[In the following excerpt from his book-length study, Watson sets out the basis for his analysis, focusing on the function of canor in Rolle's work and thought. Considering Rolle in relation to larger mystical traditions, Watson finds him distinctive by virtue of "an idiosyncrasy not of thought but of focus."]

[Here I will examine] the major themes of [Rolle's] writing, through which he articulates his audacious argument as to the status of the solitary mystic in the Church, and points to ways in which these, too, are idiosyncratic. In theory I am here concerned merely with a broad exposition of ideas and make no assessment of the purpose they are made to serve. Yet in practice the assessment tends to make itself. Since the structure of Rolle's thought is explicitly built around a particular view of his own status, even this introductory account of his exposition of the perfect life cannot avoid conveying that he is deeply concerned with the matter. Thus, in spite of itself, this survey anticipates the findings of my overall argument by pointing to the conclusion that Rolle's writing is not primarily didactic at all, but apologetic in its fundamental orientation.

There would be small point in building a discussion of Rolle's thought around his teachings on the central doctrines of Christianity, as if he were a theologian. He has little to say about Creation and Fall, Redemption and the Trinity, and what he does say is conventional and closely based on a source. His only systematic theological works are Super Orationem Dominicam, Super Symbolum Apostolorum and Super Symbolum S. Athanasii: derivative verse-by-verse expositions of major doctrinal texts, which indicate (as was perhaps intended) no more than that their author is wholly orthodox. Elsewhere he usually assumes that the nature of true belief is self-evident. Incendium Amoris, caps. 5-7, one of a very few formal doctrinal expositions in his works, is exceptional in putting his Trinitarian orthodoxy ostentatiously on show; but here again his account is wholly conventional, and his main point is that the Trinity is a mystery on which it is unwise to ponder: 'Let us not examine too closely things we cannot understand in this life' (163.28-29: 'Non nimis investigemus ea que in via comprehendere non possumus'). Regarding doctrinal deliberation as speculative rather than devotional, he seems to have heeded his own warning against it—that 'the harder teachings should be left to academics and learned men with long experience of sacred doctrine' (Emendatio Vitae, f. 139v. 15-17: 'Difficiliores vero sententiae disputantibus et ingeniosis viris longo tempore in sancta doctrina exercitatis relinquant'). When he requires doctrinal information himself, he relies on general guides: the Gloss Ordinaria for biblical glosses and Hugh of Strasbourg's Compendium Theologicae Veritatis for much of the rest. With the help of these and perhaps a small number of other works, he is always adequately informed, even about detailed theological points; but he is seldom concerned to be informative.

Nor does Rolle have much to say about the major Christian doctrines from a devotional point of view. He wrote a good deal about Christ, including lyrics, Passion meditations, and a scattering of devotional passages, one of which acquired fame as the Enconium Nominis Ihesu, gaining him a medieval reputation as the foremost exponent of the popular devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus.¹ Malcolm Moyes ([Richard Rolles Expositio Super Novem Lectiones Mortuorum,] 1988, chapter 2) has shown that, as a Yorkshire writer, Rolle was heir to a local tradition of Cistercian and Cistercian-inspired spiritual writing, in which affective devotion to Christ played a major part; he can, indeed, himself be regarded as an exponent of this love-centred spirituality, which derives not only from Bernard but from Aelred of Rievaulx, the poet John of Hoveden, and the anonymous author of the hymn Dulcis Ihesu Memoria … Rolle was certainly influenced by the affective, celebratory attitude of these writers towards Christ, and could neither have lived nor written as he did without them. Yet it would be a mistake to regard him as mainly a Christocentric writer. His debts to Cistercian spirituality are those of mood and imagery more than of Christology. His Passion lyrics and meditations were written to fulfil a relatively lowly function in the lives of spiritual beginners, while his more sophisticated English and Latin works make fairly few references to the Passion (although see Melos Amoris, caps. 29-32), except to say that meditation thereon belongs to the early stages of the spiritual life (see Emendatio Vitae, cap. 8). It is true that he associates devotion to the Holy Name with more advanced spiritual states; but his invocations of Jesus are almost devoid of theological content, and their structural importance, as we shall see, is in their connection with his experience of dulcor. Christology has none of the complexity and interest in Rolle's thought that it has, for example, in that of Julian of Norwich.

Similar things can be said about the importance of penitential themes in Rolle's writing. While he made notable contributions to the literature of penitence (as Moyes 1988, chapter 3 forcefully points out), especially in Super Threnos Ieremiae and Super Lectiones Mortuorum, his exercises in this mode seldom impinge upon the usual foci of his writing. He knew several of the classic expositions of the de contemptu mundi theme, such as Innocent III's De Miseria Condicionis Humane, the Speculum Peccatoris and the pseudo-Bernardine Meditationes Piissimae. But his interest in this theme is limited to a small number of works and passages in works, mostly written towards the end of his career, and all concerned with the early stages of the spiritual life. Thus in Emendatio Vitae, references to the de contemptu mundi theme are confined to the description of conversion in the first two chapters; in the epistle Ego Dormio, the penitential lyric 'Al perisshethe and passeth þat we with eigh see' (84-91) illustrates the lowest stage of the spiritual life. In Rolle's view, advanced contemplatives, whose careers form by far the most important subject of his writing, have moved beyond the need to articulate selfabnegatory contempt for the world, just as they have moved beyond the need to focus intensively on the humanity and Passion of Christ.

All in all, Rolle tends to take the main themes of Christian theology and religiosity for granted to such an extent that his writing often gives the impression of being disconnected from the mainstream of Christian thought. Reading him, it frequently seems that we have strayed into an esoteric world in which the principal landmarks are structures distinctive to Rolle himself. It is true that much of this air of eccentricity turns out to be the product of an idiosyncrasy not of thought but of focus, and that (as we saw in the introduction) a certain number of apparent oddities are in fact endemic to a literary tradition in which he is working, of writings extolling and analysing 'violent' love. Yet even when he mirrors pre-existing structures of thought most closely, the literalistic way in which he applies them to his own situation, and his concentration on a few issues sues to the exclusion of others, makes them assume a new and puzzling aspect.

The only moment of salvation history (and the only corner of Christian doctrine) with which Rolle's thought is almost invariably involved is the Judgement. Almost all his works are concerned with the division of souls that takes place at the end of the world. Judica Me contains two accounts of the Day of Judgement; Super Apocalypsim and Super Threnos are concerned with apocalyptic events prophetically foretold; both Psalter commentaries are incessantly concerned with the division of humanity into the good and the bad; almost half the chapters of Incendium Amoris end by anticipating the joys of the elect or the sorrows of the reprobate; the climax of Melos Amoris is its account of the coming gloria sanctorum and the horrors of damnation. Rolle's imagination is as dominated by the concept of future judgement as if he was after all the author of the Prick of Conscience.

His presentation of the Judgement is not, though, as crude as this remark suggests. He is not concerned with the more pictorial kinds of apocalyptic—with its descriptions of the vale of Jehoshaphat and the physical location and structure of hell—and he does not deal in the inflationary topoi meant merely to scare the reader into virtue: the Fourteen Torments, the Thousand Tongues of Steel (Prick of Conscience 6446). For Rolle the Judgement is rather a moment of moral revelation, when the true nature of the good and the wicked will be made known, and a transcendent order will triumph over the corrupt earthly one; it is a moment of reversal for the wicked and vindication for the elect, but of realization, in different senses, for both. The elect can now experience fully what before they only anticipated:

Exultabunt itaque sancti in gloria pre dotibus anime, que sunt: cognicio, amor et fruicio Creatoris. Letabuntur in cubilibus suis [Psalm 149.5] pre dotibus corporis glorificati, que sunt: claritas, impassibilitas, agilitas, subtilitas. (Melos Amoris 181.18-21)²

[The saints will exult in glory for their spiritual endowments, which are knowledge, love, and enjoyment of the Creator. They will rejoice in their beds for the endowments of their glorified bodies, which are clarity, immunity to suffering, agility, keenness.]

