If there is a single voice in the West which consistently develops a theology of originary peace, matching the leanings of Maximus and Origen, it must be Julian of Norwich. She develops a theology focused on the personal revelation of the love of Jesus Christ, dispelling any notion of unworthiness, with realization of the self with and in divine identity, very much on the order of theosis or apocatastasis. In the midst of the plague and death of her own family and some 50,000 citizens surrounding her, she feels the “woe” or heaviness of life, and then the realization of being secure in the love and goodness of God. Her feelings of personal brokenness and despair, and then entry into joy and love, in a deeply personal experience, describes the universal arc. She sees the typical theological focus on guilt, wrath, and law, as something of a necessary anthropomorphism, limiting redemption and God to negative terms characterizing human experience, and she presumes God is the unmoved, loving agent drawing humankind into divine identity.
Rowan Williams refers to her work as an “anti-theology” in that she turns the usual understanding upside-down. Rather than agonizing over God’s satisfaction, she turns from “squaring the circle” of how “God has to ‘do justice’ to his own justice.”[1] The point is not that God must pay himself a fair price. “Anger happens in us; it is that atmosphere of bitter conflict and fear which holds us away from peace, being at one with ourselves, living in atonement.”[2] We are the one’s in need of satisfaction. As God says to her, “If thou art apaide, I am apaide.”[3] God would bring us fully alive, into the satisfaction of his love – believing that we are loved – by pouring his life into us. “To be ‘apaide’ in Julian’s theological world is to discover that we cannot pull apart human need and divine self-enactment and make them struggle for resolution.”[4]
Julian explains that there are two levels of judgement, the first in which “I must necessarily know myself a sinner. And by the same judgment I understood that sinners sometimes deserve blame and wrath,” but these judgments reside in myself, not God.[5] Movement beyond guilt and wrath, into the second level, is the deeper working of grace (potentially “filled with endless joy and bliss”).[6] This entails a necessary and eternal progression: “And therefore this belongs to our properties, both by nature and by grace to long and desire with all our powers to know ourselves, in which full knowledge we shall truly and clearly know our God in the fulness of endless joy.”[7] The common teaching, perhaps necessary, misses the deeper focus: “I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be. Because he is God, he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his power, his wisdom, his charity and his unity do not allow him to be angry.”[8]
While we are in process, still our nature is complete and perfect in oneness with God, which she treats as an accomplished reality. “I saw that our nature is in God whole.”[9] In Christ, God has taken on our nature and shared his nature with us. “God is knit to our nature that is the lower part, in our flesh-taking: and thus in Christ our two natures are oned.”[10] Reality in Christ is without beginning but is integral to God’s plan and identity: “I understand in our Lord’s signifying, where the blessed Soul of Christ is, there is the Substance of all the souls that shall be saved by Christ.” So that “I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God.”[11] Christ, for Julian, is so tied to humanity that “When Adam fell, God’s Son fell,” as God’s Son cannot be separated from Adam. Christ’s incarnation insures no ultimate separation between fallen humanity and God: “for the Son to be the Son is for the Son to be the one who has always been the lover and companion of Adam’s race.”[12] God is who he always was and is, and to pull this apart is an unsolvable conundrum.
