"One of the most remarkable books of the middle ages," writes Father
Dalgairns, [1] "is the hitherto almost unknown work, titled, _Sixteen
Revelations of Divine Love made to a Devout Servant of God, called
Mother Juliana, an Anchoress of Norwich_" How "one of the most
remarkable books" should be "hitherto almost unknown," may be explained
partly by the fact to which the same writer draws attention, namely,
that Mother Juliana lived and wrote at the time when a certain mystical
movement was about to bifurcate and pursue its course of development,
one branch within the Church on Catholic lines, the other outside the
Church along lines whose actual issue was Wycliffism and other kindred
forms of heterodoxy, and whose logical outcome was pantheism. Hence,
between the language of these pseudo-mystics and that of the recluse of
Norwich, "there is sometimes a coincidence ... which might deceive the
unwary." It is almost necessarily a feature of every heresy to begin by
using the language of orthodoxy in a strained and non-natural sense, and
only gradually to develop a distinctive terminology of its own; but, as
often as not, certain ambiguous expressions, formerly taken in an
orthodox sense, are abandoned by the faithful on account of their
ambiguity and are then appropriated to the expression of heterodoxy, so
that eventually by force of usage the heretical meaning comes to be the
principal and natural meaning, and any other interpretation to seem
violent and non-natural. "The few coincidences," continues Father
Dalgairns, "between Mother Juliana and Wycliffe are among the many
proofs that the same speculative view often means different things in
different systems. Both St. Augustine, Calvin, and Mahomet, believe in
predestination, yet an Augustinian is something utterly different from a
Scotch Cameronian or a Mahometan.... The idea which runs through the
whole of Mother Juliana is the very contradictory of Wycliffe's
Pantheistic Necessitarianism." Yet on account of the mere similarity of
expression we can well understand how in the course of time some of
Mother Juliana's utterances came to be more ill-sounding to faithful
ears in proportion as they came to be more exclusively appropriated by
the unorthodox. It is hard to be as vigilant when danger is remote as
when it is near at hand; and until heresy has actually wrested them to
its purpose it is morally impossible that the words of ecclesiastical
and religious writers should be so delicately balanced as to avoid all
ambiguities and inaccuracies. Still less have we a right to look for
such exactitude in the words of an anchoress who, if not wholly
uneducated in our sense of the word, yet on her own confession "could no
letter," i.e., as we should say, was no scholar, and certainly made no
pretence to any skill in technical theology. But however much some of
her expressions may jar with the later developments of Catholic
theology, it must be remembered, as has been said, that they were
current coin in her day, common to orthodox and unorthodox; and that
though their restoration is by no means desirable, yet they are still
susceptive of a "benignant" interpretation. "I pray Almighty God," says
Mother Juliana in concluding, "that this book come not but into the
hands of those that will be His faithful lovers, and that will submit
them to the faith of Holy Church." [2] And indeed such can receive no
possible harm from its perusal, beyond a little temporary perplexity to
be dispelled by inquiry; and this only in the case of those who are
sufficiently instructed and reflective to perceive the discord in
question. The rest are well used in their reading to take what is
familiar and to leave what is strange, so that they will find in her
pages much to ponder, and but a little to pass over.
It is, however, not only to these occasional obscurities and ambiguities
that we are to ascribe the comparative oblivion into which so remarkable
a book has fallen; but also to the fact that its noteworthiness is
perhaps more evident and relative to us than to our forefathers. It
cannot but startle us to find doubts that we hastily look upon as
peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with
and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In
some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that
peculiar complexion which they assume in the light of Christianity. Yet,
owing to the modern spread of education, or rather to the indiscriminate
divulgation of ideas, these problems are now the possession of the man
in the street, whereas in former days they were exclusively the property
of minds capable--not indeed of answering the unanswerable, but at least
of knowing their own limitations and of seeing why such problems must
always exist as long as man is man. Dark as the age of Mother Juliana
was as regards the light of positive knowledge and information; yet the
light of wisdom burned at least as clearly and steadily then as now; and
it is by that light alone that the shades of unbelief can be dispelled.
Of course, wisdom without knowledge must starve or prey on its own
vitals, and this was the intellectual danger of the middle ages; but
knowledge without wisdom is so much food undigested and indigestible,
and this is the evil of our own day, when to be passably well-informed
so taxes our time and energy as to leave us no leisure for assimilating
the knowledge with which we have stuffed ourselves.
