Revelations of Divine Love

by Julian of Norwich

  God judges us in terms of our natural essence, which is always preserved unchanged in him, whole and safe for ever; and this judgement comes from his righteousness. And men judge in terms of our changeable sensory being, which seems now one thing, now another, according to the various influences on it and its outward appearance. And this judgement is mixed; for sometimes it is good and lenient, and sometimes it is harsh and painful. And in so far as it is good and lenient it belongs to God’s righteousness; and in so far as it is harsh and painful, our good Lord Jesus corrects it by mercy and grace through the power of his blessed Passion, and so changes it into righteousness. And though these two are reconciled and united, yet both shall be known everlastingly in heaven.

  The first judgement, from God’s righteousness, comes from his exalted, everlasting love, and this is the kind and lovely judgement which was shown throughout the precious revelation in which I saw him assign us no kind of blame. And though this was sweet and delectable, yet I could not be quite freed from anxiety just by contemplating this, because of the judgement of Holy Church, which I had understood before and of which I was always aware. And according to this judgement it seemed to me that I had to acknowledge myself a sinner, and by the same judgement I understood that sinners deserve blame and anger one day; and I could see no blame and anger in God, and then I felt a longing greater than I can or may tell; for God himself revealed the higher judgement at the same time, and therefore I was bound to accept it; and the lower judgement had been taught me before by Holy Church, and therefore I could in no way abandon the lower judgement.

  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, very strikingly shown, as I shall recount later.37 And yet I still long, and shall until my dying day, through God’s grace to understand these two judgements as they apply to me; for all heavenly things, and all earthly ones which belong to heaven, are included in these two judgements. And the more understanding we have of these two judgements through the gracious guidance of the Holy Ghost, the more we shall see and recognize our failings. And the more we see them, the more we shall naturally long through grace to be filled with unending joy and bliss; it is what we are made for, and our natural essence is now blessed in God, and has been since it was made, and shall be without end.

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  We cannot know ourselves in this life except through faith and grace, but we must know ourselves to be sinners; and God is never angry, for he is close to the soul, protecting it.

  But in our transitory life that we live here in our sensory being we do not know what we are; later we shall truly and clearly see and know our Lord God in the fullness of joy. And therefore it must needs be that the nearer we are to our bliss, the greater will be our longing, both through nature and through grace. We may have knowledge of ourselves in this life through the continuing help and strength of our higher nature, a knowledge which we may develop and increase with the help and encouragement of mercy and grace, but we can never know ourselves completely until the last moment, the moment in which this transitory life and customary grief and pain will come to an end. And therefore it is right and proper for us both by nature and by grace to long and to pray with all our might to know ourselves in the fullness of everlasting joy.

  And yet in all this time, from the beginning to the end, I had two kinds of perception: one of them was of endless continuing love with certainty of protection and blessed salvation, for the entire showing revealed this; the other was the general teaching of Holy Church which I was previously instructed in and acquainted with, willingly applying and understanding it. And perception of this did not leave me, for the showing did not move or lead me from it in a single detail, but in it I was taught to love and like it, so that I might, through our Lord’s help and grace, grow and rise to more heavenly knowledge and higher love. And from all that I saw it seemed to me that it was necessary for us to see and to acknowledge that we are sinners; we do many evil things which we ought not to do and leave undone many good deeds which we ought to do, and for this we deserve punishment and anger. And in spite of all this I saw truly that our Lord was never angry and never will be angry, for he is God: goodness, life, truth, love, peace; and his loving-kindness does not allow him to be angry, nor does his unity; for I saw truly that it is against the nature of strength to be angry, and against the nature of his wisdom and against the nature of his goodness. God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for he is nothing but goodness; our soul is united to him, unchangeable goodness, and in God’s eyes there can be neither anger nor forgiveness between him and our soul; for through his own goodness our soul is completely united with God, so that nothing can come between God and soul.

  And in every showing the soul was led to this understanding by love and drawn by strength; in his great goodness our Lord showed truly that it is so and how it is so; and he wants us to desire to know it, that is to say, so far as it is proper for us to know it; for everything that the simple soul understood, God wants to be revealed and known;38 for the things which he wishes to remain secret, he himself hides them strongly and wisely out of love; for I saw in the same showing that many mysteries are hidden which may never be known until the time when God of his goodness has made us worthy of seeing them. And I am well-satisfied with this, submitting to our Lord’s will in this great wonder. And for now I submit to my mother Holy Church as a simple child should do.

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  We must marvel reverently and suffer meekly, always rejoicing in God; and how our blindness in not seeing God is the cause of sin.

