2 Introduction

2 Introduction

INTRODUCTION

she has learned of the 'ghostly thirst', that God loves to heal and to save, the well-spring of the divine compassion revealed in Christ crucified and glorified. She begins to write of the godly will as it is found in all those who are to form one soul with the heavenly host, and of their love for each other in Christ. It is this love which is the godly will, and it is incorruptible. The theologian whose thought and language appear closest to hers (and we must recall that this passage is common to short and to long texts) is William of St. Thierry, in his Golden Epistle; and, significantly, this is in the final section of his treatise on the interior life of the monastic solitary, the third or spiritual state of the religious man, when 'the memory has been transformed into wisdom' and 'the thinker's understanding becomes the lover's contemplation'.215 So William writes:

For love (amor) is a great will towards God, another love (dilectio) is a clinging to him or uniting to him, and a third love (charitas) is delight in him. Yet the unity of the spirit with God in a man who lifts up his heart towards God is the perfection of his will, when he not only wills God's will, he is not only drawn to God, but in that drawing he is so made perfect that he can will nothing but what God wills. For to will what God wills, this is to be like God; not to be able to will except what God wills, this is to be what God is, for whom willing and being are one and the same. So it is well said that 'we shall see plainly what he is, when we shall be like him' (I John 3.2); that is, we shall be what he himself is.216

This is the godly wyll in the hygher party (443.18) which 'constantly the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of life, himself pours in by the way of love',217 whych my lie is so good that it may nevyr wylle evylle, but evyr good. And therfore we be tliat he lovyth, and endlesly we do that he lykyth (443.19). 'And likeness to God is perfection in man', William continues, 'but not to wish to be perfect is to fail'.218 So Julian concludes the chapter in the long text: but for feylyng of loue in oure party, therfore is alle oure traveyle (444.25).

In the first sentence of chapter 38, which corresponds to the short text (255.17-18), Julian has made one small but significant change.

Where, before, she had written: god schewed me that syn is na schame, hot wirschippe to mann, she now writes: synne shalle be no shame, but wurshyppe to man (445.2). This is indicative of her desire for theological precision; sin, at the time of its commision, and until it is forgiven, is the occasion

215 PL 184 347.

216 Ibid. 348.

217 Ibid. 347.

218 Ibid. 348.

IX. 15 REVELATION XIII

1 1 1 of shame, just as the glorious wounds of the risen Christ were, at the time of the Crucifixion, signs not of honour but of the world's sin and shame. She writes similarly of her own sinfulness (cf. 633.23 and note).

Here, in the long text, she sees the need to establish the truth of this simple but paradoxical statement; and now she has the theological and rhetorical equipment to do it. She constructs an argumentatio perfectissima, of which the opening statement becomes the proposition and the other steps of the argument follow.

... for ryght as to every synne is answeryng a payne by truth, ryght so for every synne to the same soule is gevyn a blysse by loue (445.3). is the ratio, Ryght as dyuerse synnes be ponysschyd with dyuers paynes after that it be greuous, ryght so shalle they be rewardyd with dyvers joyes in hevyn for theyr victories, after as the synne haue ben paynfulle and sorowfulle to the soule in erth (445.4) is the rationis confirmatio, For the soule that shalle come to hevyn is so precyous to god and the place so wurshypfulle that the goodnes of god sufferyth nevyr that soule to synne fynally £at shalle come ther (445.8) is the exornatio, and But what synners they are that so shalbe rewarded is made knowen in holy church in erth and also in heaven by over passyng worshypes (445.10) is the complexio. This remarkable dexterity is heightened by resuming, with the next sentence, the short text: for in this sight mynn vnderstandynge was lyfted vp in to hevenn (255.18), in such a way — and then god brought merely to my mynde ... (446.13) — that the Lord himself provides her with the rhetorical exempla, Magdalene and the others, which render her reasoning 'clear, vivid, plausible'.219 And, finally, the last section of the chapter, where the Lord brings John of Beverley to her mind, becomes a preacher's homely example, to drive home the point that the miracles worked through the intercession of penitent-saints are pre-eminently tokens of the working of the divine compassion, which in and through Christ continues to bring joy and honour out of sin and shame.

The sight of Christ bleeding from the scourging had been for Julian a most deeply moving experience in the early showings, and itself a sign of Christ's kinship with us, and the instrument of the divine com21» F. Minis.

1 1 2

INTRODUCTION

passion. Here in chapter 39, she sees sin as the scourge of those who will be saved; for it is in our sins that we have the most need of the divine compassion which we experience in our contemplation of the suffering Christ. The Pauline doctrine of reconciliation is clearly in her thought: ... He has reconciled us to himself by Christ... for God was indeed in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing to them their sins ... He made sin for us him who knew no sin, that we might be made in him the justice of God (II Corinthians 5.18-21). Here too, in another addition to the short text (451.14-452.29) we have a precise summary of the Western teaching on compunction of heart, which has already been described, in its presentation as the Lord's visitation with the three wounds with which she had prayed to be pierced:

And also whom oure lord wylle he vysyteth of his specialle grace with so grett contricion, and also with compassion and tru longyng to god that they be sodeynly delyverde of synne and of payne, and taken vp to blysse and made evyn with seyntes. By contryscion we be made clene, by compassion we be made redy, and by tru longyng to god we be made wurthy.

Theyse be thre menys, as I vnderstode, wher by that alle soules com to hevyn, that is to sey that haue ben synners in erth and shalle be savyd

(451.21).

In a final addition (453.40-48), she once more anticipates the parable of the lord and the servant, alluding to the lord's compassion for the servant who is shown not only for Christ, but also for Adam and every soul who will be saved.

In chapter 40, the last of this revelation,Julian establishes a close link between the central locution of the divine compassion, 'I keep thee full surely', and Revelation XIV, on prayer, which will follow next in the long text. In the short text she had concluded her account of the showing Tor prayer' with a reflection on the sinful soul's unhappy state until God turns to look on her with compassionate love (262.67-76).

This she has now carefully edited and expanded, so that it introduces and puts into the clear context of our need for prayer the caveat against the particular form of 'liberty of the spirit' (cf. 456.28 note) which she here makes her special concern:

But now because of alle thys gostly comfort that is before seyde, if any man or woman be steryd by foly to sey or to thynke: if this be tru, than were it good for to synne to haue the more mede, or elles to charge the lesse to synne, beware of this steryng. For truly, if it come, it is vntrue and of the enemy (456.26; cf. 257.1).

Again, in the long text she edits by constructing another argumentatio, this time rebutting the propositio which she now explicitly stigmatizes as

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

'untrue'. On the contrary, sin is to be hated, because God's love teaches us so (457.31-32, the ratio). Her own contemplative experience confirms this: the more we see his courteous love, the more we reject sin and are ashamed of it (457.33-35, the rationis confirmatio). The argument is then embellished with a conditional syllogism and an appeal to her showing

(457-35~458-39, the exornatio); and the conclusion is the complexio:

... for a kynd soule hatyth no payne but synne; for alle is good but syn, and nought is yvell but synne (458.40).

And the revelation itself ends with a gentle exhortation: the showing of God's compassion is intended to teach us to love ourselves and our brethren as he does. This is his endless comforting of us.

16 Revelation XIV This is eternal life: that they may know thee, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent' (John 17.3). Julian's revelations are basically concerned aith two moments in the existence of the incarnate

Word, his coming from God and his going to God (cf. John 13.3); for these two moments, of incarnation and of death and resurrection, express scripturally the purpose of the manifestation of the mystery of God and Christ, his plan of salvation for all who will receive him. To receive Christ is to enter into an intimate relationship with God, the relationship of children to a Father: 'as marty as received him, to them he gave the power to become sons of God' (John 1.12), which power, here on earth, is the knowing and loving of him who is unseen. It is only in heaven that we shall see God face to face, writes Julian, echoing

Paul:

And ther shall we se god face to face, homely and fulsomly. The creature that is made shall see and endlesly beholde god whych is the maker; for thus may no man se god and leue aftyr, that is to sey in this dedely lyffe

(481-53) Julian has already made it clear, when she wrote of prayer in the context of Revelation I, that this knowing and loving will be the constant preoccupation of all those who, like herself, are committed to the contemplative life:

... for oure kyndely wille is to haue god, and the good wylle of god is to haue vs, and we may never sesse of wyllyng ne of louyng tylle we haue hym in fulhede of ioy. And than we may no more wylle, for he wylle that we be occupyed in knowyng and louyng tylle the tyme comyth that we shal be fulfyllede in hevyn (308.57).

INTRODUCTION

This she understood to be the purpose of her revelations, this lesson of hue (309.62); and it is in Revelation XIV, with its deceptively simple opening, Affter thys oure lorde shewed for prayer (460.3), more than twenty years after receiving her visions, that she is enabled to explain, with an immense wealth of theological and spiritual detail, that prayer is a living and growing relationship with the triune God in Christ Jesus, such an assimilation to him as will reproduce his own 'coming from God and going to God', to the extent that she ends her account of this long and complex showing with the words:

Thus I vnderstode that all his blessyd chyldren whych be come out of hym by kynd shulde be brougt agayne in to hym by grace (619.3).

Most commentators on the long text of the Revelations have taken it for granted that this fourteenth showing on prayer occupies only three chapters, 41-43, and that Julian then returns to her obsessive problem about sin, damnation and the wrath of God, which is eventually solved

(to her satisfaction, if perhaps not to ours) through years of pondering over the parable of the lord and the servant; and this is a view which seems to be corroborated by the account of the same showing in chapter xix of the short text. The opinion of the present editors is, however, that if the prayer relationship depends on the union of man's heart and mind with his God, then, whenever God is wrathful with sinful man, discord and alienation take the place of harmony and the divine presence, and so the life of prayer ceases. Further, throughout her revelations Julian never saw God at odds with his creature, man. It seems important, therefore, before analysing this fourteenth revelation chapter by chapter, to offer a brief summary of the showing's unity.

First of all, Julian defines the contemplative prayer of petition ('seeking'), and explains its conditions and what it involves. It is, in tact, the creature's response to the creative, redemptive, unifying action of God; and as soon as the creature begins to know in faith that his seeking God is already answered, petition becomes thanksgiving, and he begins to understand that the term of the divine action in him is the beatific vision. Thus prayer is the knowledge of salvation, the mutual expression of the covenant by which man and God are partners, for the sake of man's ultimate fulfilment. Who, then, is this God who so unites himself with man in contemplation (chapter 44)? He is the God whom

Mary contemplated in the moment of the Incarnation. Julian then proceeds to consider the limitations of the human power of knowing and loving in the contemplative process, the fluctuation in man's apprehension and judgment of himself and of God, as opposed to the divine immutability (chapter 45). Though God is always at one with

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

man, man is very often at odds with himself; the contradiction will persist, so that there will be times when this unitive prayer will appear meaningless, until man truly sees himself and his God (chapter 46).

So it is essential that prayer be marked not only by wonder and reverence, but also by humility and the readiness to endure our own frailty and foolishness, an unlikeness to God in the human condition which demands submission to the workings of mercy and grace (chapter

47). From this it follows that contemplative prayer is very frequently and predominantly passive, demanding patient expectation, even when the soul experiences the Spirit's compassionate purification and loving illumination (chapter 48). Thus prayer involves our being moved from an awareness of sinfulness and alienation, through the divine illumination, to a measure of the sight and experience of the peace of God with man, which is permanent (chapter 49). So the problem arises that the truth of God seems to be incompatible with the Church's judgment on sinful man as blameworthy. If there were such incompatibility, contemplative prayer might be illusory. How can the soul's relationship in prayer with God which was described in chapter

41 exist together with sinfulness and consequent judgment (chapter 50)?

What in the end the parable of the lord and the servant explains is precisely how the relationship between God and man persists through human inadequacy and frailty. It involves Julian in a careful doctrinal exposition of the mysteries of Incarnation, redemption and the interrelationships of the persons of the Trinity, as well as of the incorporation into Christ of every man who will be saved (chapter 51).

What follows is that the contemplative relationship is Trinitarian: the Christian becomes, in Christ, the term of the divine creative activity across time into eternity (chapter 52). How this is so, how, that is, creation and redemption come together in Christ, the head of human nature, is then explained (chapter 53), as are its effects in all incorporated into Christ (chapter 54). The precise nature of this incorporation, in terms of Christ's relationship with his Father and the Spirit of them both, is then elucidated (chapter 55); and after this Julian is able to show how this knowledge in faith of God in Christ enables the creature to grow in understanding of its own nature, that is, in the context of union with the Trinity and the mutual indwelling, and the gifts which flow from that indwelling (chapters 56-57). This contemplative knowledge of Trinity and Incarnation, of the divine economy of creation is further developed (chapter 58); and contemplative prayer and Trinitarian theology compenetrate one another as Julian discourses on the Trinitarian 'perichoresis' and the operationes ad extra (chapter 59).

1 1 6

INTRODUCTION

From the consideration of the divine natura creatrix in the Trinitarian context which she has established, Julian is able to illumine for us, better perhaps than her more illustrious forebears such as Augustine and Anselm, the traditional doctrine of the creating and redeeming activity of the second person of the Trinity, using the image of 'God our

Mother' (chapters 59-62). She concludes the revelation by emphasising what, for her, is the sublimest expression of man's relationship with God in contemplative prayer: the acceptance of feebleness and failing of insight and understanding which comes from loving trust in God and which finds its truest human analogy in the authentic relationship of the child with its parents (chapter 63).

