Revelations of Divine Love. Julian of Norwich
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-ininspired 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.
PART III. THE THEME OF THE BOOK
“THE phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its origin in... that dim consciousness of the beyond which is part of our nature as human beings…. Mysticism arises when we try to bring this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents of our minds. Religious Mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realise the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or, more generally, as the attempt to realise in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal.”—W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism. The Bampton Lectures for 1900, p. 4.
“What is Paradise? All things that are; for all are goodly and pleasant and therefore may fitly be called a Paradise. It is said also that Paradise is an outer Court of Heaven. Even so this world is an outer court of the eternal, or of Eternity, and especially whatever in time, or any temporal creature manifesteth or remindeth us of God or Eternity; for the creature is a guide and a path to God and Eternity.”{23} “God is althing that is gode, as to my sight,” says Julian, “and the godenes that althing hath, it is He” (viii.).
“Truth seeth God,” and every man exercising the human gift of Reason may in the sight and in the seeing of truths, attain to some sight of God as Truth. But “Wisdom beholdeth God” and although the enlightenment of the Spirit of Wisdom for the discernment of vital truth is a grace that is granted in needful measure to him that seeks to be guided by it, it is perhaps those receivers of grace that are mystics by nature and habit that are the most ready in reaching forward while still on earth to Wisdom’s fullest and most immediate beholding of God as All in all. For theirs in the largest (and it may be the highest) efficiency, and in the fullest accordance with man’s first gift of “Reason Natural,” is the further gift that Julian calls “Mind”: the gift of a certain spiritual sensitiveness whereby they are quick to take impression of eternal things unseen (seeing them either within or beyond the things of time that are seen) with surrender of self to partake of their life. For in this Beholding of Wisdom, response of the heart in purity and insight of the imagination in faith enhance each other, while the vision of the soul through both takes clearness.
The mystic, who sees the wide-ruling oneness of God with all that is good—and thus, as the Mystics say, with all that is,—may begin at any point the beholding of Goodness and therein the beholding of God. “He is in the mydde poynt of all thyng, and all He doeth” (xi.). It is in the way of those thus fully endowed for the reaching to truth in its highest wisdom here, while they walk amongst the many manifestations of earth, to take them as delicate partial signs instinct with a single meaning. Here is mystical perception:—
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour”;{24}
by a blackbird’s sudden song overhear, “in woodlands within,” a joy out of the heart of the Life of life.{25} Speaking of the spiritual sight Julian relates: “I saw God in a point,—by which sight I saw that He is in all things.” To the mystical soul, quiet to listen to “the music of the spheres,” all sweetaccordant sounds are singing Holy, Holy, Holy; to the mystical soul, “full of eyes within”—like those Creatures of Life seen on the plain by the prophet of the Law of Life as renewed for Hope, and seen in the heights by the herald of the Evangel of life as fulfilled in Love—all symmetrical sights are as doors