Abstract
C. E. Rolt (1881–1918) is generally known for his translation of Pseudo-Dionysius. He was, however, a theologian in his own right, whose writing continues to be influential today. Marking the centenary of his death, this article outlines his life and thought, and identifies the particular way in which his work holds promise for contemporary theology.
Introduction
Less than a month before the end of the First World War, on 22 October 1918, Clarence Edwin Rolt died at the age of 37. He was not serving in the armed forces, like his two older brothers Frederick and Austin, but was a clergyman, the rector of Watermillock in the Lake District. As C. E. Rolt, he is now principally known for his posthumously published translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, which remained the standard English translation of these works until the 1980s. 1 But Rolt also wrote a work of theology himself, The World’s Redemption, which was radical in a number of ways and has influenced a number of prominent theologians up to the present day. 2 This essay commemorates his work on the centenary of his death by outlining his life and thought, and assessing why he continues to represent a valuable theological resource.
Rolt’s life
Rolt was born on 12 July 1881 in Regent’s Park Road, London. 3 His mother Augusta and his father Frederick, a solicitor, had both died by 1895. The location of his birth is significant, because, in this state of deprivation, Rolt was taken in by the vicar of St Mark’s, Regent’s Park, W. J. Sparrow Simpson, the librettist of John Stainer’s Crucifixion, who, like his father before him (a sub-dean of St Paul’s Cathedral), provided lodging for young men. 4 Rolt, who had been privately educated for two years by the Reverend A. K. Cherrill, was sent by Sparrow Simpson to King’s College School. He went up to Queen’s College, Oxford in 1900 and graduated in 1904, when he was also awarded the Liddon studentship. After having spent some time in theological training at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, he was ordained in 1907 in Canterbury Cathedral to a title post at Lenham in Kent. 5 Here, he published his first work, dictionary articles on the magi and their star, undoubtedly through the auspices of Sparrow Simpson, who contributed to the same volume. 6 In 1910, Rolt proceeded to a second curacy at Charlbury with Chadlington and Shorthampton in the diocese of Oxford, while in the same year Sparrow Simpson started up the English Church Review, ‘the organ’ of ‘the Anglo-Catholic party’ before the First World War. 7 Hence Rolt came to publish, in that rather conservative journal, articles of a more independent character. 8
A glimpse of Rolt’s life in 1912 is provided by Philip Heseltine, later known as the composer Peter Warlock. At the age of 17, Heseltine needed to cram Latin and Greek for Oxford entrance exams, and in March of that year he went to live with Rolt for nine months in order to be tutored. Heseltine’s correspondence with his musical mentor at that time, Frederick Delius, survives. At first, Heseltine found Rolt ‘exceedingly clever and interesting – really much too good for a parson’, and was sympathetic to Rolt’s views; 9 but after a few months, Heseltine wrote: ‘The “curé” is a very meek and harmless person, but, of course, frightfully bigoted, as they all are – I thought at first he was more broadminded than the common run, but that was quite a fallacy on my part.’ 10 By August, he stated bluntly, ‘I … hate the parson.’ 11 He took particular exception to Rolt’s sister Agnes, who lived in the same house and assisted with parish work: ‘a mission-maniac of the most revolting order!!!!!’ 12 The strength of Heseltine’s reaction may be explained by his rejection of Christian faith during that period. Correspondence from Rolt to Heseltine’s mother expresses concern at the influence that the Nietzschean Delius was having on Heseltine. 13
That same year, Rolt was appointed to a Queen’s College living – Newbold Pacey in Warwickshire, then in the diocese of Worcester – and after a month in Hemel Hempstead on a vegetarian diet to improve his health, he was instituted on 3 August. 14 His health, it seems, had never been strong; indeed, while at Newbold Pacey, he thought that his days were coming to an end. So he wrote hurriedly his magnum opus, The World’s Redemption, drawing on material that had been trialled in the English Church Review, and the book, dedicated to Sparrow Simpson, was published in 1913. 15 Some months later, ‘for reasons of health … having been advised to live in a more bracing climate’, he arranged to swap benefices with the rector of Watermillock, whose wife had herself been advised to live in the warmer climate of the south. 16 Queen’s College was ‘very much averse to an exchange’, as it meant that an unfamiliar clergyman would be occupying a college living. ‘However,’ the college bursar wrote to Rolt, ‘after a long discussion, which turned largely upon your health, they decided to allow the exchange so far as they as Patrons are concerned. The College hopes that you may find complete restoration to health as a result of this exchange to the top of a 900-foot hill.’ 17
The change of scenery did not greatly extend Rolt’s life. He gave the Latin sermon to the University of Oxford in 1917 – ‘virtually a new interpretation, original and yet orthodox, of the great Catholic doctrine [of the Trinity]’ 18 – but died the following year. Rolt ‘had not been well for some weeks, but his death came somewhat suddenly after only a few days’ illness’. 19 He was buried in Watermillock churchyard. 20 Sparrow Simpson saw through to publication both the translation of Pseudo-Dionysius and also a much quirkier, unfinished manuscript on ‘the spiritual body’, written partly in response to Sparrow Simpson’s own tome of 1911 on the resurrection. 21 It is ironic that Rolt’s The Spiritual Body has recently been digitized while his longer text, The World’s Redemption, has been the more influential.
