only children, and have been at the queen’s court only for a few months before her death. But even so, they can hardly have been younger than St. Aelred, who was born in 1109. The tone of St. Aelred’s letter to his sister is not that of a young man, and he refers to his sister’s advanced age,[1] as Miss Allen reminds us.[2] Yet it is very clear from the Rule that the recluses for whom it was written were young.[3] Here too Miss Allen agrees.,ref>P. 476.</ref> Her explanation would be that St. Aelred (who admits that he has no experience in guiding recluses, and writes from the works of “doctors”) is perhaps himself drawing upon the Ancren Riwle, in which case the citation in the Ancren Riwle “as Saint Aelred wrote to his sister” would be the addition of a scribe who had noted the resemblance of the two texts.[4] It is a possible explanation, but not the obvious one.
“The most conspicuous obstacle” Miss Allen feels to be that “St. Bernard (either with or without the ‘Saint’) is quoted thirteen times.” However, the difficulty is not, she thinks, insuperable. The author was, she says, a contemporary of St. Bernard.
But this difficulty becomes much more serious if, as I am afraid is the case, some of these quotations come, not from St. Bernard himself, but from the Bernardine literature of the generation succeeding the saint’s death.
One of the most difficult problems will, I think, be found to lie in Part VI., “Of Penance.” “Nimeð nu god ȝeme,” says the writer of the Rule, “vor hit is almest Seint Beornardes Sentence.” This has always been explained as “it is nearly all from the Liber Sententiarum of St. Bernard.”[5] This, however, is not the case. This section of the Rule seems to have nothing in common with Bernard’s Sententiæ or his Aliæ Sententiæ nor with the Liber Sententiarum: all these are collections of disconnected passages.[6] In the opening pages of this Part VI.,[7] the elect are described as
- ↑ Nulla vobis de macie vultus, de exilitate brachiorum, de cutis asperitate sit cura. Hæc tibi, soror (gratias deo), dicenda non fuerant: sed quia nec solum propter te, sed etiam propter adolescentiores, quæ similem vitam tuo consilio arripere gestiunt, hanc tibi formulam tradi volusti, hæc interserenda putavi.
Migne, xxxii. 1454. St. Aelred, De vita eremitica ad sororem liber.
- ↑ P. 530.
- ↑ See, especially, Morton, p. 6.
- ↑ P. 529.
- ↑ So Morton; and Hall, Selections, ii. 375.
- ↑ The Liber Sententiarum (§ 142, see Migne, Pat. Lat. clxxxiv. section 783, column 1151), and the Ancren Riwle (Morton, p. 356) both give a mystical interpretation of the wheels of the Chariot of Elijah. But it is not the same.
- ↑ Morton, pp. 348–354.
