Pierre-André BURTON, Aelred of Rievaulx (1110-1167): An Existential and Spiritual Biography, translated by Christopher Coski. Cistercian Studies vol. 276. Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2020. Pp. xiii + 598. $49.95 pb. ISBN 978-0-87907-276-6. Reviewed by Patrick F. O’CONNELL, Gannon University, Erie, PA 16541.

            Ten years after its original publication, Abbot Pierre-André Burton’s groundbreaking biography of Aelred of Rievaulx is now available in English translation. The most extensive and thorough treatment of Aelred’s life ever attempted, and the first to draw on the (at the time) nearly completed critical edition of the twelfth-century English Cistercian’s Opera Omnia (the final two volumes of which appeared in 2017), Burton’s work runs to 550 pages of text in its English version, with an additional 49 pages of back matter, in Christopher Coski’s meticulously careful translation that also provides thorough listing of texts and studies in English, updated references in the bibliography and occasionally in the copious annotation, even notes whenever the ordering of the respective languages requires insertion of an ellipsis not in the original – truly a production worth waiting for.

            The book’s subtitle might seem to suggest a circumscribed focus prioritizing Aelred’s “interior life” as somehow distinct from his external activities, but this would be to misconstrue Burton’s intention and methodology. It is “existential” in its emphasis on its subject’s concrete responses to the possibilities open to him at various crucial points in his life and the consequent process of personal growth and development, “his life’s general orientation and, in particular, his monastic vocation” as “determined” by these choices and decisions (33), as distinguished from “a more traditional event-based reading” (35). But this emphasis on personal agency is thoroughly contextualized in the social and political milieu of twelfth-century England in the wake of the Norman Conquest (signaled on the very first page when Burton begins his General Introduction with the heading “1066-1167” – calling attention to the span of almost exactly a century between the Battle of Hastings and the year of Aelred’s death). It is “spiritual” in the most expansive sense, tracing the progress of Aelred’s experience of integration in widening circles from the individual to the communal to the socio-political, a broadening and deepening immersion in the order of charity recognized as a participation in and contribution to the cosmic order established in creation, renewed in the person and redemptive work of Christ and directed toward final eschatological fulfillment at the culmination of history, “the final and perfect realization of the divine plan to establish reciprocity and mutual interdependence between all beings” (41). Thus his approach in fact encompasses “anthropological and ethical, existential and spiritual, historical and doctrinal” dimensions (9), as they are revealed in Aelred’s identity and vocation as disciple, monk, spiritual father, author and “moral conscience of his time” (11).            

Following the preliminary overview of the “General Introduction” (1-12), the first of the volume’s five parts (13-45) provides a thorough review of the relevant secondary literature, beginning with the Life of Aelred by his disciple Walter Daniel, an invaluable source of eyewitness testimony and detailed commentary despite its inevitable limitations, including its reliance on hagiographical conventions, its disproportionate attention to the final years of Aelred’s life and its lack of attention to the abbot’s role in the public life of his time. The consideration of the development of Aelred scholarship of the past 100 years, encompassing literary and doctrinal, socio-historical and psycho-historical approaches, shows both Burton’s mastery of this material and his modesty, remarking of his predecessors that to a great extent “we are but the beneficiaries of their labors” (27) (the often awkward and rather off-putting use of the first-person plural is fortunately limited mainly to the introductory and concluding sections of the book). He goes on to specify the four major segments of Aelred’s life that will provide the structure for the sections to follow, and endorses the thesis that Aelred’s teaching on spiritual friendship, for which he is best known, can be “considered the hermeneutic key par excellence” of his life, his writing and his “human engagements” (37-38).

