Medieval culture offered strong resistance to writing and teaching by women, a resistance justified by statements of Saint Paul such as ‘Let women keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted them to speak, but to be subject’ (1 Corinthians 14:34) and ‘Nor I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man; but to be in silence’ (1 Timothy 2:12).21 In Julian’s time Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, wrote as follows, possibly with Catherine of Siena in mind:
… the female sex is forbidden on apostolic authority to teach in public … All women’s teaching, particularly formal teaching by word and by writing, is to be held suspect unless it has been diligently examined, and much more fully than men’s. The reason is clear: common law – and not any kind of common law, but that which comes from on high – forbids them. And why? Because they are easily seduced, and determined seducers; and because it is not proved that they are witnesses to divine grace.22
This attitude was probably even more unquestioned in England than on the continent, where there was already a tradition of female visionaries claiming an authority alternative to that of male clerics. In England there was no such tradition; religious devotion was generally moderate and cautious, and there is little evidence of female visionaries before Julian herself. From the 1380s on, the anticlericalism of Wyclif’s followers gave some encouragement to female teaching, but that meant that any woman who seemed to be offering to teach was likely to be suspected of heresy – which was what happened to Margery Kempe. Any work discussing theological issues in the vernacular was suspect, for ‘at the same time that literacy and the tendency toward private devotion were beginning to increase, an official distrust of both was also on the rise’,23 but this was especially so when any connection was found between women and books. Hence Julian’s need for the careful, modest self-presentation found in ST chapter 6:
But God forbid that you should say or assume that I am a teacher, for that is not what I mean, nor did I ever mean it; for I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail. But I know well that I have received what I say from him who is the supreme teacher … Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God, when I saw at the same time both his goodness and his wish that it should be known?
This passage is lacking from LT, perhaps because Julian later came to feel more confidence in herself as female visionary writer and in her ability to balance her revelations against the Church’s teaching. Yet even here in ST Julian’s very modesty casts her as a spokeswoman for God himself; and more generally the role she adopts, of the mere woman who accepts and proclaims her incapacity to teach, is not necessarily disadvantageous to her. She seems to have thoroughly internalized her culture’s downgrading of her sex,24 but from it, consciously or unconsciously, she fashions a textual self that serves her purpose admirably. She avoids the outward trappings of learning – the use of Latin, of technical terminology, of citations of authority – in order to share her own meekness with her readers and with a God whose power is exercised through womanly meekness and motherly forgiveness. Within this shared space, Julian’s acknowledged womanliness, far from separating her from the male God of Christianity, could have the effect of identifying her more closely with Christ in his humanity. To quote Bynum again,
Medieval men and women did not take the equation of woman with body merely as the basis for misogyny. They also extrapolated from it to an association of woman with the body or the humanity of Christ. Indeed, they often went so far as to treat Christ’s flesh as female, at least in certain of its salvific functions, especially its bleeding and nurturing.25
In another way too, Julian turns to the advantage of her writing a disadvantage culturally imposed on her sex. In the Middle Ages most women had no public role; their sphere was private rather than public, and their religious self-expression was likely to be in private devotion. The female realm was the home – the place of direct and intimate relations among human beings, the place where children were born, fed and taught the mother tongue, the place of nourishment and sleep, where bodies met bodies for comfort, affection, procreation. Medieval laypeople were accustomed to think of their favourite saints as sharing this intimate space; thus Julian writes of Saint John of Beverley, ‘our Lord showed him very clearly to encourage us by his familiarity [homlyhed], and he reminded me that he is a very near neighbour and we know him well’ (chapter 38). But Julian goes further; as she sees it, even God accommodates himself to the domestic sphere, the home in which he visited her in 1373. In the earlier chapters of LT she repeatedly stresses God’s ‘homeliness’ with us, homely retaining the full emotional resonance of home itself, including friendliness, familiarity, intimacy, without the pejorative associations it has in American English. God is a great lord, ‘holy and awe-inspiring’ (chapter 4), infinitely superior to his creatures, but he possesses the lordly quality of courtesy, and shows his courtesy to human beings precisely in his homelyhede towards them (see especially LT chapter 7). As Julian perceives him, he is ‘everything that we find good and comforting’ (chapter 5), so familiar and accessible that we must be reminded not to forget the respect that medieval courtesy demanded from inferior to superior: ‘But be careful not to take this friendliness [homelyhede] too casually, so that we neglect courtesy; for our Lord himself is supreme friendliness, and he is as courteous as he is friendly; for he is truly courteous’ (chapter 77).
