which she grew up; an environment to which new sombre colour and new
realization of pain had been given by the Black Death which swept
through Norfolk when she was a child. More important, however, than any
external influence, was the part her own temperament played in her
special apprehension of God. It is plain that she was from the first of
an intensely religious, meditative disposition. As a girl, she says, she
asked of God three things. The first was, that she might have a keen
realization of Christ’s Passion; because although she had great feeling
of it, she desired more, and specially a bodily sight of His pains. The
second was bodily sickness, much esteemed in the Middle Ages as a means
of grace; and this she wished to suffer at thirty years of age. The
third was, that as Saint Cecilia was pierced by three wounds, so she
might be pierced with the three wounds of contrition, compassion, and
eager longing towards God. The first two desires she forgot for a while;
but the three wounds she prayed for continually. When she was thirty
years old, the gift of sickness was granted her, and it was exactly such
a sickness, “so hard as unto death,” as she had asked: a fact which
tells us a good deal about Julian’s mental make-up, revealing her as the
possessor of an extremely active “psychic background.” By the law of
association we may be sure that her illness brought back to mind the
other forgotten prayer, for a deeper insight into, and vision of, the
Passion. It is supposed that she was at this time already an anchoress,
shut in that tiny room against the south wall of St. Julian’s church at
Norwich, of which the foundations can still be traced. But nothing in
her own account suggests this, and the presence of her mother and “other
persons” round her sick bed is rather against it. At the same time, a
single woman of strong religious bent is hardly likely in that period to
have remained in the world till she was thirty. Julian was perhaps a
Benedictine nun at Carrow, and after her vision sought a life of greater
seclusion and austerity at St. Julian’s, which was the property of the
Carrow convent. The anchoress was often, but not always, a professed
nun: and though no reminiscences of cloister life can be traced in
Julian’s writings, such a life would account in part for the theological
knowledge and familiarity with dogmatic language which those writings
display.
Julian’s account of what happened in her illness is extremely precise,
and makes this part of her revelation an interesting psychological
document. She fell ill early in May 1373; and on the fourth night was
thought to be dying and given the last sacraments. For two days more she
lingered, quite conscious and expecting death; and early in the morning
of the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When the priest
came to help her agony she was already speechless; but made her nurses
prop her upright in bed, so that she could fix her failing eyes on the
crucifix he held towards her. This she could see, though everything else
grew dim to her sight. Then her head fell on one side, breath failed,
and she was sure that the end had come.
With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of the
involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended. She had
passed into a new state of consciousness, in which her mind was clear
and her body free of pain, “as whole as ever before or after.” In this
condition her old and forgotten desires came back into her mind. The
first, for sickness, had been granted. Now, she was impelled to ask the
other, for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried wish,
surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting-point of
her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that these experiences had
their pathological side. Her physical and psychic state were abnormal.
With the perfect candour and common sense which add so much to our
delight in her, she confesses that she at first mistook her revelations
for delirium, and said to the monk who afterwards visited her that she
had raved. There are, however, in these revelations, as in all visionary
experience of any value, two distinct sides. One is the visual or
auditory hallucination—the vision seen, the voice heard—the materials
for which clearly come from the unconscious mind of the visionary, and
can generally be traced to their source. The other is the intuitive
spiritual teaching that accompanies it, and often far exceeds the
visionary’s own knowledge or power. Julian, in her account of what
happened to her, keeps these two elements perfectly distinct. “All the
blessed teaching of our Lord God,” she says, “was shown to me by three
parts—that is to say, by the bodily sight, by words formed in mine
understanding, and by ghostly sight.”
The bodily vision, as she expressly affirms, she did not ask for; and
here she agrees with all true mystics, who invariably distrust these
quasi-physical experiences. Yet it was in such visionary hallucination
that her revelations began. With her eyes still fixed on the crucifix,
and apparently at the point of death, she suddenly saw red blood running
down from the Crown of Thorns, as if in answer to her prayer for more
feeling of the Passion of Christ. The Cross had become for her, as the
shining pewter dish did for Jacob Boehme, or the running stream for St.