Though Julian had written, in her short-text account of this revelation: thus makes prayere accorde betwix god and marines saule (261.53), it is there by no means obvious that prayer, for her, is consistently the petition for union. She seems rather to be writing of her own case, drawing the analogy between what was shown to her and infused contemplation (cf. 261.55 note); and under the one heading, 'prayer', she includes vocal prayer (258.9-10), and petitions for the spiritual wellbeing of her neighbours (258.10-259. l&- In ner f>nal version, however, she begins from an entirely different viewpoint. She is now bringing to the matter of this revelation the principle laid down for her in the parable: It longyth to the to take hede to alle pe propertes and the condesciow that were shewed in the example (520.87). Writing of the two conditions for prayer, she is more concerned about God's intention (460.3 e.s.) than with her own experience. So she can now sum up the first condition by using the epithet ryghtfulle, since she has already explained its meaning in chapter 36 (433.19-435.36); thus, the prayer which she is now describing is, in its term, the contemplation of God's righteousness and the participation in this 'blessed harmony' of all the souls that will be saved (cf. 435.33). She is, however, content to retain, verbatim, what she had written in the short text about the other condition, sure trust, because, to her lasting shame, she experienced a lack of this in the course of the revelations themselves (cf. chapter 66). Prayer is always the communication of God's wisdom and truth, his rightfulness; but man must enter into the relationship by accepting the gift of faith, hope and charity.

What then follows, in both texts, is the nucleus of the showing, the locution: / am grounde of thy besekyng (461.11; and cf. 259.20). But in the long text, the reflection upon the ratiocinatio which concludes the revelation itself develops in an entirely different way; no longer does

Julian interpret the locution as a sobere vndertakynge (260.29) directed at

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

her lack of trust. Instead, she tells us that the petition is for 'mercy and grace', and she argues from the question, how schoulde it than be that thou shuldyst nott haue thy besekyng? (461.13), that God's goodness is the cause of our prayer, in the sense in which she is now able to define the contemplative prayer of petition:

Besechyng is a trew and gracious lestyng wylle of the soule, onyd and fastenyd in to the wylle of oure lorde by the swet prevy werkyng of the holy gost (463.30).

The Trinitarian character of this definition should be observed. It is the Father who by his righteousness fastens the will of the soul to the will of the incarnate Son, and this creative act ab aeterno is continued in time by the werkyng, the missio ad extra of the Holy Spirit. The glorified Christ is thus the immediate term of the soul's longing; and Julian rounds out the definition with a homely description of his office as mediator: he takyth it full thankefully, and hyghly enjoyeng he sendeth it vppe above (463.33).

If the soul can only see that this prayer is the immediate effect of God's eternal and creative relationship with his creature, and that he himself seeks for our response — he lokyth ther after, and he wyll haue it

(463.39) —any particular level of emotional experience will cease to be of any great importance in the inner life of the devout Christian, and his hope will be increased.

Julian associates herself firmly with the Western tradition, as she associates prayer without ceasing with good will. 'In ipsa ergo fide et spe et caritate', writes Augustine, 'continuato desiderio semper oramus'.220 Equally, when Julian writes that thanksgiving belongs to this prayeng contynually (465.49), one must understand that she is referring not simply to private prayer, with its large dependence on what were called from early times 'ejaculations' ('... crebras... orationes, sed eas tamen brevissimas et raptim, quodam modo iaculatas'),221 but to the laus perennis of a contemplative community like the one to whom the Ancrene Riwle is addressed: the eucharistic liturgy and the divine office and the various devotions linked to this opus Dei.222

What, perhaps, is special in Julian is the degree to which she sees petition and thanksgiving integrated in the one contemplative process.

The contemplative effort is itself a response to the Spirit's working in "° Epistola 130, ed. Goldbachcr, CSEL 3, 2 60.

"' Ibid., 62.

3" Cf. supra, IX 3.

1 1 8

INTRODUCTION

us, moving us now to thanksgiving, now to a cry for mercy and grace (cf. 467.60 e.s.); and all is seen as dependent on the lectio divina, the power of the Lord's word, alive, penetrating and quickening (cf.

Hebrews 4.12).

In chapter 42,Julian begins to explore the nature of this relationship, the true expression of which is contemplative prayer. To do so, she has recourse to the current philosophical doctrine on causality (as she will do again at the end of her book, as she ponders the reason of the revelations as a whole — cf. 732.15 note). Thus God is the efficient cause of the relationship, and of every true expression of it, by hys goodnesse (468.5); God is the highest good, and all desired perfections flow from him as from the first cause.223 The form and the quality of our response is next stated: 'Man inheres in God', Thomas writes, 'in whom alone true happiness consists'.224 Thirdly, the actuality of the relation ship is located in God as the final and exemplary cause, to be onyd and lyke to oure lorde in althyng (468.12). As Thomas expresses it, 'in homine invenitur aliqua Dei similitude, quae deducitur a Deo, sicut ab exemplari';225 'secundum quod homo Deum actu cognoscit et amat perfecte, et sic attenditur imago secundum similitudinem gloriae'.226 Finally,

Julian again stresses that it is the triune God to whom man is united and assimilated:

... and he wylle helpe vs, and he shalle make it so, as he seyth hym selfe, blessyd mot he be (468.13), where helpe is for the Holy Spirit, make is for the Father and seyth is for the Son made man.

Julian continues by considering in more detail the quality and shape of our response; because of faith and grace it can in some mysterious fashion be 'large' (469.16), matching to some degree the liberality and generosity of the divine lover, and though our sight of his gift of himself is often severely limited, he is the sure object of the prayer of hope. Her own trust is so 'large' that here she begins to catch a glimpse of the Lord who is visiting her with mercy and grace, communicating his very being to her.

He wylle that we haue true knowyng in hym selfe that he is beyng; and in thys knowyng he wylle that oure vnderstandyng be groundyd with alle oure myghtes and alle oure intent and alle oure menyng (469.28).

223 Summa theologiae 1.6.3 in corf}.

114 Ibid. 1.82.2 in corf).

225 Ibid. 1.93.4 in Corp.

226 Ibid. 1.93.4 in corf}.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

She holds with St. Thomas that God's self-knowledge is his being,227 and that in contemplation we are drawn to share in this knowing. So to respond evokes from us the concentration of all our mental and spiritual powers, given to us in our noble and excelent makyng (470.34), restored and enriched in us by his redemption, and supported and enlivened by all the rest of his creation. All the divine activity, or all of it which is revealed to us in Christ, has as its term this unitive relationship which is called prayer:

Beholde and se that I haue done alle thys before thy prayer, and now thou arte and prayest me (471.37).

More than this, all that he is doing now belongs to the same relationship; and prayer, on our part, is the simple realization and acknowledgment that God is for us and that we are for God. But Julian still retains the monastic understanding inherited by Thomas Aquinas and all those who followed him that every human happiness is a participation in divine beatitude, and thus of its nature is both contemplative and eschatalogical. Thomas had written: '... quidquid est desiderabile ... totum eminentius in divina beatitudine praeexistit. De contemplativa enim felicitate habet continuam et certissimam contemplationem'.228 So Julian offers us another definition of prayer:

... prayer is a ry3twys vnderstandyng of that fulhed of joy that is for to come, with tru longyng and very trust. Saworyng or seyng oure blysse that we be ordeyned to, kyndely makyth vs to longe; trew vnderstondyng and loue with swete menyng in oure savoure graciously makyth vs to trust

(473-55)This is a reminder that she is also no stranger to the doctrine of the spiritual senses, particularly the sense of taste, as developed by the Cistercian spiritual writers.229 Julian's final description of prayer has much in common with William of St. Thierry's exegesis of John 17.3:

'Haec est, inquit, vita aeterna, ut cognoscant te' ... Beata scientia, in qua continetur vita aeterna. Vita ista ex illo gustu est, quia gustare, hoc est intelligere.230

Already in the first revelation, Julian had been at pains to stress that contemplative prayer means on our part to seek, suffer and trust under the prompting of the Holy Spirit (cf. 332.68). Here, in chapter 43, she amplifies this teaching. To pray is to acknowledge to God that we need

227 Cf". Summa theologiae 1.14.4.

221 Ibid. 1.26.4 in corp.

229 Cf. J. Walsh: 'Guillaume de Saint-Thierry et les sens spirituels'.

230 De natura amoris, X 31; PL 184 399.

INTRODUCTION

him in order to attain to union with him in knowledge and love; but to pray is also witnessing to God that, through his grace, we desire to have him as he desires to have us. In the ninth revelation (382 e.s.) she had seen not only the longing of Jesus to suffer for the whole of mankind and for each individual, but also the joy of the Trinity in the salvific achievement of Jesus (391.22-25). For Julian, as for Bernard, God is a God who moves his creatures because he desires them: 'Deus movet sicut desiderans';231 and the movement brings peace and consolation —

... comfortyth the conscience and ablyth man to grace (475.5). Thus the prayer of petition is an expression of mutuality in the relationship; we become partners first in desire and then in fact. We share God's activity, and all this is prayer:

And thus he techyth vs to pray and myghtyly to trust that we shalle haue it; for he beholdyth vs in loue, and wylle make vs perteyner of his good wylle and dede (475.6).

Implicit in this understanding of God as Deus desiderans is Julian's previous insight of herself at prayer: 'I saw him and I sought him; I had him and I wanted him' (325.14). What frustrates his desire and'our own is the vnablynes of owe selfe to Jhesu (478.29). So prayer in times of desolation is equally prayer for union and a response to grace, which itself implies the divine presence: our lord godfolowyth vs, helpyng our desyre

(479.34). All of this, as has been noticed (cf. 477.19 note), belongs to the contemplative exegesis of the Canticle of Canticles, which was Bernard's speciality,232 and for him 'You would not seek me, had you not already found me' is a principle of unitive prayer.

The sight and the feeling of God which is the term of this prayer (479.33-38) and also its purpose (477.21-26) is of the Trinity, working the salvation, of all men, indeed, but in particular of the one who receives the grace of contemplation, the hygh myghty desyer to be alle onyd in to hym (480.42), itself an assurance of that fulness of sight and possession which is the Beatific Vision. Here Julian again has recourse to the doctrine of the spiritual senses, as taught especially by William of St. Thierry in his Expositio altera in Cantica.233

231 On the theme of 'Deus desiderans' in Bernard and other Cistercian spiritual writers, cf. Dumontier: S. Bernard et la Bible, 40-43.

232 Ibid. 43 note 2.

233 For such passages as 'videndo claritatem tuam, sentiendo charitatem tuam, illuminetur in te conscientia mea; ... tractando quae proprie tua sunt, dulcius te sapiunt, suavius redolent, sapiat mihi gustus tuus, spiret odor', cf. J. Walsh, 'Guillaume de Saint-Thierry et les sens spirituels', 34-35.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

Now that Julian has shown, with all her spiritual learning and literary skills, the contemplative process as the consummate point of union attained in the immediacy, totality and mutuality of the relationship which is the divine presence, the variations to which it is subject here in via, and its final transcendence in the Beatific Vision, she can demonstrate how this happens in practice in the prayer of the Gospel prototype, our lady sent Mary (483.6). So chapter 44 begins with a proleptic allusion to man as the servant in the parable, the son who werkyth evyr more his (the Father's) my lie and his wunchyppe duryngly without styntyng

(483.2), and how this 'working' (the force and content of the word will not be lost on any reader of the Cloud) is achieved. The task Julian sets herself is to describe the object of Mary's contemplation; and she sees this contemplation as an intellectual and affective 'sight' of the mutual presence and relationship of the divine persons in the soul of Mary, which she has seen 'in part' in the first revelation (cf. 297.28-298.40,

310.2-311.11). The truth which is the Father sees God who is the Son; and the wisdom which is the Son beholds God who is the Father; and the Spirit who is love is endlessly proceeding from this mutual contemplation. And yet, mysteriously, 'all is of God's making' (484.11), because the Son who is wisdom is at the same time a human being who beholds, is given the power to contemplate, as well as seeing divinely; his soule is a creature in god (484.13), possessing by participation these same properties of truth, wisdom and love. So Julian now beholds, in the contemplative prayer of Mary (of which the evangelist Luke writes repeatedly when he deals with Christ's infancy), the analogue of the divine processions and relationships, in which the creature truly knows himself as made and existing now for ever (evyr more it doyth that it was made for, 484.14), out of the divine creative love, but also for the love with which God loves him endlessly.

(It is worth remarking that Ludolph of Saxony, in his Vita Christi, offers the speculation that the angel came to Mary when she was 'tota abstracta in devotissima oratione, vel in continua contemplatione ...

Rationabile enim videbitur quod quando sibi voluit uniri Verbum aeternum, tune ipsi spiritualiter sibi fuerit unita in contemplationis actu'.)"4

At the beginning of this fourteenth revelation which 'our Lord showed for prayer', Julian wrote of righteousness as prayer's true condition, by which she meant the participation in the divine peace and 234 Ed. Rigollot, I.v-7.

INTRODUCTION

harmony of all who will be saved, as they behold God:

And the beholdyng of thys blessyd acord is full swete to the soule that seeth it by grace. Alle £e soules that shalle be savyd in hevyn without ende be made ryghtfulle in the syjt of god and by hys awne goodnesse, in whych ryghtfullnes we be endlessly kepte and marvelously aboue all creatures (434.32).

In the chapters (41-43) which followed,Julian had explained that prayer is the expression of the graced creature's cooperation in God's righteousness, seen at its most perfect in Mary's contemplation of the incarnate Word in the moment of his conception (chapter 44). All of this flows from the truth that man, in his creation and his immortal existence, is assimilated to God in his substance (cf. 475.2-3). It is, however, equally true that homo viator 'is often unlike in condition by sin' (475.3). Now, in chapter 45, she begins to reflect on the apparent incompatibility of these two truths and their consequences in man's life of prayer. God's knowledge and judgment of us is 'upon our kindly substance'; that is, in our relationship to him as Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit:

A hye vnderstandyng it is inwardly to se and to know that god, whych is oure maker, dwellyth in oure soule, and a hygher vnderstandyng it is and more, inwardly to se and to know oure soule that is made dwellyth in god in substance, of whych substance by god we be that we be (562.12).

