ROLLE DE HAMPOLE, RICHARD

English hermit, author of Latin and English devotional treatises and poetry; b. North Yorkshire, c. 1300;d. Hampole, Sept. 29, 1349. Richard, probably of humble stock, seems to have studied at Oxford, but not to have graduated. There is no indication that he received even minor orders, and he was certainly not ordained. While still a young man, he felt a vocation to the solitary, but not enclosed, life of a hermit.

Many of his early works are marred by a querulous, at times rancorous, resentment of his opponents, whom he is not slow to call persecutors. This appears clearly in the chief treatise of his youth, the De Incendio Amoris, which has little plan or nexus, but is a series of passionate rejoinders. The editor of De Incendio Amoris, Margaret Deanesly, has described it as "the vindication of the life of the hermit or solitary, not merely from the charge of laziness or vagabondage, but of inferiority to the busy and active prelate or the devout monk." Yet if we set aside all the scornful and bitter railings against empty and unspiritual academic learning, against the worldliness and frivolity of those who wear the garb of humility and mortification, we can discern other more attractive traits; and this book contains evidence of his claim to be treated seriously as a contemplative and ecstatic.

He describes in detail the circumstances under which, after years of perseverance in solitary prayer, he first experienced those consolations that constituted both his perceptions of the divine nature and his assurance that he was divinely inspired. He calls them canor, the heavenly melodies of praise he had heard around the throne of God; calor, the sensations of heat in which he felt his heart consumed in love; and dulcor, the overwhelming sweetness with which his whole being was suffused. To experience these consolations, his own preparations—a complete renunciation of the world, a perfect purgation, a total love of God for Himself alone—were prerequisite: and these joys would follow. We shall know perfectly in

Heaven; on earth we can only love, and it is love that makes us perfect and brings us to the heights of contemplative life. "Whoever receives this joy, and glories so in this world, is inspired by the Holy Spirit. He cannot err; let him do what he will, he is safe, for no mortal can give him the salutary counsel which he receives from Immortal God." The seeming arrogance of this is tempered in other places: he concedes that the favors he has gained, especially the canor he heard on one occasion, came not through his merits but through grace.

De Incendio Amoris shows how Richard's thought was permeated by the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles, as one would expect of a beginner in theology. As his career progressed, he evidently learned from other late, affective, popular writers, but evidence of much quickening or deepening of his first perceptions was lacking.

The later English writings, it is true, showed less of the introspection and self-absorption that characterized his early productions. Toward the end of his life he seemed to have seriously applied himself to systematizing his teachings for the instruction of others; and, doubtless under the same necessity, he abandoned the insufferable preciosity that made the Melos unreadable to write a simpler prose interspersed with his own poems of divine love. But even when we admit his superficial use of the categories of growth in contemplation that he found in Richard of Saint-Victor, his ideas still remain rudimentary, and his whole system is marked by a lack of intellectual perception and curiosity. He is as indifferent to the classical authorities in his own subject as he is impatient with every other form of restraint; and it is this impatience that made later writers, such as Walter Hilton and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, distrustful of him. They thought him a guide who would be likely to lead astray those beginning their search for immediate perception of the divine nature; and they observed in his unwary followers superstitious veneration of self-induced "consolations" and a dangerous contempt for the counsel of authority.

Rolle's popularity and the best of his work, Ego Dormio, The Commandment, The Form of Perfect Living, and such independent lyrics as A Song of the Love of Jesus, point to his true achievement. This was not at all in the field where he himself claimed pre-eminence, but in writing songs of the love of the crucified Savior with a depth of sincerity and an artless fervor unequaled even in the great medieval English tradition. He was at his best when writing as a simple man for an unsophisticated audience.

Bibliography: r. rolle, Incendium amoris, ed. m. deanesly (New York 1915); Melos amoris (Oxford 1957). The English Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality; New York 1988). h. e. allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle (New York 1927).

[e. colledge]