BY EVELYN UNDERHILL
The four great English mystics of the
fourteenth century--Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich and the
anonymous author of "The Cloud of Unknowing"--though in doctrine as in time
they are closely related to one another, yet exhibit in their surviving works
strongly marked and deeply interesting diversities of temperament.[1] Rolle, the romantic and impassioned hermit; his
great successor, that nameless contemplative, acute psychologist, and humorous
critic of manners, who wrote "The Cloud of Unknowing" and its companion works;
Hilton, the gentle and spiritual Canon of Throgmorton; and Julian, the
exquisitely human yet profoundly meditative anchoress, whose "Revelations of
Divine Love" are perhaps the finest flower of English religious
literature--these form a singularly picturesque group in the history of
European mysticism.
Richard Rolle of Hampole, the first of them in
time, and often called with justice "The father of English Mysticism," is in
some aspects the most interesting and individual of the four. Possessed of
great literary power, and the author of numerous poems and prose treatises, his
strong influence may be felt in all the mystical and ascetic writers who
succeeded him; and some knowledge of his works is essential to a proper
understanding of the currents of religious thought in this country during the
two centuries which preceded the Reformation. Sometimes known as the "English
Bonaventura," he might have been named with far greater exactitude the "English
Francis": for his life and temperament--though we dare not claim for him the
unmatched gaiety, sweetness, and spiritual beauty of his Italian
predecessor--yet present many parallels with those of the "little poor man" of
Assisi. Both Francesco Bernadone and Richard Rolle were born romantics. Each
represents the revolt of the unsatisfied heart and intuitive mind of the
natural mystic from the comfortable, the prudent, and the commonplace: its
tendency to seek in the spiritual world the ultimate beauty and the ultimate
love. Both saw in poverty, simplicity, self-stripping, the only real freedom;
in "carnal use and wont" the only real servitude. Moreover, both were natural
artists, who found in music and poetry the fittest means of expression for
their impassioned and all-dominating love of God. Francis held that the
servants of the Lord were nothing else than His minstrels. He taught his friars
to imitate the humility and gladness of that holy little bird the lark; and
when sweet melody of spirit boiled up within him, would sing troubadour-like in
French to the Lord Jesus Christ. For Rolle, too, the glad and eager life of
birds was a school of Christian virtue. At the beginning of his conversion, he
took as his model the nightingale, which to song and melody all night is given,
that she may please him to whom she is joined. For him the life of
contemplation was essentially a musical state, and song, rightly understood,
embraced every aspect of the soul's communion with Reality. Sudden outbursts of
lyrical speech and direct appeals to musical imagery abound in his writings, as
in those of no other mystic; and perhaps constitute their outstanding literary
characteristic.
Further, both these impassioned minnesingers of
the Holy Ghost made the transition from the comfortable life of normal men to
the ardours and deprivations of the mystic way at the same age, and with the
same startling and dramatic thoroughness. They share the same horror of
property and possessions, "the I, the me, the mine." In each, personal religion
finds its focus in an intense and beautiful devotion to the Name of Jesus.
Francis was "drunken with the love and compassion of Christ." "The mind of
Jesu" was to Rolle "as melody of music at a feast." For each, love, joy, and
humility govern the attitude of the self to God. Each, too, adopted
substantially the same career: that of a roving lay-missionary, going, as Rolle
tells us in "The Fire of Love," from place to place, dependent upon charity for
food and lodging, and trying in the teeth of all obstacles to win other men to
a clearer view of Divine Reality a life surrendered to the will of God. Each
knew the support of a woman's friendship and sympathy. What St. Clare was to
St. Francis, that Margaret Kirkby the recluse of Anderby was to Rolle. Seeking
only spiritual things, both these mystics have yet left their mark upon the
history of literature. Rolle was a prolific writer in Latin and Middle English,
in prose and in verse, and his vernacular works occupy an important place in
the evolution of English as a literary tongue: whilst the Canticles of St.