But there is another knowledge and judgment which is only partial, one which does not see this unchangeable substance, except in so far as it is reflected in man's visible actions, which involve his changeable sensuality. It is the work of God, of his mercy and grace, with our cooperation (and this mutual activity is what she has called prayer) to transform the sensuality, so that man becomes like to God in condition as well as in substance. (It is this that Walter Hilton calls 'reforming in feeling'.) However, throughout the whole revelations, all that Julian has seen is God knowing and approving us in our substantial relationship with him (which she will come to see, through the parable, as our relationship in Christ, one perception and one knowledge, the divine wisdom and the incarnate Word). However, the teaching Church which proclaims Christ's perfection (as she will ultimately be shown: I it am that holy chyrch prechyth the and techyth the. That is to sey: All the helth and the lyfe ofsacramentys, alle pe vertu and pe grace of my worde, alle the goodnesse that is ordeynyd in holy chyrch to the, I it am (597.34)), is also the learning

Church, the body of Christ not yet completed (cf. 418.20), which must acknowledge its own sinfulness; that is, in that condition it is incapable of being incorporated into God's righteousness. It would seem that at

IX, 16 REVELATION XIV

precisely this point Julian was shown the parable of the lord arid the servant, which, when finally understood, would show her how God reconciles the apparently irreconcilable, and, what is more to the point, manifests that sinful man is called to contemplative prayer by the swet prevy werkyng of the holy gost (463.31). As yet, however, she cannot at all see its relevance; she can only reiterate that God's word and the Church's teaching alike must contain all that is relevant to salvation, the key to all Christian experience:

... the more knowyng and vnderstondyng by the gracious ledyng of the holy gost that we haue of these ij domes, the more we shalle see and know oure felynges (488.36).

When Julian writes, at the beginning of chapter 46, that whan we know and see verely and clerely what oure selfe is, than shalle we verely and clerly see and know oure lorde god in fulhed of joye

(490.3), she is not simply dealing with the eschatalogical character of all contemplative prayer, or giving voice to her own desire 'to be dissolved and to be with Christ' (Philippians 1.23); she is reflecting as a monastic theologian on the nature of man. He can only know and love himself truly in the fulness of his knowledge and love of the incarnate, glorified

Christ. So William of St. Thierry teaches that the ultimate object of Christian contemplation is not simply God, nor is it the self. It is something else, a tertium or medium quid, which he calls the beata conscientia: ... cum in amplexu et osculo patris et filii medium quodammodo se invenit beata conscientia; cum modo ineffabili incogitabili fieri meretur homo dei non deus, sed tamen quod est deus, homo ex gratia, quod deus est ex natura.235 However, Julian is here at pains to insist

235 Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei, ed. Davy, 146. The text here does not differ materially from that of Mabillon in PL 184 348; but the need for another critical edition is stressed by J.-M. Dechanet's articles in Scriptorium 6, 8 and 11. It is especially interesting, in view of the present editors' belief that Julian knew some of William's writings, to observe Dechanet's 'Anglo-Saxon' group among the manuscripts belonging to his 'Cistercian family', Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum 103 dsth century, unknown origin, possession of William Warham, ob. 1532), London BM Royal 6 B xi (i3th century, Germany, but owned by some dependency of Tewksbury Abbey),

Bodleian Hatton 103 (SCN 4051; England, a composite of 13th and early 14th-century pieces belonging to the Hereford Franciscans), Bodleian Auct. D. 55 (SCN 27875; 131(1 century, England, unknown provenance). Shewring writes that this section of the Letter

'could fairly be described as a precis of the Speculum fidei , and adduces PL 180 394; and it is part of Dechanet's thesis that all of Part III and other material derives from William's *Trealise', later Carthusianized by him to form the Letter requested by MontDieu.

INTRODUCTION

(and this is another insight which flows from her reflection on the parable) that through Christ and his Spirit there is interaction between substance and sensuality, which leads to the intensification of this contemplative knowledge of self:

We may haue knowyng of oure selfe in this lyfe by contynuant helpe and vertu of oure hygh kynd, in which knowyng we may encrese and wax by fortheryng and spedyng of mercy and grace (490.7).

And if the woe and pain which sin brings constitute an obstacle in this life to the communication of wisdom and truth by the grace of contemplation, still this is communicated in the doctrines of Holy Church by the gift of faith. In this second kind of beholding of truth (which the showings constantly confirm as authentic), Julian seems to assert that there is room for error, at least so far as the conclusions to be drawn from such truth are concerned:

And thus in alle this beholdyng me thought it behovyd nedys to se and to know that we be synners and do many evylles that we ou3te to leue, and leue many good dedys vndone that we ou3te to do, wherfore we deserve payne, blame and wrath (492.26). where me thought advances this as no more than her own opinion, which she then proceeds to refute, notwithstanding, for example, the contrary view which the author of the Ancrene Riwle cites from Anselm (cf.

492.28 note). Her propositio is that the Lord never was nor never will be angry (493.30). Her ratio is that such a view is incompatible with all the divine attributes (493.31-32). As confirmatio, she lists the essential properties of the Trinity (493.32-35); and for exornatio she embellishes the argument with the statement that the term of the Trinitarian operatic ad extra, the divine goodness, leaves no room for either wrath or forgiveness (493.35-39). All the showings are the final proof, complexio of this. Julian therefore concludes that in her prayerful relationships with the Lord she needs to wait for him to express himself more clearly or (which is the same thing) to prepare her to receive his communication.

Meanwhile, she exercises herself in both beholdings, the wonder of contemplation and the childlike submission to the truths of faith as proclaimed by the Church.

One of Julian's mature reflections on the mysterious parable of the lord and the servant deals with how easy it is for human frailty to be exposed in the contemplative situation. Consolation very quickly turns into desolation, if the soul allows itself to be overtaken by restlessness and agitation, when it cannot penetrate the divine mysteries, either because God himself hides them Tor love' (494.46), or because he has

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

not yet made us worthy to see them (494.47). So at the beginning of chapter 47 she reminds us that wonder and reverence, which themselves lead to abiding consolation, and the patient endurance of this lack of knowing, itself involving the confident expectation that we shalle in short tyme se clerely in hym selfe all that we desyer (495.4), are elements integral to contemplative prayer, the way in which we should respond to grace. It is the failure to meet these obligations which she seems here to be indicating as the sin to which contemplatives are prone: yielding to the temptation to sorrow and woe because they cannot see clearly (496.19).

The pattern of her thought in the short text had been that, in the time of such temptation and falling, man is moved by God's love to contrition and confession, so that he comes again tofynde a reste in saule and softnesse in conscience; and than hym thynke pat god hose for gyffynn his synnes, and it es soth (262.71). Now, however, she sees that, whether or no she was right in believing that the forgevenesse of his wrath shulde be one of the pryncypall poyntes of his mercy (495.11), it is certainly a very limited view of mercy and forgiveness. Thus she begins to tell us, as a preparation for her full account of the parable, against the background of twenty years of contemplative reflection on this 'showing for prayer' (cf. 460.3), how she saw and vnderstode of the workyng of mercy (496.13).

She begins with an examination of her own feelings and reactions in times of desolation, the course of which she perceives to be a failing of her sight of God. She couches her description of this desolation in terms of that dissimilitude which is contrary to the Trinitarian appropriations, power, wisdom and goodness (cf. 496.16, 18 and notes).

The powerlessness and unknowing, she observes, are in the self; but the will is 'overlaid'. So we see that she is writing not merely of her own experience of such desolation, but of all that she has seen and understood concerning the will of the servant (the oone man — 522.104) in his falling. Here, as there, it is the 'godly will' with which she deals:

This man was hurte in his myghte and made fulle febyll, and he was stonyd in his vnderstandyng, for he was turnyd fro the beholdyng of his lorde, but his wylle was kepte in gods syght. For his wylle I saw oure lorde commende and aproue, but hym selfe was lettyd and blyndyd of the knowyng of this wyll (522.104).

In the desolation she also perceives the hidden working of this godly will, in the grett desyer that the soule hath to se god (497.25). She is thus able to identify, as spiritual writers so distinguished as Bernard and Richard of St. Victor before her had done, the various affections whence her interior reactions originate, and the quality of the discretion to which she has attained through her own experience, not merely of the alternation

INTRODUCTION

of consolation and desolation, of which all the great masters of Western spirituality write — a classical instance is the famous conclusion of Hugh of St. Victor's De arrha animae236 — but of the co-existence of desolation and consolation, a theme much more rare.

This interior knowledge of the contraryous that is in oure selfe (499.41), the confrontation, that is, between rejoicing, desire and true hope, and mourning and dread (cf. 497.26-498.34) brings her to reflect, in the next chapter, 48, on the predominantly passive nature of contemplative prayer. There is no such contraryous in the good Lord whom she has seen as the initiator and also as the term of all human spiritual endeavour.

We can no longer foist off our own inner contradictions on the God whych is endlesse lyfe dwellyng in oure soule (500.2). So she is able to describe human wrath, which the Cloud-author, following Bernard, denounces as *pe foulist and ]DC worst filj>e of alle',237 as the substance of man's unlikeness to the Trinity:

... for wrath is not elles but a frowerdnes and a contraryousnes to pees and to loue. And eythcr it comyth of feylyng of myght or of feylyng of wysdom or of feylyng of goodnesse, whych feylyng is nott in god, but it is in oure party (500.7).

Far from calling down divine anger, it merely invites that mercy which is a swete gracious werkyng in loue, medlyd with plentuous pytte, for mercy werkyth vs kepyng, and mercy werkyth turnyng to vs all thyng to good

(501.17).

Julian has no wish, however, to minimize the pain of this contemplative experience. It involves her in the daily dying of which Paul writes in II Corinthians (cf. 501.20 note). Her adept use of the rhetorical colores to emphasize this point rivals that of the Latin Vulgate. None the less, with Julian as with Paul, an optimistic note predominates. Here she begins to treat of the Trinitarian processions, and of their interaction in the working out of man's total salvation. As the Cloud-author writes at the end of his treatise, perhaps echoing an aphorism of Anselm's, 'not what pou arte, ne what pou hast ben, beholdep god wij> his mercyful i3e, bot pat pou woldest be'.238 Her reflection on this constant

Trinitarian concern and care for the work of the divine hands leads her here (502.26 e.s.) to anticipate her teaching on motherhood as a divine

236 PL 176 970 inc.: Hoc ultimum interrogationis meae 217 A Treatise of Discretion of Spirits; Hodgson, Deonise, 85.

2" Hodgson, Cloud, 132, and note, 204.

IX.16 REVELATION XIV

attribute, and to introduce for the first time her own coined word for the highly technical nepixuprpis, circumsessio: spredyng abrade (cf. 502.28 note), as referring to the inter-relationship of Son and Spirit indwelling in man:

Mercy is a pyttefull properte, whych longyth to moderhode in tender loue; and grace is a wurshypfull properte, whych longyth to ryall lordschyppe in the same loue. Mercy werkyth kypyng, sufferyng, quyckyng and helyng, and alle is of tendyrnesse of loue; and grace werkyth with mercy, reysyng, rewarding, endlesly ovyr passyng that oure lovyng and our traveyle deseruyth, spredyng abrode and shewyng the hye plentuousnesse, largesse of goddes ryall lordschyppe in his mervelouse curtesy

(502.28-503.35; and cf. notes).

She will have much more to write, in the light of her coming exposition of the parable, on the Trinitarian mystery; but few theologians of her time, and, it may be, since her time, have written with such clarity and concision, such simplicity and courtesy of this high mystery.

No less a theologian than Karl Rahner has recently insisted that the great theological trap, which by no means all the scholastics or their precursors were able to avoid in writing on the Trinity, is to attempt to speculate on the unity and distinction of the persons in abstracto, prescinding, that is, from the data of revelation of the divine economy, the triune God, concerned eternally with and for man's salvation, manifested in the existence of the incarnate Christ. What Rahner has written239 emphasizes for Julian's readers that she was not so trapped, as she writes of the properte of blessyd loue that we shalle know in god, whych we myght nevyr haue knowen withou3te wo goyng before (503.46).

In chapter 49 she continues to share her reflections on the illumination which she has received concerning divine mercy, grace and love, following her experience of purification; but here the prayer is not purely passive — she is with grett diligence beholdyng (505.3). The first part of the chapter consists of two syllogistic argumentatiorm, (505.2-507.22), in which the major premiss (either the propositio or the ratio] is what she saw or what she was shown; and the conclusions drawn are identical: there is no wrath in God, but only endless goodness and friendship. The immediate object of this consideration appears to be that the illumination is inevitably leading to contemplative union; for she con239 The Trinity, 19.

INTRODUCTION

firms her statement that wrath in God is an impossibility by a reference to the soule that of his speciall grace seeth so ferforth of the hye marvelous goodnesse of god, that we be endlesly onyd to hym in loue (505.7); and the soul in question, manifestly, is herself. As is indicated in the annotations to this chapter, Julian is not merely reflecting on the Pauline andjohannine teaching on the loving union of God with every soul in grace; the divine goodness is present to her in the person of the risen and glorified

Christ:

I saw full truly that where oure lorde aperyth, pees is takyn and wrath hath no stede (506.13).

In the risen and glorified Christ are the Father and the Spirit, are endless might and endless goodness as well as endless wisdom. She develops here the traditional teaching that the God who is in some way consciously present to us in consolation, when we are aware of the Spirit producing in us his fruits (cf. 507.21 note), is equally present in the darkness of the contemplative's desolation, and that this is the experience of our sinful nature, a presence which is manifest as soon as we perceive our need for his forgiveness: that same endlesse goodnesse contynually tretyth in vs a pees agaynst oure wrath and our contraryouse fallyng, and makyth vs to see oure nede with a true drede, myghtely to seke vnto god to haue forgyvenesse with a gracious desyer of oure saluacyon (507.25).

Here she is reiterating, but with a much firmer and more assured comprehension of the Trinitarian mystery, all that she saw in the first revelation of God's goodness and his homely loving (cf. chapter 5, pp.

299.309). She is writing, too, of her own apparently frequent experience over twenty years of what she evaluates as faltering contemplative perseverance: tribulation, disquiet, woe, blindness and pronyte. She concludes by describing, now in the context of the Western tradition's anagogical interpretation of Jerusalem' as the symbol of everlasting peace, how the heavenly fulfilment will mean that we shall be as pleased with ourselves and our fellow-Christians as we shall be with God and with all his works.

