Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich

Gravely ill at the age of thirty, Julian of Norwich received a series of visions, and in one of them she saw, lying in the palm of her hand, "a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut." She was told that this small round thing was "all that is made," the entire created world, and she marveled that it did not simply crumble to nothing, so tiny and fragile did it seem. Then she understood why it lasts: it lasts because God loves it. From that one image, a whole world held in being like a nut in the hand, Julian built one of the most searching theologies of love in any language, and she built it as the first woman known to have written a book in English.

The showings. In 1373, during the illness that brought the visions, Julian received sixteen revelations, or "showings," most of them gathered around the suffering of Christ and the love disclosed in it. She recovered, and then did the thing that makes her a philosopher rather than only a visionary: she spent more than twenty years turning the showings over, asking what they meant, until a brief first account had grown into the long, meditated theology we call the Revelations of Divine Love. She lived those decades as an anchoress, enclosed in a cell built against the church of St Julian in Norwich, from which she gave counsel through a window; the traveler and writer Margery Kempe was among those who came to her for it.

The hazelnut and the fragility of everything. The hazelnut showing is, at bottom, a meditation on contingency. All that is made is as small and precarious as a nut that could be crushed in a moment; the world carries no necessity of its own and has no claim to keep existing. That it does keep existing, Julian sees, is not a fact about the world but a fact about God: creation is held in being from instant to instant by a love that makes it, keeps it, and will not let it go. Centuries before philosophers would frame the contingency of the world as an argument, Julian had seen it whole in the palm of her hand and given it an answer.

Love was his meaning. After the long labor of interpretation, Julian reports the key that unlocks the whole. Pressing to know what all the showings finally meant, she is answered from within: "Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was his meaning." Everything she was shown, she concludes, has a single substance and a single reason, which is love; love is why the world was made and why it is kept and what all the visions were about. It is the most economical theology imaginable, the entire revelation gathered into one word.

The problem of sin. Julian does not buy her hope cheaply. The hardest question presses on her: if God is nothing but love, why is there sin, and why so much pain? She is given a strange and careful answer, that "sin is behovely," that it somehow had to be allowed, and alongside it the promise that has become her signature: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." She is honest that she cannot reconcile the two intellectually; she holds the darkness of sin and the promise of its healing in an unresolved tension, trusting a reconciliation she has been shown but cannot yet see. She even reports being shown that there is no wrath in God at all, only love, a hope so wide it brushes against universal salvation. This is not the cushion-slogan optimism the line has become; it is hope wrung out of a clear-eyed look at the worst.

God our Mother. Her boldest and most original move is to speak of the motherhood of God. Jesus, she writes, is our true Mother, in whom we are enclosed and carried, fed and tended and brought to growth; the tenderness of a mother for a child is not a metaphor laid over the divine but a property of it. "As verily as God is our Father, so verily is God our Mother." Set beside the stern paternal majesty that dominated the theology of her age, Julian's maternal God is a quietly radical proposal, and it is one that much later theology would rediscover as if for the first time.

What this room reads. The corpus is Grace Warrack's edition of the Revelations of Divine Love (1901), from Project Gutenberg, a careful modernization of the Long Text with Warrack's introduction. Citations run by the revelation and chapter. Julian wrote in Middle English, and Warrack renders her into readable modern prose while keeping the flavor of the original; the Short Text and the scholarly critical editions are elsewhere, and the chat says when it reaches past the corpus.

"All shall be well" has been stitched onto so many cushions that it now hides the rigor that produced it. Julian earned that sentence by refusing both despair and easy comfort in the face of sin, suffering, and the sheer fragility of everything that is. Read whole, she is a major theologian, the first woman to write a book in English, who gave Christian thought the language of a mothering God and a hope that reaches almost to the salvation of all. She stands within the long tradition of divine love that runs from Augustine, though her hope burns warmer than his severity; she is kin, across the Channel and the same century, to the speculative mystics of the Rhineland and to Meister Eckhart's sense of God as the ground in which all things are held, a kinship of vision rather than any borrowing; she answers the great age of Thomas Aquinas not with argument but with sight; and she is an elder sister to the later women who would map the soul's union with God from the inside, Teresa of Avila above all. The hazelnut is still in the palm, and the question it asks, why does anything at all go on existing, still has only Julian's answer: because it is loved.