SOURCE: "'Cry out and write': Hysticism and the Struggle for Authority" in Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 157-92.

[In the following excerpt, Jantzen charts the "reintegration" of body and spirit performed in Julian's revelations—a feature that Jantzen claims breaks with Christian tradition and arises from Julian's experiences as a woman.]

… As the Middle Ages waned, increasing numbers of women learned to read and write, in the vernacular if not in Latin. How Julian of Norwich was educated it is impossible to say. She was born in 1342, probably somewhere in East Anglia or the Midlands. Virtually everything that is known about her comes from her writings. She wrote two accounts of the same set of visions, twenty years apart, the second being much longer than the first. By comparing the two texts, it is possible to see how Julian developed in theological understanding and her spiritual teaching (Jantzen [Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian] 1987). We will look again at her visions and her changing perception of herself as a woman in the next chapter. Here, I wish to focus on her theological and spiritual integration, which takes up much that was already present in medieval spirituality but develop it in a unique way.

From the outset, Julian's writing was intended for the comfort and encouragement of her 'even Christians' and for their spiritual assistance. Like Eckhart, she addressed herself not only to clerics or male or female religious, but also to a lay readership; but whereas in his case we have not only the sermons addressed to a lay audience but also more scholarly works, all we have from Julian are the two versions of her book. Furthermore, we would look as fruitlessly to Julian as to Hadewijch [of Antwerp, early thirteenth century] for any systematic exposition of a spiritual path, or steps in spiritual progress: there are none of the 'ladders of contemplation' or 'steps of ascent' which are frequent in male writing. Like other women writers, Julian chose to convey her spiritual teachings by recounting her own spiritual experiences and the insights based on them, rather than by any systematic treatisein spiritual theology.

In some ways, Julian offers a contrast to Hadewijch. Her writings breathe serenity and tranquillity; she speaks of peace and rest in God, not of frenzied desire or ecstatic madness. There is very little erotic imagery in her writings, though she speaks much of the love of God, of God who is 'all love'. Although like Hadewijch she is influenced by the courtly love tradition, Julian speaks of God as 'her courteous Lord', not as her 'Lady Love'; and she never characterises herself as a knight panting after Love and doing great exploits for her sake. None of Julian's writing is presented as poetry. Nevertheless, both Hadewijch and Julian, though very different in context, genre, style and temperament, show similarities to one another and differences from male mystical writers.

The most significant of these is that both Julian and Hadewijch emphasise the body, the physical and sensual and material; and for both of them this bodily reality is integrated into their spirituality in a way which is not true for either the speculative or the affective tradition of male spirituality. Julian's spirituality depends upon a well thought-out anthropology, which takes its starting-point from creation. Julian makes a point of stressing that 'we are double by God's creating, that is to say substantial and sensual' [Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh] (1978: 294). This might be taken to signal a division between body and soul, as it would in many medieval writers; but in Julian that is not the case. Sensuality in Julian does involve bodiliness, but it also involves consciousness, the life of the senses and the mind: we are made sensual, she says, 'when our soul is breathed into our body' (286), and Jesus, in sharing our humanity, shares our sensuality. Our substance, on the other hand, is for Julian the essential part of ourselves, which she holds is directly united with God at all times, whether we are aware of it or not. There is a strong parallel here with Eckhart, who also held that the essential self was always connected with God. But whereas Eckhart defined that essential self in terms of the (male) higher intellect, Julian never does so. What she does instead is, when seen against the background of Eckhart's speculative mysticism, nothing short of astonishing.

Julian does not think of God as a remote deity, but, again similar to Eckhart, she thinks of God as the substance or essence of everything that exists. This is particularly true of ourselves. She says,

It is a great understanding to see and to know inwardly that our soul, which is created, dwells in God in substance, of which substance, through God, we are what we are. And I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and stillmy understanding accepted that our substance is in God, that is to say that God is God, and our substance is as creature in God. (285)

She is very near, here, to Eckhart's claims, but seems to be distancing herself from any interpretation of monism, for which he was suspect. But whereas in content her position is similar, it is focused much less abstractly than Eckhart's discussion of God as esse or being, and always interwoven with her understanding of human nature.