Julian has already indicated, in the long series of contemplative insights and reflections upon them which are introduced in Revelation

XIII by the locution Synne is behouely (405.13), that compunction of heart is a virtue which is essential to contemplative life and prayer. The constant tradition, in the East as in the West,240 is that shame and sorrow

240 Irenee Hausherr: Penthos.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

for sin are linked with a proper fear of the divine retribution. Julian here writes, out of her considerable knowledge of the Western tradition, the precise truth that it is the common teaching of the Church and also the feeling of every true contemplative who treasures the tradition, that the blame of owe synnes contynually hangyth vppon vs, fro pe furst man in to the tyme that we come vppe in to hevyn (511.11). Yet it is equally true, not merely from what God has seen fit to show her but from her prayerful understanding of Scriptural texts such as that quoted in the annotation to 510.4, that God guards, watches over and protects his own, no matter what man's judgment may be. (The Cloudauthor makes a like observation, when he writes of sinners who have become contemplatives.)241 Yet the clarity with which she sees both

'dooms' only intensifies her anxiety; as she states her dilemma with the logic of the trained scholastic's ratiocinatio, How may this be? (511.10), she is not dismissing it, but merely sharpening its horns. It is, however, not simply a problem in logic, but a real cause of suffering to many a good and simple contemplative; and she is no longer, as in the short text, expounding with lyrical intensity a philosophical conundrum — A wricked synne, whate ert pou ...? (371.26 e.s.). What she does here, after she has reflected on the nature of her longing for relief from her fear and perplexity (which, again, her training leads her to set out as another ratiocinatio^ in a dialogue with the Lord), is to formulate a simple petition, prefaced by an ejaculation:

A, lorde Jhesu, kyng of blysse, how shall I be esyde, who shall tell me and tech me that me nedyth to wytt, if I may not at this tyme se it in the?

(512-36) When, of course, she protests that what she is asking for is a 'low — common — thing' (512.30), we may justly suspect her of art, of the rhetoricians' captatio benevolentiae, especially when we perceive how deeply complex is the Lord's simple-seeming exemplum. Were it not that for twenty years she persevered in prayer, and preserved her confident, child-like expectation that in the end divine help would be given to her, she might well have been hoist with her own petard. What emerges as wholly admirable is that she was able, despite her constant anxiety and lack of knowing, to make a coherent whole of the short text and yet in it to suppress any reference to her prayer for relief and to the showing, still at that time dark, mysterious, troubling, which had been given in answer to the prayer.

241 Hodgson, Cloud, 64-65.

INTRODUCTION

Though the editors have insisted that Revelation XIV in the long text, from chapter 41 to chapter 63, is a unified showing Tor prayer', they have sought to make it equally clear that the long text here differs radically from the short in every way except one: in both texts,Julian is at pains to reproduce faithfully the visions and locutions of her showings, and the order in which she received them, apart only from the suppression in the short text of all that has to do with the wonderfull example of a lorde that hath a servannt (513.3). The annotations to the two texts remark how dramatically her theological, literary, rhetorical and scholastic skills and the breadth of her reading developed during the period which passed (how long this was we have no means of knowing) between the publication of the short text and her final redaction of the long version. She also leaves it to her readers to discover for themselves the nature of these skills and how she may have acquired them; our almost complete lack of biographical information, and the benefits which such ignorance may bring to scholarship, have already been remarked. We know so little about Julian the woman in the first place because she herself plainly considered that curiosity about her personal history would be irrelevant to the purposes of her book. What she does undertake to describe, in chapter 51, succeeding with remarkable clarity, is her contemplative method, under the guidance of the Holy

Spirit, with regard to the content of all the showings, and with particular application to the parable of the lord and the servant, since in this mysty example the pryvytes of the reuelacyon be yet moch hyd (519. 71). She tells us that, even before she received, early in 1393, special additional insights into the parable, she had found that in her private prayer

(which, naturally, had as its centre the content of her showings) she was able to distinguish three kinds of contemplative understanding, or rather three modes ('properties' is her word) of the one inner knowledge :

The furst is the begynnyng of techyng that I vnderstode ther in in the same tyme. The secunde is the inwarde lernyng that I haue vnderstonde there in sythen. The thyrd is alle the hole revelation fro the begynnyng to the ende whych oure lorde god of his goodnes bryngyth oftymes trely to the syght of my vnderstondyng. And theyse thre be so onyd, as to my vnderstondyng, that I can nott nor may deperte them. And by theyse thre as one I haue techyng wherby I ow to beleue and truste in oure lorde god, that of the same goodnesse that he shewed it and for the same end, ryght so of the same goodnes and for the same end he shall declare it to vs when it is his wyll (519.76).

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

What she is writing here, and what follows until she recounts the locution which introduces Revelation XV (chapter 64, 620.13 e.s.), concern her prayer, how and with what gifts she applies herself to the traditional contemplative processes, reading, meditating, praying and contemplating:

... lectio ... meditatio, oratio, contemplatio. Haec est scala claustralium qua de terra in coelum sublevantur, gradibus quidem disdncta paucis, immensae tamen et incredibilis magnitudinis, cujus extrema pars terrae innixa est, superior vero nubes penetrat et coelorum secreta rimatur.242

She enumerates what she has been given: 'the beginning of teaching' — the revelations themselves in their due order, the content of which is predominantly the word of God (as the annotations consistently show), spoken directly to her in the context of her own formation and sacred learning; this, for Julian, is 'lectio'. Then there is the 'inward learning'

— her divinely-assisted reflection upon the 'lectio' over a period of twenty years, her spirituals intelligentia. Finally, there is her gift of total recall of what she has seen or heard. Although Julian is quick to refer this ability entirely to immediate divine action, she takes no pains, as we might do, to distinguish between natural and supernatural gifts; the useful terms 'acquired' and 'infused' for describing two kinds of contemplative gifts and the modes of relationship between God and man in prayer are of a much later coinage (see the annotation to 519.76). As Jean Leclercq has pointed out, discussing the Biblical imagination:

Another important factor explained by rumination and reminiscence is the power of imagination of the medieval man. Exuberant as this faculty is, it possesses on their part, however, a vigour and a preciseness which we find it difficult to understand. We are used to seeing, almost without looking at them unless with a distracted eye, printed or moving pictures.

We are fond of abstract ideas. Our imagination having become lazy seldom allows us any longer to do anything but dream. But in the men of the Middle Ages it was vigorous and active. It permitted them to picture, to 'make present', to see beings with all the details provided by the texts: the colours and dimensions of things, the clothing, bearing and actions of the people, the complex environment in which they move. They liked to describe them and, so to speak, recreate them, giving very sharp relief to images and feelings. The words of the sacred text never failed to produce a strong impression on the mind. The Biblical words did not become trite; people never got used to them.243

143 Colledge and Walsh, Guigues II, 84.

241 The Love of Learning, 93.

INTRODUCTION

Thus it is that when ... twenty yere after the tyme of the shewyng saue thre monthys I had techyng inwardly as I shall sey: It longyth to the to take hede to alle {>e propertes and the condescions that were shewed in the example, though l>e thyngke that it be mysty and indefferent to thy syght (520.86),

Julian was wholly capable of carrying out to the letter this direction, by making herself imaginatively present to the parabolic picture, in all its wealth of detail, drawn for her so many years before: the manner of the lord's sitting, the place where he sat, the colour and fashion of his garments, his facial expression; how the servant stood, where and how he went, how he was dressed and how he held himself. But this was an exercise not only of the imagination, but also of spiritual discernment.

Just as the original showing of the parable was not merely an imaginative sight — Whych syght was shewed double in J>e lorde, and the syght was shewed double in the servannt. That one perty was shewed gostly in bodely lycknesse. That other perty was shewed more gostly withoute bodely lycknes (514.4) so here she understands that she is to 'behold' (that is, 'contemplate' — cf. 491.16 note) the lord's nobley and his goodnes within (521.95) and the servant's inwarde goodnes and his vnlothfulnesse (521.98). Again, the distinction of historical exegesis is implied between historica interpretatio and spirituals intelligentia. The parable itself as Julian now recounts it, postulating these distinctions as her principles of contemplative investigation, leave us in no doubt that between 1373 and 1393 she had become thoroughly acquainted with, adept in the practice of 'mediaeval exegesis' in the technical sense in which this term has been used by every commentator since Henri de Lubac published his monumental work.244 The evidence that for Julian the content of the revelations constituted lectio divina has already been observed; this is especially true of the parable-revelation, and it is stressed by the subsequent reflections.

In the annotations to these passages, some one hundred and fifty Scriptural allusions have been identified, and, no doubt, if the editors knew their Vulgate as well as Julian did, they would have found even more.

There may be those who will think that some of these identifications, and, indeed, the whole treatment which Julian has been given in this book as Scripture scholar, Latinist, rhetorician and theologian, reflect chiefly the editors' subjective responses to her work. Against this, they

244 Exe'gese medievale; les quatre sens de I'Ecriture.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

would appeal to the opinion of scholars of the eminence of de Lubac and Leclercq, the second of whom has written:

This way of uniting reading, meditation and prayer, this 'meditative prayer', as William of St. Thierry calls it, had great influence on religious psychology. It occupies and engages the whole person in whom the Scriptures take root, later on to bear fruit. It is this deep impregnation with the words of Scripture that explains the extremely important phenomenon of reminiscence whereby the verbal echoes so excite die meaning that a mere allusion will spontaneously evoke whole quotations and, in turn, a Scriptural phrase will suggest quite naturally allusions elsewhere in the sacred books. Each word is like a hook, so to speak; it catches hold of one or several others which become linked together and make up the fabric of die expose.245

The editors consider that the method which Julian employed and the structure which she achieved, throughout her work but especially in this Revelation XIV, are very precisely described by Leclercq; and that he could so delineate the characteristics of a writer with whom he is probably unacquainted, certainly not in her original language, can only point to the pervading influence in her of the great Western spiritual writers whose modes of thought and of writing he has devoted his scholarly life to examining.

As was indicated some years ago,246 the servant in the parable is none other than the 'Suffering Servant of God', as he (and his Lord) are depicted in the 'servant-songs' of Isaias. Furthermore, Julian's first reflection upon this servant identifies him with Adam, with Adam's friendship with God and with his fall, though she hastens to add that the servant is not wholly identifiable with the historical Adam (cf.

519.67-70), that is, with the narrative of Genesis 1.27-28, 3.8, 17-23. All this accords well with a fundamental principle of mediaeval exegesis, that the Old Testament has to be 'opened', examined, so that the incarnate Word can be found. Thus the parable is offered in the form of a preacher's exemplum. The mediaeval preacher is pre-eminently an expositor veteris testamenti, so that he may truly be a dispewator novi testamenti.247

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.248

145 The Love of Learning, 91.

244 J. Walsh: The Revelations of Divine Love, 31-32; and cf. 513.3 note.

247 Exe'gese medie'vale 2 673, citing Augustine, Contra Faustinum.

241 Augustine of Dacia, O.P.; cf. Walther: Proverbia sententiaeque, no. 13899; and see

H. de Lubac, Exe'gese medie'vale i 23.

INTRODUCTION

This distich, opening with the aplomb and the metre of a Martial epigram, even though the rest of it is doggerel, achieved epigrammatic status, and is an accepted mnemonic for the objects of a tradition ancient in the time of Cassian.249 Julian's parable shows that in her times and environment the tradition still prevailed; this is particularly evident in the importance for her of Gregory the Great's teaching.2$0 We may take it that for her the res gestae which build the foundation of the parable are contained in the first chapters of Genesis, but are also adumbrated in the Isaian prophecies. She is well aware, as she constructs chapter 51, that she is embarking on the use of Scriptural allegory, in which the superficies verborum is there to lead us to the intima sententiarum.2*1 It cannot be accidental that in writing of the first showing of the parable, Julian should use the adverb full mystely (513.2; and cf. note), or that the later remark concerning the parable, For twenty yere after the tyme of the shewyng saue thre monthys I had techyng inwardly

(520.86), should apply to it the epithets 'misty' and 'indifferent':

It longyth to the to take hede to alle be propertes and the condescions that were shewed in the example, though be thyngke that it be mysty and indefferent to thy syght (520.87).

It would seem from the contexts, especially of the second, the locution enjoining prayerful and studious acceptance of the entire revelation, where the showing's obscurity is stressed by the adjective indefferent (see

521.89 note), that Julian intends us to understand by these epithets what the exegetes called allegorica, allegorice. Gregory the Great writes of allegory as the historia mystica of the sacred text;252 and the established synonyms for the word and the idea are mysticus ordo, mystica interpretatio.253 One cannot, of course, use in these contexts the English word 'mystical' in the vague and wholly irresponsible fashion in which it has in modern times been employed; in this century, probably no one did more to popularize and to debase the term than Hope Allen. When one writes of mediaeval allegory as the 'mystical sense of Scripture', one is referring to the Pauline Mysterium Christi, the sacramentum absconditum

(Ephesians 3.1-9), hidden in God from the beginning and now to be revealed in the apostolic preaching. So Julian writes, after the allegory's first showing:

249 Exegese medievale \ 190-192.

250 See supra, IX 15, Revelation XIII; and cf. Exegese medievale i 187-190.

251 Ibid. 2 483 note i.

251 Ibid. 2 493 e.s.

2" H. de Lubac: "Typologie" et "allegorisme"', 187.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

... the full vnderstandyng of this mervelouse example was not gevyn me in that tyme. In whych mysty example the pryvytes of the reuelacyon be yet moch hyd (519.70).

The reality hidden in God is revealed to individual men at the moment when it is realized in Christ,"4 but only in so far as it is addressed to each individual man: 'Sum enim quibus nondum natus est Christus'.25S

Elsewhere, Bernard had written: 'Semel locutus est deus, sed continua et perpetua locutio est'.256 This mystery of Christ is inseparable also from the mystery of the Church. Augustine had written: Totum omnium scripturarum mysterium Christum et ecclesiam (confitetur)'.257

Thus, as soon as Julian has understood that the lord of the parable is God, she also understands that the servant was shewed for Adam, that is to sey oone man was shewed that tyme and his fallyng to make there by to be vnderstonde how god beholdyth alle manne and his fallyng. For in the syghte of god alle man is oone man, and oone man is alle man (522.101), 'all mankind', as she will write later, 'that will be saved by the sweet Incarnation and the Passion of Christ' (537.254). Finally, allegory has a doctrinal quality. Since its central object is the divinity of the incarnate

Word — and it is precisely thus that the parable in the end unfolds for Julian — it presupposes faith. This knowledge, cognitio, which is mystica, occulta, of the whole Christ can be revealed only to the internal eyes of the soul, the eyes of faith illumined by the Gospel.258 Julian, through the constant contemplation of her revelations, is convinced that there is no discord between them and the common faith of the Church, and that I haue techyng wherby I ow to beleue and truste in oure lofde god, that of the same goodnesse that he shewed it and for the same end, ryght so of the same goodnes and for the same end he shall declare it to vs when it is his wyll (520.82).

