Julian's Anthropology
Creation and Human Nature
Julian's Anthropology The Augustinian theme of returning to the heart connects strongly with how Julian of Norwich approaches her theology of human identity. While the question of what we are as humans is important, equally challenging is precisely how we come to know ourselves deeply rather than superficially. As Julian underlines, this is not a self‐driven intellectual or psychological process but involves a contemplative journey inwards. As we shall see, in Julian's way of thinking, for us to come to know our own soul (or self) demands that we first come to know God.
In Julian's theological vision, her complex binary (but not dualistic) portrayal of human identity in terms of the dimensions of "substance" and "sensuality" also echoes Augustine's anthropology to some degree.
However, the fundamental source of Julian's highly original theological reflection in A Revelation of Love is what she believes was revealed to her by God initially through her visions and then through her subsequent contemplative reflection. Julian's doctrine of human nature and human destiny is expressed particularly in her chapters 53–63.
As I suggested in Chapter 2, I believe that Julian's overall theological approach may be partly placed within the category of mystical theology.
This equally applies to her theology of human identity or theological anthropology. In patristic and medieval mystical theology the theological style, including the approach to theological anthropology, takes broadly two forms. There is a "positive" or kataphatic approach that focuses on what we may legitimately affirm about human identity. The second approach, known as "negative" or apophatic theology, emphasizes that the human soul or "self" in its deep union with the divine is, like the all‐ embracing reality of God, ultimately beyond our capacity to know definitively. It is important to emphasize that while these two theological approaches have distinctive features they are not mutually exclusive.
Rather, they complement each other and, indeed, may intersect in the writings of specific mystical thinkers such as Julian of Norwich.
Two interrelated elements run through the writings of Julian of Norwich and underpin her mystical anthropology. The first element is that "the mystical" involves a process of self‐forgetfulness rather than the pursuit of self‐preoccupied interiority. Second, as a consequence, Julian's mystical reflections remind us that the core of a theology of human identity necessarily involves a risky openness to a God who draws Julian, and all her "evenchristen," forward into the unknown. In that sense, human identity is not a static reality but is a dynamic and open‐ended process.
These interrelated elements of self‐emptying and a divinely guided process of becoming are presented in a range of ways in Julian's mystical theological writing.
Julian's Anthropology
Here, I suggest that Julian modifies Augustine's three‐fold scheme of memory, understanding, and will. Julian adopts the more dynamic, process‐focused, categories of "being," "increase," and "fulfilment."
I had a partial touching, and it is founded in nature, that is to say:
Our reason is founded in God, who is nature's substance. From this substantial nature spring mercy and grace and penetrate us
["spredeth into us"] accomplishing everything for the fulfilment of our joy. These are our foundations, in which we have our being, our increase and our fulfilment. This is three properties in one goodness, and where one operates all operate in the things which now pertain to us.
(Chapter 56) Later, Julian expounds her triadic process of human existence further in relationship to the nature and work of the Trinity. Thus, "being" is nature,
"increase" is mercy, and "fulfilment" is grace (chapter 58).
In general, in Julian's theology, how she comes to understand human identity engages directly with her mystical theological understanding of God‐as‐Trinity. The mutual indwelling of God in us and us in God permeates her theological vision. Indeed, according to Julian we cannot truly know our self unless we first cease to be self‐preoccupied and contemplate God.
For our soul is so deeply grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we cannot come to knowledge of it until we first have knowledge of God, who is the Creator to whom it is united. But nevertheless I saw that we have, naturally from our fullness, to desire wisely and truly to know our own soul, through which we are taught to seek it where it is, and that is in God.
(Chapter 56) Indeed, God is closer to us than our own soul, for he is the foundation on which our soul stands, and he is the mean which keeps the substance and the sensuality together, so that they will never separate.
(Chapter 56) Julian bases her theological reflections on her foundational experience of sixteen visions. As we have already underlined, the visions, "showings," or "revelations" focus primarily upon the Passion of Jesus. Julian recognizes
Creation and Human Nature
that everything she was taught was grounded in the first revelation of Jesus' suffering and bleeding on the cross (chapters 2–9). As a result, the whole of Julian's theology of human identity finds its focus in the self‐emptying of Christ's Passion. Her teachings on God‐as‐Trinity, on creation, and on Incarnation are ultimately measured by the standard of the cross and flow naturally into her anthropology. The Passion of the incarnate Christ is understood fundamentally as the supreme revelation of the love of God.
