3. Themes in Revelations of Divine Love

Themes in Revelations of Divine Love

On 8 May 1373 Julian had the first of sixteen revelations. Today we might imagine these to be a set of hallucinations caused by fever and the onset of life-threatening illness. Our modern tendency to label mental conditions, or seek scientific solutions for events, can explain medieval mystical experiences through medical terms. Yet Julian would not have seen herself as schizophrenic, or feverish, or delusional. In her view Christ was communicating directly with her, and since she was not creating the visions herself, they must be coming directly from God.

Although her revelations may seem strange to a modern reader, Julian was no more extreme in her experiences than many of her contemporaries. In fact her text indicates that in almost every respect she handles her emotions and visions in a balanced, rational and sensible way, seeking to unpick and make sense of them, rather than punishing her body and soul in search of more mystical encounters. Another mystical writer of the time, The Cloud of Unknowing author, cautions that these experiences could be sought out through physical punishment, extreme fasting and bodily asceticism, but that ‘they will be illusions, attributable to the devil via their own foolishness’.1

Guides for anchoresses stress that they should not punish themselves too heavily, and should eat and drink adequate amounts by fourteenth-century standards. Many would have a staple diet of bread, porridge, ale and wine for feast days. Spiritual writers of the time recognized that unsound body could mean unsound mind, so cautioned against extreme asceticism:

Wear no iron, nor haircloth, nor hedge-hog skins; and do not beat yourself therewith, nor with a scourge or leather thongs, nor leaded.2

That Julian lived a life of moderation and was sound of mind were major considerations in terms of allowing her to become an anchoress. Many were not well suited to the life, either succumbing to extreme loneliness and desolation, or withdrawing for antisocial, rather than spiritual reasons. Before Julian entered her anchor-hold, she would have been interviewed by the Bishop – possibly the worldly Henry Despenser himself – to see whether she had the correct temperament to be enclosed for life. A bishop did not want someone overly extreme as an anchoress under his responsibility, so Julian would have had to pass his examinations to ensure she could endure a solitary life within both her cell, and her mind.

Yet bodily suffering and physical pain were central to Julian’s mystical experience. She records wanting to receive a life-threatening illness, which would bring her to the brink of death, at which point she would be saved. This happened to her at the age of thirty and a half. Whether she had contracted plague or another illness, she and all around her believed she would die. She was joined in her sick room by her mother and several others. Days into her sickness she became paralysed, finding it difficult even to move her eyes. She received the last rites, and the priest held a crucifix before her:

He set the cross before my face and said, ‘I have brought you the image of your maker and saviour. Look at it and take comfort from it.’

(Chapter 3)

From this image of pain and suffering, Julian experienced a set of encounters with Christ and the Virgin, and she would record these as vivid personal scenes that sparked further echoes, associations and connections.

On the back of these visions Julian listed three gifts she wished to receive:

This person had already asked for three gifts by the grace of God. The first was to relive his Passion in her mind; the second was bodily sickness; the third was that God would give her three wounds … In this sickness I wanted to have every kind of suffering in body and spirit that I would have if I were to die, with all the turbulent terrors and tumults caused by devils, and every other kind of pain, short of the soul’s leaving the body.

(Chapter 2)

This may seem like a startling request – to want to reach the very edge of death and have a true experience of dying. Yet it taps into a deeper current in medieval spirituality, which saw identifying with Christ’s pain and suffering during the crucifixion as key to creating a stronger bond of love and understanding with him. After the Black Death, attitudes towards death seem to have changed, with more artworks and texts focusing on impending mortality. To reach the point of death, yet make a recovery, was seen as a ‘gift from God’ by Julian, as it allowed her to live out the rest of her life with an appreciation of his suffering. The illness was a dress rehearsal for death, and although she did not expect to survive, the fact that she did enabled her to dedicate the rest of her life to achieving a fuller understanding of her visions. An experience of death also brought something else to Julian; an ability to cut through the trivia of life, and see to issues of more lasting significance. Today people who have a near-death experience often report how it made them value the important things more, and Julian’s seems to have had the same effect.

Contemplating the crucifix

One aspect of Julian’s work that can unsettle modern readers is her fixation upon the wounds, blood and bodily suffering of Christ. Near the opening of the Revelations she describes with graphic and expressive terms the sight of Christ on the cross:

After this my sight began to fail, and it all grew dark around me in the room, as dark as though it had been night, except that in the image of the cross there remained a light for all mankind, and I never knew how. Everything other than the cross was ugly to me, as if much crowded with fiends.

(Short Text, Chapter 2)

While some might feel that the sight of Christ hanging on the cross would be a horror, Julian in fact finds it beautiful and comforting, with everything else being ‘ugly to me’. But Julian doesn’t stop at contemplating the pain of the crucifixion. She scrutinizes the event in microscopic detail, describing the globules of blood that trickled down from the crown of thorns, and the way it pours out ‘freshly and plenteously’. At one particularly graphic moment, she contemplates looking through Christ’s wounds, inside his body:

Then with a glad expression our Lord looked into his side and gazed, rejoicing; and with his dear gaze he led his creature’s understanding through the same wound into his side within.

(Chapter 24)

The fascination with this sort of description is best exemplified in our modern day passion for horror literature and film. We still have a fixation with the violent, bloody and gory aspects of life. Yet in the medieval period this connection with Christ’s suffering was encouraged by the Church, as connecting with Jesus through his pain was seen as a means to get closer to a spiritual understanding of him.

