Ghostly GladnessThe Soul Music of Richard Rolle, Fourteenth Century Mystic
III. ROLLE’S MELODIES OF LOVE
William James has written that “not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.” Rolle’s sense that music is the medium of heaven was so intense, so passionate, that he makes it extremely difficult for us to understand exactly what he meant by canor or melos, “sange” or “melody.” By turns he uses musical terminology in a clearly metaphorical way, and is adamant that the song of the heart is mere silence to the ear; yet almost as often he writes of song “springing to his lips,” and he longs for a friend with whom he can share the expression of canor. The Psalms seemed to him a successful attempt to render heavenly music in words, and he may have experimented with similar effects in his own lyrics. In any case, his writings were immensely popular and influential in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the legacy he left both to English literature and to English spiritualism is inestimable.
A. Music and the MysticHugh of St. Victor, one of a handful of writers who exerted the greatest influence upon Rolle, differentiated a vast number of musical “kinds”: the music of the worlds (which he subdivided into the music of the elements, of the planets, and of Time); the music of the seasons, the music of number, and so forth. The unifying idea is harmony of relationship, and a sense of cyclical development and predictable rhythms. Throughout human history spiritual figures have turned to the language of music, harmony, and rhythm to express the profoundest truths. William James speculated that music can convey meaning in a way that the rational mind can neither understand nor contradict. “There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt,” he wrote, “and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.” In his contemplative raptures Rolle experienced the harmonies of the soul and the rhythms of love with a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and profundity which left him almost beside himself with love for God and the desire to share the import of his canor with others. Almost invariably he expresses the heights of contemplation in terms of music. Of the lover of God he proclaims, “His whole being is a hymn” (Fire of Love), and again, “Like the notes of an organ he rises up to achieve his high and manifest desire, to contemplate God”. Rolle makes continual use of the musical metaphor:
Our difficulty in comprehending Rolle stems from his fervor, and often he seems to make no distinction between symbol and literal fact. He relates that the first time he experienced canor he actually looked up, thinking a choir had gathered above his head, and then realized that the song he heard emanated from his heart, his soul, his whole being. He had sensed the meaningful, purposeful harmony which pervades the finest music, but Rolle felt it as infinite meaning, infinite purpose; in short, he felt the very presence of God. Most of the time Rolle is quick to caution us that the music of angels in not the music of minstrels, that melodies pouring from the soul are inaudible to the ear. He writes, for examples, that the fire of love has lifted his heart above “lesser things, so that I now rejoice in Jesus, far away from outward melodies, but with one that is within” (Fire of Love). The true lover “praises God in song — but his song is in silence; his lays are not meant for the ears of men. . . .” (Fire of Love). And yet on the other hand there are frequent hints that he yearned to burst forth in earthly harmonies. An intriguing passage in The Fire of Love suggests Rolle’s longing for a friend with whom to share his canor:
This last question may reveal a “youthful yearning” in Rolle to measure his music against the experiences of another; we can well imagine that a young hermit, often scorned and misunderstood by the local spiritual authorities, may have endured terrible periods of doubt. The exhortations to find all joy in solitude and fellowship with God may be directed more to himself than to any other reader. In any case an important idea emerges here: Rolle seems to have at least intermittently entertained the notion that words can in some measure express the harmony of canor in a way that can be comprehended by others. Further evidence is provided by Rolle’s fascination with the Book of Psalms. His translation of the Psalter, with extensive commentary, was in fact the earliest biblical book to be translated into English prose after the Conquest. In his Prologue to the Psalter, Rolle explained that
Any number of times Rolle intimated that the Psalms can act as a spiritual bridge between the material world of books and words, and the heavenly realm of loving canor. In The Form of Living, Rolle claims that in singular love, “than the sange of lovyng and of lufe es commen, than thi thoght turnes intil sang and intil melody, an the behoves syng the psalmes that thou before sayde. . . .” Clearly Rolle was fascinated by the way the Psalms could express the canor of the loving soul, and given his own exuberant creativity, it is only natural that he should have tried his hand at lyric.
