THE improvement in our modern knowledge of the medieval mystics, and our gradual progress towards an understanding of their minds, is well shown in the sort of attention now paid to the life and work of Richard Rolle of Hampole. This important religious personality, as we now know him to have been—so characteristically English in his sturdy individualism and ethical emphasis was not only this but also one of the first of English religious poets, the author of our earliest vernacular Psalter, and a popular (though never an official) saint whose local cultus survived well into the sixteenth century. Yet so complete was the oblivion into which he had fallen, that he was not even mentioned in Dean Inge’s Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism, which ushered in the revived interest in this subject; nor yet in his later lectures on the English Mystics.
Subsequent writers began to notice Richard’s existence, modernized versions of some of his works gradually appeared; and somewhat sketchy accounts of his doctrine, based upon these, have been inserted in recent books on medieval mysticism. Our genuine knowledge of Rolle, however, is mainly due to the careful labours of two scholars. First Miss Deanesly, who edited in 1915 the Latin
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text of his most characteristic work, the Incendium Amoris. (1) Next, and especially, Miss Hope Allen, who published in 1928 the important results of twenty years’ patient research—including examination of the chief existing Rolle MSS.—and followed this up in 1931 by a critical selection of his English writings (2); and in so doing has clarified and in some sense revolutionized our view of his life and personality.
Miss Allen is almost certainly the only human being of modern times—it might be safe to say, the only one since the sixteenth century—who has examined all Rolle’s authentic works. She alone is therefore really competent to arrange them in series and tell us what, at each stage of his career, he thought and taught; what elements we must take into account in our attempts at reconstructing his personality and the story of his spiritual development. Hitherto, such attempts have necessarily been made mainly on the basis of the Incendium and the three English treatises, which were written when Richard was over forty years of age and near the end of his life; helped by the judiciously selective account of his career given in the Office of St. Richard Hermit, prepared towards the end of the fourteenth century when his canoniza—
(1) The’ Incendium Amoris’ of Richard Rolle of Hampole. Edited by Margaret Deanesly. (Manchester University Press, 1915.)
(2) Writings ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials for his Biography. By Hope Emily Allen. (Oxford University Press, 1927.) And English Writings of Richard Rolle Hermit of Hampole. Edited by Hope Emily Allen. (Oxford University Press, 1931.)
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tion was hoped for. (3) We are now able for the first time to place works and legends in their proper context, and trace through them the story of a soul which had endured many vicissitudes before achieving the degree of spiritual maturity which is revealed in Rolle’s latest works.
Few pursuits are more fascinating than the study of those stages through which spiritual genius passes, and the gradual transmutation of character which is effected by the discipline of the interior life. It is such a study of Rolle’s evolution which Miss Allen has at last made possible for us, and which constitutes for many readers the chief interest of her large and learned book. Did we rely on the ‘Office’ alone, we should be obliged to regard Rolle as an extreme example of precocious holiness, who abandoned the world as a lad of eighteen, was rapidly raised to the heights of sanctity, and thereafter led the conventional life of a hermit-saint; partly a solitary contemplative, partly a wandering evangelist and trainer of souls. We should know nothing of that tempestuous individualism, those conflicts with ecclesiastical authority and outspoken criticisms of the religious orders, those arrogant claims to the possession of sainthood, which were marked characteristics of his early years. Thus we should lose all the force and interest of the contrast between the egoistic fervour and the self-oblivious spirituality of his earlier and his later works, showing the slow victory of Anima over an Animus of peculiar vigour and power.
(3) The Officium and Miracula of Richard Rolle of Hampole. Edited by R. M. Woolley, D.D. (S.P.C.K., London, 1919.)
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All this and much more Miss Allen’s researches have revealed to us, providing an invaluable mass of materials on which all future students will be able to work. Work, however, is the right word to use in describing the reader’s relation with so large and technical a treatise; and a few signposts may not come amiss to those inclined for the encounter. I propose therefore to summarize what appear to me the chief conclusions to be drawn from her book as to Richard’s inner history and status as a mystic.
