Julian of Norwich is known and loved for the lines revealed to her by God, “All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” But beyond the comfort of this understandably uplifting phrase, what are theological and philosophical insights we might learn from this anonymous medieval Christian mystic and anchoress? Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss the historical context of Julian of Norwich, her life and vocation as an anchoress, and the story of near-death experience and subsequent mystical visions that led her to write such theologically rich and uplifting words—which comprise the earliest known writing by a woman in English. Together they have an extended discussion of a rather marvelous segment from the Long Text of the Revelation of Divine Love, sections 46-58, and in particular we look at the revelation Julian herself was most puzzled and mystified by during her own life, discovering understanding only decades after having received the vision: Section 51, the Parable of the Lord and the Servant. Image Credit: adapted from The Lives of the Saints Gallus, Magnus, Otmar and Wiboradain German, 1451–60. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 602, p. 303. Show Notes “All shall be well” as an introduction to Julian for many Rowan Williams on Julian as one of the greatest English language theologians Who was Julian? How she thinks and what we can draw from her for the purposes of theological insight and spiritual maturity? Found Julian in a medieval survey course and she has remained with him What caught you in Julian? Why did it stick with you? She synthesizes a visionary experience with deep theological reflection: subtle and sophisticated theologian; simplicity, earnestness, and virtuosity So give us a little bit of her biography. I know that we know precious little, but what do we know? And maybe give us some of the historical context of her? Couple of manuscripts of her writing; the short and the long text Margery Kempe visits Julian to make a request in The Book of Margery Kempe (https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/staley-the-book-of-margery-kempe) Anchoress and is attached to a church in Norwich; 1340s first and second waves of the Black Death; mass loss and trauma The text is less focused on herself outside of the visions that happen on what she believes is her death bed. What is the spiritual occupation of an anchoress or anchorite? Anchorite as isolated spiritual calling different from monks and hermits; life is in this one cell Do you know what motivations are there for that spiritual vocation in the church? Why would anyone do this? Anchorite ceremonies are like funeral rites; a death to the world, living only for prayer The showings - 16 visions; prays for mind of the passion, bodily sickness, and three wounds (contrition, compassion, and willful longing for God) The suffering of Christ and his wounds and their popularity in medieval devotional practice 16 showings that are intertwined and vary in form (visual, auditory, bodily, mental) The last showing, which she ponders for the rest of her life. What are some of the core philosophical, theological, or other concepts that are most salient for understanding Julian? Julian understands herself as beholden to the church, its teachings, and its tradition - wrestling with these and her visions. A Vision Shown to a Devout Woman by Julian (https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02547-6.html) A Revelation of Love by Julian (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/261039/revelations-of-divine-love-by-julian-of-norwich-translated-by-elizabeth-spearing-introduction-and-notes-by-a-c-spearing/) Augustinian tradition is appealed to—his teachings on evil and sin, Christian Platonism Julian as a Trinitarian thinker What would you say about her understanding of love? Later visions in life and praying for many years for understanding —Love is THE thing for Julian, it’s the whole thing. Love as joyful communion but also a passionate willingness to sacrifice for one’s beloved A Short Play: The Lord and the Servant (from the long text) Chapter 51 of the Long Text Red herrings in Julian; the medieval trope of enumerating The perplexing vision of the servant in the hole ? Reconciling the goodness of the world with sin; dealing with what she is seeing from God and what the church teaches about sin—wresting with the details The Fall, the “Felix Culpa” or the “Happy Fault,” and the servant in the hole God looks without blame and that complicates church teaching on sin; layers in the narrative, God, humanity, Christ Being drawn into the puzzling and the pondering experienced by Julian inspired by her writing; finding comfort in a loving God that we cannot see clearly How God sees “Our life and our being are in God.” Chapter 49 of Julian’s Showings “She’s saying, sorry sin, good creatures are good creatures and their goodness qua creatures of God is kept safe and whole in God, regardless of what their concrete existential messed-upness might be.” Julian says: “Jesus is all who shall be saved. And all who shall be saved are Jesus and all through God's love along with the obedience, humility and patience and other virtues which pertain to us.” Totus Christi: Jesus as both head and body of the church Julian says: “All people who shall be saved while we are in this world have in us a marvelous mixture of both weal and woe. We have in us our risen Lord Jesus. We have in us the misery of the harm of Adam's falling and dying. We are steadfastly protected by Christ, and by the touch of His grace, we are raised into sure trust of salvation. And by Adam's fall, our perceptions are so shattered in various ways, by sins and by different sufferings, that we are so darkened and blinded that we can hardly find any comfort. But inwardly, we wait for God and trust faithfully that we shall receive mercy and grace, for this is God's own operation within us. And in His goodness, He opens the eye of our understanding, and by this we gain sight, sometimes more, sometimes less, according to the ability that God gives us to receive it.” The servant out of the hole; the mixture of weal and woe within us “She says at some point, ‘Peace and love are always at work in us, but we are not always in peace and love.’” Even when we don’t feel God, Julian wants us to know the comfort that he is there. Julian writes: “There neither can, nor shall be anything at all between God and man's soul. He wants us to know that the noblest thing he ever made is humankind and its supreme essence and highest virtue is the blessed soul of Christ. And furthermore, he wants us to know that his precious soul was