SOURCE: Dom David Knowles, "Richard Rolle," in The English Mystics, Burns Oates & Washboume Ltd., 1927, pp. 73-89.

[In the following excerpt, Knowles depicts Rolle as a kind of early Romantic poet—one whose art is spontaneous, natural, personal, and almost rebelliously individualiste]

The four writers who have now to be considered are very different in mental outlook one from another, and may to some degree be taken as the representatives in English medieval religious life of four distinct types of spirituality. Richard Rolle, the first, is a poet, almost a romanticist; a troubadour of GOD, spiritual brother of St Francis, throwing off conventional habits, and of an essentially simplifying, outgoing mind. However orthodox he may remain he is always and before all an individualist.

Rolle has had the good fortune to attract a series of able scholars both in this country and in Germany within the last half-century, and in consequence he occupies an honourable, and perhaps disproportionately great, place in histories and manuals of English literature. This is due partly to the varied interest and style of his writings, and partly to the great influence he exercised over others, which appears in the many poems and treatises once ascribed to him; but it is due above all to the simplicity and enthusiasm of his outlook on life. What may be said of Chaucer and Dame Julian may be said pre-eminently of Rolle, that he is of the springtime of English literature, and the early sunlight and fresh dew rest upon his words. It is true also that Rolle had the imaginative mind of a poet, if not a musician, and song and melody are as surely characteristic of his writing as he found them characteristic of the working of grace. His words are always spontaneous and unreflecting; he "does but sing because he must," and such spontaneity, both of language and character, must always most powerfully attract in a world where so much is stale and affected and calculated and insincere.

Rolle wrote both in Latin and English, in verse and in prose. For students of English literature his English works and his verse are naturally most interesting, as are also his translations of parts of the Bible, especially the Psalms—a work in which he anticipated Wyclif, and has earned with some justice the title of father of English prose. Nevertheless, it is rather in his Latin prose treatises that he appears as a mystic, and it is with these that we are at present most concerned. Most of them were translated into English after Rolle's death by Richard Misyn.¹

The story of Rolle's life has been told in almost identical words by all his editors, but it cannot be altogether omitted here. Its circumstances, in all their originality and picturesque details, which so nearly resemble the preconceived idea of a medieval hermit, have done much to concentrate attention upon him. The chief source for the external events of his conversation is the series of lessons drawn up for insertion in the office to be recited after his canonization. According to this he was born near Pickering in² Yorkshire (apparently about 1290), of well-to-do and perhaps gentle parents. It has been suggested that his father was in some way a dependent of the great family of Neville; certainly it was a Neville, sometime archdeacon at Durham, who paid for his education at Oxford. There the influence of the scholastic movement was at its height, but Rolle, unlike Hilton, and even unlike the author of the Cloud, found little to attract him in the intellectual atmosphere of the day, if we may believe some of his writings. Recently, however, the attractive suggestion has been put forward that he crossed to France and spent some time at the Sorbonne.³ This, if correct, would help to explain Rolle's references to his worldly past, which, if his conversion took place immediately after his Oxford days (and in the Middle Ages the university career was begun and ended at a much earlier period of life than now) must be taken as the self-depreciatory exaggerations of a saint. As it is, till this point is settled, and till many other questions of authenticity and chronology in his writings have been decided, no adequate appreciation of his indebtedness to his education can be attempted, since in some writings there is little method and a scarcity of quotation, whereas in others many of the Fathers and ecclesiastical writers of the Middle Ages are quoted.

His decision to leave home and become a hermit was taken without consulting his parents. The lessons tell us that he took two of his sister's tunics, which she brought to him in a wood, and made of them a dress like a hermit's. He then left home, and was supported for a time by Sir John de Dalton, a friend of his father's and himself the father of two boys who had been fellow-students with Rolle at Oxford. It was in this period of his life that the growth in spirituality took place which he has himself described. After several years spent near the Daltons' home he moved from place to place in search of solitude, living for some time in Richmondshire, where he was the friend and counsellor of the ancress Margaret of Anderby, for whom some of his treatises were written. Finally he moved to Hampole, a small village near Doncaster, not far from the field of Towton, and almost in sight of the Great North Road and the London and North Eastern main line to York.⁴ Here he lived as director of a convent of Cistercian nuns, here he died in 1349, perhaps of the Black Death, and here his remains were venerated by the nuns and by an increasing number of people as those of a saint. Many miracles attributed to his intercession were recorded, and it is supposed that only the unsettled state of the country and the rise of Lollardy, whose supporters claimed Rolle as one of themselves, cut short the regular process of his cause.