B. Rolle’s LyricsMedieval manuscripts containing Rolle’s works are for the most part a hodgepodge of religious writing: prose and poetry, English and Latin; sometimes noting authorship correctly, sometimes incorrectly or not at all. Rolle’s popularity was such that many works, the Prick of Conscience, for example, were falsely attributed to him. Confirming his authorship of the lyrics has proven a particularly thorny problem, but most scholars seem to agree on the canon established by Allen in Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and again in English Writings of Richard Rolle. All lyrics discussed here are drawn from this latter volume. Sister Mary Arthur Knowlton has described Rolle’s lyrics as distinctive in that the animating emotions “are those of joy, hope, confidence, compassion, and love-longing, never those of fear, gloom, or self-pity.” His consistently positive tone is well in keeping with the tenor of his prose writings, which always stress the joy that comes of love for God. Any attempt to categorize the lyrics is necessarily arbitrary, since all of them are effusions of contemplative love; nevertheless, Knowlton is right in suggesting the three degrees of love as a useful grouping. The primary feature of Rolle’s “insuperable” love, the first degree, is the need to renounce sin and all worldly affections, in order to purify the soul. “Exhortation,” the first lyric in Allen’s collection, shows Rolle the evangelist urging the hearer to exchange the world for heaven:
While each lyric contains elements of all the others, both in theme and in poetic methods, “The Nature of Love” addresses the idea of purification most directly, as in its opening line, “All vanitese forsake, if thou his lufe will fele.” St. Bernard wrote, “My philosophy is this . . . to know Jesus and Him crucified.” St. Bonaventura took this up and recommended meditation on the Passion as particularly suitable to the illuminative way (Rolle’s second degree of love). The idea was to stress the humanity of Jesus, and medieval artists — poets as well as painters — began to emphasize Jesus not as the King of Heaven so much as the man of sorrow. E. Mâle wrote: “One would say that entire Christendom had received the gift of tears.” Ego Dormio contains a lyric headed, Meditacio de passione Christi which opens:
Rolle’s treatment is graphic and direct, with no concern for fine points of theological symbolism. Closely linked to the medieval tendency to concentrate on Christ’s humanity was a growing devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus. Again the inspiration derives from St. Bernard, and the idea is to establish a loving intimacy between the soul and God. Rolle stresses the Holy Name throughout his canon:
In the lyrics we find this devotion to the Holy Name most striking perhaps in “A Salutation to Jesus”:
Given Rolle’s great popularity, it is not surprising that Rolle is imputed to be responsible for the sudden spread of devotion to the Holy Name in England. The keynote themes in meditations of singular love, the third and highest degree, are longing for union with God in death, and longing for union in love. A Latin lyric in The Fire of Love draws together the themes of music, love, and death:
Similarly his prose lyric, “Gastly Gladnesse,” is a short meditation on the desire to die into Christ:
In Rolle’s writings death-longing and love-longing are closely linked with the canor that is the highest reach of spiritual perfection. In Ego Dormio they are contained in the lines:
In this lyric as in all the others, any division by theme, however useful, is quite arbitrary; all of Rolle’s lyrics are an attempt to convey the ineffable profundity of the love of God. His skill in manipulating words is unsurpassed among early fourteenth-century lyricists, and his chief success lies in his ability to suggest the cadences of music. Although he varies his forms considerably, the favorite to which he often returns is the four-stress line, grouped four lines to a stanza with rhyme words not only at the end, but also in the middle of each line. (In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye has pointed out that this pattern is particularly musical, corresponding to “common time.”) Even in lyrics which do not follow this pattern, in all his lyrics Rolle was concerned to link his lines together with some kind of recurrence. In the cantus amoris of The Form of Living, the end rhymes divide the lyric into two stanzas of six lines each, but he has taken care to begin the internal rhyme “-yng” of the second stanza in the final line of the first. This business of linkage by sound is probably the source of Rolle’s boundless delight in alliteration. How he developed this taste no one can say, but Allen suggests that it may be traced to the influence of minstrels, and Rolle was sufficiently impressed that he would want to turn the pleasing effect to the work of God. In any case he used it lavishly, even in his Latin works. The Melos Amoris is an extreme example:
