SOURCE: "Contemplative and Radical: Julian Meets John Ball" in Julian: Woman of Our Day, edited by Robert Llewelyn, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, pp. 89-101.

[In the following essay Leech speculates on Julian's attitude toward the social upheaval of her day. He imagines her as the sympathetic supporter of peasants protesting the conditions of their lives.]

In 1973 a group of people gathered in Norwich, England, to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Julian's Revelations and to consider her relevance to the spiritual needs of the twentieth century. At one point in the discussions, a devout evangelical psychiatrist was reflecting on the pastoral value of the contemplative character. How wonderful it would be, he suggested, if the gifts and qualities of the great contemplatives could be brought out of the enclosure and put at the service of those ministering to deeply troubled persons. Suddenly, the room shook as an Anglo-Catholic theologian, known for his somewhat rigid opinions, brought down his fist upon the table. 'No', he announced. 'Julian must stay where she is—in her cell. That is where she belongs.'

No doubt his purpose was to preserve the integrity and authentic witness of the solitary and contemplative life against the possible threats from activism and direct pastoral concerns. In a highly activistic, workdominated culture (such as ours), in which people are defined by what they do rather than by who they are, the very existence of solitaries and hermits presents a fundamental test of our belief in the life of prayer. For judged in terms of function and efficiency, judged by the managerial professional model, the solitary is absurd. Something of the perplexity is caught in Phyllis McGinley's poem on St Simeon Stylites. The poem ends:

And why did Simeon sit like that,
Without a mantle,
Without a hat.
In a holy rage
For the world to see?
It puzzled the sage.
It puzzles me.
It puzzled many
A desert father,
And I think it puzzled the
Good Lord rather.¹

Why did Julian sit like that? One thing is clear. Her life of solitude was not a selfish, egocentric withdrawal, a flight of the alone to the alone, but a life of love, warmth and care towards her 'even-Christians'; a life of solidarity with Christ's passion which overflowed in compassion for humanity; a life nourished by aprofound optimism about humanity and the world. Like St Antony the first hermit, Julian would have insisted that her life and her death was with her neighbour, and that only those committed to the common life could risk the commitment to life in solitude. No one who is enclosed within the false self, the self-absorbed self, can be a true solitary. The Christian solitary lives and has meaning only within the context of the Christian solidarity, within the living organism of the body of Christ. Julian is part of the common life: that is where she belongs.

The fourteenth century in England was a period of great social upheaval and of intense interior striving, an age of militancy and of mysticism, of upheaval in soil and soul. Externally, it was a time of distress among agricultural labourers, of exploitation of the rural peasants and of the urban poor, of sickness, disease and social violence. It was the age of the Black Death and of the Peasants' Revolt. Among the peasants and others who rose up in 1381, there was a thirst for social justice and for equality, a desire to see the end of serfdom and bondage. While many commentators blamed the rising on those heretics and 'outside agitators' loosely lumped together as 'Lollards'—a term used in a similar way to the current use of the term 'Marxists'—historians such as Rodney Hilton suggest that the social radicalism of the period drew its impetus more from the orthodox Christian tradition and from patristic writers such as St Basil, St Ambrose and St John Chrysostom, whose writings had been rediscovered with enthusiasm.²

At the interior level, the fourteenth century marked the climax of a process which had begun several centuries earlier, often referred to as 'the feminization of language', the rebirth of an affective sensitized piety. There was a profound quest for the inner way, combined with a fundamental optimism about the universe, features which are clearly seen in the writings of Julian as of other mystics before her. The flowering of affective spirituality in the period after the twelfth century has been described by Caroline Bynum in her Jesus as Mother.

The affective piety of the high Middle Ages is based on an increasing sense of, first, humankind's creation in the image and likeness of God, and, second, the humanity of Christ as guarantee that what we are is inextricably joined with divinity. Creation and incarnation are stressed more than atonement and judgement.³

I will return to these two features in discussing Julian. Yet this deeply human, incarnational tradition was not the only manifestation of spiritual life, for the fourteenth century was also a time when gnosticism, millenarian cults, and a whole range of visionary, apocalyptic and what we would today call theosophical movements flourished within an age of accelerating confusion in both the inner and outer worlds.