The images Julian uses to describe the supernatural phenomena of her showings often belong to the same sphere of the domestic and familiar, appropriate to her as a woman and to the God who accommodates himself to that sphere. When she sees Christ’s blood dripping from beneath his crown of thorns, she compares the drops to pills, to herring scales and to raindrops falling from the eaves of a house (chapter 7). (Herring from the North Sea would have been available in Norwich market-place, and any housewife would have found their scales clinging to her kitchen.) As Christ dies on the cross, his skin resembles ‘a sagging cloth’, and then in the cold wind that she imagines accompanying the crucifixion (a familiar feature, this, of the dry, chilly East Anglian climate) she sees it as ‘hung in the air, as a cloth is hung to dry’, until eventually it is ‘like a dry board when it has been scorched’ (chapter 17). Similarly, the ‘little thing’ that she is told ‘is all that is made’ is described as ‘the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand’ (chapter 5). The Devil too is perceived in domestic similes; when Julian first sees his face, ‘The colour was red like newly fired tiles, with black spots on it like black freckles, fouler than the tiles themselves’ and ‘His hair was as red as rust’ (chapter 66). But the homeliness of Julian’s revelations is not a matter of cosiness, reducing the divine and the diabolic to what can be easily understood and controlled. The medieval home was the place of birth and death, and the scene of an unending struggle against squalor and confusion;26 women’s tasks of feeding, cleansing and comforting demanded incessant labour and courage, demands from which men were shielded by the supposedly larger responsibilities of the public world. If God relinquished his transcendence to take on human flesh, it was not to step boldly on to the cross as a liberating warrior but to become a cloth hung up to dry, to undergo the ‘feminine’ squalor of blood and water, herring scales and rain; and one effect of Julian’s writing is to confront the hidden but inescapable horrors of the body and the home. They are epitomized in her vision – a housewife’s nightmare – of an immovable ugliness stinking and swelling uncontrollably: ‘I saw a body lying on the earth, a body which looked dismal and ugly, without shape or form as if it were a swollen and heaving mass of stinking mire’ (chapter 64).
Christ as Mother
The element in Julian’s work that now seems most strikingly feminine is her insistence that God is not only our father but our mother. In family roles as conceived in medieval culture, the father is associated with authority, punishment and fear, the mother with kindness, gentleness, mercy, protectiveness, and with nourishing and
clothing.27 ‘It is fitting that God’s lordship and fatherhood should be feared’, Julian writes, and from that fear we take refuge ‘like a child upon its mother’s bosom’ (chapter 74). Medieval people felt less difficulty than we may in associating God with stern punishment; but in the later Middle Ages an increasing wish to find an element of motherly love in a religion dominated by maleness was one factor responsible for the rise of devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Julian places Mary in this role in a way entirely normal in her time – ‘our Lady is our mother in whom we are all enclosed and we are born from her in Christ; for she who is mother of our Saviour is mother of all who will be saved in our Saviour’ – but she adds, more unusually, ‘And our Saviour is our true mother in whom we are eternally born and by whom we shall always be enclosed’ (chapter 57).
The idea that God is our mother, absent from ST, is first mentioned briefly at the beginning of LT chapter 52. It returns in chapter 57 in the words just quoted, seeming to come as a resolution to theological complexities in which Julian has become hopelessly entangled. It is developed most fully in the following six chapters. Julian begins by associating God’s motherhood especially with Christ, the second person of the Trinity, identified with divine wisdom, which was traditionally personified as female (Sapientia): ‘God all wisdom is our mother by nature’ and ‘the great power of the Trinity is our father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our lord’ (chapter 58). She then focuses on two less abstract aspects of motherhood, creation and nourishment. God gave birth to humanity, but he also became human himself, ‘And so Jesus is our true mother by nature, at our first creation, and he is our true mother in grace by taking on our created nature’ (chapter 59). But the agony of the crucifixion was also an act of giving birth, by which human beings, born of their human mothers to pain and death, were reborn through Christ’s ‘pangs and … sufferings’ (chapter 60) to the possibility of heavenly bliss. And the body that died in its birth-pangs on the cross remains a source of generous maternal nourishment for humanity: ‘So next he had to feed us, for a mother’s dear love has made him our debtor. The mother can give her child her milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most generously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament which is the precious food of life itself.’ The consecrated host, truly God’s body in Catholic doctrine, is imagined as life-giving food; and the parallel between mother’s milk and Christ’s blood is no literary conceit but a reflection of medieval scientific understanding that milk is reprocessed blood.28 The embodiment that associates God-become-man with femaleness makes Christ homely and motherly in the most literal way, transforming violation into nourishment, the wound into a breast: ‘The mother can lay the child tenderly to her breast, but our tender mother Jesus, he can familiarly [homley] lead us into his blessed breast through his sweet open side’ (chapter 60). And God’s dealings with humanity in its daily sinfulness are no less motherly, calling up intensely homely images of a child frightened, dirty and ashamed, turning to mother for comfort:
But often when our falling and our wretched sin is shown to us, we are so terrified and so very ashamed that we hardly know where to put ourselves. But then our kind Mother does not want us to run from him, there is nothing he wants less. But he wants us to behave like a child; for when it is hurt or frightened it runs to its mother for help as fast as it can; and he wants us to do the same, like a humble child, saying, ‘My kind Mother, my gracious Mother, my dearest Mother, take pity on me. I have made myself dirty and unlike you and I neither may nor can remedy this without your special help and grace.’ (chapter 61)
Julian’s teachings on the motherhood of God reflect the experience of a woman for whom ‘mother’ was a ‘fair, lovely word’ (chapter 60). Her own mother was present at her sick-bed in ST; omitted from LT, she is replaced by Christ as mother. But these teachings, strongly felt and intricately developed, to an extent unexpected in a medieval writer, were not original with Julian; they have precedents in writings by men. As early as Isaiah, God was presented as mother of his chosen people, asking, ‘Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? And if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee’ (49:15). And in the New Testament Jesus rebukes Jerusalem for its callousness by contrast with his own motherly concern: ‘How often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?’ (Matthew 23:37). In these texts that Julian would have known, God is mother only by analogy; there are also medieval writers who wrote directly of God’s motherhood, and whose work she might or might not have encountered. One of the originators of the theology underpinning the affective, Christocentric devotion of the later Middle Ages was Saint Anselm of Canterbury. He wrote prayers as well as theology, and in a Prayer to Saint Paul, sent to Countess Mathilda of Tuscany in the late eleventh century, he begins from the image in Matthew of Jesus as a hen protecting her young:
And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother?