Christians would scourge themselves, wear thorned crowns, deprive themselves of nutrition and lacerate their bodies in an attempt to connect with Christ’s agonies at the crucifixion. This is reflected in the genre of hagiography, saints’ lives, where saints are celebrated for the torture and pain they endured. The more pain the better, as is rather comically reflected by the third-century martyr, St Lawrence. While being roasted on a gridiron by his persecutors, he lightly remarks ‘I’m well done. Turn me over’. He has subsequently become patron saint of chefs and cooks.

This obsession with pain is also reflected in the art of the fourteenth century. Transi tombs began to appear, where a decomposing and agonized corpse is sculpted to sit below the more idealized image above. While the sculpture above shows the deceased in all the finery of life, including heraldry, weapons and fine clothing, the image below has a skeletal figure, often being eaten by rats, with entrails and flesh visible. The earliest known example of a transi memorial is in Brightwell Baldwin, Oxfordshire, and dates to around 1370. Examples of fifteenth-century cadaver tombs survive from across Norfolk, including those of Richard Howard in Aylsham and Richard Porynlond in St Stephen’s Church, Norwich. The practice became more widespread during Julian’s lifetime, perhaps in reaction to the devastating effects of the Black Death, which made memento mori (remember that you have to die) all the more pertinent.

The increasingly graphic depictions of death, decay and suffering witnessed in tomb sculpture during the late fourteenth and into the fifteenth centuries is echoed in representations of Christ on the cross. The Despenser Retable in Norwich Cathedral, which dates from Julian’s lifetime, shows in minute detail the sufferings Christ endured on the Road to Calvary and on the Cross. This was commissioned by Bishop Henry Despenser, and was just part of a now lost array of religious images that would have bedecked the interior of Norwich Cathedral. The many medieval churches of Norwich would have appeared very different from now. Post-Reformation, the majority of English churches were stripped of their many bright and glittering objects, their painted walls whitewashed or left to erode, and clearer, whiter church interiors became the norm. But the churches and cathedrals of Julian’s time would have almost been an assault on our modern eyes, with every surface colourful and decorated. Julian would have visited Norwich Cathedral for special feast days, such as Easter, and seen Gothic images of Christ’s suffering on the cross, amid an array of equally vivid and graphic depictions of the martyrdom of saints and the promises of salvation.

It is probable that Julian had a crucifix in her cell, similar to the one she gazed upon during her sickness. It would most likely have been the ‘three-nail’ type, which was introduced around 1200 and shows both Christ’s feet pierced through with one nail. This replaced an earlier version, whereby Jesus either stood on a platform or had both feet pierced, and the single nail at the bottom emphasized the physical stress placed on Christ’s arms in order to support his elongated body. It could also been seen to echo the triangular shape of a shield, so creating chivalric associations with Christ whereby he is the rightful and noble ‘lord’.3

Domestic medieval crucifixes are rare survivals, since they were not valuable, so not treasured, and were commonly made of wood. It is likely almost every home would have contained some religious imagery. The block print was becoming popular, as it was a cheaper alternative to hand-painted images and could be displayed on the wall. Although many crucifixes must also have existed, virtually none have survived. The British Museum has the remains of a simple early fifteenth-century figure, known as the Fiddleford Christ, with evidence of polychrome paint. Red paint has been used throughout to show the path of his blood, from crown of thorns, nails and scourging. Its colour has faded significantly over the course of centuries, so it is now difficult to imagine quite how rich and red the blood would have seemed to a medieval viewer.

Julian was clearly profoundly moved by the vision of Christ’s blood on the crucifix that she saw, held before her eyes by her curate as she lay dying. Despite the fact that the original event would have been a largely bloodless affair, with Jesus suffocating from the pressure of hanging on the cross, the image of the crown of thorns generates a great amount of blood in her vision. She describes it in vivid terms:

At this I suddenly saw the red blood tricking down from under the crown of thorns, hot and fresh, plentiful and lifelike, just as though it were the moment in his Passion when the crown of thorns was pressed on to his blessed head, he who was both God and man, the same who suffered for me in this way.

(Chapter 4)

The importance of medieval religious imagery in terms of Julian’s own experiences is stressed from the very opening of the book. Were it not for the bloody crucifix the priest held before her dying eyes, she may not have experienced her revelations. The image was the gateway to unlocking a lifetime of rumination on Christ and his Passion. The sixteen revelations all stem from this one image of the crucifixion. This is the centre of the spider’s web, and imagining Julian, lying on the floor of her room at the doors of death, a crucifix held before her eyes, it becomes the hub of a wheel of ideas that span out from this potent image of suffering, pain, salvation and hope.

In this respect Julian differs from two of her fellow medieval mystics: Walter Hilton and The Cloud of Unknowing author. They caution that the mind should not focus on images but should move beyond these:

When you pray withdraw your heart from all earthly things, for spiritual things are known by the intellect and not by the imagination.4

In the way Julian describes seeing Christ on the cross it is clear she is overwhelmed by the physicality of her visions. She describes the blood in three rather domesticated, normal ways, as pellets, as the scales of herrings and as water dripping from eaves. These are all very homely comparisons, which suggest Julian had run a household in her time before becoming an anchorite. The word ‘pellet’ seems to refer to a measure of flour, which came rolled up in a ball mixed with cereal.5 The water running down from eaves would most likely have been a continual trickle, flowing between the reeds on thatched roofs. Finally the herring scales create the impression of Julian scaling a fish, bought from the busy harbour in Norwich. All three are unusual but appropriate images to suggest the globules and trickles of Christ’s blood, and show how Julian’s mind could leap from a divine revelation to another set of visual recollections. As the eaves, herring scales and pellets are real and tangible, so to her was Christ’s blood at his crucifixion.