Miss Allen gives good reason for supposing that the date, 1290, usually given for Rolle’s birth is too early. He was probably born about 1300 in the Pickering district of Yorkshire; and almost certainly died in the great plague year of 1349. We must therefore remember that the expressions ‘early’ and ‘late’ have in reference to his work a limited significance. He died in the prime of life, and his writings are those of youth and of maturity. We must expect from him nothing of that deep reflection, that geniality, tranquillity and peace, which seem the special gifts of old age to the contemplative. Rolle shows with disarming candour the raw material of sanctity, and lets us discern something of the process whereby that raw material was subdued to the purposes of God; but the curtain falls before the last act in the great drama of the soul’s transfiguration has been reached.
We must suppose that Richard was a promising boy, since he was sent to Oxford—probably at thirteen, the normal age—and remained there four years. His known career begins at the end of this
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period; with the well-known scene, so picturesquely described in the ‘Office’, of his adoption of a hermit’s career, and the conversion of two of his sister’s frocks into a habit. Here it is perhaps worth while to remark on the intimate connexion in this country between mysticism and the eremitic life. English mysticism begins, historically, in the great religious revival of the twelfth century, which produced a vigorous cult of the solitary life; and has its earliest literary masterpiece in the Ancren Riwle. Though the heroic austerity of the first Cistercians attracted many fervent souls, spiritual enthusiasm seems on the whole to have chosen the ‘singular’ path to perfection more often than that which was offered by the monastic orders. When Rolle appeared, at the opening of that which was destined to be the golden age of English mysticism, the north had many memories of hermit saints, and a continuous tradition of ‘singular living’; and in judging his adoption of this life, and what it meant to him, we should remember his almost certain knowledge of the path his spiritual ancestors had trod, and the romantic appeal of the legends which had gathered round their names. It may have been due to his example and prestige that a revival of the eremitic life took place in the fourteenth century; since he complains in the Melum that whereas in ancient days many of the more perfect went out from the monasteries to dwell in solitary places, now none do this ‘and thus without doubt they lack the visitation of angels’.
This conviction of the superior character of the solitary life never left Rolle; and the new current of mysticism which he started in England maintained a
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close connexion with the anchoretic ideal. In the next generation both The Scale of Perfection and The Cloud of Unknowing were written for recluses: and witness by the loftiness of their counsels to the spiritual maturity of those to whom they were addressed. Julian of Norwich, perhaps the greatest of the English mystics, was an anchoress. Thus, if at the beginning Rolle’s ‘singular purpose’ seems inspired by a boyish love of the romantic and picturesque, a determination to cut a striking figure in the religious world, and a rather unpleasing contempt of ordinary ways, the method is well within the lines of contemporary piety.
The word hermit covered in his day a wide variety of vocations, from the extreme ascetic to the pious vagabond; and could even include the comfortable agricultural life of the hermit William of Dalby, whom Edward II confirmed in his right of pasturage for two cows.
A comparison of the notices given in the ‘Office’ with Rolle’s earliest writings, and the confessional passages in his later work, help us to reconstruct the first phase in his development. These sources present him as a brilliant, ardently religious boy; impetuous, self-opinionated, full of reforming zeal and strong in a sense of his own vocation. It was probably in the parish church of Pickering that he preached his first sermon, as described in the ‘Office’; and attracted the attention of the wife of John de Dalton, the Constable of Pickering Castle. For the next three years he seems to have occupied—if one may say so with respect—the position of tame hermit in the Dalton establishment; living in a room or cell where he
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could be visited, and exhibited by his patrons to their guests. It apparently opened upon the farm-yard, and the noise of the carters, the flies and the summer heat provided ample opportunity for the exercise of patience. The physical and mental discomforts of this situation for a young, self-occupied and somewhat irritable contemplative, need no emphasis; and Richard, whose temperament did not incline him to silent endurance, described them vigorously in later life. The picture which is given in the ‘Office’, of the youthful recluse steadily continuing his writing, whilst he emitted (dare we say automatically?) the pious remarks expected by his visitors, has its pathetic as well as its edifying side.
