DAME JULIAN: Julian of Norwich - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"For I saw no wrath except on man's side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love."

Julian of Norwich - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: When she was 30 and living at home, Julian suffered from a severe illness. Whilst apparently on her deathbed, Julian had a series of intense visions of Jesus Christ, which ended by the time she recovered from her illness on 13 May 1373.^[6] Julian wrote about her visions immediately after they had happened (although the text may not have been finished for some years), in a version of the Revelations of Divine Love now known as the Short Text; this narrative of 25 chapters is about 11,000 words long.^[7] It is believed to be the earliest surviving book written in the English language by a woman.^[8]

Twenty to thirty years later, perhaps in the early 1390s, Julian began to write a theological exploration of the meaning of the visions, known as The Long Text, which consists of 86 chapters and about 63,500 words.^[9] This work seems to have gone through many revisions before it was finished, perhaps in the first or even second decade of the fifteenth century.^[7]

Although Julian's views were not typical, the authorities might not have challenged her theology because of her status as an anchoress.

In Christianity, an anchoress is a woman who chooses to withdraw from the world to live a solitary life of prayer and mortification. Julian of Norwich was an anchoress whose writings tell of her life and spiritual journey. The word anchoress comes from the Greek “anachoreo” meaning to withdraw.

A lack of references to her work during her own time may indicate that the religious authorities did not count her worthy of refuting, since she was a woman. Her theology was unique in three aspects: her view of sin; her belief that God is all-loving and without wrath; and her view of Christ as mother.[20]

Julian believed that sin was necessary because it brings someone to self-knowledge, which leads to acceptance of the role of God in their life.[22] She taught that humans sin because they are ignorant or naive, and not because they are evil, the reason commonly given by the mediaeval church to explain sin.[23] Julian believed that to learn we must fail, and to fail we must sin. She also believed that the pain caused by sin is an earthly reminder of the pain of the passion of Christ and that as people suffer as Christ did they will become closer to him by their experiences.

Julian saw no wrath in God. She believed wrath existed in humans, but that God forgives us for this. She wrote, "For I saw no wrath except on man's side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love." Julian believed that it was inaccurate to speak of God's granting forgiveness for sins, because forgiving would mean that committing the sin was wrong. She preached that sin should be seen as a part of the learning process of life, not a malice that needed forgiveness. She wrote that God sees us as perfect and waits for the day when human souls mature so that evil and sin will no longer hinder us.

Julian's belief in God as mother was controversial. According to Julian, God is both our mother and our father. As Caroline Walker Bynum showed, this idea was also developed by Bernard of Clairvaux and others from the 12th century onward.^[26] Some scholars think this is a metaphor rather than a literal belief or dogma. For example, in her fourteenth revelation, Julian writes of the Trinity in domestic terms, comparing Jesus to a mother who is wise, loving and merciful. F. Beer asserted that Julian believed that the maternal aspect of Christ was literal and not metaphoric: Christ is not like a mother, he is literally the mother.^[27] Julian believed that the mother's role was the truest of all jobs on earth. She emphasised this by explaining how the bond between mother and child is the only earthly relationship that comes close to the relationship a person can have with Jesus.^[28] She also connected God with motherhood in terms of "the foundation of our nature's creation", "the taking of our nature, where the motherhood of grace begins" and "the motherhood at work". She wrote metaphorically of Jesus in connection with conception, nursing, labour and upbringing, but saw him as our brother as well.

The 20th-century poet T.S. Eliot incorporated the saying that "…All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well", as well as Julian's "the ground of our beseeching" from the 14th Revelation, into Little Gidding, the fourth of his Four Quartets:

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us—a symbol:

A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

By the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseeching.