SOURCE: "'God fulfylled my bodye': Body, Self, and God in Julian of Norwich" in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance, University Press of Florida, 1990, pp. 263-78.

Sometime after she received a series of sixteen "showings" or revelations during the course of a nearly fatal illness, Julian of Norwich became an anchoress, walling herself up in a cell attached to a church in Norwich, England. In such a state of isolation, Julian would seem an odd choice for a visionary with special insight into the nature of the self, of God, and especially of reality. Yet, with her emphasis on neglected aspects of these psychological, theological, and ontological realms, Julian offers us a new, fuller vision than much of the Western tradition to date. This essay argues that the thoroughly embodied character of her experience of Christ and of herself opens her to a more holistic relationship to God, on the basis of which she can originate an actual theology of the body, of God informing her "sensuality." In her consistently positive valuation of the body, Julian manages to overcome centuries of a Neoplatonic-Augustinian dualism of body and soul, matter and spirit, which is pervasive of the Western religious tradition. Julian, in her isolation from social structures of family, church, and even religious community, became liberated from some of their confining implications. Her anchorite existence freed her to accept uncommon insights into the spiritual significance of the body. Further, her trust in her own experience, sometimes at odds with the received authority of the Church, enabled her to unshackle herself from the exclusively patriarchal tradition.

Embodied modes of consciousness affect every aspect of Julian's thought, from her epistemology with its grounding in experiences of the body, to her vocabulary of the self, with its insistence on the sensuality of the self, to her theology of the motherhood of God. Julian's anthropology is radically and consistently incarnational, for it incorporates the spirit left disembodied in more dualist, patriarchal versions of human personhood. Julian rewrites the famous Anthanasian dictum that "God became 'man' in order that 'man' might become God," by allowing God through her illness and her visions to become her body, that is to come into and inscribe her body with illness, so that she in her body might become the incarnation of Christ. The deeply female root metaphors that give life to her theology of divine motherhood—the womb of God, the nurturing blood of Jesus—inscribe and incarnate God with the female body. It is no accident that this theology of the body as already grace-filled derives from a spirituality of reflection on her female experience and subjectivity. The importance of the body as a nonrational vehicle of divine perception has not usually been seen in Julian's work.' This paper seeks to address Julian's bodily experience as an epistemology of the Divine that lays the foundation for her full-blown theology of "sensualyte."

Among fourteenth-century English mystics like Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton, Julian is in the forefront in expressing an emphatically incarnational view of Jesus, and an emphatically Christocentric piety. Just as divine and human, spirit and matter (as Holy Spirit and Mary's flesh), came together in the Incarnation, so fleshly humanness was the most appropriate vehicle of the Divine and body the most appropriate receptacle of spirit. The doctrine of incarnation is clearly the source of Julian's affirmation of body. Moreover, for fourteenth-century English mysticism, incamationalism becomes far more than doctrine, as Jesus' fleshliness is, through the Benedictine tradition's lectio divina and scriptural meditations, taken in, embedded in the body. Gospel event becomes flesh again in being lived through at the deepest center of self, the ensouled body. Further, Julian's internalized meditations become externalized once more in the sixteen visions she receives over a day and night in the year 1373.² In this process of embodying and then revisualizing the meditations, the visionary becomes participant in the new vision.³

Julian's experience of the body—her bodily sickness, her healing, her intensely physical visions of Christ's passion—informs nearly every dimension of her book of Shewings or Revelations. From the bodily experiences recorded in the first, short text of her visions comes a plethora of insights in the long text, the fruit of twenty years' reflection on the visions and their meaning. Although we know nothing about Julian's former life before she became an anchoress, we do know from the Ancrene Riwle, the Rule for Anchoresses and Anchorites,4 that meditation on the sufferings and Passion of Christ formed an integral part of the "Devotions" expected of those leading this enclosed life. Julian's meditations reflected and forged a theology of incarnation uncompromising in its attention not only to the humanity but to the very fleshliness of Jesus. This theology, Franciscan and Cistercian in its origins, is assumed, without needing explicit formulation at the time of her visions. But a threefold process is actually at work: Julian's theology of incarnation of Word into flesh is itself incarnated in the bodiliness of her sickness and in her visions, and once that Word is made flesh in her flesh, it renews itself as Word, becoming theology again in her long text's theology of the body, of "sensualyte" as God-informed. Through her illness, her flesh becomes Worded with Christ and Christ's sufferings. Her written text then becomes a hermeneutic of the text written into her body and her visions. And what she reads there is a Christ whose suffering and bleeding are motherly love.