Rolt’s thought
The starting point and recurrent theme of The World’s Redemption is a re-conception of divine omnipotence, which Rolt saw as the solution to many a theological fix: ‘Get rid … of the false conception of omnipotence, and everything falls into its right place.’
22
The opening two chapters are a forthright case against understanding omnipotence in terms of coercion, God’s will to do anything God likes. ‘The truth is that the conception of an omnipotence consisting in a kind of infinite brute force is immoral, irrational and anti-Christian, and from this fruitful source have sprung some of the worst travesties of the Christian Faith which have ever hindered the Gospel of God.’
23
For Rolt, the correct conception of omnipotence was the very opposite of compulsion: heavenly power cannot crush opposing forces; it can only suffer and be crushed by them. It cannot break or bend anything to its will; it can only be bent and broken and yet remain unconquered. It cannot consist of coercive brute force; but only of still and patient endurance. In a word, it cannot drive and compel; it can only hope and wait.
24
Drawing on Augustine and Aquinas, Rolt was clear that the attributes of God are not separate qualities, but the one God viewed from different angles. A refrain in The World’s Redemption is that ‘God is love, and nothing else than love’. 26 God’s power is thus not isolatable from God’s love, but rather to be identified with it. ‘God is Love, and this Love is itself His power.’ 27 In the words of another refrain, ‘God’s power is itself nothing else than love.’ 28 ‘Love is, in fact, the only real power, and force is not power at all.’ 29 This, according to Rolt, is the way in which Christ conceived God, and, indeed, Christ’s life revealed what the character of God is like. 30
In among Rolt’s florid passages of purple prose, a number of commitments can be discerned that illuminate his theology. First, Rolt wished to uphold an evolutionary understanding of the universe. 31 The ‘process of evolution’ (to use the opening words of his book) was none other than (to use the closing words) ‘the world’s redemption’: a great creative/redemptive process (as with divine attributes, Rolt saw no distinction between the two), by no means consisting of continual advance, which suggested a persuasive force behind the cosmos, not a coercive one. 32 In advocating a view of omnipotence that was consonant with this, Rolt hoped to align theology with the findings of natural science and show how it was possible to reconcile the two: the misconception of omnipotence was ‘the very bane and curse of all theology’; it lay ‘at the root of almost the whole of that large class of difficulties which have driven some of the noblest minds into atheism’. 33 The right conception of omnipotence had, by inference, the potential to bring those minds back. Second, Rolt held that experience, particularly mystical experience, is the fundamental theological data. 34 It is no coincidence that Rolt regarded Christ as the ‘true and perfect Mystic’, that he translated the Mystical Theology, and that Sparrow Simpson described Rolt as ‘a singularly refined and religious character, combining the acuteness of a philosophic mind with the fervour of a mystic’. 35 Both these commitments – to an evolutionary view of creation and to experience as the fundamental data of theology – may have been derived from, or at least reinforced by, Rolt’s reading of Henri Bergson, by whom he was particularly influenced, as can be seen from the explicit references to Bergson within his work, as well as references to the ‘vital force’ of the cosmos. 36 The authority on mysticism (and on Bergson) Emily Herman regarded The World’s Redemption as ‘most original and suggestive’, ‘full of interest for the student of Mysticism’. 37 Just as Rolt found Pseudo-Dionysius ‘daring and untrammelled’, so there was something of those qualities in himself. 38
At the same time as having these ‘progressive’ impulses, Rolt was religiously committed to the conservative tradition in which he had been nurtured. He held a high Christology in which the sinless Christ differed from the rest of humanity by kind and not by degree. 39 Christ was not simply a human being who revealed what God was like. Because divinity is self-sacrificial in essence, God had to be incarnate in order for divinity fully to give itself and so be fully love. Christ was the necessary complete expression of God’s love, through whom God was able fully to meet evil and redeem the world. The fullness of Christ’s confrontation of evil led Rolt to the somewhat unusual position that Christ died from spiritual anguish rather than physical causes. 40 Rolt’s Christology could even be said to be higher than his doctrine of God, for Rolt held that while God could not foresee the future, Christ could. 41
Rolt was thus an unusual mix of, on the one hand, the independent and the speculative, and, on the other, the orthodox and the uncritical. He rejected the doctrine of the fall, for example, and explained away (for particular reasons) Christ’s miracles of raising the dead, while holding strongly to the doctrine of the virgin birth.
