Never Looking Away from the Cross
By Edwin Woodruff Tait
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In the flourishing late medieval town of Norwich, next to the parish church of St. Julian, there was (and still is, though the church has largely been rebuilt after being destroyed by German bombs in WWII) a small room built onto the main church building, known as an “anchorite’s cell.” There were a number of medieval churches with such “cells” attached. The anchorites, female or, somewhat less frequently, male, who lived in the cells had taken vows to spend their lives in solitude and prayer.
While they attempted to withdraw from the world, they lived in the heart of the community and thus often became centers of pilgrimage and sources of spiritual advice. The most famous of the late medieval anchorites, the woman who lived next to St. Julian’s church in Norwich, succeeded in abolishing her original identity so completely that we know her only as “Lady Julian of Norwich,” after the parish church to which her cell was attached. Yet “Julian” not only was a famous spiritual advisor in her own day, with people travelling miles to see her, but has come down to posterity as one of the greatest spiritual writers of the Middle Ages, or indeed of Christian history as a whole.
Her fame rests on a single book, existing in a longer and a shorter version: the Showings or Revelations of Divine Love. This book, written down by a male cleric, records a series of visions Julian received following a severe illness. Her visions, as so often in the late Middle Ages, focus on a graphic portrayal of the physical sufferings of Christ, which demonstrate God’s love. But what makes Julian’s book so remarkable is the vivid and radical way in which she draws out the implications of Jesus’ sacrificial love for the nature of God. At one point, tempted by a “friendly suggestion” in her heart to look up to God and away from the Cross that appears in her vision, she responds by saying to the crucified Jesus, “You are my heaven.”
Julian’s spirituality is radically Christocentric and Trinitarian—her entire understanding of God is reoriented around the love of the crucified Jesus. This is why she refers to Jesus as “mother,” a move that has naturally endeared her to modern feminists. (Like the other elements of her spirituality, this wasn’t entirely new—medieval mystics had referred to Jesus as mother quite often from the twelfth century on.) But for Julian this wasn’t a rejection of traditional masculine language—it was a dramatic way of highlighting the nurturing love of Jesus as central to the character of God.
Or, again, she has been understood as a universalist based on her repeated statement that her visions revealed “nothing about hell,” and her insistence that “all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” I am inclined to take at face value her insistence that, in fact, she does adhere to Church teaching on damnation (as on all other points). She clearly struggles with reconciling this teaching with her vision of the unconditional love of God. But then, so do I and many other Christians. The closest she comes to resolving this tension is her claim that God will “do a deed” at the end of time which will be unimpeded by human sin. Rather than providing a speculative eschatology, Julian trusts in the utter goodness of God. One of her most memorable metaphors, which sums up her spirituality (literally) in a nutshell, is the vision of the whole universe as “a little thing like a nut” held in the protecting and nurturing hand of God.
I first encountered Julian’s writings in a class on medieval mysticism I took in college. The Revelations of Divine Love have been one of the most powerful spiritual influences on me ever since. I find in Julian a rich, imaginative, and profoundly orthodox presentation of the heart of the Christian faith, unequaled by any writer outside Scripture. And I find her all the more compelling because she is so thoroughly medieval, so thoroughly of her time even as she transcends so radically the flaws and limitations of much medieval popular piety.
When modern “progressives” tell me that God is all love, they are saying what all their culture requires them to say if they are to be respectable believers at all. But when a medieval ascetic, shut up in a tiny cell attached to a stone church, has lurid visions of the discolored body of Christ on the Cross, and on the basis of those visions tell me that the self-giving, all-forgiving love of Jesus is the ultimate truth about the universe—then I dare to believe that it just might be true.
Edwin Woodruff Tait is consulting editor for Christian History.