We must not, however, think of Mother Juliana as shut up within four
walls of a cell, evolving all her ideas straight from her own inner
consciousness without any reference to experience. Such a barren
contemplation, tending to mental paralysis, belongs to Oriental
pessimism, whose aim is the extinction of life, mental and physical, and
reabsorption into that void whence, it is said, misfortune has brought
us forth to troublous consciousness. The Christian contemplative knows
no ascent to God but by the ladder of creatures; he goes to the book of
Nature and of human life, and to the book of Revelation, and turns and
ponders their pages, line by line and word by word, and so feeds and
fills the otherwise thin and shadowy conception of God in his own soul,
and ever pours new oil upon the flame of Divine love. Father Daigairns
writes: "Juliana is a recluse very different from the creatures of the
imagination of writers on comparative morals. So far from being cut off
from sympathy with her kind, her mind is tenderly and delicately alive
to every change in the spiritual atmosphere of England.... The four
walls of her narrow home seem to be rent and torn asunder, and not only
England but Christendom appears before her view;" and he is at pains to
show how both anchorites and anchoresses were much-sought after by all
in trouble, temporal or spiritual, and how abundant were their
opportunities of becoming acquainted with human life and its burdens,
and of more than compensating, through the confidences of others,
whatever defect their minds might suffer through lack of personal
experience. Even still, how many a priest or nun whose experience had
else been narrowed to the petty domestic interests of a small family,
is, in virtue of his or her vocation, put in touch with a far larger
world, or with a far more important aspect of the world, than many who
mingle with its every-day trivialities, and is thus made a partaker in
some sense of the deeper life and experience of society and of the
Universal Church! The anchoress "did a great deal more than pray. The
very dangers against which the author of her rule [3] warns her, are a
proof that she had many visitors. He warns her against becoming a
'babbling' or 'gossiping' anchoress, a variety evidently well-known; a
recluse whose cell was the depository of all the news from the
neighbourhood at a time when newspapers did not exist." Such abuses
throw light upon the legitimate use of the anchoress's position in the
mediæval community.
And so, though Mother Juliana "could no letter," though she knew next to
nothing of the rather worthless physical science of those times, and
hardly more of philosophy or technical theology, yet she knew no little
of that busy, sad, and sinful human life going on round her, not only at
Norwich, but in England, and even in Europe; and rich with this
knowledge, to which all other lore is subordinate and for whose sake
alone it is valuable, she betook herself to prayer and meditation, and
brought all this experience into relation with God, and drew from it an
ever clearer understanding of Him and of His dealings with the souls
that His Love has created and redeemed.
It is not then so wonderful that this wise and holy woman should have
faced the problems presented by the apparent discord between the truths
of faith and the facts of human life--a discord which is felt in every
age by the observant and thoughtful, but which in our age is a
commonplace on the lips of even the most superficial. But an age takes
its tone from the many who are the children of the past, rather than
from the few who are the parents of the future. Mother Juliana's book
could hardly have been in any sense "popular" until these days of ours,
in which the particular disease of mind to which it ministers has become
epidemic.
If then these suggestions to some extent furnish an explanation of the
oblivion into which the revelations of Mother Juliana have fallen, they
also justify the following attempt to draw attention to them once more,
and to give some sort of analysis of their contents; more especially as
we have reason to believe that they are about to be re-edited by a
competent scholar and made accessible to the general public, which they
have not been since the comparative extinction of Richardson's edition
of 1877. Little is known of Mother Juliana's history outside what is
implied in her revelations; nor is it our purpose at present to go aside
in search of biographical details that will be of interest only after
their subject has become interesting. Suffice it here to say that she
was thirty at the time of her revelations, which she tells us was in
1373. Hence she was born in 1343, and is said to have been a
centenarian, in which case she must have died about 1443. She probably
belonged to the Benedictine nuns at Carrow, near Norwich, and being
called to a still stricter life, retired to a hermitage close by the
Church of St. Julian at Norwich. The details she gives about her own
sick-room exclude the idea of that stricter "reclusion" which is
popularly spoken of as "walling-up"--not of course in the mythical
sense.
With these brief indications sufficient to satisfy the craving of our
imagination for particulars of time and place, let us turn to her own
account of the circumstances of her visions, as well as of their nature.