This was the context within which Julian practised her life of solitude and contemplation. We know very little about the life of Julian apart from her revelations. However, we do know, from the writings of her contemporary Margery Kempe, that the talkative and tearful Margery visited the solitary Julian, and it is a reasonable guess that others did so too. The Christian tradition, in east and west, contains numerous examples, from the desert Fathers onwards, of solitaries who were spiritual guides to social activists and those in the thick of the world's struggles. So Jim Forest and the Berrigans gained strength and vision during their resistance to the Vietnam war from their friendship with the contemplative prophet Thomas Merton.⁴ So, we might conjecture, Julian, sensitive and compassionate soul that she was, could not have remained unaffected by the social upheavals taking place in East Anglia in the later years of the fourteenth century.

Now there was in East Anglia at the same time as Julian another Christian figure of whom we know little: a priest called John Ball. John Ball was one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 when the rural poor, industrial workers, and a significant number of the lower clergy revolted against the harsh taxation laws, and demanded the ending of serfdom—and, incidentally, of hierarchy within the Church and clergy. (They chopped off the head of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and his head can still be seen in the local church of Sudbury in Suffolk!) 'I have come not from heaven but from Essex', announced John Ball. Ball was a hedge priest, a sacerdos vagans, a wanderer, and it is therefore open to speculation that his journeyings in East Anglia might have led him beyond his home city of Colchester to Norwich, and to Julian's cell.

What might have happened had the contemplative of Norwich and the radical priest of Essex met? What would they have said to each other, these early representatives of contemplative solitude and liberation theology? What would have been the common ground between the mystic and the militant?

They would, first of all, have shared a belief in the closeness of God in the intimacy of prayer and of human comradeship. As Julian wrote: 'He is the ground, his is the substance, he is very essence of nature, and he is the true Father and the true Mother of natures' (ch. 62). God is closer to us, Julian explains, than we are to our own souls, for he is the ground in which our soul stands. Our human nature (she emphasizes, following the teaching of the Greek Fathers) was joined to God in its creation (ch. 57). God is our substance, and is in our sensuality also (ch. 56).

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 in the goodness of God, and enclosed, groundedand rooted in God. (ch. 6. Paris MS)

In her teaching about the fundamental grounding and rooting of the soul in God by virtue of its creation, Julian, consciously or unconsciously, stands within the theological tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy.⁵ Her language recalls that of St Gregory of Nazianzus who stressed the fundamental communion of the whole person with God: or, in the modern period, the writings of Paul Evdokimov who speaks of 'ontological deiformity', the God-shaped character of humankind by virtue of its creation in the image and likeness of God.⁶ In Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, Fr John Meyendorff stresses that the openness of humanity to God, in Orthodox theology, is not a supernatural gift, but is the very core of human nature.⁷ In Julian's words, that nature was joined to God in its creation. Humanity as created is struck in the image and likeness of God: it is essentially deiform.

It was this humanity, grounded in God, created for union with God, which Christ assumed at the incarnation. Julian would therefore have greeted John Ball as a brother, struck in the divine image, restored through the incarnation to share the divine life. In contrast to all forms of gnostic spirituality, with their mistrust of the flesh and of the common people, Julian's mysticism was earthy and fleshly, incarnational through and through. In this incarnational, materialistic spirituality, Julian stands as an early and highly significant representative of what can be seen as the dominant theological tradition within Anglicanism. This tradition sees the incarnation not simply as a historic event, an article of belief, but also as a process, a movement—in Lionel Thomton's words, the 'regulative principle' of the Christian conception of God.' In this tradition there is no such thing as a 'lower nature', itself a Greek and non-biblical idea. Human nature in its entirety has been raised and restored in Christ. In the words of Charles Gore, writing in 1901, Christian theology 'associates the lower and material nature with the whole process of redemption, and teaches us that not without a material and visible embodiment is the spiritual life to be realized either now or in eternity'.⁹

This incarnational, materialistic foundation of Christian mysticism needs to be emphasized strongly today when, as in the fourteenth century, many people are looking to 'spirituality' as a way out of the pain and complexity of the world. Rarely has such false spirituality been so strongly attacked than it was by Julian's contemporary, the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck, in his warning against 'those who practise a false vacancy', and who ignore the common life and the demands of love and justice. They are, says Ruysbroeck, the most evil and most harmful people that live.'" Spirituality and the contemplative life can never be a purely personal quest for peace and inner harmony. It is intimately involved with the anguish of the world, for it is rooted in the incarnation and the passion of Christ. Nor can it exalt the 'spiritual' above the demands of material life, for it sees (as St Teresa of Avila put it) that God is among the saucepans, a reference perhaps to the prophecy of Zechariah that there will come a time when all the household pots and pans will be labelled 'Holy to the Lord!' (Zech. 14:20-1).