beautifully bound to him in the making. With a knot which is so subtle and so strong that it is joined into God, and in this joining, it is made eternally holy. … Furthermore, he wants us to know that all the souls which will be eternally saved in heaven are bound and united in this union and made holy in this holiness.” The Beauty of the Middle English it was originally written in: “one-ing” “Christ's union with God is our union with God by virtue of Christ's union with us.” The meaning of atonement for Julian of Norwich The soul as an intricately woven knot; one knot that is interwoven with those of others by and through God—atonement, the one-ing of humans and God; being tied together and pulled in by the incarnation “It’s Julian reminding me that my blindness doesn’t have the final say, doesn’t actually say anything about what’s real and true and how God sees.” Production Notes This podcast featured Ryan McAnnally-Linz Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa Hosted by Evan Rosa Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Macie Bridge A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
Julian of Norwich is known and loved for the lines revealed to her by God, “All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” But beyond the comfort of this understandably uplifting phrase, what are theological and philosophical insights we might learn from this anonymous medieval Christian mystic and anchoress?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss the historical context of Julian of Norwich, her life and vocation as an anchoress, and the story of near-death experience and subsequent mystical visions that led her to write such theologically rich and uplifting words—which comprise the earliest known writing by a woman in English. Together they have an extended discussion of a rather marvelous segment from the Long Text of the Revelation of Divine Love, sections 46-58, and in particular we look at the revelation Julian herself was most puzzled and mystified by during her own life, discovering understanding only decades after having received the vision: Section 51, the Parable of the Lord and the Servant.
Image Credit: adapted from The Lives of the Saints Gallus, Magnus, Otmar and Wiboradain German, 1451–60. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 602, p. 303.
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Do you want to know what the Lord meant? That love was what he meant. Who showed this to you? Love. What did he show? Why did he show it to you? For love. So love is, love is the whole thing. God is love. God acts out of love. We exist because of love. We are made for love. For love. My sense is that for Julian, love is something like joyful communion, but also a kind of passionate willingness to sacrifice for the good of your beloved.
And that is particularly what Julian is. God's love for us in Christ, looks like.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
Maybe you've heard those comforting words before. They're the words of God, spoken to a medieval anchoress, who we now know as Julian of Norwich, recounted in her divine revelations of love. And for us anxious denizens of this world of technological warfare and suspicion and all manner of unwell things, looking out at the 21st century through the tiny window of our phones, those are comforting words indeed.
But they take on a new meaning when you place them in Julian's time and context. 14th century England, ravaged by plague and war and trauma and death and grieving and crisis. Hell, it's also probably raining. It's like always raining in England. Things look and feel pretty bleak. She too looks out a tiny window onto the world, locked away in the stone walls of her anchorage, with one window for light and food, and given the gift of divine showings or revelations when she appears to be on her deathbed.
It'd be good to move past the near platitudinous or sloganized level of all shall be well to appreciate the entirety of Julian's divine revelations. And to try to understand how to read this mysterious medieval theologian locked away for a life of prayer and reflection in rainy old England. It's like always raining.
So in this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins me to consider how to read Julian of Norwich. Like most episodes in our How to Read series, we cover her life, the primary interpretive concepts operating in her work, and a longer discussion of a key passage. We discuss the historical context of Julian of Norwich, her life and Christian vocation as an anchoress.
And the story of her near death experience and subsequent mystical visions that led her to write such theologically rich and uplifting words, all of which comprise the earliest known writing by a woman in English. Then we have an extended discussion of a rather marvelous segment from the long text of the Divine Revelations.
If you're interested, sections 46 through 58, and in particular, we look at the revelation Julian herself was most puzzled and mystified by during her own life, discovering her own understanding and interpretation of this only decades after having received the vision. It's section 51, the parable of the Lord and the servant.
We'd be delighted, of course, for you to read along, but we quote passages at length as Ryan exposits and explains. And you can find additional resources on Julian of Norwich in the show notes and online. Thanks for listening. Thanks for joining me to talk about Julian of Norwich.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Thanks, Evan. This is one of my favorite things to talk about.
So I'm really happy to be here.
Evan Rosa: Amazing. I'm so glad that you picked up Juliana Norwich. I have been a sort of like admirer of hers from afar. Like a lot of people, I became exposed to this really key passage from the divine revelations. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well and left to its own.
It's a slogan. It's a comforting slogan, but it's still a slogan. Clearly there is a lot behind that slogan. And so as part of our occasional series of how to read various figures, I think it's really cool to be diving in a little bit more to who Julian was, how she thinks and what we can draw from her for the purposes of theological insight and spiritual maturity, perhaps.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. I mean, uh, Rowan Williams has said that the Julian might be the greatest, English language theologian ever. And as is often the case, I think Rowan Williams might be right there. She's a phenomenal thinker, but she's also, I mean, just so gripping in her language. Oftentimes what happens is you get little slogans.