She tells us that in her life previous to 1373, she had, at some time or
other, demanded three favours from God; first, a sensible appreciation
of Christ's Passion in such sort as to share the grace of Mary Magdalene
and others who were eye-witnesses thereof: "therefore I desired a bodily
sight wherein I might have more knowledge of the bodily pain of our
Saviour." And the motive of this desire was that she might "afterwards
because of that showing have the more true mind of the Passion of
Christ." Her aim was a deeper practical intelligence, and not the
gratification of mere emotional curiosity.
This grace she plainly recognizes as extraordinary; for she says: "Other
sight or showing of God asked I none, till when the soul was departed
from the body." Her second request was likewise for an extraordinary
grace; namely, for a bodily sickness which she and others might believe
to be mortal; in which she should receive the last sacraments, and
experience all the bodily pains, and all the spiritual temptations
incident to the separation of soul and body. And the motive of this
request was that she might be "purged by the mercy of God, and
afterwards live more to the worship of God because of that sickness." In
other words, she desired the grace of what we might call a
"trial-death," that so she might better meet the real death when it
came. Further, she adds, "this sickness I desired in my youth, that I
might have it when I was thirty years old." And "these two desires were
with a condition" (namely, if God should so will), "for methought this
was not the common use of prayer." But the third request she proffers
boldly "without any condition," since it was necessarily God's desire to
grant it and to be sued for it; namely, the grace of a three-fold wound:
the wound of true sorrow for sin; the wound of "kind compassion" with
Christ's sufferings; and the wound of "wilful belonging to God," that
is, of self-devotion.
She is careful to tell us that while she ever continued to urge the
unconditional third request, the two first passed completely out of her
head in the course of years, until she was reminded of them by their
simultaneous and remarkable fulfilment. "For when I was thirty years old
and a half, God sent me a bodily sickness in which I lay three days and
three nights; and on the fourth night I took all my rites of Holy
Church, and weened not to have lived till day. And after this I lay two
days and two nights, and on the third night I weened oftentimes to have
passed, and so weened they that were with me.... And I understood in my
reason, and by the feeling of my pains that I should die, and I assented
fully with all the will of my heart, to be at God's will. Thus I endured
till day, and by then, was my body dead to all feeling from the midst
down." She is then raised up in a sitting position for greater ease, and
her curate is sent for, as the end is supposed to be near. On arrival,
he finds her speechless and with her eyes fixed upwards towards heaven,
"where I trusted to come by the mercy of God." He places the crucifix
before her, and bids her bend her eyes upon it. "I assented to set my
eyes in the face of the crucifix if I could; and so I did; for methought
I could endure longer to look straight in front of me than right up"--a
touch that shows the previous upturning of the eyes to have been
voluntary and not cataleptic. At this moment we seem to pass into the
region of the abnormal: "After this my sight began to fail; it waxed as
dark about me in the chamber as if it had been night, save in the image
of the cross, wherein I beheld a common light, and I wist not how. And
all that was beside the cross was ugly and fearful to me, as it had been
much occupied with fiends." Then the upper part of her body becomes
insensible, and the only pain left is that of weakness and
breathlessness. Suddenly she is totally eased and apparently quite
cured, which, however, she regards as a momentary miraculous relief, but
not as a deliverance from death. In this breathing space it suddenly
occurs to her to beg for the second of those three wounds which were the
matter of her unconditional third request; namely, for a deepened sense
and sympathetic understanding of Christ's Passion. "But in this I never
desired any bodily sight, or any manner of showing from God; but such
compassion as I thought that a kind soul might have with our Lord
Jesus." In a word, the remembrance of her two conditional and
extraordinary requests of bygone years was not in her mind at the time.
"And in this, suddenly I saw the red blood trickling down from under the
garland;"--and so she passes from objective to subjective vision;[4] and
the first fifteen revelations follow, as she tells us later, one after
another in unbroken succession, lasting in all some few hours.
"I had no grief or no dis-ease," she tells us later, "as long as the
fifteen showings lasted in showing. And at the end all was close, and I
saw no more; and soon I felt that I should live longer." Presently all
her pains, bodily and spiritual, return in full force; and the
consolation of the visions seems to her as an idle dream and delusion;
and she answers to the inquiries of a Religious at her bedside, that she
had been raving: "And he laughed loud and drolly. And I said: 'The cross
that stood before my face, methought it bled fast.'" At which the other
looked so serious and awed that she became ashamed of her own
incredulity. "I believed Him truly for the time that I saw Him. And so
it was then my will and my meaning to do, ever without end--but, as a
fool, I let it pass out of my mind. And lo! how wretched I was," &c.
