Ghostly GladnessThe Soul Music of Richard Rolle, Fourteenth Century Mystic
II. RICHARD ROLLE’S LIFE, CONTEMPLATION, AND TEACHING
Given the background of fourteenth-century spiritualism, the life of Richard Rolle stands out as an exemplary case of the mysticism that developed out of the variety of tendencies and reactions already described. If he is exemplary, though, he is certainly not typical; Rolle’s own temperament and the intensely subjective nature of mystical contemplation combined to make his experiences and his accounts of them extremely individual and idiosyncratic. The most marked features in his writings are his evocation of the calor, dulcor, and canor (heat, sweetness, and song) he experienced in the rapture of contemplation, and his most persistent theme, the love of God. The word “love” itself appears almost innumerably in Rolle’s writings, and the message is always the same: man has no higher calling than utter devotion to God, and the reward to the purest and most ardent lovers is the indescribably sweetness of burning in the soul with the melodies of heaven.
A. Rolle’s LifeTwo sources reveal details of Rolle’s life. First, we have a fairly large number of autobiographical references in his writings. From Rolle himself we learn, for example, that the devil, in the form of a beautiful woman, once tried to seduce him and was driven away by Rolle’s invocation of the phrase, “Oh, Jesu, how precious is thy blood.” a second source of information, perhaps less enlightening of his spiritual growth but much richer in mundane detail, is an Office drawn up by the nuns at Hampole after Rolle’s death. Altogether, this much is known — Richard Rolle was born in 1300 or a little before in the tiny village of Thornton-le-dale, near the boundaries of the North and East Ridings in Yorkshire. He went o University College, Oxford, under the patronage of Thomas de Neville, a son of the first Lord Raby. Before completing his course of study, at about the age of nineteen, Rolle left Oxford and returned to Yorkshire determined to become a hermit. He soon ran away from his father’s house, and in makeshift hermit’s garb mad his way to a church in or near Pickering, where he spent a whole night in prayer before ascending to the pulpit during morning Mass, where, with the blessing of the priest, he preached a sermon that so impressed John de Dalton, the local constable, that Rolle was given anchorage and meals in order that he be able to pursue the contemplative life. In the years to follow, he changed his abode a number of times, and finally came to the priory at Hampole where he was a sort of spiritual advisor until his death. He seems to have been something of a renegade; he writes of his frequent clashes with local clergymen who disapproved of the zealous and unorthodox ways of this self-styled hermit. Rolle died on 29 September 1349, probably of the Black Death. About thirty years later, the nuns at Hampole recorded a number of miracles near his tomb which they attributed to Rolle, and they compiled an Office in his honour. The formalities of canonization were never completed, though Rolle was venerated as a saint until the Reformation. Rolle’s writings remained extremely popular for more than a century and a half after his death, and so many copies of his works exist that it is nearly impossible to determine exactly what he wrote. Most scholars agree that the canon established by Miss H. E. Allen is the most authoritative presently available. His major Latin works, written in a highly alliterative style peculiar to Rolle, include Melos Amoris (The Melody of Love) and Incendium Amoris (The Fire of Love). His English works include a translation of the Psalms, with a commentary, two short meditations on the Passion, a group of lyrics (the subject of Section III below), a couple of short prose pieces, and three epistles: Ego Dormio, The Commandment, and The Form of Living. The idea of writing in English (done probably for the sake of the unlearned nuns at Hampole) was novel enough that Rolle saw fit to defend the practice in the Prologue to his Psalter: “In this werk I seke no strange Inglis, bot lightest and comunest and swilke that es mast like unto the Latyn, so that thai that knawes noght Latyn, be the Inglis may come tille many Latyn wordes.” This desire to share the scripture with the unlearned, characteristic of the Franciscans in his day, is one of the many clues he has left us as to his personality and the factors which may have shaped his spiritual development. Comper notes that although Rolle was not a Franciscan, he nevertheless was sure to have come under their influence while at Oxford, and “was imbued with their love for God, and their delight in poverty and simplicity; and was instrumental in spreading the doctrines of St. Francis in the north, since he became the most widely read of all religious writers.” In The Fire of Love Rolle gives us an inkling of why he may have left Oxford before taking his degree: “An old woman can be more expert in the love of God — and less worldly too — than your theologian with his useless studying.” He dedicated the book to “the simple and unlearned, who are seeking rather to love God than to amass knowledge.” Elsewhere in The Fire of Love Rolle echoes the teachings of Ockham, whom he must have heard at Oxford:
In any event, Rolle seems to have rejected the Franciscans’ scholastic method, but absorbed much of their teaching. It was probably at Oxford too that Rolle was exposed to the writings of he great Catholic mystics whose influence shows in his own work, men like Richard of St. Victor, St. Bernard, and St. Bonaventura. Nevertheless his natural temperament seems to have had a strong mystical bent without any prompting from outside his own heart. Evelyn Underhill has written that
Rolle’s emotionalism is both his strongest and weakest trait as a writer. Comper says that he had an “untidy mind” and she is right; but the very shapelessness of his works gives them an urgency quite unexpected in the literature of contemplation. “He pours forth the melody that surges in his heart in impassioned words, which rush out, tumbling over each other in their eagerness.” Whatever the source of Rolle’s vast creative energy, his zealous urge to share his contemplative experience is a prominent and engaging feature of Rolle’s spiritual record.