The damned have to recognize their earthly blindness to their condition:

Videntes namque reprobi se iusto Dei iudicio ab electorum gloria perhenni excommunicacione sequestratos, inexcogitabili tristicia contabescent … Tune dicent illi miseri in inferno collocati: 'Ve nobis quia peccavimus [Lamentations 5.16]; obtenebrati erant oculi nostri ut mala nostra videre non poteramus'. (Judica Me 8.19-21, 9.12-14)

[For the reprobate will be consumed with unthinkable sadness when they see themselves cut off in eternal excommunication from the glory of the elect by God's just judgement. Then those wretches gathered in hell will say, 'Woe to us, for we sinned; our eyes were blinded so we could not see our evil'.]

Cut off from the sight of God, they are still granted a kind of insight.³

For Rolle, then, one of the most important things about the Judgement will be that the wicked will have to admit that they were wrong and that the elect were right. Hell, as well as heaven, will witness the vindi cation of the elect. A group of the elect (the pauperes), however, will be summoned to the Judgement not to be judged but to judge: 'O ineffabilis gloria pauperum, o inestimabilis laus sanctorum, qui a consiliis et iudiciis deiecti sunt, et cum Christo congregati in eius iudicio sedentes iudicabunt' (Melos Amoris 180.36-181.2: 'O unutterable glory of the poor, O inestimable renown of the saints, who were cast out from courts and councils and now will judge, gathered together with Christ, sitting in his court!').⁴ After the Judgement the elect will rejoice in the suffering of the damned: 'Et in ultimo iudicio cum viderit mundanum miserum terre quam dilexerat derelictum, non solum non compacietur, sed etiam de morte mali letabitur. Unde Propheta: Videbunt iusti et super eum ridebunt [Psalm 51.8]'⁵ (Judica Me 6.19-22: 'And at the Last Judgement, when he sees the wordly wretch bereaved of the earth that he loved, not only will he have no compassion, but he will even rejoice at the death of the wicked—as the prophet says: The just will look on and laugh at him'). The scorn that the elect will feel for the damned is a saintly equivalent of the contempt that the reprobate feel for the elect now; they will laugh ('ridebunt') because the reprobate derided ('deridebant'): 'Et [reprobi] electos Dei habebunt accusantes, quos bene vivere videbant, nee opera eorum neque exhortaciones imitabantur, sed eos deridebant et despexerant' (Judica Me 7.15-17: 'And the reprobate will have God's elect for accusers, whom they saw living virtuously, and followed neither their works nor their exhortations but derided and despised them'). Like Lazarus, the elect are paupers here but will be blessed in the next life; like Dives, the reprobate are rich here, 'tiranni, perversi divites, pauperum oppressores, iniqui principes' (Super Psalmum Vicesimum 22.25-23.1)—and will be judged worthy of damnation.

The positions of elect and reprobate after the Judgement will thus be the exact reverse of their current positions except that they will be immovable. The elect have bought an eternal reward by giving up the temporal world and its pleasures; the reprobate have bargained away eternity to gain the fleeting riches of the temporal: 'Proinde pensemus dum adhuc peccare possimus, prospera mundi fugere, adversa libenter tollerare. Mala namque mens cum gaudet deperit, et seipsam quasi blando veneno, dum in creatura iocunditatem querit, occidit' (Incendium Amoris 156.9-12: 'Accordingly, while we are still able to sin, let us decide to flee the world's prosperity and to sustain its adversities willingly. For the evil soul perishes while it rejoices, and kills itself, as with sweet poison, while it searches for pleasure in created things').

As notes 2-5 show, there is nothing of itself unusual in this depiction of the Judgement. What is unusual, at least in so concentrated a form, is the way that these ideas become for Rolle the building-blocks of a narrowly antithetical and symmetrical model of Christian moral history as a whole. For Judgement does not only occupy a crucial place as a future event in his works; the coming division of souls suffuses his thinking about this life to such an extent that it often seems that it has already occurred, and elect and reprobate know their places in advance. Both the title and the content of the Liber de Amore Dei contra Amatores Mundi suggests this predestinarian view: 'Habent igitur celestis amor et secularis sectatores suos; sed inter se continue decertant, quis illorum amatum suum amplius diligat, cum alter ad Christum alter ad mundum tanto ambitu suspirat' (3.27-30: 'So both worldly and heavenly love have their followers; but they continually contend with one another as to which of them loves his beloved more, the one sighing after Christ, the other after the world, with such great eagerness"). This depiction of spiritual warfare is deliberately fanciful in imagining the lovers of God and of the world in conscious competition. But while Rolle normally assumes the wicked to be culpably ignorant of their spiritual state, he almost always speaks of electi and reprobi, and the patterns of behaviour which distinguish each group, as though it is clear who fits into which category. He denies having any knowledge of or interest in the predestined fate of individuals, and denounces those who judge others (Judica Me 1); but he still satirizes the wicked as though their obduracy was established, their damnation assured. Just as their eyes are to be forcibly opened on the Day of Wrath, so in this life they are irrecoverably blinded (a favourite image) by their foolishness: 'Excecantur utique oculi secularium tenebris viciorum; sed et sapiencia mundi per quam magnos se esse putant nimirum stultos efficit et a vere sapiencie lumine in obscura ducit' (Contra Amatores Mundi 3.41-44: 'You see, worldly eyes are blinded by the darkness of sin. But the world's wisdom, through which they think themselves great, also certainly makes them fools, and leads them from the light of true wisdom into the dark'). The division of souls at the Judgement thus has its counterpart for Rolle in a schematic opposition between the good and the evil in this life. The wicked, though rick and powerful, are already reprobate and can do no right; the good, though poor and despised, are already elect and can, in effect, do no wrong. Instead of viewing the world tropologically, as a vale of soul-making (in the way a pastoral writer like Walter Hilton generally does), Rolle habitually sees it anagogically, as though through the foreseeing eyes of God himself, and in the form in which the Judgement is to fix it forever.

Yet when Rolle speaks of electi and reprobi he is not generally concerned with the whole of humanity, but with two smaller groups, one good, one evil:

Unde notandum est quod quatuor erunt ordines in iudicio: duo electorum et duo reproborum. Primus ordo electorum erit apostolorum et sequencium eos, scilicet, perfectorum, qui omnia pro Christo perfecte reliquerant et in viam paupertatis Christum secuti sunt. Et isti iudicabunt alios, unde Job ait, Non salvat impios, et pauperibus indicium tribuit [Job 36.6]. Quoniam et hie a tirannis et malis hominibus incaute iudicamur et contempnimur, ibi a nobis tiranni et alii mali discrete iudicabuntur. Secundus ordo electorum erit beatorum Christianorum, qui fidem et dileccionem Christi tenuerunt et opera misericordie ex iuste acquisitis diligenter fecerunt … Tertius ordo erit falsorum Christianorum, qui fidem Christi habuerunt et illam bonis operibus non impleverunt. Et istis improperabitur quia non pascebant esurientes, nee potabant sicientes … Quartus ordo erit illorum qui fidem Christi non habuerunt. (Judica Me 74.5-75.4)

[Concerning which it is to be noted that there will be four groups in the Judgement, two elect and two reprobate. The first group of elect will be of apostles and their followers, that is the perfect, who left everything perfectly for Christ, and followed Christ in the way of poverty. These will judge others, as Job says: He does not save the impious, and entrusts judgement to the poor. For since we are judged and despised foolishly here by tyrannical and wicked people, so there tyrants and the other wicked will be judged discerningly by us. The second group of elect will be of blessed Christians, who held to the faith and to the love of Christ, and who dutifully performed the works of mercy with goods justly acquired. The third group will be of false Christians, who had the Christian faith and did not implement it by good works. These will be reproved for not feeding the hungry, not giving drink to the thirsty. The fourth group will be of those who did not have Christian faith.]