Francis are amongst the earliest of Italian poems.
True, Francis had the gayer, sunnier and more
social nature. Once the first, essential act of renunciation was accomplished,
he quickly gathered about him a group of disciples and lived in their company
by choice. Rolle, temperamentally more intense and ascetic, loved solitude; and
only in the lonely hermitage "from worldly business in mind and body departed,"
does he seem to have achieved that detachment and singleness of mind through
which he entered into the fullness of his spiritual heritage. To him Divine
Love was "as it were a shameful lover, that his leman before men embraces not":
but "in the wilderness more clearly they meet," where "true lovers accord, and
merry solace of lovely touching is, unable to be told." Yet the enormous
influence which he exercised upon the religious life of the fourteenth century,
the definitely missionary character of many of his writings, is a sufficient
answer to those who would condemn him on these grounds as a "selfish recluse."
Francis upon La Verna, Rolle in his hermit's cell, were caught up to the
ultimate encounter of love: but each felt that such heavenly communion was no
end in itself, that it entailed obligations towards the race. For both,
contemplation and action, love and work, went ever hand in hand. "Love," says
Rolle, "cannot be lazy": and his life is there to endorse the truth of those
golden words. True contemplatives, he says again--and we cannot doubt that he
here describes the ideal at which he aimed--are like the topaz "in which two
colours are," one "pure as gold" and "t'other clear as heaven when it is
bright." "To gold they are like a passing heat of charity, and to heaven for
clearness of heavenly conversation": exhibiting, in fact, that balanced
character of active love to man and fruitive love to God--the double movement
of the perfect soul--which is the peculiar hallmark of true Christian
mysticism.
As with St. Francis, so with Rolle, the craving
for reality, the passionate longing for fullness of life, did not at first turn
to the religious channel. The life of chivalry, the troubadour-spirit, first
attracted Francis; the life of intellect first attracted Rolle. Already noticed
as a boy of unusual ability, he had been sent to Oxford by the help of the
Archdeacon of Durham. But the achievement of manhood found him unsatisfied. He
was already conscious of some instinct within him which demanded as its
objective a deeper Reality: of a spiritual vocation which theological study
alone could never fulfill. At the crucial age of eighteen, when the genius for
God so often asserts itself, St. Francis definitely abjured all that he had
seemed to love, and embraced Poverty with a dramatic thoroughness; abandoning
home, family, prospects, and stripping off his very clothes in the public
square of Assisi. At the same age Richard Rolle, sacrificing his scholastic
career--and the high literary merit of his writings shows us what that career
might have been--suddenly returned from Oxford to the North, his soul "lifted
from low things," his mind set on fire with love for the austere and solitary
life of contemplation. There, with that impulse towards concrete heroic
sacrifice, decisive symbolic action, which so often appears in the childhood
and youth of the mystical saints, he begged from his sister two gowns, one
white, one grey, together with his father's old rain-hood; retired into the
forest; and with these manufactured as best he might a hermit's dress in which
to "flee from the world." His family thought him mad: the inevitable conclusion
of the domestic mind in all ages, when confronted with the violent
other-worldliness of the emerging mystical consciousness. But Rolle knew
already that he obeyed a primal necessity of his nature: that singular living,
solitude, some escape from the torrent of use and wont, was imperative for him
if he were to fulfill his destiny and order his disordered loves. "No marvel if
I fled that that me confused . . . well I knew of Whom I look." The way in
which he realized this need may seem to us, like the self-stripping of St.
Francis, crude and naive: yet as an index of character, an augury of future
greatness, it must surely take precedence of that milder and more prudent
change of heart which involves no bodily discomforts. There is in both these
stories the same engaging mixture of singleminded response to an interior
vocation, boyish romanticism, and personal courage. Francis and Richard ran
away to God, as other lads have run away to sea: sure that their only happiness
lay in total self-giving to the one great adventure of life.