B. Rolle’s MysticismContemplation is so completely a subjective matter that there can be no yardstick with which to gauge the validity of mystical claims. Nevertheless, Rolle’s experiences accord remarkably well with the paradigms William James found nearly six hundred years later. What makes Rolle unusual as a Christian mystic is that the makes no attempts whatever to fit his accounts into orthodox frameworks. He sought to share, not prove, his contemplation. Rolle never tired of describing contemplation in terms of calor, dulcor, and canor. Here is his record of his first attaining these gifts:
Let other authors illuminate the darkness of what the presence of God is not; Rolle never tires of proclaiming canor, his gift of song, as the highest and surest mark of heavenly grace: “I call it song when there is in the soul, overflowing and ardent, a sweet feeling of heavenly praise; when thought turns into song; when the mind is in thrall to sweetest harmony” (Fire of Love). Again and again Rolle describes his canor as the participation in the song of angels before God: “A mans hert verraly es byrnand in the life of God . . . hase myrth and joy and melody in aungels sang.” To Rolle, canor is in every respect the culmination of the soul’s mission to love God.
That canor is Rolle’s paramount contemplative experience is perfectly clear, but assessing exactly what he meant by the term, or even whether he always meant the same thing, is quite difficult, and the issue will be taken up in Section III.
C. Rolle’s MessageRichard Rolle was, above all else, a prophet of love. The love of God towards man, which Rolle paints vividly in his Meditations on the Passion, can only be received by utterly devoted love for God. Rolle is resolute in his insistence that anything less than absolutely self-abnegating love of God will hinder us from completing the primary mission, in fact, the only real mission, of the soul — to return from exile to the source of all love, and “all love which is not God-directed is bad love, and makes its possessors bad too” (Fire of Love). Our task is to strip the soul bare of all that conceals from itself the immanent presence of God, and only then will the soul become one with the transcendence of God: this is the apogee of contemplation. A recurrent theme in Rolle’s work is the necessity to renounce the desire for knowledge. Our spiritual work is not to know God, but to love Him. Rolle was by no means the first to voice this idea; in The Fire of Love he quotes St. Paul’s assertion that “knowledge without love does not edify” (1 Cor. 8:1), and he surely had read the same idea in Hugh of St. Victor: “One loves better than one understands, and love comes close to the goal while knowledge remains on the threshold.” Rolle points to the example of those (and by implication he includes himself) who have attained the heights of contemplation:
Only love can bring calor, dulcor, and canor. Rolle calls his path the “three degrees of love”: “insuperable love,” “inseparable love,” and “singular love,” the three more or less corresponding to the three-stage discipline of Purification, Illumination, and Union outlined above in Section I. He defines love as “insuperabel when na thyng that es contrary til Gods lufe overcomes it, bot es stalworth agayns al fandyngs, and stabel, whether thou be in ese or in angwys, or in hele or in sekenes. . .” (Form of Living). Insuperable love can be obtained only by the path of purification; ecstasy is available to anyone “but first a man must exercise himself vigorously in prayer and meditation for some years, virtually heedless of his bodily needs” (Fire of Love). the contemplative must renounce sin:
The way is hard, he says: “No one in this vale of tears is going to attain perfection in the contemplative life overnight” (Fire of Love). The lover of God must completely extinguish in himself the love of all material creation; otherwise his love will never by perfect: “For ay, whils thi hert es heldand til lufe any bodely thyng, thou may not perfitely be coupuld with God” (Ego Dormio). Rolle reports that he himself spent nearly three years in prayer and penitence before his first experience of calor. This first illumination, to use the traditional term for the second stage of mystic contemplation, is a glimpse of heavenly glory which can only be attained by someone advanced in purifying his soul and dedicated, at every waking moment, to his love of God. Rolle calls this love “inseparable,”
Inseparable love has two important features in addition to the process of purification which must carry on. The first is the love-longing which Rolle expresses in one of his favorite Latin phrases, amore langueo. “For love is a continual meditation with an immense longing for what is beautiful, good, and lovely”; that is, for God (Fire of Love). The second feature of inseparable love is that the earliest glimmering of the glory of contemplation, like all that can follow, is solely a gift of God’s grace. “For to have the privilege of seeing heavenly things is a matter of God’s grace, not our merit” (Fire of Love). The contemplative can prepare himself for the mystic experience, but he can in no way “earn” it; God bestows His favor however, whenever, and to whomever He wishes. A man’s love for God is pure only if it loves without expectation of return; and only pre love is returned. Such a paradox can only trouble a would-be mystic whose love is not pure. We must have faith in God’s generosity. After more than four years, by his own account, Rolle attained to that perfected union with God which he calls “singular” love, in which the soul delights in the continual presence of God and nothing else. The sense of hardship, even the sense of self, is gone. “Singuler lufe es, when all comforth and solace es closed owt of thi hert, bot of Jhesu Cryste alane” (Form of Living). It is in this state of singular love that the contemplative enjoys the gift of canor in full measure. Calor, dulcor, and canor are all divine, but over and over again Rolle emphasizes that canor is the culmination of all contemplative prayer: “It is reckoned to be the certain foretaste of everlasting sweetness” (Fire of Love). In this third and highest degree of love, all “thi prayers turnes intil joyful sange, and thi thoghtes to melody” (Ego Dormio). The soul joys without end to lend its voice to those of angels in the praise of God. The singing heart is awash with love; the will of the soul is one with the will of God.
© Michael Fleming Oxford, England January, 1984
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