14. Julian’s Revelation of Love: A Web of Metaphor
14
Julian’s Revelation of Love: A Web of Metaphor
ENA JENKINS
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are enfolded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’
Influenced – perhaps unduly – by an early encounter with Julian in Eliot’s Four Quartets, I have long read her as a poet, like Dante both a mystical poet and a theological mystic. Hinted at in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, this becomes a defining characteristic of A Revelation of Love1 and, in looking at both texts as a work in progress, I have perceived both poet and poetic in process of becoming, the growth of a poet’s mind as Julian seeks ways of communicating what can be told of the nature of her mystical awakening. To read A Revelation as a literary work is to discover a poetic which is both functional and elegant and which is the way in which seeing and seeking proceed.
As Julian makes clear, all is present in the First Revelation, albeit embryonically in A Vision and in a developed form in A Revelation, in which the full effect of transformation of being is apparent. To recognise Julian as a poet is to see that she has found within herself what Wordsworth would define as ‘the feeling intellect’.2 She writes, ‘Oure faith cometh of the kinde love of oure soule, and of the clere lighte of oure reson’ (Revelation, 55.1–12). Her poetic is one in which ‘wonderfully prosaic images’3 develop organically within a structured context. An aesthetic of the ordinary, originating in A Vision in the image of the hazelnut, frees her to articulate a recognition that ‘spirituality coinheres in material reality’,4 in everyday life – in her own kitchen, her garden, her family. To read A Vision, therefore, is to be drawn into an extraordinary experience; to read A Revelation is to enter a vividly realised world, startling in the simplicity of images which appear in clusters, form patterns and grow into a complex metaphorical system.
The poetic of A Revelation both reflects and reflects on the showings and subsequent contemplative return to them. As a model of the devotional life, this may be compared with other practices – the monastic discipline of lectio divina, for example, or the Orthodox custom of visiting the icons. Indeed, the form in which the Crucifixion was exhibited to Julian5 suggests that these early showings might usefully be described as ‘Passion Icons’,6 thus identifying both their iconography and the manner of Julian’s devotion. Motivated by an urgent desire to understand and a perceived vocation to communicate, she is enabled to ‘make at least something of her experience accessible … using language with the quickening power of the artist’.7 In finding the way of the poet – close attentiveness, analogy, image, metaphor – she has found an intuition of interrelatedness, a sense that, in the words of Philip Sheldrake, ‘all things are interconnected and interconnectedness is the inner reality of things and persons in themselves’.8 In this sense, Julian’s text becomes a rich fabric of metaphor working within structures to open on ‘an imaginative universe’.9
The series of events with which both texts open – prayers, sickness, healing – forms a prologue. From this point in A Revelation a change of tone suggests that careful editing has separated out the showings to give due attention both to the qualities of each and to their interrelatedness, something most evident in the Passion Icons passages. In the course of repeated contemplative return to the whole experience, a three-fold structure has begun to emerge; this, however, will not be finally achieved until the appearance, or recollection, or acceptance, of the revelatory example which becomes Chapter 51, after which it becomes possible to identify three stages in the growth of Julian’s understanding. Within the structure, three properties may be discerned. The first, the property of Sight, stated in the priest’s instruction and actualised in the Passion Icons, is reinforced in the Third Revelation as Julian is ordered to ‘See, I am God. See, I am in all thing […] See, I lede all thing to the end that I ordaine it to’ (Revelation, 11.42–4). The multiple ways of seeing which lead at last to understanding form a constant in the text and a metaphorical pathway through it. The second property, that of Growth, stated in the hazelnut, is the source of metaphors of birth, development and maturation. Shown as a microcosm of ‘all that is made’ (Revelation, 5.10), in shape it suggests the womb, in function it suggests birth. In its protection of the kernel it is a place of safety and enclosure, as a seed it is a symbol of resurrection. A