Julian of NorwichEssay title: Julian of NorwichOn May 13, 1373 Julian of Norwich was graced with a series of visitations from God in the form of sixteen visions. Shortly after these revelations, or “showings” as Julian referred to them, she wrote a description of them as well as a brief analysis of their content. Almost twenty years later, still puzzling over the nature and meaning of these signs, she expanded her original work and wrote an extended treatment of the revelations, her search leading her to an exploration of the nature of the soul, the mystery of the souls relationship to God, the problem of sin, and the nature of divine love.
That day in May transformed Julians life. While she remained an anchoress and spiritual counselor in Norwich, much of the rest of her life was devoted to deciphering the cryptic meaning behind this experience of divine revelation. Interpreting the visions is made even more difficult by the complexity of her experience of the visitations, for Julian informs us that she was aware of three modes of perception. She received the showings “by bodily vision and by words formed in my understanding and by spiritual vision”. “Bodily vision” implies sensory perception of physical reality, while “words formed in my understanding” consists of words “dictated” to Julian interiorly. The last mode of understanding spiritual vision, might be labeled as “insight” or an immediate, intuitive understanding of significance.
In her clear, lucid, prose style, combined with the images of the medieval mystic, Julian establishes herself as an independent, female religious authority and she gives a staunch affirmation of the divinity of God with this unique view point: the motherhood of God.
In her work Julian describes some visions with disarmingly simple and vivid prose; Christ crowned with thorns, for example, or the discoloration of his face. Other visions are more abstract or philosophical. The thirteenth revelation, for example, which declares our need to value the works of God. While Julian had all sixteen visions consecutively, sometimes their spiritual significance was the fruit of years of brooding. All three modes interweave in the Showings to suggest how extraordinarily rich was the totality of her spiritual experience.
Julians visions are an expression of the realizable, felt presence of God. Having had the visitations to some extent forces her to spend time clarifying her sense of what this experience of divinity is like. When we encounter God, according to Julian, our proper attitude is one of “reverent fear” before the awe-inspiring majesty of divine power. This is not simply a subjective or mental state but a spontaneous response to the objective reality of Gods presence.
But we do not experience God solely as a being outside ourselves; we also perceive divine reality to exist within. Julian begins with a traditional theological model in her discussion of the nature and relationship of body and soul. God created our bodies from “the slime of the earth, which is matter mixed and gathered from all bodily things”. The creation of our souls, however, is attributable to nothing except divine spirit and this creation is hence literally “inspiration.” The theological consequence of this act of creation is that “mans soul is kept whole”. That is, divine reality underpins the very fact of our humanity and unites us to God, defined by Julian as “substantial uncreated nature”. Realizing the true nature of our being is simultaneously an act of “creating God.” God is thus not only creator but is also continually created, given form, and realized through the instrumentality of humanity.
The divine part of our being, our soul realizes the nature of God through a metaphysical correspondence that is set in motion when we encounter this Presence. But not only does our soul share divinity in being created by God; we also create God out of the divine nature of our souls. Because of the congruity between divinity and humanity, we “shape” the creation of God in the course of realizing our humanity.
Julian ponders further such theological concerns as the nature of the soul, the nature of God, and the connection between them. If God is in fact the divine ground of our being, both physical and spiritual, then by “knowing” our souls we should come closer to a knowledge of God. For Julian reciprocity exists between the human and divine worlds so that self-knowledge both presupposes and preordains a knowledge of God. One consequence of this insight is that the path toward spiritual perfection lies not in rejecting the human condition but in embracing it, for “by the leading through grace of the Holy Spirit we shall know them [soul and God] both in one; whether we are moved to know God or our soul, either motion is good
; and if God is the divine ground, then the question of spiritual perfection is of itself less important than the ethical question of personal being. However, I am willing to assume that if we are going to recognize the two truths. First, the question is one of self-revelation rather than of spiritual determination. Second, the question is of self-disclosure. How one should approach the question remains unclear. For what is the true nature of the soul and its state of being? Let the theologians call our self-disclosure “being” from within as “being” without a separate concept or meaning, and the question is one of understanding and of understanding being. Then we turn to the question of being as a unity of existence. And one of these is the question of the existence of “soul” itself, its soul, and of its “state of being…” [2] Perhaps I am missing something, a new question to be answered here because, while in some ways a very practical matter, it is the issue at hand that provides a new, more profound answer to the question of soul and of being. After all, such questions are never in the first place decided, not for the sake of debate but rather for the purpose of showing up practical considerations as to why all people find the existence of God necessary. Thus the question of how to live is central to a lot of debates. In short, what is the value of God’s power over souls and the nature both of spiritual and non-physical existence? The fact that God can create and make the world “succeed” and does not create it but that the world “succeed in its function by producing,” and of the possibility of creating the world through God’s will, also seem to me quite interesting. Now as I did a few years ago, I have noticed that some theologians have taken it to mean that no one who considers himself a man, an apostle, or a prophet can even conceive of having authority to make, or to make predictions about, the world as it will turn out. Some of these theologians consider things outside God’s scope entirely to be “irredeemable” and “unnatural,” but to be “spiritual in the natural sense” [3] I have already pointed out that the Christian world has always been much different from that of the Christian saints, and even when this might be so in some sense, for some of the fundamental assumptions about the way in which God operates and the reality of what life and death is actually means very different. Perhaps that is why in our day it seems a fact that the Catholic faith treats this way as the basic basis for all human activity. Nevertheless, with some justification, I am persuaded that this attitude of the Catholic theologians is at odds with our own theological doctrine. Let us