It will thus be seen that both in the knowledge we have of his life, and in the bulk and variety of his writings, Rolle has the advantage over all the English medieval mystics. Yet it cannot be said that his additions to our knowledge of the contemplative life, either in theory or practice, are so significant as those of Hilton or the Cloud. Dom Noetinger may be simplifying the matter too much when he says that Rolle hardly does more than reproduce in words the impressions he receives,⁵ but the error, if any error there be, is not great. Rolle is throughout intensely personal. All the stages of the spiritual life are described in terms taken from his own experience, and this would seem to have been singularly simple in form. The most typical works of Rolle which are available to the general reader are the Fire of Love and the Mending of Life. From them we can form a fairly complete idea of the manner of his growth in holiness. Like all those who have been converted to a contemplative life, he looks upon the time spent before his conversion as passed in sin; perhaps we should do well not to regard this as a mere refinement of humility, especially if we bear in mind the possibility of some years spent in Paris. He says:

Lord God, have mercy on me! My youth was fond; my childhood vain; my young age unclean. But now, Lord Jesu, my heart is inflamed with thy holy love and my reins are changed; and my soul also will not touch for bitterness what before was my food.⁶

After his conversion his growth in the mystical way was gradual. In an autobiographical passage he speaks of a sudden visitation that came to him for the first time, as it were a door opened.

The high love of Christ standeth soothly in three things: in heat, in song, in sweetness…. Forsooth three years, except three or four months, were run from the beginning of the change of my life and of my mind, to the opening of the heavenly door; so that, the face being shown, the eyes of the heart might behold and see what way they might seek my love, and unto him continually desire. The door forsooth yet biding open, nearly a year passed until the time in which the heat of everlasting love was verily felt in my heart. I was sitting forsooth in a chapel, and whiles I was mickle delighted with sweetness of prayer or meditation, suddenly I felt within me a merry and unknown heat. But first I wavered, for a long time doubting what it could be. I was expert that it was not from a creature but from my Maker, because I found it grow hotter and more glad. Truly in this unhoped-for, sensible and sweet-smelling heat, half a year, three months and some weeks have run out, until the inshedding and receiving of this heavenly and ghostly sound…. Whiles truly I sat in this same chapel, and in the night before supper, as I could, I sang psalms, I beheld above me the noise as it were of readers, or rather singers. Whiles also I took heed, praying to heaven with my whole desire, suddenly, I wot not in what manner, I felt in me the noise of song, and received the most liking heavenly melody which dwelt with me in my mind. For my thought was forsooth changed to continual song of mirth…and in my prayers and psalm-saying I uttered the same sound, and henceforth, for plenteousness of inward sweetness, I burst out singing what before I said, but forsooth privily…. Wherefore from the beginning of my changed soul unto the high degree of Christ's love, the which, God granting, I was able to attain… I was four years and about three months.⁷