third property is not as easily identified but may be approached through the word ‘homelyhede’ which, with its variants, occurs repeatedly, notably in the meditative return to the First Revelation in . Here, Julian describes an encounter with a lord who is both ‘reverent and dredfulle’ and ‘homely and curteyse’ (Revelation, 7.25–6). She confirms this in an ‘open example’, a ‘bodely exsample’ (Revelation, 7.27, 34) comprising the elusive lord/servant story which points to a God close to his creatures, not ‘strange in maner’ (Revelation, 7.33). The passage, in pre-figuring the parable, anticipates a theological exploration of the Trinity in familial terms as Julian writes of ‘this marvelous curtesy and homelyhede of oure fader that is oure maker, in our lorde Jhesu Crist that is oure broder and oure savior’ (Revelation, 7.42–4) and that of this ‘marvelous homelyhede may no man know in this life, but if he have it by specialle shewing of oure lorde, or of gret plenty of grace inwardly given of the holy gost’ (Revelation, 7.45–7). Julian is grounded in the homeliness of her early life, the domestic world in which she was formed and the anchorhold in which she came to maturity.10 All that she has loved and known is enfolded in the word ‘kind’ which echoes through the text to find its fullest expression in Chapter 53, where she writes:
whan God shulde make mannes body, he toke the slime of the erth […] and therof he made mannes body. But to the making of mannes soule he wolde take right nought, but made it. And thus is the kinde made rightfully oned to the maker, which is substantial kinde unmade, that is God. (Revelation, 53.35–9)
In the property of Kind, its associations and the metaphors arising from it, Julian affirms a fundamental link between Creator, humankind and the natural world. The three properties are similarly enmeshed: in them all things are seen to be interconnected and from them springs the metaphoricity of the text. As Julian’s understanding grows, so she finds ‘metaphors of depth rather than surface’11 or, more accurately, metaphors of depth and surface, which state an intention to see a persistent wholeness in a creation which is, to all appearance, flawed and fractured. Moreover, these properties of the work form both a secondary structure and a sub-text.
Disarming images of hazelnut, fish scales and raindrops place Julian firmly in her natural habitat, her ‘ownmost’ place,12 and indicate the form which her metaphoricity will take. Such images express a natural delight in the feminine, even the womanly, and, in their ordinariness, modesty and humility. In these reminders of what is most dear to her she is inducted ‘with explanation kind’,13 by way of unthreatening epithet and homely illustration, through a joyful acclamation of the Trinity and a glimpse of the young Virgin, into the sequence of four Passion Icons. In the course of these the tone darkens and the images mutate as she is made gradually aware of the harrowing nature of the event in which, long before, she had prayed to participate. So, blood which had flowed freely dries up to obscure and discolour the face of Christ, only to flow once more, reassuring, life-affirming – salvific even – as the body is savagely assaulted. In the Fourth Icon the blood has dried up completely as earthly life ends, leaving an empty shell. In a parallel metaphor the body is seen in terms of clothing becoming a ‘foule, black, dede hame’ (Revelation, 10.29) which will disintegrate to become a rag buffeted in a bitter wind. The concept of cloth/clothing as enfolding and safely enclosing is subverted, undermined and negated as it moves through this sequence in a text which not only describes, declares and proclaims the showings but analyses them by means of metaphor. It is in Julian’s capacity to hold to the reality both of common life recalled in image and visionary experience explored in metaphor that she is enabled to ‘straddle’14 the gap, to find an essential unity in her life and the confidence to address her fellow Christians.
The fact and property of Sight also becomes a working metaphor as sight, insight and perception lead to understanding and form a pathway through the text. As clothing images are subverted in the Passion Icons, so is sight also found in its opposite, in blindness which is an obtuse failure, even a refusal to understand. The metaphor mirrors a developing intellectual awareness of the challenge presented by the showings as exemplified in a series of questions, culminating in the plea to which the parable offers an answer. Sight in all its various meanings is the metaphor by which Julian, transformed, enters the imaginative universe of the final chapters.