She recasts the usual theological dilemma, characterizing it as an overcoming of refusal of God’s love. Like a neurotic who enjoys his sickness, imagining this is the kernel of who he is, our tendency is to ward off divine love. We would have God change, so as to accept us, as if it is God who is out of sorts. Julian shows, the “‘problems’ can be resolved only by the erosion of my anger, my refusal of life.”[13] Sin is precisely this refusal of life, and is thus always an embrace of death. “And thus we are dead for the time from the very sight of our blissful life.”[14] But this deadness does not change the truth of God. “But in all this I saw soothfastly that we be not dead in the sight of God, nor He passeth never from us.”[15]
There is a reciprocity involving a sort of divine necessity: “But He shall never have His full bliss in us till we have our full bliss in Him, verily seeing His fair Blissful Cheer.”[16] We are working out in nature what is fulfilled in God’s grace, but God is the undergirding reality. We may be confused about who God is and who we are, but God is not. We are coming to know ourselves and God, in the assurance, as Paul says, that he knows us (Gal 4:9). God’s knowledge, and not our own, is the sustaining center of who and what we are. The unreality of sin does not alter God, and he is the reality we are being drawn into. “Thus I saw how sin is deadly for a short time in the blessed creatures of endless life.”[17] It is just a matter of coming to see rightly: “Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love.”[18]
God is unchangingly himself, acting in his love to bring us out of our disasters into his peace. Redemption is not balancing the legal books, but is “the sheer outworking of who or what God is.”[19] God in Christ is tied to humanity so that the journey of Adam (of humankind), is God’s journey in Christ. It is not as if God started at some point to love mankind, this love is an eternal fact about us and God. Likewise, there is no anger for God to forgive as “between God and our soul there is neither wrath nor forgiveness in his sight. For our soul is so wholly united to God, through his own goodness, that between God and our soul nothing can interpose.”[20]
Anger, in her description, in both its source and object is purely human, and falls short of God’s unmoving love. Self-destructive anger obscures God and self, and misses the deeper identification of the soul with God’s unchangeable goodness. She acknowledges that this is not the common teaching of the church, and humbly submits to this teaching, but she also offers a counter-explanation. Man in his weakness and fallibility loses sight of God, “for if he saw God continually, he would have no harmful feelings nor any kind of prompting, no sorrowing which is conducive to sin.”[21] There may be the necessity for sorrow, wrath, and forgiveness, as if these are movements in God, but this describes the changeableness of humans, fallibility and sin, and not the fulness of divine peace and love. “For we through sin and wretchedness have in us a wrath and a constant opposition to peace and to love.”[22]
Sebastian Moore, in the spirit of Julian, describes this “refusal” to enter completely into the fulness of life, as the result of a deep attachment to the false self. It is not simply refusal of “obedience to God” but an unwillingness to relinquish attachment to death. “Some unbearable personhood, identity, freedom, whose demands beat on our comfortable anonymity and choice of death. Further, something that at root we are, a self that is ours yet persistently ignored in favor of the readily satisfiable needs of the ego.”[23] Moore though, like Julian, hits upon the necessity of a deeper identity with Christ: “What if Jesus were the representative, the symbol, the embodiment, of this dreaded yet desired self of each of us, this destiny of being human, the unbearable identity and freedom (freedom and identity being really the same thing)?”[24] The crucifixion of Jesus is not, at its deepest level, concerned with conflict involving Caiaphas and Pilate but it concerns “man’s refusal of his true self.”[25] The crucifixion is at once the ultimate evil and its defeat: the evil of destruction not just of a general “true” humanity, but of the individual’s true self. But recognition of this self-destruction in Christ is also the resolution of this evil. This recognition is already “forgiveness.” Evil is transformed into a specific and personal sin and sin transforms into grace. “And through this conversion the believer finds as his own that identity which first he rejected and crucified.”[26]
Our life is with God in Christ, and where we fall short, we turn to death. As Julian describes it, where we fall we die, and “we must necessarily die inasmuch as we fail to see and feel God, who is our life.”[27] We may pass from doing the nailing to being nailed to the cross, from being the crucifier to being the crucified. The life and self, invested in crucifying, is in reality the destruction of life and self. The passage is at first the refusal of our own death, the projection of it on another, and then the relinquishing of this false sense of self. The passage beyond the ego, the death of self, is the only means of “return” to the Father.
God accepts our failings and works with them to transform us: “grace transforms our dreadful failing into plentiful and endless solace; and grace transforms our shameful falling into high and honourable rising; and grace transforms our sorrowful dying into holy, blessed life.”[28] Grace is transforming who and what we are, turning our earthly shame and sorrow into heavenly honour and bliss, and our present sufferings into endless rejoicing. She concludes: “And when I saw all this, I was forced to agree that the mercy of God and his forgiveness abate and dispel our wrath.”[29] Not God’s wrath but our wrath is dispelled and abated. Likewise, God cannot forgive because he cannot be angry. “For this was revealed, that our life is all founded and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live.”[30] God’s love is the ground and reality of life and it is into his life that we are being endlessly united.
