Mother, Son, and Holy Ghost: Femininity and the Divine in Julian of Norwich

Lying close to death in May 1373, Julian of Norwich interpreted her illness in a manner that seems puzzling and even demented to the minds of modern people, receiving the affliction as an answer to prayer. In her only known work, Revelations of Divine Love, the English anchoress tells us that she was thirty years old at this time and had been beseeching God since her youth to inflict sickness upon her so that through suffering her devotion might be increased. 1 Specifically, Julian asked that she would be brought close to death so that she would know what was essential in life. 2 This knowledge came in the form of sixteen ‘showings’—visions of Christ on the cross that appeared to her when she was near death.

If this Julian, the woman we read of in Revelations of Divine Love, strikes us as perplexing, the ‘historical Julian’ is a positive enigma. Her life of seclusion is remarkable, since medieval writings were typically produced in the context of religious communities. Yet if Julian is distinguished from other writers of her period by virtue of her calling as an anchoress, she is likewise distinguished from her fellow anchorites by virtue of her calling as a writer. Benedictine Ward offers a pious explanation for the scarcity of solitary writers in her introduction to the Ancrene Wisse:

Not only were the first solitaries not necessarily monks or even particularly ‘churchy’ people, they were very often both inarticulate and uneducated. For this reason there has been very little indeed in the way of literature coming from the hermitage: hidden in the quiver of God’s love, they have a work so absorbing that they have neither time nor ability to write about it. It is better, they would say, to have salvation than to write about it.3

Julian apparently did consider herself ‘inarticulate and uneducated’, for she introduces Revelations of Divine Love as the work of a ‘simple, unlettered creature’.4 However, some scholars maintain that based on Julian’s command of theology and rhetoric, it is likely that she was acquainted with English translations of several devotional masters, in addition to the Latin Vulgate and perhaps even Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.

Such speculations attempt to compensate for the lack of extant records of Julian’s circumstances prior to the writing of Revelations of Divine Love.5 Indeed, the life of this great Christian writer remains almost wholly mysterious. Yet it does seem clear that Julian’s vision occurred before she became an anchoress; in fact, Ward even suggests that the first version of the Revelations may have been written prior to Julian’s enclosure in solitude. But in any case it is certain that Julian wrote the final, significantly elongated version of the work after she had assumed the life of a hermit, an accomplishment that places her among the most prolific anchorite writers.

Although numerous people wrote about mystical visions in the high medieval period, few write with as original and independent a voice as Julian. Many of the visions recorded in this period now appear suspect on account of the precise correspondence between their imagery and the theological teachings peculiar to their context. For example, in the case of one mystic who speaks of having seen Christ entering Mary’s womb ‘like light through a glass’, the content of the vision corresponds rather too neatly with then-current theological teachings concerning the virgin birth.6 It is speculated that such accounts may have been edited by scribes to suit the doctrinal expectations of the day.

Given this tendency among mystical documents of the late medieval period, Julian’s originality is particularly striking. Even more remarkable are the distinctly feminine insights pervading her work. These insights radically subvert the philosophical assumptions of fourteenth century Europe, yet remain within the framework of Christian orthodoxy. Of primary interest is Julian’s classic discussion of Jesus as Mother.

Maternal images of the divine are not unique to Julian. There are a small number of biblical allusions to the concept—for example, God’s pledge recorded by the prophet Isaiah, ‘As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you’7, or Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem in the Gospel of Matthew, ‘How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings!’8. Also, several descriptions of God as mother appear in the writings of the Church Fathers. Clement of Alexandria refers to ‘the Father’s loving breasts’ and ‘the milk of the Father’, while Irenaeus portrays the Holy Spirit as feminine.9

Following the patristics, however, there came a lengthy interval during which conventional pictures of God ‘The Father’ monopolized theological discourse. Not until the twelfth century do we again find descriptions of God as Mother, this time in the writings of monks belonging to the Benedictine and Cistercian orders.10 Anselm of Canterbury, a Benedictine, rejected the notion of a maternal deity in his theological treatise the Monologion, but radically compromised on this point in matters of personal piety. In one prayer he depicts both the Apostle Paul and Christ as ‘mothers to the soul’:

