Revelations of Divine Love. Julian of Norwich
that the Revelation of God as Love that is All in all is received. And looking thereon in the highest manifestation, the manifestation of Christ, which is made for all men, the mystics meet other beholders, who are not called “mystics,” yet who have not merely in greater or less degree, with them, the common gift of Reason, but, after their different manner and in their own share, the gift of the feeling “Mind.” For both from the seeing of Truth and from the beholding of Wisdom comes the “holy wondering delight in God” that is simply delight of love in Love. So they of the East and they of the West sit down together to partake of the Bread and the Wine of the Table of God in His Kingdom.
There is no other than one Food of the Divine Life consecrated and made ready and offered to man for his human spirit to feed on; but the Christian mystic finds an offering of that Food, which is the sanctified Life of the Christ of God, not only in its constant presentment to the spirit alone, by the Spirit of God through Christ. To him, as to other Christians, the sight and the offering of the Life in God is given in that memorial, mediate, expectant Sacrament consecrated for the spirit’s nurture through those elected Symbols of sense that are the most perfect and sacred symbols because in their earlier, natural use they most immediately minister to the whole human life on earth of the Giver and of the receivers. But along with this chosen Sacrament, and as one with it, there is shewn to the mystic the Life Divine in diverse manners of working: he sees God’s Christ from afar, fore-sees the Eucharistic Sacrament of His most sacred Death and Life, now raised in the Bread and the Wine on high,—seeing its promise low in the ground in the earliest, ageless life of the wheat and the vine: seed cast away, bruised corn of wheat, and dying Body, and broken Bread, and daily obedience; a hidden root, crushed fruit of the vine, and Blood poured forth, and uplifted Wine, and joy of Love over Death: one Life.
Sometimes there is for the mystics a partaking of these lesser “wayside sacraments,” sometimes a turning aside from their symbols; sometimes the old song of life in the lower creation awakens singing, sometimes it scarcely is heard. But always the spirit of nature’s signs as interpreted in Man, above all in Christ, lays its claim on the soul; always as sung by the chorus of human spirits that live on the “Righteousness, Peace, and Joy” of the Will of God, the New Song of Life through Death has in it a summons and receives from one and another here, passing through much tribulation, its fuller concord of human achievement, or at least the desirous Amen. So whether the mystic dwell much or little with the sights and sounds of sense, those things that are seen and heard by the soul bear to him the command of his home, and the merest doorway glimpses, the echoes most distant, making their proffer of more and more within and beyond, say Come.
“I give you the end of a golden string:
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s Gate,
Built in Jerusalem wall.”{26}
(Although this “following on to know,” this winding of the truth caught hold of into a “perfect round” of thought and will and life, is probably not more easy for the mystics than for other people.
“Amore, amor, tu sei cerchio rotondo!”{27})
God is in all; but “our soul may never have rest in things that are beneath itself” (lxvii.). “Well I wot,” says Julian, “that heaven and earth and all that is made is great and large, fair and good,” yet “all that is made” is seen as a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, held in the palm of her hand, when along with it her spiritual sight beholds the Maker. And though we may find the Maker in all things, we find Him, both as Maker and Restorer, first and best, First and Last, in the soul. There He is Alpha, there Omega. “It is readier to us to come to the knowing of God than to know our own Soul” (in its fullest powers). “For our soul is so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured, that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God, which is the Maker, to whom it is oned.” And yet, “we may never come to full knowing of God till we know first clearly our own soul” (lvi.). The knowledge begins with God, but it begins with Him in the lowest place of the soul rescued from sin by mercy and entered by grace. “For Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all” (lxxx.). To the soul that looks on Christ a remembrance rises of its own “fair nature” made in His image; yet “our Lord of His mercy sheweth us our sin and our feebleness by the sweet gracious light of Himself” (lxxviii.). Thus in the working of grace the soul comes to the knowledge both of its higher and lower parts. For in finding in itself both a natural response to the working of grace by its love and its longing after God, and a contrariness to the goodness of grace by its often failing and falling, it experiences both the action of the “Godly Will” (which is within it as a part of, and a gift from, its higher nature, “the Substance”) and the action of a “beastly will” (from the simple animal nature) which can will no moral good and which, “failing of love,” falls into sin: whereby comes pain, with all the “travail” of good and evil in conflict during the course of restoration. But it is only when the Sensesoul (wherein the higher will must overcome the lower) is at last brought up to heaven, enriched by all the profits of tribulation, and is united to the Substance waiting there, “hid with Christ in God,” that we come to the perfect knowledge of God. For that knowledge, perfect in kind though always growing, can only begin when, being in our “full powers” and “all fully holy,” we come to know clearly our own united perfected Soul. This seems to be Julian’s view (lvi., etc.).
Julian says elsewhere that we have in us here such a “medley” of good and evil that sometimes we hardly know of others or of ourselves wherein we stand, but that each “holy assent” that we make (by the Godly Will) to the grace and will of God, is a witness that we are of God. A witness to our sonship, it might be said’, and perhaps, taking Julian’s view for the time, we might think that as the Lost Son “came to himself,” so the soul comes to the consciousness of the Godly Will; that as he arose and came to his Father and found Him, or rather was found by his Father, so the soul receives the healing of Christ in Mercy and the leading of the Holy Ghost in Grace; and that as at last, the son not only found his father but found his lost sonship—yet a better sonship than ever he had known before—so the soul comes at last to find, more and more fully, that new sonship which is of its nature, yet is more than its nature. For it finds the nature oneness which by creation it had with the Son of God, enhanced and for ever sustained by grace.
Sometimes, truly, the Mystical doctrine leads by tracks that are not easily followed, but it is perhaps only when her views are regarded in single parts, that any harm could be found in Julian’s statements—all qualified as they are by her “as to my sight.” At first indeed it may startle one to read of her saints that are known in the Church and in Heaven “by their sins,” to hear that the wounds left by sin are made “medicines” on earth and turned to “worships” in Heaven; but then we remember the joy that shall be in Heaven over “one sinner that repenteth,” the love that loves much because much is forgiven. And yet we remember the little children in their high faith and love and innocent days; and of such is the Kingdom of God. But the Child, with many “fair virtues,” albeit imperfect, was likewise Julian’s type of the Christian soul: “I understood no higher stature in this life than Childhood.”
“To know our own soul”—it behoveth us to know our own soul—our high-nature soul, which is enclosed in God, and also our soul on the earth which Christ-Jesus inhabits, which has in it the “medley”: “we have in us our Lord Jesus uprisen, we have in us the wretchedness and the mischief of Adam’s falling, dying” (iii.). But elsewhere Julian gives this name “our own soul” to the Church, seeing the Church likewise as the dwelling and working-place of Christ (lxii.). She has been speaking of the Divine Wisdom being as it were the Mother of the soul, and now she seems to lead us to the Church as to the Nursery where He tends His children. “For one single person may oftentimes be broken, but the whole Body of Holy Church was never broken, nor ever shall be, without end. And therefore a sure thing it is, a good and a gracious, to will meekly and mightily to be fastened to our Mother, Holy Church, that is Christ Jesus. For the Food of Mercy that is His dearworthy blood and precious water is plenteous to make us fair and clean; the sweet gracious hands of our Mother be ready and diligently about us. For He in all this working useth the office of a kind nurse that