It was primarily the life of solitude which Rolle
needed and sought, that his latent powers might have room to grow. "Great
liking I had in wilderness to sit, that I far from noise sweetlier might sing,
and with quickness of heart likingest praising I might feel; the which
doubtless of His gift I have taken, Whom above all thing wonderfully I have
loved." Yet the first result of his quest of loneliness was the discovery of a
friend. Going one evening to a church--probably that of Topcliffe near
Thirsk--and sitting down in the seat of Lady Dalton, he was recognized by her
sons, who had been his fellow-students at Oxford: with the immediate result
that their father, Sir John Dalton, impressed by his saintly enthusiasm, gave
him a hermit's cell and dress, and provided for his daily needs, in order that
he might devote himself without hindrance to the contemplative life.
Rolle has described in "The Fire of Love"--which
is, with the possible exception of the Melum, the most autobiographical
of his writings--something at least of the interior stages through which he now
passed, in the course of the purification and enlightenment of his soul. One of
the most subjective of the mystics, he is intensely interested in his own
spiritual adventures; and a strong personal element may be detected even in his
most didactic works. As with all who deliberately give themselves to the
spiritual life, his first period of growth was predominantly ascetic. With his
fellow mystics he underwent the trials and disciplines of the "purgative way":
and for this, complete separation from the world was essential. "The process
truly if I will show, solitary life behooves me preach." The essence of this
purification, as he describes it in the "Mending of Life," lies not so much in
the endurance of bodily austerities--as in "Contrition of thought, and pulling
out of desires that belong not to loving or worship of
God":--self-simplification in fact. The object of such a process is always the
same: the purging of the will, and unification of the whole life about the
higher centres of humility and love; the cutting out, as St. Catherine of Siena
has it, of "the rooting of self-love with the knife of self-hatred." In the old
old language of Christian mysticism, Rolle speaks of the action of Divine Love
as a refiner's fire, "fiery making our souls, and purging them from all degrees
of sin, making them light and burning." We gather from various references in
the Incendium that the trials of this purgation included in his own case
not only interior contrition for past sin and bodily penance. It also involved
the contempt, if not the actual persecution of other men, and the inimical
attitude with "with wordys of bakbyttingis" of old friends, who viewed his
eccentric conduct with a natural and prudent disgust: a form of suffering,
intensely painful to his sensitive nature, which he recognizes as specially
valuable in its power of killing self-esteem, and encouraging the mystical type
of character, governed by true mortification and total dependence on God. "This
have I known, that the more men have tried with words of backbiting against me,
so muckle the more in ghostly profit I have grown.". . . ."After the tempest,
God sheds in brightness of holy desires."
The period of pain and struggle--the difficult
remaking of character--lasted from his conversion for about two years and eight
months. It was brought to an end, as with so many of the greater mystics, by an
abrupt shifting of consciousness to levels of peace and joy: a sudden and
overwhelming revelation of Spiritual Reality--"the opening of the heavenly
door, that Thy face showed." Rolle than passed to that affirmative state of
high illumination and adoring love which he extols in the "Fire": the state
which includes the three degrees, or spiritual moods of Calor, Dulcor,
Canor--"Heat, Sweetness and Song." At the end of a year, "the door biding
open," he experienced the first of these special graces: the Heat of Love
Everlasting, or "Fire" which gave its name to the Incendium Amoris. "I
sat forsooth in a chapel and whilst with sweetness of prayer or meditation
muckle I was delighted, suddenly in me I felt a merry heat and unknown."
Now, when we ask ourselves what Rolle really
meant by this image of heat or fire, we stand at the beginning of a long quest.
This is one of those phrases, half metaphors, yet metaphors so apt that we
might also call them descriptions of experience, which are natural to mystical
literature. Immemorially old, yet eternally fresh, they appear again and again;
nor need we always attribute such reappearances to conscious borrowing. The
fire of love is a term which goes back at least to the fourth century of our
era; it is used by St. Macarius of Egypt to describe the action of the Divine
Energy upon the soul which it is leading to perfection. Its literary origins
are of course scriptural--the fusion of the Johannine "God is love" with the
fire imagery of the Hebrew prophets. "Behold! the Lord will come with fire!"