Perhaps because Richard turned out less sensational than he had hoped, perhaps because his impassioned denunciations of wealth and worldliness took on too personal a tone, John de Dalton seems to have tired of his hermit; ‘they changed towards me who were accustomed to minister to me’, and bad food and neglect were added to the other disadvantages of his position. The eager brilliant boy who had decided on an impulse for ‘singular living’ was beginning to learn something of its cost. If we regard the descriptions of spiritual development in Rolle’s later works as evidence of his own experience—and in so subjective a writer it is probably safe to do this—we shall infer that the period of residence at Pickering was a time of severe and increasing self-discipline. Apparently without help—for it is a peculiarity of his story that he seems to have had no master in the spiritual life—he was undergoing his novitiate: fighting temptations,
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and coming into contact with the stern realities of the ascetic vocation.
His first experience of spiritual joy, when in his own words ‘the heavenly door’ opened and revealed to the eyes of his heart the countenance he loved, occurred nearly three years after his conversion. We shall perhaps be correct in interpreting this as his introduction into the world of mental prayer, and dedication to that beautiful type of Christocentric fervour which was expressed by the medieval cult of the Holy Name, and remained to the end of his life his characteristic devotion. For there is hardly a trace in Rolle of that devouring passion for the transcendent Godhead ‘in Himself and for Himself alone’ so magnificently set forth by the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing and his school. For Richard ‘the path to the Divinity lay through the Humanity’. Hence it is that the devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, which sprang up in Western Europe in the later Middle Ages and was no doubt fostered by Franciscan influence, is central for an understanding of his mysticism and colours all his work. It is the very substance of his religion; the recurrent refrain of his most ecstatic outpourings, the dominant theme of his poems.
Jesu that me life has lent,
into thy love me bring.
Take to thee all my intent,
that thou be my yearning.
Woe from me away were went,
and come were my coveting
If that my soul had heard
and hent the song of thy loving.
In this characteristic verse from one of his loveliest lyrics (4) we surely detect the direct influence of ]esu
(4) A Song of the Love of Jesus.’ (English Writings, p. 43.) I have modernized the spelling.
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dulcis memoria as well as of the whole world of religious feeling of which it was born; and many pages of the Incendium, on the whole the most characteristic of his writings, read like a lover’s commentary upon the Rosy Sequence. Had we to choose one sentence in which his spirituality is most fully expressed, it would probably be the famous declaration ‘My heart thou hast bound in love of thy Name, and now I cannot but sing it!’
The ‘heavenly door’, he says, remained open for a year: that period of spiritual light and consolation which is often experienced by beginners in the contemplative life. We must probably place within this his departure from the Daltons’ protection in search of a more tranquil and truly solitary cell; and also the composition of his earliest known work Judica me. This exhortation to unworldly life has no mystical characters; but is already marked by his intense interest in the reform of the clergy, and almost Franciscan passion for evangelical poverty.
Until recently it was assumed that the rest of Rolle’s life was spent as a wandering hermit and preacher in the Yorkshire dales. But Miss Allen, exploring the vast and chaotic Melum Contemplativorum, which she is probably the first person to have read, has discovered evidence that Rolle’s early life was more eventful than had been supposed. It now appears that his independent habits, and ruthless criticisms not only of the secular clergy but of the monks, brought him into violent conflict with the local ecclesiastical authorities—probably the great Cistercian Abbots of Rievaulx and Byland. The constant references in his ‘Canticles’ to monastic shortcomings, and to disputes
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with the professed religious, show that these denunciations formed a large element in his early preaching; for he was at this stage at least as much reformer as contemplative, devoured by the mystic’s longing to bring all outward religion into conformity with his inner light. All this doubtless made him very popular with the laity, among whom dislike of the monasteries was growing up; but it was equally certain to rouse hostility in the great Cistercian houses of the North Riding, whose inhabitants were unlikely to enjoy having at their doors an eloquent young critic with an unsparing tongue, unblushing self-confidence, and rigidly ascetic ideals. Thus Rolle’s situation presently became so dangerous that his friends were obliged to hide him from his persecutors: a fact which harmonizes with the possibility—likely enough on other grounds—that he spent at this period some time at the University of Paris.