The sickroom in which the visions appear is a kind of enclosure, an enveloping darkness, shifting and formless, full of shadows, and it initiates a further metaphorical sequence. With the approach of death and the dimming of her sight, Julian becomes confined within her own body and all activity ceases. What she experiences here is multiple enclosure within a darkness that culminates, contrary to expectation, neither in demonic assault nor in death, but in a sudden healing. The crucifix becomes ‘palpably alive – as if vividly lit in a silent darkness’.15 Emerging from the enclosures of sickroom, darkness and fear, Julian is enabled to focus and to behold. As she has been urged to see, so it is indicated that this may be achieved within enclosure, in a replication of the circumstances in which the showings first appeared, or so it would seem, in a later bringing together of the sickroom, which was almost a death bed, and the anchorhold, which was almost a tomb. Thus, it is enclosure which leads to disclosure in the spaciousness of the parable and the affirmations of the closing chapters. Enclosure, too, is linked metaphorically to the knot of images found in the First Revelation, Julian’s offering to Christ of her own feminine, domestic world. Each of these – the hazelnut, the pellet, the raindrop, the fish scale – has relevance in shape and function to objects which are seen and structures which enclose. The nut is emblematic: in shape it is a womb, in function a type of womb, a source of life. Safely hermetic, it will in due time deliver the potential of new life in the kernel, hinting at the new life of a child. Placed in A Revelation between the Virgin of the Annunciation and a perception of God ‘[who] is oure clotheing’ (Revelation, 5.3), the nut links metaphors of birth and clothing in a context which allows a passing recollection of swaddling. By association with the hazelnut as creative enclosure and clothing as loving enclosure, an acclamation of the Trinity affirms a God as both loving and familial in the first of a series of what may be described as ‘lyric fragments’. Most of these lyric fragments are Trinitarian, exploring and proclaiming the nature of God and recording what Julian has heard as image patterns record what she has seen. The language register of the fragments is elevated, echoing the rhythms of psalm, canticle or liturgical hymn. The interrelatedness of metaphor and the sequence of lyrics together reflect Julian’s acceptance of vocation as willing pupil and initially hesitant teacher. Her text forms a web, a woven tapestry, in which she seeks to express the rich complexity revealed in the showings and in her meditative return to them.
The showings begin in contradiction – darkness/light, sickness/healing, death/birth. The first Passion Icon is paradoxically described in images redolent more of Nativity than of Crucifixion: birth memories and images of birth are clearly ‘floating’ in Julian’s mind, of personal moment and initiating a further thread of metaphor. At the simplest and ideal level, childbirth is best experienced in a domestic, a homely setting. Looked at in this way – and there is guidance in the imagery to permit it – there is no difficulty in making an imaginative adjustment to overlay the impression of sickroom/death bed with the expectation of joy in the annunciation motif: Julian’s little Virgin is ‘a simple maiden and a meeke, yong of age […] in the stature as she was whan she conceivede’ (Revelation, 4.25–6). For Rowan Williams, the Orthodox Mother of God of the Sign demonstrates ‘one of the most mysterious bits of our belief, for nine months God was incarnate […] as a foetus growing in Mary’s womb’.16 This is essentially what Julian recalls at a late point in the Long Text:
he toke the grounde of his werke full lowe and fulle mildely in the maidens wombe. And that shewde he in the furst, wher he broughte that meek maiden before the eye of my understonding […] in this lowe place he arayed him and dight him all redy in oure poure flesh. (Revelation, 60.6–10)
Drawing upon an experience of childbirth, she finds a further strand of metaphor. The flowing blood does not at first alarm her, appearing to recall the blood flow which signals the coming delivery of the child, part of a creative process which also heralds her own rebirth in Christ and redemption made available for all. At no point as the images unfold does the sight of blood appear to distress her: that it was ‘so plentuous to my sight that methought […] it shulde have made the bedde all on bloude’ (Revelation, 12.6–9) is a vivid recollection, its significance only to be grasped in a perception of the parallel between ‘the mother’s labour’ and Christ’s sufferings which ‘give birth to human redemption’.17 Only when blood changes its form, becomes dried up or caked, or when, as in the final Icon, the body is drained of life-blood does she become distraught as:
the swet body was so discoloured, so drye, so clongen, so dedly, and so pituous as he had bene sennight dead, continually dying. And methought the drying of Cristes flesh was the most paine, and the last, of his passion.
(Revelation, 16.22–4)
While the blood flows it is a metaphor of life and of redeemed life, as it ‘floweth in all heaven, enjoying the salvation of all mankind’ (Revelation, 12.24). In a eucharistic reference she writes: ‘for ther is no licour that is made that liketh him so wele to geve us’ (Revelation, 12.11–12).18 Such positive and life-affirming associations are not to be cancelled by the horror of inflicted pain, not even by the subversion of joy so graphically described in the Eighth Revelation.
Such horror overcome, the metaphors are carried through the text to the parable. Originating in an aesthetic which is peculiarly Julian’s own, interlaced and mutually referential metaphors come together to form a web in which she identifies her own complexity, something of ‘the God we know as Trinity’,19 and the intrinsic relationship of Kind in which they are linked. Emerging from a period of darkness of mind and in answer to an anguished cry for help, Chapter 51, the parable, may be interpreted as a way-station on pilgrimage, the centre of a labyrinth, a sacred space in which pathways meet and intersect. A sense of spaciousness and Julian’s use of a recurrent word – ‘endlesse blesse’, ‘endlesse hevens’, ‘endlesse life’, ‘endlesse deth’ – together with a renewed confidence revealed in tone and manner, indicate that, for Julian, sight has become understanding; here she sees as God sees. Having been shown in the Passion Icons how redemption was achieved, now she discovers why it became necessary.
