sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 5

Marsha L. Dutton: Embracing God

Scholars familiar with Cistercian Publications books and the annual Cistercian conference sessions at Western Michigan University will be aware of Marsha L. Dutton's many contributions to scholarship on the medieval Cistercians. And a quick look at Brepols' International Medieval Bibliography will inform the reader that over the past four decades Dutton has published dozens of articles and chapters on the twelfth-century English Cistercian abbot and author Aelred of Rievaulx. This book, Embracing God, reprints six previously published articles and chapters, and includes one new chapter. The book also contains an Introduction, written by J. Stephen Russell, as well as an Appendix that lists Aelred's treatises (not only the spiritual treatises) and the various editions and English translations of those treatises from the seventeenth century to today.

One may ask - what is the value in publishing or reading a book of (mostly) reprinted essays? Happily, I suggest that anyone who questions the value of so doing will find in this book an inspiring example of a collection that is so much more than the sum of its parts (not to mention that four of the essays were originally published in the 1980s and are now out of print). Dutton explains in the Preface that decades of studying Aelred - "addressing different and apparently unrelated topics" (xi) - led to an understanding that core to Aelred's thought and writing was his determination, indeed insistence, to share with readers that God is there, has been there and will be there, all along. For Aelred, the fact that God placed his image in humans in the faculties of memory, will, and reason enables individuals to know God. As the essays show, in different and yet complementary ways, for Aelred memory plays a particularly strong role in allowing people to know God "as they have always known him" .(xi)

On another level, the republication here of Dutton's earlier essays also allows the modern reader to remember, and to discover anew via that remembering, how much we owe our scholarly forebears. In this case, the reader can appreciate the wide and deep insights that Dutton's studies have offered to Cistercian scholarship. The essays have not been updated since their original publications - except in the footnotes which add, where relevant, details of new editions or translations that have appeared since the essays' original publications, or mention other essays that Dutton has published in the meantime - and, to my mind, this was a good decision. In reading the essays as they were originally published, we can see the development of ideas over time and, more to the point in this case, can identify with hindsight the common thread that connects even seemingly separate studies. That thread is, as Dutton notes, that all the essays "offer intersecting paths leading to the same end: to the God who invites us to his embrace" (xii), as shown consistently throughout Aelred's treatises.

The first chapter, "Clinging to God: The Pedagogy of Memory in Aelred's Spiritual Treatises", is newly written and not previously published. In many ways, it is the pièce de resistance of the collection. One can see strands in the other essays pointing towards this essay. In Chapter 1, Dutton identifies that Aelred's attention to the human soul's faculties of memory, will and reason was evident throughout Aelred's entire writing career: it was there in Aelred's first treatise, the Mirror of Charity, and continued right through the later treatises Jesus as a Boy at Twelve, The Formation of Recluses, Spiritual Friendship, and On the Soul. Chapter 1 starts by summarising Augustine's understanding of the tripartite soul, and argues that scholars have seriously underestimated the influence of Augustine's explanation of the soul on Aelred, just as scholars' attention to affectus in medieval Cistercian spirituality has led them to underestimate the importance to Aelred of the soul's faculty of memory.

Russell's Introduction is a strong contribution to Cistercian scholarship and the theory and practice of source analysis in its own right, and is a model for what a good Introduction to an author's oeuvre can be. Russell identifies patterns and developments in Dutton's scholarship over the decades, and so helps the reader appreciate connections between the essays. Russell suggests that the seven essays can be roughly divided into "latitudinal essays" (in which a certain theme is studied across a given author's writing or writings) and "longitudinal essays" (in which we study the earlier influences on Aelred, e.g. the influence of Augustine; or we study Aelred's influences on others, e.g. Aelred's influence on Bonaventure). This is a clear and helpful suggestion, and it helps one appreciate the breadth of Dutton's expertise.