So I'm really interested in pushing past those a little bit. And getting to see Julian as a theologian, which is something that my education here at YDS helped me to do. You know, she was assigned in the medieval theology survey course that I took as a master's student. And of all the books that I read in class, this was the one that has stuck with me the most.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. What would you say caught you in Julian? Why did it stick with you?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: There's a kind of adventurousness to the way she thinks. There's the way that she synthesizes a kind of visionary experience with. really intense, deep theological reflection. And somehow this 14th century woman who didn't have access to formal education, as far as we can tell, certainly not formal theological education at like a university level or anything like that.
She somehow is able to interact with the theological tradition in just astonishingly sophisticated and subtle ways that And when you start to see it is, it's just a marvel and that sort of the combination of a sort of simplicity. Ernestness and virtuosity at the same time was it's gripping. I, I, I can never really let go of Julianne, even though I went years after that, without, you know, writing anything on her or anything like that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So give us a little bit of her biography. I know that we know precious little, but what do we know? And maybe give us some of the historical context of her life and time.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. So a quick note on sources. Most of what we're working with is her own writing. which survived in a very small number of manuscripts and none of which for the longer version of her book is from the same century as her.
But there are a couple of other witnesses. There are some people giving bequests to someone named Julian, who's an anchoress who attached to a church in Norwich during her lifetime and another famous Medieval English mystic Marjorie Kemp writes about a visit with Julian when Julian would have been 70 ish years old as this kind of wise figure because Marjorie's having mystical experiences and is, basically comes to Julian as like an expert on discernment of spirits and recounts their conversation.
So we, we have a strong sense that she's there, that she's known by Julian by this is the, you know, 14, 15 or so, but she was born in 1343. She tells us that in 1373, she was 30 and a half years old in May. So she may have been born end of 1342. What that means is she's born in Norwich or around it right around the time of the black death in its kind of first and second waves in England, massive population loss.
Economic disruption, social dislocation, trauma, for sure. Yeah. In the world around her. And there are a couple more instances of the plague over the course of her life. We know basically nothing about the first 30 and a half years of her life. She doesn't really tell us anything. She seems actually to want in her work to minimize the focus on herself and her own particular story.
She has to tell what happened in these crucial couple of days, where. She sees that God shows her a bunch of stuff, but she doesn't really want to dwell on herself apart from that. So that's, that's basically it. She's 30 and a half. She has these visions and when she's on what she thinks is her deathbed, she recovers.
And then she lives at least another 40 years. And in that time writes two versions of this experience.
Evan Rosa: Can you give us a little more on what it is to be an anchoress and tied to a church in that way? And like, what's the spiritual occupation there?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. So you can think of an anchorite as like a hermit in that it's a solitary life.
But unlike a hermit in that it's not, hermits are generally kind of like out in the wilderness. We think of like St. Anthony in Egypt or something like that. So it's not in a monastic community that distinguishes you from being a monk or a nun. It's not like one of the mendicant friars kind of moving around in ministry, also communal, but it's not like a hermit because you're in a you're attached to a church.
And the basic idea is you take a set of vows. And then enter a cell, one ish room, maybe with a courtyard that then you don't leave until you die. So the rest of your life is kind of in this room with minimal interaction with the outside world and all of it coming through a window, either the window into the church where you're attached to so that you can participate in services, receive the Eucharist, or there's generally a window out onto the street.
where, for instance, Marjorie Kemp may have sat and had her conversations with Julian.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Do you know what motivations are there for that spiritual vocation in the church? Why would anyone do this?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You know, I don't know a ton about it. I have gathered in reading about Julian that a lot of the ceremonies for becoming an anchorite are like a funeral mass.
So it's supposed to, at some level, enact the sort of death to the world. That is the kind of there and say Paul's description of baptism and things like that, but it's a more radical version of that and acting it while still alive, but saying that the kind of the world and its breadth and all of its cares is I'm dead to it.
And I live kind of only to this. vocation of prayer.
Evan Rosa: So tell us a little bit about what happens when she's 30, like just the, you said a series of divine showings that she calls them showings or revelations, but what's the nature of that? Can you give us a summary of like, what would her experience have been as she describes it?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: The story goes like this. She, as a young woman had prayed for three, gifts. She prays for what she calls mind of the passion, which is like a more immediate understanding and knowing participation in the passion of Jesus for bodily sickness, which is a strange thing to pray for, but she prays that she would get so sick that she'd think she would die.
And She has some reasons for this as a young woman, but she becomes kind of suspicious in the text. She says, I prayed for that. If it was God's will, I didn't pray for it without reservation. Okay. And then she prays for what she calls three wounds, which are these kinds of spiritual affective things, contrition.
So The kind of remorse that comes with repentance, compassion, primarily compassion for Jesus. And then the third of these wounds is willful longing for God. So a kind of intense desire for God.