The ‘example’, itself a minimalist allegory of the Fall, opens in an image, iconic in form, of lord and servant. A double portrait, redoubled as each figure is seen in both bodily and spiritual likeness, gives shape to a growing awareness of human complexity in which is refined the intuition of kinship – something first revealed in the simple images of the Passion Icons. Julian will come to recognise in Adam’s doubleness a reflection of the complex Being of God, and in Adam’s dividedness that reflection occluded but not effaced. Thereafter, the iconic image ‘dissolves’20 into a dramatic narrative as the servant, over-eager to please, falls and ‘blindid in his reson and stoned in his minde’ (Revelation, 51.22–3) turns from his master. His fall, an impulsive act of love which ends in catastrophe, is graphically described to convey a sense of swift and uncontrolled movement. As Julian notes the lord’s magnanimity – his readiness to forgive, to share blame, even to ‘reward him his frey and his drede’ and ‘to geve him a gifte’ (Revelation, 51.43, 43–4) – so a new phase of her spiritual journey begins: ‘an inwarde gostely shewing of the lordes mening descended into my soule’ and her understanding is ‘ledde forth […] to the ende’ (Revelation, 51.45–6, 53). An intuition that the servant is Adam leads to a pause in which Julian describes herself as standing transfixed ‘mekille in unknowinge’ – an apophatic moment in which images fall away as she realises that ‘every shewing is full of privites (Revelation, 51.58–9, 61–2). Julian’s state of being, one might suggest, is that known to both mystic and poet21 – an acceptance of waiting on God or awaiting the one appropriate, essential word or image. For Julian, this timeless moment initiates a return to the ‘affirmative way’,22 to the metaphorical pathways which give unity to the whole revelation. The instruction to ‘look well’23 and to ‘take hede to alle […] shewed in the example’ (Revelation, 51.74–5) prompts a return to the icon of the Fall in order to look again at each figure in terms of clothing and demeanour. A recognition that ‘the lord, he is God’ leads to the perception that ‘in the sighte of God, alle man is one man, and one man is alle man’ (Revelation, 51.89). Julian dwells lovingly on a Creator deserted by his loved creatures, not simply ‘alone in wildernesse’ (Revelation, 51.104), but homeless. His clothing, she now sees, is appropriately ample, significantly ‘blew as asure’ (Revelation, 51.105). She delights in beauty of face and form and perceptively, with spiritual insight, sees God ‘all full of endlesse hevens’ (Revelation, 51.108). Echoes of the enclosure motif lead to an awareness of the interiority, the ‘inscape’ of God. Drawn to explore the mystery of the Trinity, Julian ‘sees’ God looking joyfully at ‘his deerwurthy son, which is even with the fader’ (Revelation, 51.115–16). Images of sight, clothing, enclosure and homeliness are gathered in the intricate web which complements clarity of thought and reasoned argument.
Looking with equal attentiveness at the servant, Julian focuses on discrepancy and incongruity as he stands ‘at court’ in a workman’s clothing which is ill-fitting, grubby, worn, ‘unsemely’ (Revelation, 51.145) and, in a recollection of the Eighth Revelation, ‘redy to be ragged and rent’ (Revelation, 51.144). Reflecting – and in the relaxed mood of interior monologue – she ‘sees’ him dart suddenly to do whatever he thought would please his lord and it suddenly appears to her that the task may be a quest, a treasure hunt.24 ‘And then’, Julian declares, ‘I understode that […] he shuld be a gardener’ (Revelation, 51.163–4), at which point mind and imagination are alerted. Just as in images for the Passion surfaced, so now Julian is granted a glimpse of Eden in images of garden, gardener and words appropriate to them: ‘delve and dike and swinke and swete and turne the erthe up and down […] and water the plantes’ (Revelation, 51.164–5). In the pattern which emerges, Creation and Resurrection are interwoven to offer the insight which gives coherence to her Fall story. As, it is implied, the servant waters the earth, so the blood of the Servant redeems mankind – a parallel which becomes almost an identification. The figure of the servant represents Adam but also Christ who chose to ‘shadow’ him. This is a perception only to be grasped in the timeless moment of the parable and only to be communicated in a hybrid form of discourse in which the analytic and the figurative are intertwined: ‘When Adam felle, Godes sonne fell’ (Revelation, 51.185–6) develops into what can be read in terms of a lyric fragment:
Adam fell fro life to deth:
into the slade of this wreched worlde
and after that into hell.