Are you not the mother who, like a hen,
gathers her chickens under her wings?
Truly, Lord, you are a mother;
for both they who are in labour
and they who are brought forth are accepted by you.
You have died more than they, that they may labour to bear.
It is by your death that they have been born,
for if you had not been in labour,
you could not have borne death;
and if you had not died, you would not have brought forth.29
This is only one instance among various medieval treatments of God as mother noted by modern scholars.
Julian then was not eccentric or unorthodox in exploring this theme; what is remarkable is the intensity of her treatment, and the theological implications developed from it. It must be stressed that, though she did not write in Latin or employ the logical and analytic methods of scholasticism, Julian was a theologian; her work has been described as ‘the most remarkable theological achievement of the English late Middle Ages’.30 Vernacular devotional writers were rarely original theologians – the works of the most widely read of all such writers in English, Richard Rolle, have little doctrinal content of their own31 – and that a medieval woman should mature ‘from a visionary into a theologian’ is truly extraordinary. What specially drove Julian towards theology seems to have been her difficulty in seeing the ‘fatherly’ side of God, in the medieval sense of anger and punishment. Belief in hell and purgatory, the manifestations of divine punitiveness, was required by Catholicism, and she insists that she ‘firmly believed that hell and purgatory have the purpose taught by Holy Church’. She wished for ‘a complete vision of hell and purgatory’, yet found that what her showings revealed was ‘of goodness, and there was little mention of evil’. Her vision of the Passion itself was affected by this absence of evil, for she saw Christ’s pain and his friends’ sorrow, but nothing of those who caused his pain. The ‘Jews who did him to death’ (chapter 33), usually prominent in medieval pictures and plays of the Passion, are conspicuously absent from Julian’s showing. If Christ is our mother and his pains those of a woman in childbed, they are in a sense natural and even healthy, and emphasis on the cruelty and wickedness of those who caused them is unnecessary and even misleading. Similarly, if the Passion involves a spiritual feeding of humanity from Christ’s own body, we need think only of ‘his sweet open side’ and not of any human malice that tore it open.
In God’s showings to Julian of his own nature, fatherly anger played no part; this she repeatedly stresses. According to the Church’s teaching she must acknowledge herself a sinner and must recognize ‘that sinners deserve blame and anger one day; and I could see no blame and anger in God’ (chapter 45). Not only is she unable to see blame and anger in God, she sees that ‘God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for he is nothing but goodness’ (chapter 46). Moreover, our very existence proves that God cannot be ang
ry: ‘it seems to me that if God could be even slightly angry we could never have any life or place or being’. Anger exists, but only on man’s part; God forgives us, but in regard to himself he cannot forgive, for he cannot be angry – ‘it would be an impossibility’ (chapter 49). The implications of this impossibility are far-reaching, leading Julian to an apparent impasse: ‘My good Lord, I see that you are truth itself and I know for certain that we sin grievously every day and deserve to be bitterly blamed; and I can neither give up the knowledge of this truth, nor can I see that you show us any kind of blame. How can this be?’ (chapter 50). The path is blocked, and Julian can only trust to God’s assurance that ‘you shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well’ (chapter 31). She interprets this promise as entailing that, at the Day of Judgement, beyond present human understanding, God will perform a ‘great deed’ to reconcile his motherly love with the unquestionable fact of human sin:
… there is a deed which the Holy Trinity shall do on the last day, and when that deed shall be done and how it shall be done is unknown to all creatures under Christ, and shall be until it has been done … This is the great deed ordained by our Lord God from eternity, treasured up and hidden in his blessed breast, only known to himself, and by this deed he shall make all things well; for just as the Holy Trinity made all things from nothing, so the Holy Trinity shall make all well that is not well. (chapter 32)
Just as God made everything at the beginning of the world, like a mother giving birth to a child, so that deed will be matched by another equally motherly deed at the end of the world: we do not know what it will be, but it will ‘make all well that is not well’. It is for that comfort, that making well or making better, that children have historically turned to their mothers rather than their fathers.
Revelations of Divine Love Page 3
