Julian repeatedly affirms her acceptance of the Church’s teachings, and by leaving the nature of the great deed mysterious she avoids head-on conflict with orthodoxy. Nevertheless, a God who cannot be angry without self-contradiction, and who will ultimately make all well, surely leaves no place for damnation; Julian is troubled by this, yet remains unshaken in her conviction of what God has directly revealed to her. She acknowledges the Church’s teaching that ‘many shall be damned’, including the fallen angels, the heathen and Christians who die as unrepentant sinners.
Holy Church teaches me to believe that all these shall be condemned everlastingly to hell. And given all this, I thought it impossible that all manner of things should be well, as our Lord revealed at this time. And I received no other answer in showing from our Lord God but this: ‘What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things and I shall make all things well.’ (chapter 32)
Despite the statement in 1 Timothy 2:4 that God ‘will have all men to be saved’, belief that all would be saved at the Last Judgement was a heresy, known as universalism; but Julian clearly entertains it as a possibility. In this she was not alone in her time. Earlier, it had been held that most Christians and certainly all non-Christians would be damned, but by the fourteenth century opinion was shifting. There was discussion of the possibility that virtuous pagans might be saved, and many felt, with the fourteenth-century devotional writer Walter Hilton, that the salvific power of Christ’s sacrifice must match its greatness: ‘It had been a little purchase to Him to have come from so far to so near, and from so high to so low, for so few souls. Nay, His mercy is spread larger than so.’32 In Piers Plowman, too, when Langland sees Jesus harrowing Hell, he hears him promise mercy to his human brothers despite the orthodox teaching that ‘no evil shall go unpunished’, and he identifies that promise with Saint Paul’s ‘secret words which it is not given to man to utter’.33 Langland’s vision throughout his poem is strongly and often harshly masculine, with no suggestion of God’s motherhood, but he and Julian are at one in their vision of a divine mercy that will encompass all humanity.
It has been said of writing by medieval women that ‘There is, more often than in men’s writing, a lack of apriorism, of predetermined postures: again and again we encounter attempts to cope with human problems in their singularity – not imposing rules or categories from without, but seeking solutions that are apt and true existentially.’34 To return to our earlier point: if such a generalization holds good, it is less as a consequence of unchanging truths about the sexes than because it reflects the roles and powers allotted them in actual historical societies. Men on the whole have been in a position to impose ‘rules or categories from without’, and women have not; but women’s powerlessness could enable them to recognize what was omitted or obscured by the systematic official teachings of their time. Even a woman’s silence can be eloquent; and, as final aspects of Julian as a woman writer, we note her complete silence about Eve’s alleged responsibility for Adam’s sin (there is no figure corresponding to Eve in the parable of the lord and servant in LT chapter 51), and her equally complete silence about chastity and celibacy,35 the distorting obsessions of so many of the Church’s male teachers from Saint Paul and Saint Augustine onwards.
The Parable of the Lord and the Servant
Julian’s vision of a God whose mercy is universal is supported by her conception of the human soul as having two aspects, which she calls substance and sensualyté, here generally translated as ‘essential being’ and ‘sensory being’ or as higher nature and lower nature. As she explains in chapter 37, ‘… in every soul that shall be saved there is a godly will which never consented to sin and never shall; just as there is an animal will in our lower nature which can have no good impulses, there is a godly will in our higher nature which is so good that it can never will evil but only good …’ She begins chapter 45 by distinguishing between two kinds of judgement corresponding to these aspects of the soul: human beings judge in terms of the sensualyté, and thus judge severely, but ‘God judges us in terms of our natural essence, which is always preserved unchanged in him, whole and safe for ever’ (chapter 45). God’s judgement expresses justice, but (contrary to normal medieval assumptions) is not harsher but less harsh than men’s judgements, because human beings see only the ‘animal will’ corrupted by the Fall, while God sees the ‘godly will’ that reflects his own purity and remains uncorrupt. True, that ‘godly will’ exists only ‘in every soul that shall be saved’; but Julian cannot help suspecting that this may mean all souls.
Her most penetrating insight into this mystery of salvation comes in the parable of the lord and the servant, expounded in LT chapter 51, by far the longest chapter she wrote and ‘the heart of the entire work’.36 Just as the idea of God’s motherhood emerges in chapter 57 as the solution to theological difficulties that seemed insoluble through logical argument, so earlier this parable had emerged to resolve the fundamental discrepancy between human judgement as conveyed by the Church’s teachings and divine judgement as revealed in her showings: ‘So this was what I longed for: that through him I might see how what is taught in this matter by the judgement of Holy Church is true in the sight of God, and how it befits me to know it truly; so that both judgements might be preserved to the glory of God and in the right way for me. And the only answer I had to this was a wonderful parable of a lord and a servant …’ (chapter 45). This parable (example, or exemplary story) is a showing of a different kind from the others. First Julian recounts it as it was originally shown her, ‘spiritually in bodily likeness’ (chapter 51), but already accompanied by some degree of understanding beyond what could be represented in bodily form. A lord is sitting peacefully and a servant stands by, ready to do his commands. The lord, whose looks convey his love for the servant, sends him on an errand, and the servant sets off in haste to do the lord’s will; but in his very eagerness he falls into a slough, is injured and laments that he cannot help himself or look towards the lord, even though still near him. Absorbed though the servant is in his misery, the lord does not blame him, ‘for his good will and his great longing were the only cause of his fall’; indeed he promises to reward him for his sufferings, beyond what he would have received if he had not fallen. There ‘the showing of the parable vanished’, and Julian is left to ponder its meaning.