A MS. History of the Sorbonne, compiled from earlier sources and now in the library of the Arsenal, gives Richardus de Hampole as having been admitted about 1320 and again as resident in 1326. Miss Allen, who discusses these entries in detail, points out that though not conclusive they deserve consideration, and are consistent with the rest of our biographical material. They give an explanation of Rolle’s extensive theological knowledge, as shown particularly in his erudite Latin and English psalters; knowledge which is otherwise very difficult to account for. A yet more important consequence is that, if true, they establish direct connexion between the English school of which Rolle was the founder, and the mystical tradition of Western Europe. The great Dominican, Meister Eckhart, who
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had been in Paris in 1302 and 1311, was still living, and at the height of his reputation. It is at least probable that his Latin works were known in the Paris schools. His pupils Suso and Tauler were Rolle’s contemporaries. He could hardly avoid some knowledge of their doctrine, though hardly a trace of its influence can be found in his work. The great Franciscan Spirituals, with whom he has far more temperamental kinship, were now dead. But memories of their teaching, and of the Joachist prophecies that inspired it, lingered both in France and Italy; to form part of that strong current setting towards a mystical and evangelical Christianity, which was felt both inside and outside the Church. There would then be much in the religious atmosphere of Paris to encourage Rolle in his religious individualism, his anti-clerical bias, and his reforming zeal.
If he indeed took refuge in Paris when the situation in Yorkshire became acute, perhaps it was there that he experienced the mystical states he calls ‘Heat, Sweetness, and Song’; a triad, perpetually recurring in his writings, to which as time passed he gave more and deeper meaning. As Julian of Norwich tells us that her ‘revelations’ were all given in a five-hours’ trance, and sufficed for a lifetime of meditation, so Rolle’s ecstatic experience seems to have been condensed into two vivid illuminations, nine months apart. Looking back on these twenty years later, the impression was yet so strong that he could say he then achieved ‘the highest degree of the love of Christ he was able to reach’. Such cases remind us how small a space abnormal phenomena actually occupy
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in the lives of the great mystics. Their real credentials abide, not in these peculiar and transitory experiences of the supernatural, but in the completeness of their surrender to the supernatural: their faithful correspondence to that which is revealed. Rolle’s life is a particularly instructive example of this distinction between the abrupt and ‘given’ character of the mystical experience and the slow travail of the mystical life; the fact that ‘knowledge comes but wisdom lingers’ in the world of spirit as well as in the world of sense. Either in Paris or elsewhere, nearly a year after those beginnings of sensible devotion which he calls the ‘opening of the door’, he was sitting in a chapel ‘finding great delight in the sweetness of prayer’—a significant and revealing phrase—when suddenly he felt within ‘an unwonted and pleasant heat’. Lest any should suppose this to be a metaphor for a special degree of fervour, he describes here and elsewhere his amazement as the ‘burning of his soul burst up’, and how he even felt his breast to see whether this heat was of physical origin.
In the presence of such events, the modem critic at once proceeds to the utterance of those comfortable words ‘psycho-physical automatism’ and feels that no more need be said. But this reference does not really dispose of the subject, or its interest. The comparative study of mysticism shows that the term ‘fire of love’ or its equivalent carries a precise meaning for those who use it; and that the experience it implies cannot entirely be accounted for in terms of suggestion. Though we need not be afraid to acknowledge that the form taken by religious
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experience is always influenced by traditional symbols, Miss Allen’s statement that what Rolle now ‘felt sensuously he first learned academically’ hardly covers the facts. When Pascal could find no better words than ‘fire’ and ‘joy’ to describe his overwhelming revelation of reality, we may surely supppose here some likeness to Rolle’s great experience; and perhaps it is again the same mysterious phenomenon, which a modem contemplative describes when she says of her own initiation into Divine love,
J’ai été saisie, possedée par une flamme intérieure, dont rien ne m’avait donné l’idée, des vagues de feu se succèdant pendant près de deux heures.(5)
In such experiences as these, sense and spirit coooperate. Though the mechanism may be docile to psychological analysis, an element is present with which psychology cannot deal. So too with the final form taken by Rolle’s intuition of reality; the Canor or Song of Joy which came to him nine months after the Heat. As those whose apprehension of spiritual realities takes a visionary form, declare that they are shown a light, a colour, and a loveliness which exceed anything that the world of the senses can give; so the ‘heavenly melody’ which made him 'miraculous in mind through music’ so far exceeded the harmonies heard with the ear of the senses, that they created in him an absolute distaste for 'all mundane melody, all music made with instruments’—even for the liturgical chants of the Church.