John Ball also stood within a long tradition, central to Christian orthodoxy, which stressed that spiritual reality must have a material embodiment, that spiritual theology and the struggle for social justice were inextricably bound up together through the incarnation. This unity of spiritual and material, of mysticism and politics, of holy and common, was the practical outworking of the early Christological debates. For human nature, orthodoxy insisted against the heretics, must be raised and restored in its entirety. And in fact Christian spirituality is utterly rooted in the historic reality of Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection. In Rowan Williams' words:

The life of Jesus has sanctified the particular, the 'spare and strange', manifesting God in a conditioned human story. Henceforth it is clear that the locus of God's saving action, his will to be known, loved, encountered, is the world of historical decision, whether individual or corporate. It is not, and cannot be, in a 'privileged' dehistoricized ecstasy or in the mechanisms of the gnostics' spiritual science.¹¹

The spiritual necessity of orthodoxy is something which needs to be stated strongly in the face of today's gnostic revival.

John Ball would have agreed with all this, and he would have added that God was intimately and disturbingly present in the poor and downtrodden, in the anger of the oppressed and the broken, in the voices of the unheard. He would have agreed with Leonardo Boff who speaks of Christ's 'sacramental density' among the poor and disadvantaged. In conversation with Julian, he might well have pointed to the terrible oppression and cruelty inflicted upon Christ. For the peasants were images of God, Christ's brothers and sisters, and inasmuch as cruelty and neglect was inflicted on them, it was done to Christ himself. That is a central theological truth which we need to recover in western society where to be poor is seen as little less than criminal. The Christian spiritual tradition includes, at its heart, the prophetic warning against those who grind the faces of the poor, who sell the righteous for a pair of sandals, and who neglect the alien, the orphan and the widow. It is an obligation laid upon the Christian community and its pastors, now as in the fourteenth century, to warn governments and communities of the grave moral and physical dangers of such policies of cruelty and neglect. In the words of the Bishop ofDurham, broadcast to the British people in April 1985: 'A society which does such things deliberately and refuses to recognize that that is what it is doing is a society which is tearing itself apart and heading for turbulence and disaster."² The fourteenth century was a time of turbulence and disaster. John Ball warned of woe, and, says the unsympathetic chronicler, it was whispered in the hedgerows and among the common people that John Ball spoke true.

Julian might have reassured him of the abiding and strengthening presence of God in his own troubled and restless heart, as he told her of the great suffering which the naked and wounded Christ was enduring on the roads of eastern England.

Secondly, they would have agreed that, terrible as is the reality of sin, it is not the final word about humanity. Sin, Julian wrote, 'is in opposition to our fair nature'. It is 'unnatural'. 'It belongs to our nature to hate sin' (ch. 63). It is a violation of the divine image in all people. Nature is all good and fair, and grace was sent to save it. Again, Julian is much closer to the Eastern Orthodox tradition with its emphasis on the divine image and the glory of the human than to the Augustinian tradition with its emphasis on human fallenness. This does not mean that Julian was 'soft on sin'. But she would not allow her life or her spirituality to be dominated by the sinfulness of the world, holding rather to the power of grace to perfect and transfigure humanity and the creation itself It is important to stress how different is her approach from that tendency in much western Christian theology which at times seems to regard original sin as the only Christian doctrine, and which misuses the doctrine as an argument against change. Christian theology is a theology not of imperfection and resignation before imperfection, but of redemption and of overpowering grace. 'You can't change human nature' is a blasphemous denial of the most fundamental Christian belief: that God has changed, transformed, healed, transfigured human nature, taken that nature into himself ('humanity into God'), and raised that nature to the glory of heaven. Julian recovered for all time the truth that transforming, perfecting grace, grace which perfects nature and does not destroy it, is a more fundamental reality than sin. Sin is strictly accidental, a pathological distortion of human nature, not a fundamental part of it.

