SOURCE: "Some Characteristics of Julian's Thought" in The Lady Julian: A Psychological Study, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1924, pp. 51-65.

[Considering Julian's mystical experiences within a psychoanalytic framework, Thouless speculates on the psychic sources and meanings of her imagery.]

Before passing to a consideration of particular teachings embodied in the shewings of the Lady Julian, we may notice two characteristics of her thought which must strike at once her most casual reader. These are the rich content of imagery in her thinking, and her almost repellent insistence on the physical awfulness of the crucifixion. The former is a point of psychological interest upon which we may dwell a little; the second is one which we shall be forced to consider, for it would be indeeduseless to commend a mediaeval religious writer to the average reader of the present day unless some defence could be made for her against the charge of morbidity.

The plentifulness of the imaginal content of Julian's thought is shown not only by the corporeal and other visions of her revelation. She seems at other times to think in pictures. An example of the ease with which her thought expressed itself in imagery may be found in her tenth chapter. Her mind was occupied with the abstract idea that a man or woman in any situation "if he might have sight of God so as God is with a man continually, he should be safe in body and soul, and take no harm: and overpassing, he should have more solace and comfort than all this world can tell."¹ This thought expressed itself in a visual image of "the sea-ground, and there I saw hills and dales green, seeming as it were moss-begrown, with wrack and gravel."²

And later, when she received the locution, "I thank thee for thy travail, and especially for thy youth," the thought contained in this shewing presented itself in the following visual image: "I saw our Lord as a lord in his own house, which hath called all his dearworthy servants and friends to a stately feast. Then I saw the Lord take no place in His own house, but I saw Him royally reign in His house, fulfilling it with joy and mirth, Himself endlessly to gladden and to solace His dearworthy friends, full homely and full courteously, with marvellous melody of endless love, in His own fair blessed countenance."³ It should be noticed that this picture of our Lord in Heaven is not described as a shewing. It did not appear to Julian to have come from outside herself, as did the words of thanks. It was simply the way in which she thought of the idea of God thanking those who have served Him.

The significance of these observations for an appreciation of Julian's methods of thought may best be appreciated if we examine shortly the process of thinking as it goes on in different minds. Probably the most primitive elements in our thinking are images. These are pictures seen before the mind's eye, sounds heard, movements felt in the mind, or reproductions of sensations from other senses (smell, taste, etc.). They may be simple reproductions of the past, or new combinations of imagined impressions—the work of the creative imagination. Such images form an undercurrent in most of our thinking, attaining a more important position in the condition of reverie, and becoming dominant in dreams. Dreams seem to be the expression in images of primitive levels of thought of which we are not conscious when, in waking life, we are dominated by our environment with its demand for action.

A later acquired element of our mental life is our habit of thinking in words. Words, when we think them, are of course also images (we must either image the movements of pronouncing them, ortheir sound, or their appearance), so the kinds of imagery mentioned in the previous paragraph may be distinguished by giving them the name of concrete images. It is mainly the use of words in thinking, under conscious direction and control, which makes up intellectual processes of thought—processes which stand at the opposite pole to mere dreaming.

In addition, however, to words and concrete images, there appear to be elements in our thought of a more elusive character which have been given the somewhat clumsy name of "imageless thought." These are immediate grasps of meanings—of relationships or of references to fact—without any appearance of a mental intermediary in the form of a word or other image. Such imageless thoughts are much more difficult to speak of clearly, since they are less tangible than concrete images and words; but they are probably no less important for the full understanding of the thinking process.

Galton was the first person to draw attention to the importance of the differences between the types of thinking in different minds.⁴ He found that, while most persons have more or less rich and vivid imagery of things seen, such visual imagery may be completely absent from the minds of other persons, particularly of those who have devoted themselves to abstract thought. It is difficult for the person with vivid visual imagery to imagine what a barren waste would appear to him the mind of the person without visual images; while the verbal thinker is shocked if he discovers that the intellectual processes of the visualiser are accompanied by what seem to him to be merely a logically irrelevant riot of mental pictures. Differences of outlook are often determined by such profound differences in the contents of different peoples' minds, and the adherents of different schools of philosophy may have their views determined in this way.⁵

It is a very important peculiarity of our thinking in words that we can distinguish between valid and invalid trains of thought by logical rules. Of course, we can reach conclusions (and correct conclusions) by using images and imageless thoughts without going through a logical process of reasoning. Indeed, it is probable that generally most of us reach our conclusions in this way; but we can only be sure whether such conclusions are right or wrong when they are put to the test of experience. It is only when our steps to the conclusion have taken logical verbal form that we can assure ourselves that they are right and can convince other people of their rightness before they have been tested by experience.

