AELRED of RIEVAULX. The Liturgical Sermons: The Reading-Cluny Collection, 2 of 2 – Sermons 134-182, translated by Daniel Griggs, with an Introduction by Marjory Lange. Cistercian Fathers vol. 87. Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2021. Pp. xlviii + 454. $49.95 pb. ISBN 978-0-87907-187-5. Reviewed by Patrick F. O’CONNELL, Gannon University, Erie, PA 16541.

The appearance of the latest volume of sermons by Aelred of Rievaulx in the Cistercian Fathers series of translations is particularly satisfying, for (at least) three reasons. The first and most immediately evident is that it presents the second half of the 98 sermons in the Reading-Cluny manuscript, by far the largest collection of Aelred’s work in this genre (a total of 182 in the critical Latin edition). It is considered by scholars to bring the reader closest to the author’s original compositions, being perhaps only two removes from a lost autograph manuscript in Aelred’s own hand, whereas the other collections probably descend from stenographic transcriptions of the abbot’s oral presentations. While the first 49 pieces, published in 2021, consist principally of sermons (or chapter discourses, as they are sometimes called, being preached not in church during mass but in the context of the daily gathering of the community after the office of prime in the usual assembly room) on the events of the liturgical calendar from the beginning of Advent through Trinity Sunday – thus the major celebrations of Christ’s incarnation, public ministry, passion, death, resurrection and glorification – the contents of the latter half of the collection are considerably more varied. They complete, of course, the sequence of feasts for the remaining months of the year, from early summer through All Saints Day at the beginning of November. These 49 sermons include materials on six of the seventeen occasions for which Cistercian abbots were mandated to preach: the Birth of John the Baptist, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, the Marian celebrations of the Nativity of the Virgin, the Annunciation (out of sequence and separated from the two earlier commemorations of the feast properly located in the first half) and the Assumption, and All Saints Day. Most of these include multiple examples, presumably preached over a span of years – no less than eight on the Assumption, a record number, six on Mary’s nativity, three each on the Baptist, Peter and Paul and All Saints, along with four on St. Benedict’s July 11 feast day. There is in addition at least one sermon for fifteen other occasions, some considering additional commemorations of Mary, Peter and the Baptist, the rest of saints either chosen by Aelred himself or commissioned by requests of others, with an additional pair of sermons addressed to an assembly of abbots and the only sermon in the Aelredian corpus identified as being preached to nuns. The four sermons presumably written at the request of their abbot for the monks of Westminster Abbey – three on the recently canonized St. Edward the Confessor (##170-72) and one on the Feast of the Holy Relics (#148) that also explicitly mentions Edward’s body entombed there – were perhaps intended to be used as readings during the monastic office rather than being preached in chapter. It is evident then, with its extensive groupings and numerous unique items, that this volume has attractive elements both of depth and of variety peculiar to itself.

Multiple presentations for the same feast exhibit Aelred’s range both in content and in structure. As in the first half of the collection, he occasionally adopts and adapts an entire sermon from a single contemporary source, as with the pair of sermons on the Assumption (##167, 168) dependant on Hugh of St. Victor. More frequently he will incorporate extensive quotations from patristic sources into his own overarching structure, as he does with Origen’s Homilies on Exodus in sermon 141 on St. Benedict, or with Ambrose’s Commentary on Luke and Bernard’s tenth Sermon on the Canticle in sermon 150 on Mary Magdalene. A few of these sermons are variants of ones found in other collections, as sermons 137 and 138 on the Birth of John the Baptist closely resemble sermons 44 and 14, respectively. Occasionally he will link up successive sermons, as when he follows up the images of Mary as Jacob’s ladder, burning bush, constellation and star of the sea at the conclusion of sermon 162 on her nativity with further exploration of these same images at the opening of the following sermon dedicated to the same feast. His love of triadic patterns is frequently evident, as with the triple anointing of Christ’s feet, head and body by Mary Magdalene in sermon 150, and his extensive consideration of the three-fold barrier of sea, wall, and cloud that separate the seeker from Christ in sermon 158 (another Marian nativity sermon, though one that never actually gets around to making the connection to Mary, who explicitly appears only in a brief phrase – “through the intercession of his most sweet mother” – at the very end of the sermon!); a particularly striking instance of this three-fold pattern is found in the sermon for the Feast of St. Andrew (#175), in which the malign “fishing” of the Adversary with hook, net and seine, each with various figurative applications, is finally contrasted with the call of Andrew and his brother Simon to become fishers in a way that contrasts with and counters that of the enemy of humankind.

