He made his little body free of everything that is pleasant in this present life. He sacrificed himself on the altar of unfailing suffering: hardly any flesh clung to his bones; his lips alone remained a frame to his teeth. The excessive emaciation of his body and the thinness of his face gave an angelic expression to his countenance. Eating scarcely anything and drinking less, by his unbelievable fasting, he lost altogether, and no wonder, the desire for food.
So wrote Walter Daniel of his erstwhile friend and mentor, Ailred, in his Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, some time after Ailred’s death in 1167. This was written in an attempt to demonstrate his abbot’s sanctity with the clear hope that as a result he might eventually be canonized. It is hard, therefore, to understand why this image of the abbot who, if we are to believe Walter, governed ‘over one hundred monks and five hundred laymen’, s is so at odds with the instructions to abbots contained within the generally moderate Rule of Benedict, which governed the lives of all Cistercian monks. The Cistercians interpreted the Rule more rigidly than the Benedictines, but even for them there should be no ostentatious exhibitions of pious self-starvation since a monk must exhibit mediocritas or moderation in all he did. Moreover, regulation of eating must not be at the expense of life itself. In order to resolve Walter’s anomalous portrait of his abbot I will first seek the source of the textual representation of the ascetic Ailred and then, very briefly, consider its relationship to what we can surmise about Ailred’s actual practices in order to hypothesise about what kind of influences helped to form them. In the process, I will suggest that the extreme form of monastic disciplina, exemplified by the literary model of Ailred, causes us to question Foucault’s notion that: ‘Discipline produces practiced bodies, docile bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).’