  There are two points which are the duty of our soul: one is that we should wonder reverently, the other that we should suffer meekly, always rejoicing in God; for he wants us to know that in a short time we shall see clearly in him all that we desire. And in spite of this I considered things and wondered very much what the mercy and forgiveness of God really is; for from what I had already learned, I understood that the mercy of God would be the remission of his anger after our time of sin; for I thought that to a soul whose whole intention and desire is to love, the anger of God would be harsher than any other punishment, and therefore I took it that the remission of his anger would be one of the principal points of his mercy. But however hard I looked and longed, I could not see this anywhere in the whole showing.

  But with his grace I shall say a little of what I saw and understood of the works of God’s mercy. I understood that we men are changeable in this life and through frailty and accident we fall into sin. Man is naturally weak and foolish, and his will is smothered; and in this world he suffers storm and sorrow and woe, and the cause is his own blindness – he does not see God; for if he saw God continually he would have no evil feelings, nor any sort of impulse towards the craving which leads to sin. I saw and felt this at the same moment; and the sight and the feeling I was given seemed to me exalted and generous in comparison with our usual feelings in this life; but yet I thought they were low and mean in comparison with the great longing which the soul has to see God. For I felt in myself five kinds of emotion: joy, mourning, desire, fear and sure hope; joy, because God allowed me to understand and recognize that it was he himself I saw; mourning, because I was bereft of him; desire, which was always to see him more and more, understanding and recognizing that we shall never be completely at rest until we see him truly and clearly in heaven; fear, because it seemed to me during all that time that the vision would fail and I would be left to myself; my sure hope was in his endless love, so I saw that I would be protected by his mercy and brought to his bliss. And rejoicing in his sight with this sure hope of his merciful protection gave me understanding and comfort so that the mourning and fear were not very painful.

  And yet in all this I saw from Go
d’s showing that this kind of sight of him cannot continue in this life – cannot for his own glory and the augmentation of our endless joy. And therefore we often lack the sight of him, and we are immediately thrown back into ourselves, where we find no right feelings, nothing but our own contrariness, and that of the ancient root of our first sin with all those contrived by ourselves that follow from it; and in this we are tossed and troubled with all the many different feelings of sin and suffering, both of the body and the soul, which are known to us in this life.

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  Of mercy and grace and their properties; and how we shall be glad that we bore sorrow patiently.

  But our good Lord the Holy Ghost, who is eternal life dwelling in our souls, keeps us safe, and brings peace to our souls, giving them comfort through grace and harmony with God and making them pliant. And this is his mercy and the direction in which he always leads us for as long as we are here in this changeable life; for the only anger that I saw was man’s, and he forgives us for that; for anger is nothing but contrariness and antagonism to peace and love, and it comes from lack of strength, or from lack of wisdom, or from lack of goodness – and it is not God who lacks these things but we who lack them; for through sin and vileness we have in us a vile and continual antagonism to peace and love, and he showed this again and again in his affectionate expression of pity and compassion; for the source of mercy is love, and the action of mercy is to hold us safely in love; and this was shown in such a way that, at least as it appeared to me, I could not discern where mercy was to be found if it were not in love alone.

  Mercy works through tenderness and grace blended with abundant pity; for by the work of mercy we are held safe and by the work of mercy everything is turned to good for us. Through love mercy allows us to fail to some extent, and in so far as we fail, so far we fall, and in so far as we fall, so far we die; for we really must die in so far as we fail to see and feel God who is our life. Our failing is full of fear and our falling of shame and our dying of sorrow; but through all this the sweet eye of pity and love never leaves us, nor does mercy cease to work. For I saw the property of mercy and I saw the property of grace, which have two ways of working in one love. Mercy is a pitiful property which belongs to motherhood in tender love, and grace is an honourable property which belongs to royal lordship in the same love; mercy works – protecting, tolerating, reviving and healing, and all through the tenderness of love; and grace works – raising, rewarding and going infinitely beyond what our love and our effort deserve, spreading far and wide, and showing the great and abundant generosity of God’s royal lordship through his marvellous courtesy. And this comes from the abundance of love; for through the working of grace our fearful failing is transformed into abundant, eternal comfort, and through the working of grace our shameful falling is transformed into high, noble rising, and through the working of grace our sorrowful dying is transformed into holy, blessed life; for I saw quite certainly that just as our contrariness brings us pain, shame and sorrow here on earth, so, on the contrary, grace brings us comfort, honour and bliss in heaven; and so far beyond measure that when we come up and receive the sweet reward which grace has prepared for us, then we shall thank and bless our Lord, rejoicing eternally that ever we suffered grief. And that will be because of a property of blessed love which we shall recognize in God, which we might never have known without first suffering grief.

  And when I saw all this, I had to admit that the effect of God’s mercy and forgiveness is to lessen and wear away our anger.

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  Our life is grounded in love, without which we perish; yet God is never angry, but in our anger and sin he mercifully keeps us safe and ordains peace in us, rewarding our tribulations.

