Revelations of Divine Love. Julian of Norwich
cannot of course be assumed that she did not give them, even beyond the incumbent rule of the Church, though not in excess of her usual moderation, some part in her Christian striving for mastery over self. Nor could this silence in itself be taken as a proof that ascetic practices had not in her view a preparatory function such as has by many of the Mystics been assigned to them during a process of self-training in the earlier stages of the soul’s ascent to aptitude for mystical vision. It is, however, to be noted that neither in regard to herself nor others do we hear from Julian anything about an undertaking of this kind. To her the “special Shewing” came as a gift, unearned, and unexpected: it came in an abundant answer to a prayer for other things needed by every soul.{13} Julian’s desires for herself were for three “wounds” to be made more deep in her life: contrition (in sight of sin), compassion (in sight of sorrow) and longing after God: she prayed and sought diligently for these graces, comprehensive as she felt they were of the Christian life and meant for all; and with them she sought to have for herself, in particular regard to her own difficulties, a sight of such truth as it might “behove” her to know for the glory of God and the comfort of men. According to Julian the “special Shewing” is a gift of comfort for all, sent by God in a time to some soul that is chosen in order that it may have, and so may minister, the comfort needed by itself and by others (ix.). In her experience this Revelation, soon closed, is renewed by influence and enlightenment in the more ordinary grace of its giver, the Holy Ghost. But a still fuller sight of God shall be given, she rejoices to think, in Heaven, to all that shall reach that Fulfilment of blessed life—the only mount of the soul set forth in this book. Thither, by the high-road of Christ, all souls may go, making the steep ascent through “longing and desire,”—longing that embodies itself in desire towards God, that is, in Prayer.
Nothing is said by Julian as to successive stages of Prayer, though she speaks of different kinds of prayer as the natural action of the soul under different experiences or in different states of feeling or “dryness.” Prayer is asking (“beseeching”), with submission and acquiescence; or beholding, with the self forgotten, yet offered up; it is a thanking and a praising in the heart that sometimes breaks forth into voice; or a silent joy in the sight of God as all-sufficient. And in all these ways “Prayer oneth the soul to God.”
To Julian’s understanding the only Shewing of God that could ever be, the highest and lowest, the first and the last, was the Vision of Him as Love, “Hold thee therin and thou shalt witten and knowen more in the same. But thou shalt never knowen ne witten other thing without end. Thus was I lerid that Love was our Lord’s menyng” (lxxxvi.). Alien to the “simple creature” was that desert region where some of the lovers of God have endeavoured to find Him,—desiring an extreme penetration of thought (human thought, after all, since for men there is none beyond it) or an utmost reach of worship (worship from fire and ice) in proclaiming the Absolute One not only as All that is, but as All that is not. Julian’s desire was truly for God in Himself, through Christ by the Holy Spirit of Love: for God in “His homeliest home,” the soul, for God in His City. Therefore she follows only the upward way of the light attempered by grace, not turning back to the Via Negativa, that downward road that starting from a conception of the Infinite “as the antithesis of the finite,”{14} rather than as including and transcending the finite, leads man to deny to his words of God all qualities known or had by human, finite beings. Julian keeps on the way that is natural to her spirit and to all her habits of thought as these may have been directed by reading and conversation: it does not take her towards that Divine Darkness of which some seers have brought report. Hers was not one of those souls that would, and must, go silent and alone and strenuous through strange places: “homely and courteous” she ever found Almighty God in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Julian’s mystical sight was not a negation of human modes of thought: neither was it a torture to human powers of speech nor a death-sentence to human activities of feeling. “He hath no despite of that which He hath made” (vi.). This seer of the littleness of all that is made saw the Divine as containing, not as engulfing, all things that truly are, so that in some way “all things that are made” because of His love last ever. Certainly she passes sometimes beyond the language of earth, seeing a love and a Goodness “more than tongue can tell,” but she is never inarticulate in any painful, struggling way—when words are not to be found that can tell all the truth revealed, she leaves her Lord’s “meaning” to be taken directly from Him by the understanding of each desirous soul. So is it with the Shewing of God as the Goodness of everything that is good: “It is I—it is I” (xxvi.). Certainly Julian looks both downward and upward, sees Love in the lowest depth, far below sin, below even Mercy; sees Love as the highest that can be, rising higher and higher far above sight, in skies that as yet she is not called to enter: “abysses” there are, below and above, like Angela di Foligno’s “double abyss”; but here is no desert region like that where Angela seems as “an eagle descending”{15} from heights of unbreathable air, baffled and blinded in its assault on the Sun, proclaiming the Light Unspeakable in anguished, hoarse, inarticulate cries; here is a mountain-path between the abysses and the sound as of a chorus from pilgrims singing:
“Praise to the Holiest in the height
And in the depth be praise”;—
‘All Is Well: All Is Well: All Shall Be Well.’
Moreover, Julian while guided by Reason is led by the “Mind” of her soul—pioneer of the path through the wood of darkness though Reason is ready to disentangle the lower hindrances of the way; and where her instructed soul “finds rest,” those things that are hid from the wisdom and prudence of Reason only are to its simplicity of obedience revealed. Even as her Way is Christ-Jesus, and her walk by “longing and desire” is of faith and effort, so the End and the Rest that she seeks is the fulness of God, in measure as the soul can enter upon His fulness here and in that heavenly “oneing” with Him which shall be by grace the “fulfilling” and “overpassing” of “Mankind.” “The Mid-Person willed to be Ground and Head of this fair Kind,” “out of Whom we ben al cum, in Whom we be all inclosid, into Whom we shall all wyndyn, in Him fynding our full Hevyn in everlestand joye” (liii.).{16} The soul that participates in God cannot be lost in God, the soul that wends into oneness with God finds there at last its Self. Words of the Spirit-nature fail to describe to man, as he is, this fulness of personal life, and Julian falls back in one effort, daring in its infantine concreteness of language, on acts of all the five senses to symbolise the perfection of spiritual life that is in oneness with God (xliii.).
It may be noted that in these “Revelations” there is absolutely no regarding of Christ as the “Bridegroom” of the individual soul: once or twice Julian in passing uses the symbol of “the Spouse,” “the Fair Maiden,” “His loved Wife,” but this she applies only to the Church. In her usual speech Christ when unnamed is our “Good” or our “Courteous” Lord, or sometimes simply “God,” and when she seeks to express pictorially His union with men and His work for men, then the soul is the Child and Christ is the Mother. In this symbolic language the love of the Christian soul is the love of the Child to its Mother and to each of the other children.
Julian’s Mystical views seem in parts to be cognate with those of earlier and later systems based on Plato’s philosophy, and especially perhaps on his doctrine of Love as reaching through the beauties of created things higher and higher to union with the Absolute Beauty above, Which is God—schemes of thought developed before her and in her time by Plotinus, Clement, Augustine, Dionysius “the Areopagite,” John the Scot, Eckhart, the Victorines,{17} Ruysbroeck, and others. One does not know what her reading may have been, or with what people she may have conversed. Possibly the learned Austin Friars that were settled close to St Julian’s in Conisford may have lent her books by some of these writers, or she may have been influenced through talks with a Confessor, or with some of the Flemish weavers of Norwich, with whom Mystical views were not uncommon. Yet the Mysticism of the “Revelations” is peculiarly of the English type. Less exuberant in language than Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole, Julian resembles him a little in her blending of practical sense with devotional fervour; but the writer to whom she seems, at any rate in some of her phrases, most akin is Walter Hilton, her contemporary.{18} Hilton, however, is very rich in quotations from the Bible, while Julian’s only direct