Sometimes it seems that Aelred deliberately withholds mention of the figure or event being celebrated, heightening anticipation in his listeners before eventually satisfying it. For example, the first of the four sermons on St. Benedict in this volume (#140) focuses throughout on the parallel phrasing of Isaiah 26:7 (“The path of the just is right; the trail of the just is right to walk on”), first identifying the path (or way) with Christ, and only in the final paragraph bringing Benedict into the discussion, citing the abbot’s life journey as exemplifying the trail of the just. Likewise in the following sermon (#141) on guarding the heart, while making a couple of unattributed allusions to the Benedictine Rule along the way, Aelred refers explicitly to Benedict as a model for this discipline only in the final three paragraphs. On the other hand, in sermon 146 Aelred immediately applies the words to Peter on leaving all to follow Christ (Mt. 19:27) to Benedict, citing the Rule, particularly the steps of humility in chapter 7, along with passages from Gregory the Great’s Life of Benedict, to support his case, and in the next sermon (#147) he frames his discussion with references to Benedict as one consecrated to Christ, while devoting most of the intervening sections to the figure of David. Aelred can at times seem playful, almost teasing, in delaying his main point about his subject, as when in sermon 178, on the Feast of St. Gregory the Great (March 12, thus out of chronological sequence when grouped with other commemorations of individual saints), he imagines the protests of his listeners as he begins his sermon with a “Lenten” source (Isaiah 58:1) about wicked deeds, as if forgetful of the day’s special celebration, reserving for the culminating portion of the sermon an extensive direct address to the day’s saint, drawing on his Vita to show that his voice is indeed like the trumpet prominently mentioned in the verse from Isaiah. The common thread running through all these sermons is that the Word of God, communicated in the events commemorated and the persons celebrated, is a gift and a challenge to himself and his audience in the concrete circumstances of their own daily lives.

Secondly, this volume marks the complete English version not only of this largest collection of Aelred’s sermons, but of the entire extant corpus of Aelred’s work in this genre. Though his biographer Walter Daniel had written that his friend and abbot had composed about 200 sermons, until the mid-twentieth century little more than two dozen, found in what is now known as the first Clairvaux manuscript, were recognized as Aelred’s. But beginning in 1952 a succession of discoveries in additional manuscript collections has resulted in the identification and eventual publication of a total of 182 sermons by Aelred, close to the number mentioned by Walter Daniel more than eight centuries earlier. Critically edited texts of all these sermons were eventually issued in three volumes edited by Gaetano Raciti, culminating with the Reading-Cluny critical edition that appeared in 2012, the basis of the present translation, which completes the series of liturgical sermons issued by Cistercian Publications, preceded by translations of the two Clairvaux collections in 2001 and 2016, the Durham and Lincoln collections (plus an additional single sermon) in 2018, and the first half of Reading-Cluny in 2021. But this volume also contains one important further addition. The only sermon mentioned specifically by Walter Daniel in his biography is that which Aelred wrote for the occasion of the “translatio” or reburial of St. Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, in Westminster Abbey, the monastery he had commissioned to be built before his death in 1066, a solemn ceremony which took place on October 13, 1163, two years after his canonization. This sermon, commissioned, along with Aelred’s biography of Edward, by the Abbot of Westminster, Lawrence, a former monk of Durham and a kinsman of the Abbot of Rievaulx, and reported in one early source to have been preached in person by Aelred himself, was long considered to be lost; but in 2005 the scholar Peter Jackson proposed that an anonymous sermon commemorating Edward found (immediately following the Vita by Aelred) in a manuscript held by the Peterborough Central Library, with strong thematic and verbal similarities to the sermons (##170-72) for the Feast of St. Edward found in Reading-Cluny, might well be the missing sermon, a suggestion that has received strong support from Aelredian scholars; the English translation published along with the Latin text when this attribution was first proposed has now been included in the present volume, making a grand total of 183 liturgical sermons credited to Aelred.