No doubt John Ball would have been told, as those who struggle for a more just and more Godlike world in all ages are told, that humanity is fallen, that a perfect society is impossible, and that a belief in human imperfectibility is the basic Christian doctrine. The combination of a belief in total, even cosmic, depravity with a low view of grace is a recipe for social inaction, indeed for social autism. It cuts the ground away from Christian social action and represents a serious and dangerous perversion of Christian belief. Against the cosmic pessimism of those who exalt sin at theexpense of grace, he would point to the fundamental equality of humankind, rooted in the equality and common life of the Holy Trinity. He saw the Holy Trinity as the basis of the new world order. As in the Holy Trinity, so on earth: none is afore or after other, none is greater or less than another. If human beings shared the divine image, then they shared the common life and the inner equality of the divine being.

So, on the 13 July 1381, the feast of Corpus Christi, John Ball preached his memorable sermon on Blackheath in south London, in which he warned: 'Things cannot go well in England, nor ever shall, till all be held common; till there be not bond and free but we all are of one condition.' He rooted that belief in human equality in his understanding of the nature of God, and, significantly, in the account of Adam and Eve, created in the image of God. Were we not all children of these original parents, he asked. Inequality in wealth and status did not exist in Paradise, for

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

We find John Ball's words and themes picked up later by the radical movements of the English Civil War period, the Levellers, the Diggers and the Fifth Monarchy Men. In language which recalls John Ball's sermon, Gerrard Winstanley speaks of the created order as the 'clothing of God', of the earth as a 'common storehouse', and of Christ's presence among the poor, for 'he takes up his abode in a manger in and amongst the poor in spirit and the despised ones of the earth'.¹³

Julian of Norwich and John Ball shared a high view of human nature and of human potential, a view of humanity as sharing God's image, rooted and enfolded in the divine ground. Humanity is 'fundamentally rooted in God's eternal love'. Like John Ball, Julian saw the divine purpose expressed in the most basic physical functions: in one manuscript she speaks of the process of excretion as the work of God who does not 'disdain to serve us in the simplest natural functions of the body'.¹⁴ Similarly, John Ball rejected the sharp dualism of spirit and matter which sought to protect God from flesh and from the struggles of humanity. Both Julian and John lived at a time when, as in our day, gnostic and occult spiritual movements were undergoing a renaissance. They were thoroughgoing incarnationalists and Christian materialists, believing that what has not been assumed has not been healed. At the heart of their spirituality was the Eucharist, the sacramental manifestation of the common life, the koin nia. The Christian Eucharist stands as a permanent protest against private, de-materialized, elitist spirituality, for it roots its mystical vision in the social, physical, common, shared reality of eating and drinking. John Ball and his followers drew radical consequencesfrom the eucharistic sharing: they saw it as a pointer towards a more eucharistic world in which resources were truly offered, consecrated, divided and shared. The Eucharist for them was a living symbol of how human society could be refashioned. They would have agreed with the nineteenth-century Anglican writer Stewart Headlam that those who assist at holy communion are bound to be holy communists.¹⁵

Finally, Julian and John Ball would have shared that divinely inspired optimism expressed in Julian's memorable words: 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' Julian might have strengthened John Ball with such words as these. For the future to him must have seemed bleak. He was soon to meet his death, with the peasant rising crushed. Things would not go well in England. Many less optimistic souls would have given up the struggle as hopeless. Neither Julian nor John Ball were fatalists: neither was naive about the easy perfectibility of human beings or human society. Yet both held firmly to an unshakeable conviction that God was in control, that human beings and human society were not doomed, that God was mending his broken creation. This belief that God is at work within human history, within the upheavals and crises of nations and peoples, is the heart of the prophetic tradition. The New Testament symbol for the belief is the Kingdom of God. To discern the ways in which God is bringing in the Kingdom, to discern the signs of the times, to recognize, and cooperate with, the working out of God's purpose within history, is a central task of Christian spirituality. This is why contemplation and prophecy must always go together, for without the contemplative vision, the sun goes down on the prophets. Prophecy and action are born from, and constantly nourished and sustained by, vision. But vision must be vision of reality, involving a deepened awareness of the anguish of the world, and of what is happening to the images of God. Julian of Norwich and John Ball need each other badly. Contemplatives and activists need to hold close to each other, to nourish, to interrogate, to disturb, confront, and sustain each other.

