Aelred of Rievaulx
Aelred of Rievaulx , also known as also Ailred, Ælred, or Æthelred; was an English Cistercian monk and writer who served as Abbot of Rievaulx from 1147 until his death. He is venerated by the Catholic Church as a saint and by some Anglicans.
Life
Aelred was born in Hexham, Northumbria, in year 1110, one of three sons of Eilaf, priest of St Andrew's at Hexham, himself a son of another Eilaf, treasurer of Durham. In 1095, the Council of Claremont had forbidden the ordination of the sons of priests. This was done in part to end the inheritance of benefices. He may have been partially educated by Lawrence of Durham, who sent him a hagiography of Saint Brigid.Aelred's early education was probably at the cathedral school at Durham. Aelred spent several years at the court of King David I of Scotland in Roxburgh, possibly from the age of 14, rising to the rank of echonomus. At some point during this period, Aelred became the target of personal harassment by a knight of the king's court, which came to a head in the king's presence and included a degrading sexual slur. Walter Daniel related this incident to demonstrate Aelred's forgiveness of the knight and his skill in conflict resolution, but around this time Aelred developed feelings of depression and alienation, and he left court at age twenty-four to enter the Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire.
In 1138, when Rievaulx's patron, Walter Espec, was to surrender his Wark on Tweed Castle to King David of Scotland, Aelred reportedly accompanied Abbot William of Rievaulx to the Scottish border to negotiate the transfer. He saw that his reluctance to part from his friends at court delayed his adopting his monastic calling. For Aelred, the source and object of true friendship is Christ.
In 1142 Aelred travelled to Rome, alongside Walter of London, Archdeacon of York, to represent before Pope Innocent II the northern prelates who opposed the election of Henry de Sully, nephew of King Stephen as archbishop of York. The result of the journey was that Aelred brought back a letter from Pope Innocent summoning the superiors whom Aelred represented to appear in Rome the following March to make their deposition in the required canonical form. The resulting negotiations dragged on for many years.
Upon his return from Rome, Aelred became novice master at Rievaulx. In 1143, he was appointed abbot of the new Revesby Abbey, a daughter house of Rievaulx in Lincolnshire. In 1147, he was elected abbot of Rievaulx itself, a position he was to hold until his death. Under his administration, the abbey is said to have grown to some 140 monks and 500 conversi and laymen.
His role as abbot required him to travel. Cistercian abbots were expected to make annual visitations to daughter-houses, and Rievaulx had five in England and Scotland by the time Aelred held office. Moreover, Aelred had to make the long sea journey to the annual general chapter of the Order at Cîteaux in France.
Alongside his role as a monk and later abbot, Aelred was involved throughout his life in political affairs. The fourteenth-century version of the Peterborough Chronicle states that Aelred's efforts during the twelfth-century papal schism brought about Henry II's decisive support for the Cistercian candidate, resulting in 1161 in the formal recognition of Pope Alexander III.
Aelred wrote several influential books on spirituality, among them Speculum caritatis and De spirituali amicitiâ.
He also wrote seven works of history, addressing three of them to Henry II of England, advising him how to be a good king and declaring him to be the true descendant of Anglo-Saxon kings.
In his later years, he is thought to have suffered from the kidney stones and arthritis. Walter reports that in 1157 the Cistercian General Council allowed him to sleep and eat in Rievaulx's infirmary; later he lived in a nearby building constructed for him.
Aelred died in the winter of 1166–7, probably on 12 January 1167 at Rievaulx.
''De spirituali amicitiâ''
De spirituali amicitiâ, considered to be his greatest work, is a Christian counterpart of Cicero's De amicitia and designates Christ as the source and ultimate impetus of spiritual friendship. On top of its intellectual foundation, Aelred draws on his personal experience to provide "specific and concrete" recommendations for creating and maintaining long-term friendships. According to Brian McGuire, "Aelred believed that true love has a respectable name and a rightful place in good human company, especially that of the monastery." This "emphasis on the centrality of friendship in the monastic life places him outside the mainstream of the tradition. In writing a special treatise dedicated to friendship and indicating that he could not live without friends, Aelred outdid all his monastic predecessors and had no immediate successors. Whether or not his need for friendship is an expression of Aelred's sexual identity, his insistence on individual friendships in the monastic life meant a departure from what is implied in the Rule of St. Benedict." Within the wider context of Christian monastic friendship, "it was Aelred who specifically posited friendship and human love as the basis of monastic life as well as a means of approaching divine love, who developed and promulgated a systematic approach to the more difficult problems of intense friendships between monks."It was likely at Durham that Aelred first encountered Cicero's Laelius de Amicitia. In Roman terminology amicitia means "friendship" and could be between states or individuals. It suggested an equality of status and in practice it might only be an alliance to pursue mutual interests. For Cicero, amicitia involved genuine trust and affection. "But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle —friendship can only exist between good men. We mean then by the 'good' those whose actions and lives leave no question as to their honour, purity, equity, and liberality; who are free from greed, lust, and violence; and who have the courage of their convictions."
