Human Nature
Human Nature
of the self‐giving love of God. Her chapter 8 clearly states that one of the important things she came to understand from this powerful vision of the bleeding Christ was both that "heaven and earth and all creation are great, generous and beautiful and good" and that God
"created everything for love, and by the same love is it preserved, and always will be without end."
The proper Christian attitude towards creation is summarized in Julian's chapter 75. God's presence is to be affirmed in the smallest part of what is created.
But it is proper to God's honourable majesty so to be contemplated by his creatures, trembling and quaking in fear, because of their much greater joy [literally, "mekehede of joy," meekness of joy] endlessly marvelling at the greatness of God, the Creator, and at the smallest part [literally, "litilhede," littleness] of all that is created.
While in Julian's mind even "the smallest of deeds which is done is well done," she has a hierarchical approach to the created order that is typical of a medieval world view. Thus, she affirms that "man's creation is superior to all God's works" (chapter 1) and that God
"wants us to know that the noblest thing which he ever made is mankind" (chapter 53).
Human Nature Turning now to Julian's theology of human nature and identity, or theological anthropology, it is important to underline at the outset that Julian's understanding of the value of human nature in God's eyes makes no distinction between women and men. As already noted, her more conventional, and apologetic, portrayal of womanhood in the Short Text, chapter vi, as ignorant, weak, and frail disappears in the Long Text. Here,
Julian's confident voice addresses her teachings, a woman's teachings, to all her fellow Christians, both men and women.
A rich starting point for considering Julian's anthropology is a second image employed by her at the very beginning of the Long Text, in chapter 5. Here she describes how God showed her a spiritual sight of his
"familiar love." The closeness of God to humankind is described in terms of clothing. "He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us." By describing God as our clothing, Julian does not merely offer an image of closeness and loving intimacy but also
Creation and Human Nature
one of care and protection. It is important to note that Julian does not express any dichotomy between male and female in the chain of being.
All humanity is equally loved and protected.
It is interesting to note that later in the same chapter Julian appears to use human nakedness as an image of innocence when she added that God also revealed that "it is very greatly pleasing to him that a simple soul should come naked, openly and familiarly." The notion of a "simple soul," or "sely soule" in Middle English, may validly be translated as an "innocent soul." The image of being clothed in God is repeated in the following chapter 6 immediately after the graphic image of human excretion (as it appears in the Paris manuscript) where
God's care is shown in "the simplest natural functions of our body."
From this, Julian concludes that "we, soul and body, are clad and enclosed in the goodness of God."
Taken together, Julian's images of God as our "clothing" and "being clad" by God in love appear to contrast with the imagery of nakedness and clothing as they appear in the Book of Genesis, chapter 3. There, the narrative of humanity's original disobedience and "fall" has Adam and Eve lose their innocence, become aware of their nakedness and seek to cover themselves up. Subsequently, in the Eden story, God clothes Adam and Eve in garments of skins before expelling them from the Garden of Eden. The contrast between Genesis and Julian's text is that, in the first, being covered up by clothing is a sign of human degradation whereas in Julian's text being clothed by and in God is an image of love and protection. In this regard, there is also a striking contrast between Julian and the other fourteenth‐century English spiritual writer Walter Hilton. In Book 1, chapter 84 of his The Scale of Perfection, Hilton has a more negative view of human embodiment as a symbol of our sinful state.
Our Lord made clothes of beasts' hide for Adam and his wife as a sign that for his sin he was misshapen like a beast. With these bestial clothes we are all born, wrapped up and disfigured from our natural shape.
In her Seventh Revelation (as in the Long Text chapter 15, also summarized in chapter 1), Julian suggests that she (and no doubt her intended audience) was caught between an experience of well‐being, which she understood as being enlightened by God's grace, and what she refers to as woe. She suggests that this is caused by "the heaviness and weariness of our mortal life" (chapter 1). However, this sense of depression is to be understood as a temptation.