Julian of Norwich 1

In the academic world, we are required to inhabit, and indeed
are trapped in, the discourse of analysis. We take a scientific
approach to everything we read, which means we take it apart, we
take everything apart. Julian of Norwich's writings lend
themselves to analysis because she herself, being essentially a
medieval writer, which means steeped in Aristotelian logic,
analyzes. She tries to explain through categories. And I've given
you some analytical categories, and I'm going to give you more
categories to talk about Julian, because that's what we do in
academia.
But I want to make a disclaimer right up front and say that the
process of analysis is essentially antithetical to mystical
experience and mystical literature. Analysis involves taking things
apart. Mysticism is about the unity or wholeness of everything. So
the most meaningful thing I think I can say about Julian is
something I can't really make sense of myself, let alone get you to
understand it in your rational mind. But anyway, it's this: That the
experience of reading Julian's Revelations has always been to me
very similar to the experience of looking at a star: You know
something very powerful is happening, but you don't know exactly
what it is; and you know it's happening inside yourself, but it's
almost impossible to get into focus and even harder to put words
to. It's a sort of illuminated peeling-back feeling, the way you start
to feel when you look at a star steadily for many minutes. It's scary
and moving, somehow.

* * *

But so much for the real experience. The rest of this talk is to
show some examples of what I talked about earlier by looking at
Julian's visions. Two things are of interest: the nature of her
vision, and her understanding of unity. The general aim of these
remarks is to clarify the nature of mystical experience and to give
some sense of how Julian's statement of her experience accords
with the statements of other mystics about the nature of ultimate
reality, as Underhill and Stace summarize them.
You've all read the Revelations of Divine Love, presumably, so
maybe I can generalize to start and say there are three general
mystical themes working in Julian's statement, and they all
involve her experience of unity. She repeats in different ways 1)
that Love unifies; 2) that the Love of God is intensely personal and
protective, sympathetic rather than wrathful and punishing; and 3)
that ultimately Love rectifies wrong or "sin" and remedies wrong
relationships of people to God or reality.
These ideas have a deeply Christian tint, of course, and part of her
purpose in writing is to show how her experience squares with
church teachings. But she also writes explicitly in order to share or
make known her revelations, which is a commonly claimed
purpose among mystical writers: The 13th century Persian mystic
Rumi captures this when he says (in Coleman Barks's translation)
of the experience of mystical union: "No metaphor can say this /
but I can't stop pointing / to the beauty." And in this light, an
interest for us is that the sensibilities themselves are not limited to
Christian teaching or Christian mysticism, but are recognizable in
what amounts to all the mystical traditions of the world. That's a
big generality that is continually debated and that I don't have
time to substantiate now, but Stace and Underhill have made the
case, so we're going on their findings.

The principal reason Julian's statements accord with the
statements of other mystics is that she gets her information
firsthand. That is, she is not speculating metaphysically about
what reality might consist of, but she is reporting what she
experienced.
Like Eunice Baumann-Nelson and Socrates' cave-dweller, Julian
had or was granted intense visions which revealed (cf. the word
"revelation") the true nature of reality to her. She experienced it,
she is not guessing, and she stresses this in different ways, as all
mystics who talk about their experiences do. So from one point of
view, one thing that's interesting is how she came by the
experience, or in other words, the nature of her vision.
At least twice she gives us her analysis of the kinds of visions she
had, in basically the same terms. In Chapter 9, p. 54, she says: "All
this was shown in three ways: by bodily sight, and by words
formed in my understanding, and by spiritual sight." Another
translation gives this sentence as: "All this was shown me in three
ways, in actual vision, in imaginative understanding, and in
spiritual sight." And in Chapter 73, p. 161, she says again: "All the
blessed teaching of the Lord God was shown in three ways: that is
to say, by bodily sight, by words formed in my understanding and
by spiritual sight."
These three kinds of vision correspond pretty closely to the three
kinds of mystical vision described by St. Augustine and further
explained by other Christian writers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas.
Augustine calls the three kinds of vision: Corporeal, Imaginary and
Intellectual. The Corporeal vision is a fact of the seer's senses; the
mystic actually sees with her eyes a visionary form. The
Imaginary vision is a visual image seen in the mind, rather than by
the eyes. And the Intellectual vision is an understanding or
experience that is "fed into the soul by the direct action of God," in
one commentator's words (Clifton Wolters).
Let me just point to examples of each in the Revelations. Maybe
the most striking image she seems to see before her actual eyes is
the image of the disfigured Christ. In Chapter 10, p. 55, of our text,
she says:

I saw with my bodily sight in the face of Christ on the crucifix
which hung before me, which I was looking at continuously, a part
of his Passion: contempt and spitting, dirt and blows, and many
lingering pains, more than I can tell, and frequent changes of color.
And once I saw how half his face, beginning at the ear, was
covered in dry blood until it reached the middle of his face, and
after that the other half was covered in the same way.

The imagery itself is startlingly vivid, but what's of interest to us
is not simply that she saw the image, but that it occurred before
her actual eyes, not just in her mind, and further that she takes it
for "real" - there is no doubt to her about its reality. It is not a
hallucination, and it is also not a physical actuality, but it is
nevertheless a real figure that her eyes perceive. It's what
Augustine and Aquinas refer to as a "Corporeal" vision, and it's a
clear marker of a person in what Evelyn Underhill calls the stage
of "Illumination": It's a "joyous apprehension of the Absolute" in
the form of Jesus, and an ocular vision.
It's easy for us here in the modern, scientific world to dismiss this
as a subjective hallucination brought on by body chemistry heavily