Love Quote by Richard Rolle

Singularity is the point: Rolle is trying to make desire behave. In a spiritual culture where the heart was imagined as a restless, leaky vessel, “Thy love is singular” reads less like romantic rapture and more like a rule for attention. Love counts as real, he implies, only when it has been stripped of rivals.

The line works by turning an interior feeling into a diagnostic test. If “all thy delight is in Jesus Christ,” then you’re not merely believing; you’re correctly ordered. Everything else - “no other thing” - is cast as a kind of counterfeit consolation, pleasure that may feel like comfort but reveals itself as distraction. The subtext is blunt: mixed motives aren’t charming; they’re spiritually dangerous. Rolle isn’t interested in negotiating with human complexity. He’s offering a clean, almost ruthless standard that converts ordinary experience (joy, comfort, delight) into theological evidence.

Context matters here. Rolle, a 14th-century English mystic, wrote for a world shaken by plague, political churn, and a church that mediated salvation through institutions and habits. Mysticism’s promise was direct access: God not as doctrine but as felt heat, sweetness, song. That intensity, though, had to be policed. “Singular” love is both an aspiration and a safeguard, a way to claim authenticity and fend off self-deception.

Read now, it also sounds like an early manual for the attention economy: the most radical devotion is exclusive focus. Rolle’s sentence demands that the heart become monogamous, not because other joys are evil, but because divided delight makes the soul unreadable.