As Gregory had written, allegory not only presupposes faith but builds it up.259

Julian, in her first reflections on what she was shown 'for prayer', 254 Exegese medievale 2 397.

255 Ibid. 2 566, citing Bernard, Sermones de diversis 44.

256 Ibid. 2 567; Sermones de diversii 5.

257 Ibid. 2 500; Enarratio in Psalmum 79.

251 Ibid. 2 522-525.

259 Ibid. 2 530, quoting Homiliarum in Evangelia II, Sermon 40, and many similar aphorisms.

INTRODUCTION

began by considering how she (and we) should conduct ourselves in all that concerns our relationship with God, in the life which is prayer (cf. chapter 41, 460.3 e.s.). Here we have the parable's moral or tropological sense (Moralis quid agas); the Word is always addressed to us, and to how we live in its light.260 In fact, every grace for which Julian ever asked, including the bodily sickness, was so that she might live more to God's glory (cf. 287.30). Through the tropological sense, the mystery of Christ, prefigured by the allegory, is made real and actual in the Christian soul;261 and this is an interiorization which takes place in the present moment, 'moraliter, intrinsecus, quotidie, hodie'.262

So Julian from the start recounts the actions of the lord and the servant in the present tense: a lorde that hath a servannt ...the lorde syttyth ...the servannt stondyth ... goyth ... stertyth ... rynnyth ...fallyth. Gregory had written that the tropological sense is that which tends to the infusion of divine love: (Mira atque ineffabilis sacri eloquii virtus agnoscitur cum supremo amore animus penetratur).263 So, after the enumeration of the servant's vij' grett paynes (515.22; the number seven, de Lubac observes, exercises a special fascination for the mediaeval exegete),264 Julian remarks upon the servant's virtues, his meekness and endurance

(516.32), his good will and great desire (517.44), and upon the various aspects of the lord's love for him (516.38). She is, of course, writing in the tradition of the monastic or contemplative development of the tropological sense, as she extracts the various virtues of the lord and the servant from their general appearance and demeanour. Of the lord, for example, she writes:

The blewhed of the clothyng betokenyth his stedfastnesse, the brownhed of his feyer face with the semely blackhede of the eyen was most accordyng to shew his holy sobyrnesse, the largnesse of his clothyng, whych was feyer flammyng about, betokenyth bat he hath beclosyd in hym all hevyns and all endlesse joy and blysse (526.153).

At the same time, as has been noticed more than once in the comparison of the short and long texts, she avoids the tendency among monastic exegetes to dismiss all other forms of spiritual living but their own which de Lubac observes especially in the Cistercians and the Vic260 Ibid, a 551-552.

261 Ibid. 2 557, quoting Origen: 'Vere impletur in nobis'.

262 Ibid. 2 562-563, citing Adam the Scot and Gregory the Great.

243 Ibid, a 569, citing In Ezechielem.

264 Ibid, i 131.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

torines.265 In editing the long text she deliberately suppresses every indication in the short that she may be addressing herself only to those who are cloistered. What she is able to draw from the parable, in its allusion, for example, to Isaias 53.4-7 and to the comment of Paul to the whole Corinthian community, is that thus hath oure good lorde Jhesu taken vppon hym all oure blame; and therfore oure fader may nor wyll no more blame assigne to vs than to hys owne derwurthy son Jhesu Cryst (535.232, and cf. notes).

Though she understands well and appreciates that mystical tropology which is the renewed experience of the interiorized savour and joy of the allegory, she is never guilty of emphasizing a personal interior life to the detriment of the social and eschatological elements of Christian spirituality. In the last analysis, as the 82 scribe insists, these revelations of pe unutterable loue of God in Jesus Christ were vouchsafed ...to all his dear friends and lovers (734.29 app.), and not simply to cloistered contemplatives.

Quo tendas anagogia: Julian is very much at home with the anagogical sense of Scripture, which for so many of the Fathers expresses the whole of the Christian mystery, and, as such, absorbs the allegorical and tropological senses, and makes the synthesis of the sensus spirituals sen plenior*66 So much of her contemplation throughout the revelations

(and signally in the first, which sets the tone and temper of the rest) is anagogical; it could with justice be described as the meeting place of her developing understanding of Scripture and of the infused contemplative graces bestowed on her. The word itself, dvaywy?? — 'subvectio', 'elevatio', is one which she very often renders. She writes of a ledyng of my vnderstandyng in to the lorde (516.41), my vnderstandyng was led in to the lorde (527.158), now was my vnderstandyng ledde ageyne in to thefurst

(517.45), oure good lorde ledde forth my vnderstandyng in syght and in shewyng (518.62), all in this chapter; and much earlier, she writes of a bodely exsample very reminiscent of the lord-and-servant parable that it was shewde so hygh that thys mannes hart myght be rauyssched and almost foryet hym selfe for ioy (314.43).

Yet perhaps the most anagogical of all Julian's experiences was "' Ibid. 2 577-578, quoting, among others, Walter Daniel, writing of Aelred of Rievaulx 'qui me genuit per evangelium dei ad vitam S. Benedict!'; he is alluding to Aelred's own comparison of Benedict with Paul, applying to Benedict I Corinthians

4.15.

"4 Ibid. 2 631-633.

INTRODUCTION

Revelation IX, when, like Paul (II Corinthians 12.2), her understanding was lifted up to where she saw three heavens (383.8). It is to this experience, and its link with her sight of the suffering Christ (382.3 e.s.) that she reverts as she contemplates the parable, an anagogy which is both doctrinal and contemplative,267 one which echoes Gregory's classical statement, 'Et ipsa civitas, scilicet sancta ecclesia, quae regnatura in caelo, adhuc laborat in terra':268

For all mankynde that shall be savyd by the swete incarnacion and the passion of Crist, alle is the manhode of Cryst. For he is the heed, and we be his membris, to whych membris the day and be tyme is vnknowyn whan every passyng wo and sorow shall haue an eende, and the everlastyng joy and blysse shall be fulfyllyd, whych day and tyme for to see, all the company of hevyn longyth or desyreth. And all that be vnder hevyn, whych shall come theder, ther way is by longyng and desyeryng; whych desyeryng and longyng was shewed in the seruant stondyng before the lorde, or ellys thus in the son stondyng afore the fadyr in Adam kyrtyll.

For the longyng and desyer of all mankynd that shall be safe aperyd in Jhesu (537-254)Here we have an expression of the whole Christian mystery in which the anagogical sense embraces the allegorical and the tropological.269 A similar ascensio mentis through the three spiritual senses is equally evident in her progressive consideration of the place where the lord sits and of the ravine where the servant lay after his fall. The ravine was alang, harde and grevous (516.30 and note). The lord was seated symply on the erth, bareyn and deserte, aloone in wyldernesse (523.120 and note). Later this landscape becomes the scene of the servant's toil as a gardener, deluyng and dykyng and swetyng and turnyng the erth vp and down (530.195 e.s. and notes), the place where is the treasure whych the lorde lovyd

(529.185 e. s. and notes); and finally it becomes the city of God, the city of rest and peace which is at once man's soul, redeemed and perfected, and the New Jerusalem, the bride of Christ:

Now is the spouse, goddys son, in pees with his lovyd wyfe, whych is the feyer maydyn of endlesse joy. Now syttyth the son, very god and very man, in his cytte in rest and in pees, whych his fader hath dyjte to hym of endlesse purpose, and the fader in the son, and the holy gost in the fader and in be son (545.326 e.s. and notes).

267 Ibid. 2 624-625.

268 Ibid. 2 627.

269 Ibid. 2 631-633.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

'Allegoria', Bede had written, 'est cum verbis sive rebus mysticis praesentia Christi et ecclesiae sacramenta signantur'. 27° Throughout her final investigation of the parable at the Lord's behest — It longyth to the to take hede to alle pe propertes and the condescions that were shewed in the example (520.87), she is seeking and finding, in its res and verba, the presence of the incarnate Word in his suffering past, 'in the days of his flesh'

(Hebrews 5.7), in his glorified present, and in his mystical body, the Church: he is the heed, and we be his membris (537.256). What Julian has achieved in this chapter, through the contemplation of the parable against the background of the whole sequence of the revelations, is a unified spiritual exegesis in which the three senses, allegory, tropology and anagogy, are constantly and easily identifiable, but, none the less, inextricable. It is Paul who is the father of such exegesis, and it appears to be from her study of the Pauline letters in the Vulgate (there are at least thirty such allusions in chapter 51 alone) that she has chiefly acquired her exegetical skill, based on her understanding of revelation

(whether this be Scripture and tradition or her own contemplative graces) and of the nature of Christ's Church. Her life of prayer is from first to last In aedificationem corporis Christi,donee occurramusomnes in unitatem fidei et cognitionis filii dei, in virum perfectum, in mensuram aetatis plenitudinis Christi' (Ephesians 4.12-13).

The opening paragraph of chapter 52, And thus I saw that god enjoyeth that he is our fader, and god enjoyeth that he is our moder, and god enjoyeth that he is our very spouse, and our soule his lovyd wyfe. And Crist enjoyeth }>at he is our broder, and Jhesu enioyeth that he is our savyour (546.5?), appears to be the admen contemplationis of the parable, her beholding and snaring in the joy of the Trinity in their own divine activity, which terminates in the incarnate Word, the glorified and risen Christ in his relationship with the Church in glory. This is a vision similar to that granted to John on Patmos of the heavenly liturgy: 'I saw a great multitude clothed in white garments standing before the throne and in the presence of the Lamb ... and they cried out with a loud voice ...

'Blessing and glory and praise and thanksgiving and honour and power to our God, for ever and ever'" (Apocalypse 7.9-12). But in addition,

Julian's sight has comprehended the various aspects of God's relationship in Christ with mankind, the origins of her 'five joys': Father/Son, mother/child, husband/wife, brother/sister, Redeemer/redeemed.

270 Ibid. 2 500, citing De tabernaculo et vasts ejus I 6.

INTRODUCTION

The chapter proper begins with a renewed reflection on this last relationship of Christ with us as our Saviour. The working out of this salvation involves us (as it did him) in a mervelous medelur both ofwele and of woo (546.9). Julian establishes this proposition by an argumentatio perfectissima, based on her understanding of the relations between the first

Adam, as natural parent of the human race, and the second Adam, Christ, the race's spiritual parent, and of the participation of all the children in the life of both parents. In the exornatio of the argumentation (547.13-549.33), she makes it clear that we still have, as the chief object of our attention, unitive prayer: the mercy and grace which work in us, when God of his goodnesse openyth the ey of owe -understanding

(547.18), demand from us holy assent pat we assent to god when wefele hym, truly wyllyng to be with hym with all oure herte, with all oure soule and with all oure myghte (548.24), a Trinitarian allusion which is also a tropological exegesis of the great commandment: 'You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and with all your might'

(Luke 10.27).

In what follows, Julian elaborates what she has stated to be the second condition for unitive prayer at the very beginning of this revelation, seker trust (460.5). The foundation of this trust is the doctrine of Christ's two natures and his consequently two-fold relationship with us, his presence to us in his divinity and iv his glorified humanity. The divine power manifested in the raising up of Adam (the 'Harrowing of Hell'), which, characteristically, she sees as manifestations of the Lord's ruth and pity (549.44), operates equally in all those who fell with Adam. They are even now being raised by the vertu of the passyon and pe deth of his deerwurthy son (549.45). Our falling with Adam, as she stressed earlier in the revelation, is real enough, dreadful, shameful, sorrowful

(502.23 e.s.); but there she adds, from her contemplation of the Suffering Servant who was bruised for our sins (Isaias 53.5), what is the cause of our deepest sorrow: for oure synne is cause of Cristes paynes

(550-51)- It is the sorrow of the contemplative, which leads to that 'sweet touching of grace' which may readily be experienced in the sacrament of penance, when we wylfully amend vs vpon techyng of holy chyrch (551.62). Like Bede and many another before her, Julian is ever conscious, in her consideration of sinfulness, of the evils of Pelagianism, which so easily drive a man to despair by robbing him of his hope; we must mekely know oure febylnes, wyttyng that we may nott stonde a twynglyng of an ey but with kepyng of grace, and reverently cleue to god, in hym oonly trustyng (551.66).

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

The showing of the parable has also enabled her to reconcile the apparently contradictory 'dooms' which earlier she had seen as threatening a conflict between her revelations and the teaching of the Church (487.13 e.s.). The solution lies inpe doubyll chere in whych the lorde behelde pefallyng ofhys lovyd servant (552?. 72). What the Church teaches is that we should accuse ourselves, both sacramentally and in prayer, to a Lord who is loving and merciful. This she now sees in pe doubyll chere ... shewde oujtward, whereas before this she has been aware only of that other ofinwarde endlesse loue and ryght (552.75). What is more, this second, outward 'doom', which is pe meke accusyng that oure good lorde askyth of vs

(552.80), is itself a grace: hym selfe wurkyth there it is, and this is the lower party of mannys lyfe

(553-8i), and it cornyth downe to vs of the kynde loue of the selfe by grace (553.87), the grace which belongs to the one unitive love which is the working of the Trinity.