Of course, there is not a shred of evidence that this meeting ever took place. But we do know that over the centuries contemplatives and activists, mystics and militants, seekers after personal and political liberation, have talked with, and gained nourishment and insight from, each other. We know too that Christian spirituality at its best seeks to unite interior and exterior struggles and cares, rooted as it is in the materiality of incarnation, resurrection and Eucharist. We know too that in our own day, among Christians of many traditions, the false polarizing of spirituality and social justice is being overcome, and that the ending of the related false polarity of personal and political remains one of our most urgent theological and pastoral tasks at the end of the twentieth century. Central to this task is the recovery ofChristological orthodoxy and of the good news of the Kingdom of God.

For we know also the subtle temptations for spirituality and politics to be driven apart by those who seek a private ecstasy and those who wish to maintain power, untroubled by religious interference. We know that, in our day, 'spirituality' is being marketed as a diversion, a form of inner excitement, a devotional commodity which in no way disturbs, upsets or affects the established order. We know that spirituality can easily become a way of escape from the living God who continues to confront and trouble us in the desperate and anguished faces of the broken and dehumanized people of the back. streets. We need to learn from Julian that spirituality must be human, natural, earthy, and joyful: and from John Ball that it must be related to, and tested against, the experiences and sufferings of the common people.

In our own discipleship the encounter must take place between the recognition of the presence of God in the depths of the soul, and the recognition of his presence in the poor and downtrodden; between the awareness of the terrible reality of personal and structural sin, and the awareness of the potential Godlikeness, the 'ontological deiformity', of the human person and the human community; between the recognition of the destructive forces in the world, and of the reality of the Kingdom of God as a sure and certain hope; between the vision of God and the anguish of the world.

If these encounters take place in us, Julian of Norwich and John Ball, the contemplative and the radical prophet, will truly have met.

Notes

¹ Phyllis McGinley, Times Three (New York 1975), pp. 46-7.

² See Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: medieval peasant movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London 1977 edn.). Hilton claims that 'the better they knew the Bible and the writings of the Fathers of the Church the more explosive the mixture of social and religious radicalism was likely to be' (p. 210). Of John Ball, he notes that 'his reported sayings are in the long tradition of Christian social radicalism which goes back to St Ambrose of Milan if not before' (p. 211).

³ Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London 1982), p. 130.

⁴ For some reflections on Merton by his friends, see Paul Wilkes(ed.), Merton by those who knew him (San Francisco 1984).

⁵ Brant Pelphrey, Love Was His Meaning: the theology and mysticism of Julian of Norwich (Salzburg 1982). Pelphrey says that Julian's work 'draws together the important strands of Christian spirituality as it is found in both the western Catholic mystics and in Eastern Orthodoxy' (p. x.).

⁶ Paul Evdokimov, L'Orthodoxie (Neuchatel 1959), p. 88.

⁷ John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (New York 1975), p. 11.

⁸ L. S. Thornton, The Incarnate Lord (London 1928), p. 7.

⁹ Charles Gore, The Body of Christ (London 1901), p. 39.

¹⁰ Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Book of Supreme Truth, ch. 4. See also The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, ch. 66.

¹¹ Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London 1979), p. 30.

¹² David Jenkins, 'The God of freedom and the freedom of God', The Hibbert Lecture 1985, The Listener (18 April 1985), pp. 14-17.

¹³ G. H. Sabine (ed.) The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (New York 1941), pp. 190, 251-2, 473-4. See also Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: radical ideas during the English Revolution (London 1972).

¹⁴RDL ch. 6 (Paris MS). Here and elsewhere I have used the translation of E. Colledge and J. Walsh (London and New York 1978).

¹⁵ Stewart Headlam, The Laws of Eternal Life (London 1888), p. 52.