Julian of Norwich

Mystic or Visionary?

Kevin Magill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134236985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century woman who at the age of thirty had a series of vivid visions centred around the crucified Christ. Twenty years later, while living as an anchoress in a church, she is believed to have set out these visions in a text called the Showing of Love.

Going against the current trend to place Julian in the category of mystic - a classification which defines her visions as deeply private, psychological events - this book sets Julian's thinking in the context of a visionary project used to instruct the Christian community.

Drawing on recent developments in philosophy that debate the objectivity and rationality of vision and perception, Kevin J. Magill gives full attention to the depth and richness of the visual language and modes of perception in the Showing of Love. In particular, the book focuses on the ways in which Julian presented her vision to the Christian society around her, demonstrating the educative potential of interaction between the 'isolated' anchoress and the wider community.

Challenging Julian's identification as a mystic and solitary female writer, this book argues that Julian engaged in a variety of educative methods – oral, visual, conversational, mnemonic, alliterative – that extend the usefulness of her text.

1
Understanding Julian’s Showing of Love as visionary theology

This chapter will be the first stage towards detailing the reasons for studying Julian in language that is not burdened by presuppositions concerning the mystics and the mystical. It is worth emphasizing that allocating something as ‘mystical’ is not erroneous in itself. Rather, in what follows, the term will be set aside to avoid interpreting Julian through unquestioned characteristics of what is mystical and what it is to be a mystic. In not implementing characteristics common to the mystics, a case can be made for finding alternative terms of reference when considering Julian’s aims and execution of her visionary project. The alternative terms of reference are not themselves new, as evidenced in Watson’s use of labels such as ‘vernacular theology’ and ‘pastoral care’ when referring to late medieval spiritual writing in English. However, the turn to alternative terms of reference does mark a new start in the scholarly study of the mysticism genre. Watson redefines the mystical life as a creative experiment using vernacular language as a pastoral medium for reaching a wider Christian audience. Following Watson’s innovative approach to English vernacular theology, this chapter offers a set of observations necessary for reconsidering and understanding Julian’s theology as visionary.

Mystical experience is a leading category of mysticism scholarship of which one needs to be constantly wary. When mysticism is defined as an experience that differs in some way from states of normal consciousness, a series of suppositions concerning experience generally accompany the definition. Therefore, questions concerning the cognitive faculty that receives such an experience and the content or the veracity of experience have become features of recent discussions of mysticism.¹ As a consequence of the shift in scholarly discussion towards cognition, content and veracity, the unwary reader can happily conclude that inquiring about such matters is a true reflection of activities in which mystics engaged. Questions restricted to the character, origin and veracity of a certain type of experience, a so-called mystical experience, over-determine how the relationship between God and humankind is conceived. That is to say, the concept of mystical experience is loaded with a series of assumptions concerning how human beings come to know God, and what is known of such a God.

In what follows, I will show that talk about ‘knowing’ God in the context of mystical experience confuses epistemological concepts of philosophical interest with the devotional concepts of closeness to God, seeing God and the love of God. Although Julian never doubts that a sight of God is saved for the life after death, what is revealed to her as a lesson of love, in a vision of Christ’s Passion, is of edificatory importance in this life. The epistemological claims of the vision, what Julian calls ‘goode wille and trewe menynge’, presuppose a level of devotion.² The vision, the sight of Christ’s suffering and joy, offers Julian an exposition of a Christian life lived through suffering and joy. The theological import of the vision, its edificatory goal, is the knowledge that in this life Julian is constantly faced with divinity’s loving gaze, whether or not she is certain of this.

The temptation to fix Julian in the company of mystics by other routes must also be resisted. Assumptions concerning mystics and mystical experience tend to colour increasingly sophisticated attempts to secure Julian’s mystical membership. Efforts to present Julian’s vision as mystical that rely on a shift from the concrete and visible to the abstract and invisible repeat assumptions concerning the character and nature of the mystical as ineffable, pure and imageless.³ Advocates of this approach appear to be searching for an inner ‘mystical’ quality in the vision, discarding the more concrete visual husk in the process. The first part of this chapter will demonstrate that what has been assigned traditionally to opposing areas of the visual and the conceptual is, in fact, one with the process of vision itself. This is not to suggest that a conflation of the visual and the conceptual means that Julian sees the unseeable. Rather, it focuses attention on two central features of Julian’s teaching. First, Julian is engaging in a visual transmission of the vision she receives – she is not constructing a progressive ascent towards abstraction and away from the visual. In Julian’s theology, matters that are generally assumed to be beyond the visual are meditated upon, critiqued and unified in a visual medium. Second, the primary focus of Julian’s vision is Christ’s loving act of salvation and redemption in the Crucifixion. It is the detail, shape, colour and movement of this spectacle that informs and then revises Julian’s theology. Reference to this image in Showing of Love is constant, notwithstanding the changes to Christ’s countenance from suffering to joy, darkness to light and brokenness to wholeness. It is worth remembering that Julian is not shown a vision of God, whatever that would mean, but a revelation of God’s love in the Passion of Christ.