This distinction between groups of saved and damned is common in medieval theology;⁶ but in many of his works Rolle uses it in his own way by applying it directly to his picture of the world before the Judgement. Electi, pauperes and perfecti are thus distinguished from ordinary Christians (the pusilli fideles or mediocriter boni)⁷ in his accounts of this life; and this distinction regularly corresponds to one he draws between contemplatives or hermits and Christians in active life. The former group are the main concern of almost all his works and (we shall see) are treated as members of an elite club: different criteria apply to them than to ordinary Christians; different rewards will be allotted to them. In dealing with the evil, Rolle always writes of the first of the groups of reprobate:

Reprobi vero, omnino inaniter se habent erga Deum. Audiunt enim verbum Dei cum anxietate, orant sine affeccione, cogitant sine dulcedine. Intrant ecclesiam, implent parietes, tundant pectora, emittunt suspiria, sed ficta plane, quia ad oculos hominum, non ad aures Dei perveniunt. (Incendium Amoris 149.34-150.3)

[But the reprobate conduct themselves with utter futility towards God. For they hear the word of God restlessly, pray without desire, think without sweetness. They go into church, fill it from wall to wall, beat their breasts, gasp out sighs—but all quite falsely, since they reach the eyes of people, not the ears of God.]

For most of the occasions on which he uses the words, reprobi refers only to false Christians (not also to pagans), and electi to those (especially solitaries) who have attained the summits of perfection (not also to the mediocriter boni); indeed much of his writing scarcely acknowledges the existence of anyone who fits into neither category.

Thus in Rolle's account of this world there is for the most part no middle ground on which the evil could repent and reform or the good suffer a fall from grace. Not that he believed that there was no such middle ground: it is clear from his few attempts to write for the mediocriter boni (as in most of Judica Me and in Super Lectiones Mortuorum) that in theory he saw the life of ordinary Christians as a continual and uncertain struggle with sin. But he has little interest in and small ability to write about this struggle; indeed, for all his theoretical knowledge of its existence he often seems to forget about it. His portrayal of evil is so undifferentiated that even when he tries to analyse the process of damnation in the manner of a pastoral writer (as in Incendium Amoris, cap. 23), the result shares the harshness and externality of satire. Instead of being analyses of a problem that afflicts everybody, his portrayals of sin seem to anticipate the joy he will have in triumphing over the reprobate at the Judgement, by triumphing over them on earth. Far from inviting them to be converted, his treatments of the wicked consist mainly of reproofs, the objects of which are satirical types whose lot is already determined: corrupt clergy, rulers, lovers of the world, who play out their role of persecuting the elect, while the latter contend with them by going on, heedless of tribulation, to their enormous heavenly reward.

The one spiritual process which Rolle does write about is that whereby the perfecti achieve their high state. If the reprobate are homogeneous stereotypes in his works, the electi are described with great particularity as those whose regeneration has taken place according to a specific model. The way in which this model is applied varies according to the context in which it appears, but nowhere does it diverge substantially from his accounts of his own spiritual experiences. One corollary of this fact is that in spite of the significance of the theme of regeneration in his works, the focus of interest, even in his depictions of the elect, is never the psychological intricacies or moral difficulties of spiritual advance; his own experience of such complexities was evidently so slight that he is naive and indifferent in dealing with them. His interest is rather in the structure of advance and the interpretation of that structure—and 'interpretation' here equals 'elevation'. If Rolle's treatment of the reprobate is concerned more with the topoi of blame than with analysis, in discussing the elect he is always somehow concerned with their praise; indeed, those whose progress towards holiness follows the pattern he describes come to be accorded the highest spiritual status. In order to grasp the logic of his position we must look at his version of the ascent to God from its beginning: an enterprise that involves examining the affective and autobiographical accounts found in works like Incendium Amoris, in the context of the more structured and distanced pastoral discussions found, pre-eminently, in Emendatio Vitae.

The elect are those who set their hearts to love Christ, not the world:

Noverint universi in hoc erumpnoso exilii habitaculo immorantes, neminem posse amore eternitatis imbui, neque suavitate celica deliniri, nisi ad Deum vere conventantur. Converti quippe ad ipsum oportet, et ab omnibus rebus visibilibus in mente penitus averti, priusquam poterit divini amoris dulcedinem saltern ad modicum experiri. Hec quidem conversio fit per ordinatum amorem, ut diligat diligenda, vel non diligenda non diligat. (Incendium Amoris 148.1-7)

[Everyone lingering in this wretched place of exile should know that they cannot be imbued with the love of eternity nor be anointed with heavenly sweetness unless they are truly converted to God. For a person must be converted to him and totally turned away from everything visible in his mind before he can experience even a little of the sweetness of divine love. This conversion occurs through ordered love, so that what should be loved is loved, while what ought not to be loved is not loved.]

For Rolle, the process of spiritual advance begins not with moral doubt or confusion, but with conversion and the ordering of the affections, so that the will is put in tune with the self-evident moral structure of the world, and so that the individual can say, in the words of the Song of Songs (2.4), 'Ordinavit in me charitatem'. The opening four chapters of Emendatio Vitae, a work which self-consciously mirrors Rolle's model of spiritual ascent in its own structure, are thus respectively entitled De Conversio, De Contemptu Mundi, De Paupertate and De Institutione Vitae, the first urging readers to this turning to God, the next three indicating what it is they are to turn from and how the converted life, in its broad outlines, should be organized. Conversion is, of course, initiated by God: 'For if God, in his grace, did not go before those elect whom he has determined to save, he would not find anyone among the sons of men whom he might justify' (Super Psalmum Vicesimum 7.13-15: 'Nisi enim Deus electos quos salvare decrevit gratia preveniret, inter filios hominum non inveniretur quern iustificaret').⁸ Yet it is also a process which begins at a definitive moment and requires vigorous human activity. Rolle's own spiritual ascent began with his flight into the wilderness, an act of headstrong determination in which he literally turned away from the world. Emendatio Vitae exhorts the reader in more abstract terms to do the same thing, citing the brevity of human life, the uncertainty of the hour of death, and other de contemptu mundi motifs (f. 130r.). One of the Passion meditations is an aid for readers who wish to convert their affections from the world to Christ in the more positive and forcible way popularized by the Stimulus Amoris; by dwelling on the details of Christ's death, and on their own incapacity to respond to that death as emotionally as they should, the readers of these works are meant to wrench their wills away from wordliness and into a proper attitude of faith and feeling:

Now is þe malice of my hert, þat is so wikked, more þan is þy passioun, þat is þy precious deth, þat wroght such wondres and manyfold more, and þe mynd þerof stirreth nat my hert? Bot, swet lord, a drop of þy blode droped vpon my soul in mynd of þy passioun may suple and soft my soule in þy grace, þat is so hard. I wot wel, swet Ihesu, þat my hert is nat worpy þat þou sholdest come þerto and þerin alyƷt. I ask hit nat of be dignite of by sepulcre. Bot, swete Ihesus, pou IyƷted in to helle to visite per and ryghtyn; and in pat manere I ask py comynge in to my soule. (Meditation B, 507-16)

Here it is Christ who is begged to induce a response in the work's readers, but their own wills (sustained by the affective force of Rolle's prose) are nonetheless assumed to be very much active participants.

