7 Ergebnisse.

The Meditations, written over a period from 1125 to 1137, are a personal account of William of Saint-Thierry's ascent into Trinitarian intimacy. Writing to the monks of Mont Dieu sometime around 1144, he proposed the Meditations as helpful in forming minds in prayer. These Meditations, with their accompanying commentary, are now presented as helpful in forming an intimate relationship with the triune God.

Written during his benedictine years, these colloquies reveal William's inner struggle to reach out to God by stripping away encumbrances, to learn to love and to accept God's love by learning to accept himself.

William of Saint Thierry wrote down his reflections on the nature and greatness of love during the second decade of the twelfth century, while he was abbot of the benedictine monastery of St Thierry, near Rheims. His insight, drawn from Scripture and the Church Fathers, shaped his own spiritual journey and his earthly pilgrimage from the schools to the abbey and finally to cistercial life at Signy in the Ardennes. Love, he writes, is a force w...

William of Saint Thierry wrote The Mirror of Faith and The Enigma of Faith shortly after he read the Theology of Peter Abelard. Writing at the cistercian abbey of Signy, which he entered in 1135 after fifteen years as a benedictine abbot, he tried to correct what he considered Abelard's failure to root his theology in the faith revealed by Christ in Scripture and explained by generations of Church Fathers. Unless we choose to believe, he was c...

William of Saint Thierry left all things in his search for God. He left his home in Liage (modern Belgium) to study in France. He left the schools to enter benedictine monastic life at Rheims. And late in his life he left the Benedictines to enter the more 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.

The Epistle to the Romans was a favorite text of medieval commentators, especially in an age concerned with the theology of grace. William of Saint Thierry's Exposition is a thoroughly monastic text. In it the twelfth-century monk is concerned, not with dialectic or scholastic disputation, but with something far more personal: humility of heart and the recovery of the image of God in fallen humankind. Only when a person is open to God's grace ...

Perhaps no book was more central to medieval spirituality and mysticism, " writes Bernard McGinn, "or more problematic to contemporary readers, than the Song of Songs. . . Lingering Victorian attitudes towards the opposition between sex and religion find the Song's frank erotic language embarrassing and even distasteful." But in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the Song of Songs was a favorite book of Cistercian monks. Bernard of Cl...