Aelred of Rievaulx

About Aelred of Rievaulx

Aelred of Rievaulx was born around 1110 and entered the Yorkshire abbey in 1134, after serving at the Scottish court. He became abbot in 1147. His community remembered a leader whose responsibilities continued through disabling illness: monks still visited him when he needed separate accommodation near the infirmary. Walter Daniel, who cared for him, became his biographer. Aelred died on 12 January 1167, leaving both a community and writings concerned with the difficult practice of loving other people.

Before that monastic career, he had lived among the household of King David of Scotland. The older Catholic Encyclopedia describes his friendship with the king's son Henry and says that David would have advanced him in the Church. Aelred instead chose the monastery. He later led a new community at Revesby, taking twelve monks from Rievaulx to establish it. His religious life did not erase his earlier connections: on a journey to Scotland in 1153 he visited David for the last time. News of the king's death prompted a written remembrance. He also wrote about Edward the Confessor and preached at Westminster when Edward's relics were translated in 1163.

At Rievaulx, leadership involved buildings and people as well as books. The abbey belonged to the Cistercian reform, which emphasized austerity and close observance of Benedict's monastic rule. A growing community needed room for worship, meetings and care. During Aelred's abbacy a large new church was begun, the chapter house was rebuilt, and the eastern range was enlarged to accommodate the choir monks. His lodging stood near an infirmary hall and a novitiate arranged around a second cloister. These changes gave the expanding household places to gather and places to care for its members. They also help explain why the abbot's responsibilities cannot be reduced to solitary study: his work belonged to the daily life of a substantial monastery.

Aelred's Spiritual Friendship begins with memories of his own need for affection. He recalls wanting to love and be loved while still at school, but also confusing friendship with things that resembled it. Reading Cicero gave him a language in which to examine that desire. His Christian account asks what makes friendship truthful and fruitful. Near the work's close, he describes friends who can speak openly, correct each other without anger and receive correction without resentment. Neither flattery nor harshness belongs in that relationship. Their companionship should assist them in loving Christ, while love of Christ returns them to the care of a friend. Affection thus becomes something to cultivate with honesty, rather than a feeling that excuses every choice.

The Mirror of Charity examines attraction with similar care. Aelred does not tell the reader simply to distrust every response to outward beauty, nor does he treat attraction as a sufficient guide to conduct. He asks that it be examined for the good or harm it may encourage. Where affection supports virtue, it can be welcomed; where it draws someone into wrongdoing, it needs correction. He gives stricter advice to a person who knows that such attachment will overcome self-control. The passage belongs to an ascetic account of charity, in which desire must be educated.

His Rule for a Recluse answers a different need. Addressing his sister, Aelred responds to her request for practical guidance and explains that he has selected earlier teaching for her circumstances. The result moves between bodily routines and spiritual attention. He assigns time to prayer, reading and manual labor, but recognizes that the mind cannot sustain the same exercise indefinitely. If psalmody becomes burdensome, the reader can turn to a book; if reading becomes wearisome, to prayer; and when these tire her, to work. He prefers frequent brief prayer to a length that produces aversion, unless devotion carries it onward naturally. For a woman unable to read, he proposes work interrupted by short prayers, making room for her within the pattern of devotion.

Aelred's Pastoral Prayer addresses his responsibility for others. He asks for wisdom to lead, patience with shortcomings and words that tell the truth acceptably. He asks that teaching serve those in his care. The prayer also acknowledges bodily limits: when illness prevents demanding fasts and vigils, he asks instead for humility and charity. Material administration appears alongside these petitions, as he seeks to distribute the community's resources wisely in both scarcity and abundance.

Modern editions reveal a writer whose self-disclosure did not make his reception simple. The Dumbarton Oaks introduction to his writings notes both affection for him and criticism of his leniency and favoritism. It also emphasizes the movement between confidence and fear in his accounts of his own experience. Alongside his more familiar spiritual teaching stands A Certain Marvelous Miracle, a religious narrative about a young nun's pregnancy and a miraculous deliverance. His surviving work therefore includes confession, instruction, prayer and storytelling: different forms through which an abbot tried to address embodied people, their attachments and their needs.

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