Mr. Dundas Harford, in his edition of The Mending of Life, pointed out the striking parallel between Rolle’s
(5) Madeleine Simer Convertie et Mystique 1874—1921, p. 71.
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experience of ‘celestial sound’ and that of St. Chad, as given by Bede. St. Chad, a week before his death, heard in his oratory ‘a sweet sound of singing and rejoicing descend from heaven to earth . . . and return to heaven with unspeakable sweetness’; and when we remember the neighbourhood of Rolle’s first cell to Lastingham, with its memories of the saint, we cannot dismiss the probability that this story was known and dear to him. Nevertheless that ‘ghostly song’ which, more than anything else, gives us the peculiar temper of his spirituality, cannnot be disposed of as due to unconscious memory alone. It is better understood as the special form under which the celestial beauty impinging on our life was apprehended by his music-loving soul: a form doubtless suggested by current religious symbols, and perhaps connected with the
Jubilo del core
Che fai cantar d’amore—
described by ]acopone da Todi (whose poems were known in Paris by Rolle’s day) and other mystics. The Jubilus, which often appears in mystical literature, was not a general term for unbridled emotionalism. It was the name of a recognized type of spiritual experience. ‘The Jubilus’, says Ruysbroeck, ‘hath no words, and no man knoweth it save him who hath conceived it in his heart ... thence cometh joyfulness, and the same is a heartfelt love and a burning of devotion ... and he who conceiveth this sweetness, and yet seeketh therein his own delight without thanking and praising God therefore, is utterly at fault.’
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Here then, in a mystic of all others most foreign to his temperament, we find associated Rolle’s triad of Song, Heat, Sweetness. Yet how different is the status given to them by the English and the Flemish contemplative.
‘This heavenly song of the love of God which is called Jubilus “ says Rolle in one of his latest works, ‘is the end of perfect prayer and of the highest devotion that may be here.’ ‘The Jubilus’ says Ruysbroeck, ‘is the first and lowest mode whereby God inwardly declares Himself in the Contemplative Life’; and here he would certainly be supported by all the great masters of prayer. This comparison suggests that Rolle’s status as a mystic has been over-estimated; and that the extreme beauty of his Christo-centric rhapsodies and ‘elevations’ has blinded us to the fact that they mostly belong to the literature of sensible devotion. It is certain that for him, the emotional experiences which he translated as Calor, Dulcor and Canor remained the ne plus ultra of spirituuality. ‘Here’, he says in the Melum, ‘is shown the highest grade of the Love of God; for by great Heat and divinely given Sweetness the most holy lover flows into Song, and now (as if set in heaven) is all bathed in harmony.’(6) So in the touching prayer with which the Incendium ends; the prayer of maturity looking wistfully back at the fervours of youth :
Jhesu bone, redde mihi organum celicum canticum angelorum, ut in hoc rapiar laudes tuas jugitur modulari; quod dedisti nescienti et non cognoscenti, nunc experto et petenti retribue! . .. 0 bone Jhesu, ligasti cor meum in cogitacione nominis tui, et illud jam non canere non valeo. (7)
(6) English Writings, p. 46.
(7) Incendium Amoris, p. 278.
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Though in later years the emotional vehemence of his nature was somewhat disciplined and purified, still the ‘delight that passes all wit and feeling’ remained for him the essence of religious experience.