Chapter 2 is "Christ Our Mother: Aelred's Iconography for Contemplative Union" (first published 1985), a latitudinal study. Chapters 5 and 6 can be read profitably together. Both are latitudinal studies, and both study the spirituality of key twelfth-century Cistercians (Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St Thierry, as well as Aelred). The chapters are "Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: The Eucharistic Spirituality of the Cistercian Fathers" (from 1987) and "Intimacy and Imitation: The Humanity of Christ in Cistercian Spirituality" (from 1987).

The longitudinal studies are: Chapter 3, "Friendship and the Love of God: Augustine's Teaching in the Confessions and Aelred of Rievaulx's Response in Spiritual Friendship" (first published 2005), which examines similarities and differences between the two authors' understandings of friendship (including the famous phrase amare et amari), with Aelred being more optimistic and believing, in contrast to Augustine, that all kinds of friendship could lead one towards God; and then a companion-piece to Chapter 3 in Chapter 4, "A Model for Friendship: Ambrose's Contribution to Aelred of Rievaulx's Spiritual Friendship" (from 2013), where Dutton shows that earlier scholars had underestimated the influence of Ambrose's On Duties [De officiis] on Aelred's De spirituali amicitial, in part it seems because those scholars had been looking for the influence of Cicero and, so, when Aelred quoted or alluded to ideas that appeared in both Cicero's and Ambrose's writings, they identified these as citations of Cicero only; and Chapter 7, "The Cistercian Source: Aelred, Bonaventure and Ignatius" (from 1985), where Dutton identifies the influence that an extract (on the life of Christ) from the threefold meditation in Aelred's The Formation of Recluses had on Bonaventure's Lignum vitae and Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, and untangles the medieval and recent misattributions of Aelred's work to Anselm that had led to Aelred's influence being under-appreciated.

Certain qualities of Dutton's work are highlighted by reading a range of essays written over such a wide time-span. One is Dutton's deep knowledge of the texts, including those such as Aelred's sermons that in many cases are still not translated or widely accessible. Another is Dutton's capacity to challenge scholarly assumptions, often by using fundamental techniques of source-criticism that are too often overlooked. For example, while many scholars have assumed that the autobiographical sections in Aelred's spiritual treatises are transparent windows into Aelred's own life, Dutton argues that we must start by recognising that such autobiographical sections serve a literary and educative function and that these functions are the key things to study. In so doing, Dutton's essays cumulatively identify a consistency across Aelred's spiritual treatises that has not been recognised previously. Dutton articulates this consistency in Chapter 1. All five spiritual treatises start with a familiar person asking Aelred to explain something, but these are not strictly autobiographical accounts. Instead, the requests to Aelred are the literary technique that Aelred uses in order to open up space for Aelred the author to in turn offer questions and prompts to the readers to "remember the God they already know". (41-42)

Finally, as I sit in Tasmania writing this review, I find myself looking south and imagining that I can see Antarctica (the only continent with no Cistercian communities!). This brings to mind an analogy relevant to Chapter 1's masterly synthesis of Aelred's understanding, across his entire written oeuvre, of the soul, memory in the soul, memory's alignment with the Son, and hence Aelred's (and Bernard's and William of St Thierry's) persistent (indeed, "audacious" and "importunate" - in a positive sense, in Dutton's analysis) yearning for intimacy with Christ. The analogy is that of an iceberg.

In deciding to open this collection of essays with the most recent essay, Dutton has offered readers the tip of the iceberg - an inspiring thing in its own right, and even more inspiring when one understands that the tip stands on all that rests under it. And what rests under it is Dutton's half-century's worth of reading, thinking, and writing. Embracing God's individual essays are models of close reading and deep immersion in the sources, extending at times to scrutinising Aelred's individual word choices and verb tenses and moods - there are no short-cuts here. Readers interested in twelfth-century Cistercian theology and history must be thankful that Dutton's initial training in editorial practice and Middle English translations of Aelred's writing was but the start of her ongoing commitment to reading the early Cistercian writers, listening to what they had to say, and entering into dialogue with them (and modern readers) via essays such as those published in this excellent book.