In chapter 37, at the beginning of Revelation XIII, dealing with the divine compassion, Julian, in associating her awareness of her own sinfulness and the pain and sorrow which accompanied it with that of her fellow-Christians, 'all that shall be saved', was already writing, in the last version of her long text, in the light of the parable. Dealing there with what she here calls the godly wylle that nevyr assentyd to synne ne nevyr shall (555.12), she had taken it for granted that her readers would be acquainted with the principles of Augustinian psychology,271 at least in the simplified form in which they are found, for instance, in the Cloudauthor's disquisition on the powers of the soul272 or in Hilton's Scale

II27J — a psychology which is the point of departure for all her teaching on the Trinity in its operationes ad extra. Now, here in chapter 53, she can repeat with assurance, and verbatim, what she has already written about the godly will, and she can add that this is the partial answer to her question — how can God love us in our sin? What she has seen in the parable, what she is now contemplating, is the good will which is

God's first gift in the creation of the human soul of his servant, Christ, who is every man who will be saved in Christ, a creation which is participation in the divine being. Furthermore, she now sees (and for this understanding she is certainly in the debt of the monastic theologians,

271 See De Trinitate, XII.

272 Ed. Hodgson, 115 e.s.

273 Underbill, 272-273.

INTRODUCTION

and particularly of William of St. Thierry) that this teaching is no novelty in her showings, but belongs, of the Lord's will, to the faith and belief of the Church:

There fore oure lorde wylle we know it in the feyth and the beleue, and namly and truly that we haue all this blessyd wyll hoole and safe in oure lorde Jhesu Crist, for that ech kynde that hevyn shall be fulfyllyd with behovyd nedys of goddys ryghtfulnes so to be knytt and onyd in hym that there in were kepte a substannce whych myght nevyr nor shulde be partyd from hym, and that thorow his awne good wyll in his endlesse forseing purpose (555.16).

(Her contemplation here is in the fullest sense anagogical; she is seeing Christ not only in his fall into the maiden's womb and into the pains of his Passion(cf. 534.222, 541.2946.5.), but in his union with the blessed in glory, now and to the end of time.) It would seem that the lines which follow (556.23 e.s.) are in parenthesis. They may explain why the parable is still only a partial answer to her desire (555.9). She does not tell us why, but simply states:yett the redempcion and the agayne byeng of mannekynde is nedfull (556.24). Be that as it may, the passage which precedes this, There fore oure lorde wylle we know it..., just cited, is clearly the proposition of an argumentatio perfectissima, of which the ratio now follows: For I saw that god began nevyr to loue mankynde (557.26). The exornatio of the argument (the rationis confirmatio runs from 557-27,/or ryghte the same that mankynd ..., to 557.30, knowen and lovyd fro without begynnyng in his ryghtfull entent) must be counted as one of the finest examples of Julian's polished prose, one which demonstrates vividly the powers and the uses of the rhetorician's art. It is an equally fine example of theological writing at its best, explaining with a wealth of Trinitarian detail, firmly based on Scripture and tradition, all of it purposefully designed to draw out the complexio

(itself an echo of the prologue to John's gospel): And thus is mannys soule made of god, and in the same poynte knyte to god (558.39). It also shows us

Julian at prayer; in the depths of her soul she is aware of the Father speaking his purpose (entent], and of the Son responding (assent) in the Spirit (full acorde) who, as she had already written, is the evyn loue whych is in them both (533.218), concerning the operatio ad extra which is at once creation, Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection, recapitulating all mankind who, in Christ, are to come from and return, like himself, to the Father in the same Spirit. God loves us, she sees in his eternal utterance, and as soon as we exist we participate in the response to his love. This love-made is the made-love, and it is thus attributed to the Spirit, with the power of the Father and the wisdom of the Son permeating it.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

As Julian penetrates further into the mystery of the incarnate Christ, still pondering the parable, speculating about the origins, divine and human, of the servant — 7 marveylyd from wens the servant came (532.210)

— she is, as very often, close to Paul and his Trinitarian teaching in the eighth chapter of Romans. Though it suits Julian here to translate into her own English the language of the schools, when she describes God as 'substantial kind unmade', and insists with Bede (cf. 559.45 note) that when we speak of creatio ex nihilo, we mean the 'inspiring' of the soul, her point is ultimately Pauline: there is nothing between man's soul and God, because 'nothing can separate us, neither now nor in the time to come, from the love of God which is ours in Christjesus' (Romans 8.3839):

In whych endlesse loue we be ledde and kepte of god, and nevyr shalle be lost; for he wyll that we know that oure soule is a lyfe, whych lyfe of hys goodnesse and his grace shall last in hevyn without ende, hym lovyng, hym thangkyng, hym praysyng (559.51).

As Julian continues her reflection on the parable, in chapter 54, she seems to be especially aware of Johannine teaching: The Word was with God from the beginning ... the Word was made flesh ... to every one who received him, he gave the power to be the children of God ... the only begotten Son who is in the mind and heart of the Father, he has made him plain ... of his fulness we have all received' (John 1.118). Again she is concerned, by means of the tropological and anagogical exegesis of Scripture which the Church's tradition has taught her, to insist on the unity between the Church's faith and belief and what she continues to see in her contemplation of her revelations.

Like the apostle, she is telling of what she has seen, and his purpose is also hers: 'What we have seen and heard we are telling you, that you also may have this union (societatem) ... with the Father and with his Son

Jesus Christ ... and we write this so that you may rejoice, and that your joy may be full' (I John 1.3-4). So she describes the mutual indwelling, not, as do so many of her contemporaries (see 562.17 note), with respect to transforming union, but by oblique reference to John chapter 17, where Christ is praying, with full confidence that the Father hears him, for all believers, 'that they may be one, as thou, Father, in me and I in thee, that they may be one in us'. The sight that accompanies this belief is indeed full of prevytes (539.271); and so, with a theologian's care, she insists that though I sawe no dyfference betwen God and oure substance, but as it were all god ... yett my vnderstandyng toke that oure substance is in god, that is to sey that god is god and oure substance is a creature in god (562.17).

INTRODUCTION

But the truth of Scripture and tradition remains; Christ's place is the Father and he is the Father's place (John 17.23-24), and we are the Son's place, and his place is ours (cf. 563.23 note).

Aware, however, that those for whom she is writing may have too limited a view of the faith of Holy Church in this Trinitarian doctrine, she also stresses the tropological sense of all these Johannine texts; love leads ('If any man love me ...'), and the gift of indwelling is equally the gift of unitive love. But it is faith that gives understanding of this: for it is noujt eles but a ryght vnderstandyng with trew beleue and suer truste of cure beyng, J>at we be in god and in vs, whych we se nott

(564.30).

This is a power received when Christ becomes incarnate, when our sensual nature is linked with our substance, that substance in God which becomes ours and becomes human when Christ becomes human by the power of the Spirit in the womb of the virgin (cf. Luke 1.35). Early in Revelation XIV, in chapter 43, she had written of the prayer of faith which is itself a participation in God's rightfulness: thus he techyth vs to pray and myghtyly to trust that we shalle haue it; for he beholdyth vs in loue, and wylle make vs perteyner of his good wylle and dede (475.6).

This brings an awareness of ourselves as God's children which does not come from normal human sight or understanding. So she sees faith as the form of all man's knowing and loving, by means of which we believe, hope and love what we do not see. This powerful presence has for its sign baptism, which effects its initiation, that baptism by which we become God's children and followers and members of the Mystical

Body.

So far,Julian has related the mutual indwelling which she has come to see contemplatively in the relationship between the lord and the servant with the Trinitarian teaching of John and Paul, as interpreted allegorically and tropologically by traditional exegesis. Now, in chapter

55, she turns again to Christ as she saw him in the ninth revelation (cf.

566.11 note), as leading us where we are to go (quo tendas — anagogia).

As is observed (565.4 note), there is allusion to a text of Paul's which she must have known well, in Ephesians 5.25-32, where the Vulgate makes him write of the 'sacramentum in Christo et in ecclesia'. Julian writes of Crist, vs alle havyng in hym that shall be savyd by hym (565.3).

Gregory the Great had written: 'Christus et ecclesia una persona est',274 274 Moralia XIV xlix i; PL 75 1068.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

the persona which Augustine had called 'duo in carne una';275 and Julian writes: Crist in his body myjtely beryth vs vp in to hevyn (565.2).

Hope is the virtue of anagogical contemplation, just as it is the prerequisite for Julian's unitive prayer. It is the virtue which flows from our incorporation into Christ, and it becomes operative in the first moment of our separate existence:

And what tyme oure soule is enspyred in cure body, in whych we be made sensuall, as soone mercy and grace begynne to werke, havyng of vs cure and kepyng with pytte and loue, in whych werkyng the holy gost formyth in oure feyth hope that we shall come agayne vp abovyn to our substannce (566.16).

It is, however, an existence in Christ, as is seen in the sign of its inception, as soone mercy and grace begynne to werke, that baptism in which the formal cause is the Holy Spirit, in whych werkyng the holy gostformyth in oure feyth hope. She also sees Christ in relation to his Mystical Body as life

('I am ... the life',John 14.6), and suggests that the poynt of the divine presence is also the poynt of union between soul and body (where 'point' seems to indicate time — see 226. i note — and place — see 338.20 note

— together): for in the same poynt that oure soule is made sensuall, in the same poynt is the cytte of god, ordeyned to hym fro without begynnyng (567.25).

Again she reverts to the ecclesial implications in her contemplation of the lord and the servant, as she refers to the divine gift to man of growth and alludes to Christ's own human growth: all the gyftes that god may geue to the creature he hath gevyn to his son

Jhesu for vs, whych gyftes he wonnyng in vs hath beclosyd in hym in to the tyme that we be waxyn and growyn, oure soule with oure body and oure body with oure soule (567.31).

It is here, as she reflects, with William of St. Thierry, on 'imago et similitude' (cf. 568.40 note), that she offers us a definition of her contemplative understanding of this aspect of the parable, to which she had been led by God:

Thys syght was fulle swete and mervelous to beholde, pesyble and restfull, suer and delectabyll (568.42).

It is perhaps in this reflection on the union of soul and body in Christ incarnate and in his brethren that she begins to see more clearly what

275 Enarrationes, Psalm 140.3; CCSL 40 2027.

INTRODUCTION

before she had simply stated as a fact, mankind's need of the redemptive activity of the whole Trinity in Christ. But she sees it first in the revelation of the person of Christ in his Incarnation, and only then as she regards the person suffering: The lower perty, whych is sensualyte, sufferyd for the saluacion of mankynd (569.51). This is not abstract theologizing; Julian has come to understand it through her own experience of desolation during the showings of the Passion.

In the parable, the final object of this showing which had seemed to her mysty and indefferent (521.89) is Christ and the Father in the unity of the Spirit working out man's salvation. Faith and knowledge, given her

Tor prayer', led her to persevere in prayer here in via, and so she was given self-awareness. As chapter 56 begins: For oure soule is so depe growndyd in god and so endlesly tresoryd ..., she is thinking of Colossians 3.3 (see

570.3 and note). It is only when we are risen with Christ that we shall see ourselves in him. So she returns to her teaching on contemplation, to that desire for God which leads us to seek the hidden treasure which is the life of union with him. She accepts that we can only know the nature of body, soul and spirit and how they are kept together (570.3) in so far as we are shown from wens the seruant came (532.210). So she examines again the whole course of the parable: the servant's fall, his preparation of the treasure, the sitting and the standing (571.12 e.s.) In the sixteenth revelation she will write more of the process of assimilation to Christ, which is our becoming holy in this holynesse

(560.64). Meanwhile, like Paul, we must share Christ's Passion (cf.

573.34 e.s., Philippians 3.10), if we are to enter the depths of his charity (cf. 576.8, Ephesians 3.18-19).

/ had in perty touchyng, she writes (573.38). Here she reinforces what she has just been expounding about growth in the unitive life by this reference to her own contemplative experience. This divine activity, the dynamic relationships of the persons of the Trinity can be 'felt' in us when God wishes to 'touch' us, that is, to make us aware of such activity in a way which transcends our normal intellectual and affective processes, because of our existential participation in the divine life. We are in some way integral to God's substance by virtue of our creation ex nihilo. At the same time (Julian reiterates this teaching in a variety of images and concepts) this activity can be known and is known only because it is revealed in the mystery of the incarnate Word. She finds the English with which to convey the Trinitarian teaching of the Latin theologians. Mercy and grace (Son and Spirit), eternally flowing from substantial kindness (Father, and also the triune God) complete their missio ad extra (the Son is sent by the Father, the Spirit by both Father

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

and Son) by returning man in Christ to his source:

Of this substancyall kyndnesse mercy and grace spryngyth and spredyth in to vs, werkyng all thynges in fulfyllyng of oure joy (574.39).

She shows art and skill and she indicates her multiple triadic terminology by the singular pronoun 'it':

It be thre propertes in one goodnes, and where that one werkyth alle werkyn in the thynges whych be now longyng to vs (574.44).

Her knowledge of the Trinitarian operations and attributes is theological, but it is also contemplative, a beginning, growing knowledge in love of the three persons:

God wylle we vnderstande, desyeryng with all oure hart and alle oure strengh to haue knowyng of them evyr more and more in to the tyme that we be fulfyllyd; for fully to know them and clerely to se them is not elles but endles joy and blysse that we shall haue in hevyn, whych god wyll we begynne here in knowyng of his loue (574.47).

The 'touch', however, is not merely in our reason or the higher part of our nature, though it has there its ground. It is in our sensuality, which Christ, second person of the Trinity, has taken. The Incarnation, the sending of the second person into human existence, and his glorification through Passion and death, is not only the term of the Trinitarian operations; it constitutes a second creation for mankind.

The Spirit, proceeding from Father and Son, was 'sent' into Christ's human, sensual soul to join it to his human substance, spirit. All this

Julian sees as the manner and the order of human endowment, that is, of all those who are destined for final fulfilment, by the working of the Trinity, through kynde, mercy and grace,

In Revelation XVI Julian will show that the Trinity made marines soule asfeyer, as good, as precious as he myght make it a creature (644.41). Here, in chapter 57, she states why this is so: because our (that is, Christ's) human substance is a participation in God's substance, the Father's will is fulfilled in the will of his creature, Christ and all that will be saved in him (the destiny of those who are not to be saved, if there be any such, was never shown to her). This salvation, she insists, is the restoration and the fulfilment of the sensual soul of man, which, by virtue of its substance, participates in the endowment of his substantial spirit, but through the operation of mercy and grace (Son and Spirit) out of Christ's spiritual fulness, by mesure (576.6; cf. John 1.16).