Julian's incamationalism and embodied knowing form part of a larger feminine awareness and language that are much more pervasive than has usually been seen in her work, since they anticipate and are not limited to the motherhood of God theme. Although I agree to a certain extent with the distinguished medievalist, Dom Jean Leclercq, when he says, "What she develops is not the idea of femininity as opposed to or distinct from masculinity, but that of the motherhood of God as complement to that of his fatherhood,"⁵ I believe feminine knowing and being as an ontological principle pervades Julian's writings from beginning to end.⁶ The idea of femininity never appears as an idea, disembodied and abstracted from her experiences; yet her work is at every turn grounded in her feminine experience.

Julian is not particularly interested in notions of gender and in differences based on gender, or in describing traits of individual men and women.⁷ Differences between men and women did not concern her, and in that sense I agree with Jean Leclercq that she does not offer us a vocabulary of sex. But Julian's notions of motherhood-fatherhood, nature-substance, mercygrace—and the list could be extended—all encompass a transcendent notion of sexuality: sexual categories raised to an ontological principle for understanding human nature, the world, and God. Jean Leclercq reminds us that sex means "a part, a division, the opposite of totality,"⁸ and it is just for this reason that Julian must complete the totality by including the excluded member. Julian's division into sexually charged opposites is in the service of a higher unity. Her sexual opposites are not merely divisive, but are in an ultimately unifying polarity. As William James tells us in his Varieties of Religious Experience, mystics have nearly always seen the opposites arraying themselves into such a higher unity.⁹ In Julian of Norwich, the priestly assertion in the first chapter of Genesis that "In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them" finds fulfillment in the images both of God and of humanity as both take on their full complement of femininity as well as masculinity. In order to fulfill the image of God, all human beings, whether male or female, must accept the feminine aspect of their natures.

Julian's epistemology of the divine, grounded as it is in the body, breaks through the Western tradition's bias toward reason as the defining aspect of human nature. In her homely but powerfully articulate way, Julian introduces new categories, overturning centuries of rigid adherence to the notion that the soul or mind is the only vehicle for divine perception. Clearly, she does not identify the person with the strictly rational dimension. Feminine awareness as an alternative way of understanding and engaging reality, as an epistemology, appears in Julian's work first by her constant recourse to the depth and concreteness of experience. No matter how theologically abstract her reflections become, they are never merely scholastic but are continually grounded and fed by the experience of her visions. Again and again, she reminds us of the experiential character of her way of knowing by the use of the phrase "I saw."¹⁰

In her feminine epistemological standpoint, Julian seems to have sensed the necessity of undergoing through experience as a way to gain true wisdom, the wisdom of the mother as she later calls it. To incarnate what had been known only in her theology and meditation, Julian prayed to enhance her own experience of Christ's bodiliness through her desires for three transformative experiences or "graces." Out of the "sloth and weakness" of her early life, ennui in modern existentialist terms or accidia in medieval ones, Julian desired and prayed intensely for those transforming experiences: to experience more deeply the Passion of Christ, to suffer an intense illness, and to receive the three wounds of contrition, compassion, and ardent longing for God. In each of these transformations, Julian is entrusting her conversion to her body.

Each of these experiences is connected to the others through body as the middle term. The Passion of Christ is taken in bodily, in the sense that it is both perceived as "bodyle syghte" or sensate image and that it is undergone in her own bodily illness. The fruits of these corporeal experiences are her "wounds," which though spiritual, bear the stamp of their bodily origin. Moreover, it is significant that Julian prays for the concrete wounds of bodily sickness rather than the spiritual blessure d 'amour of Origen. "In this sekenes," she says, "I desyrede to hafe alle manere of paynes, bodelye and gastelye, that I schulde have zyf I schulde dye …" (1:203). Julian's second desire, for a bodily illness, is received first, since it is the means by which she is to experience the Passion of Christ. Julian's illness acts as a kind of ensoulment for her. Unlike those attempting to escape the prison of body, Julian sees body as the locus of spiritual enlightenment, in other words, as the temple of the Holy Spirit.

It is as if the contemplative senses that until she knows with her body, in her marrow and bones and in every cell, she will have no basis for knowing Christ at all. Whatever resistances she has to knowing and experiencing God are contained first in the body. Julian's desire for bodily sickness seems to be a means of unlocking those resistances, and unleashing the considerable spiritual resources of the fully embodied consciousness. Both her paralysis and its sudden healing a few days later mark a metaphorical transformation, a death to her old slothful body and a birthing of the newly soulful one. It is significant that Julian's desire initiates this spiritual transformation. The intentionality of Julian's bodily suffering powerfully fuses body and soul into one." A suffering that is willed, desired, and actively chosen as was Julian's, as part of a larger context of meaning and purpose, is transformed into something more.

