The Fire of Love

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. 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.