Conversion is turning from the world to Christ. It is also a movement from an existence centred on the body to one focussed inwardly: a convert 'has almost let go external perception, is wholly gathered within, is wholly lifted up into Christ' (Emendatio Vitae, f. 135v. I: 'Pene exteriores sensus amittit, totus intus colligitur, totus in Christum elevatur'). Such language is commonplace in itself, but Rolle's application of it is typically extreme. The outside world is given almost no place in his writing. For spiritual and economic reasons, most contemplatives recognize a need to maintain a balance between inner activities and various kinds of structured engagement in the world. Thus Ancrene Wisse divides its injunctions for the solitary life into 'outer' and 'inner' rules, including in the latter liturgical prayer, food, clothing and day-to-day conduct; in this it follows Aelred's De Institutis Inclusarum, as do many other late-medieval Rules (see Ayto and Barratt 1984, p. xli). Aelred's own ultimate source is the Benedictine Rule, which of course places much emphasis on the liturgy, and also directs monks to manual work as a way of avoiding idleness; thus cap. 48 (De Opere Manuum Cotidiano) opens 'Otiositas inimica est animae'—'Idleness is the enemy of the soul'. In obedience to the injunction to manual work, even the Carthusians, who considered themselves an eremitic order of especial rigour, copied books as a physical labour which was meant to balance the strenuous inner life expected of them.⁹ Rolle, however, does not prescribe such a balance. He is anxious to avoid the charge of idleness (e.g. 'Non ergo contemplatores celestis iubili ociosi sunt', Super Canticum Canticorum 6.9-10), but the labour he enjoins is rather the 'labor … dulcis, desiderabilis et suavis' of contemplation (6.22-23) than bodily labour, which he thinks of small value ('Parum enim prodest corporalis exercitacio', 6.15)—and the term contemplatio, here as always in his work, refers to private not liturgical prayer.¹⁰ His own anchoritic rule, The Form of Living, is almost entirely concerned with the inner life, and gives no help as to how a recluse is to pray, structure her day or keep herself in food. Where he does write of the matters comprised in the outer rule it is to urge their unimportance. Although he first experienced canor while engaged in a communal recitation of the psalms (Incendium Amoris, cap. 15), he ceased to regard even the liturgy as relevant to him (cap. 31). Similarly, as we saw in Chapter 1, asceticism has little value for him, and he recommends conformity with others as a guide to eating habits (Emendatio Vitae, f. 137r. 7). He does not envisage a life in which food and shelter is a problem; his own life was economically dependent on patrons, and he did not regard himself as obliged to do anything to support himself. For Rolle, the living of an inwardly gathered life entails a rejection of the concerns of the outer life so total as to require that contemplatives be accorded a wholly special status.¹¹

The movement from a sensual outwardly directed existence to an inner and spiritual one has, of course, its difficulties. Super Canticum Canticorum contains a famous anecdote of one of Rolle's temptations, in which a devil appears to him as a beautiful woman, but is scared off by his praising the blood of Christ (47.26-48.16). In Emendatio Vitae he writes more generally of the 'triple cord' that binds men (sic) to the earth: riches, female flattery and youthful beauty (f. 135r. 44-45). But this obviously personal list (compare Incendium Amoris 166.22-167.14), like his other accounts of temptations encountered by converts, is of interest mainly for what it omits. Unlike more practical spiritual guides, Rolle dwells almost exclusively on problems caused by the blandishments of world or flesh, and says little about inner dryness, sins of pride and envy, and other spiritual trials.¹² On the few occasions when he alludes to a range of sins and temptations, such as in the last part of Judica A (10-15), cap. 4 of Emendatio Vitae, and a passage of The Form of Living (332-484), his writing is often mechanical. The last of these works merely lists categories of sins and their remedies, borrowing its material directly from the Compendium Theologicae Veritatis (as Ogilvie-Thomson's notes show), without regard for relevance; it is unlikely that any of its intended readers can have needed injunctions against drunkenness, gifts to harlots or usury. Moreover, Rolle's discussions of temptations seldom invoke the commonplaces which regard them as instruments of growth, and so give them a positive role in the structure of spiritual ascent; even his accounts of the early stages of this ascent treat temptation merely as a nuisance to be dealt with as quickly as possible. Lacking an appreciation (and probably much experience) of spiritual struggle, Rolle has little sense that sin is hard for contemplatives to deal with. He often uses the formula 'At the beginning we are sharply stung, but at the middle and end we are delighted by heavenly sweetness' (Judica Me 16.2-3: 'In inicio graviter pungimur, sed in medio et in fine celesti suavitate delectamur'); yet he has little use for the idea that the elect, at any stages of their careers, encounter internal obstacles serious enough to threaten them.

The most serious obstacle contemplatives encounter is not a temptation at all but the external trial of persecution. All the elect must expect to suffer opprobrium, scandal-mongering and detraction (Judica Me 10.21-22); whoever wishes to rejoice with Christ must first be a partner with him in tribulation (ll.2-3). Where Ancrene Wisse, like most works in the tradition of penitential spirituality, regards suffering as something which any would-be follower of Christ must deliberately seek (see part VI), Rolle assumes it will be brought about mostly by the external agency of the enemies of the elect. Moreover, he usually identifies it not with bodily pain or temptation but with verbal abuse. Even caps. 5-6 of Emendatio Vitae (De Tribulatione Patienter Sustinenda and De Patientia), which generalize the theme of tribulation in order to appeal to a broad readership, frequently betray the assumption that it is equivalent to persecution. Yet while he often refers to his own enemies, he does not tell elect readers what persecution to expect for themselves, nor how to deal with it. For the most part, his interest in the theme is that it shows those who suffer persecution to be the chosen of God, linking them with the early Christian witnesses and martyrs:

Palam facere, dico, ea que oportet fieri cito [Revelation 1.1] … Animat nos sanctus Iohannes quasi inevitabilia ostendens adversa calumpniarum, improperiorum et magnarum tribulacionum, non solum ab extraneis sed eciam a falsis fratribus, quorum persecucio eo est magis periculosa, quo occulta … Hos perverse mentis ideo permittit Deus longe lateque discurrere, et malivolas linguas ac venenosas relaxare, ut paciencia electorum exerceatur et gloriosius coronentur … (Super Apocafypsim, 120.17-32)

[To make known, I say, those things which must soon come to pass. St John encourages us by showing as virtually inevitable the suffering of calumnies, reproaches, and great tribulations, not only from outsiders but also from false brothers, whose persecution is the more dangerous in that it is secret. For God allows these perverseminded people to rush about hither and thither and give free rein to their malevolent and poisonous tongues, so the patience of the elect may be tested, and they may be crowned the more gloriously.]

It is true that this emphasis on persecution is typical of eremitic writing from the Vitae Patrum on, so that even Ancrene Wisse (especially the opening pages of part III) is somewhat improbably preoccupied with the opprobrium the anchoresses must suffer (see also William of St Thierry's Epistola Aurea III-VI). But Rolle's handling of this traditional theme is still notable for the narrowness of its focus and the repetitiveness of its treatment.

