THE spiritual writer Richard Rolle is commemorated in the Common Worship calendar on 20 January. He began and ended life in Yorkshire, born in 1300 in what is now chocolate-boxy Thornton Dale (presently more famous as the home of the TV series Bangers and Cash), and dying at Hampole, north-west of Doncaster, in 1349 — very probably of the Black Death, which was sweeping England at the time.
His was an age with a sharp focus on the purpose of life: to prepare for the next world. Particularly for the educated and religious classes, there was much written help at hand, all in Latin, and gathered from all over pan-Catholic Europe.
Rolle himself was not confined to Yorkshire: he studied at Oxford (although left without graduating), and possibly also at the Sorbonne. His writings certainly show evidence of contact with contemporary theological thinking. But most of his life seems to have been spent as a hermit and mystic: first, near his family home; later, further north in the Richmond area; and, later still, settling in the West Riding at Hampole, close to the Cistercian convent where he was spiritual adviser to at least one anchoress.
ROLLE’s particular gift was to write in Latin and in English, and to be one of the first whose works spoke to a wider, lay audience, not just the more restricted readership of previous spiritual writers. And — in contrast to many at the time, whose works have been lost or exist only in tantalising fragments — Rolle left a wealth of material: his works survive in nearly 400 English manuscripts and at least 70 Continental ones.
One commentator has suggested that, in the 14th and 15th centuries, Rolle was more widely read than Chaucer; and his was not only a wide readership, but a remarkable breadth of writing — commentaries on scripture (the Commandments, the Magnificat, the Lord’s Prayer, Psalm 20, Lamentations, and more); on the Office of the Dead; meditations on the Passion; an apologia for his eremtical life; what might be called manuals of spiritual instruction; commentaries, visions, pastoral writings, epistles, rules . . . — the list goes on. Three-quarters of what we have is in Latin; the rest is in Middle English.
One of his more famous works is Incendium Amoris (The Fire of Love), in which he describes and systematises his mystical experiences. He is one among a growing number in Western Europe at the time who were debating whether faith appealed at base to the “affective” — emotional — life or to the intellect. Rolle‘s sympathies are with the affective.
He urges his readers, with the advantage of a soul and the gift of reason, to be “fired up”, as he was, by a divine love that overwhelms the soul and leads to deeper yearning and devotion. Thus, the seeker is cultivating a relationship with God in a different way from attending mass or listening to a sermon; rather than kneel to pray, the seeker after God sits in contemplation, focusing on particular interior disciplines aimed at keeping the seeker in a relationship to God which is as near, and as deep-seated, as possible. The urging is always to seek a stronger desire for God.
SO FAR, so good. Rolle’s writings fall within the Western tradition extant since the 12th and 13th centuries, particularly from Cistercian and Franciscan writers. But not all his writings found favour in his time. He was accused of putting himself too much in the picture and of being too emotional. His assertion that he heard heavenly melodies all the time was doubted, as was his claim of being in constant union with God. His writings were said to betray undisciplined religious fervour.
But, in his prolific and diverse output, written apparently over a long period, there can be traced a more settled sense of spiritual sure-footedness, which appealed not only to the Hampole community, but, in the later 14th century, to literate lay men and women with a hunger for spiritual writing in their native tongue. What had previously been writings with an appeal mainly to female religious now, by Rolle’s ability to put his experiences into the context of contemporary mystical theology, would become mainstream and be embraced by the laity.
He cast a long shadow over the spiritual life of the 14th and early 15th centuries — mainly, but not exclusively, in England. After his death, when his body had been moved into its own chapel, there was a movement for his canonisation, but it came to nothing.
A PARTICULAR feature of his spiritual exercises is worthy of mention. He urges an articulated, sung engagement with some of the texts and lyrics that he provides, particularly in “Ego dormio” (which springs from a verse in the Song of Songs). This is part and parcel of the affective nature of contemplation for Rolle. Texts are provided that combine spiritual song with a lyrical outpouring of yearning for God. One example (modernised from Middle English) is:
O Jesu sweet, now will I sing
To Thee a song of love-longing;
Cause in my heart a well to spring
Thyself to love above all things.
Rolle’s death came probably at Michaelmas in 1349, as plague burned its way through England. Nearly 700 years later, how does he still speak to us? Today’s social and religious context would be unrecognisable to Rolle and his contemporaries. Spiritual contemplation is probably much more of a minority interest now than it was back then. But his witness to a disciplined approach in cultivating our relationship with God, accompanied by a spiritual director, still holds good today.
Moreover, his appeal to the affective side of our personalities in cultivating our relationship with God seems to fit well with the present Zeitgeist. Modern church life is certainly no stranger to singing love for Jesus, although whether that is a feature of private contemplative practice is open to question.
Rolle remains one of the innumerable “cloud of witnesses” from the past who were willing to lay aside the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, to seek union with God in Christ — and were sufficiently impelled by the fire of God’s love to urge others, through his writings, to follow that path and, by instruction, to show the way.
The Revd Roy Shaw is a retired priest in the diocese of York.