JULIAN of Norwich (c.1342—after 1416), English spiritual writer. Little is known of her life, except that by 1394 she was an anchoress, prob. at St Julian’s church, Norwich. Acc. to her own account, in May 1373 she received a revelation, consisting of 15 ‘showings’ (and one more ‘showing’ the day after). Her book, commonly known in modern times as Showings or Revelation(s) of Divine Love, survives in two recensions. The first draft (the Short Text) was prob. written soon after 1373, but it was not until 1393 at the earliest that she completed the Long Text, in which she expounds an original and competent theological vision of life, on the basis of the revelation and her reflections upon it.

She freed herself from conventional ‘contemplative’ notions and came to see that the content of the revelation was identical with that of the faith, and must therefore contain doctrine applicable to all Christians. The kernel of her message is God’s love, but she does not shrink from the speculative problems posed by sin and evil. She develops a twofold understanding of human life in terms of ‘substance’, which is inseparably united with God, and ‘sensuality’, which is the life we perceive ourselves to be living in this world, and which is characterized in varying degrees by an inability to see God’s love clearly. ‘Substance’ and ‘sensuality’ are united in Christ by the Incarnation, and esp. by the Passion and Resurrection.

Julian finds in the Passion the key to the understanding of all that is wrong with this world, as somehow part of God’s purpose in creating human beings in whom ‘sensuality’ can become capable of union with God.

Her doctrine is essentially one of the coherence of creation and redemption in the predestination of the elect in Christ; it is exemplified, for instance, in her uniquely unsentimental use of the fairly common medieval idea of Christ as mother, which she sees at work in human motherhood and in the way in which Divine providence allows people to get hurt, while protecting them from ultimate harm. No literary sources have been certainly identified, but it is clear that Julian was theologically well informed. Feast day in parts of the Anglican Communion, 8 May.

Crit. edn. of both texts by E. Colledge, OSA, and J. Walsh, SJ (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Studies and Texts, 35; Toronto, 1978). Diplomatic edn., with Eng. tr., by A. M. Reynolds, CP, and J. B. Holloway (Florence, 2001). The Long Text is also conveniently ed., on the basis of one MS, for the use of students, by M. Glasscoe (Exeter Medieval English Texts, 1976). Modern trs. by E. Colledge, OSA, and J. Walsh, SJ (Classics of Western Spirituality, 1978) and E. Spearing (Penguin Classics, 1998). P. Molinari, SJ, Julian of Norwich (1958). W. Riehle, Studien zur englischen Mystik des Mittelalters (Anglistische Forschungen, 120; 1977; Eng. tr., 1981). B. Pelphrey, Love was his Meaning: The Theology and Mysticism of Julian of Norwich (Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, 92:4; Salzburg, 1982). M. A. Palliser, OP, Christ, our Mother of Mercy: Divine Mercy and Compassion in the Theology of the Shewings of Julian of Norwich (Berlin and New York, 1992). D. N. Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, 1994). S. J. McEntire (ed.), Julian of Norwich (New York and London, 1998). C. Abbott, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999). S. [C. ff.] Tugwell, OP, Ways of Imperfection (1984), pp. 187–207. E. Colledge, OSA, and J. Walsh, SJ, in Dict. Sp. 8 (1974), cols. 1605–11, s.v. ‘Julienne de Norwich’.

Audience, Wednesday, 1st December 2010

JULIAN of  NORWICH

I still remember with great joy the Apostolic Journey I made in the United Kingdom last September. England is a land that has given birth to a great many distinguished figures who enhanced Church history with their testimony and their teaching. One of them, venerated both in the Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion, is the mystic Julian of Norwich, of whom I wish to speak this morning.

The — very scant — information on her life in our possession comes mainly from her Revelations of Divine Love in Sixteen Showings, the book in which this kindly and devout woman set down the content of her visions.

It is known that she lived from 1342 until about 1430, turbulent years both for the Church, torn by the schism that followed the Pope’s return to Rome from Avignon, and for the life of the people who were suffering the consequences of a long drawn-out war between the Kingdoms of England and of France. God, however, even in periods of tribulation, does not cease to inspire figures such as Julian of Norwich, to recall people to peace, love and joy.

As Julian herself recounts, in May 1373, most likely on the 13th of that month, she was suddenly stricken with a very serious illness that in three days seemed to be carrying her to the grave. After the priest, who hastened to her bedside, had shown her the Crucified One not only did Julian rapidly recover her health but she received the 16 revelations that she subsequently wrote down and commented on in her book, Revelations of Divine Love.

And it was the Lord himself, 15 years after these extraordinary events, who revealed to her the meaning of those visions.

Inspired by divine love, Julian made a radical decision. Like an ancient anchoress, she decided to live in a cell located near the church called after St Julian, in the city of Norwich — in her time an important urban centre not far from London.

She may have taken the name of Julian precisely from that Saint to whom was dedicated the church in whose vicinity she lived for so many years, until her death.

This decision to live as a “recluse”, the term in her day, might surprise or even perplex us. But she was not the only one to make such a choice. In those centuries a considerable number of women opted for this form of life, adopting rules specially drawn up, for them, such as the rule compiled by St Aelred of Rievaulx.

The anchoresses or “recluses”, in their cells, devoted themselves to prayer, meditation and study. In this way they developed a highly refined human and religious sensitivity which earned them the veneration of the people. Men and women of every age and condition in need of advice and comfort, would devoutly seek them. It was not, therefore, an individualistic choice; precisely with this closeness to the Lord, Julian developed the ability to be a counsellor to a great many people and to help those who were going through difficulties in this life.

We also know that Julian too received frequent visitors, as is attested by the autobiography of another fervent Christian of her time, Margery Kempe, who went to Norwich in 1413 to receive advice on her spiritual life. This is why, in her lifetime, Julian was called “Dame Julian”, as is engraved on the funeral monument that contains her remains. She had become a mother to many.

Men and women who withdraw to live in God’s company acquire by making this decision a great sense of compassion for the suffering and weakness of others. As friends of God, they have at their disposal a wisdom that the world — from which they have distanced themselves — does not possess and they amiably share it with those who knock at their door.

I therefore recall with admiration and gratitude the women and men’s cloistered monasteries. Today more than ever they are oases of peace and hope, a precious treasure for the whole Church, especially since they recall the primacy of God and the importance, for the journey of faith, of constant and intense prayer.

It was precisely in the solitude infused with God that Julian of Norwich wrote her Revelations of Divine Love. Two versions have come down to us, one that is shorter, probably the older, and one that is longer. This book contains a message of optimism based on the certainty of being loved by God and of being protected by his Providence.

In this book we read the following wonderful words:

The theme of divine love recurs frequently in the visions of Julian of Norwich who, with a certain daring, did not hesitate to compare them also to motherly love. This is one of the most characteristic messages of her mystical theology.

The tenderness, concern and gentleness of God’s kindness to us are so great that they remind us, pilgrims on earth, of a mother’s love for her children. In fact the biblical prophets also sometimes used this language that calls to mind the tenderness, intensity and totality of God’s love, which is manifested in creation and in the whole history of salvation that is crowned by the Incarnation of the Son.

God, however, always excels all human love, as the Prophet Isaiah says: “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will never forget you” (Is 49:15).

