Julian and Universalism
Sin and Salvation
may feel in ourselves anger, contention and strife, still we are all mercifully enclosed in God's mildness and in his meekness, in his benignity and in his accessibility.
While human beings cannot easily forgive themselves but are subject to angry self‐judgment (see the end of chapter 48), God's only characteristic is mercy (that is, compassion) rooted in God's unchangeable love of humanity. In chapter 49 Julian also returns to the image of God's "friendship" with human beings expressed in her vision of heaven in chapter 14.
Thus, "It is the most impossible thing which could be that God might be angry, for anger and friendship are two contraries."
Julian and Universalism Over the years, the question has regularly been asked about whether
Julian is fundamentally a universalist. In other words, does Julian believe that everyone will ultimately be redeemed and eternally "oned" with God? If this is so then, in an obvious literal sense, "all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well." Opinions about this question have differed because Julian's own perspective is both complex and ambiguous.
In recent years, the scholarly consensus is broadly that there are clear hints of universalism in Julian. However, the consensus is also that Julian is deliberately ambiguous. This is partly because universal salvation does not easily correspond with her sense of the damage caused by human sinfulness. Equally, Julian does not wish to set up a conflict between what she believes she has been led to understand through her revelations or inner teaching and the "common teaching of holy Church."3
During the early Christian centuries there had been theological speculation about the possibility of universal salvation, or what was called apokatastasis. A number of commentators have suggested that such major theologians as Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa addressed the restoration of all creation and the reconciliation to God of sinful humanity as a whole at the end of time through the medium of God's overwhelming love and mercy. However, without going into the complexities of the related debates, there are a number of interpretations of each of these writers that make it uncertain what their views were about the possibility of universal salvation.
It seems that there was further theological speculation about universalism during the Middle Ages. For example, in the ninth century there was a carefully argued defense of universalism by the Irish philosopher and theologian John Scotus Eriugena in his work Periphyseon.4 Later, during the fourteenth century, apart from Julian of Norwich, the German
Julian and Universalism
Dominican mystical theologian Johannes Tauler and the Flemish theologian Jan van Ruysbroeck (or John Ruusbroec) are also sometimes cited as possible universalists. However, conventional Church teaching, at least in the Western Church, affirmed clearly that hell existed, that the devil was certainly damned, and that eternal damnation was always a theoretical possibility for unrepentant human beings. This was deemed to be necessarily the case in the context of human free will. However, apart from the devil, the Church never officially defined whether anyone was actually in hell.
In their 1978 scholarly edition of Julian's texts, Colledge and Walsh note that the final "great deed" which Julian was told God would perform and which would make all things well cannot be contemplated by humans until it is done. Meanwhile, as Colledge and Walsh put it, there is definitely "a contrary which reasoning cannot resolve." That is, there seems to be a conflict between Church teaching and Julian's vision. In chapter 33 Julian writes that she did request a sight of purgatory and hell but that this was not given to her.
And yet in this I desired, so far as I dared, that I might have had some sight of hell and purgatory…. But for all that I could wish,
I could see nothing at all of this except what has already been said in the fifth revelation, where I saw that the devil is reproved by God and endlessly condemned.
Julian also recalls that in all her visions of Christ's Passion she did not see any of "the damned" except for the devil.
In reference to the devil, in the Fifth Revelation (chapter 13) Julian saw that the devil is overcome by Christ's Passion, is shamed and scorned by God, and despised "as nothing" as a result of which Julian "laughed greatly."
Also I saw our Lord scorn his malice and despise him as nothing, and he wants us to do so. Because of this sight I laughed greatly, and that made those around me to laugh as well; and their laughter was pleasing to me. I thought that I wished that all my fellow
Christians had seen what I saw. Then they would all have laughed with me….
According to Colledge and Walsh, the most important thing is that Julian is not explicitly drawn away from any article of Church teaching. The latter affirmed that eternal damnation was always a possibility. As chapter 33 asserts, "I saw that the devil is reproved by God and endlessly condemned." Julian also understood that "every creature who is of the
Sin and Salvation
devil's condition in this life and so dies is no more mentioned before God and all his saints than is the devil." However, it can never be definitively asserted that anyone is actually "of the devil's condition" when they die.