Evan Rosa: I mean, what, what strikes me just In hearing those is the first two are don't sound like gifts and, and, and the final three don't sound like wounds.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Right. Yep. So here, and we're talking a little bit about how to read Julian. You've got to read Julian carefully because there's going to be stuff that comes up here and it's just really distant from our way of thinking. There's a
Evan Rosa: mindset and perspective and a set of values. I think that is distant from the modern understanding
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: by the 14th century, this sort of.
Piety was widespread across Western Europe. There's a lot of focus on the human Jesus and particularly his suffering as objects of devotion. And so Julian seems to be kind of normal in participating in that. And her showings actually kind of flip some of it around. She gets more or less what she wants, but in not quite the way that she would have understood it.
It does something different to her than she thought it would do. So she's prayed these things. We don't know how long ago, we don't know if they were constantly on her mind or if they had passed, but then she gets really sick. She's 30 and a half and she and everybody around her thinks that she's dying.
A priest comes to give her the last rites. It's that serious. She's losing feeling in most of her body, effectively kind of paralyzed from the chest down. And as this is happening, he's Old prayers come to mind and she reprays them a little bit. And then, then the priest puts a crucifix in front of her face and says, look, you know, look on your Lord.
Julianne recounts that she, she wanted to look up. She wanted to look towards heaven, but then she thought maybe it'll be easier to look straight ahead. Maybe I can kind of endure it longer. That way. And then she comes down and her gaze lands on the crucifix and the figure of the crucified Jesus. And shortly thereafter the lighting changes because everything goes black, except there's just normal light on the crucifix.
And then she starts to see blood trickle down from the crown of thorns. And this is the start of a series of she'll eventually count them out of 16 different showings from God. Most of which are, they're not. Kind of easy, discreet little things. It's not like scene one, scene two, scene three, they're all internally complex.
They have different facets and they come in different forms. She'll enumerate all these different forms, bodily site or in my mind's eye or verbal. Right. And the Lord starts to speak to her. Yeah. And sometimes it seems like that's Jesus on the cross speaking. Sometimes it's not clear kind of where the voice is coming from.
She doesn't seem to think of it as like an audible in your ear voice, but a mental voice. And she's got this really complex set of experiences that last for hours. And she is interacting with God and hearing and seeing these things, then they stop. We're on now something like the second day. She kind of comes to herself again, and a religious person, she says, comes, so probably a monk, and she says, you know, it's, I've been raving.
I thought, I thought the crucifix in front of me was bleeding. And this person becomes really. Solemn. He treats it very seriously. You know, like God has said something to you and Julian is suddenly stricken by repentance for having written this off as raving in retrospect. Yeah. And She goes to sleep that night and then has, she doesn't count this as one of the showings, but she, she recounts it as a different sort of vision.
She starts to smell smoke and it seems to her that there is a demon with its, with its hands around her throat and she appeals to God and gets through it via that appeal to God. The comfort of Christ and kind of, she had seen in one of her visions that the fiend is overcome. So she, she knows this is to be true.
And it's that reliance on her vision to get through this temptation. Then it's like a seal on the whole thing and it lets her be confident in it. And then the next day she, she receives the last of the 16 visions and then kind of the whole thing wraps up. And then sometime after that, she becomes an anchor, right?
And she spends the rest of her life
Evan Rosa: thinking about this. So it's in light of these showings that she makes the commitment to become an anchoress. That's
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: our best
Evan Rosa: guess. Okay. I mean, it helps to understand how someone might be motivated in that direction.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It doesn't seem like she was an anchorite when this happened.
And some people have suggested maybe the short version of her text was actually like the testimony she gave in her application basically to become an anchorite. Oh, interesting.
Evan Rosa: So What are some of the core philosophical, theological, or other concepts that are most salient for understanding Julian?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So, it's really important to have in mind that Julian sees herself as an ordinary member of the church and beholden to the church's teaching.
Some of the things she sees don't obviously fit with that teaching as she has received it. And so one of the best ways to look at her work, which eventually comes in these two forms, there's a short version of the text, which sometimes gets called a vision shown to a devout woman. And though a longer version, that's as much longer, much more theologically worked out.
And I'm convinced is the later version of this text that we'll call a revelation of love and particularly a revelation of love. We can see as in large part, a wrestling with the tensions between church teaching as she's understood it and the love of God as it has been shown to her in these visions and her best work to try to synthesize these sort of things.
Evan Rosa: That's interesting.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: She is appealing to In large part, to like the Augustinian tradition, as it's the main theological stream and in Latin Christianity. So a lot of Augustinian concepts are helpful for understanding Julian, um, Augustin is famous for his, privation account of evil. Evil doesn't have any ontological standing on its own.
It's privation of a good. This is a more broadly Christian Platonist idea that Julian affirms it's is thinking along those lines. And that's one of the key resources she's going to use as she tries to sort through questions about sin and evil. It's really important to have. to understand Julian as a Trinitarian thinker.
And in particular, she says early on that Christ, the Trinity is intended. The classic rule again, which in the West goes back to Augustine here, is that the works of the Trinity are inseparable or undivided. There's this kind of scholastic slogan, opera trinitatis indivisa sunt, right? So, which is to say that it's not like the spirit just kind of like goes out and does some of the stuff that God does and the son does some other stuff and the father does some stuff and you put it all together and you get the work of God.