This passage, which has been quoted at some length because it is so typical of Rolle, shows clearly enough the peculiarities of his spiritual experience. Unlike most of the great mystics, he almost always describes it, not in terms of knowledge or ignorance, nor even in terms of love and union, but by the two words, "heat" and "song," taken directly from sense-perception. Indeed, so emphatic is his repetition of these words that we are driven to some sort of enquiry as to the nature of the experience he wished to describe. At first sight—and possibly enquiry will not remove this impression—he seems to stand out of the tradition of the great mystical Doctors, who teach with unanimity that sensible devotion of any kind is to be resisted, and that the permanent grace of contemplation is almost imperceptible, and sometimes least perceptible when most undoubtedly present. Rolle, in opposition to this, writes at times as if during his whole life this "heat" and "song" were at his call; and that his influence was to some extent mischievous, as tending to make would-be contemplatives strive for some sensible realization of their prayer, is evident from the implied condemnation of Rolle in the Cloud and Hilton. Perhaps it is best to acknowledge that Rolle, owing to peculiarities of temperament, lies somewhat outside the normal course. Modern critics are inclined to assume that this "heat" and "song" were auto-suggestions. In the somewhat ponderous terms of modern psychology, "psycho-sensorial parallelisms are set up…in certain temperaments," and as a result there may be induced "senseautomatisms, which may vary from the slightest of suggestions to an intense hallucination."⁸ In the passage just quoted Miss Underhill proceeds to bring under the heading of sense-automatisms cases of stigmatization and visions. As we have seen, it is not necessary to follow modern psychology to such lengths in all cases, nor should we ever, in regard to such cases as Rolle, be too ready to transfer to a great and sane religious genius theories which modern psychology has only verified in morbid and insignificant personalities. Nor need we assume that a soul touched by powerful grace need follow the ordinary rules of psychology.

Yet even if we assume the immediate cause of Rolle's heat or fire to have been purely natural, this need not reflect on the value of his testimony. It may be that the impalpable touch of the finger of God is thus translated into sense-perceptions. Rolle himself was surprised by his first experience of the heat, and though he is clear that there is nothing imaginary about it, his language suggests that it was in no sense an enlightenment of the intellect. He says:

More have I marvelled than I showed when, forsooth, I first felt my heart wax warm, truly, and not in imagination, but as if it were burned with sensible fire. I was forsooth amazed as the burning in my soul burst up, and of an unwont solace; ofttimes, because of my ignorance of such healthful abundance, I have groped my breast seeking whether this burning were from any bodily cause outwardly. But when I knew that it was only kindled inwardly from a ghostly cause, and that this burning was nought of fleshly love or concupiscence, in this I conceived it was the gift of my Maker.⁹

However, we have to remember, in our attempts to rationalize Rolle's words, that he is committed to visions and diabolical visitations.¹⁰

Nevertheless, in spite of the recurrence of "heat" and "song," the chief impression gained from reading Rolle is not that of unusual experiences, but of the deeply loving and pure nature which was the basis and the result of his holy life. The love of God, not the knowledge of divinity, is the one thing needful.

"Alas, for shame!" he says, quoting St Augustine. "An old wife is more expert in God's love, and less in worldly pleasure, than the great divine whose study is vain."¹¹

That he may have this love is his continual prayer.

And yet I come not to as great love of God as mine elder fathers, the which have also done many other profitable things; wherefore I am full greatly ashamed in myself, and confused. Therefore, O Lord, make broad my heart that it may be more able to perceive thy love."¹²

For God alone can satisfy the soul.

Man's soul is the taker of God only; anything less than God cannot fulfil it: wherefore earthly lovers never are fulfilled.¹³

This life but delays the moment when the lover shall meet his beloved.

Thou, Lord Jesu, truly art my treasure, and all the desire of my heart; and because of thee I shall perfectly see thee, for then I shall have thee. And I spake thus to Death: O Death, where dwellest thou? Why comest thou so late to me, living but yet mortal? Why halsest¹⁴ thou not him that desires thee? Who is enough to think thy sweetness, that art the end of sighing, the beginning of desire, the gate of unfailing yearning? Thou art the end of heaviness, the mark of labours, the beginning of fruits, the gate of joys. Behold I grow hot and desire after thee: if thou come I shall forthwith be safe…. I pray thee tarry not mickle; from me abide not long!… Now grant, my best Beloved, that I may cease; for death, that many dread, shall be to me as heavenly music.¹⁵

No one who reads Rolle and knows the circumstances of his life will accuse him of laxity or softness, but they will scarcely fail to be struck by his insistence—comparable to that of the great St Augustine—on the claims of the heart.

I dare not say that all love is good, for that love that is more delighted in creatures than in the Maker of all things, and sets the lust of earthly beauty before ghostly fairness, is ill and to be hated; for it turns from eternal love and turns to temporal that cannot last. Yet peradventure it shall be the less punished; for it desires and joys more to love and to be loved than to defile or be defiled.¹⁶

Therefore if our love be pure and perfect, whatever our heart loves it is God.¹⁷

A soul can not be reasonable without love whiles it is in this life; wherefore the love thereof is the foot of the soul, by which, after this pilgrimage, it is borne to God or the fiend.¹⁸

Once or twice, also, he speaks almost with sadness of the lack of one to stand with him.