Julian goes on to say that it is substance and sensuality which form human 'doubleness': the substance is continually united with God, while the sensuality is the locus of independence. Julian elaborates that theme of doubleness in her concept of two wills:

For in every soul which will be saved there is a godly will which never assents to sin and never will. Just as there is an animal will in the lower part which cannot do any good, so there is a godly will in the higher part, which is so good that it cannot ever will any evil, but always good. (241)

The 'godly will' can be seen as a parallel to Eckhart's apex of the soul, always united with God; but whereas he placed that apex in the intellect, for Julian it is centred in the will. This 'godly will' is a part or aspect of our substance, and it can will only what God wills. The 'animal will' which is incapable of willing what is good is ari aspect of our sensuality in its fallen state. It is not to be equated with sensuality as such, and certainly not with physicality, but rather with that tendency toward evil which Julian believed was part of the sinful condition of humanity inherited from Adam.

This tendency to sin is characterised by Julian not so much as a falling away from God as a fragmentation of the human person, a split between the substance and the sensuality, so that whereas the substance wills only what is good, the sensuality is constantly lapsing into evil. 'And so in our substance we are full and in our sensuality we are lacking', she says. And then she completely subverts both the speculative tradition of Eckhart and the affective tradition of Bernard. Instead of proffering advice or exhortations about how to leave the sensuality behind and progress upwards toward the realm of spirit or substance where only the good is willed, she says, hardly pausing for breath,

and this lack God will restore and fill by the operation of mercy and grace, plentifully flowing into us from his own natural goodness. (291)

Rather than practising ascetical techniques which will free the higher self, the godly will from the sensuality, Julian looksfor a reintegration of that fragmented sensuality into the substance. Spirituality does not mean leaving part of the self behind, but bringing the whole of the self, sensuality included, into the unity of the love of God in which she believes we are enfolded. It is a breath-taking reversal of Eckhart.

To accomplish the reversal, she looks to Christ, whom she sees as the remedy of the fragmentation between sensuality and substance. In taking flesh, Jesus shared human sensuality, but in such a way that, in him, it was not in conflict with substance. Put another way, Jesus' godly will and his animal will were united in constantly willing the good. This reunification of substance and sensuality in Christ is, according to Julian, the remedy for the split which we experience, as well as the prototype for our reunification and healing. She articulates the doctrine of the two natures of Christ in traditional terms of the death of Christ for human salvation:

And because of the glorious union which was thus made by God between the soul and the body, mankind had necessarily to be restored from a double death, which restoration could never be until the time when the second person of the Trinity had taken the lower part of human nature, whose highest part was united to him in its first creation. And these two parts were in Christ, the higher and the lower, which are only one soul. The higher part was always at peace with God in full joy and peace. The lower part, which is sensuality, suffered for the salvation of mankind. (287)

Traditional as this might be thus far, Julian then pushes it in the very untraditional direction of affirming that all people have two natures, just as Christ did, and that it is precisely because of this that the incarnation is effectual for human salvation.

And so in Christ our two natures are united, for the Trinity is comprehended in Christ, in whom our higher part is founded and rooted; and our lower part the second person has taken … For in the same time that God had joined himself to our body in the maiden's womb, he took our soul, which is sensual, and in taking it, having enclosed us all in himself, he united it to our substance. In this union he was perfect man, for Christ, having joined in himself every man who will be saved, is perfect man. (291)

Christ reunites in himself divine substance and human sensuality, and thereby effects the healing of human fragmentation. All that the person was created to be, including the body and its sensuality, is taken up into the full spiritual life made possible by the incarnation.

Accordingly, we find in Julian's writings no comment about ascetical practices, nothing about chastity, no cautions about sexuality or any other form of bodily need or desire. Instead, she speaks of bodily functions in a completely natural way as an illustration of the extent of divine love:

A man walks upright, and the food in his body is shut in as if in a well-made purse. When the time of his necessity comes, the purse is opened and then shut again, in most seemly fashion. And it is God who does this, as it is shown when he says that he comes down to us in our humblest needs. For he does not despise what he has made, nor does he disdain to serve us in the simplest natural functions of our body, for love of the son which he created in his own likeness. For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the trunk, so are we, soul and body, clad and enclosed in the goodness of God. (186)

The positive valuation of the body and sensuality means that, rather than being left behind or 'mortified' in spiritual progress, the body is cherished and enfolded in the love of God, and reintegrated in a spiritual whole-making. It is a vastly different perspective from the male traditions we have considered.