Part II (47-127) considers the first period of Aelred’s life, from his birth in 1110 up to his entrance into the Yorkshire Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx in 1134, two years after its foundation as a daughter-house of St. Bernard’s Abbey of Clairvaux, the circumstances of which are thoroughly treated here. His first years at Hexham, son of the last in a distinguished line of Anglo-Saxon married priests, brought to an end by the Gregorian Reform shortly after his birth, his probable early education at Durham and his adolescence at the Scottish court, where he developed deep friendships with members of the royal family and rose to the responsible position of seneschal in his early twenties, lead up to the intense spiritual crisis that would precipitate his decision to embrace religious life. Countering the idealized presentation of this period provided by Walter (criticized even by his own contemporaries), Burton draws on autobiographical passages from Aelred’s own works (subjected to careful analytical scrutiny) to explore the feelings of “immense disgust” (120) that assailed Aelred despite his worldly success, the experience of “inner division, dispersion, and fracture” that bring him to “the edge of the abyss” (124); his restless quest for “inner peace, freedom, and unity” (127) explains the attraction of the monastic life as a source of mental, emotional and spiritual healing. At the same time, as Burton, following Aelred Squire, will later point out, the mature Aelred would not simply repudiate the positive experiences of his pre-monastic life: “Everything significant” about his past “eventually fell into place” (533).

Part III (129-264) encompasses the period of his monastic formation and assumption of early responsibilities in his community (1134-1143). Burton highlights the transition from an initial reliance on corporeal austerity and excessive ascetical practices that ultimately failed to provide the peace he sought to a more mature, gospel-centered “ethical Christocentrism . . . a mystique of conformity to Christ” that is at the heart of authentic monastic discipline, a paschal “communion with Christ crucified” (202), that becomes central not only in Aelred’s life but in his teaching. Burton shows how Aelred’s development leads to increasingly important roles in and for the monastery, including a trip to Rome in 1142 that would also include a momentous encounter with Bernard at Clairvaux. Becoming novice master shortly thereafter, Aelred shared the insights gained from his own experience of spiritual integration with those under his guidance, both in his personal direction and through his writings of spiritual instruction, beginning with the Mirror of Charity, composed during his mastership at Bernard’s instigation as a defense of authentic Cistercian asceticism. This aspect of Aelred’s vocation of course is not limited to this period of his life, so Burton moves beyond his chronological framework to provide discussion here not only of the Mirror but of later works of instruction including the Formation of Recluses, written for his anchoress sister and including a series of meditations on the life of Christ that became widely influential under the name of St. Anselm; his meditation on Jesus at the Age of Twelve, in which Christ’s bodily growth becomes a pattern for “the spiritual growth of the believer’s soul” (219); his late “Pastoral Prayer”; and finally the dialogue on Spiritual Friendship, which progresses “from Christ’s inspiring the love with which we love a friend to Christ’s offering himself to us as the friend we may love” (256). Burton does not try to provide complete, systematic analyses of these works, but rather highlights themes and motifs that illustrate his own key points.

The fourth section (265-346), covering his years as founding abbot of the Rievaulx daughter house of Revesby (1143-47) and the first phase of his return to Rievaulx to become its third abbot (1147-54), is perhaps surprisingly short, given its pivotal importance in his exercising the role of monastic leadership, though it must be noted that his tenure as abbot continues of course until the end of his life. Here Burton focuses on the progression from personal to communal unification and integration, the formation of the ecclesial Body of Christ by which the monastery becomes a sign and instrument of the divine plan for humanity, “an ecclesiola, a small church with one heart and one soul forming, with Christ the Head, his entire Body” (331). Relying extensively on Walter’s Life, viewed through a modern critical lens, Burton presents Aelred as embodying and professing various leadership models, as pastor, father, mother, physician, friend, “master architect” (285) – all roles that require a participation in “the mystery of kenosis and the merciful heart of Jesus” (311). He particularly emphasizes Aelred’s commitment to legitimizing “intracommunity pluralism” (333), recognizing and affirming the diversity of gifts among his monks, “the possibility of differentiated ways of living one common monastic grace by adapting it to each person’s temperament” (332) rather than imposing artificial patterns and practices of conformity and convention. While Burton considers individual sermons in this section, as well as the next, to provide illustrations of various aspects of Aelred’s teaching on monastic community life, this source is perhaps the least drawn upon of all the abbot’s writings. Burton notes Chrysogonus Waddell’s proposal that the 28 sermons of the first Clairvaux collection (the only group of sermons recognized as Aelred’s for centuries after his death) should be dated from his time at Revesby (see 343), but no effort is made to consider this group specifically for what it reveals about this initial period of his abbatial leadership, or to locate and consider subsequent collections in their chronological settings, as editor Gaetano Raciti does with the longest set, the 98 liturgical sermons of the Reading–Cluny collection, that he dates to the final period of Aelred’s life. This is an area that calls for greater attention in future biographical and literary studies.                        