Goddes son fell with Adam
into the slade of the maidens wombe
which was the fairest doughter of Adam –
and that for to excuse Adam from blame
in heven and in erth –
and mightely he feched him out of hell. (Revelation, 51.187–91)
In the opening chapters of the text, as we have seen, the crucifixion story is surprisingly related in images of annunciation, nativity and resurrection. In the ensuing Passion Icons, metaphors of clothing modulate from safe enclosure to torn flesh. In the parable these image patterns are gathered in the figure of Christ transfigured, his clothing now ‘of fair semely medolour which is so mervelous that I cannot it discrive, for it is all of very wurshippe’ (Revelation, 51.263–4). He wears a wedding garment and ‘a crowne upon his hed of precious richenes. For it was shewede that “we be his crowne”‘ (Revelation, 51.269–70). The lost treasure ‘much desired’, the fruit of the garden, is Alman, the prodigal. Julian’s reading of the story of Redemption concludes in a majestic, richly allusive psalm. In a measured, credal statement of relationship, the way is opened for further exegesis of the Trinity as the family from which human concepts of family derive. Seeing as God sees, Alman being one man, all times are equally one time. There being once more a necessity to bridge a gap, Julian achieves this in three ways: in concentrating on one aspect of the Fall – there is no Eve and no Serpent, both being contained within the teaching that ‘Alman is one man’; in her own comprehensive principle of Kind; and in the hybrid discourse in which analytic and figurative are ‘oned’, that is to say ‘knit’ in a metaphorical linearity which places the temporal in the eternal.
In the final chapters of this ‘most theological of mystical texts’25 metaphors are discovered, are gathered, and ‘oned’ – Julian uses the concept of knit/knot in the sense of healing, mending, restoring. The matter is theological, the mood is spiritual, and the whole moves towards an affirmation of the centrality of love. In this context, Julian returns to relatedness, the property of Kind which includes home, family, kindred, all that is deemed natural. A way has been opened in father/child terms, which ‘float’26 in her mind and in which she can engage with trinity. Just as she found domestic images, so now she makes a transition, building on earlier Trinitarian statements, to focus on the family. This she does initially in the tentative credal statement ‘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’ (Revelation, 52.1–3). The name by which God is known is Trinity, the dynamic of the Three is familial. Life in the human family, it is implied, to whatever extent it may be modified and twisted out of true within the fallen state, reflects and grows from that dynamic. Delighting in kinship with God, Julian plays her ‘game of faith’ in variations on the theme of family. She writes, ‘I beheld the werking of alle the blessed trinite, in which beholding I saw and understode these three propertes […] of the faderhed […], the motherhed […], the lordhede in one God’ (Revelation, 58.15–17).27 Julian celebrates traditional belief while moving within its formal structures, infusing them with a sense of the living God whom she encounters. She perceives that ‘alle these have we in kinde and in oure substantial making’ (Revelation, 58.29–30). ‘Kind’ is the web of relationships which forms a sacramental bond between God and His creation:
God is kind in his being: that is to say, that goodnesse that is kind, it is God. He is the grounde, he is the substance […] And all kindes that he hath made to flowe out of him […] it shall be restored and brought againe unto him.
(Revelation, 62.10–13)
At no point in A Revelation are subtlety of thought and clarity of expression more apparent than in the exegesis of motherhood as a property of Trinity, embraced with confident enthusiasm in Chapter 59. Playing ‘the game of faith’ with panache, Julian tries out ways of making her thinking plain, beginning with the proviso: ‘As verely as God is oure fader, as verely is God oure moder’ (Revelation, 59.10). There is in the Trinity, she claims, no hierarchy but a dynamic, a dance. Her theological argument develops in another lyric fragment, a canticle notably terse and succinct, its tone strangely at ease with its celebratory mood. Set out experimentally in a form dictated by rhythm and repetition, its place within Julian’s poetic becomes evident:
I it am,
the might and goodnes of faderhode,
I it am,
the wisdom and the kindnes of moderhode,
I it am,
the light and the grace that is all blessed love.