If Rolle is not very helpful, as a pastoral writer, in his depictions of the difficulties new converts must expect to have to face, he is hardly more so in his positive instructions. Almost the only tool for directing the mind to God he describes in any detail in the generalized Benedictine triad of spiritual exercises, lectio, meditatio and oratio:

Tria vera exercicia cognoscere debemus quibus succendimur in amore Dei, videlicet, sacra leccio, oracio, meditacio. Leccio amantem … nobis insinuat. Oracio ad amorem Christi nos inflammat. Meditacio in amoris dulcedinem nobis continuacionem subministrat. (Judica Me 17.1-5)

[We should recognize three exercises by which we are set alight in the love of God, namely holy reading, prayer, meditation. Reading introduces us to the beloved. Prayer inflames us in the love of Christ. Meditation affords us a continuation in the sweetness of love.]

In the same vein as Judica Me, Emendatio Vitae recommends contemplatives to move between these three exercises at will, in order to inspire love in themselves (f. 139v. 35-38): a use of the triad that recalls the prologue to Anselm's Orationes sive Meditationes, where the reader is encouraged to let her or his thoughts move from reading, to meditation, to prayer, as seems best.¹³Emendatio Vitae gives a chapter to each of the three. Oratio has pride of place (cap. 7), but the term covers so wide a range (from recitation of the office to the moments before the experience of canor) as to render the chapter's advice on the subject of only general relevance. One of the most striking indications of Rolle's indifference to the mundane details of the spiritual life is this lack of clarity about the forms and occasions of prayer. Canor is a heightening of a kind of verbal prayer; Rolle's works are full of elaborate and impassioned prayers; yet the most specific advice he gives about prayer is that one should sit, not kneel, to do it. Lectio (cap. 9) has special importance for Rolle: reading the affective parts of the Scriptures kindles love ('accendunt nos ad amandum', f. 139v. 19) and teaches us to avoid sin. His biblical commentaries were presumably intended to assist in this process, and indicate how important he thought it to be; but his treatment of the exercise, here and elsewhere, is brief. Meditatio receives a fuller treatment than either lectio or oratio (cap. 8), because Rolle is anxious to warn readers against treating it as more than a means to an end. The practical tone of this chapter derives from its negativity: meditation is easy to practise to excess; it makes no difference what subject is chosen for meditation, since the exercise is of only temporary use. Such advice is conventional (visual meditation was often seen as a mere prologue to contemplation), but gives few indications as to how the exercise is to be performed. Like the other stages of the spiritual life discussed so far, prayer, reading and medita tion are mainly significant for Rolle because they lead to something else.¹⁴

What this 'something else' is the last three chapters of Emendatio Vitae sketch in different ways. Cap. 10 (De Puritate Mentis) describes the goal of the conversion of the will as inner purity; once this is achieved, love is 'ordered' in the way the opening of Incendium Amoris says it must be. Total purity is not possible in this life, because venial sin cannot quite be destroyed. But affective prayer, reading and meditation can destroy the effects of venial sins as soon as they occur, by burning them up in the heat of charity (see Chapter 5, n. 22): 'Quamvis enim aliunde peccet venialiter cito tamen propter suam integram intentionem ad Deum directam deletur; fervor namque charitatis in ipso existens, omnem rubiginem peccatorum consumit' (Emendatio Vitae, f. 139v. 42-44: 'For while he may sin venially sometimes, his sin is at once annihilated, because his whole will is turned to God; for the fire of love dwelling in him consumes every speck of sin'). Cap. 11 (De Amore) then gives an account of the fervor caritatis, which draws on many of Rolle's earlier writings (see Excursus 1, item 2.1-6), as well as on Richard of St Victor's De Quattuor Gradibus Violentae Caritatis (see pp. 216-218), and in a general sense on Bernard. Had Rolle's account of the spiritual life stopped at this point, there would still be relatively little to distinguish him from any of the writers of luxuriant prose in celebration of passionate love whom I discussed in the introduction (pp. 18-22). However, it does not stop. As cap. 12 of Emendatio Vitae (De Contemplatio) implies and many of his other works make very clear, for Rolle 'violent' love cannot constitute the fulfilment of a contemplative's aspirations until it expresses itself in four specific mystical experiences: Sight into Heaven, fervor, dulcor and the climax of the perfect life, canor. With the adumbration of these experiences, he passes beyond the traditional language of affective spirituality on to ground which is increasingly his own, and where his own life is by far his most significant source. Indeed, writing of fervor and canor near the end of Incendium Amoris, Rolle admits that he is himself unable to suggest parallels for them: 'Ob hoc utique evenit huiusmodi amatori quod nequaquam in aliquorum doctorum scriptis inveni aut reperi expressum' (237.21-23: 'Then indeed there happens to this kind of lover something I never discovered in any of the writings of the learned nor heard expounded').¹⁵ Here, accordingly, we must explore in a little more detail.

The final chapter of Emendatio Vitae gives a somewhat allusive rendering of Rolle's mystical thought. For a fuller account we must turn to Incendium Amoris, which, as well as containing the most famous narrative of his experiences (in cap. 15), provides several shorter third-person summaries:

Cum ergo homo ad Christum perfecte conversus cuncta transitoria despexerit, et se in solo conditoris desiderio immobiliter ut mortalibus pro corrupcione carnis permittitur fixerit: tune nimirum vires viriliter exercens primo quasi aperto celo supemos cives oculo intellectuali conspicit, et postea calorem suavissimum, quasi ignem ardentem, sentit. Deinde mira suavitate imbuitur, et deinceps in canore iubilo gloriatur. Hec est ergo perfecta caritas, quam nemo novit nisi qui accipit [Relevation 2.17], et qui accipit nunquam amittit, dulciter vivit, secure morietur. (Incendium Amoris 202.26-35)

[So when someone perfectly turned to Christ despises all transitory things and unmovingly attaches himself solely in desire for the Creator (so far as fleshly corruption renders this possible for mortals), then truly, exercising his strength manfully, first with intellectual vision he sees the celestial citizens, as though heaven had been opened; then he feels a very sweet heat like fire burning; next he is imbued with wonderful sweetness; and thereafter he glories in joyful song. This then is perfect charity, which nobody knows unless he receives it; and he who receives it never lays it down. Sweetly he lives; confidently he will die.]

The images used to describe the four experiences are derived from all five senses: sight (Sight into Heaven), touch (fervor), smell or taste (dulcor), sound (canor). They occur in this order (to be understood as an ascending scale) in most of Rolle's works, and in pastoral as well as autobiographical contexts. Ego Dormio tells a nun that she will have these same experiences:

At þe begynnynge, when bou comest thereto, þi goostly egh is taken vp in to be light of heuyn, and bare enlumyned in grace and kyndlet of þe fyre of Cristes loue, so þat þou shal feel verraily þe brennynge of loue in þi herte, euermore lyftynge þi thoght to God and fillynge be ful of ioy and swetnesse, so myche bat no sekenesse ne shame ne anguys ne penaunce may gref be, bot al þi lif shal turne in to ioy. And þan for heynesse of þi hert, þi praiers turneth in to ioyful songe and þi þoghtes to melodi. (Ego Dormio 225-233)

The images may shift their meaning in different contexts, but the structure of Rolle's account, once formulated, is rigid. In his view it constitutes the definitive form in which the elect, while in this life, rejoice in God.