She seems to be surprised herself at how tangible this blood appears. She could have reacted with histrionics, and her visions could have been laden with sexual references, drama and extreme ascetics. Yet rather than being horrified and disturbed by this vivid, bloody image, Julian says that she finds ‘homely comfort’ in it. ‘Soothly it is more joyful to me than if he gave me great gifts … the most joy that might be to my sight.’ From the horrors of the world, she moves through the pain of Christ’s crucifixion, to a point of transcendence whereby there is complete peace and love in this most vivid of images.

Julian and love

In a time of turmoil, war, conflict between families as one fights for one pope and another for an antipope, and accusations of heresy and death are around every corner, Julian’s insistence on the importance of love is startling:

And he who loves in this way is saved, and so I wish to love, and so I do love, and so I am saved.

(Short Text, Chapter 6)

The rhetorical device of ‘the rule of three’ serves Julian well here, yet the equation of unconditional love with safety was perhaps a difficult one to convince people of at a time of widespread betrayal and violence. But for Julian love emanates from, and is unconditionally supplied by, God. Her visions focus clearly on the cross, Christ’s passion and suffering, yet her mantra throughout is ‘love was his meaning’. She even opens the book with the phrase ‘this is a revelation of love’. The love does not, however, stem from one direction, from the crucifix before her, or from a god who sits in heaven. Her concept of God is not of a being ‘on high’, to whom we look ‘up’. Instead, he is in all directions, in everything, everywhere. Her God is in the very ground, and grounds us all:

there is a spreading outwards of length, and breadth, and of height and of depth without end, and all is one love.

(Chapter 59)

The way everything is permeated with love combines with Julian’s insistence on our own ‘blindness’. According to her vision of God, he has always been present in everything, and has always been imparting unconditional love, but our own blindness has made this difficult to see. That her visions open her to the opportunity to see his love is a message Julian repeats again and again throughout her work. While Julian’s contemporary mystics, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and the Cloud author, all write for a specific recluse, giving them individual guidance on their path to salvation, Julian writes ‘for all my fellow Christians’. Her world is not stratified into layers of more and less worthy, more and less sinful. Instead she sees everyone as deserving and in receipt of the same degree of God’s love.

Another facet of love that Julian develops at something of tangent to her contemporaries is the idea of mercy. The idea of a judgemental God, sitting enthroned at the end of days, sending souls to heaven or hell, is one that was very familiar to Julian. Sermons delivered from the pulpit at weekly mass would contain constant reminders to the congregation that they will be judged for their actions, and many churches would contain ‘doom paintings’ or images of the Last Judgement. As the Church encouraged people to look to themselves in fear of justice, so the state imposed rigid sets of rules and regulations. As fourteenth-century society was stratified in terms of class and gender, so it was rigidly organized with regard to the justice system.

In 1389, when Julian was a middle-aged woman, a law was passed in Parliament that limited pardons for violent crimes. This reflects a widespread desire to punish malefactors severely, and the punishments were often designed to invoke terror. Public executions were widespread, and were seen as a legitimate form of punishment, designed to combat wanton and uncontrolled violence. Ears and hands could be cut off, individuals could be racked, burned and pulled apart by beasts, people were hung, drawn and quartered, and flogging was common as one of the least violent forms of justice. In the face of such a rigid judicial system, Julian again surprises her readers with the loving concept of mercy she stresses throughout her Revelations. If God is all-loving, he must show mercy to those he loves.

Julian does not see justice as superior to mercy, and this is made very clear in the parable of a lord and servant that she includes in the Long Text. Julian recounts how she saw ‘two persons in bodily form, that is to say, a lord and a servant’. There is a great bond between the two, and the lord looks on the servant ‘most lovingly and sweetly’. The lord sends the servant out on an errand, and the servant willingly rushes to do his bidding ‘because of his love to do his lord’s will’. Yet the servant falls in a pit and injures himself gravely and ends up ‘waiting in woe’ because he cannot turn back to see his lord. The lord does not blame the servant, but rather is full of concern and love for him. He could punish the servant for failing to complete his task, falling from his path and erring, but instead he sees that the servant has come to harm because he has been faithfully and lovingly serving him.

The lord then states:

what harm and distress he has received in my service for love of me, yes, and because of his good will! Is it not reasonable that I should recompense him for his fright and his dread, his hurt and his injury and all his misery?

(Chapter 51)

Instead of judging his servant, he rewards him. The servant’s plain tunic is replaced with a glorious, colourful gown. The idea of ‘universalism’ – the belief that all humankind will be saved – is strong here, and would have sat uncomfortably alongside traditional fourteenth-century Christianity. Yet Julian is stressing the point that a loving lord will be merciful. In place of the biblical Fall, she has the servant literally fall into a pit – something accidental, unintentional and morally neutral.6 The love of God means that there is no suggestion of forgiveness in this parable, since that implies rules and judgement. Instead there is pure compassion, as the lord feels the love of his servant and reciprocates this love. Julian is sailing close to the wind here, and the parable of a lord and servant is one point in Revelations where Julian shows quite clearly her tolerant stance in contrast to the more judgemental teachings of ‘Holy Church’.