Ignatius, a focal point on which to concentrate; and so a door to a
deeper state of consciousness. Spiritual insight went side by side with
the bodily vision, which was accepted without question by Julian as a
direct message from Christ to strengthen her, “lest she be tempted of
fiends before she died”; for in spite of her intuitive philosophic
sense, we must remember that she lived in imagination in that Gothic
world of concrete devils and angels which the cathedral sculptors
reproduced. The double experience—outward pictures of the Passion, and
inward teachings of the nature of God—continued for five hours, whilst
she lay in a state of trance which her mother mistook for death. “The
first began early in the morn, about the hour of four; and they lasted,
showing by process full fair and steadily, each following other, till it
was nine of the day overpassed.” In those five hours Julian received the
whole substance of her teaching, afterwards divided by her into sixteen
“revelations of love.” When they had passed, normal consciousness
returned, or, as she says, she “fell to herself,” and knew that she must
live. She lay for some time in weakness and depression, tormented by
evil dreams; but she recovered from her sickness, and lived to a great
age. Her careful account of that illness, and of the psychic experiences
accompanying it, helps us to understand those experiences from the
psychological as well as the mystical point of view. Seen thus, they are
not unique; but classic examples of a type which turns up from time to
time in medical history. Thus Dr. Edwin Ash, in _Faith and Suggestion_,
has described a case which strikingly resembles that of Julian. Here,
too, at the crisis of an apparently hopeless illness, the patient fell
into a death-like trance, had visions of a religious type, and emerged
cured. Her mind was far inferior to that of Julian, hence her experience
had less beauty and significance and was of little value for other
souls. Nevertheless, its general outline forces us to acknowledge that
it belongs to the same class, and helps us to interpret the facts which
lie behind Julian’s words.
Julian’s revelations have come down to us in two distinct versions,
which have both been edited for modern readers. The best known is the
long version, reproduced in Miss Warrack’s delightful edition: but our
earliest manuscript of this only goes back to the sixteenth century, at
least a hundred years after Julian’s death. Another, much shorter, is
found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Museum, and
this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford, who claims—I think with good
reason—that it represents Julian’s first account of her visions, written
or told while they were still fresh in her mind, and before her memory
of them had been coloured by long meditation, or by the theological
learning which she certainly acquired in later life. It briefly sets
forth her chain of visions, and the “ghostly words” and inward teachings
that accompanied them. These, she says, she has set down for the help of
her fellow-Christians and because she saw it to be God’s will. “But,”
she adds, “God forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a
teacher: for I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a woman,
unlearned, feeble and frail; but I know well that this that I say, I
have it of the showing of Him that is Sovereign Teacher.” In the long
version these deprecatory words are omitted. Julian no longer fears to
be regarded as a teacher. On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle
authority as one whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt,
the established anchoress; the devout woman whose special vocation is
known, and to whom people come for spiritual teaching. Moreover, she
tells us in this book that only twenty years, less three months, after
her vision was she inwardly taught the importance of all its details,
however “misty and indifferent” they seemed. She was therefore past
fifty when she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the fruit, not only
of her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings by which the
last atom of significance was extracted from it, the “enlightenings and
touchings of the same Spirit,” which kept the revelation fresh in after
life.
As she says herself—for her introspective powers were remarkable—the
“first beginnings” and subsequent “ghostly teachings” at last became so
merged in her understanding that she could not separate them. There is a
parallel to this in the life of Boehme. He says that in the abnormal
state which was induced by gazing at the polished pewter dish he
“understood the Being of all Beings”—even as Julian “saw God in a
Point”—but this stupendous revelation only left him dazed and
inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during which he
felt the seed of truth “unfolding within him like a young plant,” was he
able to describe it.
When we compare the two versions of Julian’s work, we find many
differences which remind us of this confession. Although the whole
doctrine of the long book is really implied in the short book—for it is,
in Boehme’s phrase, an unfolding of the plant from that one seed—we see
that the most beautiful and poetical passages are found in the long
version only. They are the fruit of meditation upon vision. The workings
of Julian’s unconscious mind in her trance have only provided the raw
material, as the inspiration of the poet gives only the crude beginnings
of the poem. Moreover, with age her character deepened and grew richer.
She used her talent to help other souls, and it increased. She studied,
too, and found language of great subtlety and beauty in which to express
her vision of truth. Though even the first version of her book shows
theological knowledge which would put to shame most present-day
Christians, in the later work this knowledge is much increased. Reading
was part of the duty of an anchoress, being regarded as an essential
element in the life of prayer; and intelligent reading has clearly
nourished Julian’s deep meditations on the character of God. In her
there was an almost perfect balance between the intellectual and the
emotional life, and there are few women mystics of Whom we can say this.
