Embracing God

Aelred of Rievaulx’s spiritual reflections guide readers toward God’s embrace.

In Embracing God, Marsha L. Dutton surveys the interwoven structures and themes of five treatises, showing how Aelred guides his readers to cling forever to God through memory: being one of the three faculties of God’s image placed in humankind at creation. Individual chapters explore Aelred’s meditations on Jesus’s life, spiritual friendship, the eucharistic nature of Cistercian spirituality, and the nature of the soul.

Marsha L. Dutton is the executive editor of Cistercian Publications. Emeritus professor of English at Ohio University, she is the author of many articles and book chapters on a variety of Cistercian subjects. Dutton is also the editor of A Companion to Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167) (Brill, 2017), of four volumes of Aelred’s works in translation, and of “Aelred of Rievaulx” and (with Tyler Sergent) “The Cistercians” in the Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies. Her sixteen presentations on Aelred for Schola Cisterciensis appear on YouTube.