Julian’s understanding of love is not that it moves in one direction but that it is entirely reciprocal. She receives her visions because she already loves God, and as she contemplates them, withdraws to her anchor-hold and continues to ruminate on Christ’s Passion, she grows in love. In turn she receives more understanding that ‘love was his meaning’, and all pondering on her visions will continue to lead back to that one revelation of love:

And fifteen years and more later, I was answered in my spiritual understanding, and it was said: ‘Do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this? Be well aware: love was his meaning. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love.

(Chapter 86)

This love is unlike that described by other theologians of the time, particularly in one respect; Julian likens it consistently to the unconditional love of a mother.

God as mother

There is an interesting difference between the Short and Long texts of Julian’s Revelations. In the shorter text, which she may have had recorded earlier in her life, she shows an awareness that her femininity holds her back. In distancing herself from accusations of ‘teaching’ or ‘preaching’, she writes:

for I am a woman, ignorant, weak, and frail. But I know very well that what I am saying I have received through revelation from him who is the supreme teacher.

(Short Text, Chapter 6)

Yet when she reworks her ideas in the Long Text the insecurities in her gender, and also her education, are removed. Instead, the longer version attempts to work the female aspects of spirituality, revelation, and even the divine, into the text more completely.

A theme that has caught the attention of feminist readers of Julian’s text is her understanding of God as both loving father and mother.7 Out of 86 chapters, five are dedicated to expanding the idea of God as mother. This sounds radical from a modern perspective: were medieval writers, with their misogynistic treatment of women, really able to conceive of the deity in female terms? Julian was in fact following a tradition of perceiving God as mother established centuries earlier, and expanded by such writers as Bernard of Clairvaux and Anselm of Canterbury. In this respect she is not revolutionary, and is treading on suitably traditional ground.

However, the ways in which she expands this idea, bringing her own femininity into the accounts and creating a homely image of God, are unique and fascinating. What’s more, she does not simply introduce the idea of a feminine aspect to God to create emotional impact, as earlier writers do. To her, God is equally male and female: ‘As truly as God is our father, so truly is God our mother.’

Julian’s understanding of God as mother is not restricted to five chapters of the book – it permeates the whole, and seems to be a lynchpin rooting all her ideas about the divine. That Julian may have been a mother herself is suggested by the intimate love she describes God having for his creation, and the emphasis she places on seeing God’s love as enclosing like a womb. Again, this may strike modern readers as radical, but womb imagery was expounded by a number of medieval theologians. In terms of the design of monasteries, the central cloister was understood as the womb, a place of enclosure at the very centre of the monastery where monks and nuns found sanctuary.

Julian writes of being enclosed in love, like a child in the womb. Whether this comes from theological texts, or from her own experience of growing a child in utero, it becomes a powerful image that continues the idea of God’s love being everywhere – upwards, in the ground, in all creation, and even inside us:

For as the body is clad in cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the chest, so are we, soul and body, clad and enclosed in the goodness of God.

(Chapter 6)

Julian identifies with the unconditional love of a mother, which ‘will not be broken by our offences’. This lies in contrast with the conditional love of a father, who rewards his child for good behaviour. Walter Hilton understands the love of God as achieved by degrees, like an ascent up a ladder. The more sinless a life you lead, the better works you do, the more you will deserve the father’s love. Julian’s attitudes towards God as mother tie in with her attitudes towards sin. A mother will forgive anything a child does because of the overwhelming sense of love, born from having grown the child inside of herself. This is the love Julian can see in God.

The idea of a mother watching her child in its falling and blindness is also reflected in the system of mercy Julian has developed. In the parable of a lord and servant, the cloak that the servant receives is blue, symbolizing steadfastness. The blue mantle of the Virgin Mary is something frequently emphasized in medieval art, and is bound up with the idea of the mother as merciful. If the servant ‘falls’, God as mother will look on with mercy, and reward the servant’s climb up from the pit.

Julian develops her idea of both God and Christ as mother more fully in the Long Text than in the Short Text. Alongside this, she subsumes Mary within the son, becoming an aspect of the ‘sensualite’ or humanity of Christ.8 For her, Christ is the mother and an intimate part of Mother Church. She is not redefining the Trinity, although her conflation of the Virgin Mary with her son is very developed in her work. She very specifically only uses the masculine pronoun when referring to Christ, so phrases will run: ‘Our mother Christ, he gave us …’. Yet throughout Julian has managed to feminize Christ by conflating him with his own mother, creating an allegory of Mary as understanding, grace and sensuality, combined with Christ as the caring, loving saviour who would die rather than see those he loves suffer. Mary as mother of Christ feels everything, and is the emotional conduit for Julian, herself enclosed in the feelings and emotions her visions have ignited. So she sees her love for Jesus as reflecting that of his mother, and similarly she sees herself as a ‘lover’ of Christ.

Julian and desire

The potency of Julian’s prose is achieved partly through the glorious Middle English in which she frames her thoughts, but also through the vocabulary of desire that permeates the text. Reading her visions can be an unsettling experience, as Julian manages to capture the intensity of what she witnesses through language that makes the reader yearn and ache along with her. This is not the sexually charged description from Margery Kempe, but it is visceral, vivid and emotive. ‘From first to last her spirituality is permeated with longing for God.’9

Even before receiving her visions, Julian describes how she has a desire for three ‘graces’ – three experiences for which she longed. She wished to have a recollection of the Passion, a bodily illness that would bring her to death but not actually kill her, and the ‘three wounds’ of contrition, compassion and longing with the will of God. That a young woman could desire such painful experiences may seem strange, but medieval affective piety was such that it was thought such sensations could bring an individual towards understanding the pain Christ experienced on the cross, and so gain greater unity with him.