Equally, as we shall see, the meaning of the phrase "no more mentioned" is ambiguous. In summary, what Colledge and Walsh underline is that basically Julian is not shown a conclusive answer to her question about sin and salvation.5
In their more recent scholarly edition, Watson and Jenkins refer to chapter 9 of the Long Text where Julian makes the first of many references to "those who will be saved" and suggest that "the saved" are an unknowable body. Equally, Julian says nothing about anyone else. In fact the phrase
"that shalle be saved" is used some twenty‐five times in the Long Text to qualify Julian's teaching. Watson and Jenkins suggest that there is a kind of universalizing logic to chapter 9 but that the phrase "those who will be saved" appears to be Julian's way of cautiously balancing out that apparent logic. In Julian's Thirteenth Revelation (chapters 27–40) she explicitly confronts ideas of universal salvation. "Alle shalle be wele" dominates the insights of the Revelation. However, as Watkins and Jenkins note, chapter 27 uses the phrase "to alle that shalle be saved" to qualify what would otherwise appear to be overt universalism. Like Colledge and Walsh, they also note that chapter 32 suggests that God's final "great deed," which "will make well all which is not well," cannot be resolved until the last day. This is partly because Julian and all human creatures are incapable of understanding it now and partly because the logic of such a great deed is that it is a conclusion to everything and necessarily lies beyond the end of time.
Chapter 32 also outlines the traditional categories of "the damned": the fallen angels who are now devils and those who "die out of the faith of Holy Church" whether they are pagans or baptized people who nevertheless lived unchristian lives. Further (and more controversially) in chapter 33, Julian indicates that she had been taught that the Jews who put
Jesus to death "were eternally accursed and condemned, except those who had been converted by grace." I have already noted in Chapter 1 that the city of Norwich had a particularly unpleasant relationship with the Jewish community. Overall, as she indicates in chapter 32, Julian struggled with God's message that everything will be well given "that one article of our faith is that many creatures will be damned."
It is worth noting that both Watson and Jenkins and Barry Windeatt, in what is the most recent scholarly edition of Julian, suggest that she apparently writes of two distinct "deeds" in chapters 32 and 36.6 Watson and Jenkins suggest that this second deed relates to Julian's comment in chapter 35 that once sin has ceased to "harass righteous souls" everything
"will be brought into righteousness and stand fast there forever." This second mysterious deed has a more limited compass than the first deed
Julian and Universalism
which embraces both unbelievers and those who have led an un‐Christian life. Unlike the first deed which is entirely eschatological, beyond time and this present world, the second deed appears to be begun here, will be known by each person when they die, and is aimed primarily at "all his lovers on earth." Its purpose seems to be to redeem God's lovers from the fear that they are inextricably trapped in their status as sinners. The aim of the deed is to offer joy and to "make us rejoice in him and in all his works." However, as both Watson and Jenkins and Barry Windeatt note, later in the chapter this second deed also seems to expand beyond
"his lovers" to include the more mysterious "all who will be saved."
Fundamentally, Colledge and Walsh, Watkins and Jenkins, and Windeatt all agree that Julian's position on universalism, and on who is to be saved, is highly ambiguous because it is unresolved in her own mind.
More critically, Julian's God is not some fierce judge who saves or damns but one who acts out of love to make all things well. Equally, the heart of her anthropology is that human beings are created with their "being" in God. Their destiny is to return to God and to be delivered from the non‐ being of sin. In his study of Julian's theology, Denys Turner suggests that sin offers a false narrative which sets the story of sinful human beings and the "story" of God in a relationship of mutual exclusion. As the parable of a Lord and a Servant makes clear, human failure and falling, like the servant in the ditch, is its own hell. The fallen, injured servant cannot see the Lord looking at him nor can he "see" himself as God sees him. He can only feel his failure and experience his woundedness. As Turner puts it, we tend to create a negative reality out of the unreal. However, to do that is to replace God as creator and lover with God as a judgmental tyrant.7
However, the late Grace Jantzen, a philosopher of religion, in her study of Julian points out that the logic of human free will is that we must remain free to identify with the "nothingness" of sin even though it goes against our true selfhood in God. Interestingly Jantzen relates the "nothingness" of sin in the present life to the possibility of ultimate nothingness when we die. In that sense, hell would seem to be not a state of eternal punishment but rather an option for literal self‐annihilation.
However, Jantzen interprets Julian as implicitly affirming that there is the hope that in practice this possibility will not be actualized in anyone.8
The possibility of falling into nothingness or oblivion is also mentioned speculatively by Joan Nuth in her study of Julian's theology. This is in reference to the comment in Julian's chapter 33 that every creature who dies "in the devil's condition" is "no more mentioned" before God. Not being "mentioned" may refer to being overlooked as irrelevant or it may imply falling into nothingness rather than enduring eternal punishment.9
Nuth feels that Julian's ambiguous and careful approach to the question of salvation strongly suggests that the "all" that will ultimately be well