Revelations of Divine Love. Julian of Norwich
of others. Yet the single soul knows itself best in the souls of all the saints, in the fellowship of the “Blessed Common,” where every virtue is found, not in each, at this time, but in all—not now in the perfect height nor the fairest flowering, but at growth in that ground where each plant holds some likeness to Christ.
With Julian the Christian Faith is not a thing added to the Mystical sight: these are, as again and again she says, seen both as one. It is the inherent Christianity of her system that makes her teaching always, in a large way, practical. For the system came at first to be seen by prayerful searching made out of her practical need of an answer to the problem of sin and sorrow; the Mystical Vision came with “contrition, compassion, and longing after God,” those wounds that her contrite, pitiful, longing heart had desired should be made more deep in her life. It is through the work of grace that Julian reaches back to the gift of nature, its ground; and from the depths of this root-ground she rises soon again to the “springing and spreading” grace. So in the First of her Shewings the “higher” truth is seen: “we are all in Him beclosed,” but in the Last—the conclusion and confirmation of all—the lower, yet nearer, truth, which all may know: “and He is beclosed in us.” And speaking of this dwelling within the soul she speaks of His working us all into Him: “in which working He willeth that we be His helpers, giving to Him all our entending, learning His lores, keeping His laws, desiring that all be done that He doeth; truly trusting in Him” (lvii.).
Julian had prayed to feel Christ’s dying pains, if it should be God’s will, in order that she might feel compassion, and the visionary sight of His pain in the Face of the Crucifix filled her with pain as it grew upon her. “How might any pain be more to me than to see Him that is all my life, all my bliss, and all my joy suffer?” Yet the Shewing of Pain was but the introduction to, and for a time the accompaniment of, the Revelation; the Revelation, itself, as a whole, was of Love—the Goodness or Active Love of God. So the First Shewing, as the Ground of all the rest, was a large view of this Goodness as the Ground of all Being. Although through these earlier Shewings the Saviour’s bodily pain is felt by Julian so fully in “mind” that she feels it indeed as if it were bodily anguish she bore, it is in this very experience that the shewing of Joy is made to her spirit. So when in the opening of the Revelation she tells of beholding the Passion of Christ, her first unexpected word is of sudden joy from the inner sight of the Love that God is: the sight of the Trinity:—“And in the same Shewing suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy. (For where JESUS appeareth, the blessed Trinity is understood, as to my sight.)” And even as Julian finds afterwards that the Last Word of the Revelation is the same as the First: “Thou shalt not be overcome” so the opening Sight already shews her that which shall be revealed all through, for learning of “more in the same,” and uplifts her heart to the fulness of joy that is shewn at the close. For she feels that this shock, as it were, of Revelation—this sudden joy of seeing Love in the midst of earth’s evil, beyond and beneath and in the pain that is passing, is the entrance into the joy of the Lord. “Suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart with utmost joy And so I understood it shall be in heaven without end to all that shall come there” (iv.). So at the close, when the vision was not of the Love Divine in that bending Face beneath the Crown of Thorns, but of the human love that shall spring up to meet the Divine out of the lowness of earth,—the vision of how from this body of death, as from an unsightly, shapeless, and stagnant mass of quagmire, there “sprang a full fair creature, a little Child, fully shapen and formed, agile and lively, whiter than lily; which swiftly glided up into heaven”—the spiritual shewing to the soul is this: “Suddenly thou shaft be taken from all thy pain…. and thou shalt come up above and thou shalt have me …. and thou shalt be fulfilled of love and of bliss” (lxiv.). And so in that early experience of Julian’s when in her love, abandoned to pity and worship, she would not look up to Heaven from the Cross, it was also the inward, sight by the higher part of her soul of the higher part of Christ’s life, that Heavenly Love that could only rejoice, that overcame her frailty of flesh unwilling to suffer, and made her choose “only Jesus in weal and in woe.” “Thou art my Heaven” (xix.-lv.). “All the Trinity wrought in the Passion of Jesus Christ,” though only the Son of the Virgin suffered, and in seeing this, Julian saw “the Bliss of Christ’s works,” “the joy that is in the blissful Trinity [by reason] of the Passion of Christ”; the Father willing all, the Son working all, the Holy Ghost confirming all.”