Julian is repeating here something of what she has written in the previous two chapters, because, it would seem, there is a mutuality

INTRODUCTION

achieved between God and man in the eternal activity of the Trinity, a mutuality which itself is eternal, because the Son accepted to become man ab aeterno (cf. 557.30): for oure kynde, whych is the hyer party, is knytte to god in Jje makyng, and god is knytt to oure kynde, whych is the lower party in oure flessch takyng (577.17).

Thus in Christ all the Trinitarian operations, of which the Father is the principium originans, are comprehended. The incarnate Word is the term of the divine activity; there is no other. So faith is described as our participation in and reception of the Word made flesh, who Tor loue ... made mankynd, and for the same loue hym selfe wolde become man (578.25), in his relationship, that is, with the triune God. Hence Julian can write that faith is grounded in us and we in it; the relationship, by gift, is instantaneously mutual. On our side, it is a knowledge which has its impact on the lower part of our life which Christ has assumed. In him, every mode of his human relationship with his Father is available to us

— the reflection of God's life by human kind as he prepares it to receive the Son (the commandments of the Old Covenant, which Christ came to fulfil and not to destroy), the power which Christ as man receives from the Father and shares with his Church (the sacraments), that power in which we receive the Spirit. Again Julian is contemplating the servant's origins, from wens he came, so that her mind is logically led to that maiden who is the human origin by the power of the Spirit of Christ's sensual life; and she makes the point that this mode of his relationship, also, is available to us. She catches exactly the mystical tropology in monastic exegesis of the twelfth century, especially in the Mariological commentaries on the Canticle of Canticles. The union of the Word with all human nature was achieved in Mary's womb, so that she is to be found at the heart of the mystery of the Church, Mary in whom every

Christian soul realises its perfection.276 But Julian also takes the occasion here (following, apparently, Augustine — see 580.50 note) to observe that it is Christ who is Mary's spiritual mother, not Mary Christ's.

The teaching on the spiritual motherhood of the divine and human Christ which she is about to develop at length has come through her renewed contemplation, after the showing of the parable, of the mutual relations between God and man in Christ, and of what she was shown in the first and the last of her revelations.

276 Exegese medie'vale, 2 561 and notes.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

In chapter 58 Julian presents us with a synthesis of all that she has learned in her contemplative reflection, not only on the parable but also on the first, ninth and eleventh revelations, as illumined by her understanding of the lord and the servant, about the mysteries of Trinity and Incarnation. She now sees mankind as a whole in its relationship to Christ; and this is the same view which all mediaeval exegetes who are in the authentic tradition of Origen and Gregory have of the union between Christ and his Church, seen at once as militans et triumphant. It is thus that in our making (he made vs alle at onys — 582.6 — in Christ) we are destined now and everlastingly to share in his own will, the bona voluntas, the divine goodness. this is the werkyng whych is wrought contynually in ech soule that shalle be savyd, whych is the godly wylle before seyde (582.10).

Again she rehearses the various characteristics of this relationship with God, one and three; but here she differs in emphasis from the Cistercian and Victorine spiritual writers and from such contemporaries as Hilton, the Cloud-author and the English translator of Suso's Horologium sapientiae. The Church, as she consistently understands it, all who will be saved, is for her the virginal wife of God the Trinity, in the Trinity's union with the incarnate Christ. We may, if we wish, follow other writers of the fourteenth century (cf. 582.14, 583.15, 16 notes) in applying this teaching to the relationship of Christ with the individual soul in the transforming union, the 'spiritual marriage'; but Julian, though her language closely resembles theirs (/ loue the and thou louyst me, and oure loue shall nevyr parte in two — 583.17), never makes this application.

The nearest she ever comes to it is in her account of the procession of penitent-saints in Paradise (chapter 38), in whom the godly will was never extinguished and whom God mercifully preserved in their falling.

Here, in writing of the creative activity of the Trinity, the natura creatrix, she carefully lays down the principles which she will follow when she comes to deal with the motherhood of God and the incarnate

Christ (cf. 584.25 note, 586.44 note). To explain the matter as clearly as she herself had seen it in her contemplation, she constructs another argumentatio, the proposition of which is the showing she had received of Christ in his 'pre-existence': he stondyth before the fader evyn ryghte

(544.315) ... his stertyng was pe godhed (539.278)... seyng in his menyng: Lo, my dere fader, I stonde before the (536.248) ... stondyng redy before the father in purpos tyll what tyme he wolde sende hym (535.235), who is now become oure moder sensuall (585.39). Her ratio is that we be doubell of gods makyng, that is to sey substanndall and sensuall (585.39). After referring in the confirmatio

INTRODUCTION

to what she has seen of the divine natura creatrix, 'in our substancial making' and his working of mercy in accepting for his own our sensuality (585.40 e.s.), she embellishes her argument by rehearsing the way in which this mercy works through Passion, death and Resurrection, thus keeping our 'parts undeparted', and uniting us to our substance, the triune God. She goes on to summarize what she has seen in contemplative prayer concerning the operation of the Holy Spirit, the working of that grace which belongs to the royal lordship (cf. 502.26 e.s.), elucidating what she had there called 'rewarding' (503.32), by defining it here as a gyfte of trust (587.53 and note). And she ends the chapter with a characteristic anagogical contemplation: the purpose of the divine Trinitarian operation in the Incarnation of Christ is that all who are to be saved should be wurschypfully brought vp in to hevyn, and blyssydfully onyd to oure substannce, encresyd in rychesse and nobly by all the vertu of Crist and by the grace and werkyng of the holy gost (588.66).

As Cassiodorus had written of the Church's ultimate reality: 'collectio fidelium sanctorum omnium anima et cor unum, sponsa Christi,

Jerusalem futuri saeculi'.277

Julian devotes the last chapters, 59 to 63, of Revelation XIV to setting out, in as clear and orderly a fashion as possible, the fruits of all that she has seen and heard concerning the second person of the Trinity, the 'mid person' who never appears to her understanding except in his relationship to Father and to Spirit:

... the trinide is our endlesse ioy and our bleisse, by our lord Jesu Christ, and in our lord Jesu Christ. And this was shewed in the first syght and in all, for wher Jhesu appireth the blessed trinide is vnderstand, as to my sight (295.13).

Twenty years of constant study and contemplative reflection on the parable of the lord and the servant, in which, she tells us, the mysteries and obscurities of all her showings were hidden (519.71), have enabled her to do this. There is now a serenity in her contemplative vision of Jesus. She sees in him every man who will be saved, enriched by his wisdom and knowledge, built up in him who is the firm hope of heavenly glory, for all the fullness of the divine substance is incorporated in his glorified humanity — 'in ipso inhabitat omnis plenitude divinitatis corporaliter' (Colossians 2.9). Her mind and heart

277 Ibid. 2 515 and note 5.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

seem to be impregnated with the wealth of Paul's Christological insights. As he does, she sees Christ as God's principle and instrument of goodness, opposing all the evil and wickedness in the sinful world of man, '... delens quod adversus nos erat ... quod erat contrarium nobis, et ipsum tulit de medio ... expolians principatus et potestates, traduxit confidenter, palam triumphans illos in semetipso' (Colossians 2.14-15).

This is the starting point in chapter 59 for her magisterial teaching on the motherhood of God, teaching which stands as an unique theological achievement in the Church's spiritual traditions. The working of mercy and grace is the simple countering of evil by goodness; and this belongs to the feminine principle of the natura creatrix, the divine creative activity where the ground of moderhed begynnyth (589.10). Without this carefully developed Christology, her teaching on the Trinity, though it would still be remarkable from the pen of a woman of the fourteenth century, could be accounted nothing more than a skilful restatement of traditional monastic theology. She may have suppressed any mention in the short text of this doctrine of God's motherhood, not merely because its implications only became fully clear to her after the publication of that version, but also because she feared the reception which such a theological development might have from readers unaware that here, too, she has tradition on her side. John Gerson, writing only a few years after she completed the long version, with, it would seem, Catherine of Siena in mind, remarks that 'the female sex is forbidden on apostolic authority (he is alluding to I Timothy 2.12) to teach in public, that is either by word or by writing ... All women's teaching, particularly formal teaching by word and by writing, is to be held suspect unless it has been diligently examined, and much more fully than men's. The reason is clear: common law — and not any kind of common law, but that which comes from on high — forbids them. And why? Because they are easily seduced, and determined seducers; and because it is not proved that they are witnesses to (cognitrices) divine grace'.278 This is the voice of authority sounding in a world made by men for men; it is well known how Christine de Pisan inveighed against such a world, and against that particular voice.

Andre Cabassut has remarked279 that to find in certain mystical writings the title 'Mother' given to Christ would occasion no surprise in the thirteenth century or in the seventeenth, to the contemporaries of 171 De examinatione doctrinarum Pars I Consideratio aa, 33; Omnia opera, ed. ElliesDupin, i 14-16.

279 'Une devotion medievale', 236.

INTRODUCTION

Francis of Assisi or of Benet Canfield; and, as the annotations to these chapters abundantly prove (see the notes to 597.32, 599.54, 606.48,

616.24), the devotion, if not the theological implications, was well established among Julian's immediate precursors such as the author of the Ancrene Riwle, Mechtild of Hackborn and the editor-translator of The Chastising of God's Children. Of particular importance here is the evidence that the devotion had found expression in popular preaching in England over a century and a half earlier, just as the lyric cited at 597.32 note shows that the devotion had won a place in popular piety.

The homily entitled by Richard Morris An Bispel™ found in MS British Museum Cotton Vespasian A. 22, contains the following:

(God) is indeed a father; he gives us his earth to till, he gives us corn to sow ... But can we, in any way, call him a mother, we ask? Indeed we can. What does the mother do with her child? First she cheers"1 and rejoices over it as it sees the light, and then she supports it on her arm, or covers its head to send it to sleep and give it rest ... Moreover, he spoke a wonderful word to the soul by the prophet Isaias: 'Can a mother forget her babe and not have pity on the son of her womb?' (Isaias 49.15). If she does forget, yet shall I not forget you, says the Lord.282

The reference to Isaias is of particular interest. It occurred spontaneously (with the other Isaian texts, 49. i and 66.12-13) in this context to Cabassut,283 who did not know of the existence of An Bispel, just as the text Matthew 23.37 occurred to Anselm as he wrote, with affective devotion, first of Paul and then of Jesus as our mother:

Sed et tu lesu, bone domine, nonne et tu mater? An non est mater qui tamquam gallina congregat sub alas pullos suos? Vere, domine, et tu mater. Nam et quod alii parturierunt et pepererunt, a te acceperunt. Tu prius illos et quod pepererunt parturiendo mortuus es et moriendo peperisti ... Ambo ergo matres. Nam etsi patres, tamen et matres. Vos enim effecistis, tu per te, tu per ilium, ut nati ad mortem renasceremur ad vitam. Patres igitur estis per effectum, matres per affectum ... Tu quoque anima, mortua per te ipsam, curre sub alas lesu matris tuae et conquerere

210 Old English Homilies i, 233-235.

211 For 'cheers' the manuscript reads cheted, a hap. leg. which, MED suggests, should be emended to 'cherej>'. This is very probable; the author seems to be recalling John

16.20-21: Tristitia vestra vertetur in gaudium. Mulier cum parit tristitiam habet quia venit hora ejus; cum autem peperit puerum, jam non meminit propter gaudium, quia natus est homo in mundum.

212 We owe our knowledge of this passage to Sr. Mary Arthur Knowlton: The Influence of Richard Rolle and of Julian of Norwich, 78 n./j.

213 'Une devotion medievale', 236-237.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

sub pennis eius dolores tuos ... Christe mater, qui congregas sub alas pullos tuos, mortuus hie pullus tuus subicit se sub alas tuas.284

Cabassut remarks that this prayer seems to be the beginning of the devotion: 'Anselme parait etre en effet 1'initiateur de la devotion a Jesus notre mere'.285 This may well be true, so far as the devotion itself is concerned; but we must look elsewhere for possible sources of the Trinitarian theology which for Julian is the cause and the foundation of the devotion. In her Revelations, contemplation and theology are interdependent, whereas the Trinity can hardly be in Anselm's mind as he writes of Jesus and Paul as ambo matres.

Richard Rolle, perhaps, points us in the right direction, in his exposition on the first few verses of the Canticle of Canticles:

Unde et, allegorice loquendo, ad quemlibet sanctum potest dici illud quod mulier dixit in evangelio ad Christum: Beatus venter qui te portavit et ubera que suxisti (Luke 11.27). Quemadmodum namque antequam in mundum nascimur corporaliter in matris utero portamur, et priusquam ambulare vel currere vel aliquem cibum forte sumere possumus necessarie est ut lac ab uberibus matris capiamus; ita, spiritualiter, ante baptismum vel ante penitenciam, in utero Christi, id est in paciencia sua, ne vel abortivi suffocemur vel diversis sceleribus dampnati simus, gestamuf. Cum vero per baptismum vel per penitenciam a carcere infidelitatis vel iniquitatis parturiente nos deo, extracti fuerimus, opus habemus ut lac quo nutriamur sugendo ad ubera pendamus. Unde apostolus: Quasimodo geniti lac concupiscite (I Peter 2.a).286

Rolle's commentary is in the tradition of that authentic mediaeval exegesis which in the previous century had begun to degenerate through an exaggerated attention to the tropological sense of Scripture as the privileged field of the ex professo contemplative. In the annotations to 596.22, 606.48, 608.64 will be found citations from the English translation, contemporary with Julian, of the Liber spedalis gratiae of Mechtild of Hackborn which well illustrate this degeneration.

However, another witness to the devotion to the motherhood of Christ, which we must consider as well-established by the end of the thirteenth century, Margaret d'Oyngt, shows a more balanced approach (see the annotations to 616.24 ar*d 616.31).

It seems certain that the source of Anselm's devotion is Augustine's exegesis of Psalm 101.7, 'similis factus sum pelicano in deserto', since

"4 Ed. Schmitt, 'Oratio ad Sanctum Paulum', 3 40-41.

