Love was His Meaning
Love was His Meaning
Julian uses the word "grace" on many occasions throughout her Long Text. For Julian, grace is God's work in us and for us. Grace is regularly linked to mercy and therefore to that changeable and contingent dimension of human identity referred to as our "sensuality." We shall explore this further in the exploration of Julian's binary anthropology of "substance" and "sensuality" in the next chapter. For example, chapter 62 notes that we are bound to God by nature ("kind") in our fundamental
"substance" and "we are bound to God by grace" – by implication in our changeable "sensuality." In chapter 52 our human lives are described by Julian as a mixture of well‐being and woe. We endeavour to wait for God and to trust that God will give us grace and mercy. "And this is his own working in us." In chapter 57 mercy and grace are explicitly said to bring our sensuality to completion.
Love was His Meaning By focusing everything on the Passion (that is, on Jesus Christ) Julian is offering a strong signal that everything she has to say about God has a connection to our way of understanding human life. Thus, the various triads of properties that Julian uses in writing about the Trinity refer outwards to God's active being; that is, God's relationship with creation. For this reason some scholars suggest that Julian concentrates on the "economic" Trinity.8 It would be better to say that Julian's approach refuses to separate an economic from an immanent Trinity. For Julian, God is as God does. She is concerned to establish that the "meaning" of God is love but that this "substantial" (i.e. natural) meaning is inherently related to God's deeds.
Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love.
What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end. So I was taught that love is our Lord's meaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before God made us he loved us, which love was never abated and never will be, And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had beginning, but the love in which he created us was in him from without beginning.
(Chapter 86) As we have seen, Julian is assured that God the Trinity has the power to perform "on the last day" a great deed whereby "all that is not well will be
Love is God's Meaning
made well" (chapter 32). Yet, this powerful God who can and will accomplish more than we can imagine is, for Julian, revealed totally and essentially as love. Love is not only God's meaning but the whole teaching of Julian's book. Everything else (including, for example, God's Lordship) is to be interpreted in the light of love. God may be thought of as all‐powerful and all‐knowing but the deepest truth about God is love. For it is love that unites the Trinity. Love is the inner life of God.
Though the three persons of the blessed Trinity be all alike in the self, the soul received most understanding of love. Yes, and he wants us in all things to have our contemplation and delight in love. And it is about this knowledge that we are most blind, for some of us believe that God is almighty and may do everything, and that he is all wisdom and can do everything, but that he is all love and wishes to do everything, there we fail.
(Chapter 73) As an aside, it is important to underline that the notion of God's meaning as love is not merely a comfortable and comforting message. First of all, it runs against the conventional Christian teaching of Julian's day that, in the words of her chapter 45, "Sinners sometimes deserve blame and wrath" and that, as she suggests in chapter 46, humans may merit pain for the many evil deeds they have done. That there is neither anger nor blame in God also challenges the frequent violent anger of human beings towards other humans who do evil. However, as created in the image of God‐as‐love, we humans are called upon to be agents of love in our own world. This is frequently a deeply uncomfortable message.
It is widely thought that Julian's approach echoes, whether consciously or unconsciously, Augustine's De Trinitate, XV. There it is the reciprocal love of each person for the others that unites the Trinity. For Julian, this love of the Trinity is never purely inward or introspective. It necessarily overflows into love for creatures or, perhaps better, it overflows itself as creation.
Julian is clear in her teaching about the fundamental unity of God‐as‐Trinity.
For the Trinity is God, God is the Trinity. The Trinity is our maker, the Trinity is our protector, the Trinity is our everlasting lover, the Trinity is our endless joy and our bliss, by our Lord Jesus Christ and in our Lord Jesus Christ.
(Chapter 74) This early statement is further underlined in chapter 23 concerning our salvation, as we have seen: "All the Trinity worked in Christ's Passion,