"His word was in my heart as a burning fire." "He is like a refiner's fire."
But, examining the passages in which Rolle speaks
of that "Heat" which the "Fire of Love" induced in his purified and heavenward
turning heart, we see that this denotes a sensual as well as a spiritual
experience. Those interior states or moods to which, by the natural method of
comparison that governs all descriptive speech, the self gives such sense-names
as these of "Heat, Sweetness, and Song," react in many mystics upon the bodily
state. Psycho-sensorial parallelisms are set up. The well-known phenomenon of
stigmatization, occurring in certain hypersensitive temperaments as the result
of deep meditation upon the Passion of Christ, is perhaps the best clue by
which we can come to understand how such a term as "the fire of love" has
attained a double significance for mystical psychology. It is first a poetic
metaphor of singular aptness; describing a spiritual state which is, as Rolle
says himself in "The Form of Perfect Living," "So burning and gladdening, that
he or she who is in this degree can as well feel the fire of love burning in
their soul as thou canst feel thy finger burn if thou puttest it in the fire."
Secondly, it represents, or may represent in certain temperaments, an induced
sense-automatism, which may vary from the slightest of suggestions to an
intense hallucination: as the equivalent automatic process which issues in
"visions" or "voices" may vary from that "sense of a presence" or consciousness
of a message received, which is the purest form in which our surface
consciousness objectivizes communion with God, to the vivid picture seen, the
voice clearly heard, by many visionaries and auditives.
The "first state" of burning love to which Rolle
attained when his purification was at an end, does seem to have produced in him
such a psycho-physical hallucination. He makes it plain in the prologue of the
Incendium that he felt, in a physical sense, the spiritual fire,
truly, not imaginingly; as St. Teresa--to take a well-known historical
example--felt the transverberation of the seraph's spear which pierced her
heart. This form of automatism, though not perhaps very common, is well known
in the history of religious experience; and many ascetic writers discuss it.
Thus in that classic of spiritual common sense, "The Cloud of Unknowing," we
find amongst the many delusions which may beset "young presumptuous
contemplatives," "Many quaint heats and burnings in their bodily
breasts"--which may sometimes indeed be the work of good angels (i.e., the
physical reflection of true spiritual ardour) yet should ever be had suspect,
as possible devices of the devil. Again, Walter Hilton includes in his list of
mystical automatisms, and views with the same suspicion, "sensible heat, as it
were fire, glowing and warming the breast." In the seventeenth century
Augustine Baker, in his authoritative work on the prayer of contemplation
mentions "warmth about the heart" as one of the "sensible graces," or physical
sensations of religious origin, known to those who aspire to union with God. In
our own day, the Carmelite nun Soeur Thérèse de
l'Enfant-Jésus describes an experience in which she "felt herself
suddenly pierced by a dart of fire." "I cannot," she says, "explain this
transport, nor can any comparison express the intensity of this flame. It
seemed to me that an invisible force immersed me completely in fire." Allowing
for the strong probability that the form of Soeur Thérèse's
transport was influenced by her knowledge of the life of her great namesake, we
have no grounds for doubting the honesty of her report; the fact that she felt
in a literal sense, though in a way hard for less ardent temperaments to
understand, the burning of the divine fire. Her simple account--glossing, as it
were, the declarations of the historian and the psychologist--surely gives us a
hint as to the way in which we ought to read the statements of other mystics,
concerning their knowledge of the "fire of love."
Rolle's second stage, to which he gives the name
of "sweetness", is easier of comprehension than the first. It represents the
natural movement of consciousness from passion to peace, from initiation to
possession, as the contemplative learns to live and move in this new atmosphere
of Reality: the exquisite joy which characterizes one phase of the soul's
communion with God. He calls it a "heavenly savour"; a "sweet mystery"; a
"marvellous honey." "With great labor it is got; but with joy untold it is
possessed." It is of such sweetness that the author of "The Cloud of
Unknowing"--that stern critic of all those so called mystical experiences which
come in by the windows of the wits--writes in terms which almost seem to be
inspired by a personal experience.