Like Teresa of Avila, Julian goes from living on the surface—an aimless, slothful, frivolous life—to living at the depth and centerof her soul. In both mystics, it is curious that images of the soul as a city with Christ sitting in its midst¹²—images of masculine-feminine wholeness and unity in polarity—appear as this deepening and centering take place (68.313).¹³ Julian's true center, expressed in this paradoxical metaphor and arrived at through the paradoxical deepening that her wounds bring, is Christ.

Julian's threefold hermeneutic of the visions she receives involves her whole psychophysical nature. "Alle this blyssede techynge of oure lorde god was shewyd to me in thre partyes, that is be bodyle syght, and be words formede in myne vndyrstandynge, and be gastelye syght" (1:224). Nearly all Julian's visions and revelations are in bodily form. As visionary rather than as mystic, she advocates the concrete nature of her experience. Quite explicitly, she says: "I desyrede a bodylye syght, whare yn y myght have more knawynge of bodelye paynes of oure lorde our savyoure and of the compassyonn of oure ladye and of all his trewe loverse.… Other syght of gode ne schewynge desyrede I nevere none tylle atte the sawlle were departyd from the bodye.…" (1:202). The corporeal nature of her visions enables her to perceive in them seemingly opposing qualities, as her catalogue of adjectives—"quyck and lyuely and hidows and dredfulle and swete and louely" (2:313)—running the opposites together, attests. This reconciliation of opposites in the bodily visions prepares her for her later spiritual insights into the polar nature of God and humanity. Indeed, a visceral reading of her sickness and her visions enables Julian to mediate her revelations through her body now become a vehicle of profound insight and wisdom. Julian perceives a direct relation between her bodily experience and the truth she gains from it, when she says, "this was my menynge [intention], for I wolde aftyr be cawse of that schewynge have the more trewe mynde in the passionn of Cryste" (1:203).

Though she too has inherited the body-soul dualism of Plato and Paul,¹⁴ but not yet in its full-blown Cartesian form, Julian has come to appreciate a wisdom of the body, even a spirituality of the body. For Julian, the body is first a means to a deepened spiritual experience of a transformative character, and second, in its transformed, ensouled state, a principle of "sensualyte" in which God is present. Both in her experience and in the theology that pours forth from it, the transformed body is the medium through which she comes to know God.

At the end of her nearly fatal but short-lived illness, as her body becomes suddenly healed, she expresses the desire for the first and third graces: "that he walde fulfylle my bodye with mynde of felynge of his blessede passyonn, … with compassyonn and aftyrwarde langynge to god" (1:210). A body fulfilled with "mind of feeling" is a newly ensouled body, a body that becomes the medium of her spiritual revelation. Looking back on her original desirefrom the twenty-year van. tage point of the long text, she restates this remarkably holistic sentiment: "my body was fulfylled of felyng and mynd of Cristes passion and his dyeng. And ferthermore with this was a suttell felyng and a prevy inwarde syghte.…" (2:569). "Inward sight" and "subtle feeling" capture the holism of embodied thinking and being.

Julian's desire for a deepened experience of Christ's Passion, "to have mynde of Chryste es passionn" (1:203), carries with it a desire to be present with Mary Magdalen and others of Christ's lovers so that she might suffer with Christ. Her faith in the Incamation must itself be embodied. For, although she "believed firmly" in Christ's pains, as she states, "Nouzt withstondynge alle this trewe be leve I desyrede a bodylye syght …; for I wolde have beene one of thame and suffrede with thame" (1:202). Contemporaneity with Christ and depth of experience are the antidotes for a belief that no longer goes far enough. Julian seeks to move, then, from faith to experience, from mere belief to vision, and from a doctrinal, secondhand knowing to her own inner authority.¹⁵ And the passage from an intellectual, nonintegral faith to a thoroughly grounded experience is through bodiliness, both the bodiliness of the visions and her own bodily experience, her suffering, of them and with them.

It is no accident, then, that her desires for bodily sickness and a body filled with mindful feeling of the Passion of Christ lead naturally to the spiritual "wounds" of compassion and longing for God (i.127).¹⁶ Julian's woundedness allows soul to emerge and guide her life. As the Passion of Christ becomes her passion, in all the meanings of that word, passion leads naturally to compassion. No dissociated sensibility can obtain, for it is her body that is fulfilled with "mind of feeling," a feeling-minded body, an embodied soul, an ensouled body. As Julian draws more deeply on her bodily experience, she becomes a more integrated and therefore more truly spiritual self. Further, her own integration and its resulting compassion lead to her feeling of one body with her "even Cristens" (2:220).¹⁷ Julian's bodily experience, her sickness and her body wounded with compassion, may well be the link between her suffering, Christ's suffering, and a compassionate feeling of oneness with all other beings. In her long text, Julian emphasizes the human being's material interconnectedness with all the things of earth in her account of creation: "whan god shulde make mannes body, he toke the slyme of the erth, whych is a mater medelyd and gaderyd of alle bodely thynges" (2:558).¹⁸