Julian of Norwich understood the central message for spiritual life: God is love and it is only if one opens oneself to this love, totally and with total trust, and lets it become one’s sole guide in life, that all things are transfigured, true peace and true joy found and one is able to radiate it.

Yes, dear brothers and sisters, God’s promises are ever greater than our expectations. If we present to God, to his immense love, the purest and deepest desires of our heart, we shall never be disappointed. “And all will be well”, “all manner of things shall be well”: this is the final message that Julian of Norwich transmits to us and that I am also proposing to you today. Many thanks.

from The 1919 Catholic Encyclopedia

ENGLISH mystic of the fourteenth century, author or recipient of the vision contained in the book known as the “Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love”. The original form of her name appears to have been Julian. She was probably a Benedictine nun, living as a recluse in an anchorage of which traces still remain in the east part of the churchyard of St. Julian in Norwich, which belonged to Carrow Priory. According to her book, this revelation was “shewed” to her on 8 or 14 May (the readings differ), 1373, when she was thirty years and a half old. This would refer her birth to the end of 1342. Her statement, that “for twenty years after the time of this shewing, save three months, I had teaching inwardly”, proves that the book was not written before 1393. An early fifteenth-century manuscript, recently purchased for the British Museum from the Amherst library, states that she “yet is on life, Anno Domini 1413”. It is probable that this is the manuscript cited by Francis Blomefield, the eigtheenth-century historian of Norfolk, and that a misreading of the date led to the statement that she was still living in 1442. Attempts have been made to identify her with Lady Julian Lampet, the anchoress of Carrow, references concerning legacies to whom occur in documents from 1426 to 1478; but this is manifestly impossible. The newly-discovered manuscript differs considerably from the complete version hitherto known, of which it is a kind of condensation, lacking the beginning and the end. Only three, much later, manuscripts of the fuller text are known to exist. The earliest, in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris (from which the book was first edited by Serenus de Cressy in 1670), dates from the sixteenth century; the other two, both in the British Museum and not independent of each other, belong to the seventeenth. The better of the latter is evidently a copy of a much earlier original.

Whatever be their precise date, these “Revelations”, or “Shewings”, are the most perfect fruit of later medieval mysticism in England. Juliana described herself as a “simple creature unlettered” when she received them; but, in the years that intervened between the vision and the composition of the book, she evidently acquired some knowledge of theological phraseology, and her work appears to show the influence of Walter Hilton, as well as neo-Platonic analogies, the latter probably derived from the anonymous author of the “Divine Cloud of Unknowing”. There is one passage, concerning the place in Christ’s side for all mankind that shall be saved, which argues an acquaintance with the letters of St. Catherine of Siena. The psychological insight with which she describes her condition, distinguishing the manner of her vision and recognizing when she has to deal with a mere delusion, is worthy of St. Teresa. When seemingly at the point of death, in the bodily sickness for which she had prayed in order to renew her spiritual life, she passes into a trance while contemplating the crucifix, and has the vision of Christ’s suffering “in which all the shewings that follow be grounded and joined”.

The book is the record of twenty years’ meditation upon that one experience; for, “when the shewing, which is given for a time, is passed and hid, then faith keepeth it by grace of the Holy Ghost unto our lives end”. More than fifteen years later, she received “in ghostly understanding” the explanation, the key to all religious experience: “What? wouldest thou wit thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Wit it well: Love was His meaning. Who sheweth it thee? Love. Wherefore sheweth He it thee? For love. Hold thee therein, thou shalt wit more in the same. But thou shalt never wit therein other without end.” With this illumination, the whole mystery of Redemption and the purpose of human life become clear to her, and even the possibility of sin and the existence of evil does not trouble her, but is made “a bliss by love”. This is the great deed, transcending our reason, that the Blessed Trinity shall do at the last day: “Thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well.” Like St. Catherine, Juliana has little of the dualism of body and soul that is frequent in the mystics. God is in our “sensuality” as well as in our “substance”, and the body and the soul render mutual aid: “Either of them take help of other till we be brought up into stature, as kind worketh.” Knowledge of God and knowledge of self are inseparable: we may never come to the knowing of one without the knowing of the other. “God is more nearer to us than our own soul”, and “in falling and rising we are ever preciously kept in one love.” She lays special stress upon the “homeliness” and “courtesy” of God’s dealings with us, “for love maketh might and wisdom full meek to us.” With this we must correspond by a happy confidence; “failing of comfort” is the “most mischief” into which the soul can fall. In the Blessed Virgin the Lord would have all mankind see how they are loved. Throughout her revelation Juliana submits herself to the authority of the Church: “I yield me to our mother Holy Church, as a simple child oweth.”

WARRACK COMMENTARY

VERY little is known of the outer life of the woman who nearly five hundred years ago left us this book.

It is in connection with the old Church of St Julian in the parish of Conisford, outlying Norwich, that Julian is mentioned in Blomefield‘s History of Norfolk (vol. iv. p. 8l): “In the east part of the churchyard stood an anchorage in which an ankeress or recluse dwelt till the Dissolution, when the house was demolished, though the foundations may still be seen (1768). In 1393 Lady Julian, the ankeress here was a strict recluse, and had two servants to attend her in her old age. This woman was in these days esteemed one of the greatest holiness. In 1472 Dame Agnes was recluse here; in I481, Dame Elizabeth Scott; in 1510, Lady Elizabeth; in 1524, Dame Agnes Edrygge.”

The little Church of St Julian (in use at this day) still keeps from Norman times its dark round tower of flint rubble, and still there are traces about its foundation of the anchorage built against its south-eastern wall. “This Church was founded,” says the History of the County, “before the Conquest, and was given to the nuns of Carhoe (Carrow) by King Stephen, their founder; it hath a round tower and but one bell; the north porch and nave are tiled, and the chancel is thatched. There was an image of St Julian in a niche of the wall of the Church, in the Churchyard.” Citing the record of a burial in “the churchyard of St Julian, the King and Confessor,” Blomefield observes: “which shews that it was not dedicated to St Julian, the Bishop, nor St Julian, the Virgin.”

The only knowledge that we have directly from Julian as to any part of her history is given in her account of the time and manner in which the Revelation came, and of her condition before and during and after this special experience. She tells how on the 13th day of May, 1373,^[1] the Revelation of Love was shewed to her, “a simple creature, unlettered,” who had before this time made certain special prayers from out of her longing after more love to God and her trouble over the sight of man’s sin and sorrow. She had come now, she mentions, to the age of thirty, for which she had in one of these prayers, desired to receive a greater consecration,—thinking, perhaps, of the year when the Carpenter’s workshop was left by the Lord for wider ministry,—she was “thirty years old and an half.” This would make her birth-date about the end of 1342, and the old Manuscript says that she “was yet in life” in 1442. Julian relates that the Fifteen consecutive “Shewings” lasted from about four o’clock till after nine of that same morning, that they were followed by only one other Shewing (given on the night of the next day), but that through later years the teaching of these Sixteen Shewings had been renewed and explained and enlarged by the more ordinary enlightenment and influences of “the same Spirit that shewed them.” In this connection she speaks, in different chapters, of “fifteen years after and more,” and of twenty years after, “save three months”; thus her book cannot have been finished before 1393.

