Ascetical and Monastic

Kassia the Nun offers a unique glimpse into ninth-century Byzantium in the only woman whose works were included in the corpus of liturgical hymns. This volume explores Kassia’s thought on Christology, on gender, and on monasticism itself. It provides readers with an opportunity to know this woman of remarkable intellect, wit, and piety by drawing primarily on her own words. Kassia’s is one of the only female voices from ninth-century Byzantium and this volume accordingly examines her reflections on gender in the context of her society and concludes that she represents a perspective that might be described as feminist.

Meditation on Christ's humanity and a letter of instruction on a disciplined spiritual life for his sister, epitomize Aelred's gentle spirituality. His pastoral prayer reflects a man conscious that he is accountable to God for the souls of others.

Far from the Christian metropolis of Alexandria, removed from the well-known and much–visited monastic settlements of the Thebaid, and infintely remote from Rome, lay the garrison towns of Aswan and Philae. There Christians and pagans coexisted. Integral to the christian community on this desert frontier of Empire were the local monks–ascetics, intercessors, and miracle workers.

Written in the fifth century, during one of the most formative periods of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Palestine, The Ascetic Discourses show a strong influence of the Scripture, both Old and New, and of Early monastic writers. Abba Isaiah has set forth a practical guide for monks, ever aware of the challanges that interpersonal relationships present within monastic communities.

A panorama of Russian Christian spirituality, richly illustrated with passages from formative works.

Eyewitness accounts of the lives and teachings of the fourth-century Desert Fathers from the Historia monachorum in Aegypto.

Separated by schism from Greek and Latin Christians and surviving under Islamic suzerainty, the Church of Egypt produced insightful saints and heroic martyrs in a chapter in church history now opened to readers of English for the first time.

At the dividing line between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, scholar-diplomat-pastor-writer-pope Gregory the Great drew on his profound knowledge of Scripture and his personal experience to preach the Gospel. These forty homilies show the practical concerns Gregory faced as well as the theological expectations he had of his flock.

The living link through whom the ascetic principles of hellenistic philosophers passed into monasticism, Evagrius molded Christian asceticism through his own works and through his influcence on John Cassian, Climacus, Pseudo–Denis, and Saint Benedict.

A profound mystic, Bernard sought, above all and in all, to be with God and to bring all persons to the experience of God. His Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the most famous and most beautiful examples of medieval scriptural exegesis. In them the modern reader can catch a glimpse of the genius which an entire generation found irresistible.

A profound mystic, Bernard sought, above all and in all, to be with God and to bring all persons to the experience of God. His Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the most famous and most beautiful examples of medieval scriptural exegesis. In them the modern reader can catch a glimpse of the genius which an entire generation found irresistible.

William of Saint Thierry left all things in his search for God. He left his home in Liège (modern Belgium) to study in France. He left the schools to enter Benedictine monastic life at Rheims. And late in life he left the Benedictines to enter the most austere, recently founded Cistercian abbey of Signy in the Ardennes forest. What he did not leave was his keen intellect and his vehement love of Truth.

Aelred of Rievaulx was born in the borderlands of Northumbria was raised at the royal court of Scotland. While traveling in King David’s service in 1134, the restless young man visited Rievaulx, a new foundation of the Cistercian monks in Yorkshire. The next day he returned to become a monk, and thirteen years later became abbot. In this second volume on spiritual friendship, written near the end of his life, Aelred completes his early treatise and shares his mature experience of the love of his companions and the love of God.

In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, The Song of Songs was a favorite book of Cistercian monks. Bernard of Clairvaux, Gilbert of Hoyland, and John of Ford, as well as William of Saint Thierry, read it as a dialogue between Christ the Bridegroom and the human soul, the Bride. William of Saint Thierry began composing his commentary soon after entering the Cistercian abbey of Signy in 1135. Having left behind a busy life as a Benedictine abbot and author of theological treatises, he turned to writing meditations on Scripture as the means of listening to the voice of the Beloved.

This book tells the life of a saint by a saint. Malachy O'Morgair spent his life and considerable energies exhorting, wheedling, badgering, and praying his countrymen back to christian faith and practice. Bernard holds him up in this Life, eulogy, and hymn as a model to bishops.

A scholar turned monk, Isaac combined the increasingly technical vocabulary of the cathedral schools with the spiritual tradition of the monastery. Dialectic is here combined with meditative reflection.

The son of Burgundian nobility, Bernard admitted after years of struggle that humility remained for him the most elusive of the virtues. Yet the uncompromising vehemence of his love for God made him strive for what monastic tradition taught is indispensable to anyone hoping to share God's perfect love.

Perhaps Bernard's most delightful tract, On Loving God posits that everything good in human persons is an expression of God's love and by love the person may participate in the being of the triune God. In a new analytic commentary, Stiegman examines Bernard's language, logic, and theology, demonstrating the vital importance of reading medieval authors on their own terms, without superimposing categories developed by later generations.

Taking up Saint Bernard's unfinished sermon-commentary, Gilbert ruminates on verse 3:1-5:10 in forty-eight sermons, leaving the task to be finished by John of Ford.

Aelred of Rievaulx possessed a personal charm which drew friends and disciples naturally to him. His own experience of human weakness in a worldly life at the court of King David of Scotland made him sensitive to the doctrine of charity which he found among Cistercian monks. The Mirror of Charity gives us a solid theology of the Cistercian life. Because the divine nature is love, as the Bible tells us, directing our love to God-love conforms us to the image of God that has been lost through sin. All love, to Aelred, is a participation in God-love that leads us to union.

The young abbot meditates on the singular role of the Virgin Mother of Christ 'to satisfy [his] own devotion', and in doing so bequeathes his own love of Mary and of Scripture to his Order and to the Church.

Amadeus became a monk of Clairvaux in 1125, just about the time its abbot, Bernard, began to be noticed by the Church at large. After twenty years in the cloister, Amadeus became bishop of the troubled diocese of Lausanne. Reform and renewal did not come easily. Amid political skullduggery, as well as the demands of pastoral and administrative duties, Bishop Amadeus managed to write–perhaps to preach–these eight homilies in praise of Mary. Formed as a monk under the charismatic influence of Saint Bernard, Amadeus retained a distinctive piety which finds eloquent expression in this series of sermons, almost all that survives from his pen.

The monk and the knight—the two quintessentially medieval European heroes—were combined in the Knights Templar, men who took the monastic vows and defended the holy places and pilgrims. With characteristic eloquence, Bernard of Clairvaux voices the cleric's view of the knights, warfare, and the conquest of the Holy Land in five chapters on the knight's vocation. Then, in another eight chapters the abbot who never visited the Holy Land provides a spiritual tour of the pilgrimage sites guarded by this 'new kind of knighthood.'

Taking up Saint Bernard's unfinished sermon-commentary, Gilbert ruminates on verse 3:1-5:10 in forty-eight sermons, leaving the task to be finished by John of Ford.

These are the letters of Adam of Perseigne, Spiritual director to kings and clerics, nuns and nobles and adviser to Richard the Lion-hearted; Adam also found favor at the witty court of the Countess of Champagne.