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Richard Rolle and the Three Degrees of Love

FOR anyone involved in either the study or the practice of the contemplative life, mention of Richard Rolle's three degrees of love immediately connotes its three stages of purgation, illumination and union. Even the complicating factors of Rolle's 'heat, sweetness and song' and his repetition of the triple formula in the Latin treatise Emendatio Vitae have occasioned little recent comment beyond Phyllis Hodgson's In Ego Dormio, The Commandment and The Form of Living, Rolle distinguished the threegrades of lovewhich are part of hischaracteristic teaching, and which he named in The Commandment and The Form 'insuperabel', 'inseparabel' and 'singuler'.' Such scholarly dismissal is unfortunate because consideration of Rolle's statements on love in the light of medieval spirituality points to one of the real vagaries in mystical literature and reveals Rolle's curious position among the historians of the soul. Though present in a 'secular' form in the writings of Plato and particularized in Plotinus," the elemental stages of Christian mysticism must be traced in the New Testament and in the Church Fathers where mystical life as a religious commitment knew confirmation as early as the writings of St Augustine." Mystical theology, however, received firm backing through the writings of Pope Gregory the Great and a philosophical orientation through the translations of Dionysius the Areopagite's works made in the ninth century by John Scotus Erigena. In the succeeding centuries, mystical thought was affected by scholastic and non-scholastic elements, until in the fourteenth century it was modified both by Christological emphases and by the rise of individual approaches to the great mystery of union with God.' This intense earnestness to live through the mysteries of the spiritual life as the only way to understand and prove them is just as clearly manifested in John