Revelations of Divine Love. of Norwich Julian
mercy and grace for the fabric of love she is weaving, and all through she guides them in and out, with no hesitation, till at last the whole design lies fair before her, shewing the Goodness of God.
With regard to this scheme it may be noted that apart from her merely intellectual pleasure in arithmetical methods of statement, Julian shews throughout a mystical sense of numerical correspondences. Life, both as being and action, is, to her sight, in its perfection full of trinities; while there are doubles—incident to its imperfection, as we may put it, perhaps, though the book itself does not mark this distinction in so many words—there are doubles wherein two things are partially opposed and require for their reconciling a third that will complete them into trinity. First, as the Centre of all, there is the BLESSED TRINITY: All-Might, All-Wisdom, All-Love: one Goodness: FATHER and SON and HOLY GHOST: one Truth. To the First, Second, and Third Persons correspond the verbs MAY, for all-powerful freedom to do; CAN, for all-skilful ability to do; WILL, for all-loving will to do. So also "the Father willeth, the Son worketh, the Holy Ghost confirmeth." Another nomenclature of the Holy Trinity is, Might, Wisdom, Goodness: one Love; but that of Might, Wisdom, Love (employed by Abelard, Aquinas, and the Schoolmen generally) is the usual one, while Truth, Wisdom, Love, is employed in reference to that Image of God wherein Man is made: for man has not created might: his might is all in the uncreated might of God. Man in his essential Nature is "made-trinity," "like to the unmade Blessed Trinity"—a human trinity of truth, wisdom, love; and these respectively see, behold, and delight in the Divine Trinity of Truth, Wisdom, Love.
Man possesses Reason, which knows, Mind, or a feeling wisdom, which wits, and Love, which loves. The making of Man by the Son of God as Eternal Christ, is the work of Nature; the falling of Man is "suffered" (allowed), and afterwards healed, by Mercy; the raising of Man to a higher than his first state is the work of Grace. "In Nature we have our Being; in Mercy we have our Increasing; in Grace we have our Fulfilling." The work of grace by means of our natural Reason enlightened by the Holy Ghost to see our sins, is Contrition; by means of our naturally-feeling Mind, touched by the Holy Ghost to behold the pain of the world, is Compassion; by means of our nature-and grace-inspired Love, which loves our Maker and Saviour (still by the separation of sin partially, painfully, hid from our sight) is greater Longing toward God. This longing must become an active "desire": for the chief work that we can do as fellow-workers with God in achieving full oneness with Him is Prayer; of which there are three things to understand: its Ground is God by whose Goodness it springeth in us; its use is "to turn our will to the will of our Lord"; its end is "that we should be made one with and like to our Lord in all things." And lastly we have for this life, both by nature and grace, the comprehensive virtue of Faith, "in which all our virtues come to us" and which has in its own nature three elements: understanding, belief, and trust. With Faith, which belongs perhaps chiefly to Reason—Faith is "nought else but a right understanding, with true belief and sure trust, of our Being: that we are in God, and God in us, Whom we see not," "A light by nature coming from our endless Day, that is our Father, God" (liv., lxxxiii.)—is also Hope, which belongs to our feeling Mind (our Remembrance) and to the work of Mercy in this our fallen state: "Hope that we shall come to our Substance (our high and heavenly nature) again." Moreover, "Charity keepeth us in Hope and Hope leadeth us in Charity; and in the end all shall be Charity" (lxxxv.).
With these trinities and groups of threes are others, belonging to God and man, mentioned successively in the closing chapters of the book: three manners of God's Beholding (or Regard of Countenance): that of the Passion, that of Compassion, and that of Bliss; three kinds of longing God has: to teach us, to have us, to fulfil us; three things that man needs in this life from God: Love, Longing, and Pity—"pity in love," to keep him now, and "longing in the same love" to draw him to heaven; three things by which man standeth in this life and by which God is worshipped: "use of man's reason natural; common teaching of Holy Church; inward gracious working of the Holy Ghost";—and last of all, "three properties of God, in which the strength and effect of all the Revelation standeth," "Life, Love and Light."
Again, Julian speaks of things that are double, and this double state seems to be one of imperfection, though she does not explicitly say so. Man's nature, she says, was created "double": "Substance" or Spirit essential from out of the Spirit Divine, and "Sensuality" or spirit related to human senses and making human faculties, intellectual and physical. These two, the Substance and Sense-soul, in their imperfection of union through the frailty of created love (which needs the divine in its might to support it), became partially sundered by the failing of love. "For failing of love on our part, therefore, is all our travail"—from that comes the falling, the dying, and the painful travail between death from sin and life from God—both in the race and the individual. But Christ makes the double into trinity: for Christ is "the Mean [the medium] that keepeth the Substance and Sense-soul together" in his Eternal, Divine-Human Nature, because of His perfect love; and Christ-Incarnate in His Mercy, by this same perfect love brings these two parts anew and more closely together; and Christ uprisen, indwelling in the soul thus united, will keep them forever together, in oneness growing with oneness to Him. Moreover, Man being double also as "soul and body," needs to be "saved from double death," and this salvation, given, is Jesus-Christ, who joined Himself to us in the Incarnation and "yielded us up from the Cross with His Soul and Body into His Father's hands."
In a mere reading of the Book these repeated correspondences may be felt as wearisome, formal, fantastic—or rather they may seem so when, as here, they are brought together and noted, for Julian herself simply speaks of these different groups as they come in her theme. But when one tries to follow the thought of this book amongst the heights and depths of the things that are seen and temporal and the things unseen and eternal, these likenesses, found in all, seem to afford one guidance and surety of footing, like steps cut out in a steep and difficult path. And as one goes on, and the whole of the meaning takes form, these significations of something all-prevailing give one a partial understanding such as Julian perhaps may have had: the feeling, the "Mind," of a certain half-caught measure in "all things that are," a proportion, a oneness. We are amongst free nature's mountains, but they do not rise haphazard: they shew a strange, a balanced beauty of line and light and shade, as convincing, if not as clear in its intention as the sunrise-lines and colouring of the euphrasy flower at our feet. We hear as we walk the wandering sound of "the vagrant, casual wind," but there is something in its rise and fall, and rising again, that has kinship with the flow and ebb and onrush of the lingering, punctual waves on the shore. Sursum Corda.
[1] The soon-forgotten petition of Julian's youth for a "bodily sickness" does not seem to have had any connection in her mind with special Revelation: it was desired neither as in any way a sign of invisible things nor as a direct means of beholding them. And probably, as a matter of fact, the sickness that was granted helped her in the way that she had desired, helped her to the sight of the Revelation, not directly, but by drawing her spirit to that utter dependence on and trust in God that is death's first lesson for all, that uttermost self-devotion to God that is life's last exercise. This spiritual state, with all that through years had gone before of feeling and thought and life's experience, made her ready to be shewn with special largeness and clearness God's love: how it filled the empty place of sin and pain and sorrow with its divine fulness. As to the "bodily sight" introducing the Revelation, a sight of "parts of the Passion," which may be compared with "The XV. Oos"—'Orationes'—Passion-prayers each beginning with 'O' (v. Hora of Sarum), it was recognised by Julian herself, even at the time of her seeing it, as being a sight of things "not in substance or nature." In this recognition it was proved to be neither mental delusion nor mere "raving" delirium. But it would, it seems, be natural that in her weakness of body and her exaltation of spirit (so tense that the strength of her self-surrender to death seemed to cast her back upon bodily life in the painless world between the two) some sort of physical illusion should be brought about by