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Monastic Friendship and Toleration in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Brian Patrick McGuire
Brian Patrick McGuire*
Affiliation:
The Medieval Centre, Copenhagen University, Denmark
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Extract

Friendship is a commonplace of monastic life. What more congenial environment could be found for the formation and cultivation of friendships than the protective recesses of monastic cloisters? Here existed the time, charity and mutual concern so painfully absent in the outside world. In the cloister men could get to know each other and to experience each other in the fellowship of Christ. Under a mild and understanding abbot, they could discover, as Ailred of Rievaulx did in the twelfth century, that God is friendship.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 22: Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition , 1985 , pp. 147 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1985

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References

1 For full documentation see my forthcoming book, Friendship in the Middle Ages: The Monastic Experience (Cistercian Publications: Kalamazoo, Michigan). I am greatly indebted for guidance in this paper to Sir Richard Southern, Peter Brown, Jean Leclercq, Chrysogonus Waddell, and to the Trappist community at New Clairvaux, California.

2 Lawrence Giustiniani (1381–1455), De disciplina et perfectione monasticae conversationis, cap io in Opera Omnia, 1 (Venice 1751): ‘Interdicenda est privata conversatio in collegiis servorum Christi, quae quamquam in nullo alio reprehensibilis sit, sine proximorum tamen scandalo fieri nequit’.

3 See “amitiés spirituelles”, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité (Paris 1927) 1 pp. 521—29.

4 Amand Boon, ed Pachomiana Latina (Bibliothèque de la Revue d’Histoire Ecclésias tique 7 Louvain 1932) esp Praecepta § 92–7. The Rules of Saint Basil can be found in PG 31, and relevant sections at cols 921, 936–7, 940–1, 996–1001.

5 As seen in Sister Michael Connor, ‘The First Cistercian Nuns and Renewal Today’, Cistercian Studies 5 (1970) pp. 131–68.

6 Michael Petschenig, ed Iohannis Cassiani Conlationes XXIIII (CSEL 13 Vienna 1886) p. 462. Abbreviated as Conl

7 Constttutiones Monasticae, PC 31 col 1418.

8 This is Alard Gazet, whose commentary is most easily available together with the text of Cassian in PL 49 col 1044: ‘haec, inquam, et his similia, ne cui forte scrupulum moveant, intelligenda sunt, quoad externam conversationem et familiaritatem, sive de exterioribus et communibus amicitiae et charitatis signis et officils, quae omnibus fratribus aequaliter, id est, indifferenter et promiscue, exhibenda sunt’.

9 Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago and London 1980) esp cap 9, ‘The Triumph of Ganymede’.

10 Here I am greatly indebted to the seminar for interpretative studies at the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where John Benton invited me in 1982 to present a paper on dreams and visions in Cistercian literature.

11 Ailred’s De Spiritali] Amk[ttia] is available in a critical edition by Anselm Hoste (ce Continuatio Medievalis i 1971).

12 PL 16 col 25–194, esp bk III caps 127–31.

13 Lecture at the Medieval Centre, Copenhagen University, November 1982, by Professor Birger Munk Olsen, on the basis of his exhaustive survey of the survival and transmission of classical texts in medieval sources.

14 ‘The Desert Myth’, One Yet Two, ed B. Pennington (Kalamazoo 1976) pp.183-99.

15 Contrast, for example, his Confessions IV, ch 7 and 8, after the death of his boyhood friend.

16 In this context Possidius’s biography of Augustine should be looked upon as the record not just of Augustine but of the community he formed and in which Possidius shared (like Eadmer with Anselm much later, or Walter Daniel with Ailred).

17 Leclercq, Jean, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France (Oxford 1979) pp. 8–16. Google Scholar.

18 I am grateful to Peter Brown for a conversation on monasticism in Late Antiquity, where he emphasized a link between kinship and friendship. Bonding provides insights also into the medieval experience. For a surprising study of friendship, see his The Cult of the Saints (Chicago and London 1982).

19 Dialogus Miraculorum ed J. Strange (Cologne 1851) I p. 45: Dist. Prima, cap 37, ‘De conversione Walewani militis, qui armatus ad ordinem venit’.

20 De Spir. Amie. lib. 3, 40–44.

21 Southern, R. W., The Life of Saint Anselm by Eadmer (OMT 1972) lxxii p. 150 Google Scholar: ‘Qualiter servata sint aliter quam praeceperit ipse pater Anselmus de quo scripta sunt’.

22 See my ‘The Cistercians and the Rise of the Exemplum in early Thirteenth Century France’, Classica et Medievalía (Copenhagen 1982).

23 Vita Prima (PL 185) bk I cap 59.

24 Sermones Super Cantica Canticorum 26: 3–8 in eddj. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, H. M. Rocháis, S. Bernardi Opera 1 (Rome 1957).

25 De Excessu Fratris Sui Satyri, PL 16, cols 1345–1414.

26 Gerard died in 1138: B. Griesser, ed Exordium Magnum Cisterciense (Rome 1961) p. 153, and Bernard wrote his lament immediately afterwards. Ailred met Bernard at Clairvaux in the spring of 1142 and began his Speculum Caritatis on his return to England: Aelred Squire, Aelred of Rievaulx (Kalamazoo 1981) p. 25. The lament is in bk II, cap 34.

27 De Spir. Amie. 3:85-7.

28 ‘Cassian and the Carta Caritatis’, was a paper presented at the Cistercian Conference in Kalamazoo in May 1983.

29 ‘Notes towards the Exegesis of a Letter by Saint Stephen Harding’, Noble Piety and Reformed Monasticism (Studies in Medieval Cistercian History 7 Kalamazoo 1981) pp. 10–39.

30 See my ‘Love, Friendship and Sex in the Eleventh Century: The Experience of Anselm’, Studia Theologica 28 (1974) pp. 111–52.

31 ‘The Cistercians and the Transformation of Monastic Friendships’, Analecta Cisterciensia 37 (1981) pp. 1-Ó3.

32 One of the best and earliest expressions of this change is a letter by Alexander III, in J. Leclercq, ‘Epìtres d’Alexandre III sur les cisterciens’, Revue Benedictine 64 (1934) pp. 68–82.

33 McDonnell, E. W., The Béguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New York 1969)pp. 105–19 Google Scholar.

34 ‘The Challenge of Scholasticism’ in Louis Lekai, The Cistercians: [deals and Reality(Ohio 1977) pp. 77–83.

35 Brooke, Rosalind B., The Coming of the Friars (London 1975). The rule VI p. 123 Google Scholar ‘Wherever the brothers are or happen to be, they shall act as intimate friends one to another.’ XI p. 125 ‘Nor shall they form close friendships with men or women, so that no scandal arise between brothers or on their account for any such reason. ‘

36 The Life of Saint Clare, trans Pascal Robinson (Philadelphia 1910) p. 10.

37 De Imitatione Christi II pp. 8–9.

38 There are exempla of friendship in twelfth century miracle collections from Clairvaux, as Troyes MS Bibl. mun. 946. See my ‘A lost Clairvaux Exemplum Collection found’, Anal. Cist. (1983) pp. 27–62.

39 For a contemporary Catholic evaluation of spiritual friendship, see Conner, Paul M., Friendship between Consecrated Men and Women and the Growth of Charity (Rome 1972)Google Scholar.