Cistercian Fathers
6 primary works • 8 total works
Book 2
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 5
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 58
Aelred, abbot of the Yorkshire Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx from 1147 to 1167, wrote six spiritual treatises, seven historical treatises, and 182 liturgical sermons, many of which he delivered as chapter talks to his monks. Translations of the first twenty-eight of these sermons appeared in CF 58 in 2001, translated by Theodore Berkeley and M. Basil Pennington, and sermons twenty-nine through forty-six appeared in CF 77 in 2015, translated by Marie Anne Mayeski. The current volume contains thirty-eight sermons for feasts from Advent through the Nativity of Mary, taken from the Durham and Lincoln collections, edited by Gaetano Raciti in CCCM 2B and 2C.
Book 71
Book 73
Book 83
Homilies on the Prophetic Burdens of Isaiah, Volume 83
by Aelred of Rievaulx
Aelred (1110-1167) served Rievaulx Abbey, the second Cistercian monastery in England, for twenty years as abbot. During his abbacy he wrote thirteen treatises, some offering spiritual guidance and others seeking to advise King Henry II. He also wrote thirty-one sermons as a commentary on Isaiah 13-16 and 182 surviving liturgical sermons, mostly addressed to his monks.
This volume contains the first half of Aelred's ninety-eight liturgical sermons from the Reading-Cluny collection, Sermons 85 through 133. For the most part, the collection follows the liturgical year, beginning in this volume with three sermons for Advent and ending with five for Pentecost and three for the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. Sermons 134 through 182, from the Nativity of John the Baptist (June 24) through the Feast of All Saints, will appear in CF 87. These sermons appear to contain evidence of Aelred's editorial additions to the autograph of the sermons, as he added selections from patristic and medieval authors within the sermons and between them.