Of the circumstances in which the Revelations came, and of all matters connected with them, Julian gives a careful account, suggestive of great calmness and power of observation and reflection at the time, as well as of discriminating judgment and certitude afterwards. She describes the preliminary seven days’ sickness, the cessation of all its pain during the earlier visions, in which she had spiritual sight of the Passion of Christ, and indeed during all the five hours’ “special Shewing”; the return of her physical pain and mental distress and “dryness” of feeling when the vision closed; her falling into doubt as to whether she had not simply been delirious, her terrifying dream on the Friday night,—noting carefully that “this horrible Shewing” came in her sleep, “and so did none other”—none of the Sixteen Revelations of Love came thus. Then she tells how she was helped to overcome the dream-temptation to despair, and how on the following night another Revelation, conclusion and confirmation of all, was granted to strengthen her faith. Again her faith was assayed by a similar dream-appearance of fiends that seemed as it were to be mocking at all religion, and again she was delivered, overcoming by setting her eyes on the Cross and fastening her heart on God, and comforting her soul with speech of Christ’s Passion (as she would have comforted another in like distress) and rehearsing the Faith of all the Church. It may be noted here that Julian when telling how she was given grace to awaken from the former of these troubled dreams, says, “anon all vanished away and I was brought to great rest and peace, without sickness of body or dread of conscience,” and that nothing in the book gives any ground for supposing that she had less than ordinary health during the long and peaceful life wherein God “lengthened her patience.” Rather it would seem that one so wholesome in mind, so happy in spirit, so wisely moderate, no doubt, in self-guidance, must have kept that general health that she could not despise who speaks of God having “no disdain” to serve the body, for love of the soul, of how we are “soul and body clad in the Goodness of God,” of how “God hath made waters plenteous in earth to our service and to our bodily ease,”^[2] and of how Christ waiteth to minister to us His gifts of grace “unto the time that we be waxen and grown, our soul with our body and our body with our soul, either of them taking help of other, till we be brought unto stature, as nature worketh.”^[3]

Julian mentions neither her name not her state in life; she is “the soul,” the “poor” or “simple” soul that the Revelation was shewed to—”a simple creature,” in herself, a mere “wretch,” frail and of no account.

Of her parentage and early home we know nothing: but perhaps her own exquisite picture of Motherhood—of its natural (its “kind”) love and wisdom and knowledge—is taken partly from memory, with that of the kindly nurse, and the child, which by nature loveth the Mother and each of the other children, and of the training by Mother and Teacher until the child is brought up to “the Father’s bliss” (lxi.–lxiii.).

The title “Lady,” “Dame” or “Madame” was commonly accorded to anchoresses, nuns, and others that had had education in a Convent.^[4]

Julian, no doubt, was of gentle birth, and she would probably be sent to the Convent of Carrow for her education. There she would receive from the Benedictine nuns the usual instruction in reading, writing, Latin, French, and fine needlework, and especially in that Common Christian Belief to which she was always in her faithful heart and steadfast will so loyal,—”the Common Teaching of Holy Church in which I was afore informed and grounded, and with all my will having in use and understanding “ (xlvi.).

It is most likely that Julian received at Carrow the consecration of a Benedictine nun; for it was usual, though not necessary, for anchoresses to belong to one or other of the Religious Orders.

The more or less solitary life of the anchorite or hermit, the anchoress or recluse, had at this time, as earlier, many followers in the country parts and large towns of England. Few of the “reclusoria” or women’s anchorholds were in the open country or forest-lands like those that we come upon in Medieval romances, but many churches of the villages and towns had attached to them a timber or stone “cell”—a little house of two or three rooms inhabited by a recluse who never left it, and one servant, or two, for errands and protection. Occasionally a little group of recluses lived together like those three young sisters of the Thirteenth Century for whom the Ancren Riwle, a Rule or Counsel for “Ancres,” was at their own request composed. The recluse’s chamber seems to have generally had three windows: one looking into the adjoining Church, so that she could take part in the Services there; another communicating with one of those rooms under the keeping of her “maidens,” in which occasionally a guest might be entertained; and a third—the “parlour” window—opening to the outside, to which all might come that desired to speak with her. According to the Ancren Riwle the covering-screen for this audience-window was a curtain of double cloth, black with a cross of white through which the sunshine would penetrate—sign of the Dayspring from on high. This screen could of course be drawn back when the recluse ‘held a parliament’ with any that came to her.^[5]

 Before Julian passed from the sunny lawns and meadows of Carrow, along the road by the river and up the lane to the left by the gardens and orchards of the Conisford of that day, to the little Churchyard house that would hide so much from her eyes of outward beauty, and yet leave so much in its changeful perpetual quietude around her (great skies overhead like the ample heavenly garments of her vision “blue as azure most deep and fair”; little Speedwell’s blue by the crannied wall of the Churchyard—Veronika, true Image, like the Saint’s “Holy Vernacle at Rome”) her vow^[6] might be: “I offering yield myself to the divine Goodness^[7] for service, in the order of anchorites: and I promise to continue in the service of God after the rule of that order, by divine grace and the counsel of the Church: and to shew canonical obedience to my ghostly fathers.”

The only reference that Julian makes to the life dedicated more especially to Contemplation is where she is speaking, as if from experience, of the temptation to despair because of falling oftentimes into the same sins, “especially into sloth and losing of time. For that is the beginning of sin, as to my sight,—and especially to the creatures that have given themselves to serve our Lord with inward beholding of His blessed Goodness.”^[8]

“One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in His temple”—His Sanctuary of the Church or of the soul. That was her calling. She had heard the Voice that comes to the soul in Spring-time and calls to the Garden of lilies, and calls to the Garden of Olive-trees (where all the spices offered are in one Cup of Heavenly Wine): “Surge, propera amica mea: jam enim Hyems transiit, imber ambiit et recessit. Surge, propera amica mea, speciosa mea, et veni.” “Arise: let us go hence.”^[9] ”For this is the natural yearnings of the soul by the touching of the Holy Ghost: God of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself, for Thou art enough to me; . . . and if I ask anything that is less, ever me wanteth; but only in Thee I have all” (v.).

“A soul that only fasteneth itself on to God with very trust, either by seeking or in beholding, it is the most worship that it may do to Him, as to my sight” (x.). “To enquire” and “to behold”—no doubt it was for these that Julian sought time and quiet. For she had urgent questionings and “stirrings” in her mind over “the great hurt that is come by sin to the creature”—”afore this time often I wondered why by the great foreseeing wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted” (“mourning and sorrow I made over it without reason and discretion”); and also she was filled with desire for God: “the longing that I had to Him afore” (xxvii.).

Moreover, this life to which Julian gave herself was to be a life of “meek continuant prayers” “for enabling” of herself in her weakness, and for help to others in all their needs. For thought and worship could only be held together by active prayer: the pitiful beholding of evil and pain and the joyful beholding of Goodness and Love would be at war, as it were, with each other, unless they were set at peace for the time by the prayer of intercession. And that is the call of the loving soul, strong in its infant feebleness to wake the answering Revelation of Love to faith that “all shall be well,” and that “all is well “ and that when all are come up above and the whole is known, all shall be seen to be well, and to have been well through the time of tribulation and travail.

