Creation

Chapter 5 Creation and Human Nature The themes of God's relationship with material creation and the status of humankind before God are central to the theological vision of Julian of Norwich and her teachings in the Long Text. I suggest that the rich imagery employed by her in chapter 5 offers an evocative and appropriate starting point for considering her understanding of both creation and her theology of human nature.

Creation In terms of God's relationship to material creation, I will begin with one of Julian's most famous images, that of "something small, no bigger than a hazelnut." Without being pedantic, it is worth noting that Julian's language is comparative whereas some popular writings and icons of Julian are more literal, suggesting that the "something small" actually was a hazelnut!

And in this he [our good Lord] showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? And I was given this general answer: it is everything which is made.1

(Chapter 5) Julian wonders how creation could survive, given that it is so little and therefore fragile. "I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing." However, the answer she receives is that it is simply God's love that is the cause both of creation's existence and of the survival of everything that is other than God. Julian then summarizes her understanding of the three essential "properties" of creation, "this little thing." First, God made it, then God loves it, and finally God preserves it.

Julian of Norwich: "In God's Sight" – Her Theology in Context, First Edition. Philip Sheldrake.

Creation

However, in the following sentences Julian declares that an appreciation of creation as the gift of God's love must never be allowed to come between us and God. Here we need to be careful about how we understand what Julian says. On the face of it, we are asked to "delight in despising as nothing everything created" – in Middle English, "that us liketh to nought all thing that is made." However, Julian qualifies this potential contradiction of the value and goodness of creation. "Despise" is arguably an unhelpful translation. The point Julian seeks to make is that if we mistakenly focus our "liking," that is our ultimate satisfaction, on created things rather than on God ("if we seek rest in this thing which is so little") we cannot truly love God or be "substantially united" to our uncreated God.

Overall, in reference to Julian's teaching, both Watson and Jenkins in their scholarly edition of the Middle English text, as well as Bernard

McGinn in the chapter on Julian in his volume on late medieval mysticism, detect echoes in Julian's imagery of the deutero‐canonical book of the Old Testament, The Wisdom of Solomon 11, 22–25.2 Here the littleness of creation is portrayed as "a speck that tips the scales" and "a drop of morning dew." Yet "you [God] love all things that exist."

More strikingly, the image of a nut is also used in relation to creation, albeit in a different way, in a text by another of the fourteenth‐century

English mystics, Walter Hilton (mid‐1340s–1396). This is specifically in his The Scale [or Ladder] of Perfection. Hilton's text consists of two Books, apparently written some years apart, and addressed to an anchoress.

These probably date from the late 1380s and the early 1390s. Of course, as with everything else about Julian's sources and influences, we have no way of knowing whether she knew Hilton's text let alone whether she had read it. However, its intended audience and its likely dates make this theoretically feasible. In his Book 2, chapter 33, Hilton refers to Jesus being "within all creatures but not in the way that a kernel is hidden inside the shell of a nut…he is within all creatures as holding and keeping them in their being."

Interestingly, in her reference to Julian's image the Australian theologian Kerrie Hide refers to an "active kernel of growth" within a hazelnut.

In this way she notes that Julian's image suggests an evolutionary view of creation rather than a static one. Beyond "making," the images of God's

"preserving" or keeping creation and "loving" creation suggests both God's continuous involvement in renewing creation and also the dynamic nature of creation itself.3

What Julian portrays in chapter 5 is that the whole of creation is a manifestation of divine love. There is a radical contingency to everything that is not God. That is, in relation to God's "Being" created reality is infinitesimal. Yet God is nevertheless always active in the world of time

Creation and Human Nature

and space which God loves eternally. Julian makes no overt reference to the creation myth in the Book of Genesis but her parable of a Lord and a Servant in chapter 51, which we explored in depth in Chapter 3, can be seen as an image of God's restoration and renewal of creation. The servant of the parable is also identified as the second Adam, God's Son. The servant is thus imaged as "a gardener, digging and ditching and sweating."

He waters plants, and makes streams to flow and fruit to grow. In summary, Julian's understanding of the created universe is Christocentric both in terms of its making and also in terms of its renewal through Christ, the second Adam, in his embodied suffering and death. The critical point is that the work of salvation carries on God's work of creation.

In Julian's theology there is a unity and continuity between them that underlines the irreversible value of material creation, including human nature. The theme of salvation will be developed further in the next chapter.

A second evocative image of God in relation to creation appears in chapter 11. "I saw God in a pointe…by which sight I saw that he is in al thing." From the wider context of the passage, I have already suggested that this "pointe" is a spatial image rather than a reference to "an instant of time" as in the translation by Colledge and Walsh.4 In other words, for Julian, God is unquestionably the center of everything that exists and does everything in the functioning of creation. Indeed, God alone is the "doer."

In chapter 11, the image of "a pointe" also suggests God's presence and action in even the smallest conceivable thing. "Everything which exists in nature is of God's creation, so that everything which is done has the property of being God's doing." Further, "the smallest of deeds which is done is as well done as the best and the greatest." Again, as in chapter 5, the image of God "in a pointe" is used at the end of the chapter to underline God's continuous involvement in preserving creation. Julian expresses this by having God say:

See, I am God. See I am in all things. See, I do all things. See I never remove my hands from my works, nor ever shall without end. See,

I guide all things to the end that I ordain them for, before time began, with the same power and wisdom and love with which I made them.

Both images, "like a hazelnut" and "in a pointe," offer a vision of a created universe wholly dependent on God, originating in God, and also destined to return to God. All things finally converge in God.

Julian's vision of, and subsequent meditation upon, the bleeding head of Christ leads her to see creation as a whole as the ultimate expression

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