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Animal Rights History Timeline » [c485-1450] Medieval Ages » Richard Rolle of Hampole, Richard the Hermit

Richard Rolle of Hampole, Richard the Hermit

The Nature of the Bee

[14thc c.] Richard Rolle of Hampton, The Nature of the Bee [from the Thorton MS. before 1450] in Fourteenth Century Verse and Pro (Google Books: Online Library of Free eBooks).

Richard Rolle of Hampton [Richard the Hermit], "The Bee and the Stork, An Allegory of Richard Hermit on the Nature of the Bee," in Richard Rolle, The English Writings, trans. Rosamund S. Allen (Paulist Press:New York, 1988;Google Books: Online Library of eBooks: Preview) 128.

The bee has three qualities. The first is that she is never idle, and she never associates with those who refuse to work, but throws them out and drives them away. A second is that when she flies she picks up earth in her feet so that she cannot easily be blown too high in the air by the wind. The third is that she keeps her wings clean and bright. In the same way, good people who love God are never unoccupied; either they are at work, praying or meditating or reading or going other good works, or they are rebuking lazy people, indicating that they deserve to be driven away from the repose of heaven because they refuse to work. Here good people "pick up the earth," so to speak, and by reckoning themselves despicable and made of earth, so that they may not be blown by the wind of frivolity and pride. They keep their wings clean; in other words, they fulfill the two commandments of love with a clear conscience and they retain other virtues uncontaminated by the filth of sin and impure desires.

Aristotle states that bees are in the habit of attacking the man who wants to extract their honey from them. That is what we should do to counteract the devils who do their best to plunder from us the honey of a simple life and of God's grace. For there are many who are never able to maintain proportion in love where their friends are concerned, both related and unrelated; either they love them too much, focusing their thoughts immoderately on them, or they love them too little if those friends do not treat them in exactly the way they would like. People like that do not know how to fight for their honey with the result that the devil converts it into wormwood and frequently makes their thoughts most bitter, in distress, and misery, and the whirling of futile thoughts and other worthless things, because they are so heavy with earthly friendship that they cannot fly up into the love of Jesus Christ, with which they could so easily relinquish the love of all creatures living on this earth.

In which connection, correspondingly, Aristotle says that some birds excel in flight, and these migrate from one land to another; some are inadequate fliers because of the heaviness of their bodies, and accordingly their nests are not far above the earth. So it is with those who are converted to the service of God: some excel in flight, for they soar from earth to heaven and rest themselves there in contemplation and are made replete with God's love, having not thought for worldly affection; but there are some who do not know how to fly from this land, but allowed their heart to relax on the journey and take great pleasure in many affections for men and women as they come and go, not this one and not that, and in Jesus Christ they do not know how to detect any sweetness, or, if on any occasion they do feel something, it is so little and so brief because of the other thought that they harbor that it does not have a stabilizing effect; they are like a bird which is called strucyo or the stork, which has wings but cannot fly because of the weight of its body. And so they do have intellect, and they fast and keep vigils and appear holy in people's eyes, but they are not able to fly up to love and contemplation of God, so weighed down are they with other affections and trivialities.