Most persons will agree to one limitation of verbal thinking—that it is powerless, by itself, to give us new knowledge. We may be able by the use of words to draw correct conclusions from our experience, but no manipulation of words alone can tell us anything except what those words mean in the current use of language. It cantell us nothing about facts. The belief that manipulation of words can give us new knowledge about facts is the fallacy underlying certain ambitious metaphysical theories by which men have tried to gain knowledge about the universe by a priori construction of theories.

Possibly there is another limitation. The biological end of our intelligence is to enable us to modify our environment for our advantage. Verbal thinking is the last and most efficient weapon for this end. Professor Bergson suggests, however, that it is not an effective method of discovering what is ultimately true. Philosophic thought was not the end for which the intelligence was designed in the course of evolution. There are conditions known to the student of religion in which verbal thinking is reduced to a minimum and its place is taken by images and the processes of imageless thought. These may be called conditions of intuitional knowledge. Such knowledge, whether true or false, may be very convincing to the person experiencing it. He cannot demonstrate to us that it is true, for it cannot be put into logical verbal form without losing its character; but we must bear in mind the possibility of such intuitional conditions giving a real insight into reality, possibly even an insight which cannot be gained by verbal thinking. Such states certainly occur in mysticism, and their occurrence produces the note of subjective certainty which was mentioned in the first chapter as a characteristic mark of mystical writings. A more detailed examination of such states would take us too far into fields which we must not explore now. Enough has, I hope, been said to indicate how a knowledge of the psychology of normal thinking can help us to an understanding of such conditions.

The predominant use of concrete imagery, which we have seen to be so characteristic of Julian's writing, is found very commonly (but by no means universally), in the thinking processes of mystics. It is characteristic of the type of mind most sharply opposed to the logical and mathematical, which thinks mainly in words. The person with the logical-mathematical kind of mind is inclined to call the imaginal mind primitive or infantile. Thinking in concrete images has certainly its own peculiar pitfalls. There is, for example, the danger of passing from a perceived loose analogy between two things to a tacit assumption of their identity. An image which serves well for the illustration of an abstract thought becomes a danger if new facts about the object of the thought are deduced from the properties of the image. Examples of such misuse of imaginal illustrations abound in the loose thinking of both popular theology and psychology. The word subliminal, for example, was coined for mental processes which seemed not to appear in consciousness. The word, of course, means "below the threshold," and suggests the image of a threshold beneath which something is buried. An improper use of the illustration was made as soon as people began to attacha different metaphorical meaning to the "below," and inferred that what was below the threshold was in some ethical respect inferior to what was present in consciousness.

While such dangers are ever present to the thought of the imaginal thinker, there are others to which he is less exposed than the thinker in words. He is, for example, generally more clearly conscious of the inadequacy of his means of expression. Julian, seeing God in a point, was not likely to be misled into thinking that she had obtained an adequate expression of the immanence of God. The religious philosopher, on the other hand, who has obtained a conception of the Absolute by the manipulation of thoughts expressed in words (as in the Hegelian dialectic), is less inclined to be modest about the adequacy of his formulae.