  Now this was a great marvel to the soul, continually shown in everything and considered with great attentiveness: that in regard to himself our Lord God cannot forgive, for he cannot be angry – it would be an impossibility. For this is what was shown: that our life is all grounded and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live; and therefore to the soul which through God’s special grace sees so much of his great and marvellous goodness, and sees that we are joined to him in love for ever, it is the greatest impossibility conceivable that God should be angry, for anger and friendship are two contraries. It must needs be that he who wears away and extinguishes our anger and makes us gentle and kind is himself always consistently loving, gentle and kind, which is the contrary of anger; for I saw quite clearly that where our Lord appears, everything is peaceful and there is no place for anger; for I saw no kind of anger in God, neither for a short time nor for a long one; indeed, it seems to me that if God could be even slightly angry we could never have any life or place or being; for as truly as we have our being from the eternal strength of God and from the eternal wisdom and from the eternal goodness, so truly are we sustained in the eternal strength of God, in the eternal wisdom and in the eternal goodness; though we feel vengeful, quarrelsome and contentious, yet we are all mercifully enclosed in the kindness of God and in his gentleness, in his generosity and in his indulgence; for I saw quite certainly that our eternal support, our dwelling, our life and our being are all in God; for as his endless goodness protects us when we sin so that we do not perish, the same endless goodness continually negotiates a peace in us in place of our anger and our contentious falling, and makes us see that what is needed is that with true fear we should heartily beseech God for forgiveness with a gracious longing for our salvation; for we cannot be blessedly saved until we are truly in a state of peace and love, for that is what our salvation means.

  And though we, through the anger and contrariness which is in us, are now in a state of tribulation, distress and grief, as our blindness and weakness deserve, yet through God’s merciful care we are certainly safe so that we shall not perish. But we are not blessedly safe in the possession of our eternal joy until we are in a state of peace and love; that is to say, taking full pleasure in God and in all his works and in all his decrees, and loving and peaceful within ourselves, towards our fellow Christians and towards all whom God loves, as is pleasing to his love. And this is what God’s goodness does in us.

  Thus I saw that God is our true peace, and he is our sure support when we are ourselves unpeaceful, and he is continually working to bring us into eternal peace. And thus when, through the working of mercy and grace, we are made humble and gentle, we are surely safe. The soul is quickly united to God when it truly finds inner peace, for in God no anger can be found. And I saw that when we are all peaceful and loving we shall find no contrariness, nor shall we be hindered in any way by whatever contrariness is already in us. Our Lord of his goodness makes this contrariness beneficial to us; for it is the cause of all our grief and tribulations, and these our Lord Jesus takes and sends up to heaven, and there they are made more sweet and delectable than heart can think or tongue can tell, and when we come to heaven we shall find them waiting there, all turned into beautiful and eternal glory. So God is our firm ground, and he shall be our bliss and make us as unchangeable as he is when we are there.

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  How the chosen soul was never dead in the sight of God, and how she wondered about this; and three things which emboldened her to ask God to explain it to her.

  And in this mortal life mercy and forgiveness are our path and keep leading us on to grace. And through the distress and sorrow that we ourselves fall into, the earthly judgement of men often considers us dead, but in the sight of God the soul that shall be saved was never dead, nor ever shall be. But yet at this point I was amazed and marvelled most earnestly in my soul, thinking as follows: ‘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?’ For I knew through the universal teaching of Holy Church and through my own experience that the guilt of our sin weighs us down continually, from Adam, the
first man, until the time when we come up into heaven; then this was what amazed me, that I saw our Lord God blaming us no more than if we were as pure and as holy as angels in heaven. And between these two contraries my reason was greatly tormented by my blindness, and could not rest for fear that God’s blessed presence should pass from my sight and I should be left not knowing how he regards us in our sin; for either I needed to see in God that sin was all done away with, or else I needed to see in God how he sees it, so that I might truly know how it befits me to see sin and what sort of blame is ours.

  My longing endured as I looked continually towards him, and yet my trouble and perplexity were so great that I could not be patient, thinking, ‘If I suppose that we are not sinners nor do we deserve blame, my good Lord, how can it then be that I cannot see this certainty in you, who are my God, my Maker, in whom I long to see all truths? Three reasons give me the courage to ask this: the first is because it is such a humble thing, for if it were exalted I should be afraid; the second is that it is so universal, for if it were special and secret, that would also make me afraid; the third is that it seems to me that I need to know it if I am to live here, in order to recognize good and evil, so that I may through reason and through grace distinguish between them more clearly, and love goodness and hate evil, as Holy Church teaches.’ I cried inwardly with all my might, beseeching God for help, thinking as follows: ‘Ah! Lord Jesus, king of bliss, how can I be helped? Who can show me and tell me what I need to know if I cannot see it now in you?’

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  The answer to the previous doubt through a marvellous parable of a lord and a servant; and how God wishes us to wait for him, for it was nearly twenty years later before she understood this example fully; and how it is understood that Christ sits at the right hand of the Father.