Finally, with this volume all known works of Aelred are now available in English, the completion of a project begun over a half-century ago with the 1971 publication of three of Aelred’s spiritual writings, the Rule of Life for a Recluse, Jesus at the Age of Twelve and the Pastoral Prayer, as volume 2 of the newly established Cistercian Fathers series. His dialogues On the Soul (1981) and On Spiritual Friendship (2020) followed, along with his first treatise, The Mirror of Charity (1990), the three hagiographic works collected in Lives of the Northern Saints (2006) and four Historical Works (including the Life of Edward) (2005) – thirteen treatises in all, plus his series of 31 Homilies on the Prophetic Burdens of Isaiah (2018), a commentary on chapters 13-16 of Isaiah, a sort of treatise in homiletic form that was probably never actually preached.              

With its three-dimensional culmination, then, this impressive volume is particularly – though not quite perfectly – satisfying. Certain helpful editorial elements could have provided valuable enhancements. Some, but not all, the sermons are provided with the dates for the feasts; for example, one has to look elsewhere to discover that the Feast of the Holy Relics (#148) was celebrated at Westminster on July 16, or that August 1 is the feast day of St. Peter in Chains (#151), and August 29 that of the Beheading of John the Baptist (#145). While marginal citations identify various texts of liturgical antiphons and responsories used by Aelred, along with the myriad biblical verses and quotations from patristic and even secular sources, there are almost no references to the specific use elsewhere in the liturgy for a particular feast of scriptural texts quoted by Aelred (one of these rare references, the appearance of Psalm 149:5 in the gradual for the mass of the Holy Relics, had previously been identified by Abbot Elias Dietz in his own translation of this sermon accompanying his review of the critical edition of the Reading-Cluny manuscript); it would have been instructive to see how key scriptural verses upon which Aelred based a motif or theme of a particular sermon were rooted in the day’s liturgy, as presumably they were on numerous occasions. No mention is made of the fact that the sermons on the Chair of St. Peter (#152) and the Annunciation (#165) that are included, out of chronological order, in this volume had been preceded by sermons for the same feasts placed according to their proper dates (February 22 and March 25, respectively) and so are to be found in the preceding volume (##106, 112, 113 and ##118, 119, respectively). Conversely, no attention is drawn to the fact that the four sermons on St. Benedict found in this volume (##140, 141, 146, 147) are not out of place, belonging to the July 11 commemoration by Benedictines of the translation of the abbot’s relics to the Abbey of Fleury, whereas the four in the preceding volume (##114-117) from the first half of the manuscript were preached on his primary feast day of March 21. While this volume does provide comprehensive indices of all scriptural, patristic, classical and medieval citations from all five sermon volumes, there is no topical index such as the one included, for example, in the fourth, final volume of St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs in this same Cistercian Fathers series, or that found in the last of the four volumes of the massive Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony, recently published in the companion Cistercian Studies series. At least a comprehensive list of all the sermons from the entire corpus for each feast could have been provided. The illuminating introduction to this volume by Marjory Lange concludes with a “Retrospective Look” at various aspects of the introductions and translations of the five volumes, but does not provide here or elsewhere a summary overview of the temporal progression of the groups of sermons themselves – the scholarly consensus that the first Clairvaux collection probably dated from Aelred’s time as abbot of Rievaulx’ daughter house of Revesby (1143-45), the second Clairvaux collection from the early years of his Rievaulx abbacy (1145-47), the Durham and Lincoln collections dating from the period after 1147 and the Reading-Cluny to the mid-1160s.

But this “wish-list” of an ideal volume should not distract attention from the truly magnificent accomplishment that this final translation brings to its fulfillment. In Marjory Lange’s closing words, in Aelred’s sermons we find him “speaking to his monks, on occasions both obligatory and voluntary, attempting to guide them with passion, compassion, wit, vulnerability, honesty, and faith. In the chapter room as at the altar, he ministered to them and served them, offering himself to them as he had always sought to do. Now, nine [actually eight] hundred-some years later, we are fortunate to join their company” (xliv).