Love is not something God "does" or "has." Rather, love is God's very nature and this love is directed outwards towards creation and towards humanity in particular. In other words, for Julian, self‐giving love is God's entire reality. Julian does not provide simple definitions or a systematic structure to help us to understand what this means. Her pedagogical approach is to begin with the Passion, expressed in visionary form, and then to proceed by means of other images and stories. In this way, Julian is able to teach a deeper wisdom beyond the language of logic. Julian's
A Revelation of Love begins with an overwhelming image of self‐giving love manifested in the face of the crucified and suffering Christ and which is to be the measure of all human existence. The cross is both an indication of humanity's need for healing and radical transformation and also of humanity's continued worth "in God's sight."
The point of the visions was to find the transcendent reality of God in this broken human figure of the crucified Jesus. Yet, at the same time, to see God mediated essentially through the suffering flesh of Jesus and through God's "working" in all contingent things also paradoxically serves to preserve the otherness of God. That is, God's transcendence is inextricably linked to God's immanence. "I perceived, truly and powerfully, that it was he [Christ] who just so, both God and man, himself suffered for me, who showed it to me without any intermediary"
(chapter 4).
Thus, in Jesus Christ the creation, life, and eternal future of humanity are caught up into the life of God‐as‐Trinity.
And in the same revelation, suddenly the Trinity filled my heart full of the greatest joy, and I understood that it will be so in heaven without end to all who will come there. 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 4) On the cross, the love of God for humankind is shown to be a parallel of the love relationship within the Trinity – a dynamic and mutual
Julian's Anthropology
indwelling in which each person of the Godhead is constantly giving to and sharing with the others. This way of being is also revealed as afflicted love, united through suffering to all humanity. From the vision of Jesus
Christ on the cross Julian learned that everything is filled with God and enclosed by God. Through the cross, God offers intimacy or "familiar love." Julian does not suggest directly that God suffers. Yet there are hints that God is not untouched by our condition. In the Incarnation, God is indissolubly joined to the human condition and longs for us.
As we saw in the last chapter, within God there is a longing and desire as part of God's everlasting goodness. Also because of God's indwelling within the human soul, God's thirst underpins our own deep longing and desire. God in Christ thirsts for us and because of our union with God we also thirst for God.
For Julian the simple fact is that, in her understanding of the Passion, the Trinity as such participates in all activities relating to salvation. This is part of the eternal economy of God even if only the "virgin's Son" may be said to suffer. "All the Trinity worked in Christ's Passion, administering abundant virtues and plentiful grace to us by him; but only the virgin's
Son suffered, in which all the blessed Trinity rejoice." Further, concerning our salvation, "All the Trinity worked in Christ's Passion, administering abundant virtues and plentiful grace to us by him" (chapter 23).
The participation of the Trinity in salvation is also strongly implied earlier in chapter 11 where, as we have already noted several times, Julian sees God "in a pointe." Here, God is seen to be in all things, as doing all things and as bringing them to their preordained conclusion.
And therefore the blessed Trinity is always wholly pleased with all its works; and God revealed all this most blessedly, as though to 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; how should anything be amiss?
(Chapter 11) As we have seen, in the three "properties" of fatherhood, motherhood, and lordship "in one God" our essential human nature (what Julian refers to as our "substance") dwells equally in each person of the Trinity and in all the persons together. "And our substance is in our Father, God almighty, and our substance is in our Mother, God all wisdom, and our substance is in our Lord God, the Holy Spirit, all goodness, for our substance is whole in each person of the Trinity, who is one God." In chapter 58 Julian also explicitly links her theology of the Trinity to human
Creation and Human Nature
existence. "For all our life consists of three: In the first we have our being, and in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilment. The first is nature, the second is mercy, the third is grace." In other words, in relation to human existence, God's love has three effects, corresponding to the persons of the Trinity. First, God's love performs a work of nature by creating us in God's image and sustaining us in existence. Second, God's love performs a work of mercy by healing the damage caused by our failing and falling (that is, by sin). Finally, God's love performs a work of grace, fulfilling human existence by bringing it into union with the life of God. This begins now in time and space but is to be finally completed in heaven.
The mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity one in the other (perichoresis), as affirmed at a number of points including at the end of the famous parable of a Lord and a Servant, is related to the human condition. "Now the Son, true God and true man, sits in his city [the human soul] in rest and in peace, which his Father has prepared for him by his endless purpose, and the Father in the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Father and in the Son" (chapter 51). We are drawn into this mutual indwelling, into an intimacy with God that is Julian's version of deification. She expresses this as a mutual enclosure. We are enclosed in God and God is enclosed in us:
And I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and still my understanding accepted that our substance is in God, that is to say that God is God, and our substance is a creature in God. For the almighty truth of the Trinity is our
Father, for he made us and keeps us in him. And the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, in whom we are enclosed. And the high goodness of the Trinity is our Lord, and in him we are enclosed and he in us. We are enclosed in the Father, and we are enclosed in the Son, and we are enclosed in the Holy Spirit. And the Father is enclosed in us, the Son is enclosed in us, and the Holy
Spirit is enclosed in us, almighty, all wisdom and all goodness, one God, one Lord.
(Chapter 54) Also, "Our soul sits in God in true rest, and our soul stands in God in sure strength, and our soul is naturally rooted in God in endless love"
(chapter 56).
Because Julian seeks to articulate not only something of what God is but also something of how God sees reality and has revealed it to her in part, she offers a radically alternative vision of all created reality, including human existence. As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter,
Julian's Anthropology
this results in two striking assertions. First, there is neither blame nor wrath in God (chapters 45–49). Second, and related to it, sin is "no deed"
(chapter 11). In seeing God in everything (chapter 11) Julian also sees all things in God and therefore "in all this sin was not shown to me." Later, as she considers the paradox of how the experience of sin hinders her longing for God (chapter 27) she is taught that she could not see sin as she contemplated the Passion because "it has no kind of substance, no share in being, nor can it be recognized except by the pain caused by it."
What is critical is that in her anthropology, Julian teaches that the essence of human nature is not "sinful." Sin is the cause both of human pain and of the Passion and yet "sin is necessary" (in Middle English, "behovely").
In Julian's thinking around the question of what sin means it is somehow a providential dimension of our contingent incompleteness and fallibility. Counter‐intuitively, while sin often blinds us it also at times enables us to experience more deeply God's essential nature as love.
As we shall explore in the next chapter, God does not "see" human sin but only the ultimate bliss that will be ours. In God's vision this is the truth of human existence. Thus Julian, in her vision of God's eye‐view, cannot see sin even though she knows its impact on human life and experience. This does not deny that human beings sin. However, it is to say that the centrality of sin in human experience is not reproduced on the level of God's essential relationship with humanity. Julian expresses this in terms of a paradox at the end of chapter 34: "When I saw that God does everything which is done, I did not see sin, and then I saw that all is well. But when God did show me about sin, then he said: All will be well."
The two assertions are based on God's "great endless love" (chapter 45).
"God is that goodness which cannot be angry, for God is nothing but goodness" (chapter 46). However, as we have seen, the parable of a Lord and a Servant makes clear (chapter 51) that it all depends on a difference in ways of seeing. The point is that God looks on human beings and their failings with unending love and compassion and not with blame.
The fallen servant in the parable then sees neither his loving lord who remains nearby "nor does he truly see what he himself is in the sight of his loving lord." We do not see ourselves truly. Indeed, the next chapter
(chapter 52) clearly states that "God sees one way and man sees another way." Essentially God can only see humanity in the light of his Son. "When
Adam fell, God's Son fell [into Mary's womb]; because of the true union which was made in heaven, God's Son could not be separated from Adam, for by Adam I understand all mankind" (chapter 51). Julian finally understands the parable when she is granted an insight into how God sees humankind.
From this standpoint, the story of Adam's Fall and of Christ's "fall" into Mary's womb (the Incarnation) are inextricably linked; they are even