Julian's desire for a deeper knowledge of the Passion of Christ is met with a vision of the "the rede blode treklylle downe fro vnder the garlande" (1:210). The sight of profuse bleeding from the crown of thorns, the most persistent recurring image in Julian's visions (see 1:217), is comfort and strength to her (1:211). She comparesit to "bountiful waters," to a drink which is "most plentiful," which "blessedly flows over us" and is flowing now in heaven (12.200; 2:342-45). This image "viscerally meditated" over twenty years, is so charged,¹⁹ taboo, and powerful that it resists direct and immediate interpretation, yielding up its import after almost twenty years' reflection. An outpouring of blood so continual that she thought it would soak the bed-sheets (1:227) is made even more taboo when we compare its overflowing of boundaries to the necessity for containment of fluidity in Talmudic texts.²⁰ The metaphor of flowing, powerfully embedded in the seer by the vision of bleeding, reappears in the long text to signify the flowing of the operation of mercy, God's "feminine" side.

The key to Julian's hermeneutics of this vision and of all her visions is that all the theology found in the long text is contained first in the visions. She states this explicitly at the very beginning of the long text: "this is a reuelacion of loue that Jhesu Christ our endles blisse made in xvi shewynges, of which the first is of his precious crownyng of thornes; and ther in was conteined and specified the blessed trinitie with the incarnacion and vnithing betweene god and mans sowle.…" (2:281). The Word of the suffering Christ inscribed in her body's illness is rewritten to be reinterpreted in and from the visions. The long text completes the three-stage process of theology, embodiment in visions, and new theology. Yet, in another sense there are no stages, no heights, no ascents but a continued deepening of her initial knowing.

Throughout the long text, then, Julian's visions and her experience, her body filled full with mind of feeling, are continually culled for the insight they provide into the nature of "sensualyte." Her brief illness appears to operate as a cauterizing experience fusing body and soul in a unity only fully understood in her mature theology of "sensualyte."²¹ This term, which begins to appear in the long text, seems to point as much to an event as to an abstract quality for Julian. It is the event of ensoulment, a unifying of body-soul, so that the body can never live again as disspirited "dedlye flesshe," nor the soul as disembodied. Julian lives now in a new wholeness of embodied soul. She is "oned" (united) in her own being as precondition of her "oneing" with Christ. Hers is a true at-onement of spiritual and physical worlds. So, the "vnithing betweene god and mans sowle" (2:281) that the long text's theology articulates began within her.

Corresponding to the body as a heuristic basis for receiving and writing her visions is Julian's richly developed psychology of the self. In her incarnational affirmation of the self as nature and sensuality as well as grace and substance, Julian foregrounds a principle of body much neglected in the patriarchal tradition. She forges a vernacular vocabulary of the self, one that encompassesand transcends the prevailing Augustinian psychology. What is new in Julian's anthropology is that nature and grace, the lower part and higher part of human nature, deserve equal place in the economy of God's salvific action. Although Julian employs hierarchical metaphors of the union of soul and body, she undermines their very hierarchical nature, as when she says: "the lyfe and the vertu that we have in the lower perty is of the hyer … Betwene that one and that other is ryght nought, for it is all one love, which one blessyd loue hath now in vs doubyll/werkying; …" (2:553).²² Soul and body, to the extent that they can be reified, are penultimate realities, transcended by the all-unifying action of love. Like John Ruysbroeck, who said that nature is the bride of God, Julian can state that "I saw that oure kynde is in god hoole … for oure kynde, whych is the hyer party is knytte to god in pe makying, and god is knytt to oure kynde, whych is the lower party in oure flessch takying" (2:577-78). She sees that God has made a glorious "oneing" between the soul and the body (2:568), so that each takes help from the other (2:567; 55.287). This oneing has already occurred in Christ, where the higher part of the soul is always at peace with God, and the "lower" part, our sensuality, still is given the high purpose of suffering for the salvation of humankind (55.288; 2:569). The idea of a union of body and soul dominates almost everything she wrote about the human being in the long text.