(Chapter 2)

It is also important to remember what Norwich was like in young Julian’s lifetime. When many family members and friends were succumbing to the most excruciating and painful death brought about by plague, then the opportunity to find solace in Christ’s suffering must have seemed like a hopeful perspective on an otherwise bleak outlook. Julian’s prayers were answered, and at the age of thirty she was brought to the gates of death by illness. As she had wished, she was then miraculously saved, did not perish, and so could move on through vivid recollections of the Passion to the ‘three wounds’. Revelations of Divine Love is her response to many decades of extra life she was granted to ruminate on the recollections, and get closer to the contrition, compassion and longing she desired. The longing in particular would preoccupy her to the end of her days.

Women were encouraged to visualize themselves as wedded to Christ, to long for him and to empathize with his pain as a wife would with that of her husband. The Ancrene Wisse used vivid language to suggest that the anchoress should see herself as a bride of Christ. Indeed, it was an anxiety of many fourteenth-century writers that solitude and exclusion from community (monastic or lay) could lead to an overly vivid interior life, powered by sensual and sexual imaginings. Although anchoritism was sanctioned by the Church, there were anxieties about the devotional freedoms that might grow within the confines of an unsupervised private cell. Manuals of instruction were designed to guide the anchoress, in terms of both her inner feelings and outer actions.

Another instructional text for anchoresses, Holy Maidenhood, contrasts the life of a married woman with that of a virgin. While a wife must submit to her husband’s sexual desire and expect domestic violence, endure the vileness of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth, a virgin has a peaceful and elegant life, which will lead to a privileged place in heaven. Sexual desires are to be purged from the anchoress through regular confession to a holy man or cleric, so that they do not stay within and multiply. There were concerns that anchor-holds might be used as brothels, since they were private and unsupervised, but no reports of such activities have survived, which suggests that, on the whole, anchoresses followed the advice of their guides, and suppressed their sexual desires.

The Ancrene Wisse accepts that anchoresses will have yearnings, perhaps even sexual ones, while enclosed in their cell. It harnesses these by channelling the anchoress towards Christ, suggesting she consider him her spouse, for to forbid is also to tempt. The union between anchoress and Christ, however, is not couched in the language of the Fall. Instead it is full of desire, but stripped of sexual terminology.

Julian moves beyond the sexually implicit language of fellow female mystics such as Margery Kempe, preferring instead to see desire as something important and purifying. It is only through fully desiring an intimacy with Christ on a spiritual level that she will gain any understanding of the full intensity of his love for her. Throughout Julian’s text she speaks of love coming almost relentlessly from God, while the individual has to cure himself or herself of blindness and the wounds of sin in order to truly see it. This is not a love-sick woman pining for her lord but rather a slowly unfolding awareness of love, driven by desire to understand and to get closer. Julian’s visions leave her constantly out of reach, aware that there is so much more to understand, and the desire comes through most strongly in her continual striving to get to the next point of experiential revelation. Yet one barrier to desire, longing and love is sin; the recurring yoke of previous misdeeds that weighs heavy on every soul.

Julian and sin

The modern view of medieval Christianity is that it was dogmatic, particularly with regard to sin. Numerous images or sculptures survive depicting the Last Judgement, with the saved securing a place in the comfort of heaven, while the damned – the sinners - languish in hell. The Last Judgement would be painted or sculpted on the west door of many churches, or above the chancel arch, where it separated the clergy from the lay congregation. Known as ‘doom paintings’, these would often be the last thing people would see as they left the church, reminding them that they should avoid sin as they re-enter the world. In Julian’s Norfolk there are surviving doom paintings at Attleborough, West Somerton and Bradfield. She would have seen images of the saved and the damned, and her ever-compassionate mind would have worried away at the problem of sin.

Traditionally in representations of the Last Judgement, Christ sits in the centre, with heaven to his right and hell to his left, St Peter guarding one door and the devil the other. In hell, sinners are shown enduring all manner of torments, depending on which sins they committed in life. In the tympanum at Sainte Foy in Conques, for example, usurers are shown hanging from a bag of coins like Judas, adulterers are hung naked next to their lovers, and liars have their tongues pulled out. The many sins (some more heinous than others) a human being could commit were carefully enumerated. Dante describes these most vividly in his Divine Comedy, completed before Julian was born, around 1320. By the time Julian wrote Revelations of Divine Love, very clear outlines were in place regarding which sins deserved which punishment, and the concept of purgatory was firmly established as ‘God’s waiting room’. Through payment of indulgences, the patronage of monastic organizations, and a sequence of prayers, individuals could ensure a quicker transition from purgatory to heaven: money talks, and the threat of purgatory for even those who had not committed terrible sins, alongside that of hell, kept clerics, monks and friars in pocket.

In Julian’s youth she would have frequently encountered images, texts and sermons encouraging her to veer away from sin, to receive confession and to remember the fate of her soul at all times. When the average life expectancy was around forty, it is unsurprising that people would want to consider a sinless life on earth in exchange for an eternity in paradise. The ideas of heaven, hell, purgatory and the Last Judgement were not something medieval people chose to believe in or not – there was no alternative, and although some may have questioned their exact natures, they were firmly and tangibly believed in. As this earthly life is real, so was the afterlife. This is an important point to consider when viewing medieval attitudes to sin from our modern perspective. To sin was to secure yourself a place for eternity in the never-ending punishments of hell. If you could maintain thirty, forty, fifty years on earth without breaking the rules, you would get a never-ending paradise.

