The Importance of Chapter 27
The Importance of Chapter 27
The Importance of Chapter 27 In chapter 27, Julian returns to her fundamental deep longing for God.
She comes to see that the only thing that gets in the way of this desire for God is sin. This leads her to speculate that if there had been no sin this problem would not have arisen. So why was sin not prevented by God from the very beginning of human creation? If it had been prevented everything would have been well.
And after this our Lord brought to my mind the longing that I had for him before, and I saw that nothing hindered me but sin, and I saw that this is true of us all in general, and it seemed to me that if there had been no sin, we should all have been pure and as like our Lord as he created us.
As I have already stated briefly, here I do not believe that Julian was in the strict sense addressing the philosophical question of theodicy. Classical theodicy focuses on how the existence of an all‐powerful and benevolent
God is logically consistent with the existence of evil. In her text Julian records her questioning of God through which she is led to understand the nature of "sin" very differently. Behind her question in chapter 27 lies an assumption by Julian that the "wellness" of creation depends on the absence of sin. The sense that there is only one answer to this problem, that she could see it and was troubled by it, is then described as "lacking discretion." That is, her instinctive understanding was unwise or a failure of good judgment. Julian then experiences an answer from Jesus. First of all, she is told that "Sinne is behovely." What does the Middle English word "behovely" mean? The Colledge and Walsh modern translation uses the phrase "sin is necessary."
But Jesus, who in this vision informed me about everything needful to me, answered with these words and said: Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.
However, the word "necessary" may seem to imply ontological necessity.
This would raise theological and philosophical difficulties. However, "necessary" is also not the only possible translation of the Middle English word. In practice, "necessary" reflects the Latin word necessarium as it appears in the hymn of proclamation Exultet sung at the Easter Vigil
Liturgy, as Julian would have known it. The relevant phrase from the hymn is O certe necessarium Adae peccatum: literally "Oh truly necessary sin of Adam." Some alternative modern English words for the Middle