The fifth and last section (347-551), on the final period of Aelred’s life (1153-67), is by far the longest and arguably the most original. Here Burton proposes the further broadening of Aelred’s vision of integration in Christ as encompassing generally the entire sweep of human history, and as applicable particularly to the tumultuous events of his own place and time. To do so he draws on what have been the least studied of Aelred’s writings: the historical works composed in the wake of the catastrophic civil war fought by Stephen of Blois and the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I, for the English throne from 1135 through 1153, finally resolved with Stephen’s acceptance of Henry Plantagenet, Matilda’s son, as his heir; and the series of 31 sermons on the Prophetic Burdens of Isaiah written toward the end of Aelred’s life that serve as an exposition of his theology of history. It is in this final period, Burton maintains, that Aelred emerges on a wider stage as the moral conscience of his age and a counselor to kings. The extent of such a role is to some degree speculative, in the absence of documentary evidence confirming Aelred’s actual contacts with major political actors, though the list of important civil and ecclesiastical figures named by Walter as recipients of (now lost, or perhaps never collected) correspondence is quite suggestive (see 363-64), as are his own late writings. The historical works are to be read as functioning particularly as a set of instructive models, both negative and positive, for the future Henry II, considered by Aelred as a providential figure descended from both the current Norman rulers and (somewhat remotely and in a roundabout path through Scotland) from the previous Anglo-Saxon dynasty, and thus possessing full legitimacy to rule and to unite all factions of the nation, a vision of social and political integration by which “Aelred passes from building a monastic community as a model for all communal life to the construction of a civil society that is a Jerusalem-like city of peace rather than a Babylon-styled city of confusion” (351). (How the actual events of Henry’s reign, particularly of course the murder of Thomas Becket three years after Aelred’s own death, would have affected this vision of reconciliation and integration is of course unknowable, though Burton endorses Brian Patrick McGuire’s speculation that given Aelred’s “desire for peace and his moral authority, . . . if he had still been alive at that time the murder would never have been committed” [416-17].) These concrete presentations of the deeper significance of both civil and religious events are succeeded and complemented by his “mystical and eschatological theology of history” (472) presented in what Burton calls “Aelred’s most mature work,” the hitherto little-studied treatise on Isaiah 13-16 presented as a series of homilies, dating from the early 1160s, in which “Aelred gave his theology of history its broadest and most definitive expression, centered on the mystery of the cross and the recapitulation of all things in Christ” (476). Here Aelred’s understanding of the full scope of Christ’s transformative work is given its definitive articulation, a recognition and proclamation “that the formation of Christ does not just represent baptismal theology as it occurs in the individual (in anima) and the ecclesiology of communion as it occurs within a community (in ecclesia). Rather, it also represents a cosmic theology occurring within history itself (in historia)” (486-87). In the context of his own lived experience and that of his country’s recent history, “the chaos of a torn and divided world,” Aelred expresses his firm belief in “a divine and universal reconciliation realized through Christ,” perceived in the incarnation and redemption and in the work of the Church, properly complemented by that of civil authorities, to be completed and fulfilled in the final uniting of all things in Christ as the culmination of history (499-500). Following this detailed explication, Burton provides a much briefer look at Aelred’s final work, the unfinished De Anima, which both circles back to the personal focus of his earliest works and points forward to eternal life with God, and presents Walter’s edifying portrait of Aelred’s final days, in which the “coherence of Aelred’s life” is understood as “wholly founded on a close participation in the mystery of the cross” (515). Having guided the reader with clarity and conviction through the successive dimensions of his subject’s life and thought, Burton’s comprehensive presentation of Aelred’s life-project arrives at the same endpoint, tracing the “single thread . . . consisting of the mystery of personal history or the unification of the individual; the political and mystical theology of human history, or the solidarity of nations, peoples, and cultures; and the cosmic vision of universal history, or the harmonia mundi . . . summarized in Christ, who creates the unity of all things in God through the paschal mystery of the cross” (548-49). This new translation now extends to a wider audience the opportunity to trace the passage of this “single thread” through the complexities of personal, communal and public dimensions of Aelred’s life in this splendid “existential and spiritual biography.”