Given the proliferation of images and sermons on sin, Julian’s approach to the subject is surprising. True the tide was turning, and the work of Wycliffe and others sought to do away with purgatory, indulgences and confession in favour of seeing God as the only judge. But ‘Holy Church’, as Julian describes it, was still clear in its attitudes towards sin. ‘We might plausibly see the primary theme of the Long Text as the fruit of her meditation on the problem of evil and its remedy.’10 Surrounded by evidence of sin, in the acts of bishops, crusaders and clerics, and faced with the consequences of evil behaviour, as the Black Death and Great Schism were perceived, Julian had good cause to ruminate on this issue. Yet the conclusions she draws are remarkably open-minded. Perhaps formed through her early life outside the anchor-hold, or through interaction with a cross-section of society at her cell window, Julian declares that ‘there is no sin’.

The idea that God himself created no sin is not a new one. That God left a space, if you like, within humanity for ‘free will’ led to the Fall of Adam and Eve, and to all consequent evil choices made by humans. This was seen as a theological way around the perceived errors of God’s perfect creation, made in his own image. Sin comes from our freedom to choose, but never directly from God. Yet this ‘free-will debate’ is ultimately profitless, since if God is able to create an existence in which sin exists through free will, why did he not choose to create a better world in which there was no sin? This is just one of the cyclically problematic dialogues medieval theologians engaged with. But Julian, in contrast, has a clear, unflinching and unwavering attitude towards sin.

Julian qualifies her ideas on sin with the statement that ‘sin is behovely’, which is a term at once both ambiguous and distinctly Julian in its intent.11 ‘Behovely’ is almost always translated as ‘necessary’, but this fails to take on board the nuance Julian intended in the word. Rather we should consider that sin ‘fits’ against a backdrop in which it is necessary, and which makes sense of it. We could call Julian’s views ‘cosmic’ in terms of their reach, summed up by her hazelnut analogy and born from contemplation on the great questions: ‘Who am I? Do I exist? What is existence? Do I matter?’ A number of ‘prayer nuts’ survive from the late medieval period. These are often incredibly highly carved, and an example from the British Museum measures 6 cms across. They contain a wealth of religious images for an individual to open up and contemplate, seeking an understanding of deeper spiritual truths through a nut held in the palm of the hand. We could project Julian’s ideas into our own space-age time, whereby we contemplate all humanity as atoms within an almost unbearably large universe. On this sort of a scale an individual person’s sin becomes part of the fabric; it is necessary in the sense that it exists within a web of consequences and events, but it is still so tiny in the eyes of a loving God.

If a person has sinned, in the eyes of the fourteenth-century Church, then there begins a cycle of guilt, confession and reparation. Yet Julian would argue that it is unnecessary, since sin is ‘behovely’; that is, the sin has become part of what has been – it was necessary in terms of its fit within the narrative of existence. To consider that her God, who is forgiving and loving like a mother, would punish his creation for eternity due to an individual sin, already part of the fabric of the past, fails to take account of the breadth of his love.

Seen within a medieval Christian world-view, this divine patience witnesses to the sense that wickedness, destruction and sin are all happening continually on our little planet, but that there is an unfolding of time (what biblical scholars sometimes call ‘salvation history’), which means these evils become part of a much wider narrative. In Julian’s text this gives rise to a characteristic calm, which comes through most strikingly in her treatment of sin. As she believes that ‘all shall be well’, so must she believe that ‘sin is behovely’, since it is part of the unfolding story of God’s design. Yet she is not passive in the face of sin:

We must feel a naked hatred for sin, and love the soul as God loves it without end. Then we shall hate sin just as God hates it, and love the soul as God loves it.

(Chapter 40)

She believes that, while there is terrible suffering and injustice, criminality and cruelty, these fly in the face of the overall scheme God has devised; a scheme that is founded on love. If we can sin in the knowledge that God loves us then that is for our own soul to bear.

There is an interesting change between the Short and Long Texts of Julian’s Revelations with regard to sin. In the Short Text she cites a range of sinners who received forgiveness, including Mary Magdalene, Peter and Paul, Thomas and King David. Yet in the Long Text these are replaced with one fascinating example: the now lost story of St John of Beverley. We know virtually nothing of this saint, as his life has disappeared along with those of many other British saints:

in his youth and in his tender years he was a beloved servant of God, greatly loving and fearing God. And nevertheless God allowed him to fall, mercifully protecting him so that he did not perish nor forfeit any time; and afterwards God raised him to many times more grace.

(Chapter 38)

In the 1990s a Dutch account of ‘Jan van Beverley’ was discovered, which gives some flesh to John’s story. He was the son of a powerful English earl, who chose to live as a hermit. The devil visited him in the form of an angel and told him he must choose one of three sins to avoid damnation: drunkenness, unchastity or murder. He chose drunkenness, since he thought this the least damaging of the three. While under the influence of drink he was visited by his sister, whom he didn’t recognize, then raped and murdered; he committed all three of the devil’s sins. Overcome with grief, he decided to do penance by walking only on all fours, letting his hair grow all over his body, drinking only water and eating grass, until a newborn child will absolve him of his sin. Seven years later this happens; he returns to his sister’s grave to find her miraculously alive, and his sins are forgiven.