“At some time in the day or night,” says the Ancren Riwle, which Julian perhaps may have read, though as to such prayers her compassionate heart was its own director—”At some time in the day or night think upon and call to mind all who are sick and sorrowful, who suffer affliction and poverty, the pain which prisoners endure who lie heavily fettered with iron; think especially of the Christians who are amongst the heathen, some in prison, some in so great thralldom as is an ox or an ass; compassionate those who are under strong temptations; take thought of all men’s sorrows, and sigh to our Lord that He may take care of them and have compassion and look upon them with a gracious eye; and if you have leisure, repeat this Psalm, I have lifted up mine eyes. Paternoster. Return, O Lord, how long, and be intreated in favour of Thy servants: Let us pray. ’Stretch forth, O Lord, to thy servants and to thy handmaids the right hand of thy heavenly aid, that they may seek thee with all their heart, and obtain what they worthily ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.’“ Julian tells how in her thinking of sin and its hurt there passed before her sight all that Christ bore for us, “and His dying; and all the pains and passions of all His creatures, ghostly and bodily; and the beholding of this—with all pains that ever were or ever shall be” (xxvii). From sin, except as a general conception, Julian’s natural instinct was to turn her eyes; but with this Christly compassion in her heart in looking on the sorrows of the world she could not but take account of its sin. As she came to be convinced that “though we be highly lifted up into contemplation, it is needful for us to see our own sin,”—albeit we should not accuse ourselves “overdone much” or “be heavy or sorrowful indiscreetly”—so when sins of others were brought before her she would seek with compassion to take the sinner’s part of contrition and prayer. “The beholding of other man’s sins, it maketh as it were a thick mist afore the eyes of the soul, and we cannot, for the time, see the fairness of God, but if we can behold them with contrition with him, with compassion on him, and with holy desire to God for him “ (lxxvi.).

And notwithstanding all the stir and eager revival of the Fourteenth Century in religion, politics, literature and general life, there was much both of sin and of sorrow then to exercise the pitiful soul—troubles enough in Norwich itself, of oppression and riot and desolating pestilence—troubles enough in Europe, West and East,—wars and enslaving and many cruelties in distant lands, and harried Armenian Christians coming to the Court of Edward to plead for succour in their long-enduring patience. There was trouble wherever one looked; but to prayer, and to that compassion which is in itself a prayer, the answer came. Indeed the compassion was its own first immediate answer: for “then I saw that each kind compassion that man hath on his even-Cristen (his fellow-Christians) with charity, it is Christ in him.” This is the comfort that both comforts in waiting and calls to deeds of help. And such “charity” of social service was not beyond the scope of the life “enclosed,”—whether it might be by deed or, as more often, by speech.^[10]

It is in her seeking for truth and her beholding of Love that we best know Julian. Of the opening of the Revelation she says: “In all this I was greatly stirred in charity to mine even-Christians, that they might see and know the same that I saw: for I would it were comfort to them,” and again and again throughout the book she declares that the “special Shewing” is given not for her in special, but for all—for all are meant to be one in comfort as all are one in need. “Because of the Shewing I am not good, but if I love God the better: and in as much as ye love God the better it is more to you than to me. . . . For we are all one in comfort. For truly it was not shewed me that God loved me better than the least soul that is in grace; for I am certain that there be many that never had any Shewing nor sight but of the common teaching of Holy Church that love God better than I. For if I look singularly to myself I am right nought; but in general [manner of regarding] I am, I hope, in oneness of charity with all mine even-Christians. For in this oneness standeth the life of all mankind that shall be saved, and that which I say of me, I say in the person of all mine even-Christians: for I am taught in the Spiritual Shewing of our Lord God that He meaneth it so. And therefore I pray you for God’s sake, and counsel you for your own profit that ye leave the beholding of a worthless creature [a “wretch”] it was shewed to and mightily, wisely and meekly behold God that of His special goodness would shew it generally, in comfort of us all “ (ix.).

Thus Julian turns our eyes from looking on her to looking with her on the Revelation of Divine Love.

Yet surely in her we have also “a shewing”—a shewing of the same. She tells us little of her own story, and little is told us of her by any one else, but all through her recording of the Revelation the simple creature to whom it was made unconsciously shews herself, so that soon we come to know her with a pleasure that surely she would not think too “special” in its regard. (For she herself in speaking of Love makes note that the general does not exclude the special). Perhaps we are helped in this friendly acquaintanceship by those endearingly characteristic little formulas of speech disavowing any claim to dogmatic authority in the statements of her views of truth: those modest parentheses “as to my sight,” “as to mine understanding.” “Wisdom and truth and love,” the dower that she saw in the Gracious soul, were surely in the soul of this meek woman; but enclosing these gifts of nature and grace are qualities special to Julian: depth of passion, with quietness, order, and moderation; loyalty in faith, with clearest candour—”I believe . . . but this was not shewed me”—(xxxiii., lxxvii., lxxx.) pitifulness and sympathy, with hope and a blithe serenity; sound good sense with a little sparkle upon it—as of delicate humour (that crowning virtue of saints); and beneath all, above all, an exquisite tenderness that turns her speech to music. “I will lay thy Stones with fair Colours.”

“Thou hast the dews of thy youth.” Hundreds of years have gone since that early morning in May when Julian thought she was dying and was “partly troubled” for she felt she was yet in youth and would gladly have served God more on earth with the gift of her days—hundreds of years since the time that her heart would fain have been told by special Shewing that “a certain creature I loved should continue in good living”—but still we have “mind” of her as “a gentle neighbour and of our knowing.” For those that love in simplicity are always young; and those that have had with the larger Vision of Love the gift of love’s passionate speech, to God or man, in word or form or deed, as treasure held—live yet on the earth, untouched by time, though their light is shining elsewhere for other sight.

“From that time that the Revelation was shewed I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years afterwards and more, I was answered in ghostly understanding, saying thus: Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn other thing without end.”

And if we, with no special shewing, might ask and, in trust of “spiritual understanding,” might answer more—asking to whom, and for whom was the Revelation shewed, we might answer: To one that loved; for all that would learn in love.

“Ecco chi crescerà li nostri amori”!^[11]
“Here is one who shall increase our love.”

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

1.      This must have been a Friday—sacred Day of the Passion of Christ—for Easter Sunday of 1373 was on the 17th of April (O.S.). So when the Revelation finally closed and Julian was left to “keep it in the Faith”—the Common Christian Faith—it was Sunday morning, and the words and voices she would hear through her window opening into the Church would be from the early worship of “the Blessed Common” assembled there.

2.      See the Ancren Riwle Part viii. Of Domestic Matters, for counsels to anchoresses as to judicious care of the body: diet, washing, needful rest, avoidance of idleness and gloom, reading, sewing for Church and Poor, making and mending and washing of clothes by the anchoress or her servant. “Ye may be well content with your clothes, be they white, be they black; only see that they be plain, and warm, and well made—skins well tanned; and have as many as you need. . . . Let your shoes be thick and warm.”

3.      cf. Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, xii.

4.      S. de Cressy was probably the originator of the designation “Mother Juliana.” The old name was Julian. The Virgin-Martyr of the Legend entitled “The Life of St Juliana“ (Early English Text Society) is called in the Manuscripts, Iulane, Juliene, and Juliane and Julian. So also Lady Julian Berners is a name in the history of Fifteenth Century books.