Not only so, but these consolations seemed to him to guarantee his own sanctity; a point on which he displays a disconcerting assurance. This is placed beyond doubt by the many personal passages of the Melum, a work aptly described by Miss Allen as a monument of egocentric enthusiasm. In it Rolle, now aged about twenty-seven, declares that he has already reached ‘the eminence of sanctity’. Its theme, ‘the glory and perfection of the saints’, is frankly treated from the personal angle; and the contrast between the holiness of the recluse and the shortcomings of the clergy is drawn with more vigour than charity. All this raises the serious psychological problem of harmonizing the dispositions revealed in the Melum, first with those which we might expect to follow a real ‘opening of the heavenly door’, and secondly with the devotional beauty of Rolle’s latest works, and his enormous spiritual influence on his contemporaries and successors. And this might lead, did time and space allow, to a further study of the degrees in which genius and character co-operate in the works of the mystics. We are hindered by lack of material from any detailed treatment of the later stages of his development; but at least on the analogy of the lives of other contemplatives, we may expect that the emotional expansion and vivid joys of his first period would be followed by a time of difficulty and struggle proportioned to the intensity of the
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consolations that had preceded it. Many hints in the Melum suggest this, and perhaps give us a clue to the disciplines which at last transformed an impulsive religious individualist into a true saint and father of souls.
Rolle’s movements between his twenty-third and fortieth year—except for the possible sojourn in Paris—are not exactly known. He was much in Richmondshire, and sometimes at Hampole near Doncaster; where he was friend and adviser of the nuns. Probably, like the Franciscan Spirituals, he alternated periods of seclusion with wanderings from place to place; for he combined the instincts of the reforming prophet with those of the poet, scholar and recluse. His great Scripture commentaries, the fruits of much intellectual labour and research, but saturated in his own romantic spirituality, suggest that by the time of their composition he possessed readers and disciples of the educated class, to whom these writings were addressed. His last years are specially connected with one of these, Margaret Kirkby, the St. Clare of this imperfect English Francis.
She was a nun of Hampole, who became under his influence an anchoress; and his chief vernacular work, The Form of Living, was written in 1348 for her enclosure. It is perhaps an epitome of his own experience that he gives her when he says:
A man or woman that is ordained to contemplative life, first God inspires them to forsake this world, and all the vanity and the covetise and the vile lust thereof. Sithen He leads them by their own, and speaks to their heart; and as the prophet says, He gives them at suck the sweetness of the beginning of love ... Sithen when they have suffered many
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temptations, and foul noyes of thoughts that are idle, and of vanities that will cumber them that cannot destroy them, are passing away, He makes them gather together their heart and fasten only in Him; and opens to the eye of their souls the gates of heaven, so that ilk eye may look into heaven; and then the fire of love verily ligges in their heart and burns therein and makes it clean of all earthly filth, and sithen forward and they are contemplative men, and ravished in love.
If we are asked to define the outstanding characteristics of Rolle’s mysticism, we must put first that impassioned devotion to the Holy Name, which runs through all his writings and inspires all his rhapsodies. Here it is that the contrast is strongest between the English school descending from him, and the contemporary movement in Germany and Flanders, with its definitely theocentric bias. Rolle shows no trace of the influence of the Dionysian writings; though a theologian of his standing, well acquainted with the Victorines and other standard authorities, can hardly have been ignorant of them. In the opposite direction, he shares the curiously marked aloofness of all the English medieval mystics from Eucharistic devotion and references. An exacting ethical standard, and close contact with the homely realities of human life, give to his doctrine a bracing character; but on the whole his outlook is that of the lover, musician and poet. Like the angels in Mason’s great hymn, he ‘sings because he sees the Sun’; contemplation is for him an ‘inshed melody’, and seems to have been closely connected with lyrical expression. As a teacher of the spiritual life we must consider him inferior to the wise and gentle Hilton; as a religious genius, to Julian of Norwich. Yet he did a greater work for
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mystical religion in England than either of these. By the very fervour of his delight in God, by his convinced declaration that there is ‘nought merrier than grace of contemplation’, he re-kindled the languid fires of divine love, and restored to its primacy the supernatural gift of Joy.