It's that in anything God does with respects to creation, all of the persons of the Trinity are acting. And so Julian has this same idea, which means she can tie what she sees about Jesus very tightly to her understanding of God.
Evan Rosa: What would you say about her understanding of love?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Well, one thing I would say about it is that's the key to the whole thing.
Yeah. She says it herself. So Julian recounts only two kind of revelations or or analogous interactions with God later in her life. One of them comes about 19 and a half years after the original showings. And that has to do with interpreting one particularly thorny portion. Another is that she keeps trying to pray, like, what does this whole thing mean?
And at the very end of the book, she tells us that 15 or so years later, She receives an understanding and her spiritual understanding, which was this. Do you want to know what the Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed this to you? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you?
For love. So love is, love is the whole thing. God is love. God acts out of love. We exist because of love. We are made for love. But you repeat a word like love that often and it starts to sound almost like gibberish. Like, what does it mean? Right? It's not self evident. My sense is that for Julian, love is something like joyful communion.
But also a kind of passionate willingness to sacrifice for the good of your beloved. And that is particularly what God's love for us in Christ looks like.
Evan Rosa: This seems like a really fitting point to discuss this passage, which you just referenced, this particularly thorny passage. Revelation, which for years after receiving it, she felt like she still did not understand and still longed for a deeper understanding, which she claims she did receive 20 years later, which is the parable of the Lord and the servant.
So I'm wondering if you can queue that up for us.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, so in the short text, Julian leaves something out. I'm, I'm credulous. I'm inclined to think she actually left it out. If you wanted to be a super suspicious reader of Julian, you could say that she made it up after the fact. And that's why it's not in the short text.
I can't, I can't think of Julian as a liar like that. Um, so she leaves something out. In fact, what she leaves out, winds up being the longest chapter in the long text. It's This little short play, basically, that happens. This is kind of different in form than most of the other showings, but not entirely, and the story goes very simply like this.
She sees a Lord seated and a servant before the Lord and the servant then leaps up to do the Lord's bidding and runs maybe hastily and falls into a hole, suffers a bunch of injuries, and because of his position now. down in a hole, can't see the Lord and is distraught over the fact that he doesn't know how the Lord is responding to, is thinking about his plight.
And that's, that's it. That's all she sees at a, at a kind of level. And it's just perplexing to her. She notices early on that the Lord is not angry at the servant. The servant is distressed. The Lord looks on the servant Not with anger, but with compassion and with a resolution to bring the servant back into a better position than the servant was as kind of compensation for the suffering to, to kind of make it so that the suffering is
Evan Rosa: So I think I'll just read a little bit of this and maybe we can like, just like get that context.
Right. So I'm reading from the long version. So this is chapter 51, a long version. There's this bodily likeness of two people, a Lord and a servant. And with this, God gave me spiritual understanding. The Lord sits with dignity in rest and peace. The servant stands waiting reverently in front of his Lord, ready to do his will.
The Lord looks at his servant lovingly and kindly, and he gently sends him to a certain place to do his will. The servant does not just walk but leaps forward and runs in great haste, in loving anxiety to do his lord's will, and he falls immediately into a slough. And is very badly hurt. And then he groans and moans and whales and rides, but he cannot get up or help himself in any way.
And in all this, I saw that his greatest trouble was lack of help for he could not turn his face to look at his loving Lord, who is very close to him, who is the source of all help, but like a man who was weak and foolish for the same, weak and foolish for the time being. He paid attention to his own senses and his misery continued.
And this is how his loving Lord tenderly continued to consider him in two ways. Outwardly, he regarded him gently and kindly, with great sorrow and pity, and this was the first way. The second was more inward, more spiritual, and this was shown when my understanding was led into the Lord. I saw him rejoicing greatly because of the honorable rest and nobility to which he would and must bring his servant through his plentiful grace.
This was the second kind of showing. Then this kind Lord said within himself, Look, look at my beloved servant, what injury and distress he has received in my service. For love of me, yes, and all because his will was good. Is it not reasonable that I should compensate him for his terror and his dread, his hurt and his injury and all his misery?
And not only this, but would it not be proper for me to give a gift that would be better for him and give him more glory than if he had never been injured? Otherwise, it seems to me that I would do him no favor. I saw that given his own greatness and glory, it needs must be that his dear servant whom he loved so much should be truly and blissfully rewarded forever, more than he would have been if he had not fallen.
Yes, and to such an extent that his fall and the misery it caused him should be transformed into great and surpassing glory and eternal bliss. What do we do with this, Ryan?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So, so here's, here's the background we need from Julian's text. She has been wrestling ever since God says those famous lines, all shall be well and all shall be well in all manner of things shall be well with the question of how that can be given the reality of sin and.
the church teaching that some indeed many are damned. And she says that she no answer to the question of, of how to reconcile what she's seeing about the way God looks at sin with what the church teaches about sin other than this parable. And yet this parable is really opaque to her. As I said before, it takes her, there's 19 and a half years or so that she is, wondering about this, working on this book, maybe trying to figure out what happened, you know, what it means for how she should counsel people who come to her for wisdom.