Developing her new anthropology into a new theology, Julian states explicitly that "God is in our sensualyte … for in the same poynt that oure soule is made sensuall, in the same poynt is the citte of god, ordeyned to hym fro without begynnyng" (2:567). God has in Julian's words, "no disdain to serve us in the simplest natural functions that belong to our body" (2:307). Julian even marvels over the fact of defecation (6.186)! And our bodily birthing too is accomplished by God.²³ As our sensuality becomes a vehicle of the Divine, no aspect of human nature escapes the all-encompassing action of divine love. Employing one of her favorite metaphors, that of clothing, Julian can describe the self in physico-spiritual terms, which defy ancient dualisms; we are, "soule and body, cladde and enclosydde in the goodnes of god" (2:307).

While Julian has greatly enriched the concept of self in her emphasis on its bodily aspects, she never conceives the self apart from God's workings in it. As in Meister Eckhart, to "know thyself in Julian is to know God: "And whan we know and see verely and clerely what oure selfe is, than shalle we verely and clerly see and know oure lorde god in fulhed of joye" (2:490).²⁴ Thus, it is no surprise that Julian's psychology is symmetrical with her theology and that its constantly reiterated feminine element has anticipated the feminine in God. If body and nature suggest the implicitly "feminine" elements of the self, the feminine aspect of godhead becomes fully explicit in her theology. Whereas there were bubblings up of this theme of divine motherhood among the twelfth-century Cistercians, as Caroline Walker Bynum's study Jesus as Mother amply shows, in Julian this theme fairly erupts not only as metaphor but as the literal truth of the divine nature.²⁵

But long before her explicit reflection on the mystery of divine motherhood in the long text, Julian has offered a cryptic clue to her later insights in the hazelnut passage found near the beginning of the short text. After God shows her "… a lytille thynge, the qwantyte of a haselle nutte …" and she asks, "Whate maye this be?" she is answered, "It is alle that ys made" (1:2-13). Her choice in this image is of an object whose worth is anterior to any human reckoning or valuing. Its only value is in being itself, but that value is infinite because it is informed and sustained by God. The hazelnut passage, with its concern for the ordinary, nonutilitarian aspects of being, reveals the kind of love that accepts and protects what is undeveloped and undistinguished—motherly love.²⁶

Yet, it is only after Julian's insertion of the completely new lord and servant parable in the long text, a parable that editors Colledge and Walsh see as suppressed in the short text, that her reflections on the maternity of God and Jesus begin to pour out. It is as if along with the parable, which she says was too mysterious for her immediate understanding, she also suppressed her insights into the feminine nature of God as potentially subversive of the overwhelmingly patriarchal teachings of Holy Church. She allowed her vision twenty years of growth in darkness before giving birth full-term to the mature theme of the Motherhood of God. Julian's way offers a paradigm of the feminine mode of patient nurturing of a conception—in her case a vision—before it is brought to birth. Her term of pregnancy with the full import of her visions was twenty years!

As in her concept of the self, so too in God's being Julian sees the balance of opposites, of motherhood-fatherhood, mercy-grace, as when she says: "Mercy is a pyttefull properte, whych longyth to moderhode in tender loue; and grace is a wurshypfull properte, whych longyth to ryall lordschyppe in the same loue. Mercy werkyth kypyng, sufferyng, quyckyng and helyng, and alle is of tendyrnesse of loue; and grace werkyth with mercy, reysying, rewarding, endlesly ovyr passying that oure louying and our traveyle deseruyth.…" (2:502-3),27 Julian precisely balances the more interior maternal quality of mercy in its quickening and healing with grace, a more "paternal" quality, which acts in an external way to raise and reward. However, in the parable the characters embody the both-and of paradox, as they contain both qualities within themselves. The lord of the lord and servant parable is a type of both mother and father, for he looks with compassion on his servant and later raises him when he falls. What is dichotomized inJulian's discursive language is unified in the parable.

God's mercy and compassion are, therefore, not merely abstract attributes for Julian but are grounded in the full compass of activities of the mother. Jennifer Heimmel points out that all stages of the divine maternity are present in Julian's reflections: "Enclosure and growth within the womb; the trauma of labor and birth; the suckling of the infant and feeding of the child; the care and education of the older child; the setting of examples and disciplining of the child; the washing, healing, forgiving, and comforting of the child as it matures; and the continual loving, touching, and guiding of the child even to the point of its own death which becomes in turn a rebirth and return to the original womb."²⁸ Nowhere is the divine motherhood more powerfully or paradoxically expressed than in the beautiful images of Mother Jesus bearing us for joy and endless life, nourishing us with him/herself, and comforting us against his/her breast (2:598). Motherhood in Julian's notion of God fairly explodes as it expands to include "kynd [nature], loue, wysdom and knowyng" and in fact the reality of God (2:599).

Julian's notions of the union of opposites in God and the nondualist vision of the self have, I believe, a nonrational bodily origin, reflecting a female capacity, the capacity of the womb, to hold otherness and opposition within itself. She grounds her notions of the human being as a body-soul unity in the bodily image of the womb, which operates on an unconscious but pervasive level in her work. Drawing on the womb's capacity for uniting the opposing elements of being, she unites Christ's incarnation with the creation of humans: "For in that same tyme that god knytt hym to oure body in the meydens wombe, he toke oure sensuall soule, in whych takying, he vs all havyng beclosyd in hym, he onyd it to oure substance" (2:580). The metaphor of the womb underlies Julian's frequent assertions of the coinherence of all beings in God and of God in all beings.²⁹ God is the womb of all beings as we are the womb of God. In this consists the ground of the Motherhood of God.

Recalling Julian's hermeneutic of her theology in and through her visions, we can see how she reads the image of Christ's flowing blood as containing in inchoate ways the theology of the Motherhood of Christ. Like a mother's menstrual blood and lactating breasts, Christ's blood flows to heal and nurture.³⁰ Christ is our Mother both substantially and sensually, "our Mother in nature in our substantial creation, in whom we are founded and rooted, and he is our Mother of mercy in taking our sensuality" (58.294).

The root metaphors of the womb and the superabundant blood/milk form the unfathomable ground for Julian's theology of the Motherhood of God and Jesus. If God as Mother holds us in the divine maternal womb, then Jesus as Mother flows out to us in anever-cascading flood of nurture. Our being in the womb of God is eternal for "oure savyoure is oure very moder, in whom we be endlesly borne and nevyr shall come out of hym. e (2:580). It is the maternal womb in which paradoxically we are at the same time enclosed and out-flowing (2:556-58).

In assessing the distinctness of Julian's writing on and through the body, we can point to Peter Brown's thesis that social asceticism offered the individual a means of social dissent, of opting out of the pressure for marriage and social commitment.³¹ On the other hand, Julian's asceticism, unlike that of those saints examined in Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast,³² does not involve her in an obsession with ascetic practices toward the body. She appears remarkably balanced in seeking almost unconsciously a body-soul concord. Julian does not seek suffering for its own sake. "As to the penance which one takes upon oneself," she says in her long text, "that was not revealed to me.… But what was revealed is that we ought to bear and suffer the penance which God himself gives us." (77.330).³³ She appears neither to engage in nor to encourage penitential asceticisms such as fasting, flagellation, and other extreme austerities so popular with other female saints, which Weinstein and Bell tell us are "invariably associated with rejection of [their] sexuality."³⁴ Even her actual physical illness does not linger nor does she linger in it but it disappears in a sudden healing.³⁵

As her illness disappears, it gives way to a torrent of exuberant insights into the goodness of God, culminating in the final insight that the meaning of the whole experience was Love. It was Love she was suffering at the beginning and that suffered her to learn its meaning at the end. Julian's "end is her beginning," as suffering is reconciled and even identified with Love. And the body is the alchemical vessel where the dross of suffering is turned into the gold of love. While her nearly mortal illness involves the ascetic participation of body, its emptying, her visions involve the ecstatic participation of body, its fulfillment.³⁶ In Julian, the suffering of bodily asceticism turns easily into the joy of ecstatic illumination. In this process, "soul" becomes embodied, and body becomes ensouled, breaking down whatever unnatural divisions might obtain between them. Another bodily experience in the life of a woman, the carrying and birthing of a child, attests to the possibility of the coinherence of suffering and love, the dialectic of suffering and joy.³⁷

In conclusion, what Julian offers us is not only a nondualistic epistemology of the body as spirit but a theology of the body, a somatic revelation of God in and as body. In her anthropology, we see how far Julian has come from any trace of Manichean (or in their contemporary version, Catharist) attitudes toward the body or of a Docetic spiritualizing of Christ and the human being. In herincarnational affirmation of the self as God-informed sensuality, Julian foregrounds a principle of the body much neglected in the patriarchal tradition. As she reads the text of her God-inscribed body, she finds her sensuality filled with God and God filled with sensuality. Julian's final reconciliation of opposites reconciles an exclusive psychology and an exclusive theology in God's all-encompassing self-enclosure. Such radical visions of reality are made possible only by her equally radical ontology of feminine being at the heart of reality. Because the feminine as an ontotheological principle seeks to unite disparate elements, her psychology of the self is God-informed and her metaphysics profoundly personal. Julian's emphasis on the body as vehicle of the Divine, on nature and sensuality as already united to God, and on the motherhood of God deeply enriches the self, God, and reality itself.

Notes

¹ Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, deals admirably with the concept of sensuality in Julian's thought but does not see the body as an organ of knowing in Julian. Other studies, like that of Brant Pelphrey, treat Julian as spiritual writer and visionary without the important link to embodiment in her work. Joan Nuth's masterful recent study of Julian, Wisdom's Daughter, treats Julian primarily as theologian, and although she is careful to lay out a thoroughgoing theology of nature in Julian, the corporeality of her experience of God is not emphasized.

² See Wright, "Birthing Jesus," 23-44, for a discussion of contemplation as internalization of symbol leading to a subsequent reemergence of the symbol in visions.

³ Petroff, in Consolation of the Blessed, 59-66, classifies these visions as "participatory."

⁴ Ackerman and Dahood, eds. and trans. Ancrene Riwle, 18, 35, 57, and 63. For example, "Let her meditate, at about midday who can, or some time, on God's cross as much as she can and on his precious torment … and say such a prayer as this: We adore you, 0 Christ. We adore your cross.… Hail, holy cross.… wood triumphant" (69).

⁵ Leclercq, preface to Julian of Norwich, trans. Colledge and Walsh, 11.

⁶ This notion of an ontological feminine allies itself more readily with dual than with single anthropology feminism, and with "romantic" feminism than with liberal feminism. See Rosemary Radford Ruether's Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983) for discussion of this latter typology.

⁷ The only exception occurs when she demurs that she is "a woman, ignorant, weak and frail," but at the same time asks, "But because I am a woman, ought I therefore to believe that I should not tell you of the goodness of God …" (Colledge and Walsh, trans., vi.135; Colledge and Walsh, eds., 1:222). (References to the latter [the critical edition] appear with volume and page number; vol. I indicates the short text and vol. 2 the long text.) The topos of the frailty of the female gender does not invade her writings as it does those of the twelfth-century prophetess and saint, Hildegard of Bingen. See Newman, Sister of Wisdom, especially chap. 1.

⁸ Leclercq, preface to Julian of Norwich, trans. Colledge and Walsh, 11.

⁹ William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958), 298.

¹⁰ In one of the more striking instances of this emphasis on seeing, she says, "when we see god we hafe that we desyre, and than nedes vs nought to praye" (Colledge and Walsh, eds., 1:261).

¹¹ Yet it is paradoxical language she uses to express both active and passive aspects of this desire: "there came into my mind with contrition—a free gift from God which I did not seek—a desire of my will to have by God's gift a bodily sickness" (Colledge and Walsh, trans., i. 126).

¹² "That wurshypful cytte pat oure lorde Jhesu syttyth in, it is oure sensualyte, in whych he is enclosyd; and oure kyndly substance is beclosyd in Jhesu, with the blessyd soule of Crist syttyng in rest in the godhed" (2:572).

¹³ References to Colledge and Walsh's modem English translation of the short text are in lowercase roman numerals followed by page numbers; to the long text, in arabic numerals followed by page numbers.

¹⁴ In what appears a striking exception to Julian's holistic vision, she sees a body lying on the earth, itself "a devouring pit of stinking mud" (64.306), while out of this loathsome body springs a beautiful child. Here the opposites, the body as mortal flesh and the child as the pure soul, threaten to disengage from their "glorious union." Compare Brant Pelphrey's statement that "in the past [Julian] had conceived of a false separation between flesh and spirit, nature and holiness. Whereas she evidently believed that spirituality means rising above our mortal flesh—our human nature, our sensuality—she now sees that God loves all nature and delights in it," in "Spirituality in Mission: Lessons from Julian of Norwich," Cross Currents (Summer 1984): 182. See also Vinje, Understanding of Love, 151-62.

¹⁵ For a modem interpretation of such a movement from "received knowledge" to subjective knowing, see Mary Field Belenky, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

¹⁶ Compare Angela of Foligno's saying that: "The sight of the crucified body of the good and beloved Jesus did awaken such compassion that in all my inward parts and my bones and joints did I feel new pain, and I lamented afresh with terrible anguish" (quoted in Petroff, Consolation, 210).

¹⁷ "The charyte of god makyth in vs such a vnitie that when it is truly seen no man can parte them selfe from other," she says (2:629).

¹⁸ Compare Bynum's statement that "the woman, by suffering, fused with a cosmic suffering that redeemed the world" (Holy Feast, 289); and Petroff s that "The participation in the crucifixion became enormously liberating, for in the crucifixion women saw a powerful male figure saving the world by suffering passively, as women do" (Consolation, 66).

¹⁹ Robert Detweiler, in Breaking the Fall (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 123, speaks of a "charged corporeality too forceful to be fully articulated in language."