Then she falls asleep and has a terrifying dream of the Evil One, of
which she says: "This ugly showing was made sleeping and so was none
other," whence it seems that her self-consciousness was unimpaired in
the other visions; that is, she was aware at the time that they were
visions, and did not confound them with reality as dreams are
confounded. Then follows the sixteenth and last revelation; ending with
the words: "Wit well it was no raving thou sawest to-day: but take it,
and believe it, and keep thee therein, and comfort thee therewith and
trust thereto, and thou shalt not be overcome." Then during the rest of
the same night till about Prime next morning she is tempted against
faith and trust by the Evil One, of whose nearness she is conscious; but
comes out victorious after a sustained struggle. She understands from
our Lord, that the series of showings is now closed; "which blessed
showing the faith keepeth, ... for He left with me neither sign nor
token whereby I might know it." Yet for her personally the obligation
not to doubt is as of faith: "Thus am I bound to keep it in my faith;
for on the same day that it was showed, what time the sight was passed,
as a wretch I forsook it and openly said that I raved."
Fifteen years later she gets an inward response as to the general gist
and unifying purport of the sixteen revelations. "Wit it well; love was
His meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. Wherefore showed He it thee? For
love."
Having thus sketched the circumstances of the revelations, we may now
address ourselves to their character and substance.
There is nothing to favour and everything to disfavour the notion that
Mother Juliana was an habitual visionary, or was the recipient of any
other visions, than those which she beheld in her thirty-first year; and
of these, she tells us herself, the whole sixteen took place within a
few hours. "Now have I told you of fifteen showings, ... of which
fifteen showings, the first began early in the morning about the hour of
four, ... each following the other till it was noon of the day or past,
... and after this the Good Lord showed me the sixteenth revelation on
the night following." Speaking of them all as one, she tells us: "And
from the time it was showed I desired oftentimes to wit what was in our
Lord's meaning; and fifteen years after and more I was answered in
ghostly understanding, saying thus: 'What! wouldst thou wit thy Lord's
meaning in this thing? Wit it well: Love was His meaning.'" But this
"ghostly understanding" can hardly be pressed into implying another
revelation of the evidently supernormal type.
We rather insist on this point, as indicating the habitual healthiness
of Mother Juliana's soul--a quality which is also abundantly witnessed
by the unity and coherence of the doctrine of her revelations, which
bespeaks a mind well-knit together, and at harmony with itself. The
hysterical mind is one in which large tracts of consciousness seem to
get detached from the main body, and to take the control of the subject
for the time being, giving rise to the phenomena rather foolishly called
double or multiple "personality." This is a disease proper to the
passive-minded, to those who give way to a "drifting" tendency, and
habitually suffer their whole interests to be absorbed by the strongest
sensation or emotion that presents itself. Such minds are generally
chaotic and unorganized, as is revealed in the rambling, involved,
interminably parenthetical and digressive character of their
conversation. But when, as with Mother Juliana, we find unity and
coherence, we may infer that there has been a life-long habit of active
mental control, such as excludes the supposition of an hysterical
temperament.
Perhaps the similarity of the phenomena which attend both on
extraordinary psychic weakness and passivity, and on extraordinary
energy and activity may excuse a confusion common enough, and which we
have dwelt on elsewhere. But obviously as far as the natural
consequences of a given psychic state are concerned, it is indifferent
how that state is brought about. Thus, that extreme concentration of the
attention, that perfect abstraction from outward things, which in
hysterical persons is the effect of weakness and passive-mindedness--of
the inability to resist and shake off the spell of passions and
emotions; is in others the effect of active self-control, of voluntary
concentration, of a complete mastery over passions and emotions. Yet
though the causes of the abnormal state are different, its effects may
well be the same.
In thus maintaining the healthiness and vigour of Mother Juliana's mind,
we may seem to be implicitly treating her revelation, not as coming from
a Divine source, but simply as an expression of her own habitual line of
thought--as a sort of pouring forth of the contents of her subconscious
memory. Our direct intention, however, is to show how very unlikely it
is antecedently that one so clear-headed and intelligent should be the
victim of the common and obvious illusions of the hysterical visionary.
