Mystical Theology
Mystical Theology
Paul, and the apostle Thomas (chapter 38). Many of these could have come from listening to popular preaching or from the religious art with which Julian was familiar. There are also occasional quotations. For example in chapter 15 she says "And in the time of joy I could have said with St Paul:
Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ; and in the pain I could have said with St Peter: Lord save me, I am perishing."
At other moments, Julian embeds scriptural phraseology or allusions in her texts in an apparently seamless way. A particularly rich example is her exemplum known as the parable of a Lord and a Servant (chapter 51).
Clearly her reference to the story of Adam and the Fall echoes the Book of Genesis, chapter 3. The figure of the servant is both rich and ambiguous.
The image of falling into a ditch and being wounded immediately suggests the story of Adam. However, the image of the servant as beloved and chosen also seems to echo the servant songs and image of a "suffering servant" in the Book of Isaiah, especially the chapters now known as Deutero‐Isaiah. For example, there is "Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights" (Isaiah 42, 1–7). There is also the ambiguity and pain of being Yahweh's servant in Isaiah 49, 1–7. The servant was "a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity" yet will "be exalted and lifted up" (see Isaiah 52, 13 to Isaiah 53, 12). The "man of sorrow" in 53, 3 echoes the experience of Julian's servant but also points to the connection in the Christian mind between Isaiah's suffering servant and the person of Christ, God's servant who must suffer and be rejected (Gospel of Luke 9, 22). It is now thought by scholars that Julian's chapter 51 may have significant Pauline echoes. The willingness of the servant to leave himself aside to do the will of his lord may be an allusion to the kenotic hymn in Philippians 2 where Christ Jesus, though at one with God, the Lord ("in the form of God," verse 6), emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. This fits with the fact that in chapter 51 Julian's servant is shown to be both Adam and Christ. There also seem to be a number of allusions to the Letter to the Ephesians, chapter 5 and to 1 Corinthians, chapter 12 and to Christ as the head of the body and Christians as his members.
More controversially, the inability of the servant in the ditch to see the lord who has followed him or to feel the lord's continuing love may be an echo of Jesus Christ on the cross crying "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" (Gospel of Matthew 27, 46 and Gospel of Mark 15, 34).
Mystical Theology If we are to describe Julian's theology as mystical, what exactly does this imply? The eminent Belgian Catholic philosopher, Louis Dupré, who developed an interest in what might be called a mystical experience of
Julian's Theology
"the self," suggested that "The mystics start their spiritual journey from within, and that is the only place where the believer must begin, whether he wants to or not."16 As we shall see in a later chapter, this inwardness does not compromise the essence of Christian theological anthropology, which involves self‐giving rather than self‐focused interiority.
This inwardness is also radically open to a mysterious God who draws human beings into the unknown. What Dupré critiqued is the failure of conventional theology to be touched by the reality of God rather than limiting itself to abstract and systematic attempts to analyse God's nature.
In that sense, Dupré's "from within" is not self‐preoccupation but implies the courage actually to encounter God and to be radically changed by this encounter. What is conventionally termed "mystical theology" is an alternative (and subversive) approach to theological reflection based not simply on intellectual thought but also on the vulnerable practice of contemplation. This means taking seriously the witness of those theological thinkers like Julian of Norwich who in their engagement with the immediacy of God risk the experience of "rupture"; that is, in the words of Bernard McGinn, the "surprise and amazement that opens up new possibilities in spiritual experience."17
Julian's rich theological reflection is founded upon her deep mystical‐ visionary experience and, according to her own testimony, intense on‐ going spiritual reflection over a period of many years. This led Julian to a transformed perception of God, and of God's relationship with humanity.
Without her deep encounter with God, and the sense that she had been "shown" vitally important insights through that encounter, Julian would not have been inspired to write theology at all.
From its patristic origins, not least in the central figure of the anonymous sixth‐century theologian known as Pseudo‐Dionysius, mystical theology has consistently sought a different approach to theological reflection from one founded purely upon analytical‐philosophical ways of thinking.18 This is partly a process, as with Julian, of engaging the process of theology with a lived experience of God and with the on‐going practice of the Christian life including exposure to the scriptures, participation in the liturgy and sacraments, and through belonging to "the fellowship of the mystery"; that is, the Church. The very heart of all theology was mystical. "Doctrinal theology" arose from this basis rather than from speculative reasoning in isolation.19
From the patristic period until the development of the so‐called "new theology" of scholasticism around the twelfth century, theology was a single unified enterprise. By unified I do not simply mean that there was an absence of the later distinctions between theological disciplines, such as doctrine, moral theology (ethics), Church history, sacramental theology, and so on. Rather, the unity of theology overall implied that