5.      ”So he kneeled at her window and anon the recluse opened it, and asked Sir Percival what he would. ‘Madam,’ said he, ‘I am a knight of King Arthur’s Court and my name is Sir Percival de Galis.’ So when the recluse heard his name, she had passing great joy of him, for greatly she loved him before all other knights of the world; and so of right she ought to do, for she was his aunt.” —Malory‘s Morte d’ Arthur, xiv. i.

6.      Manuale ad usum insignis ecclesie Sarisburiensis (ed. of 1555), fo. lxix. Servitium includendorum,

7.      ”pietaiis.”

8.      The sins that Julian mentions, “despair or doubtful dread,” “sloth and losing of time,” “unskilful [unpractical, unreasoning] heaviness and vain sorrow,” seem to be all akin to that dreaded sin, besetting particularly the Contemplative life, Accidia. See Ancren Riwle p. 287. “Accidies salue is gostlich gledshipe. The remedy for indolence is spiritual joy, and the consolation of joyful hope from reading and from holy meditation, or when spoken by the mouth of man. Often, dear sisters, ye ought to pray less, that ye may read more. Reading is good prayer. Reading teacheth how, and for what ye ought to pray. In reading, when the heart feels delight, devotion ariseth, and that is worth many prayers. Everything, however, may be overdone. Moderation is always best.” —(Pub. by the Camden Society).

9.      Canticles ii. 10. St John xiv. 31.

10.   See the chapter “How an Anchoress shall behave herself to them that come to her,” in “The Scale of Perfection,” by Walter Hilton (died 1396), edition of 1659, p. 106. “Since it is so that thou oughtest not to goe out of thy house to seek occasion how thou mightest profit thy Neighbour by deeds of Charity, because thou art enclosed; . . . therefore who so will speake with thee . . . be thou soon ready with a good will to aske what his will is . . . for thou knowest not what he is, nor why he cometh, nor what need he hath of thee, or thou of him, till thou hast tryed. And though thou be at prayer, or at thy devotions, that thou thinkest loth to break off, for that thou thinkest that thou oughtest not leave God for to speake with any one, I think not so in this case, for if thou be wise, thou shalt not leave God, but thou shalt find him, and have him, and see him in thy Neighbour as well as in prayer, onely in another manner. If thou canst love thy Neighbour well, to speake with thy Neighbour with discretion shall be no hindrance to thee. . . . If he come to tell thee his disease [distress] or trouble, and to be comforted by thy speech, heare him gladly, and suffer him to say what he will for ease of his own heart; And when he hath done, comfort him if thou canst, gladly, gently, and charitably, and soon break off. And then, after that, if he will fall into idle tales, or vanities of the World, or of other men’s actions, answer him but little, and feed not his speech, and he will soon be weary, and quickly take his leave,” etc.

11.   Dante, Paradiso, v. 105.

PART II: The Manner of the Book

As an hert desirith to the wellis of watris:
so thou God, my soule desirith to thee. . . .
The Lord sent his merci in the day:
and his song in the nyght.

Ps. ’Quemadmodum’; from the Prymer.

WITHOUT any special study of the literature of Mysticism for purposes of comparison, in reading Julian‘s book one is struck by a few characteristics wherein it differs from many other Mystical writings, as well as by qualities that belong to most or all of that general designation.

The silence of this book both as to preliminary ascetic exercises and as to ultimate visions of the Absolute, might be attributed to Julian’s being wholly concerned with giving, for comfort to all, that special sight of truth that came to her as the answer to her own need. She sets out not to teach methods of any kind for the gradual drawing near of man to God, but to record and shew forth a Revelation, granted once, of God’s actual nearness to the soul, and for this Revelation she herself had been prepared by the “stirring” of her conscience, her love and her understanding, in a word of her faith, even as she was in short time to be left “neither sign nor token,” but only the Revelation to hold “in faith.” Moreover, the means that in general she looks to for realising God’s nearness, in whatever measure or manner the revelation of it may come to any soul, is the immediate one of faith as a gift of nature and a grace from the Holy Ghost: faith leading by prayer, and effort of obedience, and teachableness of spirit, into actual experience of oneness with God. The natural and common heritage of love and faith is a theme that is dear to Julian: in her view, longing toward God is grounded in the love to Him that is native to the human heart, and this longing (painful through sin) as it is stirred by the Holy Spirit, who comes with Christ, is, in each naturally developed Christian, spontaneous and increasing;—”for the nearer we be to our bliss, the more we long after it” (xlvi., lxxii., lxxxi.). “This is the kinde [the natural] yernings of the soule by the touching of the Holy Ghost: God of Thy goodness give me Thyself: for Thou art enow to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worshippe to Thee.” God is the first as well as the last: the soul begins as well as ends with God: begins by Nature, begins again by Mercy, and ends—yet “without end”—by Grace. Certainly on the way—the way of these three, by falling, by succour, by upraising—to the more perfect knowing of God that is the soul’s Fulfilment in Heaven, there is a less immediate knowledge to be gained through experience: “And if I aske anything that is lesse, ever me wantith,” for “It needyth us to have knoweing of the littlehede of creatures and to nowtyn all thing that is made, for to love and have God that is onmade.” But this knowing of the littleness of creatures comes to Julian first of all in a sight of the Goodness of God: “For [to] a soule that seith the Maker of all, all that is made semith full litil.” By the further beholding, indeed, of God as Maker and Preserver, that which has been rightly “noughted” as of no account, is seen to be also truly of much account. For that which was seen by the soul as so little that it seemed to be about to fall to nothing for littleness, is seen by the understanding to have “three properties”:—God made it, God loveth it, God keepeth it. Thus it is known as “great and large, fair and good”; “it lasteth, and ever shall, for God loveth it.”—Yet again the soul breaks away to its own, with the natural flight of a bird from its Autumn nest at the call of an unseen Spring to the far-off land that is nearer still than its nest, because it is in its heart. “But what is to me sothly [in verity] the Maker, the Keper and the Lover,—I cannot tell, for till I am Substantially oned [deeply united] to Him, I may never have full rest ne very blisse; that is to sey, that I be so festined to Him, that there is right nowte that is made betwix my God and me” (v., viii.). This “fastening” is all that in Julian’s book represents that needful process wherein the truth of asceticism has a part. It is not essentially a process of detaching the thought from created things of time—still less one of detaching the heart from created beings of eternity—but a process of more and more allowing and presenting the man to be fastened closely to God by means of the original longing of the soul, the influence of the Holy Ghost, and the discipline of life with its natural tribulations, which by their purifying serve to strengthen the affections that remaining pass through them. “But only in Thee I have all.” On the way this discovery of the soul at peace must needs be sometimes a word for exclusion, in parting and pressing onward from things that are made: in the end it is the welcome, all-inclusive. And Julian, notwithstanding her enclosure as a recluse, is one of those that, happy in nature and not too much hindered by conditions of life, possess for large use by the way the mystical peace of fulfilled possession through virtue of freedom from bondage to self. For it is by means of the tyranny of the “self,” regarding chiefly itself in its claims and enjoyments, that creature things can be intruded between the soul and God; and always, in some way, the meek inherit the earth. “All things are yours; and ye are Christ’s.”