"But would to God thou hadst shown me a fellow in the way,"¹⁹ he exclaims.

And again:

I wot not soothly by what unhap it now befalls that scarcely or seldom is found a true friend…from God it truly is that amid the wretchedness of this exile we be comforted with the counsel and help of friends, until we come to him. Where we shall all be taught of God, and sit in eternal seats; and we shall be glad without end in him that we have loved, and in whom and by whom we have friends.²⁰

And in another place, for once sounding the depths scanned by Dame Julian, he says:

Wherefore when they [sinners] shall be deemed they shall see Christ sharp and intolerable to their eyes because in this life they never felt him sweet in their hearts…. Such truly as we now are to him, such a one shall he then appear to us; to a lover certain lovely and desirable, and to them that loved not, hateful and cruel. And yet this change is not on his part but on ours.²¹

But his natural inclination is to the sunshine.

Therefore the life that can find love and truly know it in mind shall be turned from sorrow to joy unspoken, and is conversant in the service of melody. Song certain it shall love, and, singing in Jesu, shall be likened to a bird singing to the death. And peradventure in dying the solace of charitable song shall not want—if it happen to him to die and not go swiftly to his love…. There shall be halsing of love, and the sweetness of lovers shall be coupled in heart, and the joining of friends shall stand for ever…. Therefore let us love bumingly, for if we love we shall sing in heavenly mirth to Christ with melody, whose love overcomes all things. Therefore let us live and also die in love.²²

These last quotations have shown Rolle at his best, in the full stream of a deep and direct current of feeling that has rarely found purer expression and that overleaps all the barriers between the modern world and the Middle Ages. The book ends on the same passionate level.

In the beginning truly of my conversion and singular purpose I thought I would be like the little bird that languishes for the love of his beloved, but is gladdened in his longing when he that it loves comes, and sings with joy, and in its song also languishes, but in sweetness and heat. It is said that the nightingale is given to song and melody all night, that she may please him to whom she is joined. How mickle more should I sing with greatest sweetness to Christ my Jesu, that is spouse of my soul through all this present life that is night in regard to the clearness to come, so that I should languish in longing and die for love.²³

The contemplative life, as Rolle saw it, or at least as he has recorded it, is singularly joyful. His fellowcountrymen of the fourteenth century, joyful and far from morbidity as they are, yet suggest a far more arduous and complex scheme of things. Yet even they, taking them as a body of feeling, may be set against too many modern mystics, whose days have been spent in darkness and sorrow and self-reproach. Even St Teresa, who is optimistic in spite of, or owing to, her desire for suffering, shows us a very different outlook on life, and the distrust and introspection of St John of the Cross, Father Baker, and a host of modern saints is too well known to need further indication. How far these apparent differences of view resolve themselves into different aspects of the same view seen by varying tempers of mind, how far either may err on the side of simplicity or complexity, how far, finally, the later and sadder outlook is a child of the sadder and less simple age that has followed upon the Renaissance, is a question too large for these pages. Here it is sufficient to quote a few words of Rolle which show that we may be wrong in assuming that with him was always the sunlight.

And if it sometimes happen that sweet easiness be not to thee in praying or in good thinking, and that thou be not made high in mind by the song of holy contemplation, and thou canst not sing as thou wast wont: yet cease not to read or pray.²⁴

As with almost all contemplatives whose life has been passed in men's eyes, Rolle was driven by outward attack and inward certainty alike to an apology for his form of life, and it is couched in a well-known and valid form of argument.

Man is not holier or higher for the outward works that he does. Truly God that is the beholder of the heart rewards the will more than the deed. The deeds truly hang on the will, not the will on the deeds. For the more burningly that a man loves, in so mickle he ascends to a higher reward…. God forsooth has foreordained his chosen to fulfd divers services. It is not given truly to ilk man to execute or fulfil all offices, but ilk man has that that is most according to his state…. Yet there are many active better than some contemplative; but the best contemplative are higher than the best active.²⁵

Only on one point does he seem to be opposed to the common teaching of the saints. In one place he asserts that the less holy are sometimes better fitted for the office of ruling souls,²⁶ but his exact meaning is not clear, as another passage contradicts what he has said before.