If Julian knew an account of John of Beverley’s life that had some or all of these elements, then her citation of him as a forgiven sinner is all the more astounding. The fact that it is found in a Dutch manuscript may not be so surprising when considering the trade links between Norwich and Flanders. His saint’s life is one of the most dramatic examples of sin, combining the ‘hairy anchorite’ motif with that of the devil’s three temptations. John was a native English saint, and it is likely his story was well known, given the lack of information Julian includes from it. Presumably she thought her readers would know of this legendary sinner. By citing someone with whom people would have been familiar, Julian is holding up a strong and relevant example. She is showing how God’s ability to absorb all sin is extended to those who strive through ‘service and labour’ to love him. She states that she herself had sinned, and yet:

Our Lord in his special grace visits whomever he wishes with such great contrition, and also with compassion and a true longing for God. Then they are suddenly freed from sin and from pain.

(Chapter 39)

It is God who is active in this relationship, not the sinner. God delivers compassion and true longing, which heal and reward the sinner. This is a reversal of ‘striving for perfection’ presented in Rolle’s or the Cloud author’s texts. If anything, it is sin, both Julian’s own and that of all her fellow Christians, that brought about the ‘gift’ of true longing for God’s love. Sin is the vehicle by which one reaches this understanding, so sin is not just absolved, it is part of what it means to be able to truly engage with God. It is ‘behovely’. We need to be wounded in order to heal, and so the wounds of sin are the means by which we recognize the need for mercy, compassion, grace and love. The Ancrene Wisse touches on this:

They who love most shall be most blessed, not they who lead the most austere life, for love outweigheth this.

(Ancrene Wisse, Chapter 7)

But Julian extends this even further. It is not about austerity, or forgiveness, or perfection. It is about love. The understanding that God wants to give all his loved ones the gift of freedom from sin through love is a radical and almost unique aspect of Julian’s spiritual view.

Julian’s strength

A characteristic of Julian’s writing that is worth stressing, but frequently overlooked, is the idea of inner strength. At a number of points she emphasizes that, while life can be incredibly challenging, full of suffering, pain and punishments, God wants us to know we are strong enough to survive them because of his unconditional love. She uses the phrase ‘you shall not be overcome’ in an emphatic way, as the culmination of some powerful rhetoric:

And these words, ‘You shall not be overcome’, were said very distinctly and very powerfully for assurance and comfort against all the tribulations that may come. He did not say, ‘You shall not be perturbed, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be distressed’, but he said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’

(Chapter 68)

In response to the age-old question of why a loving God would allow his beloved children to suffer, die, experience hardship, Julian gives this response. The world is full of pain and suffering, and all of us will be afflicted. But because of his love, while we experience the suffering, we will be strong enough not to be overcome. Julian has a remarkable view of time, whereby those things that have happened, and have become the past, do not affect the overall positivity and joy to be found in the eternal love of God. This is what she means by saying ‘thou shalt not be overcome’. There will be challenges, but the bigger picture, for those who can see it, is one of positivity and hope. Strength, understanding, compassion, patience; these all have their place, but the ultimate thing to hold on to is that ‘all shall be well’.

Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love is not a self-help manual. It will not give readers a guide to spiritual progress or self-improvement. We cannot learn spirituality according to Julian, but rather it is something that happens to us through being wounded and healed. Instead of trying to improve ourselves on the ‘Ladder of Perfection’ recommended by both medieval writers such as Hilton and more recent authors of self-help guides, Julian encourages us to see how impoverished, wounded and in need of love we are. Only by removing ourselves further will we see the bigger picture and our part in it. We are ultimately saved and joyful, because we are part of God’s love. We cannot make ourselves better, more deserving, more austere, in order to secure this love. We simply have to give ourselves up to it, and then we shall ‘not be overcome’.

One of Julian’s greatest strengths is to see joy and happiness in spite of pain, sin and suffering. Hers is an incredibly happy text, permeated with optimism throughout, and even revelling in laughter. When she describes how, in the fifth revelation, she saw evil incarnate in the devil, and how it was rendered redundant by the Passion of Christ, she describes laughing:

At the sight of this I laughed heartily, and that made those who were around me to laugh, and their laughter was a pleasure to me. In my thoughts I wished that all my fellow Christians had seen what I saw, and then they would all have laughed with me.

(Chapter 13)

Julian is the eternal optimist, someone we can cling to in dark days because somehow she sees a bigger picture behind the daily chaos. She can laugh at something so terrible because she feels loved, secure and safe. We can read her text and find similar comfort.

Existentialist, transcendentalist, perennialist or unique?

Albert Einstein saw great value in the mystical experience, likening it to his moments of awareness and revelation:

The most profound and sublime experience of which man is capable is the awareness of the mystical. In it lie the seeds of true science.12

To many, the real essence of mystical texts comes from the representation of time and space they present. As a result, mystical texts have not only fascinated theologians, literary scholars and artists, but also scientists, mathematicians, astrologers and philosophers. While most people experience time linearly, with past, present and future lined up as a series of memories, experiences and ambitions, the mystic sees a dimension outside this. Julian describes it as seeing the world as a hazelnut that nestles in the palm of her hand, and she, like the majority of mystics, presents this transcendental perspective as one of positivity, hope and joy:

And in this he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand … In this little thing I saw three properties: the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; the third is that God cares for it. But what is that to me? Truly, the maker, the carer, and the lover. For until I am of one substance with him I can never have complete rest nor true happiness; that is to say, until I am so joined to him that there is no created thing between my God and me.

(Chapter 5)

Reaching this level of understanding requires the mystic to leave behind the noise and confusion of daily life, step away to a place of quiet contemplation, and meditate on spiritual rather than earthly matters.