Julian's account of spiritual progress is directly related to this. She says that until our substance and sensuality are reunited and we are whole again, we are 'moaning and mourning', distressed at our brokenness. But how and when will they be reunited? There are three answers to this. The first is that it has happened already; 'in Christ our two natures are united', and are united because of his incarnation. The second is that it will not happen until heaven. Only then will the split within ourselves be fully healed. The third is that it can be going on gradually throughout our lives, largely by a process of our recognising that in Christ the reintegration has already taken place, and living in that growing realisation. Julian's spirituality involves this deepening awareness, gradually increasing in knowledge of God and of our own soul. In some ways this is like Eckhart, who also encourages us to 'become what we are'. Yet in Julian, rather than this involving a detachment from (female) sensuality and being in tune with the (male) higher reason, it requires an increasing integration of the sensuality and the substance, the godly will. As she puts it,

And I saw very certainly that we must necessarily be in longing and in penance until the time when we are led so deeply into God that we verily and truly know our own soul … For until the time that it is in its full powers, we cannot be all holy; and that is when our sensuality by the power of Christ's Passion can be brought up into the substance … (289)

Sensuality is not a barrier or a distraction from spirituality but rather is crucially involved in it.

Like Eckhart, therefore, Julian is full of the importance of self-knowledge, but her emphasis is much more homely: she stresses that we come to the recognition that we are good and beautiful and precious to God, learning to take delight in ourselves as Julian is sure that God takes delight in us.

For I saw in the same revelation that if the blessed Trinity could have created man's soul any better, any fairer, any nobler than it was created, the Trinity would not have been fully pleased with the creation of man's soul. But because it made man's soul as beautiful, as good, as precious a creature as it could make, therefore the blessed Trinity is fully pleased without end in the creation of man's soul. And it wants our hearts to be powerfully lifted above the depths of the earth and all empty sorrows, and to rejoice in it. (314)

Here is something quite different from what we find in the male traditions. Eckhart also stressed positive self-knowledge, but it was, as we have seen, knowledge of the higher intellect as the god-like apex of the soul. The affective tradition, on the other hand, would emphasise the importance of knowing oneself, not to recognise god-likeness, but to become contrite for one's sinfulness and unworthiness before God: in Bernard's The Steps of Humility, for instance, self-knowledge was to lead to penitence and humility. Julian does not deny the need for penitence, but her emphasis falls differently: recognising our beauty and worth will be a source of joy for us just as it is for the Trinity itself. She says that it is of great profit to us to contemplate this, because contemplation of the Trinity who delights in us 'makes the soul which so contemplates like to him who is contemplated, and unites it in rest and peace' (314). Here once again is the old Platonic theme that the knower becomes like what it knows; but it is turned to a purpose that is very much Julian's own: in taking pleasure in God who takes pleasure in us, we learn to take pleasure in ourselves.

Julian never mentions gender in this discussion. But if her reversal of the traditional theme of self-knowledge is striking, her application of it to herself as a woman, and by implication to other women, is nothing short of audacious. Women, after all, were exhorted in the Bible and throughout patristic and medieval writing to 'learn humility, in all subjection', not to learn to delight in themselves. Since it was through Eve that sin had entered into the world, and since women were still held to be the locus of temptation, especially sexual temptation, the path to holiness for women would be a path of penitence, humility, and self-renunciation. Self-knowledge would be knowledge of oneself as related to Eve, the source of temptation and a snare to men.

Julian does talk about contrition and humility, but never with the overtones of the above paragraph. She is troubled about why God permitted sin; but in all her anxious questioning about sin's nature and origin, she never once links it to women. Contrition is for sin actually committed, and not for a vague sinfulness connected with the very fact of being an embodied, sexual creature, let alone being female. Humility has to do with accepting and receiving the overwhelming love and delight of God in us, not with being ashamed of who and what we are. And surely it must be highly significant that Julian never mentions chastity or virginity. Though she herself, as an anchoress, had almost certainly taken the monastic vow of chastity, it is never raised as an issue in her book, never suggested as part of spiritual progress, in fact, never mentioned at all. In an era when it was taken as a commonplace that sexuality, especially female sexuality, was a hindrance to spiritual progress, and virginity held up to be the ideal, Julian's silence is eloquent.

Coupled with this, Julian offers other pieces of spiritual instruction unusual for women of any age and doubly unusual for her own. One of the most central of these was the admonition not to be unduly distressed by sin and failure. Julian recounts that in one of her visions, 'God brought it to mind that I should sin.' But the reason for which she was reminded of this was not to make her ashamed or fearful, but rather to reassure her of God's protection and mercy whatever happened, so that when she did sin she would not fall into despair (241). Julian agonises about sin, calling it 'the sharpest scourge with which any chosen soul can be struck, which scourge belabours man or woman', until they feel that they are 'not fit for anything but as it were to sink into hell' (244). But she develops the insight that sin and wrongdoing, though serious, are the very things which teach us most about sensitivity and compassion for ourselves and one another.

