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Discipline and the Rule of Basil in Walter Daniel’s Life of Ailred of Rievaulx*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
He made his little body free of everything that is pleasant in this present life. He sacrificed himself on the altar of unfailing suffering: hardly any flesh clung to his bones; his lips alone remained a frame to his teeth. The excessive emaciation of his body and the thinness of his face gave an angelic expression to his countenance. Eating scarcely anything and drinking less, by his unbelievable fasting, he lost altogether, and no wonder, the desire for food.
So wrote Walter Daniel of his erstwhile friend and mentor, Ailred, in his Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, some time after Ailred’s death in 1167. This was written in an attempt to demonstrate his abbot’s sanctity with the clear hope that as a result he might eventually be canonized. It is hard, therefore, to understand why this image of the abbot who, if we are to believe Walter, governed ‘over one hundred monks and five hundred laymen’, s is so at odds with the instructions to abbots contained within the generally moderate Rule of Benedict, which governed the lives of all Cistercian monks. The Cistercians interpreted the Rule more rigidly than the Benedictines, but even for them there should be no ostentatious exhibitions of pious self-starvation since a monk must exhibit mediocritas or moderation in all he did. Moreover, regulation of eating must not be at the expense of life itself. In order to resolve Walter’s anomalous portrait of his abbot I will first seek the source of the textual representation of the ascetic Ailred and then, very briefly, consider its relationship to what we can surmise about Ailred’s actual practices in order to hypothesise about what kind of influences helped to form them. In the process, I will suggest that the extreme form of monastic disciplina, exemplified by the literary model of Ailred, causes us to question Foucault’s notion that: ‘Discipline produces practiced bodies, docile bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).’
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2007
Footnotes
*
I would like to thank the AHRC for sponsoring this research.
References
1 The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel, ed. and trans. F. M. Powicke (London, 1950), XLI, 49. Throughout this paper roman numerals refer to the chapter number in the primary text, followed by arabic numerals to denote page numbers in the modern edition.
2 ‘Letter to Maurice’, in Powicke, Life of Ailred, 49–65, at 79.
3 License, Tom, ‘The Gift of Seeing Demons in Early Cistercian Spirituality’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly 39: 1 (2004), 49–65 Google Scholar, at 50; citing a more developed study of the Cistercian preoccupation with mediocritas by Giles Constable, ‘Moderation and Restraint in Ascetic Practices in the Middle Ages’, in Haijo Jan Westra, ed., From Athens to Chartres: Neoplatonism and Medieval Thought; Studies in Honour of Edouard Jeaneau, Studien und Texte zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 35 (Leiden, 1992), 315–27; reprinted in idem, Culture and Spirituality in medieval Europe (Aldershot, 1996), no. X.
4 William of St. Thierry, The Golden Epistle: a Letter to the Brethren of Mont Dieu, trans. T. Berkeley, intro. J. M. Dechanet (Kalamazoo, MI, 1980), XXXII, 53.
5 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (Harmondsworth, 1977), 138.Google Scholar
6 McGuire, B. P., Brother and Lover: Aelred of Rievaulx (New York, 1994), 60 Google Scholar; Aelred Squire, Aelred of Rievaulx: a Study (London, 1981), 12, 24, 127.
7 Aelred of Rievaulx, De Sanctis ecclesiae haugustaldensis, in James Raine, ed., The Priory of Hexham, vol. 1: Its Chroniclers, Endowments and Annals, Surtees Society 44 (Durham, 1863–4), 173–203.
8 Life of Ailred, V, 12 n. 1.
9 Ibid., XXVI, 34.
10 Squire, Aelred of Rievaulx, 28.
11 The Rule of Saint Benedict: in Latin and English, ed. and trans. Justin McCann, (London, 1952), II, 17–23.
12 Ibid., Prologue, 13; XL, 97; LXXIII, 161.
13 Ibid., LXXIII, 161.
14 There are two surviving library catalogues for the abbey compiled between 1190 and 1200: Cambridge, Jesus College, MS 34, fols 1–5r and 5V-6. They have been edited by David N. Bell, The Libraries of the Cistercians, Gilhertines, and Premonstratensians, Corpus of British Library Catalogues 3 (London, 1992) [hereafter: Bell, Libraries], 87–137.
15 Regula Sancti Basilii Episcopi Cappadociae ad Monachos (PL 103, 487–554); and Basili Regula a Rufino Latine Versa, ed. Klaus Zelzer, CSEL 86 (Vienna, 1986).
16 Life of Ailred, XXX, 25. Although both McGuire and Squire use this scene to illustrate Ailred’s use of Celtic practices it also resembles a scene in the Lausiac History concerning Evagrius of Pontus: Palladius: Lausiac History, ed. and trans. Robert T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers 34 (Westminster, MD, 1965), XI, 38, 113. There was a copy of this text in the Rievaulx library during the twelfth century. MSS no. Z19, 136a, in Bell, Libraries, 110.