The life of a recluse demanded, no doubt, as other lives do, a daily self-denial as well as an initiatory self-devotion, and from Julian’s silence as to “bodily exercises “ it 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.^[1] 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,”^[2] 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. Jullian 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”^[3] 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.).^[4] 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,^[5] 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.^[6] Hilton, however, is very rich in quotations from the Bible, while Julian’s only direct quotations from any book—beyond her reference to the legend of St Dionysius—are one that belongs to Christ: “I thirst” (xvii.), and two that belong to the soul: “Lord, save me: I perish!” “Nothing shal depart me from the charite of Criste” (xv.). (And indeed these three are a fit embodiment of the Christian Faith as seen in her “Revelations.”) But Julian, while perhaps more speculative than either of these typical English Mystics, is thoroughly a woman. Lacking their literary method of procedure, she has a high and tender beauty of thought and a delicate bloom of expression that are her own rare gifts—the beauty of the hills against skies in summer evenings, of an orchard in mornings of April. Again and again she stirs in the reader a kind of surprised gladness of the simple perfection wherewith she utters, by few and adequate words, a thought that in its quietness convinces of truth, or an emotion deep in life. Of a little child it has been said: “He thought great thoughts simply,” and Julian’s deepness of insight and simplicity of speech are like the Child’s.^[7] ”For ere that He made us He loved us, and when we were made we loved Him” (liii.). “I love thee, and thou lovest me, and our love shall not be disparted in two” (lxxxii.). “Thou art my Heaven.” “I had liefer have been in that pain till Doomsday than have come to Heaven otherwise than by Him.” “Human is the vehemence,” says a writer on Julian’s “Revelations,” of that reiterated exclusion of all other paths to joy. ‘Me liked,’ she says, ‘none other heaven.’ Once again she touches the same octave, condensing in a single phrase which has seldom been transcended in its brief expression of the possession that leaves the infinity of love’s desire still unsatiated: ’I saw Him and sought Him, I had Him, and I wanted Him.’ Fletcher‘s tenderness, Ford‘s passion lose colour placed side by side with the utterances of this worn recluse whose hands are empty of every treasure.”^[8] Sometimes with her subject her language assumes a majestic solemnity: “The pillars of Heaven shall tremble and quake” (lxxv.); sometimes it seems to march to its goal in an ascent of triumphal measure as with beating of drums: “The body was in the grave till Easter-morrow and from that time He lay nevermore. For then was rightfully ended” . . . (close of Chap. li.). Generally, perhaps, the style in its movment recalls the rippling yet even flow of a brook, cheerfully, sweetly monotonous: “If any such lover be in earth which is continually kept from falling, I know it not: for it was not shewed me. But this was shewed: that in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kept in one love” (lxxxii.). But now and again the listener seems to be caught up to Heaven with song, as in that time when her “marvelling” joy in beholding love “breaks out with voice”:—”Behold and see! the precious plenty of His dearworthy blood descended down into Hell, and braste her bands, and delivered all that were there that belonged to the Court of Heaven. The precious plenty of His dearworthy blood overfloweth all Earth and is ready to wash all creatures of sin which be of goodwill, have been and shall be. The precious plenty of His dearworthy blood ascended up into Heaven to the blessed body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and there is in Him, bleeding and praying for us to the Father, and is and shall be as long as it needeth; and ever shall be as long as it needeth; and evermore it floweth in all Heavens, enjoying the salvation of all mankind that are there, and shall be—fulfilling the Number that faileth” (xii.).

The Early English Mystics make good reading,—even as to the mere manner of their writings we might say, if it were possible to separate the style from the freshness of feeling and the pointedness of thought that inform it; and though we do not, of course, have from Julian,—a woman writing of the Revelations of Love,—the delightfully trenchant, easy address of Hilton in his counsels as to how to scale the Ladder of Perfection—counsels both wise and witty—yet Julian, too, with all her sweetness, is full of this every day vigour and common sense. And sometimes she puts things in a naïve, engaging way of her own, grave and yet light—as if with a little understanding smile to those to whom she is speaking:—”Then ween we, who be not all wise”; “That the outward part should draw the inward to assent was not shewed to me, but that the inward draweth the outward by grace and both shall be oned in bliss without end by the virtue of Christ, this was shewed” (lxi., xix.).

Rolle, Hilton, and more especially the Ancren Riwle, give examples of that custom of allegorical interpretation of Sacred Scriptures that has fascinated many mystical authors, but one can scarcely suppose that this method would ever have been a favourite one with Julian even if she had been in the way of dealing with literary parallels and references. For though she uses “examples,” or illustrations (sometimes calling them “shewings,” or “bodily examples”) and also metaphorically figurative speech, she does not shew any interest in elaborate, arbitrary symbolism. At any rate she is too directly simple, it seems, and too much in the centre of realities, to be a writer that (without constraint of following the lines of others) would take as foundation for an argument or an exposition outward resemblances or verbal connections, fit perhaps to illustrate or enforce the truth in question, but lacking in relation to it that inward vital oneness whereby certain things that to man seem below him may become symbolic to him of others that he beholds as within or above him.

Exposition by analysis has been reckoned to be characteristic of the Schoolmen rather than of the Mystics,^[9] though surely a mystical sight may be served by an analytical process, and to see God in a part before or while He is seen in the whole is effected not without analysis of the subtlest kind. So we find analysis in Julian’s sight (Rev. iii.): “I saw God in a point”; and in her conclusions from this: “By which sight I saw that He is in all things”; and in her immediate raising, from this conclusion, of the question: “What is sin?” and throughout her treatment of the problem in the scheme of her book. Even for the merely formal task of distinguishing by number, Julian, we see, will set briskly forward (though we may not feel much inclined to follow) and often she begins her careful dissections with: “In this I see”—four, five, or six things, as the case may be. Her speech of spiritual Revelations is, however, helped out less by numbers than by living and homely things of sight: the mother and the children and the nurse; lords and servants, kings and their subjects (with echoes of the language of Court and chivalry); the deep sea-ground, waters for our service; clothing, in its warmth, grace and colour; the light that stands in the night, the hazel-nut, the scales of herrings.^[10]

As one grows familiar with the “Revelations” one finds oneself in the midst of a great scheme: a network of ideas that cross and re-cross each other in a way not very clear at first, perhaps, but not really in confusion. All through this treatise from its beginning, the Revelation as a whole is in the mind of Julian; interpolation by another writer is out of the question: the book is all of a piece, both as the expression of one person, in mind and character, and as the setting forth of a theological system. From the first we find Julian holding her diverse threads of nature and 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 is 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.

In Man are united 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-in-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” (lxxxiv.).

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. Horæ 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 her prolonged gaze upon the Face of the Crucifix, and that in her desire to enter into the sufferings of the Passion as fully as those friends of her Lord’s that beheld it, Julian thus gazing in the midst of night’s shadows and the dim light of dawn should seem to herself to behold the sacred drops, depicted beneath the painted or sculptured Crown of Thorns, flow down “right plenteously.” Julian gave thanks for this and all the “bodily sight” as a gift from God. By Him sickness and illusion, as well as things evil, are “suffered” to come, and by Him Revelation is given according to sundry times in diverse manners. Gain of the spirit through failure of the body—and no less by illusions of fever than by trance-state visions their seers speak of, when Death passes the Spirit half through the gates—would indeed be accordant with the truth of the Shewing that came to Julian, how man is raised through shame and death into glory and life, since in the weakness of failing men the strength of Christ is made perfect.