The first experience, Sight into Heaven, is notable as a sign of blessings to come, but is otherwise of obscure significance. It seems to be a temporary state which is made insignificant by the experiences that succeed it—perhaps because it lacks their affective force. Incendium Amoris says this about it:

Ab inicio namque alteracionis vite mee et mentis usque ad apercionem hoscii celestis, ut revelata facie oculus cordis superos contemplaretur, et videret qua via amatum suum quereret, et ad ipsum iugiter anhelaret, effluxerunt tres anni, exceptis tribus vel quattuor mensibus. Manente siquidem hoscio aperto usque ad tempus in quo in corde realiter senciebatur calor eterni amoris, annus unus pene transivit. (Incendium Amoris 188.24-189-6)

[From the beginning of the transformation of my life and mind up until the opening of the heavenly gates—so that the heart's eye could contemplate the supernal with face unveiled, and could see by what way it should seek its beloved and continually desire him—three years less three or four months went by. Nearly a year passed (the heavenly gates staying open) before the time when the heat of eternal love was really felt in the heart.]

Sight is here contrasted with the feeling of love that accompanies fervor; its low status is made clear by its presentation as 'seeing the way' rather than as part of that way. But while Rolle's accounts of the ascent to God seldom do more than mention it, he has at least two reasons for retaining it in his exemplary model. One is that he experienced something which he thought of as a sight into heaven, and considered that this fact alone made it important. The other is that without invoking such an experience it would be difficult for him to draw on the visual imagery of contemplation employed by the Fathers: Gregory's description of God as an 'incircumscriptum lumen' (see, e.g., Super Canticum Canticorum 1.7-8), or the pseudo-Dionysian image of 'ascent' to God. Such metaphors would be hard for any mystical writer to dispense with, and are important for Rolle as indications that he is describing a genuine and spiritual experience with authoritative precedents, for all his insistence on literal heat and a spiritually audible song.

The source of the image of 'Sight into Heaven' is Revelation 4.1. The comment on this passage in Super Apocalypsim implies a good deal about the place of the experience in the overall structure of Rolle's thought:

Et ecce ostium aperto in celo. Cum obscuritas scripturarum in Ecclesia ostenditur, quasi ostium in celo aperitur. Vel sic: dum devota mens perfecte nititur ut a sordibus purgetur, dumque continua meditacione et oracione se sursum erigit … subito insolita lux apparet et mentem attonitam rapit, sicque ut contemplativus efficiatur cum oculis cordis iam mundatus ad celestia contemplanda suscipitur, ostium in celo aperitur, non corpori sed spiritui, et deinde dona melliflua descendunt et archana patefiunt. (156.13-21)

[And behold, a door open in heaven. When the darkness of the Scriptures is set forth by the Church, it is as though a door into heaven is opened. Or thus: when the devout soul strives perfectly to be purged from uncleannesses, and when it lifts itself upward by continual meditation and prayer, an unusual light suddenly appears and snatches away the amazed mind. And so, in order that he may become a contemplative, and with his heart's eye now cleansed, he is caught up to the sight of heavenly things, a door is opened in heaven (not corporeally but spiritually) and from it descend mellifluous gifts, and secrets are thrown open.]

Here Rolle gives two interpretations of the same verse, the first derived from his source, a commentary by pseudo-Anselm of Laon, the second his own.¹⁶ The juxtaposition of these readings suggests that he saw this experience as a culmination of lectio, in which he suddenly understood the spiritual sense of the Scriptures, without as yet having the affective experience of the divine which fervor was to provide. Emendatio Vitae describes lectio as an intellectual exercise ('Ad lectio pertinet ratio et inquisitio veritatis', f. 141 r. 23-24), from which affective meditation and prayer can arise; Super Apocalypsim here suggests a reciprocal process in which meditation and prayer lead back to lectio at a higher level, where 'secrets are thrown open'.

Rolle's next two experiences can be dealt with quickly. The one to which he gave the name fervor was the culmination of a long period of prayer and meditation, in which his soul was suddenly granted the gift of response to and feeling for God, and kindled in love. This sensation evoked dulcor, a mixture of longing and fulfilment summed up by the Bride's cry 'Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth' (Song of Songs 1.1). The prologue to Incendium Amoris (quoted on pp. 113-115) conveys vividly the excitement these feelings create, and the way they transcend all the contemplative's earlier spiritual exercises. Indeed, fervor and dulcor stand in the same relation to meditatio and oratio as Sight into Heaven does to lectio. Cap. 15 of Incendium Amoris says that Rolle first experienced them while delighting in the sweetness of meditation or prayer (189.7-8: 'Dum suavitate oracionis vel meditacionis multum delectarer'). Cap. 7 (De Oratione) of Emendatio Vitae likewise says that 'We truly pray when our soul is inflamed by the fire of the Holy Spirit' (f. 138v. 38-40: 'Tune enim veraciter oramus cum … animus noster igne Spiritus Sancti inflammatur'), and later adds that true prayer leads to 'ineffabilis dulcor' (46). Cap. 8 (De Meditatione) makes the same claims for the higher forms of meditation, in which love is fervent and sweet (f. 139r. 36: 'Qui utique amor fervor et dulcor est'). More dramatically, at their height both experiences are seen as raising those who undergo them to exalted spiritual conditions. As Incendium Amoris says, contemplatives who burn in love are like the burning Seraphim who contemplate God, and after death will take their seat with them (cap. 3):¹⁷

Amor namque inhabitat cor solitarii … Fervet hinc funditus et languet lumini, cum sic sinceriter sapit celescia; et canit mellite sine mesticia, clamorem efferens dilecto nobili sicut seraphycum [see Isaiah 6.3], quia conformitur in mente amorosa; dicitur, 'En amans ardeo anhelans avide!' Sic igne uritur inestimabili amantis anima … Sanctus quidem solitarius quia pro Salvatore sedere sustinuit in solitudine, sedem accipiet in celestibus auream et excellentem inter ordines angelorum. (Incendium Amoris 184.5-11, 14-16)

[For love inhabits the heart of the solitary. On this account he burns from his very centre, and languishes for the light, when he thus truly tastes the celestial, and he sings honeyedly without heaviness like the Seraphim, uttering a cry to his noble beloved, which is fashioned in an amorous mind; it says, 'Ah! avidly panting, loving I burn!' So the soul of the lover is consumed in an unthinkable fire. Indeed, since the holy solitary suffered to sit in solitude for his Saviour, he will receive in the heavens a golden and excellent seat among the ranks of the angels.]

Dulcor does not become the basis of any claim so specific as this, but the opening of Super Canticum Canticorum suggests, echoing the third of Bernard's Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, that only one who has truly experienced the sweetness of heavenly communion with God will dare to ask for the 'kiss of the mouth'. The imagery of dulcor, like that of fervor, also gives Rolle an automatic link with other exponents of affective mysticism, and ties his experience closely, if implicitly, to that of the Bride in the Song of Songs, of the psalmist (mystically interpreted), or of the contemplative who ascends through the four grades of violent love described by Richard of St Victor.

Yet while fervor and dulcor are of lasting importance in all of Rolle's writings, even these experiences are significant mainly on account of the culmination to which they point: to the gift of canor, the highest earthly goal of the contemplative. Cap. 15 of Incendium Amoris tells us that Rolle received fervor and dulcor while he was praying and meditating in a chapel. The same chapel was the setting for his reception of canor nine months later:

Dum enim in eadem capella sederem, et in nocte ante cenam psalmos prout potui decantarem, quasi tinnitum psallencium vel pocius canencium supra me ascultavi. Cumque celestibus eciam orando toto desiderio intenderem, nescio quomodo mox in me concentum canorum sensi, et delectabilissimam armoniam celicus excepi, mecum manentem in mente. Nam cogitacio mea continuo in carmen canorum commutabatur, et quasi odas habui meditando, et eciam oracionibus ipsis et psalmodia eundem sonum edidi. Deinceps usque ad canendum que prius dixeram, pre affluencia suavitatis interne prorupi, occulte quidem, quia tantummodo coram Conditore meo. Non cognitus eram ab hiis qui me cernebant, ne si scivissent me supra modum honorassent, et sic perdidissem partem floris pulcherrime, et decidissem in desolacionem. (Incendium Amoris 189.19-190.6)

[While I was sitting in the same chapel and saying the night-psalms before supper as best I could, I heard as it were a ringing of psalmody, or rather of singing, above me. And when I was stretched out in prayer and with all my desire towards heavenly things, I do not know how but I soon felt a symphony of song within myself and caught up from heaven the most delicious harmony, which remained with me in my mind. For my thought was forthwith changed into a tuneful song; and I had as it were melodies in my meditation, and I also gave out the same song in my prayers and psalmody. Finally, because of the abundance of the internal sweetness, I burst forth into singing what before I had spoken—but silently, because only before my Maker. I was not noticed by those who observed me, in case they should have recognized me and honored me immoderately—and so I would have lost part of the loveliest flower and descended into desolation.]