Evan Rosa: And even begging God for an answer.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And, and yeah, just periodically saying, I want to know what was up with that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I mean, she has this articulation at the end of the, in the prior chapter, she says, who can show me and tell me what I need to know if I cannot see it now in you speaking to God.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yes. And that's, that's when she sees the showing, right.
If she asked this question, Uh, I need to get an answer to the question about how, what I'm seeing about God's stance towards sin, which is not blaming, and what the church teaches, which is blame and damnation for many, how do these go together? This is the, this is the thing I need to know. And then she sees this showing and then she still feels like she doesn't really know because it's so opaque.
And she spends all this time wondering, wrestling, asking, and then she gets this instruction almost 20 years later. And she hears, Pay attention to the details. Go back through. And so she rehearses again, in her mind, all of the things. And she notices, where is the Lord sitting? He's sitting on the ground.
What is the servant wearing? He's wearing this plain white tunic. Now it seems like the servant's never gone out to serve before, but the tunic is Shabby, right? It's shabby. It's torn. It's, it's covered in sweat stains.
Evan Rosa: It's as if he's a labor.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It's as if he's a labor who's gone out and labored before, but it looks like he's going out for the first time.
And she starts to see all these details that don't really make sense. And over time, what clicks for her is that the figure of the servant is a multivalent figure. Yeah. So. If you're a Christian and you hear a story about somebody in the position of the servant falling, well, like what's our, our big resonance with fall is the fall, right?
So the servant falls into a hole that should tip us off. It tips Julian off. Oh, this is talking about the fall. And I kind of asked a question about how God sees sin. So if I see a story where someone's falling, that's gotta be the fall,
Evan Rosa: right? Perhaps one other way to think about A fall is the good Samaritan, which is falling into a ditch and just being hurt, harmed in some way, perhaps unrelated to sin.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's true. You'd wonder about like where, where the robbers and the bandits figure, if that's a main resonance for you there, I think. Plus Julian then goes on and says, you know, I took the servant to be Adam. So she's very clearly, she's reading along these lines. She's saying, this is about the fall. And if you hear a thing like, You know, bringing about a good that's greater than the harm that's gone here, then again, an Augustinian trope in, in Western Christian thought, the Felix culpa, the happy fault comes to mind.
Maybe this is a version of that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And you can see how the effects of being in the hole for the servant in the parable do resemble what we might consider the effects of the fall and not, not being able to see God. basically out of one's wits in some way. All
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: sorts of pain and loneliness. There are noetic intellectual effects, right?
There are all sorts of bad things that come along with this.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And the trouble is, if you read the, if you read the story like this, the servant is Adam and he falls. And then you ask the question, how does God look at it? And Julian sees that God looks without any blame. That just brings her right back to the problem that started this because.
Yeah. Yeah. Like the church says that sin matters, and here we get it being treated as if it doesn't really matter. And here's the thing that kind of ties it all together for Julian. When you look at the servant, you're seeing a multifaceted character. It's Adam, but it's all of us because when God sees one of us, God sees all of us.
And that's crucial. God kind of looks at us. One and sees all looks at all and sees one. mm-Hmm. . And so all of us are in this story. Yep. But you're also seeing Christ. You're seeing Christ both incarnate and his humanity. Mm-Hmm. . And in certain facets, Christ as the eternal son of God.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And when Julian starts to look at it this way and say, so you've got kind of compressed into one little narrative story.
All of these things, because some aspects make sense of it being Christ, how the servant goes out willfully, happily, right? Eagerly to do this work, how the Lord doesn't look with blame and how Julian doesn't see any particular fault in the Lord falling because You can look at this and say, Oh, it's in this respect, it's not Adam falling into sin.
It is, she says, the sun falling into the slade of the Virgin's womb. Christ becoming human is kind of like a fall. So you see it in that way. And she starts to layer all these things on top of each other. Honestly, at some level, it just gets even more complicated to try to figure out what's going on here.
What's being said, because You still have a narrative. that it's hard to make any sense of. Yeah. Right. Wait, so is there blame? Is there guilt for sin? How does it work? Are you puzzled?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I mean, it is a puzzling kind of passage. One of the things that I'm interested in is the outward and the inward looking of the Lord, because it seems like there's more to say about who the Lord is in this passage.
You know, we spent a little bit of time identifying Julian's interpretation of that multifaceted servant. But then there's this Lord who she says looks in two different ways. There's this outward appearance of looking gently and kindly with great sorrow and pity and a second, more inward, more spiritual way.
which is a sort of window into a different way of seeing the scenario that God is, or if you, if we were to think of the Lord as the Father.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So the Lord is a relatively stable character in that it's going to signify God. And then particularly insofar as a servant is the eternal son is going to signify the Father.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. It's, I mean, I think, I think the puzzling nature of it, I mean, it's good to be drawn into. the perplexity that Julianne might have felt for so long, worried about this particular parable, what it could mean. And I think that for a lot of people, the very question of this, the problem of hell, the problem of how to square God's loving benevolence with the potential eternal suffering of some, and squaring that is not an easy task.