"Sometimes He will inflame the body of devout
servants of His here in this life: not once or twice, but peradventure right
oft and as Him liketh, with full wonderful sweetness and comforts. Of the
which, some be not coming from without into the body by the windows of our
wits, but from within; rising and springing of abundance of ghostly gladness,
and of true devotion in the spirit. Such a comfort and such a sweetness shall
not be had suspect: and shortly to say, I trow that he that feeleth it may not
have it suspect."
That intimate and joyful apprehension of the
supersensuous which Rolle calls "sweetness" is not rigidly separated either
from the burning ardour which preceded it, or the "third" state of exultant
harmony, of adoring contemplation--prayer pouring itself forth in wild yet
measured loveliness--which he calls "song"; and which is the most
characteristic form of his communion with the Divine Love. All three, in fact,
as we see in the beautiful eighth chapter of "The Form of Perfect Living," are
fluctuating expressions of the "Third Degree of Love, highest and most wondrous
to win." They co-exist in the soul which has attained to it: now one and now
the other taking command. "The soul that is in the third degree is all burning
fire, and like the nightingale that loves song and melody, and fails for great
love: so that the soul is only comforted in praising and loving God . . . and
this manner of song have none unless they be in the third degree of love: to
the which degree it is impossible to come, but in a great multitude of
love."
This true lover, he says again in the
Incendium, "has sweetness, heat and ghostly song, of which before I have
oft touched, and by this he serves God, and Him loving without parting to Him
draws . . . Sometime certain more he feels of heat and sweetness, and with
difficulty he sings, sometime truly with great sweetness and busyness he is
ravished, when heat is felt the less; oft also into ghostly song with great
mirth he flees and passes, and also he knows the heat and sweetness of love
with him are. Nevertheless heat is never without sweetness, although sometime
it be without ghostly song."
Rolle's own first experience of this state of
song, like the oncoming of the "Fire," seems to have had a marked
psycho-sensorial character. His passion of love and praise translated itself
into the "Song of Angels"; and the celestial melody was first heard by him with
the outward as well as with the inward ear. "In the night before supper, as I
mine Salves I sung, as it were the noise of readers or rather singers
about me I beheld. Whilst also praying to heaven with all desire I took heed,
on what manner I wot not suddenly in me noise of song I felt; and likingest
heavenly melody I took, with me dwelling in mind."
We gather from the writings of other mystics of
the medieval period that such an experience was a well understood accompaniment
of the contemplative life. Like the "burning of the fire" it was one amongst
those "sensible comforts"--or, as we should now say, automatisms--which were
never accepted at their face value as certain marks of divine favour, but were
studied and analyzed with the robust common sense that characterizes true
spirituality. Walter Hilton, in a tract on the "Song of Angels" which is
certainly inspired by, and was long attributed to Rolle himself, says of it:
"When the soul is lifted and ravished out of the sensuality, and out of mind of
any earthly things, then in great fervour of love and light (if our Lord
vouchsafe) the soul may hear and feel heavenly sound, made by the presence of
angels in loving of God . . . Methinketh that there may no soul feel verily
angel's song nor heavenly sound, but he be in perfect charity; though all that
are in perfect charity have not felt it, but only that soul that is so purified
in the fire of love that all earthly savour is brent out of it, and all mean
letting between the soul and the cleanness of angels is broken and put away
from it. Then soothly may he sing a new song, and soothly he may hear a blest
heavenly sound, and angel's song without deceit or feigning."