In fact, Julian develops an audacious comparison between our sins and the wounds that were inflicted on Jesus at his crucifixion. According to scripture and tradition, those wounds of Jesus, the nail prints in his hands and feet and side, became the badges of honour of the risen Christ: just so, too, the wounds of our sins will be turned into honours, so that it will be far better for us than if we had never sinned at all.

For [God] regards sin as sorrow and pains for his lovers, to whom for love he assigns no blame. The reward which we shall receive will not be small, but it will be great, glorious and honourable. And so all our shame will be turned into honour and joy. For our courteous Lord does not want his servants to despair because they fall often and grievously; for our falling does not hinder him in loving us. (245)

Again, there is no indication in Julian that this discussion is genered, and we can only speculate about whether she might have had women particularly in mind. Whatever the case, her words carry a weight for women quite different from the shame and blame that women had been taught to assume. According to Julian, disproportionate shame or guilt is not the response God desires (even if there were those in the ecclesiastical structures who might have found it gratifying that women should bear such a weight). Although she was made to understand 'that we cannot in this life keep ourselves completely free from sin', nevertheless the remedy for that sin has already been provided.

And if we through our blindness and our wretchedness at any time fall, then let us quickly rise, knowing the sweet touch of grace, and willingly amend ourselves according to the teaching of Holy Church, as may fit the grievousness of the sin, and go on our way with God in love, and neither on the one side fall too low, inclining to despair, nor on the other side be too reckless, as though we did not care; but let us meekly recognise our weakness, knowing that we cannot stand for the twinkling of an eye except with the protection of grace, and let us reverently cling to God, trusting only in him. (281)

Thus we can see that in Julian's terms, spiritual progress involves self-knowledge, but that self-knowledge is construed differently than in the other strands of the tradition we have looked at. For her, self-knowledge also means an increasing sense of self-worth, but not one built only upon increasing identification with rationality, but rather with a realism that accepts not only bodiliness but also sinfulness without being crushed by guilt. Her words were written for all her 'even Christians', men as well as women; but they must have had a special resonance for women, whose sinfulness and shame was so often highlighted by ecclesiastical preaching and practice and whose self-worth was so regularly undermined. She sums up her encouraging message in a metaphor of knitting, a figure of speech which beautifully conveys her meaning:

And just as we were to be without end, so we were treasured and hidden in God, known and loved from without beginning. Therefore he wants us to know that the noblest thing which he ever made is mankind, and the fullest substance and the highest power is the blessed soul of Christ. And furthermore, he wants us to know that this beloved soul was preciously knitted to him in its making, by a knot so subtle and so mighty that it united us in God. In this uniting it is made endlessly holy. Furthermore, he wants us to know that all the souls which will be saved in heaven without end are knit in this knot, and united in this union, and made holy in this holiness. (284)

Both Hadewijch and Julian, different as they are in temperament, context and style, offer a spirituality or mysticism of integration which contrasts considerably with their male counterparts. Unlike the speculative tradition, they did not develop a spirituality centring on the mind; and unlike the male affective tradition, they did not use spiritual love as an alternative to bodily love, or see the physical as something to be overcome. Although both of them respected reason, and were no advocates of a mysticism of ignorance, they placed emphasis on love and on the will, which must be united in the growth of spiritual wholeness, based in the flesh, not in its suppression. Hadewijch used passionate and erotic language more than Julian did, but Julian was at least as emphatic about the body and its integration in spirituality. Neither woman saw spiritual development in terms of steps or stages, or used metaphors of ladders or staircases as did many male writers. Their construction of mysticism, their understanding of what spirituality is, was therefore quite different from that of their male counterparts in the tradition of western spirituality. It was, furthermore, an understanding which allowed a good deal of scope for visionary experience, on which female authority could be based; and as we shall see in the next chapter, this became a threat to male dominance in the social construction of mysticism which could not be allowed to go unchecked.

The struggle for power and authority in deciding who should count as a mystic, and the issues of gender within that struggle, are largely ignored by contemporary philosophers of religion, who frequently behave as if there is a single sort of phenomenon known as 'mystical experience' which is available for philosophical scrutiny. As is becoming evident, however, the understanding of the mystical went through major shifts within the western tradition; and those shifts were not innocent. If contemporary philosophers of religion ignore these shifts, and work on the assumption of an 'essence' of mysticism, it is unsurprising if the net result produces more obfuscation than insight. Not only are the philosophical arguments built on dubious argumentation, they are based on dubious morality as well, because an uncritical acceptance of a gender-skewed understanding of mysticism is bound to perpetuate it.