Series:

Monastic Studies

3 primary works

Book 11

Cover of Treatises and the Pastoral Prayer
Meditation on Christ's humanity and a letter of instruction on a disciplined spiritual life for his sister, epitomize Aelred's gentle spirituality. His pastoral prayer reflects a man conscious that he is accountable to God for the souls of others.

Book 15

Cover of Spiritual Friendship

Spiritual Friendship

by Aelred of Rievaulx

Published 1 April 2010

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.

Book 26

Cover of The Mirror of Charity
Aelred of Rievaulx possessed a personal charm which drew friends and disciples naturally to him. His own experience of human weakness in a worldly life at the court of King David of Scotland made him sensitive to the doctrine of charity which he found among Cistercian monks. The Mirror of Charity gives us a solid theology of the Cistercian life. Because the divine nature is love, as the Bible tells us, directing our love to God-love conforms us to the image of God that has been lost through sin. All love, to Aelred, is a participation in God-love that leads us to union.