Such "Song"--where it really represents the
soul's consciousness of supernal harmonies, and is not merely the hallucination
of one who "by indiscreet travailing turneth the brains in his head" so that
"for feebleness of the brain, him thinketh that he heareth wonderful sounds and
songs"--does for the temperament which inclines to translate its intuitions
into music, that which the experience of vision does for those whose
apprehensions of reality more easily crystallize into a pictorial form. One
seems to see, another seems to hear, that Perfect Beauty which is the source
and inspiration of all our fragmentary arts. For Rolle, by nature a poet and a
musician, the language of music possessed a special attraction and
appropriateness: and not only its language but its practice too. Like Francis
of Assisi, Catherine of Genoa, Teresa, Rose of Lima, and many other saints, he
was driven to lyrical and musical expression by his own rapture of love and
joy. "Oh Good Jesu! my heart Thou hast bound in thought of Thy Name, and now I
cannot but sing it."
All mystics are potential poets. Rolle was an
actual poet too. Hence by the Canor, which was the third form by which
his rapture of love was expressed, we must understand not only the "Celestial
Melody" in which he participated in ecstatic moments, not only those exultant
moods of "great plenty of inward joy" when the spiritual song "swelled to his
mouth" and he sang his prayers "with a ghostly symphony," as St. Catherine of
Genoa "sang all day for joy"; but also the genuine poetic inspiration to which
his writings give ample testimony. All these are varying expressions of one
life and one love: for the great mystic, living in contact with Eternity, is
seldom careful to note the exact boundary which marks off "inward" from
"outward" or earth from heaven. To Rolle, contemplation was the song of the
soul: song was contemplation expressed. Some, he observes in "The Mending of
Life," think that contemplation is the knowledge of deep mysteries: others that
it is the state of total concentration on spiritual things: others again that
it is an elevation of mind which makes the self dead to all fleshy desires. All
these no doubt are true in their measure: but "to me it seems that
contemplation is joyful song of God's love." It is love and joy "with great
voice out-breaking" as the ascending spirit stretches towards the Only Fair.
Rolle's mysticism is fundamentally of the "outgoing" type. He seldom uses the
language of introversion, or speaks of God as found within the heart; but
pictures the soul's quest of Reality as a journey, a flight from self, an
encounter "in the wilderness" with Love. "Love truly suffers not a loving soul
to bide in itself, but ravishes it out to the lover, that the soul is more
there where it loves, than where the body is that lives and feels it." When the
Canor seizes him, his spirit seems to rush forth on the wings of its own
music, that "music that to me is come by burning love, in which I sing before
Jesu": for indeed his "song", whether silent melody or articulate, is love in
action; the glad and humble passion of adoration taking poetic form.
We see then at last that Heat, Sweetness, and
Song are each and all names for, and psycho-physical expressions of, one
thing--that many-coloured, many-graded miracle of Love which is the substance
of all mysticism, and alone has power to catch man into the divine atmosphere,
initiate him into the friendship of God. "O dear Charity . . . Thou enterest
boldly the bedchamber of the King Everlasting: thou only art not ashamed Christ
to take. He it is that thou hast sought and loved. Christ is thine: hold Him,
for He may not but take thee, to whom thou only desirest to obey."
Here we find, fused together, the highest flights
of mystical passion for the Ineffable God, and the intense devotion to the
Person of Christ: the special quality which marked all that was best in English
religion of the medieval period. In such passages--and his works abound in
them--Rolle sets the pattern to which all the great English mystics who
followed him conformed. Were we asked, indeed, to state their peculiar
characteristic, I think that we must find it here: in the combination of
loftiest transcendentalism with the loving and intimate worship of the Holy
Name. Thus it is that they solve the eternal mystic paradox of an unconditioned
yet a personal God. "The Scale of Perfection," "The Cloud of Unknowing," "The
Revelations of Divine Love," all turn on this point: and those who discount
their strongly Christian and personal quality, gravely misunderstand the nature
of the vision by which their writers were inspired.