One result of the predominance of imagery in Julian's thinking is the concreteness of the objects of her devotion. We may take, as an example, the rhapsody on the blood of Jesus at the end of the Fourth Revelation. "Behold and see!" she exclaims, "the precious plenty of His dearworthy blood descended down into Hell and burst her bands and delivered all that were there which belonged to the Court of Heaven. The precious plenty of His dearworthy blood overfloweth all Earth, and is ready to wash all creatures of sin, which be of good-will, have been, and shall be. The precious plenty of His dearworthy blood ascended up into Heaven to the blessed body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and there is in Him, bleeding and praying for us to the Father,—and is, and shall be as long as it needeth;—and ever shall be as long as it needeth. And evermore it floweth in all Heavens enjoying the salvation of all mankind, that are there, and shall be—fulfilling the number that faileth."⁶ Here it is to the blood of Christ, a concrete imaginable thing, that she gives the emotional significance which to a theological mind would appear properly to belong to the notion (unimaginable and expressed inadequately in words), of Christ's Atonement. We are reminded of the devotion of St. Francis to the Christmas crib as a pictorial representation of the mystery of the Nativity. Consideration of the differences between the kind of thinking which goes on in different types of mind—one of the most striking and significant discoveries of the empirical psychology of the end of the last century—should prepare us to view with understanding the highly concrete devotions which have grown up in Roman piety which seem often to the uncomprehending intellectual mind to savour of idolatry.

The worst that the intellectually disposed can think of Julian's imaginal thinking is that it is childlike. But what are we to think of the content of her terribly vivid visions of the crucifixion? The spirit in which she broods over the sufferings of Jesus on the Cross is one with which we modems are strangely out of sympathy. We do not hesitate to call it morbid. We no longer wish to think of such things as death and misery, but prefer to saturate our mindswith wholesome ideas of health and beauty. The agonising Christ on the roadside crucifix shocks us by its cruel emotional contradiction to the beauty of the sunlit Tirolese mountain and valley in which it is set. We love living too well to wish to be reminded of death at every turn.

But it may be doubted whether our rejection of "morbidity" is entirely a gain. Death, failure, and misery become no less real because we have lost our feeling of reality about them. We may "healthy-mindedly" refuse to face the fact, but fact it remains, that the end of all our earthly struggles, hopes, and loves is death and bodily decay. We have attained "healthy-mindedness" by thrusting these facts out of the region of conscious recognition. In the rare moments of realisation when they force themselves into consciousness they are an unresolved terror before which we quail until we can again attain confidence by the redirection of our energy towards the business of living. Julian's method of dealing with the ultimate horror of existence was the opposite of this. She saturated her mind with pictures of this side of life, trying not to banish the morbid from consciousness but rather to attain the fullest possible consciousness of it, with the object of developing an attitude towards existence which should include it but in which it should be robbed of its power to terrify. This she succeeded in doing. If we do not believe in Julian's religion we shall probably say that she attained mental harmony by the construction of a delusional system. But at least we must admit that she did attain a harmony, and a harmony which was stable because it included all the facts; while the harmony of "healthy-mindedness" is essentially unstable because it refuses to face a wide range of facts, which, as life advances, it becomes more difficult and finally impossible to continue to ignore.

Such a complete view of the universe as is contained in a religion like that of Julian is also attained by those who face the facts of pain, desolation, and hopelessness, and who find them so to predominate that any belief in a benevolent God appears to them to be impossible. Thus a modem philosopher writes: "Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day."⁷ It is true that such a view of the universe leads to a despairing resignation instead of to the hope of Lady Julian, but both are alike in their "morbidity"-—in their fearless facing of unpleasant facts—and both are equally far removed from the shallow cheerfulness which results from the repressions of "healthy-mindedness."

In a later chapter I shall try to demonstrate that there is a further purpose in this close affective touch with suffering. This purpose is that it may take the place, in the life of the mystic, of the pain which the love for other persons brings to one whose affections have remained in the world. The love which seeks the sky may too easily be lost in the self. Christ in agony on the Cross is the object calling out in sympathetic pain all the love of Julian, thus saving her from the dangers of self-love.

It is probably true also that the sufferings of Christ, on which Julian's mind dwelt, themselves served to strengthen the bond of her love for Him. There is a primitive element in the sex instinct which finds itself attracted by the pain, physical or mental, of the beloved. Even this element is made to serve, by devotion to Christ's Passion, a useful purpose in the building up of Julian's religious sentiment. Sympathetic pain, which is the sharing of the pain of a loved one, strengthens love as no other relationship can. From the psychopathological side, it is no more a really effective criticism of religious devotion of this kind to say that it is sadism, than to say that other forms of devotion are disguised sexuality. All the elements in our instinctive make-up can be used and transmuted for the ends of the religious sentiment, and the more perfectly God-directed is a person's character, the more certain it is that they will be so used.