The education of the senses

The separation of the visual or sensational from the conceptual has a long history.⁴ Since early Greek thought, the bodily senses have aroused suspicion. How the bodily senses reported objects in the world and how the bodily senses were related to the human soul and transcendent realities were considerable matters of debate. Certain areas of this debate were given a Christian form in the Middle Ages. Thus, speculative theologians constructed cosmological and psychological systems to account for God’s relationship to the world and the part or capacity of the human being that apprehends God.⁵ In such systems, it is assumed that the material world, including the body and bodily senses, is categorically opposed to a spiritual, incorporeal God. As a consequence, progress towards God is charted exclusively in the faculties of the human soul in separation from the bodily senses. A necessary part of this chapter, therefore, will be an account of some of these ideas concerning the perceptual acuity of the soul and its relationship to the embodied human being. I will make reference to three thinkers who profoundly shaped the intellectual environment of the Middle Ages and ideas concerning the primacy of the soul, the relationship of the soul to the bodily senses and the education of the senses (bodily and spiritual). The three thinkers are Plato, Aristotle and Augustine. All three devoted some time to considering the role of the senses, especially vision, in the pursuit of truth, beauty, knowledge and God.⁶

Plato and his student Aristotle occupy different ends of the scale concerning the senses. Plato’s philosophy can be regarded as a paradigm of otherworldly, pure Forms to which the bodily senses are an obstacle. The bodily senses tend to have an instrumental use for Plato: they are the instruments through which the external world is perceived with the mind. For Aristotle, by contrast, the soul is embodied in the activity of seeing itself. The soul of sight is the activity of seeing, according to Aristotle, in the same way that cutting defines the activity or function of an axe. For Aristotle, the soul is the presence or ability to do things that are characteristic of living beings.⁷ In the theology of Augustine, there is a combination of the metaphysics of Plato and the biological approach of Aristotle. For Augustine, bodily vision and the vision of the mind operate as a fruitful metaphor for one another. The act of visual perception, initiated by the viewer, requires the concentration and selective focus intentio of the human soul.⁸ The selective focus of the soul has its moral corollary in the objects that the viewer finds either attractive or repugnant. For Augustine, the affinity of the viewer’s adaptable affections to the qualities of objects delighted in is a reflection of inner order. The bodily senses are only considered an obstacle where the object of attention, that which attracts and holds the senses, is morally deficient. However, Augustine’s treatment of the bodily senses in relation to the perceptual acuity of the soul is not always consistent. Indeed, Augustine’s inconsistency is due in part to his admission that the subject is extremely difficult.⁹

Plato and Aristotle share Augustine’s concern for the object of the senses and the moral consequences for the viewer. The pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of virtue, or the Good, are intricately related in their philosophical thinking. It is precisely this point that makes the inclusion of these thinkers valid in a study of Julian’s vision. For Julian, as for Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, what is looked at and the way something is looked at carries bodily and spiritual consequences. The role of the senses, especially vision, is inextricably linked to the moral condition of the human being. The senses, therefore, must be educated as a part of human moral improvement.

Before demonstrating the method and means of educating the senses in Julian’s vision, I will briefly turn to some ideas from Rudolf Arnheim’s influential studies.¹⁰ Arnheim’s relevance is twofold. First, he has a concern for the visual and its role in determining human action and identity. He bases this concern upon the premise that visual activity is central to an individual’s ability to learn about the principal components of the world in which they live.¹¹ Second, processes that are usually assigned to cognition (rational organization, collation and categorization of sense data), he reassigns to the act of visual perception itself. Arnheim is convinced that the dominance of cognitive processes over the sensory, according to which the bodily senses give a distorted view of the world, is virtually complete. A result of this dominance is an unquestioned acceptance of a mental picture of the world as the only one we can trust. In other words, thinking and sensing are sharply distinguishable events. In a pedagogic context, therefore, the visual operates as a superficial starting point before abstract, propositional learning can begin.

Arnheim’s concern to reposition the senses resonates in the need to reconsider Julian outside the category ‘mystic’. Where Julian continues to be considered a mystic, there is limited possibility for studying the visual and edificatory character of her vision. The category ‘mystical’, like the cognitive categories, limits the role of the bodily senses. What is mystical is not presented to the senses.¹² The senses are locked in the bodily existence of the human condition, a condition that must be transcended according to normative mystical values. Julian’s theological model is more modest. Her understanding of the human condition is fixed in the doctrine of the Incarnation. Julian never suggests that the human condition must be superseded in some heroic spiritual act. The human condition is redeemed but not overcome in Julian’s theological programme. The work of redemption is precisely what Julian is shown in a vision centred on Christ’s Passion.

So, if it is a mistake to define Julian as a mystic, it follows that it is a mistake to assume that the visual is assigned the same superficial role in her theology as it is in the mystical models being rejected. Julian lived in a rich visual environment. Julian is acutely aware of the visual’s capacity to engage the emotions, imagination, belief and creativity.¹³ For Arnheim, too, the expansion of the visual beyond the passive role of data collection is a matter of signal importance:

We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses. Concept is divorced from percept, and thought moves among abstractions. Our eyes have been reduced to instruments with which to identify and to measure; hence we suffer a paucity of ideas that can be expressed in images and an inadequacy to discover meaning in what we see.¹⁴

The separation Arnheim is referring to is founded upon the assumption that the senses are the passive collectors of raw sensory data for cognitive interpretation. What is sensory, therefore, still requires a thinking apparatus to decide what is seen. The separation in the perceptual process explains Arnheim’s description of a breakdown in our ability to express the world in images, which has the effect of an inability to see meaningfully. As human beings, then, we have our minds to thank for the fact that we can make perceptual sense of the world. After all, the senses report a distant object as small, when we know that, close at hand, the same object is not the size it appears at a distance, and it does not change size. To some degree, the senses threaten to confuse a correct, mental, picture of the world.¹⁵ For Arnheim, however, the senses ‘think’.¹⁶ The senses are not passive, but assume a level of activity that is creative and not merely functional:

Far from being a mechanical recording of sensory elements, vision proved to be a truly creative apprehension of reality – imaginative, inventive, shrewd and beautiful. It became apparent that the qualities that dignify the thinker and the artist distinguish all performances of the mind […] All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is a...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Julian’s Showing of Love as visionary theology
• 2 The anchoress and her community
• 3 Imagery, literacy and audience
• 4 The redemptive body and the redemption of vision
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index