For her book contains not only the matter of her revelations, but also
the history of all the circumstances connected with them, as well as a
certain amount of personal comment upon them, professedly the fruit of
her normal mind; and best of all, a good deal of analytical reflection
upon the phenomena which betrays a native psychological insight not
inferior to that of St. Teresa. From these sources we could gather the
general sobriety and penetration of her judgment, without assuming the
actual teaching of the revelations to be merely the unconscious
self-projection of her own mind. But in so much as many of these
revelations were professedly Divine answers to her own questions, and
since the answer must ever be adapted not merely to the question
considered in the abstract, but as it springs from its context in the
questioner's mind; we are not wrong, on this score alone, in arguing
from the character of the revelation to the character of the mind to
which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and write above or
beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but not so He who
reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations were not addressed to
the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she says, were addressed to
herself and were primarily for herself, though most that was said had
reference to the human soul in general. They were adapted therefore to
the character and individuality of her mind; and are an index of its
thoughts and workings. For her they were a matter of faith; but, as she
tells us, she had no token or outward proof wherewith to convince others
of their reality. Those who feel disposed, as we ourselves do, to place
much confidence in the word of one so perfectly sane and genuinely holy,
may draw profit from the message addressed to her need; but never can it
be for them a matter of faith as in a Divine message addressed directly
or indirectly to themselves. So far as these revelations are a clear and
noble expression of truths already contained implicitly in our faith and
reason, which it brings into more explicit consciousness and vitalizes
with a new power of stimulus, they may be profitable to us all; but they
must be received with due criticism and discernment as themselves
subject to a higher rule of truth--namely, the teaching of the Universal
Church.
But to determine, with respect to these and kindred revelations, how far
they may be regarded as an expression of the recipient's own mind and
latent consciousness, will need a digression which the general interest
of the question must excuse.
There is a tendency in the modern philosophy of religion (for example,
in Mr. Balfour's _Foundations of Belief_) to rationalize inspired
revelation and to explain it as altogether kindred to the apparently
magical intuitions of natural genius in non-religious matters; as the
result, in other words, of a rending asunder of the veil that divides
what is called "super-liminal" from "subliminal" consciousness; to find
in prophecy and secret insight the effect of a flash of unconscious
inference from a mass of data buried in the inscrutable darkness of our
forgotten self. Together with this, there is also a levelling-up
philosophy, a sort of modernized ontologism, which would attribute all
natural intuition to a more immediate self-revelation on God's part than
seems quite compatible with orthodoxy.
But neither of these philosophies satisfy what is vulgarly understood by
"revelation," and therefore both use the word in a somewhat strained
sense. For certainly the first sense of the term implies a consciousness
on the part of the recipient of being spoken to, of being related
through such speech to another personality, whereas the flashes and
intuitions of natural genius, however they may resemble and be called
"inspirations" because of their exceeding the known resources of the
thinker's own mind, yet they are consciously autochthonous; they are
felt to spring from the mind's own soil; not to break the soul's
solitude with the sense of an alien presence. Such interior
illuminations, though doubtless in a secondary sense derived from the
"True Light which enlightens every man coming into this world,"
certainly do not fulfil the traditional notion of revelation as
understood, not only in the Christian Church, but also in all ethnic
religions. For common to antiquity is the notion of some kind of
possession or seizure, some usurpation of the soul's faculties by an
external personality, divine or diabolic, for its own service and as its
instrument of expression--a phenomenon, in fact, quite analogous, if not
the same in species, with that of hypnotic control and suggestion, where
the thought and will of the subject is simply passive under the thought
and will of the agent.
Saints and contemplatives are wont--not without justification--to speak
of their lights in prayer, and of the ordinary intuitions of their mind,
under the influence of grace, as Divine utterances in a secondary sense;
to say, "God said to me," or "seemed to say to me," or "God showed me,"
and so on. But to confound these products of their own mind with
revelation is the error only of the uninstructed or the wilfully
self-deluded. Therefore, as commonly understood, "revelation" implies
the conscious control of the mind by another mind; just as its usual
correlative, "inspiration," implies the conscious control of the will by
another will.
There can be no doubt whatever but that Mother Juliana of Norwich
considered her revelations to be of this latter description, and not to
have been merely different in degree from those flashes of spiritual
insight with which she was familiar in her daily contemplations and
prayers. How far, then, her own mind may have supplied the material from
which the tissues were woven, or lent the colours with which the
pictures were painted, or supplied the music to which the words were
set, is what we must now try to determine.