REMEMBERING GOD AS A WAY OF LIFE IN THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE AND RICHARD ROLLE'S THE FIRE OF LOVE
REMEMBERING GOD AS A WAY OF LIFE IN THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE AND RICHARD ROLLE'S THE FIRE OF LOVE

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I intend to discuss the medieval mystics’ understanding of reality and the way they chose to experience it, and I will focus on their interest in the past. To exemplify the concept of mystical experiences and how to attain them I am going to use one of the books Margery Kempe knew, Richard Rolle’s work The Fire of Love; but since this is an impersonal treatise, I will use The Book of Margery Kempe in an attempt to gain a more personal insight into the daily difficulties and worries of a person who feels bound to follow this path. In order to understand the role of memory in their lives I must differentiate between the 21st-century mode of interpretation of time as continuous and homogenous and the medieval perception of time. To this purpose I will use Charles Taylor’s analysis of the pre-modern time consciousness and I will show that the pattern that applies to the ordinary secular time – which consists of a succession of events and which implies the existence of the memory of an event after it has passed – does not apply to a medieval Christian’s perception of time. According to Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) the pre-modern man felt an awareness of a “higher time” which re-ordered (or “gathered”) profane conventional time, breaking its chronological order and thus in the medieval Christians’ consciousness events become connected through their meanings in the divine plan. The standard opinion regarding the mystics is that they wanted to be isolated from society, and that their, rather passive, way of life was past-oriented and centred on the person of Jesus Christ, and on the historical events that had marked His life and death. I want to challenge this perception and to show that far from having a past temporal orientation, the mystics used the concept of memory in an active way, by immersing themselves in those events and re-living them, and moreover their lives were motivated by their future expectations in the heavenly kingdom.

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