And so to desire some kind of quick solution, some quick interpretation. It feels like it's just too facile and not fitting. So like being drawn into the perplexity of it is, I think one of the things that I'm taking away from it is to allow the perplexity to linger, even though that she's going to walk through this interpretation that she is going to, it appears to be satisfied with in an important way.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So Julian, I think she says a bunch of times that what the Lord shows her is for everyone, for all Christians. And it's for comfort.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And so there's something wise and right about being drawn into the perplexity, but the end aim of it, as far as Julian understands, is a loving God, lovingly comforting us in the position of those who are in that hole and can't see God clearly.
So that means we have to push past the perplexity a little bit. Because just perplexity is probably not that comforting. So where do you wind up when you kind of, when you push along this? The hinge to me seems to be, Julian has asked how God sees things and the closest thing to an answer here seems to be God sees things in Christ.
So why would Adam and all of us and Christ be one character, one figure? That's just confusing, unless what it's doing is telling us that in God's perspective, which is what Julian has asked about, they're united.
Evan Rosa: Right. And this, this reminds me of something she says just prior to explaining or stating the parable.
It's in number 49 that she sees quite certainly, and I'm quoting, that our eternal support, our dwelling, our life, and our being are all in God. And I wonder if that's operative in. this identification between Christ and Adam, and therefore all of us.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: We have to get into one of the other super thorny things about Julian to really get through that passage because she's touching on her anthropology.
She makes this distinction between our substance and what she calls our sensuality, which is not like our bodies, but is our kind of temporal, historical, bodily. But also psychological soul existence, right? It's, it's us as concrete embodied, living, temporal beings, sensuality. And. The substance she says is always in God and it never, it kind of isn't touched by sin.
And this sounds kind of heterodox, maybe it seems to me that she's saying, sorry, sin, good creatures are good creatures. And the goodness qua creatures of God is kept safe and whole in God, regardless of what their concrete existential messed upness might be. But you do have the problem then of these two falling apart and the big story that she's wrapping up in this example of the Lord and the servant is the story of how Christ in Christ's identification with us, reunites our substance and our sensuality.
So the sort of the, the distension, the gap, the fracture. Between who we are meant to be as good creatures in God and who we have actually been and are actually being and will actually be for our earthly lives is healed in Christ. Precisely by Christ taking on one of these historical existences And living it in perfect unity with God and in loving unity with us.
Evan Rosa: And I need to read another passage again from some of her explication and understanding of the parable about the identification of Christ and all of us. She says, Jesus is all who shall be saved and all who shall be saved are Jesus and all through God's love along with the obedience, humility and patience and other virtues which pertain to us.
And that is just a remarkable thing to say and very bold. But here's another case
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: where, where what she's doing is she's taking a relatively traditional Augustinian theme and doing something phenomenal with it. So the idea of the totus Christus, like Christ being both head and body, both kind of the glorified Lord Jesus, and also the body of the church.
And, and she's just pushing that and saying, think about that for real. That means a deep identification. Christ is you. You are Christ at the most fundamental, truly real level. And any gap that you see. is a misseeing. It's a kind of blindness. It's because you are that servant in that position of not being able to see how things actually look from outside the hole.
Evan Rosa: Right. It's interesting to me that we, I mean, do we see in this parable, the servant ever leaving the hole?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: We don't see the servant leaving the hole. We see the servant out of the hole. So at the very end of the parable, she's been wondering, she's been telling us about all the things that she's learned by looking at all the, at the examples.
And then she says, now the Lord does not sit in a wilderness on earth, but sits in the noblest seat in heaven. So that's saying she's seeing now kind of Now the son does not stand in awe in front of the father like a servant, plainly dressed and partly naked, but he stands immediately before the father, richly dressed in holy munificence, with a crown of inestimable richness on his head, for it was shown that we are his crown.
And that this crown is the Father's joy, the Son's glory, the Holy Ghost's delight, an unending and wonderful bliss to all who are in heaven. Now the Son does not stand before the Father on his left like a laborer, but he sits at his Father's right hand in eternal rest and peace. And she goes on. So we get this vision of Christ Kind of after the whole economy of redemption glorified as he is at the right hand of the father, as the, as the creed puts it with us as his crown and kind of brought us up into this Trinitarian life of God.
And she says elsewhere, the son takes us, brings us up to the father, gives us to the father. And what the father does is give us right back to the son. And so we are Christ's not only by virtue of his buying us with, with his death, she says, but by virtue of the father's having given us to him, you can get maybe some resonances of bridal imagery there, which she uses sometimes.
And so the idea is, yes, there's this communion and Julian sees a glimpse of it. And I think that's where. That's where the great comfort comes in. At that point, we, she stops talking about the indeterminate servant and starts talking about the son. And we have a particular place, which is, has that kind of crown of glory that the son is given.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I'm going to read a little bit more that might draw a little bit on that. She says all people who shall be saved while we are in this world, having us a marvelous mixture of both wheel and woe. Amen. Amen. We have in us our risen Lord Jesus. We have in us the misery of the harm of Adam's falling and dying.