2.      See the Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism. W. R. Inge. (P. 111.)

3.      See the Introduction to Le Livre des Visions et Instructions de la Bienheureuse Angèle de Foligno, traduit par [[Author:Ernest Hello|]]. Paris, 1895.

4.      When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.”

5.      v. pp. 27, 57, 126, 156, 168; cf. Dionysius: “On Divine Names. Cap. iv. (tr. by Parker). S. Aug. Conf.: b. i. ch. 2; iii. 7; iv. 10–16; vii. 12–18.

6.      See the extract from Hilton given as a note to chapter lvii.

7.     Little Flowers of a Childhood (in Mem. J. D. W., Oct. 1894—March 1899). Some of the thoughts of children,—some of the rising thoughts of a very little child who, like Julian, faced the darkness of time (steadfast as Dürer‘s pilgrim Knight, gentle as Chaucer‘s,) and beheld on his journey the shining of the Eternal City,—might be set beside words of the Mystics as shewing, perhaps, through their very simplicity, the oneness of truth that there is to see, and the oneness of souls that see it. Here are convictions that the Cause of love, felt within,”must be Jesus’ Good Spirit”; comfort in discovering of death’s unreality (for if only the body, not the spirit, dies, “Oh, then it is only pretending-dying!”); a flash of discernment, perhaps, as to the passing away of lifeless evil since although, to the child, indeed “it is a pity that some one did not come and kill the devil; and then he would be dead,” yet he has his own eschatology: “Well, when we are all dead, the devil will be dead too.” More significant is a sudden overawed realisation of the great universe (setting pause to his own run round in play), the door to a quick perception, in the child’s devout spirit, of analogy binding truths unseen by sense: “Is this world always going round, now?” (‘Yes.’) “It stays still! still!—Jesus is looking down now: we don’t see Him.”—Here, too, are habitual references to the things that are meant to be,—musings over the goodness and knowledge, the braveness and courtesy “meant to be” in a man; and here is a grateful, trusting sense of the real ‘kindness’ of ‘wild’ creatures and of hurting remedies. Many of those simple utterances, careless yet arresting like a blackbird’s song, and personal with the ardent love and clear reason of a child faithfully living and bravely dying, seem to attest a kinship with seers of truth to whom longer trial has offered a sterner strength of complex thinking, for wider service here, but who, although they may have learnt thus ’more’ in the knowledge of love, “shall never know nor learn other thing without end.”—”I understood none higher stature in this life than childhood.”

“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be.······A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night.
It was the plant and flower of Light.”

For all of the Company of saints have the sight of One Vision, and be it in the steadfast fulfilment of labour, or from out of the merriment of play,—through the strong, bright peace of endurance, or the silent acquiescence of the will, led along valleys of darkness,—or again in some swift rush of prayer into the morning light,—all of the saints, the babe and the ancient, beholding “the Blissful Countenance” say “with one voice”: “It is well.” “Amen. Amen.”—(De la More Press: London, 1906.)

8.      ”Catholic Mystics of the Middle Ages.” Edinburgh Review, October 1896.

9.      In reference to introspection M. Maeterlinck speaks of Ruysbroeck as “the one analytical mystic.” Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, p. 19.

10.   In ch. vii. de Cressy‘s “the Seal of her Ring” gives a misreading.

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.”^[1] ”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”;^[2]

by a blackbird’s sudden song to overhear, “in woodlands within,” a joy out of the heart of the Life of life.^[3] 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 sweet accordant 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 that are opened in Heaven. But it is most of all in the music and the symmetry made of adverse life and death by the power of love, as this is seen from highest to lowest, from lowest to highest, 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.”^[4]

(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!”^[5]

God is in all; but “our soul may never have rest in things that are beneath itself” (Ixvii.). “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 Sense-soul (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” (lii.). 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 hath not else to do but to entend about the salvation of her child” (lxi.). Each soul is indeed the soul of a person and most intimately knows itself in its personal experience, through which indeed alone it can come to knowledge 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 shalt he 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 wonld 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,^[6] 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 after this manner, through contrition and grace, we shall be broken from all that is not our Lord. And then shall our blessed Saviour perfectly heal us and one us to Him” (lxxviii.)—

Theodidacta, Profunda, Ecstatica—so Julian has been designated; perhaps she might in fuller truth be called Theodidacta, Profunda, Evangelica. She is indeed a mystic, evangelical, practical. With all her fellow-Christians and in the most deeply personal concern she looks with a tender mind on the redeeming work of God by Christ in the “glorious satisfaction” (“Asseth”), and in fervent response of love and thankfulness trusts in the blessed Passion of Christ, and in His sure keeping, and in all the restoring, fulfilling work by the Holy Ghost. But after the Mystical manner she seeks “the beyond”: that is, while in no way leaving the works of mercy and grace she seeks to go back to the ground or source of them, the Goodness of God,—yes, to God Himself. “I could not have perceived of the part of Mercy but as it were alone in Love.” “The Passion was a noble worshipful deed done in a time, but Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending.”

The Mystical Vision is that which in outward nature sees the unseen within the seen, but it is also that which in spiritual things sees behind and beyond the temporal means, the eternal causes and ends (vi.). And it is surely here in the spiritual things, in the heart and centre of human existence, in the stress of sin and suffering, rather than amongst the gentle growing things, and flaming lights, and songs, and blameless creatures of Nature that the Beatific Vision on earth is at its highest. For here are found united the Evangel and the Vision and the Life of love. “There the soul is highest, noblest, and worthiest, where it is lowest, meekest, and mildest”: it is not in nature’s goodness alone that we have our life, “all our life is in three,” in nature, in mercy, in grace; “whereof we have meekness, mildness, patience and pity” (lviii., lix.). Man’s “spirit,” the higher nature that Julian talks of, may indeed be there in the Heavenly places, as an infant’s angel lying in the Father’s arms, always beholding His Face in love’s silence of waiting; but here in earthly places is the Prodigal Son returning, here too is the Father’s embrace, and here is His earliest greeting of the son that was lost and is found. And already here in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth (where all grow pure in the sonship obedience of Jesus Christ), are those that are kept from the first as little children, taken up in His arms and suffered to sing their Hosannahs, which perfect His praise.

The Revelation of Love is all centred in the Passion, and looking on the Passion in time the soul sees, in vision, the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world, the mind conceives how before all time the Divine Love took to itself in the Wisdom of God the mode of Manhood, and in time created Man in the same, and how thus God could be and do all that man could be and do, could exercise Love Divine in human Faith and Courage: could “take our flesh” and live on the earth as “the Man, Christ-Jesus,” “in all points tempted like as we are,” finding His daily Bread in the will of the Father, drinking with joy of the Wine of Life in the evening cup of Death. “Pain is passing,” says Julian, but in passing it leads forth love in man to its deepest living, its fairest height of pureness and strength and fulfilment. Thus it behoved the Captain of man’s salvation to have His perfection here through suffering. It is the Lamb in the midst of the Throne, the Almighty Love that was slain, that is Shepherd to the Martyrs, leading them unto living fountains of waters. He that bore the yoke gives rest to the heavy-laden; blessed is He that mourned: for He comforteth with His comfort.

