The English Spirit

Extract

On the whole the English type of spirituality shows greater consideration for the human needs of the individual than that of, say, Italy or Spain; it has a gentler and more tolerant character. The northern climate preaches moderation in penances and asks for attention to human frailty and feelings. The phlegmatic Englishman is seldom demonstrative in external religion, for he is unwilling to reveal his emotions, though they be intense. The warm blood of the South appears to him to indulge in excess in all things, excess in sanctity as in sinning. We may find a gentle human element in the mystics of fourteenth-century England; but it goes further back than that. St. Aelred of Rievaulx shows it in his life and writings in the twelfth century; he is in fact one of the only spiritual writers who has dealt with human friendships to justify them as part of the spiritual life. ‘I began to wonder whether Scripture had any blessing to give to friendship, or was it only a thing that paganism had praised. However, I had found that the letters of the saints were full of references to friendship.’ And so he sets out in pursuit of a human love within the embrace of the divine. ‘Particular friendships’ have often been condemned; yet there is something of the same sympathy as St. Aelred’s in the writing of Richard Rolle, while the author of the Ancren Riwle (c. 1200) takes it for granted that the recluses for whom he writes will have special friends.