Monastic Friendship and Toleration in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Life
Brian Patrick McGuire
Friendship is a commonplace of monastic life. What more congenial environment could be found for the formation and cultivation friendships than protective recesses cloisters? Here existed time, charity mutual concern so painfully absent in outside world. In cloister men get to know each other experience fellowship Christ. Under mild understanding abbot, they discover, as Ailred Rievaulx did twelfth century, that God friendship.
Studies in Church History