in one sentence, the lesson Saint Aelred leaves to every Christian: never to love a friend without inviting Christ to sit between the two.^[43]

• Saint Bernard of Clairvaux — the great Cistercian abbot who commissioned Aelred's Mirror of Charity and of whom Aelred was nicknamed the "second".
• Saint Stephen Harding — the English founder of Cîteaux and of the Charter of Charity, at the origin of the order to which Aelred devoted his life.
• Saint Benedict of Nursia — the father of Western monasticism, whose Rule structured the life of Rievaulx.
• Saint Anselm of Canterbury — the other great master of the interior life of medieval England, slightly earlier than Aelred.
• Saint Thomas Becket — the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Aelred's exact contemporary in the England of Henry II.
• Saint Hildegard of Bingen — the great mystic and doctor of the twelfth century, Aelred's contemporary on the continent.