In Julian’s ‘hazelnut’ there is a sense of the fragility of the universe, such a little thing poised on extinction, but there is ultimately hope because it is loved by God. The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield took God out of the equation, but what he described of his experience in space had something of Julian’s hazelnut about it. Seeing Earth from afar allowed him to perceive in its wars, violence and destruction a longer narrative, by which it will wait patiently across time and stay secure:

What started seeping into me on, I don’t know, my second-thousandth time around the world, seeing all the ancient scars, was the incredible temporal patience of the world.13

Julian’s quiet calm and patience in her book is in sharp contrast to her fellow medieval mystics, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and The Cloud of Unknowing author. In their search to achieve perfection, and so deserve the love of God the father, they urge their readers constantly, and at times frantically, to strive in their efforts. ‘Quickly, set yourself to work’, encourages the Cloud author, while Hilton states, ‘you must constantly desire and strive’.14 Julian does not have such an emphasis on the climb of a wretched soul towards perfection. Instead she sees everyone in a childlike state, and uses passive constructions, such as ‘we are brought’ to suggest a gradual and slow unfolding. This calm tone permeates the text and is perhaps born out of the many years Julian had to slowly analyse and appreciate her own revelations.

The inward gaze of Julian’s text could be likened to the work of existentialist philosophers, who look to the thinking and feeling human individual as the gateway to understanding complex truths about existence. Philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, who is widely recognized as the originator of existentialism, believed that authenticity was the most powerful way of finding meaning in life. Only by living passionately and sincerely can an individual come to make sense of what appears at times an absurd world. Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love pre-dates the emergence of existentialism by some five centuries, yet she does present a view that is truly authentic, in terms of being rooted firmly in her own visions and experiences, and that looks beyond the chaos around her to more profound truths. But Julian is no existentialist. The principle of ‘existence before essence’ would sit uncomfortably with a fourteenth-century Catholic who believed in an all-knowing God who has a pattern in place for his creation. While she does seem to be open to alternatives with regard to predestination, Julian would not have believed so completely in the power of the self to define, craft and create itself.

Julian is no existentialist, although her work could be misread to fit its ends. She can also be read in the light of another important nineteenth-century philosophic movement – transcendentalism. Born of German and English Romanticism, transcendentalists saw the truly self-reliant and resilient individual as the core of community. Certainly, it is the ‘littleness’ of things that interests Julian, as she seeks to rise above creation to see a broader picture:

It seemed to me that this little thing that is made might have disintegrated into nothing because of its smallness. We need to know about this so as to delight in setting at nought everything that is made in order to love and possess God who is unmade.

(Chapter 5)

Given the transcendentalist’s approach that society, its institutions, politics and religion all corrupt, we could see Julian’s deliberate silence on the events that surrounded her as a way of tapping into the ‘over-soul’ of God. The idea of accessing the inner essence of humanity lay at the heart of the American transcendental movement. Yet Edgar Allan Poe claimed it was ‘mysticism for mysticism’s sake’; something that cannot be laid at Julian’s door.

Julian creates an impression of God as the essential essence that imbues, underpins and inspires everything. This universal spirit is something many modern philosophers and thinkers have grappled with. In the fourteenth century, to express an idea of God not as a bearded, judgemental man in the sky but as an essential quality of all creation could be seen as radical. Today the notion of perennialism has been introduced, to express the underlying unifying factors between all world religions and belief systems. This suggests that specific religions are adapted to the social and intellectual needs of a specific place in a specific time, but that individual mystics and philosophers have been able to access a core set of truths. These include summum bonum, a belief in an ultimate goodness, which sees individuals as able to achieve communion with God, and an experiential union with the divine. Julian arguably achieved both. While she was firmly rooted in fourteenth-century Catholicism, and did not want to be perceived as anything other than a devout follower of ‘Holy Church’, she was able to tap into these perennial truths as only a few great philosophers have managed.

She can barely see a divide between our own souls and that of the divine:

God is nearer to us than our own soul; for he is the foundation on which our soul stands … for our soul sits in God in true rest, and our soul stands in God in sure strength, and our soul is naturally rooted in God in endless love. And therefore if we want to have knowledge of our soul, and communion and discourse with it, we must seek for it in our Lord God, in whom it is enclosed.

(Chapter 56)

Now we can label this sort of cosmic awareness transcendentalism, existentialism or perennialism. Yet what Julian was doing was something thinkers across time and space have sought to do. Aldous Huxley, the English novelist who wrote Brave New World, set in a dystopian London, also wrote a book entitled The Perennial Philosophy. In it he drew together the words and ideas of mystics across time, in search of the themes and ideas that united them:

The rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago.15

Julian is not a perennial philosopher; indeed, she may have baulked at the way her text has been misread and given New Age slants of every variety. But she was tapping into a mystical tradition that sought access to what Huxley calls ‘the Highest Common Factor’, and she calls ‘the unconditional love of mother Jesus’. Julian was not trying to be a philosopher, but rather was trying to make sense of her own existence and her own visions. That she did so in such a humble, accessible and honest way is perhaps why she is attracting a new readership today. That her message still resonates is testament to the universality of her message.

Despite apparent similarities between these more recent philosophical stances and Julian’s Revelations, she is not representative of these modern approaches to the divine. Her God, while complex, embracing the role of mother and father, and loving unconditionally, is still a firmly Christian one. Her world-view is framed by the intellectual and spiritual fabric of fourteenth-century Western Christianity, and to use her as a conduit for modern philosophical thought is to do her a disservice. She was not fully of her time, she is not fully of ours; her words resonate across the centuries to all people, but do not need harnessing to a particular group or approach.