42
Sparrow Simpson, who himself had written against ‘broad church theology’, regarded aspects of Rolt’s The Spiritual Body as ‘conspicuously modernist’: he noted that Rolt’s ‘veneration for the traditional Faith makes him in some respects distinctly conservative: yet at times his deviations from the accepted view … are startlingly conspicuous’.
43
Similarly, in a letter of 1914, the modernist William Danks (who as a canon of Canterbury had preached at Rolt’s ordination to the priesthood in 1908) noted the combination in Rolt of both High Church and modernist leanings: Did I mention to you C. E. Rolt’s book ‘The World’s Redemption’ (Longmans). It is in some respects very striking, especially for a man brought up in the High Church tradition … If I were competent I w[oul]d review it in the Modern Churchman. But I’m not … The book is something of a new attempt to read the Riddle of the Universe.
44
Rolt’s influence
Emily Herman was not the first to refer to Rolt’s work as ‘suggestive’. The theologian and New Testament scholar B. H. Streeter, who had begun writing a paper on the suffering of God around 1911, came across the ‘brilliant style and profound thought’ of The World’s Redemption and found it ‘so suggestive’ that he abandoned the attempt to complete his own paper and simply concluded it by summarizing Rolt’s position: God cannot prevent or annihilate evil, but can only endure it. 45 Arguing that it is in the nature of love not to impose itself, but to wait and suffer until that which is contrary to its nature has been won over, Rolt slots into a steady procession of passibilists in British theology from the 1850s. 46 He was naturally included in Kenneth Mozley’s survey of passibilists compiled in 1926, and has become an example of passibilism in Anglican theology before the First World War. 47
Rolt is distinctive, however, in pressing further in his willingness to modify the commonly received concept of deity. There are intriguing resemblances between the ‘sheer endurance and patient love’ of God in The World’s Redemption and the strident revisionist ideas forged by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy while acting as a chaplain to troops in France during the First World War. 48 When Jürgen Moltmann was formulating his doctrine of God in the 1970s, he picked up on both Rolt and Studdert Kennedy. In an essay (tellingly) on mystical experience, Moltmann discussed how ‘everything that lives, lives out of the almighty power of [God’s] suffering love, out of his inexhaustible self-giving’, and commented that ‘no-one has presented this better than C. E. Rolt’, comparing him with Berdyaev and Troeltsch. 49 Moltmann went on in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God to call Rolt’s work (as Mozley had done before him) ‘remarkable’. 50
The theologian who has given Rolt the most attention has been the late Marilyn McCord Adams, who found him ‘highly suggestive’ and ‘rich in provocative proposals’. 51 Although she found Rolt ‘less than precise’, and identified problems with his model, she examined his ‘modified Platonism’ alongside process theism, and regarded Rolt’s stance as the more cogent. 52 With his processive view of creation out of chaos, 53 and hints of panpsychism, 54 Rolt has also been acclaimed by process theology – ‘we are primarily indebted to Clarence Rolt for initially championing this insistence that the only power God has is a power of love’ 55 – for Rolt can be regarded as representing a ‘proto-process’ position in English theology two decades before process theism began to cross the Atlantic from the United States.
Conclusion
It is significant that Adams found Rolt helpful in the contexts of theodicy and ‘alternative concepts of God’, for Rolt’s re-conception of omnipotence in terms of ‘enduring love’, ‘sweet reasonableness’ and ‘the gentle persuasiveness of its own inherent beauty’ amounts to an understanding of divinity alternative to the inherited conception, one that is authentically Christian and has the pastoral benefit of enabling faith to be maintained in situations of suffering without sacrificing God’s moral integrity. 56 The reviewer of The World’s Redemption who wrote that ‘Mr Rolt’s book will hardly prove a permanent contribution to theological literature’ was thus rather short-sighted. 57 That is not to say that Rolt’s emphasis on divine passivity should be accepted without question, or that his position needs no refinement, but it does provide a striking re-definition of power, from the unfettered imposition of will (what might be called patriarchy writ large) to the ability to endure opposition until it has been won over by lure, persuasion and attraction. Whole swathes of theology in the last 50 years, not least feminist theology, womanist theology, liberation theology, queer theology, ecotheology and the contemporary theological interest in non-violence, have sought to free themselves from oppressive conceptions of power. It is for that reconfiguration of power, divine and therefore also human, that Clarence Rolt has historically been appreciated, and it is towards the fuller realization of such a reconfiguration, in today’s inequitable world, that he still has much yet to offer.