The question of her literary sources is an interesting one. A careful
examination of her revelations makes it plain that even when the short
version was written, she was already acquainted with many theological
conceptions; whilst the meditations with which the long version is
enriched, and its fuller descriptions of her spiritual “Showings,”
reveal her as possessing at least by middle life a considerable
knowledge of the language of Augustinian theology and of the root-ideas
of Christian mysticism. As used by her, many of these ideas have the
special colour which was given to them by Meister Eckhart and his
school; and suggest that Julian at one time or another had come into
contact with the characteristically Dominican type of mysticism which is
best known to us in the works of Suso and Tauler. In her teaching on
sin—“I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no substance nor any part of
being”—she is following, indeed almost quoting, Eckhart’s saying that
“evil is nothing but a privation of being; not an effect, but a defect.”
So, too, Eckhart’s daring assertion that sin has its place in the
scheme—“Since God, in a way, also wills that I should have committed
sins, I do not wish not to have committed them”—appears to be echoed in
gentler form in Julian’s view of sin as a purifying scourge, and of the
scars which it leaves on the redeemed soul as being “not wounds but
worships.” Her beautiful saying that we are God’s bliss, “for in us He
enjoyeth without end,” seems like a deduction from the Eckhartian
paradox, “God needs me as much as I need Him.” She has received, perhaps
from the same source, the antique mystical notion of the soul’s
precession from and return to God. “The soul,” said Eckhart, “is created
that it may flow back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain whence
it came forth.” “Thus I understood,” says Julian, “that all His blessed
children which be come out of Him by nature shall be brought again into
Him by grace”; and again, “all kinds that He hath made to flow out of
Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him.”
Here, again, the naked Eckhartian monism seems to be transmitted through
a more human and more spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the
German mystics in her doctrine of God as the “ground of the soul.” “Our
soul is so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we may
not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God....
God is nearer to us than our own soul, for He is the ground in whom our
soul standeth, and He is the mean that keepeth the substance and the
sensuality together so that they shall never depart.” So Tauler says, “A
man who verily desires to enter in will surely find God here, for God
never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him
and he will find and enjoy eternity here.”
Julian’s revelation was received in 1373, and the long text as we have
it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart had died in 1329, Tauler
in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck, whose mysticism owes much on its
speculative side to Eckhart’s philosophy, in 1381. The influence of
their teaching spread rapidly, and few preaching friars of an inward
disposition can have escaped it. To these preaching friars was committed
in the fourteenth century the special duty of giving solid theological
teaching to nuns. This was commonly done by way of vernacular sermons
and instructions, of which Tauler’s surviving sermons are types: and it
was possibly through such instructions given in the Carrow convent that
Julian obtained that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism, those
contacts with Augustinian and Victorine thought, on which the more
philosophic side of her revelation seems to depend. The parallels with
her great contemporary St. Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund
Gardner has noted, are probably due to the fact that both women drew
their ideas from some earlier source. Her likenesses to Ruysbroeck can
also be accounted for. His _Seven Cloisters_, _Kingdom of God’s Lovers_,
and _Ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage_ were all completed before
1350, and knowledge of them would reach East Anglia quickly, through the
Flemish colony established at Norwich. Several close correspondences
with him can be traced in Julian’s work; especially her conception of
God’s eternal thirst and love-longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck’s
“hungry yet generous love of God,” and the opening phrase of her Third
Revelation, “After this I saw God in a Point,” which reminds us of the
great definition in the _Seven Cloisters_, “That Point in which all our
lives find their end.” Julian thus represents the first emergence in
English literature of a stream of tradition which is not represented in
the classic school of English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this
school she does not appear to have been greatly influenced; there is
little in her that reminds us of it, or of that group of contemplatives
who produced the _Cloud of Unknowing_ and its companion works. Her true
affinities are with the Christian Platonism which St. Augustine
introduced into theology, and its developments in the works of Erigena
and Eckhart. But when we have given full weight to the effects upon her
work of oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work
only becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her speculative
mind, and helped her to understand and express her own experience; but
this experience in its essence was independent of intellectual
knowledge. It was the fruit of a deeply mystical and poetic nature,
brooding on the conception of God common to mediæval Christianity.
Julian had in a high degree constructive religious genius; and for such
a nature an evocative phrase is enough to waken the “ghostly sight.”