Contemplation is God's free gift:

But it is given soonest especially to those who have not lost that thing which is most pleasing to God, by their way of living, that is the flower of their youth.²⁷

Rolle nowhere gives a set description of contemplative prayer, but in many places he describes the life of a soul in the state of perfection as a continuous prayer.

We can forsooth, if we be true lovers of our Lord Jesu Christ, think upon him when we walk, and hold fast the song of his love whiles we sit in fellowship; and we may have mind of him at the board and also in tasting of meat and drink…. And if we labour with our hands, what lets us to lift our hearts to heaven and without ceasing to hold the thought of endless love? And so in all time of our life, being quick and not slow, nothing but sleep shall put our hearts from him.²⁸

He agrees with Hilton (if it is not the latter who follows Rolle) in saying that illness, fatigue, or too great exertion make actual contemplative prayer impossible, and the contemplative should therefore be discreet.

Therefore it behoves him that will sing in God's love, and in singing will rejoice and burn…not to live in too mickle abstinence.²⁹

He also holds, with many of the great contemplative Doctors, that the perfect contemplative is without fear of falling.

Nevertheless I trow that there is a degree of perfect love, the which whosoever attains he shall never afterwards lose. For truly it is one thing to be able to lose, and another alway to hold, what he will not leave although he can.³⁰

Rolle has been called a free-lance in the religious life of his time, and there is much to justify such an opinion in the circumstances of his life—for he be-longed to no religious order and was never a priest—and in his intensely personal outlook. At the risk of stressing what is obvious to all readers, it may be remarked that his originality did not extend to doctrine, and that there is nothing in his writings to suggest that he was in any way dissatisfied with the theological position or the ordinary religious practices of the Middle Ages. His temperament and outlook were unusual, but he was neither an innovator nor a reformer. The following passage shows alike his originality and his conservatism.

Because in the kirk of God there are singers ordained in their degree, and set to praise God and to stir the people to devotion, some have come to me asking why I would not sing as other men when they have ofttimes seen me in the solemn masses. They have stood up against me, because I fled the outward songs that are wont in the kirks, and the sweetness of the organ that is heard gladly by the people, only abiding among these either when the need of hearing mass—which elsewhere I could not hear—or the solemnity of the day asked it on account of the backbiting of the people. Truly I have desired to sit alone that I might take heed to Christ alone that had given to me ghostly song, in the which I might offer him praises and prayers. They that reproved me trowed not this…but I could not leave the grace of Christ and consent to fond men that knew me not within.³¹

Another curious characteristic of his contemplative prayer—to which a parallel may be found in Father Baker's Confessions—is his preference for a sitting position while engaged upon it.

And I have loved for to sit: for no penance, nor fantasy, nor that I wished men to talk of me, nor for no such thing: but only because I knew that I loved God more, and longer lasted within the comfort of love, than going, or standing, or kneeling. For sitting I am most at rest, and my heart most upward. But therefore, peradventure, it is not best that another should sit, as I did and will do to my death, save he were disposed in his soul as I was.³²

It is not easy to form a judgement on Rolle's prose style. Apart from the question of authenticity, which puts several treatises under suspicion, and the large amount of modernization necessary to make him intelligible to the ordinary reader, there is the further difficulty that the greater part of his work, other than translation, is in Latin. Hence many of the extracts given above are specimens of Misyn's prose style, not of Rolle's. A few passages, however, too striking to be passed over, may be quoted from his English Corpus.