²⁰ See Jacob Neusner, The Oral Torah: The Sacred Books of Judaism, An Introduction (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 16-21.

²¹ Jantzen Julian of Norwich, 143, points out that for Julian sensuality involves the union of soul and body, of consciousness with embodiment.

²² Jantzen too sees little or no body-soul dualism in Julian: "Julian firmly rejects the idea derived from a one-sided reading of Plato that the body is independent recalcitrant matter, always tending to evil, while the soul is the divine principle always tending toward good" (ibid., 144).

²³ Unlike Margery Kempe, for whom chastity after bearing fourteen children has become an obsessional issue, Julian sees birthing as a divine function, in that Jesus as true Mother carries us, bears us forth, and nourishes us.

²⁴ See also the corollary of this in chapter 56: "For oure soule is so depe growndyd in god and so endlesly tresoryd that we may nott come to the knowyng ther of tylle we haue furst knowyng of god, which is the maker to whom it is onyd" (2:570).

²⁵ Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 110-69. See, especially on this theme, Bradley, "Motherhood Theme in Julian of Norwich"; Heimmel's "God Is Our Mother"; and Molinari, Julian of Norwich, 169-76.

²⁶ Ann Belford Ulanov in The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 198, points up the maternal capacity for accepting the lowest, rejected aspects of being.

²⁷ Concerning this and the many other passages on divine motherhood belonging to Julian's reflections on the lord and servant parable in the long text, Colledge and Walsh remark, "The working of mercy and grace is the simple countering of evil by goodness; and this belongs to the feminine principle of the natura creatrix, the divine creative activity where the ground of moderhed begynneth" (Colledge and Walsh, eds., 1:151).

²⁸ Heimmel, "God is Our Mother," 54-55.

²⁹ St. Ambrose uses the image of the womb in his conception of God the Father giving birth to the Son (ibid., 20). Guerric of Igny (d. 1157) produces similar images in speaking of God drawing souls "into his very bowels." See his second sermon for Lent, chapter 2, Sermons 2:30 (quoted in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 121). Images of the womb and of clothing occupy a prominent place in the visionary speculations of Hildegard of Bingen. See Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 71-75, 103. See also the extensive work of the contemporary French feminist Julia Kristeva on the chora: "About Chinese Women" and "Stabat Mater" in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

³⁰ Bynum, in Jesus as Mother, makes the late medieval connection between milk and processed blood (132-33).

³¹ Peter Brown, "Society and the Body: The Social Meaning of Asceticism in Late Antiquity" (Plenary Address, International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, Mich., May 1986). See Brown, Body and Society.

³² Bynum's revaluation of asceticism as "an effort to plumb and to realize all the possibilities of the flesh" (Holy Feast, 294) certainly applies to Julian, though her own asceticism seems limited to reclusion.

³³ Although this statement goes a long way to indicate that Julian was not involved in extreme self-inflicted penances, as Bynum pointed out to me at a panel at the American Academy of Religion meeting in New Orleans, 1990, we do not have a biography of Julian to confirm such self-descriptions.

³⁴ Bell and Weinstein, Saints and Society, 234.

³⁵ Though it reappears briefly after the fifteenth revelation and before the sixteenth.

³⁶ See Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 106.

³⁷ I am indebted for this notion to a paper given by Roger Corless at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, Mich., May, 1985.

Selected Bibliography

Ackerman, Robert W., and Roger Dahood, eds. and trans. Ancrene Riwle. Part I, Vol. 31. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984.

Bell, Rudolph, and Donald Weinstein. Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Bradley, Ritamary. "The Motherhood Theme in Julian of Norwich." Fourteenth Century English Mystics Newsletter 2, no. 4 (1976): 25-30.

Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

——. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Colledge, Edmund, and James Walsh, eds. A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich. 2 vols. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978.

——. trans. Julian of Norwich: Showings. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.

Heimmel, Jennifer P. "God Is Our Mother": Julian of Norwhich and the Medieval Image of Christian Feminine Divinity. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1982.

Jantzen, Grace M. Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian. New York: Paulist Press, 1988.

Molinari, Paul. Julian of Norwich: The Teaching of a FourteenthCentury English Mystic. London: Longman, Green, and Company, 1958.

Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Nuth, Joan M. Wisdom's Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1991.

Pelphrey, Brant. "Spirituality in Mission: Lessons from Julian of Norwich." Cross Currents (Summer 1984): 171-90.

Petroff, Elizabeth. Consolation of the Blessed. New York: Alta Gaia Society, 1979.

Vinje, Patricia Mary. An Understanding of Love According to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik.

Wright, Wendy M. "Birthing Jesus: A Salesian Understanding of the Christian Life." Studia Mystica 8, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 23-44.