Notes On the Prologue of St. Aelred of Rievaulx's ‘De spirituali amicitia,’ with a Translation.

The brief prologue to Aelred of Rievaulx's De spirituali amicitia is written with a disarming simplicity that allows the reader to follow it and feel its charm the very first time he comes across it. Aelred invites his reader into the intimacy of his own early life and shares with him the experiences from which his reflections on friendship, and his book, were to grow. It is a confidence which he is sharing, one that he must have revealed to many of his friends, and the reader is made aware of the privilege from the very first line: ‘Cum adhuc puer essem in scholis ….’ Nothing holds an audience or a reading public like a story, as Aelred well knew; and if the story is of the speaker or writer, it is of double value: it is an invitation to relax in the presence of the storyteller, the friend. Aelred's instinct is unerring. He is a skilled communicator, he is confident of his audience, he knows himself, and he wants his public to know him. How many medieval books have such an appealing incipit as this one- or rather, how few? How many writers of that, or any, period have presented the emotional upheavals of adolescence with such clarity and compassion in a mere dozen lines? And how many writers on the very subject of friendship have scored their overture in such a masterly fashion? The direct Augustinian quality is there unmistakably from the very start of this work; much as it will indeed owe to Cicero, its first tones have the vibrant, experiential directness of the author of the Confessions, from whom the opening four words are drawn (Conf. 1.11.17).