Alliteration in the lyrics is not so extravagant, but still very marked; the “Song of Mercy” begins: “Mercy es maste in my mynde, for mercy es that I maste prayse.” This effect, combined with Rolle’s great sensitivity to rhythm and balance of phrasing, shows him striving mightily to render the feeling of music in words. Was he successful? Allen thinks not, writing that although “the affinity of ecstasy with rhythm is well known,” nevertheless “he was not in the current sense a poet, for rhyme . . . confused his powers of expression.” Knowlton agrees; though she praises the intensity and sincerity of the lyrics, she continues,
Certainly it was Rolle’s prose rather than his poetry which proved most influential; this may mean that the fervour of his heart needed the freedom of prose to find its own rhythms, apart from the strict patterns of formal music, and later writers responded more to the natural cadences of his prose. But Rolle’s prose and lyric styles overlap so much that it is misleading perhaps to differentiate them, and the fact that his prose and poetry tend to appear interspersed in manuscripts demonstrates that, at the very least, medieval scribes did not see fit to make much distinction. Everywhere in Rolle the message is the same: the love of God is the means and end of life itself.
C. Conclusion: Rolle’s AchievementR. W. Chambers, in On the Continuity of English Prose, claims that in either English or Latin Rolle was the most widely read English author from the time of his death until the Reformation; “investigation of English wills and documents bearing on the ownership of books seems to show a dozen owners of manuscripts of Rolle for one or two of the Canterbury Tales.” Carl Horstmann is perhaps a bit overenthusiastic in calling Rolle “the true father of English literature,” but his point is well-taken, that Rolle’s work does form a link between the Old English alliterative verse and the alliterative revival of the latter half of the fourteenth century. It is much more difficult to assess his spiritual achievement. It was surely Rolle who popularized devotion to the Passion and the Holy Name in England, and these themes appear often in the spiritual literature which followed him. Although his fervour may have pointed many into the way of mysticism, his own path and the claims he made for it were criticized later in the fourteenth century. Walter Hilton, in The Scale of Perfection, suggested that sensible gifts such as calor (and, by implication, canor as well), do not reveal true contemplation:
Similarly, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, perhaps the greatest work of English spiritualism, cautions: “All other comforts, sounds, and gladness and sweetness that come from without suddenly, I pray thee have them suspect.” Recent criticism includes that of Dom David Knowles, who argues that Rolle’s heat, sweetness, and song are altogether too subjective, and “to the mystical theologians of his own day and later ages would not be classed as contemplation in any sense of the word.” Moreover he says:
Sister Mary Arthur Knowlton takes issue with Knowles, claiming that Rolle’s practice and teaching do accord with the traditions of the Church, and that his hat, sweetness, and song are the “final gifts or marks” that accompany the experience of contemplation.“ Perhaps the very issue of whether or not Rolle is in accord with the authority of the Church is not only beside the point, but shows also Rolle’s exact reason for leaving Oxford and failing to take holy orders. Of course his mysticism is very subjective; all mysticism, by its nature, is utterly subjective. If criticism of Rolle’s spirituality is necessary, it may be more just to point out that his persistent efforts to render the effects of contemplation in words, however heroic an attempt, and however beautiful the result, are a denial of what Rolle himself knew to be true, that real contemplation is absolutely and fundamentally incommunicable. As he himself sings in The Fire of Love:
© Michael Fleming Oxford, England January, 1984
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