Of the two works of Richard Rolle which Miss
Comper here presents in a modernized form, "The Fire of Love" represents his
subjective manner--"The Mending of Life" an attempt towards the orderly
presentation of his ascetic doctrine. The whole system of his teaching, in so
far as a system was possible to so poetic and "inspired" a temperament, aims at
the induction of other men to that state in which they can fulfill the supreme
vocation of humanity: take part in "angels' song," the music of adoration which
all created spirits sing to God. He knows that the "ghostly song" of highest
contemplation is a special gift, a grace shed into the soul, and does not
hesitate to proclaim his own peculiar possession of it: yet he is sure that the
heavenly melodies may be evoked, in a certain measure, in all who are
surrendered to divine love. The method by which he would educate the soul to
the point at which it can participate in the life of Reality, is that method of
asceticism--profound contrition, mortification and prayer--which he has
followed himself: here conforming to the doctrine of the three great masters of
the spiritual life whose writings had influenced him most, St. Bernard, Richard
of St. Victor, and St. Bonaventura. Though he often seems in his more didactic
works to echo the teaching of these doctors, and in some passages repeats their
very words--as for instance in his description of the Three Degrees of Love,
and in his doctrine of Ecstasy--yet all that he says has been actualized by him
in his own personal experience. His most "dogmatic" utterances burn with
passion: he uses the maps of his great predecessors because he has tested them
and found them true. It is commonly said that the Incendium Amoris--that
most personal and unconventional of works--is an imitation of St. Bonaventura's
Stimulus Amoris. Apart from the fact that the Stimulus Amoris is
no longer accepted as an authentic work of St. Bonaventura, but was probably
composed by James of Milan, the two books--as any may see who take the trouble
to compare them--have hardly a character in common. True, both are largely
concerned with the Love of God; but so are all the works of Christian
mysticism. The subjective element which occupies so large a place in the
Incendium is wholly absent from the Stimulus. There we find no
autobiography, rather an orderly didactic treatise, miles asunder from the
Yorkshire hermit's fervid rhapsodies. The Incendium is not an artificial
composition, but a work of original genius. It is the rhapsody and confession
of a "God-intoxicated" poet, who longed to tell his love, yet knew that all his
powers of expression could not communicate one little point of the vision and
the ecstasy to which he had been raised: "Would God of that melody a man I
might find author, the which though not in word, yet in writing my joy he
should sing."
Passionate feeling taking artistic form: this
perhaps is the ruling character of all Rolle's mystical writings. He has been
accused of laying undue emphasis upon emotional experience. Yet a stern system
of ethics--as we may see from his life as well as from his works--underlies
this exultant participation in the music of the spheres. Though some may be
repelled by his love of that solitude in which heart speaks to heart, or amused
by his quaint praise of the virtues of "sitting"--the attitude which he found
most conductive to contemplation--surely none can fail to be impressed by the
heroic self-denials, the devoted missionary labours, which ran side by side
with this intense interior life. His love was essentially dynamic; it invaded
and transmuted all departments of his nature, and impelled him as well to acts
of service as to songs of joy. He was no spiritual egotist, no mere seeker for
transcendental satisfaction; but one of those for whom the divine goodness and
beauty are coupled together in insoluble union, even as "the souls of the lover
and the loved."
NOTE: My quotations from "The Fire of Love" and
"The Mending of Life" are made direct from Richard Misyn's fifteenth century
English translation, as printed by the Early English Text Society: save only
for modernization of the spelling. They may not therefore agree in all
particulars with Miss Comper's version. I have used Miss Geraldine Hodgson's
edition of "The Form of Perfect Living" (1910); my own of "The Cloud of
Unknowing" (1912), and the text of "The Song of Angels" which is printed from
Pepwell by Mr. Edmund Gardner in "The Cell of Self-knowledge" (New Medieval
Library, 1910).
[1] Richard Rolle was probably born about 1290
and died in 1349: "The Cloud of Unknowing" was written in the second half of
the fourteenth century: Walter Hilton died about 1396: Julian of Norwich was
born in 1343, and was still living in 1413.