Conor is superficially similar to fervor, although affecting a different spiritual sense. Like fervor it develops out of the exercises practised by contemplatives during their time of self-preparation, rising out of cogitacio (which stands in here for lectio) and meditatio, but especially out of oratio (in this case, the saying of the night-psalms). As Emendatio Vitae implies, oratio is the exercise that, above all, leads to contemplative experience: 'Ad orationem pertinet laus, hymnus, speculatio, excessus, admiratio; et sic in oratione vita contemplativa consistit vel meditatio' (f. 141r. 19-21: 'To [the exercise of] prayer pertain praise, hymnody, contemplation, rapture, wonder; and thus the contemplative life consists in prayer or meditation'). Moreover, the heavenly source of Rolle's canor is itself a 'psallencium', while if canor has any non-experiential source, it is to be found in the psalms, with their adjurations to sing, in the general concept of the liturgy, and perhaps in the specific practice of the singing of the jubilus, the wordless musical elaborations on the last syllable of the Alleluia, at High Mass (Womack 1961, chapter 1). Again like fervor, canor is a gift from above that at first seems to involve merely an intensification of the recipient's spiritual life, a new dimension of richness. Yet in Rolle's developed account it is of far more importance than this. Whereas fervor and dulcor are little more than gifts that refresh the pilgrim in via, canor emerges as in effect the goal of the journey, arrival at the Heavenly City: a final transformation of the soul. In this chapter, I can describe the elaborate structure that Rolle erects around his experience of canor only in a preliminary way.

Cap. 15 of Incendium Amoris tells us that Rolle was initially silent about his gift of canor•; in cap. 31 (quoted on pp. 136-137), he describes his first attempt to articulate the significance of the gift, after being goaded by people critical of his way of life, and especially of his refusal to sing in the choir at Mass. His reply to these critics becomes an important theme of his writings. Canor, he argues, is incompatible with earthly song and noise. He is a solitary because only in quiet can be experience canor. On the other hand, those who criticize him—Christians in the world or in religious communities—are scarely able to experience or even understand it, since they live amidst noise. It is difficult to tell how literal this argument is meant to be, although in caps. 31-33 of Incendium Amoris it is presented in crudely physical terms; the fact that Emendatio Vitae, cap. 10 speaks of canor as arising directly from a purified mind (f. 140v. 45-52) suggests equations between earthly sound and worldly sin on the one hand and solitude and purity of thought on the other, and may imply that we are dealing here with a sustained metaphor. Yet Contra Amatores Mundi also says:

Omnis melodia mundialis, omnisque corporalis musica instrumentis organicis machinata, quantumcumque activis seu secularibus viris negociis implicatis placuerint, contemplativis vero desiderabilia non erunt. Immo fugiunt corporalem audire sonitum, quia in se contemplativi viri iam sonum susceperunt celestem. Activi vero in exterioribus gaudent canticis, nos contemplacione divina succensi in sono epulantis [Psalm 41.5] terrena transvolamus … Alioquin iam desinimus canere, atque ab ilia invisibilis gaudii affluencia cessare, ut dum ab illis corporaliter perstrepentibus non fugimus, veraciter [discamus] quia nemo unquam in amore Dei gaudere potuit, qui prius vana istius mundi solacia non dereliquit. (Contra Amatores Mundi 4.102-117)

[All mundane melody, all corporal music contrived by instruments and organs, however much they may satisfy active people and seculars bound up in business, will certainly not be desirable things for holy contemplatives. Indeed they flee from hearing corporeal sound because contemplative people have already received celestial sound in themselves. Actives rejoice in external songs; but we, set alight by divine contemplation, transcend the terrestrial With the sound of feasting. Otherwise we fall away from song and lose the richness of that invisible melody; so that while we do not flee from those bodily pandemoniums, we truly learn that nobody can ever rejoice in the love of God unless he first relinquishes the vain solaces of this world.]

It follows from this depiction of canor that solitaries like Rolle are more or less beyond the criticism of all those who have not experienced it, since they cannot know the significance of what they are missing. It also follows that those who experience canor will wish to take as little part in communal events as possible, including the liturgical worship of the Church, since their inner music will be interrupted; this is why Rolle says he did not want to sing in the choir, and is his most individual reason for insisting on the superiority of the solitary life to all other ways of serving God—that quiet can only be found in solitude. Unlike fervor and dulcor, canor thus radically distinguishes those who receive it from the rest of humanity.

Yet if canor is important enough for its recipient to be justified in shunning all but nominal participation in the Church's worship, and if it is impossible to criticize those who have it, the gift must have enormous intrinsic significance. This significance Rolle defines by means of a daring antithesis. Although the perfectino longer profitably participate in the worship of the earthly Church, their practice of canor is also an act of participation—in the worship of the heavenly Church. In singing spiritual songs, the perfect are joining, while still on earth, with the chorus of the saved and the angels in heaven; they are enjoying a part of their heavenly reward in advance:

Est enim angelica suavitas quam in animam accipit et eadem oda, etsi non eisdem verbis laudes Deo resonabitur. Qualis angelorum, talis est iscius concentus, etsi non tantus, nee tam perspicuus, propter carnem corruptibilem que adhuc aggravat amantem. Qui hoc experitur eciam angelica cantica expertus est, cum sit eiusdem speciei in via et in patria. (Incendium Amoris 237.4-10)

[So it is an angelic sweetness that he takes into his soul, and angelic song, even if he will not resound the praises of God in the same words. For this harmony is like that of the angels, although neither so great nor so clear, because of the corruptible flesh which still weighs down the lover. He who has experienced this has also experienced angelic song, since this is of the same sort both on the road and in the Fatherland.]

The transformation brought about in the elect soul by the gift of canor is thus fundamental. In effect, the mature contemplative is already in patria—already a member of the Church Triumphant, who participates in the felicity to which all the saved will eventually be called, and who is almost disengaged from the world's sin. Indeed, Rolle's contemplatives, while they are still on earth, participate not merely in the common joys of heaven but in the higher forms of ecstasy. Their place on earth is lowest of all, but their place in heaven will be (and already implicitly is) the highest, with the Seraphim who burn in contemplation of God. These perfectissimi experience frustration at the barriers their flesh imposes between them and God, and long to die, for their conversion from this world to the next is already so complete that they have nothing to fear, and much to relish, in the prospect of the Judgement—where it will be they who will judge sinful humanity with Christ and his apostles. Canor, in short, is the highest gift attainable in this life and an expression of the highest degree of holiness: Incendium Amoris calls it (with fervor and dulcor) 'summa perfeccio christiane religionis' (185.16-17), while in Melos Amoris (cap. 1) its existence in today's world is taken as proof that sanctity is still not dead. The gift of canor brings the earthly careers of the elect to a joyful standstill, for they can subsequently have nothing further to look forward to and little to fear in this life; the ordering of their affections is already complete.