It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account of her
teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent consciousness of
God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing reality; a conception at
once philosophic and practical. For Julian, as for the Platonists, God
is the sum of the highest spiritual values—“He is all-thing that is good
to my seeming, and all-thing that is good, it is He.” Her perception of
the Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and expressed in the
strongest terms. “God is kind (nature) in His being: that is to say,
that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is the ground, He is the
substance, He is the same thing that is kind-head,” and again, “I saw
full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our
sensuality God is ... for it is His good pleasure to reign in our
understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell in
our soul endlessly, us all working into Him.” But this vivid sense of
Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is closely bound up with
her devotion to the person of Christ. Her theological path, like her
mystical experience, lay through the human to the Divine, through
emotional realization of the Passion to intellectual vision of the
Godhead. In the first revelation of all we get these two aspects of
truth sharply contrasted; for there her vision of the bloodstained Crown
of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart, is balanced by her
other interior sight of “the Godhead seen in mine understanding.” The
long version of her book elaborates this simple intuition of the Deity
into a very beautiful description of the Holy Trinity—always one of
Julian’s favourite subjects—but the whole is really implied in the first
brief statement, which strikes at once her characteristic chord of
intimacy and awe, or, as she puts it, “the dread and the homeliness of
God.” In the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, which was never far from
her thoughts, she found the link between these personal and impersonal
apprehensions. That half-Platonic notion of Christ the Eternal Wisdom as
“Mother” of the soul, which is one of her most original conceptions,
here takes its place side by side with the other, more metaphysical
intuition of that unconditioned Deity in whom “All-thing hath the
Being.” “For all our life is in three: in the first we have our being,
in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our
fulfilling: the first is nature, the second is mercy, and the third is
grace. For the first I understood that the high might of the Trinity is
our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the
great love of the Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in nature
and in our substantial making.... All the fair working, and all the
sweet kindly office of dearworthy motherhood is impropriated to the
Second Person ... and all is one Love.”
This blend of personal and metaphysical vision is not unique. We find it
again in the Franciscan contemplative, Angela of Foligno. But Julian’s
nature is richer and more mellow, and the doctrine of love which she
deduced from her experience is more profound. Here, in this harmonized
consciousness of the most human and most philosophic aspects of
religious experience, she is typical of Christian mysticism at its best.
She avoids on the one hand the excessive intellectualism of the
Neoplatonist, and on the other the unpleasant exuberance of the
religious emotionalist, yet draws from the apprehensions of both the
heart and the head all the elements needed to feed a full spiritual
life. The human element brought in by Christianity, with all the
emotional values belonging to it—however symbolic this side of
contemplation must necessarily be—redeems philosophic mysticism from the
clear coldness, the lofty superiority, that St. Augustine condemned in
the Platonists. But, equally, it is the philosophic background, the
austere worship of that trinity of Light, Life, and Love, in whom, as
Julian says, we are clad more closely than a body in its clothes, which
saves mystical fervour from its worst extravagances. Here she is and
will ever be one of the safest guides to the contemplative life.
Another special quality of Julian’s teaching is its healthy, vigorous,
affirmative character. The only two sins she sternly condemns—and she
calls them not sins, but sickness—are sloth or lack of zest, and
doubtful dread or lack of hope. Zest and hope she regards as essential
factors in the life of the soul. The Light, Life, and Love which form
her ultimate definition of triune Reality—the Mother, Brother, and
Saviour, which are her nearest images for Christ’s relation with
man—these are conceptions which kill the sort of pious moods that R. L.
Stevenson called “dim, dem, and dowie.” God’s attitude to man is
“courteous, glad, and merry,” and we do Him less honour by solemnity
than by “cheer of mirth and joy.” To her, only the good is the true, and
evil is a void, a lack of the only reality; a Platonic notion which has
always been dear to the mystics. “In this naked word Sin,” says Julian,
“our Lord brought to my mind generally all that is not good ... but I
saw not sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of
being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of.” It follows
that our attention should not be given to the avoidance or consideration
of sin, but to the understanding and enjoyment of the good and the real.
“The beholding of other men’s sins, it maketh as it were a thick mist
before the eyes of the soul,” says Julian. Her strongest condemnation is
given to morbid pondering of past sins and mistakes. “Right as by the
courtesy of God He forgets our sins when we repent, right so will He
that we forget our sin, and all our heaviness and all our doubtful
dreads.” This world, after all, is only a nursery for heaven, and its
inhabitants mostly spiritual babies who need not be taken too seriously.
“I understood no higher stature in this life than childhood;” and the
attitude of God to our infant souls is that of “the kindly loving Mother
that witteth and knoweth the need of her child and keepeth it full
tenderly as the kind and condition of Motherhood will.”