We are steadfastly protected by Christ, and by the touch of his grace, we are raised into sure trust of salvation. And by Adam's fall, our perceptions are so shattered in various ways, by sins and by different sufferings, that we are so darkened and blinded that we can hardly find any comfort. But inwardly, we wait for God and trust faithfully that we shall receive mercy and this is God's own operation within us.
And his, and in his goodness, he opens the eye of our understanding and by this we gain sight sometimes more and sometimes less according to the ability that God gives us to receive it.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. It's, I think a lot of what Julian's doing, a lot of the key to reading Julian well is to see her as glimpsed what's always true and trying to share that glimpse with us with the recognition that we're not always going to be seeing it.
But we can always hold on to the kind of non immediate knowledge that that's the case. We're not always going to feel it. She says at some point, peace and love are always at work in us. But we are not always in peace and love. She's a realist. She recognizes, and I mean, she's lived like 20 years as she's writing this, right?
She's been through times where she's been feeling spiritually dry when she's been sorrowful. She's presumably, I mean, she will have witnessed part of the peasant's revolt, like during this, this intervening time, right? She sees this stuff is not in great shape and that people are not always. connected to God's love for them.
But she wants us to have the comfort that even when we don't feel it, we know it so that we can endure the feeling of woe in that mixture of wheel and woe.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I read another passage that also struck me as both beautiful and difficult to understand. There neither can nor shall be anything at all between God and man's soul.
He wants us to know that the noblest thing he ever made is humankind. And its supreme essence and highest virtue is the blessed soul of Christ. And furthermore, he wants us to know that his precious soul was beautifully bound to him in the making with a knot which is so subtle and so strong. That it is joined into God and in this joining, it is made eternally holy.
Furthermore, he wants us to know that all the souls, which will be eternally saved in heaven are bound and united in this union and made holy in this holiness.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Can I, can I drop in the middle English a little bit? Yeah. Cause it's, it's even more beautiful. there. So we've got this at the end of
Evan Rosa: 53.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah.
We've got this image. So she has a sense that Christ is eternally destined for incarnation. So kind of from all eternity, the second person, the Trinity is incarnated to be incarnated. And so when that soul is made in this kind of intricately tied knot of connection to God. Yeah. Right. There's no separating.
The soul of Christ from the second person of the Trinity, which is to say from the being and life of God. Uh, and then she says, so, and furthermore, I don't know how to pronounce middle English. So this is going to, I'm going to be mangling it. I'm sure.
Evan Rosa: Duly noted.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And furthermore, he will, we wit that this dear worthy soul was preciously knit to him in the making.
Which knot is so subtle and so mighty that it is one into God, in which one ing it is made endlessly holy, what we were just talking about. Furthermore, he will we wit that all the souls that shall be saved in heaven without end be knit in this knot and one ed in this one ing and made holy in this holy seed.
Evan Rosa: It is beautiful. And I mean, the word wanting really kind of jumps out to me at the moment, but I think, I think the linguist in you can elucidate some of, some of that. I mean, so when she
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: says he will, we wit.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. That one is an interesting one.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Wit like think, think about the idea of wit or wisdom. Um, this is a Germanic word for knowing.
Yeah. Right. So gone wills. Or wants. Wants. Exactly. that we know that all that these things. Yeah. So the, the idea is you've got this knot that ties the human soul of Christ to God. And then with perfect subtlety, that same knot is tied. So as to tie all of us who shall be saved into that same knot. So Christ's union with God is our union with God by virtue of Christ's union with us.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So. What is the atonement? What is the wanting of humans and God? It just is the kind of extension, the kind of pulling in of all of us to the wanting that's there in the incarnation. And in the humanity of Christ being the humanity of the word of God.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. What do you think about this passage and your study of Julian and where you hope to take that study in the future?
What does this passage mean to you personally?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So I, my devotional life is much more often dry than anything else. I have plenty of periods of. doubt of practical atheism, if not theoretical, right? Um, plenty of time where I'm just living as though God were not, did not care about me. And what reading stuff like this in Julian does for me and why I kind of get goosebumps reading this passage and others like it is It gives me that assurance that the work is not on my side, that the decisive thing is not my faith or my feeling or anything like that, but this loving work that God has done.
And I love the knot image because I'm really bad with knots. And so I can, I can kind of imagine it as being. The sort of thing that I could never undo, right? I could never be, I can never know how to untie a subtle knot. And so there's this kind of the firmness of it and the, it's, yeah, it's Julian.
Reminding me that my blindness doesn't have the final say. It doesn't actually say anything about what's real and true and how God sees.
Evan Rosa: That is comforting indeed. Thanks Ryan, for leading us through some Julian of Norwich.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Thanks for indulging me Evan.
Evan Rosa: World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Ryan McAnally Lenz discussing Julian of Norwich. Production assistance by Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show.
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