I it am
the trinite.
I it am
the unite.
I it am
the hye sovereyn goodnesse of all manner thing.
I it am that maketh the to love.
I it am that makith the to long.
I it am,
the endlesse fulfilling of all true desyers. (Revelation, 59.11–16)
The lyric states the essence of Julian’s theology, expressing both intellectual grasp and emotional response: that is to say, the ‘feeling intellect’. It celebrates an unequivocal affirmation of fatherhood, motherhood and ‘sovereyn goodnes’ within the Trinity: the Archetypes co-exist in a pattern of loving relationship.
Nevertheless, the focus in Chapters 59–63 is on the motherhood of Christ: ‘And thus is Jhesu our very moder in kinde of our furst making, and he is our very moder in grace by taking of our kind made’ (Revelation, 59.32). Concentration on Christ our Mother leads into a meditation: ‘we ware made by the moderhed of kind love […] the service and the office of moderhode in alle thing’ (Revelation, 60.3–11). Julian returns to her own experience to bring human mother and Christ our Mother together in a comparison which is more than analogy, more than metaphor, only to be understood as a reaffirmation of the sacramental bond of kind which links Creator and created.
Central to Julian’s Trinitarian theology is the realisation that substance and sensuality are not conflicting aspects of human being but that, in an intended wholeness, they may rightly be called ‘oure soule, and that is by the oning that it hath in God’ (Revelation, 56.18–19). This leads to a perception of
That wurshipful citte that oure lorde Jhesu sitteth in, it is our sensualite in which he is enclosed. And our kindly substance is beclosed in Jhesu.
(Revelation, 56.19–21)
It is an image which recurs in the last showing of ‘the soule […] as it were an endlesse warde […], a blisseful kingdom […], a wurshipfulle citte’ and, in an echo of Julian’s ‘own most place’, that of Christ: ‘For in mannes soule is his very wonning’ (Revelation, 68.2–4, 27). Thus, she returns to the dominant images of the Passion Icons, having discovered that, whether in sickroom, kitchen or anchorhold, domestic interior or sacred space, she and her God are mutually ‘inclosyd’. This most intricate enfolding, as of the child in the mother’s womb, confirms for her the orthodoxy of her trinitarian belief. So, in reaffirming Christ as God in whom our substance is ‘inclosyd’, and Christ as the Incarnate who, in choosing the enclosing garment of flesh was the agent of redemption, she stands on firm ground, confirming her earlier statement:
And fertheremore I saw that the seconde person, which is oure moder substantially, the same derewurthy person is now become oure moder sensual. For we be doubel of Gods making. (Revelation, 58.30–2)
Julian’s argument finds its conclusion in a restatement of the concept of mutual enclosure. Deeply involved and concentrated on the bond of love exemplified in motherhood, she loses herself in a reminiscence of nurture, of a mother ‘that woot and knoweth the neede of her childe [and] kepeth it full tenderly, as the kinde and condition of moderhed will’ (Revelation, 60.45–6). Understanding the dynamic of love which is the Trinity, she perceives in it the interconnectedness of a family. Motherhood, though it may be experienced as particular to Christ, is not exclusively of Christ. The divine attributes are shared, are interchangeable within the dance of the Trinity; the Three
are not separated by their power nor by their place, they are divided not by their energy nor by their will, keeping inseparable their grounding and interpenetration one with another.28
The world of A Revelation, so essentially Julian’s ownmost place, is made available for others, for those who, blind and unwise, in the sinful condition which all share, are yet bonded in kind. The form of the invitation to enter is not only in what is written but in the manner of the writing – its poetic of close attentiveness, of metaphorical patterns, of the familiar made strange by association, by the interweaving of generic forms: anecdote, narrative, lyric, praise, proclamation. These are the ways in which a poet’s evocation of a world both realistic and imaginative works; and this may well be one reason for the widespread interest the text continues to arouse – in searchers for spiritual truth, in academics in related fields, in poets and writers of fiction. To conclude that Julian’s poeticity governs the form of her text is not to suggest that she was aware of herself as a poet or as a theologian. She clearly did not wish to be aware of herself at all, except in so far as self-examination enabled her to follow the vocation entrusted to her. So, in her creative imagination, what might have appeared incongruous is ‘knitt and onyd’ as the extraordinary experience of a mystic is mediated to her fellow Christians through her delight in the familiar and the ordinary, in the images of kitchen and garden, family and childhood, and in the web of metaphorical patterns which grow from them.