Canor is the keystone of the simple, even in its way logical, structure that is Rolle's thought, the basis of his high view of the status of the earthly elect, the source of his idiosyncrasy as a mystical writer. Other late medieval writers, from Bernard and Richard of St Victor to Ruusbroec and the Rhineland mystics, express from time to time the view that something approaching complete perfection is possible in this life; works like Ruusbroec's Spiritual Espousals, and indeed the De Quattuor Gradibus Violentae Caritatis, present as ambitious and extreme a view of the holiness attainable by the contemplative as anything we might find in Incendium Amoris. However, we would have to look far—and to writers Rolle could not have known, such as Marguerite Porete, or Hadewijch—to find other structures built so high from such slight and tendentious foundations of personal experience; even in mystical literature it is remarkable for an individual's experience to be the overt basis of so ambitious a position. Richard of St Victor may be allowed the last word, for the peroration of his great work on violent love, which speaks of the boldness love engenders in the soul, applies strikingly well to Rolle—who not only experienced such love, but told the world that he had, and spent a lifetime trying to prove that the form of his experience was definitive: 'Ecce in quantam pie presumptionis audaciam consummatio caritatis solet mentem hominis erigere, ecce quomodo facit hominem ultra hominem presumere!' (177.1-5)—'See in what boldness of pious presumption the consummation of charity elevates the human mind! See how it makes a human presume beyond the human!'

Notes

¹ Allen, pp. 66-68 lists Latin and English MSS of the Enconium (the fourth section of Super Canticum Canticoruni); the texts found in two of the latter are printed in Horstmann 1895—1896, vol. 1, pp. 186-191. There is a compilation of passages from Rolle's work concerned with Jesus in the fifteenth-century MS Kk. vi. 20, ff. llr.-26v., called Orationes Excerpte de Diversis Tractatibus quos Composuit Beatus Richardus Heremita ad Honorem Nominis Ihesu (edited by Esposito 1982); see Moyes 1988, vol. 1, pp. 83-86.

² Here Rolle may be following Compendium Theologicae Veritatis VII, caps. 26-28, which, however, lists the dotes animae as cognitio, dilectio, comprehensio; the dotes corporis are the same as in Rolle's list. For other lists of the attributes of the saved compare Aquinas's Summa Theologica III, q. 95, arts. 1, 5, Prick of Conscience 7813ff, and Speculum Ecclesie, sections 87-88. Judica Me 69.4-6 provides its own, shorter list.

³ Aquinas's Summa Theologica III, qq. 97-98, similarly makes much of the remorse felt by the damned (q. 97, art. 2), of their belated repentance for sin (q. 98, art. 2), and of the torment they experience seeing the blessed in joy, or, after the Judgement (when such sight is lost—see Compendium Theologicae Veritatis VII, cap. 22), remembering that sight (q. 98, art. 9).

⁴ The description of those elect who will judge others at the Judgement as pauperes is standard: Aquinas's Summa Theologica III, q. 89, art. 2, argues that Matthew 19.28, which gives the apostles a hand in the Judgement, applies to all the pauperes. Compendium Theologicae Veritatis also writes of a group of the elect who will judge others and not be judged themselves (VII, cap. 19).

⁵ See also Super Canticum Canticorum 11.24-12.4. Saintly rejoicing in the damnation of the evil is not mentioned in Compendium Theologicae Veritatis, but is part of a usual picture of the Judgement: see, e.g., Summa Theologica III, q. 94, arts. 1-3, and Innocent Ill's De Miseria Condicionis Humane 3.4.

⁶ Rolle is probably following either Compendium Theologicae Veritatis VII, cap. 19 ('Ordines quatuor erunt in judicio … ') or Lombard's gloss on Psalm 1.6 (which Rolle translates directly in English Psalter 8).

⁷Judica Me 1.10 uses both phrases, the second of which can also be found in, e.g., Lombard's Sententiae IV, dist. xlv, 5 (entitled Quibus Suffragiis Iuvabuntur Mediocriter Boni qui in Fine Reperientur).

⁸ Rolle here alludes formally to the doctrine of prevenient grace, which states that even humanity's desire for grace is the product of grace; see, e.g., Lombard's Sententiae II, dist. xxvi, where much of the terminology of this passage of Super Psalmum Vicesimum can be found.

⁹ See cap. 36 of Guigo II's Liber de Exercitio Cellae, entitled De Opere Manuum (PL 153, cols. 880-883), where Benedict's injunction against idleness is used to introduce the subject of writing as manual work (col. 883).

¹⁰ Rolle alludes here to 1 Timothy, 4.8—'Nam corporalis exercitatio ad modicum utilis est, pietas autem ad omnia utilis est'—misquoting a verse which is commonly used by monastic writers to counter too great an emphasis on outer works; see, e.g., Bernard's Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 33.10. By citing this verse in support of its argument that contemplatives avoid otiositas not by working with the hands but by engaging in the sweet labour of contemplation, Rolle is reinterpreting the Benedictine concept of labor.

¹¹ Womack [The jubilus theme in the later writings of Richard Rolle, Dissertation, Duke University,] 1961, pp. 104-111 rightly discusses Rolle's attitude to food and drink in terms of the monastic concept of discretio, citing in particular a discourse by Abbot Moses in Cassian's Collationes (11, PL 49, cols. 523-558, especially 549ff.). Rolle could have found discussions of conformity and discretion similar to his own in the Meditationes Vitae Christi, cap. 44, a study of poverty which draws heavily on Bernard and on William of St Thierry's Epistola Aurea. What is distinctive about his treatment is his emphasis on avoiding over-abstinence and corresponding lack of interest in the danger of over-indulgence; see, e.g., The Form of Living 45-86, in which three lines are given to the former, nearly forty to the latter.

¹² Contrast, e.g., Hilton's Scale of Perfection, with its intricate treatments of the variety of problems afflicting contemplatives (e.g. 1, caps. 36-40).

¹³ 'Orationes sive meditationes quae subscriptae sunt, quoniam ad excitandum mentem ad Dei amorem vel timorem, seu ad suimet discussionem editae sunt, non sunt legendae in tumultu, sed in quiete … Nee debet intendere lector ut quamlibet earum totam perlegat, sed quantum sentit sibi Deo adiuvante valere ad accendendum affectum orandi, vel quantum ilium delectat' (3.2-4, 5-8). Directly or indirectly this passage lies behind Rolle's devotional and private (i.e. nonliturgical) use of the triad lectio, meditatio, oratio.

¹⁴ Contrast the elaborate treatment of prayer and meditation in Book 1 of The Scale of Perfection, caps. 24-36.

¹⁵ Compare Contra Amatores Mundi 4.120-122: 'Pauci ergo sunt vel nulli quid illud [canor] referunt, quia forsitan illud nescierunt, si autem habuerint sed et aliis predicare nee verbo nee exemplo voluerunt.'

¹⁶ Pseudo-Anselm's gloss on this verse runs: 'Et ecce ostium apertum in coelo, scilicet, clausura Scripturarum quae est via ad vitam, vel obscuritas coelestium mysteriorum, vel in his qui coelum sunt' (PL 162, col. 1517).

¹⁷Compendium Theologicae Veritatis 11, cap. 14 describes the Seraphim as distinguished by their fervent love: 'Proprium est Seraphim ardere et alios ad incendium divini amoris promovere.' For the analogy between the Seraphim and contemplatives see Bernard's Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 19.5.