One must not omit to notice, also, her diabolical visitations. These were two in number: the first when the Fiend set him on her throat while she was sleeping on the night following the first fifteen revelations; the other the noise of mocking jangling after the Sixteenth Revelation. It is customary amongst writers on this subject to apologise for the entry of such elements in mystical revelations and to judge the worth of a religious mystic by the smallness of such pathological elements. I prefer to regard such phenomena as integral parts of the mystical processes, as little pathological as the formation of sediment in the process of maturing good wine. In any case, such terms as pathological appear to be abusive epithets which do not at all help towards understanding any psychological fact.

Let us consider the forces we may suppose to be at work in mysticism on the human side to see if this study supplies us with any better understanding of the diabolical element in mystical experience. The mechanism suggested by modern psychological knowledge is that of primitive instincts evolved for primitive biological ends—the ego instincts for the preservation of the individual in a largely hostile environment, the herd instincts for welding him into communities and so preserving the existence of social groups, and the sex and parental instincts for securing the continuance of the race. We see how, in the mystic's purgation each of these instincts is denied its natural outlet so that its energymay be given wholly to the religious sentiment. Julian fasted and probably practised other austerities so that her desires might be detached from her own earthly comfort and be directed entirely towards God. She lived the life of a celibate and solitary, so that neither her love for husband or children nor even her desire for human intercourse of a less intimate kind might distract her from an undivided love of God. But, since the material from which her mysticism grew was human nature with instinctive desires craving their natural biological end, these suppressed elements in her mental make-up (particularly when control was weakened by illness) tended to break through their restraint and to exhibit themselves in their simple and natural forms. These forms were to her evil because they were opposed to the supernatural redirection of her instinctive energies which was dominant in her character. Thus, primitive sexual desire remained a suppressed but not destroyed element in her psyche, and expressed itself in the vision of the young man who set him on her throat and thrust near her face a visage which was long and wondrous lean. The other elements—his red hair, his paws, and his malicious grin—which made this vision a horrible one—may be regarded as the reaction of her "higher" nature against the primitive and suppressed desires which were obtruding into her consciousness. Similarly, we may regard the noise of mockery at gabbled prayers as the expression of that part of her own nature which remained in revolt against her subjugation to the demands of the exclusive love of God. The mechanism of this visitation may well have been the same as that of the compulsions to blasphemous speech and acts which have often been the torment of persons of saintly life.

Instead of regarding these diabolical visitations as in themselves evidences of something unhealthy in the mysticism of those in whose lives they are found, we may consider that they show the clear-sightedness with which the mystic recognises the character of the impulses surging up from his suppressed instincts. It is an unhealthy symptom when such impulses are not recognised in their true character; when, for example, an impulse of primitive eroticism, instead of appearing as a diabolical visitation, undergoes a merely sentimental transformation into an apparently religious experience. Such transformation is, for example, probably to be found in the stories (which offended the good sense of William James) of nuns whose spiritual experiences seem to have contained amatory embraces and expressions of personal preferences of Jesus Christ for themselves.⁸ It seems reasonable to suppose that the same mental events would have led to some other (perhaps diabolical) experiences in persons more alive to their real source. Diabolical visitations, then, can be regarded as the occasional activity of parts of the whole mental make-up which have been rejected by a mind dominated by the desire for the exclusive love of God. They are diabolical, not because they are evil in themselves (though indeed they may be), but because they arerejected, and are thus evil from the point of view of the mystic. Their 'occurrence is no measure of the unhealthiness of Julian's mysticism; rather they are a natural by-product of the whole mystical process.

Notes

¹Revelations of Divine Love, ed. Grace Warrack (London: Methuen and Co., 1901). P. 22.

² Ibid.

³ P. 33.

⁴Inquiries into Human Faculty, by Galton; see also Remembering and Forgetting, by Professor T. H. Pear (London, 1922).

⁵ It is probable, for example, that the difference between the nominalists and the conceptualists in the seventeenth and eighteenth senturies was essentially the difference between predominantly visual and predominantly verbal thinkers.

⁶ P. 30.

⁷ "The Free Man's Worship," by the Hon. Bertrand Russell, reprinted in Philosophical Essays (London, 1910), p. 70.

⁸The Varieties of Religious Experience, chapter on "The Value of Saintliness."