You [Paul] are among Christians like a nurse who not only cares for her children but also gives birth to them a second time by the solicitude of her marvelous love.… But you, Jesus, good lord, are you not also a mother? Are you not that mother who, like a hen, collects her chickens under her wings? Truly, master, you are a mother. For what others have conceived and given birth to, they have received from you….You are the author, others are the ministers. It is then you, above all, Lord God, who are mother.11

Anselm died in 1109, at the dawn of a century that would witness an unprecedented flowering of maternal imagery in devotional writing. His prayers, such as this one, were likely a key source of inspiration to the Cistercians who followed after him.

We find depictions of God as Mother in the writings of various Cistercian monks, such as William of St. Thierry, Guerric of Igny, and Aelred of Rievaulx; yet most extreme in this respect was undoubtedly Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard obsesses on one aspect of motherhood in particular—not conception, gestation, or birth, but nursing. ‘Do not let the roughness of life frighten your tender years’, he admonishes in one letter, ‘If you feel the stings of temptation…suck not so much the wounds as the breasts of the Crucified…He will be your mother, and you will be his son’.12 To Bernard, breasts signify the outpouring of divine love and affection. This emotional emphasis is symptomatic of a tendency then ascendant in the Catholic Church, that of ‘affective’ devotion. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that the spike in medieval use of maternal imagery, exemplified by writers like Bernard, is associated ‘with the rise, from the eleventh century on, of a lyrical, emotional piety that focuses increasingly on the humanity of Christ’.13

Although her theological sophistication sets her apart from it, Julian’s thinking is clearly influenced by this trend towards affective piety. Her work is associated with a peculiar interest in the spiritual and emotional side of grace. For her, salvation is not a matter of a theology that can be grasped with the intellect—an emphasis not shared by the reigning scholastic tradition of the day. ‘We cannot profit by reason alone’, she writes, ‘unless we have equally mercy and love’.14 Interestingly, it is specifically the work of Christ our Mother that makes possible this balance between reason and affectivity. Christ expresses the creative care of God through a labor of mercy and love when, in the Incarnation, he gives birth to endless life. Summing up her visions of Christ fifteen years after the fact, Julian reflected, ‘understand it well: love was his meaning’. This love is expressed in the redemption of human frailty, in the opportunity to know Christ’s power at work to ensure that ‘all his dear children are born and brought to birth’.15

Julian insists that God is far from a detached, unconcerned deity like Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’, but rather a creator whose love for us mirrors the intimate love of a mother for her child. For although Julian is not, as some have claimed, undertaking to refashion the Trinity on the basis of Father-Mother-Holy Spirit (Christ remains the Son of God in her account, though he is given maternal qualities), she is depicting a type of mystical encounter, a way of understanding God’s love, that defies our traditional androcentric categories of the divine.

Julian’s concept of motherhood involves both the socially constructed role of being a mother and the biological facts of mothering. Her use of the unconventional metaphor of Jesus as Mother contrasts intriguingly with the way she employs the conventional metaphor of the Church as Mother. ‘Now I yield to my mother the Holy Church as a simple child ought’ she writes in chapter forty-nine of Revelations of Divine Love, alluding to the authority of the church. However, when in chapter forty-eight she claims ‘Mercy is a compassionate property which belongs to the motherhood [of God] in tender love’, she clearly has other aspects of motherhood in mind; for, as she will go on to claim in chapter fifty-one, ‘Mercy works: keeping, suffering, quickening, and healing, and all this is of the tenderness of love’.16

Julian uses not only the social ideal of the ‘merciful mother’ to portray Christ’s compassion; she also invokes the physical process of mothering, depicting Christ as ‘a true mother’ who ‘carries us within him in love and travail, until the full time’. Alexandra Barratt claims that for Julian ‘Christ is literally born as the biological son of Mary so that metaphorically he can be our true mother, carrying us…going through labor, giving birth and surpassing human mothers in feeding us’.17 Two aspects of this ‘biological event’ are magnified in Julian’s account: gestation and nursing.