This complexity of the Divine-Human life in the Son of God, this union in Christ Jesus of serene untouched blessedness in the heavenly regions of His spirit with His bearing, in the active joy of a “glad giver,” all the sin and sorrow of the world, is revealed as the comfort and confidence of man, whose own deepest experience is love that suffers, whose highest worship therefore must be of Love that is strong to suffer.
It was a double joy that was shewn in Christ besides the bliss of the impassible Godhead, which is the bliss of Love without all time and beyond all deeds. For there was joy in the Passion itself: “If I might suffer more, I would suffer more,” and joy in its fruits: “If thou art pleased, I am pleased.” Thus, too, we are told of three ways in which our Lord would have us behold His Passion: first, “the hard pains He suffered on earth”; second, “the love that made Him to suffer passeth as far all His pains as Heaven is above earth”; third, “the joy and the bliss that made Him to be well-satisfied in it.”—“With a glad countenance He looked unto His wounded Side, rejoicing” (xxii., xxiii., xxiv.).
From the sight of Love that is higher than pain comes the sight of Love that is deeper than sin. Julian had had the mystical shewing that God is all that is good,{28} and is only good, is the life of all that is, and doeth all that is done, and she had reasoned, as others before her had reasoned, that therefore “sin hath no substance” and “sin is no deed.” But perhaps it is those that are most concerned with God in creature things, that suffer most shaking from the sight of evil. Those that seek God’s Kingdom in this present world, finding “the dark places of the earth” full of the habitations of cruelty, have continually the enemy as with a sword in their bones saying within them: “Where is now thy God?” “I saw,” says Julian, “that He is in all things. I beheld and considered, with a soft dread, and thought: What is sin?” (xi.). So also it is immediately after the coming of the mystical Shewing made “yet more highly “: “It is I, it is I, it is I that am all,” that the memory of her own experience is brought to her and she sees how in her longings after God, who is all the time so close about us, around us and within,—she had always been hindered from seeing and reaching Him fully by the darkening, disturbing power of sin. “And so I looked generally upon us all, and methought: If sin had not been, we should have all been clean, and like to our Lord as He made us” (xxvii.). Thus came again the stirring of that old question over which “afore this time often I wondered,” with “mourning and sorrow,” “why the beginning of sin was not letted—for then, methought, all should have been well.”
To this darkness, crying to God, the light came first as by a soft general dawning of comfort for faith. “Sin is behoveable (it behoved that sin should be suffered to rise) but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Yet Julian, unable to take comfort to her heart over that which was still so dark to her intellect, stands “beholding things general, troublously and mourning,” saying thus in her thoughts: “Ah good Lord, how might all be well, for the great hurt that is come by sin to the creature ?” (xxix.).
The answer to this double question as to sin and pain is the central theme of the Revelation, though much is still hidden and much is but dimly revealed as yet to faith. In brief account, the sight, enough for us now, is this: “Mercy, by love, suffereth us to fail [of love] in measure, and in as much as we fail, in so much we die: for it needs must be that we die in so much as we fail of the sight and feeling of God that is our life…. And grace worketh our dreadful failing into plenteous, endless solace, and grace worketh our shameful falling into high, worshipful rising; and grace worketh our sorrowful dying into holy, blissful life” (xlviii.). “By the assay of this falling we shall have an high marvellous knowing of love in God, without end. For strong and marvellous is that love that may not and will not be broken for trespass. And this is one understanding of our profit. Another is the lowness and meekness that we shall get by the sight of our falling” (lxi.). “And by this meek knowing