17 Life of Ailred, XXX, 34.
18 Ibid.
19 The Ascetic Works of Saint Basil, ed. and trans. W. K. L. Clarke (London, 1925), Introduction, 45.
20 Basili regula, III, 1–39, 25–32.
21 Ibid., IX, 7–22, 46–9.
22 Ibid., LXXXVIIII, 3, 123.
23 Ibid., LVII, 1–3,96.
24 ‘The Longer Rules’, in Clarke, Ascetic Works, 145–228, XVII, 181. See also: Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), 101–2 Google Scholar, for a discussion of sexual continence as a way back to ‘the full humanity of Adam and Eve’.
25 Bell, Libraries, Z19: 129, 109.
26 For example, the story of the boy who swallowed a demon in the shape of a frog: Life of Ailred, XXXIX, 46–8.
27 Rule of Benedict, Prologue, 13.
28 Basili regula, 11, 101–4, 22.
29 Clarke, Ascetic Work, 45.
30 For an examination of the significance of this contrast see: Giles Constable, ‘From Cluny to Citeaux’, in Duhamel-Amado, Claudie and Lobrichon, Guy, eds, Georges Duby: l’ecriture d’histoire (Brussels, 1996), 317–22 Google Scholar, at 320 [reprinted in idem, Cluny from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000), no. VI].
31 Seen. 5 above.
32 Bell, Libraries, 97: 104. The text is found in PL 103, 487–554; and is translated into English in Rivers, Robert and Hagen, Harry, ‘The Admonitio Ad Filium Spiritualem: Introduction and Translation’, American Benedictine Review 53 (2002), 121–46.Google Scholar
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34 Bell, Libraries, 97, 104.
35 A well-used, grubby, twelfth-century manuscript of the Regula sancti Basilii episcopi Cappadociae ad monachos, translated by Rufinus, survives from Clairvaux with simple marginal annotations: Troyes, BM, 1422, fols ir-79v.
36 McGuire, Brother and Lover, 61.
37 Squire, Aelred of Rievaulx, 127.
38 In the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, written after 716, the writer says that Benedict Biscop brought back his rule from Gaul ‘as if hidden in the coffers of his breast and delivered them to us to follow’: D. Whitlock, ed., ‘The Anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, Abbott of Jarrow’, EHD 1 (1979), 758–70.
39 McNulty, Patricia M. and Hamilton, Bernard, ‘ Orientale lumen et magistra lalinhas: Greek Influences on Western Monasticism (900–1100)’, in Le Millénaire du Mont Athos, 963–1963: Etudes et mélanges, 2 vols (Chevetogne, 1963-4), 2: 181–216 Google Scholar [reprinted in idem, Monastic Reform, Catharism and the Crusades (900–1300) (Aldershot, 1985), no. V.
40 Ibid., 215.
41 Ward, Benedicta, ‘The Desert Myth: Reflections on the Desert Ideal in Early Cistercian Monasticism’, in Pennington, M. Basil, ed., One Yet Two: Monastic Tradition East and West (Kalamazoo, MI, 1976), 183–98 Google Scholar, at 187.
42 Dunn, Marilyn, ‘Eastern Influence on Western Monasticism in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Byzanlinische Forschungen 13 (1988), 245–59.Google Scholar
43 Regula S. Basilii, Interrogatione III (PL 103, 494).
44 Harmless, William, Desert Christians: an Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (New York, 2004), 428.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
45 Jotischky, Andrew, The Perfection of Solitude: Hermits and Monks in the Crusader States (Pennsylvania, PA, 1995), 71–2 Google Scholar; Patrich, J., a Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Washington, DC, 1995), 28–31.Google Scholar
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48 Ibid.
49 Stevenson, J., ed., Libellas de vita et miraculis S. Godrici, heremitae de Finchale, Auctore Reginaldo monacho Dunhelmensi, Surtees Society 20 (London and Edinburgh, 1847), 10, 42–3.Google Scholar
50 Jotischky, Andrew, Perfection of Solitude, 72–3 Google Scholar, argues that in the Palestinian monastic tradition John the Baptist was believed to have eaten the locust bean plant rather than locusts.
51 I would like to thank Andrew Jotischky for drawing my attention to references to this practice in John Moschos’ seventh-century text, The Spiritual Meadow, in PG 87, 2851–3112; the practice is also mentioned in the sixth-century text, Cyril of Scythopolis: Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. R. M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI, 1991); and in the fifth-century Byzantine historian Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers Series, 2nd ser. (Grand Rapids, MI, 1957), 2: 236–427.
52 Libellas de vita el miraculis S. Godrici, LXXVII, 126.