Seeing ourselves as crucifiers, as filled with wrath, and recognizing this in the cross, gives rise to the recognition and possibility of God’s love. The recognition of evil in the crucified, awakens to love. We can see “evil’s visible effect. And this is the manifestation of God’s love: that extraordinary love that highlights our evil in order to leave us in no doubt that it is accepted.”[31] Moore describes this as “the deepest logic of the psyche, love is experienced in the vision of the Crucified.”[32] The killing of Christ and the exposure of the ultimate limits of human evil and possibility open directly onto new life.
Both Julian and Moore speak of the absolute ground, the penetrating force of God’s love. All human movement is in this love, leading to his peace. We may be victims of a temporary blindness but this unreality cannot compete with the reality of “God’s merciful protection.” God accepts us at our worst, and he exposes and accepts this worst in us, and this is the point of the cross. The defeat of this evil though, goes beyond our rational grasp, God making Christ sin exposes the depth of evil and reaches us in our sin. God comes to us in Christ, beyond our own capacities for self-acceptance, to make us his. “It is the mystery of God who comes upon us and loves us beyond the limits of our ego-organized potential.”[33]
We cease being self-organized or egocentric, and become Christocentric. In the words of Julian, “So I saw that God is our true peace; and he is our safe protector when we ourselves are in disquiet, and he constantly works to bring us into endless peace. And so when by the operation of mercy and grace we are made meek and mild, then we are wholly safe. Suddenly the soul is united to God, when she is truly pacified in herself, for in him is found no wrath.”[34] As Moore puts it, “I acquire sufficient selfhood to be identified with the crucified. This is the transition from man who ‘crucifies the Lord of Glory’ to man who is ‘nailed to the cross with Christ.’ It is the same man, changing only through self-discovery in Christ.”[35]
Williams sums up Julian as “saying that grace is God’s ‘no’ to our ‘no’: our persistent leaning towards nothingness, to the refusal of the act that is our very being, [this] is what is annihilated by openness.to God.”[36] Our “no” is annihilated, but this does not cancel creation, but is God’s crucifixion of evil. As Moore puts it, “In the ultimate order the ultimate sin, of crucifying the Just One, reverses itself, the victim giving life to the crucifiers.”[37] Evil takes on the only “being” possible in the ultimate effect, but in this form, it is defeated and annihilated. The effect of sin in the crucified is identical with its defeat and healing.[38] Our evil is made explicit in its annihilation. “When we say ‘no’, there is an abiding ‘no’ to this ‘no’ at the heart, of what we are.”[39] Death’s power and its denial of life and love are defeated in the cross. “Yet it is at the same time the reminder that God cannot be put to death and that the passion of Christ also declares the unchanging presence, of God in the centre of our being.”[40]
Julian is a counter-voice to the Augustinian tradition by which she was surrounded. She begins her theology where most theology leaves off, by focusing on the absolute unchanging love of God and works out all the movements of redemption through the logic of this love. Total identification with Christ opens a level of grace and love, which mark Julian’s unique perspective.
[1] Rowan Williams, Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 171.
[2] Ibid, 174.
[3] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library,2002) The Thirty Third Chapter.
[4] Williams, 173.
[5] Julian, The Forty-Fifth Chapter.
[6] Ibid.
[7] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.
[8] Ibid.
[9] The Fifty Seventh Chapter.
[10] Ibid
[11] The Fifty Fourth Chapter.
[12] Williams, 176.
[13] Williams, 177.
[14] The Seventy Second Chapter.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Forty-Fourth Chapter
[19] Williams, 175.
[20] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.
[21] The Forty-Seventh Chapter.
[22] The Forty-Eighth Chapter.
[23] Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus is No Stranger (New York: Paulist Press, 1977) X.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid, XI.
[27] Julian, The Forty-Eighth Chapter.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.
[31] Moore, 2-3.
[32] Ibid, 3
[33] Ibid, 6.
[34] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.
[35] Moore, 7.
[36] Williams, 179.
[37] Moore, 8.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Williams, 179-180.
[40] Williams, 183.