At first she does not see the story’s point, but God encourages her to ‘read’ it closely as an allegory about sin, redemption and salvation. It resembles a New Testament parable, but one originally delivered in pictures rather than words; and Julian comes to see that it deserves and rewards minute decoding of the kind applied to Scriptural parables by medieval scholars. Like Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom, it offers a glimpse of God’s view of reality, translated into human terms, but terms that initially seem utterly strange to human readers, and that challenge all their interpretative powers. It then turns out to convey a mysterious truth, compatible perhaps with theological orthodoxy, but lying beyond the scope of normal theological discourse.
Reflection on the story leads to problems. Accustomed like most medieval people to symbolic narratives of the kind found in sermons and fables, Julian recognizes that the servant who falls is likely to stand for Adam; yet in him she sees ‘many different properties which could in no way be attributed just to Adam’. The only solution is to interpret more closely, ‘to pay attention’, as God later instructed her, ‘to all the properties and conditions of what you were shown in the parable, though they may seem mysterious and insignificant in your eyes’. The pictorial detail exists not just to provide verisimilitude or incite emotional response, but to carry meaning that will yield itself up only to persistent rumination. So the interpretation begins, as Julian retells the story bit by bit, now summoning up every detail to see what she can make of it. The lord must be God, and the servant Adam, yet Adam not as an individual but as a representative human being, ‘for in the sight of God, all men are one’. The fuller
realization of the lord’s and servant’s appearance and clothing, and of the setting in which she sees them, is often reminiscent of late-medieval manuscript illumination, or of panel painting of the kind that decorated many East Anglian churches. Yet some details go beyond the bounds of pictorial representation, as when Julian sees within the lord ‘a great refuge, long and wide and all full of endless heavens’.
As in other late-medieval religious art,37 elements contributing to realism are also rich in symbolic meaning, and this Julian proceeds to expound as it has come to her over the years. She explains that, though God the Father is not really a man, ‘he shows himself in a familiar way [homley], like a man’, and is so represented in her vision. God might be expected to appear in heavenly bliss or in the human soul that he created as his dwelling, so the setting on barren earth also has further meaning:
… he made man’s soul to be his own city and his dwelling-place, the most pleasing to him of all his works; and once man had fallen into sorrow and pain he was not fit to serve that noble purpose, and therefore our kind Father would prepare no other place for himself but sit upon the earth waiting for mankind, who is mixed with earth, until the time when, through his grace, his beloved Son had bought back his city and restored its noble beauty with his hard labour.
Now the servant is more exactly described. Outwardly he resembles a labourer prepared for work, wearing a garment which is white but scanty, sweat-stained and ragged. As often, a parallel from Piers Plowman suggests itself: the figure of Haukyn in B XIII–XIV, the representative of the active life of work in the world, with his coat soiled with all the sins. (Haukyn is a kind of degraded version of Piers, and Piers, the ideal labourer, is ultimately identified with Christ’s Humanity.) But here too Julian finds contradiction, for outwardly the servant seems to have been ‘a labourer continuously for a long time’, yet her ‘inward sight’ tells her that he is ‘newly beginning to labour, a servant who had never been sent out before’. More narrative detail emerges: the servant has been sent to find a treasure in the earth. Perhaps we should recall Matthew 13:44 – ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field’ – but this treasure is food, ‘sweet and pleasing to the lord’. The servant labours as a gardener (and Julian conveys a keen sense of the hard bodily labour involved in gardening), so as to get food for his lord, which he alone can provide. Meanings flicker into life and accumulate in bewildering profusion, not hierarchically layered as in orthodox Scriptural exegesis but coexisting regardless of logic: if the servant is a gardener, we cannot help thinking of Adam both in the garden before the Fall and in the life of labour to which he was condemned afterwards. And now, in the most startling insight of the whole vision, Julian grasps that the servant is Christ as well as Adam, and that this double identity underlies the narrative contradictions. The idea that Christ was the second Adam, sent to make good the sin inherited from the first, was familiar in medieval thought, but this vision of complete identity goes beyond such parallelism. A further, crucial stage of interpretation follows: in a passage of exceptional beauty, Julian sees that the Fall of Adam and the Incarnation of Christ are the same event.