215 'Une devotion medievale', 238.

J" Ed. Murray, 29-30.

INTRODUCTION

there, having written that 'Christ exercises fatherly authority and maternal love', he adds 'just as Paul is also father and mother... through his gospel-preaching' (cf. 599.57 note). Augustine here would expect his readers to refer the 'auctoritas paterna' to Christ precisely as revealing the Father, just as, in the Confessiones, where he writes, as Julian does, of the divine creative activity, which he sees operating in his own human parents (see 599.57 note), we know that he is addressing the triune God. Bede in his turn, as he expounds the text of Proverbs 31. i, reminds us of another strand of the tradition which Julian was to inherit, when he writes that the mother of Lamuel's vision is none other than divine grace or the spirit of Wisdom (cf. 598.45 note). This becomes, as we should expect, a mediaeval commonplace in traditional exegesis, especially among contemplative writers with their partiality for the sapiential books, where Wisdom is explicitly called the creative principle which is feminine. For example, in Ecclesiasticus she says of herself: 'I am the mother of fair love, of fear and knowledge and holy hope. In me is all the grace of the way and the truth ... all hope of life'

(24.24). Yet even though these are titles which Christ applies to himself in the fourth gospel (cf. e.g. John 14.6), the tradition shows a persistent reluctance to make the connexion which is Julian's audacious startingpoint: And the depe wysdome of pe trynyte is our moder (563.21). Cabassut observes how infrequently this title is given to Christ in Christian antiquity, and that when the apocryphal Acts of Peter were translated into Latin in the fifth century, the word 'mother', used of Christ in the context of Matthew 12.49-50, was suppressed.287 It is worth noticing that the only other such example cited by Cabassut is that of John

Chrysostom, citing the same text from Matthew. It could be argued that in neither case is any Trinitarian reference, direct or indirect, intended; and the Matthean text will not bear any such interpretation.

Mediaeval Dionysians like Joannes Sarracenus and Thomas Gallus are prepared to transliterate Denis's invocation of Trinitarian Wisdom, imEpOte, as superdea; although John Scotus Erigena had insisted on superdens.2*9 The Cloud-author translates as sovereyn goddesse,2*9 which in the context is faintly ludicrous. Augustine, writing of Christ's descent into hell and his liberation there of Adam, cites Wisdom 10.1-2, which states that 'she (Sapientia) preserved Adam, brought him out of his sin and gave him lordship over all things' (cf. 554.4 note). But one suspects, in 2*7 'Une devotion medievale', 237-238.

211 Chevallier, Dionysiaca i 565, 709.

289 Hodgson, Deonise 2.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

Augustine, the same reluctance to assign to the eternal Son a feminine, creative role. We also know how early the theologians of the Western

Church established the title 'Domina Mater Ecclesia' (cf. 607.57 note) and how totally the spiritual exegesis of this depends on the identification of Christ with the Church (for example, in Augustine; see

607.63 note). But it is strange to find (so far as de Lubac has been able to marshal the facts) that although the Church is Christ's 'flesh',290 and the figure of Christ as husband and the Church (or the individual soul) as his beloved wife is wholly acceptable to every exegete from Origen onward,291 as also is the concept of the 'daily birth of the Word',292 there appears to be no attribution to the Son of motherhood before that of William of St. Thierry (cf. 582.12 note), and in him one detects a somewhat cautious use of language as he expands the notion of the natura creatrix. Indeed, one may perhaps state that the proliferation of Marian commentaries on the Canticle of Canticles from the twelfth century onwards,293 reviving and pressing the earlier doctrine of Mary as the new Eve, may have prevented a more general and explicit development of the Trinitarian theology of motherhood, of which Julian remains the single forthright exponent in the Western mediaeval tradition.

For Julian, the most exalted of her revelations had been the twelfth, where our Lord had shown himself more glorified than she had seen him before (402-403). Accompanying this rarified intellectual vision of the heavenly Christ had been the locution 'I it am', which she often heard repeated. She implies there that her inability to comprehend the number of the words, which were 'in the highest', had to do with unity and Trinity (cf. 403.11, 15, notes). Now, through her understanding of the Trinitarian relationships in the light of the parable, she is able to offer a truly evangelical interpretation of the great revelation of the name of God, 'I am who am' (Exodus 3.14). If the qualities of human fatherhood are the vestiges in creation appropriated to the first person, as Paul had taught (see Ephesians 3.14-15), then equally the qualities of motherhood should be appropriated to the second person, whilst the fecundity of this knowledge and love in the natura divina creatrix is rightly appropriated to the third person.294

One of the profoundest New Testament statements on the eternal 290 Exegese medievale 2 502.

291 Ibid. 2 559 e.s.

292 Ibid. 2 565.

293 Ibid. 2 561 e.s.

294 Cf. P. Pourrat: 'Attributs divins'.

INTRODUCTION

relationship between Father and Son is that reported by Matthew: 'No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son wishes to reveal the Father'

(Matthew 11.27), tnat 's> tne children to whom, Christ has just said, those things will be revealed which the Father has hidden from the wise and prudent (ibid. 11.25). And Christ, who as Julian intimates here is within the Trinity hyest, noblyest and wurschypfullest (590.19), goes on in the gospel to say of himself to the children 'Come to me ... learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart' (Matthew 11.29), just as Julian notes that this human soul of the incarnate Word is also lowest, mekest and myldest (590.20).

In her final version of the first revelation,Julian repeats several times that God is all that is good (cf. 299.3, 301.29, 303.42, 304.10, 306.28,

318.15, 322.12). So here she writes of the unity of God: I it am, the hye souereyn goodnesse of all manner thyng (590.16). This is 'the substantial ground' in which we participate by the eternal decree of the Trinity: the divine nature, his being, which is communicated to us in the second person who is first our mother, equal to the Father, and then in the Incarnation owe very moder in grace by takyng of owe kynde made (592.38); and finally he is our Saviour through his moderhed in werkyng, in which, in the Godhead, he is equal to the Spirit, who confirms the working of the motherhood (591.29). Here she reminds us that this entire revelation is still 'for prayer'. Our response to the knowledge of our existence and growth in the Trinity is to loue oure god in whome we haue oure beyng, hym reverently thankyng and praysyng of oure makyng, myghtly prayeng to oure moder of mercy and pytte, and to oure lorde £e holy gost of helpe and grace

(592.30).

Here also, as has been observed (592.38, 40, notes) she mentions the godly (or, more probably, 'goodly') will for the last time:

Alle the feyer werkyng and all the swete kyndly officis of dereworthy motherhed is in propred to J>e seconde person, for in hym we haue this goodly wylle, hole and safe without ende, both in kynde and in grace, of his owne propyr goodnesse (592.38).

Her first reference to it was in similar terms, in Revelation I,again in the context of contemplative prayer:

And therfore we may with hys grace and his helpe stande in gostly beholdyng, with euer lastyng marveylyng in this hygh ouerpassyng vnmesurable love that oure lorde hath to vs of his goodnes; and therfore we

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

may aske of oure louer with reuerence all that we wille, for oure kyndely wille is to haue god, and the good wylle of god is to haue vs(3o8.,53).

As one of the present editors indicated several years ago,295 Dom Roger Hudleston was right in linking Julian's teaching with that of William of St. Thierry, but was wrong in dismissing it as unorthodox. Hudleston's opinion continues to be repeated.29* Her own visions and *beholdings' coincide with the teaching of William in his Aenigma fldei: it is inconceivable that in the predestined, those that will be saved, the good will of God in Christ should be absent or extinguished; for that would be a sign that they are among the reproved (and Julian saw none of these except the devil himself — cf. 427.8 e.s.). It now appears likely, in view of her closeness to William's teaching, and of such considered statements as God is more nerer to vs than oure owne soule, for he is grounde in whome oure soule standyth, and he is mene that kepyth J)e substannce and the sensualyte to geder, so that it shall nevyr departe (571.11) that she was as well aware as was the Cloud-author in his teaching on the sovereign point of the spirit297 that, affectively as well as morally, the scintilla synderesis will never be extinguished in the minds and hearts of the predestined. And for Julian, as for monastic theologians in general, the very movement towards repentance is the sign of his continuing and permanent presence, of his owne propyr goodnesse (593.41). The text employed by both William of St. Thierry and Hugh of St. Victor, discussing this matter, is I John 3.9: 'Whosoever is born of God does not sin'.298 To *be born of refers properly to the mother:

... it may not verely be seyde of none ne to none but of hyrn and to hym that is very mother of lyfe and of alle. To the properte of moderhede longyth kynd, loue, wysdom and knowyng, and it is god (598.46).

To conclude this chapter 59, Julian classifies the Trinitarian modes of the divine motherhood as she has become aware of it in her contemplative prayer (cf. 593.43 note); and in this same context she again uses the word which she had previously coined to translate the technical term for the relationship within the Trinity, circumsessio, 'forth spredyng', this time in the Pauline reference to the Christian's interior knowledge of the expanding dimensions of the divine love in Christ

295 J. Walsh: The Revelations of Divine Love, 37-40.

296 See, e.g., C. Walters: Julian of Norwich, Introduction, 37: This is wishful thinking and not the teaching of the Church'.

297 E.g. Hodgson, Cloud, 18.

298 SeeJ. Walsh: The Revelations of Divine Love, 39-40 and notes.

INTRODUCTION

(Ephesians 3.18-19) in his own spirit. This is the working of the motherhood of God in creation, redemption and glorification, which is the content of these last four chapters of Revelation XIV.

Its first movement (cf. 594.7) is the moment of the Incarnation, as it was shown to her in the sight which she received in Revelation I of Mary in the mystery of the Annunciation (cf. 594.7 note). Julian's implication is that Mary's own contemplation of her God in her own acceptance (cf. Luke 1.38) of the servyce and the officie of moderhode (595.14) is a reflection of Christ's own service in the mystery of the Incarnation as this was shown to her in the parable of the lord and the servant. (It is perhaps worth noting here that Vatican Council It's Constitution on Divine Revelation explains tradition as that which has been handed on by the apostles 'sub assistentia Spiritus Sancti in Ecclesia', and affirms that the perception of tradition grows through the contemplation and investigation of believers who, like Mary — and Luke 2.19, 51 are cited

— treasure these things in their heart).2" He served thus when he arayed hym and dyght hym ... in oure poure jlessch (595.12); and Julian goes on to show that the mothering which Christ received from Mary is derived from his own:

The moders servyce is nerest, rediest and suerest; nerest for it is most of kynd, redyest for it is most of loue, and sekerest for it is most of trewth.

This office ne myght nor coulde nevyr none done to be full but he allone (595-14)Here Julian has in mind both the Lucan description of Christ's Nativity

(Luke 2. 6-7) and the image Christ uses in John 16.20-21 of the sufferings of a woman in labour and her joy in the birth of her son, so as to explain the impact of his death and Resurrection on his apostles and the Church: Thus he susteyneth vs with in hym in loue and traveyle (595.20).

The moder may geue her chylde sucke hyr mylke, but oure precyous moderjhesu, he may fede vs with hym selfe, and doth full curtesly and full tendyrly with the blessyd sacrament, that is precyous fode of very lyfe

(596.29).

This image, as has been noted, is common enough among the mediaeval commentators, but elsewhere the emphasis is almost always on its pictorial and derivative qualities. Ludolph of Saxony is here typical, when he writes: '... ad ipsum pium patrem pauperum, tanquam parvulus ad matris gremium curre ... sicque recumbens super pectus Jesu suge ubera eius et in pace in idipsum dormies et requiesces'. But for Julian

299 The Documents of Vatican II, ed. W. M. Abbott, 116.

IX. 16 REVELATION XIV

the statement is a reasoned theological deduction from the nature of the triune God as it has been revealed to her, and the term of God's operation in the incarnate Word (cf. 596.29 note). So it is that in the end she elucidates the 'I it am' locution by making the total identification between Holy Mother Church and Christ, God and man.

I it am that holy chyrch prechyth the and techyth the. That is to sey: All the helth and the lyfe of sacramentyes, alle |)e vertu and l>e grace of my worde, alle the goodnesse that is ordeynyd in holy chyrch to the, I it am

(597-34)Thus, for one who accepts the word 'sweet' as indicative of the anagogical sense of Scripture, the ascent of the spirit into God, and the word *kind' as indicative of the divine condescension into God's creation, it follows that only the Christian notion of motherhood can embrace together the mysteries of Trinity and Incarnation, and let them grow in the life of faith, hope and charity (cf. 599.57 note).

He is our moder in kynde, Julian writes at the end of chapter 60, by the werkyng of grace in the lower perty (599.58); and it is in this way that she is found to be at one with so many of her contemporaries who share her devotion to Christ the mother (without necessarily being capable of the care with which she develops her theology). A characteristic example is the analogy of the mother playfully hiding from her child, a theme, dear to very many mediaeval spiritual writers, with its Scriptural origin in Isaias 66.13: Quomodo si cui mater blandiatur, ita ego consolabor vos. We find the theme in the Ancrene Riwle, and, as we have seen, in Anselm's Oratio X. It appears in a version of the Vespasian Homily', in Mechtild of Hackborn, in the Stimulus amoris, in William Flete, in Bridget of Sweden and in Catherine of Siena. Julian could have derived her imagery and her language from any one of these sources; but of all these writers, she is the only one who bases her devotional expression on a firm theological and contemplative understanding:

He kyndelyth oure vnderstondyng, he prepareth oure weyes, he esyth oure consciens, he confortyth oure soule, he lyghteth oure harte and gevyth vs in party knowyng and louyng in his blessydfull godhede, with gracyous mynde in his swete manhode and his blessed passyon, with curtesse mervelyng in his hye ovyr passyng goodnesse, and makyth us to loue all that he louyth for his loue, and to be well apayde with hym and with alle his werkes. And whan we falle, hastely he reysyth vs by his louely beclepyng and his gracious touchyng (601.4).

It is only thus that Christ our mother may suffer pe chylde to fall some tyme (604.35) but he may nevyr suffer vs pat be his children to peryssch (605.39), for that would contradict the very nature of the Godhead.

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