Alas! for shame, what can we, who are sinful and foul, say if we consider ourselves good, when they who are most clean and most love God consider themselves most sinful and most vile and most unworthy…. For, get who get may, this world is wide enough and good enough to win heaven in; and it is rich enough and pleasant enough and sinful enough to win hell with, flee who flee may…. Prayer freely beflowers our souls with flowers of sweetness, with the fairness and sweetness of the fruit falling into meek hearts, which is freely to behold the fairness of God, in all meek virtues, lighting with the beams of his brightness all clean consciences and all meek hearts.³³

When thou hast gathered home thine heart and its wits, and hast destroyed the things that might hinder thee from praying, and won to that devotion which God sends to thee through his dear-worthy grace, quickly rise from thy bed at the bell-ringing: and if no bell be there, let the cock be thy bell: if there be neither cock nor bell, let God's love wake thee, for that most pleases God. And zeal, rooted in love, wakens before both cock and bell, and has washed her face with sweet love-tears; and her soul within has joy in God with devotion, and liking, and bidding him good-morning.³⁴

Rolle's sources have not as yet, I believe, been thoroughly explored by any editor, and for this again a canon of his writings is necessary. Thus, to take an example, in the Daily Work the Fathers of the Church and of the Desert are quoted plentifully, whereas in the Fire of Love the obvious quotations are very few. Nevertheless, certain influences can be discerned at work throughout Rolle. Richard of St Victor is traceable, as also are St Augustine, St Bernard, and St Gregory.

Like his followers in English religious life Rolle had a very deep devotion to the holy Name and to the Passion. Indeed, his meditation on the Passion, which has often been printed and quoted, though it is only a development of a theme found elsewhere—as in the Ancren Riwle—is perhaps the finest expression of that theme in English, and one of the best examples of Rolle's style. It is worth comparing this little treatise with the many similar meditations on the Passion which have been written since his day. Of the merely pictorial ones few, if any, are superior to his, for Rolle is always successful in avoiding false or strained sentiment, insignificant realism, and far-fetched symbolism.

The general reader will find Rolle at his best and most typical in the Fire of Love and Mending of Life. Of the minor works the little essay on Prayer is very attractive, as is also, in a different way, the Meditation on the Passion. The Form of Perfect Living, written for the nun Margaret Kirkby, is very like the Mending of Life. Our Daily Work, though interesting in many respects and spiritually valuable, has little mystical teaching, and, indeed, little of Rolle's genuine flavour. It is far more like the Ancren Riwle, to which it would seem to have been indebted.

Notes

¹ Misyn translated the Mending of Life and the Fire of Love, 1434-1435.

² See the Fire of Love, etc., ed. F. M. Comper, pp. xlv ff. The references in this chapter are to this edition.

³ By that eminent authority on the English mystics, Dom Noetinger of Solesmes, in an article in the Month, January, 1926.

⁴ For a description of Hampole as it is to-day, see R. H. Benson, A Book of the Love of Jesus, p. 226.

⁵Scala Perfectionis, ed. Noetinger, Preface, p. 14. "Lors même qu'il discute ou enseigne, il ne fait guère qu'extérioriser ses impressions."

⁶Fire, Book I, ch. xii.

⁷Fire, Book I, ch. xv….

⁸Fire, Introduction, pp. xv-xvi.

⁹Fire, Prologue, p. II.

¹⁰Minor Works, ed. Hodgson, p. 53.

¹¹Fire, Book I, ch. v.

¹²Fire, Book I, ch. ix.

¹³Ibid., Book I, ch. xi.

¹⁴ Halse=embrace.

¹⁵Fire, Book I, ch. xvi.

¹⁶Fire, Book I, ch. xvii.

¹⁷Ibid., Book I, ch. xix.

¹⁸Ibid, Book I, ch. xxiii.

¹⁹Ibid., Book II, ch. v.

²⁰Ibid, Book II, ch. ix.

²¹Fire, Book II, ch. viii.

²²Ibid., Book II, ch. xi.

²³Fire, Book II, ch. xii.

²⁴Ibid, Book I, ch. x.

²⁵Fire, Book I, ch. xxi.

²⁶Ibid.

²⁷Minor Works, p. 151.

²⁸Fire, Book II, ch. x.

²⁹Ibid., Book I, ch. xi.

³⁰Ibid, Book I, ch. xix.

³¹Fire, Book II, ch. i.

³²Form of Perfect Living, ed. G. Hodgson, ch. x, p. 71.

³³Minor Works, p. 153.

³⁴Form of Perfect Living, etc., p. 116.