When Adam fell, God’s son fell; because of the true union made in heaven, God’s son could not leave Adam, for by Adam I understand all men. Adam fell from life to death into the valley of this wretched world, and after that into Hell. God’s son fell with Adam into the valley of the Virgin’s womb (and she was the fairest daughter of Adam), in order to free Adam from guilt in heaven and in earth; and with his great power he fetched him out of hell.
This insight abolishes temporal extension and historical difference, and in doing so offers a glimpse of what Julian has desired – to see reality as God sees it. The orthodox solution to the problem of predestination and free will was that for God, who exists in eternity, past and future coexist in an eternal present to which the ‘present of this brief and fleeting moment’ is the nearest human equivalent.38 In the parable Julian apprehends this divine vision of reality not as theory but as experience. It ends with the lord and the servant reigning together in heaven as Father and Son, the Son crowned with mankind; God’s triumph is also, through Jesus, the triumph of humanity. At the very centre of Julian’s vision is a God inseparable from man and woman: transcendent in some sense, yes, but unable to set aside the bodily kinship he has chosen with his creatures.
NOTES
1 Julian’s work, like many medieval English writings, lacks a title; this title has been given to it by modern editors and translators, and we retain it for its familiarity.
2 Unless prefaced by ‘ST’, references in the Introduction are to LT.
3 The adaptation was that of Grace Warrack. Julian’s most famous reader has perhaps been T. S. Eliot, who quotes her in ‘Little Gidding’ (1942); he had read her in a seventeenth-century adaptation by Serenus de Cressy. (See Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets, London, 1978, p. 71, n. 84.)
4 Felicity Riddy, ‘ “Women talking about the things of God”: a late medieval sub-culture’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 104–27; quotations from p. 111.
5 Medieval Art in East Anglia 1300–1520, ed. P. Lasko and N. J. Morgan (Norwich, 1973), p. 6.
6 E.g. Denise N. Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, 1994), p. 34; the opposing case is persuasively made by Sr Benedicta (Ward), ‘Julian the Solitary’, in Julian Reconsidered, ed. Kenneth Leech and Sr Benedicta (Oxford, 1988), pp. 10–31.
7 See Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, trans. Hugh White (London, 1993).
8 Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), p. 58.
9 Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, 1990), p. 23.
10 The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 77. For the complete passage, see Appendix III.
11 As one scholar puts it, ‘The ministry of an anchoress could be compared in some respects with that of a modern psychotherapist or professional counsellor’ (Grace M. Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, London, 1987, p. 47).
12 For further details see the ‘Translator’s Note’.
13 Nicholas Watson, ‘The composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Speculum, 68 (1993), 637–83.
14 Lines 39–41 (my translation).
15 Sermons on the Song of Songs 20, in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 2, trans. Kilian Walsh (Spencer, Mass., 1971), p. 152.
16 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), p. 186.
17 Thus when she is gazing at Christ’s suffering body and her reason urges her, ‘Look up to his Father in heaven’, she rejects the temptation of transcendence and tells Christ, ‘No, I cannot, for you are my heaven’ (LT chapter 19; cf. ST chapter 10).
18 Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, p. 12.
19 Riddy, ‘ “Women talking” ’, p. 114.
20 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 196, referring to Elizabeth Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford, 1986), pp. 28–32, and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982).
21 Throughout this volume, the Bible is quoted in the Douai version, translated from the Latin Vulgate read in the Middle Ages. The titles of some books and the numbering of the Psalms differ from those in Protestant Bibles.
22 Quoted in Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, eds., A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (Toronto, 1978), 2 vols., p. 151.
23 Lynn Staley Johnson, ‘The trope of the scribe and the question of literary authority in the works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe’, Speculum, 66 (1991), 820–38; quotation from p. 828.
24 Cf. Nicholas Watson, ‘ “Yf wommen be double naturelly”: remaking “woman” in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Exemplaria, 8
(1996), 1–34.
25 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 204.
26 Emphasized in earlier devotional writings such as the anonymous Holy Maidenhood, which describes how a wife ‘hears her child screaming, sees the cat at the flitch and the dog at the hide, her loaf burning on the hearth and her calf sucking, the pot boiling over into the fire – and her husband is complaining’ (in Medieval English Prose for Women, ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Oxford, 1990, p. 35).
27 Cf. Julian’s statement that God is ‘our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love’ (chapter 5).
28 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), p. 132.
29 Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Benedicta Ward (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 153.
30 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992), p. 314.
31 See Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 54–5.
32 The Scale of Perfection, ed. Evelyn Underhill (London, 1923), II:10, p. 256. In the next sentence, however, Hilton goes on to warn against the view that ‘there shall no soul be damned’.
33 The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London, 1978), B-text, XVIII 390–6, quoting 2 Corinthians 12:4.
34 Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984), p. x.
35 Cf. Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, p. 157.
36 Watson, ‘The composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, p. 638.
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