1 The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Turnhout, 2006). All quotations are from this edition, identified by section/chapter and line.
2 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book XIII, l. 205.
3 Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things (Norwich, 2002), p. xiv.
4 Glen Cavaliero, Charles Williams: Poet of Theology (London, 1983), p. 164.
5 The etymology of the word ‘shewing’ allows for the sense of ‘displaying’, for which see the MED, definition 4 (a).
6 Rowan Williams has suggested that ‘The point of the icon is to give us a window into an alien world, [it is] sometimes described as a channel for the “energies” of that other form of reference.’ See Rowan Williams, Lost Icons (Edinburgh, 2002) p. xiv. It is in this sense that I adopt the term in this essay.
7 A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1996), p. xv.
8 Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God (London, 1998), p. 14.
9 Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 151.
10 I am conscious that this assertion, along with similar ones of Julian’s origins, is open to contention but an examination of these issues is beyond the remit of this essay. For a persuasive argument for Julian’s lay origins see Benedicta Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, Julian Reconsidered, ed. Kenneth Leech and Benedicta Ward (Oxford, 1988).
11 Oliver Davies, A Theology of Compassion (London, 2001), p. xi.
12 See Paul Ricoeur: ‘what is to be interpreted in a text is a proposed world, a world that I might inhabit, and wherein I might project my ownmost possibilities’: Paul Ricoeur, ‘Philosophy and Religious Language’, Journal of Religions 54, 1 (1974), pp. 71–85 (41).
13 The manner in which Julian is guided into the Passion Icons finds an echo in Emily Dickinson’s poem 1129:
As Lightning to the Children eased
With Explanation kind,
The Truth must dazzle gradually,
Or every Man be blind.
14 Christopher Abbott, Julian of Norwich, Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999), p. 44.
15 Marion Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics, Games of Faith (London, 1993), p. 223.
16 Williams, Ponder These Things, p. 45.
17 Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, 2004), p. 81.
18 In a similar use of such a metaphor, George Herbert writes in his poem, ‘The Agonie’:
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud, but I as wine.
19 Sheldrake, Spirituality and Theology, p. xii.
20 This cinematic term seems appropriate to the fluid movement of the narrative at this point in the text. For a brief discussion of the cinematic qualities of Julian’s writing see Elizabeth Robertson’s essay in this volume, pp. 150–1.
21 Thomas Merton writes of Julian in a passage which echoes John Keats on ‘negative capability’: ‘This is, for her, the heart of theology: not solving the contradiction, but remaining in the midst of it, in peace, knowing that it is fully solved but that the solution is secret and will never be guessed until it is revealed.’ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, ed. Thomas More (New York, 1989), p. 212.
22 Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove (London, 1939), p. 59. Here Williams is discussing the necessarily co-inherent Ways, describing the Affirmative Way of the poet-mystic as ‘The one Way which was to affirm all things orderly until the universe throbbed with vitality’.
23 In her discussion of Dante, Helen Luke asserts: ‘Dante simply raised his eyes and looked […] we are to learn an ever deeper looking with the inner eye. Helen Luke, Dark Wood to White Rose (New York, 1989), p. 5. I am arguing for Julian’s own ‘deeper looking with the inner eye’ here.
24 The hint of a quest and the reference to ‘a tresor in the erthe’ recalls the Matthaen parable of a treasure buried in a field for which a man was prepared to give all he had. Matthew: 13:44. An argument develops into an affirmation of Christ’s dispossession.
25 Sheldrake, Spirituality and Theology, p. 100.
26 Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge, 1953, new edition, 1975), p. 213.
27 On this, Alexandra Barratt comments: ‘The later medieval good lord was, in the most literal sense of the word a ‘paraclete’ – an advocate to stand at one’s side in court and therefore a suitable metaphor for the Holy Spirit.’ See Alexandra Barratt, ‘Lordship, Service and Worship in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 177–37. I would also suggest, however, that within the context of Julian’s ‘family of the Trinity’ this may be extended to include the concept of a fatherly or godfatherly figure, one standing or standing up for another.
28 I owe this quotation from John Damascene to Dr John Herbert, offered during a conversation on the word perichoresis (the mutual in-dwelling which constitutes the relationship between the components of the Trinity). See Johannes Damascenus, Contra Jacobitas 78, PG 94, 1476 B.