The Fire of Love and the Mending of Life * INTRODUCTION o Abbreviations + METHOD AND AIM OF THIS MODERNIZATION + SOURCES + TREATMENT OF WORDS + BIOGRAPHICAL o A TRANSLATION OF THE LEGENDA IN THE OFFICE PREPARED FOR THE BLESSED HERMIT RICHARD o PROLOGUE OF RICHARD MISYN o BOOK I + CHAPTER I + CHAPTER II + CHAPTER III + CHAPTER IV + CHAPTER V + CHAPTER VI + CHAPTER VII + CHAPTER VIII + CHAPTER IX + CHAPTER X + CHAPTER XI + CHAPTER XII + CHAPTER XIII + CHAPTER XIV + CHAPTER XV + CHAPTER XVI + CHAPTER XVII + CHAPTER XVIII + CHAPTER XIX + CHAPTER XX + CHAPTER XXI + CHAPTER XXII + CHAPTER XXIII + CHAPTER XXIV + CHAPTER XXV + CHAPTER XXVI + CHAPTER XXVII + CHAPTER XXVIII + CHAPTER XXIX + CHAPTER XXX o BOOK II + CHAPTER I + CHAPTER II + CHAPTER III + CHAPTER IV + CHAPTER V + CHAPTER VI + CHAPTER VII + CHAPTER VIII + CHAPTER IX + CHAPTER X + CHAPTER XI Livros Grátis http://www.livrosgratis.com.br Milhares de livros grátis para download. + CHAPTER XII o THE MENDING OF LIFE + CHAPTER I + CHAPTER II + CHAPTER III + CHAPTER IV + CHAPTER V + CHAPTER VI + CHAPTER VII + CHAPTER VIII + CHAPTER IX + CHAPTER X + CHAPTER XI + CHAPTER XII + NOTES + BIBLIOGRAPHY ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This book is in the public domain THE FIRE OF LOVE OR MELODY OF LOVE AND THE MENDING OF LIFE OR THE RULE OF LIVING BY: RICHARD ROLLE Translated by Richard Misyn from the "Incendium Amoris" and the "De Emendatione Vitae" of Richard Rolle, hermit of Hampole METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON Second Edition First Published . April 2, 1914 Second Edition . 1920 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION THE MYSTICISM OF RICHARD ROLLE 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.