Some of the imagery Julian employs with respect to gestation and childbirth may be opaque to modern readers, as it is based upon medieval medical understanding. There is, for example, the passage on mercy quoted above, in which Julian speaks of ‘quickening’—that is, imparting life to an embryo, a distinctly pre-modern biological concept. Similarly, Julian elsewhere writes that Christ our mother ‘reforms, restores, and unites us to his substance’. ‘We may read this as an ethical or moral metaphor’ writes Barratt, ‘but for Julian to re-form, restore, and unify the parts of the body into a visible whole could have been an entirely literal account of what was thought to go on in the mother’s womb’.18 For example, in The Knowing of Woman’s Kind, a Middle English translation of a French gynecological and obstetrical treatise, the author writes of one of the functions of the uterus being to ‘form’ the child.

The Knowing of Woman’s Kind additionally suggests criteria for selecting a suitable nurse, placing supreme importance on the nurse’s exclusive devotion to the care of her charge. Julian likens Christ’s constant readiness to help us to that of such a nurse: ‘The sweet gracious hands of our mother are ready and diligently about us: for he in all this working uses the office of a kind nurse and has nothing to do but attend to the salvation of his child’.19

Julian’s writings on Christ our Mother, with their strong overtones of affective piety, may be taken as the classic expression of a movement that had been gaining momentum in Catholic devotion for hundreds of years. Yet her work is also remarkably innovative, even startling, considered within the intellectual context of the late middle ages. Writing in the fourteenth century, Julian belonged to a theological milieu that would inevitably have born the mark of the great thirteenth century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who, adopting Aristotle’s ontology, took woman to play a necessary but subordinate role in the drama of humanity. ‘Woman is naturally subject to man’, he asserts, ‘because in man, the discretion of reason predominates’.20 The meaning of womankind is for him tied to the reproduction of human nature without partaking in the faculty most characteristic of that nature—namely, the use of reason.

I have suggested that the distinctiveness of Julian’s work results in part from her feminine interpretation of the divine, as evidenced by her characterization of Jesus as Mother. But how did her interpretation of humanity differ from the dominant male constructions, such as that of Aquinas? One critical difference is Julian’s emphasis on sensuality. Julian affirms the bodily aspect of human experience in a manner alien to the masculine thinking of her day. On her view, the problem we face as humans is that of reconciling the sensual and spiritual aspects of our being. The essential or spiritual self, our ‘substance’, is at all times united with God, while the corporeal, sensual self, that which gives form to this substance, serves as the locus of independence. This thinking leads to a ‘theme of doubleness’ in the Revelations of Divine Love—the self as comprised of two wills, with sin arising from the bifurcation of substance and sensuality.

Julian’s solution to the problem of sin therefore involves a work of reunion. She does not urge us to free ourselves from embodiment and progress toward an ethereal ‘good’, to divorce substance from form. Instead she proclaims, ‘this lack God will restore and fill by the operation of mercy and grace, plentifully flowing into us from his own natural goodness’.21 Her vision subverts an entire tradition in Western philosophy, from Plato onwards. It suggests a holistic view of the human person, one that refuses to privilege reason as the exclusive means of access to the transcendent. Grace Jantzen explains:

Rather than practicing ascetical techniques which will free the higher self, the godly will from the sensuality, Julian looks for a reintegration of that fragmented sensuality into the substance. Spirituality does not mean leaving part of the self behind, but bringing the whole of the self, sensuality included, into the unity of the love of God in which she believes we are enfolded.22

Julian’s positive view of the body follows from her belief that God brings wholeness to the human person. She is at pains to see humanity’s sensuality as well as substance redeemed through the saving work of Christ. This soteriological holism is the final component of Julian’s distinctive spiritual vision, which portrays divinity, humanity, and the relationship between the two with laudable originality and optimism. Not surprisingly, Revelations of Divine Love is today increasingly used as an object of study and a source of spiritual inspiration.