Julian of Norwich

Following the talk by Claire Foster-Gilbert on Julian of Norwich, I have received the following contribution from a member which may be of interest to those present at the October meeting, as well as to those who couldn't get there.:

For a woman of whom scarcely anything is known Julian of Norwich [1342-1416] casts a long and warming  light.   Variously styled ‘Dame’ and ‘Mother’ she owed her name to the church in Norwich where she passed the greater part of her life. Fortified by a room of her own and an income from a legacy she held forth with her mystical revelations.

In the ecclesiastical order Julian was an Anchorite, that is to say one who withdrew from the world to a life of silence, prayer and mortification.  By her time there were at least 600 anchorages in England, the majority occupied by women.  Anchorages may have been favoured women because the interpretation of God and the Bible in writing was reserved for ordained priests, for men.

The loquacious among these women could be tiresome.   For the avoidance of bother the only vow their bishops imposed was stability.  This did not stop them soothing or agitating, prophesying, disturbing and occasionally enlightening any who came within earshot.   

Julian’s audience was needy.  Medieval Christianity was a whole-life religion. People lived on the edge, plagued by the possibility of sudden death to a degree unimaginable now; and in the sure and certain knowledge their end would be followed by judgement and committal to hell or to heaven, for ever.

Typically, it was a near-death experience that brought forth Julian’s  reflections on the crucified Christ, long in print under the title Revelations of Divine Love. Her mystical qualities – never to be muddled with the Mindfulness  currently in mode – must have been intuitive.  Women were valued as anchorites partly because, without the bracing discipline that makes a true mystic, they brought perceptions which while ungovernable could be more vivid on the streets: the experience God through all the senses, the openness to sight and sound, sufficient to be receptive to visions, frequently accompanied by saws and sayings. 

Few may have known Julian through having her works read to them. Rather more heard her ravings in person from the opening in her cell.  Who can say whether it was she who brought more understanding of God to the simple than the gentleman exegetes licensed for the job by the omnipotent church ?

Julian today has a far bigger, and growing, audience than her own times ever comprehended.  That is because she touched certain themes that have become very fashionable and promoted by militant interests. 

On the nature of the earth Julian expressed herself more concisely than James Lovelock.  She contemplated ‘a little thing, no bigger than a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand’ and knew it to be an emblem of the universe ‘for it is all that is made’.

                       

It is not known whether Julian was a spinster, nor whether she had been married and borne children who had perished.  It is unlikely she had read St Anselm, the heroic Archbishop of Canterbury under William Rufus. Whether she was a mother or not she appears to have absorbed Anselm’s notion of God as the Mother of Christ and Christ as the mother of humankind.  Julian’s promotion of the idea makes her most notable contribution to the fifteenth-century religious thinking.

She could be unsettling. Even Satan was disturbed in his thicket.  Everybody knew from Genesis that the Serpent was a rotter. The snake was Satan’s preferred vehicle on his mission to the Garden of Eden.  There he seduced the weak and feeble woman, Eve, thus bringing woe to all mankind.  The disaster of Original Sin proved that women had severe limits, that they must be watched and constrained.  Julian took a secondary explanation. Turning to Adam’s eager guzzling of the Tree of Knowledge, she attributed his greed not to mere seduction but to an excess of zeal to sample the whole of Creation, regardless of God’s injunction to abstain. In other words his original sin was pride, an act of defiance against supreme, benign authority.    If one mentions Original Sin these days the reaction, if any, is likely to be a snigger. The truth is, rather,  an enduring caution.

Julian would never have joined any movement.  She was a simple woman in an  age that took images and allegories literally.  The saying for which she is most remembered – ‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’ – amounts to serene confidence in the redemptive power of Christ.  If her words have a whiff of Revelation then at least, that book being set in the future, nobody could contradict her.