Julian and Visualizations
Prayer: A Journey of Desire
overtly advocate fasting, bodily mortification, or acts of self‐denial.
Although Julian makes references to penance as an attitude of repentance, there are no references to extensive penitential practices. For example, in chapter 39, penance is mentioned in reference to making confession to a priest, revealing one's sins, and accepting whatever "penance" the confessor imposes. This was most usually reciting additional prayers or undertaking an act of almsgiving and charity.
Fundamentally, Julian bypasses the question of penitential activity.
She lacks the purgative attitude of some of her contemporary visionaries.
Her attitude is not typified by self‐loathing or a desire for humiliation.
Indeed, in chapter 77, she notes: "As to the penance which one takes upon oneself, that was not revealed to me; that is to say, it was not revealed to me specifically." What was revealed to her was "that we ought meekly and patiently to bear and suffer the penance which God himself gives us, with recollection of his blessed Passion." In remembering the Passion we "suffer with him as his friends did who saw it." This is not a question of adopting artificial penitential practices. Also, fundamentally, Julian was taught that "this life is penance" and "your life is profitable penance" but that the result should not be depression but a sense that "our Lord is with us, protecting us and leading us into the fullness of joy." An important dimension of everyday life as penitential is related to our perpetual longing and desire which remains unfulfilled until we are led to a final union with God
(chapter 56). Importantly, God is here with us in our life‐as‐penance.
For it is the greatest glory to him of anything which we can do that we live gladly and happily for love of him in our penance. For he regards us so tenderly that he sees all our life here to be penance; for the substantial and natural longing in us for him is a lasting penance in us, and he makes this penance in us, and mercifully he helps us to bear it.
(Chapter 81) This approach contrasts strongly with a common intensification of penitential piety during the fourteenth century in response to the bleak experiences of such things as the Black Death. As already noted, this was commonly portrayed in sermons as God's punishment for our essentially sinful lives.11 There is no sense of this in Julian's teachings.
Julian and Visualizations More controversially, it has been suggested by several commentators on Julian that her "sight" of the crucified Jesus, including the bleeding of his head, may not simply be a question of an unprovoked, ecstatic
Julian and Visualizations
experiences in isolation. There may also be affinities with a medieval practice of "visualizations" during meditation. It has been suggested that in Julian's case her vivid, almost photographic portrayal of the details of Jesus Christ's bleeding head and the drying of his body may have been influenced by the rich religious artistic culture of Norwich and, more broadly, by the important school of medieval East Anglian art.12 However, as I will describe in more detail in a moment, Julian's visualizations may also relate to the growing practice, not least among lay people, of meditating imaginatively on scenes from the gospel, especially the Passion.
This is not to deny that such forms of visual meditation, whether inspired by art or by scripture, did not or could not lead the person praying on to a spiritual level beyond mere formulae or a self‐conscious meditative process.
To reflect specifically on Passion meditation, as Grace Jantzen notes in her chapter on Julian's prayers there was shift in late medieval devotion from a focus on the image of Christ in majesty to God sending the Son to identify with humankind. In contrast to the kingship of the glorified
Christ, the growing emphasis on the humanity of Jesus Christ was especially related to his suffering for us. In parallel to this there was a growth of affectivity in meditation which was particularly related to the increasing laicization of spirituality.13 Taken together, a growing practice of focusing meditation on the suffering of Jesus sought to enable the one praying to come to identify with this suffering. This echoes Julian's description of her three youthful desires "by the gift of God" (Long Text, chapter 2) expressed in prayer. All of these, in different ways, reflect a wish to identify with the suffering Jesus. First there was Julian's desire for a "bodily sight" so that she could share in a deeper knowledge of the Passion in parallel with our Lady and "all his true lovers." Then there was a bodily sickness. While Julian does not explicitly relate this desire for a deadly sickness to Jesus's suffering her words "if it be your will that I have it" may echo Jesus's prayer to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane as expressed in the Gospel of Matthew 26, 39: "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want." Equally the desire for this to happen when she was 30 years old may not be incidental. Given Julian's overall desire to identify with the humanity of Jesus
Christ this could relate to the statement in the Gospel of Luke (3, 23) that Jesus's ministry began when "he was about thirty years old." Finally, there was a desire to receive what she refers to as explicitly "three wounds" in her life: true contrition, loving compassion, and longing for God.
In the growing medieval tradition of meditating on Christ's life, including the Passion, people were encouraged to enter imaginatively into gospel scenes as people who were present and active, perhaps as themselves or by identifying with one of the people in the scripture narrative. To relive
Prayer: A Journey of Desire
the gospel scene in this way was not simply a question of artificially re‐enacting precisely what the gospel scene portrayed. Rather, instead it might well be an experience of being drawn spiritually into a uniquely personal narrative and dynamic. In the case of Julian, what she "sees" in relation to Christ's Passion is very selective. It is not chronological nor does it embrace all the events and elements in the scriptural narrative.
Her concentrated focus is personal which is very much in the tradition of visual meditation.
Barry Windeatt suggests that this approach to visual meditation was regarded as especially appropriate for beginners in meditation, and especially for women. He draws attention to the Horologium Sapientiae of the fourteenth‐century Rhineland Dominican Henry Suso, part of which was available in translation in England. Suso suggested that frequently visualizing the Passion moves the ignorant to becoming learned and eventually makes spiritual amateurs into teachers.14 Suso's remarks underline that imaginative or visual meditation on the gospels was not a purely emotional or devotional exercise. It points towards an experience of spiritual deepening and transformation. It was not necessarily the case that visual meditation was essentially for beginners. However, it was certainly a way in which an increasingly spiritually minded laity was able to draw upon the longer monastic tradition of scriptural meditation known as lectio divina.
The origins of the tradition of lectio lie in early Egyptian desert monasticism where famous fifth‐century collections of "sayings" from monastic teachers (known as the Apophthegmata Patrum) frequently mention meditating or ruminating upon scripture. The practice was later systematized in a twelfth‐century treatise, Ladder of the Monks, by the Carthusian monk Guigo II. This framework was described in terms of four "stages": lectio (reading and quietly pronouncing a scripture text), meditatio (memorizing, repetition of words or phrases or other ways of digesting the scripture so that it was retained in the heart), oratio (literally "prayer" but understood as a desire‐filled offering of oneself to God), and finally contemplatio. In later approaches, such as that of Guigo II, contemplatio designated an elevated spiritual state or immediacy of presence to God. In this context, the use of visualization or imagination was linked to meditatio, the second element of lectio.
Interestingly, as we have already seen, in Julian's text the overall process of "prayer" leads from a foundation of longing to beseeching (both asking and seeking) and then to "beholding."15
This form of imaginative gospel meditation (or "contemplation" in the language of Ignatius Loyola) became particularly well known via the sixteenth‐century Ignatian Spiritual Exercises which ensured its survival in spiritual practices up to the contemporary era. However, it is important