In Confessions, Augustine of Hippo identifies three phases of friendship: adolescence, early adulthood and adulthood. Adolescent friendships are essentially self-interested comradeship. Augustine then describes a close friendship he had as a young adult with a colleague. This was based on love and grew out of shared interests and experiences and what each learned from the other. The third mature phase for Augustine is transcendent, in that he loves others "in Christ": the focus is on Christ and the point of friendship is to grow closer to Christ with and through friends. In writing of adolescent friendship Augustine said, "For I even burnt in my youth heretofore, to be satiated in things below; and I dared to grow wild again, with these various and shadowy loves: my beauty consumed away, …pleasing myself, and desirous to please in the eyes of men. And what was it that I delighted in, but to love, and be loved?"
Aelred was greatly influenced by Cicero, but later modified his interpretation upon reading Augustine of Hippo's Confessions. In De spirituali amicitiâ, Aelred adopted Cicero's dialogue format. In the Prologue however, he mirrors Augustine's description of his early adolescence with the speaker describing his time at school, where "the charm of my companions gave me the greatest pleasure. Among the usual faults that often endanger youth, my mind surrendered wholly to affection and became devoted to love. Nothing seemed sweeter to me, nothing more pleasant, nothing more valuable than to be loved and to love."
Posthumous reputation
, writing about Aelred after his death, described him as "a man of the highest integrity, of great practical wisdom, witty and eloquent, a pleasant companion, generous and discreet. And with all these qualities, he exceeded all his fellow prelates of the Church in his patience and tenderness. He was full of sympathy for the infirmities, both physical and moral, of others."Aelred was never formally canonised in the manner that was later established, but he became the centre of a cult in the north of England that was officially recognised by Cistercians in 1476. As such, he was venerated as a saint, with his body kept at Rievaulx. In the sixteenth century, before the dissolution of the monastery, John Leland, claims he saw Aelred's shrine at Rievaulx containing Aelred's body glittering with gold and silver. Today, Aelred of Rievaulx is commemorated as a saint on 12 January, the traditional date of his death, in the latest official edition of the Roman Martyrology, which expresses the official position of the Catholic Church.
He also appears in the calendars of various other Christian denominations.
Much of Aelred's history is known because of the Life written about him by Walter Daniel shortly after his death.
For many centuries his most famous work has been his Life of Saint Edward, King and Confessor.
Aelred is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival and on the Episcopal Church calendar with a feast on 12 January.
Discourses on sexuality
Aelred has been popular with small circles of gay Catholics since at least the 1970s, and during the same time period, Brian Patrick McGuire and his students discussed the possibility that Aelred might have possessed a homosexual orientation. Within this context, "there is a movement among priests and religious who consider themselves to be gay in their sexual orientation to find in historical figures such as Aelred earlier expressions of their own identity."In 1980, the historian John Boswell characterized Aelred as a gay man in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, the landmark study into the relationship between the medieval Church and homosexuality. This opened up discussion of Aelred's sexuality to a wider audience, and triggered a debate that "has dragged on, often with vituperation." Critics of this hypothesis have generally used traditional literary-critical methods to argue that Aelred's writing contains conventional monastic language rather than homoerotic language, and include Elizabeth Freeman, Jean Leclercq, and Julia Kristeva.
Ruth Mazo Karras, an expert in medieval gender and sexuality, cites Aelred as an example of a man "for whom same-sex erotic relationships, even if chaste, were important." She also states that "depictions of a Middle Ages concerned only with spiritual issues as opposed to material, a culture whose people were so radically different from us that their bodies became irrelevant, have been superseded by recent scholarship." Brian McGuire, likewise, accepts Aelred as "a man who felt physically and mentally more drawn to other men than to women."
Marsha L. Dutton states that "...there is no way of knowing the details of Aelred's life, much less his sexual experience or struggles." Nevertheless, Brian McGuire admits in his emotional biography of Aelred that "the absence of women, Aelred's confession of his own passion, and the knight's obscenities all indicate that Aelred at the court of King David lost his head, his heart, and perhaps his body to another young man."
In modern times, several gay-friendly organizations have adopted Aelred as their patron saint, including Integrity USA in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, and the Order of St. Aelred in the Philippines. Aelred's inclusion on the calendar of the Episcopal Church was initiated by Integrity USA in 1985, and he was approved by the House of Bishops with their full awareness that he was believed to be a gay man by Integrity. Two years later, Integrity canonized Aelred as their official patron, promising "to regularly observe his feast, promote his veneration and seek before the heavenly throne of grace the support of his prayers on behalf of justice and acceptance for lesbians and gay men."