So in the Mediæval story,^[7] the highest Mystical Vision, the sight of the Holy Grail, comes only to him that is pure from self, and looks on the bleeding wound that sin has left in man, and is compassionate, and gives himself to service and healing.—Can ye drink of the Cup I drank of?—Love’s Cup that is Death and Life.—

Wine of Love’s joy I see thy cup
Red to the trembling brim
With Life outpoured, once lifted up,
I drink, remembering Him.—

It is the mourners who are comforted: those that bear griefs of their own, or bear griefs of others fully, do not despair, though the mere onlooker may well despair. Thus the compassionate Julian’s vision is of Comfort—comfort not for herself “in special,” but for “the general Man”—for all her fellow-Christians. She who had long time mourned for the hurt that is come by sin to the creature, came to the sight of comfort not by turning her eyes away but by deeper compassion that found through the very wounds the healing of Love on earth, the glory of Love in Heaven. She was “filled with compassion for the Passion of Christ,” and thus she saw His joy; so afterwards, she tells, “I was fulfilled in part with compassion of all mine even-Christians, for that well, well-beloved people that shall be saved. For God’s servants, Holy Church, shall be shaken in sorrow and anguish and tribulation in this world, as men shake a cloth in the wind. And as to this our Lord answered in this manner: A great thing shall I make hereof in Heaven of endless worship and everlasting joys. Yea so far forth as this I saw: that our Lord joyeth of the tribulations of His servants, with truth and compassion.” “For He saith: I shall wholly break you of your vain affections and of your vicious pride: and after that I shall together gather you, and make you mild and meek, clean and holy, by oneing to me” (xxviii.). Sin is indeed “the sharpest scourge,” “viler and more painful than hell, without comparison,” “an horrible thing to see for the loved soul that would be all fair and shining in the sight of God, as Nature and Grace teacheth.” And darkness, which overhangs the soul while here it is “meddling with any part of sin,” “so that we see not clearly the Blissful Countenance of our Lord,” is a lasting, life-long “natural penance” from God, the feeling of which indeed does not depart with actual sinning: “for ever the more clearly that the soul seeth this Blissful Countenance by grace of loving, the more it longeth to see it in fulness” (lxxii.). All this is in man’s experience, with many other pains—pains which in individual lives have no proportionate relation to sin, though, in general, “sin is cause of pain” and “pain purgeth.”—(“For I tell thee, howsoever thou do thou shalt have woe”), (lxxvii., xxvii.). But the Comfort Revealed shews how sin, which “hath no part of being” and “could not be known but by the pain it is cause of,” (sin which in this view may be compared to the nails of the Passion—mere dead matter, though with power to wound unto death for a time the blessed Life), sin, which is failure of human love,—leaves, notwithstanding all its horror, an opening for a fuller influx of Divine love and strength.^[8] And as to darkness, “seeking is as good as beholding, for the time that God will suffer the soul to be in travail” (x.). And as to tribulation of every kind, “the Passion of our Lord is comfort to us against all this, and so is His blessed will” (xxvii.).

The parts may seem to come by chance and to be “amiss,” but the whole, and in the whole each part, is ordered. “And when we be all brought up above, then shall we see clearly in God the secret things which be now hid to us. Then shall none of us be stirred to say: Lord, if it had been thus, then it had been full well: but we shall all say with one voice: Lord, blessed mayst Thou be, for it is thus: it is well; and now we see verily that all things are done as it was then ordained before that anything was made” (xl., lxxxv.). “Moreover He that shall be our bliss when we are there, is our Keeper while we are here”; and the Last Word of the Revelation is the same as the First; “Thou shalt not be overcome.” “He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be distressed; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome.”

This is God’s comfort. And that here, meanwhile, we should take His comfort is Julian’s chief desire and instruction. For Julian, who speaking so much of sin as a strange and troubling sight, yet gives as examples of sin only a slothful mistrusting despondency,—speaks indeed of faith and hope and charity, compassion and meekness, but scarcely exhorts except to the cheerful enduring of tribulation. So she gives counsel as to “rejoicing more in His whole love than sorrowing in our often fallings”; as to “living gladly and merrily for love’s sake” in our penance of darkness (lxxii.–lxxxi.). And in general, for all experiences of life, “It is God’s will that we take His promises and His comfortings as largely and as mightily as we may take them, and also He willeth that we take our abiding and our troubles as lightly as we may take them, and set them at nought” (lxiv., lxv., xv.),

“We are all one in comfort,” says Julian, “all the gracious comfort was for all mine even-Christians.” Sin separates, pain isolates, but salvation and comfort unite.

And lastly, in this mystical vision of the oneness of man with God in Christ, man is seen not only as united in himself in the diverse parts of his nature, and as one with his fellow man, but as joined to that which is below him. How often of one good and another, as of that fair and sacred “service of the Mother”—”nearest, readiest, and surest”—”in the creatures by whom it is done,” do we hear Julian’s confident word of Sacramental declaration: “It is Christ.” “For God is all that is good, as to my sight, and God hath made all that is made: and he that loveth generally all his even-Christians for God, he loveth all that is. For in Mankind that shall be saved is comprehended all: that is to say, all that is made and the Maker of all. For in Man is God, and God is in all. And I hope,” adds Julian, in words that are fitting to take for her courteous, her tender, “Good Speed” ere we pass to her book—altogether like her as they are, even to the careful, conditional “if” (for nothing, not even comfort, behoves to be “overdone much”), “I hope by the grace of God he that beholdeth it thus shall be truly taught and mightily comforted, if he needeth comfort” (ix.)—

Deus ubique est, et totus ubique est. All things are gathered up in Man, and Man is gathered up in Christ; and Christ is gathered up in the Bosom of the Father. So the world of the lower creation makes promise: All things are yours; and the Church says over its offering, lifted up: Ye are Christ’s; and from the stillness the voice of peace is heard: And Christ is God’s. “All the promises of God in Him are Yea and in Him Amen, unto the glory of God by us.” All the promises of God: the blossom that floated to the ground; “the lily of a day” that “fell and died that night”; the “little Child, whiter than lily, that swiftly glided up into Heaven”—all the utterances silenced here—in Him are Yea and in Him Amen: Yea on earth and Amen for ever. “He turneth the shadow of death into the morning.”

May 1901.

1.      Theologia Germanica, Chap. 1.

2.      Blake‘s Poems.

3.      Memorabilia of Jesus, by W. Peyton, p. 33.

4.      Gilchrist‘s Life and Works of William Blake, vol. ii.

5.      Amor de Caritade by Jacopone da Todi (formerly ascribed to S. Francis of Assisi).

6.      ”Quid me interrogas de bono? Unus est bonus, Deus.”—S. Matt. xix. 17.

7.      A Key to Wagner’s Parsifal, by H. von Wolzogen, tr. by Ashton Ellis.

8.      Goodness is Active Love—love that moves. Drawing back from the finite creature, as a wave from the shore, it “suffers” sin’s void to appear. But this lack of itself is allowed for the time, that so returning again in its force, to which evil is nothing, it may cover the desolate nature with deepness and highness and fulness unknown before. (See lvii.).

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