Julian of Norwich 2

stressed by serious illness. But on the other hand, it is an
occurrence that has been described and scrutinized many times
before by people of powerful intellect who concluded - like Julian
- that it is a vision of an actual reality. Their certainty is
characteristic of statements by mystics about the nature of their
experience.
In Chapter 7 (p. 50) similarly, she says that "all the time that God
was showing in spiritual sight what I have just described, the
bodily sight of the plentiful bleeding from Christ's head
remained." So while there is a Corporeal vision to the eyes, there's
another vision of the spiritual or inward sight, which we're calling
by Augustine's term the "Imaginary." In Chapter 4 (at p. 46), Julian
sees Mary the mother of Jesus "spiritually":

Then he brought our blessed Lady into my mind. I saw her
spiritually in bodily likeness, a meek and simple maid, young -
little more than a child … God also showed me part of the wisdom
and truth of her soul, so that I understood with what reverence she
beheld her God and Maker … And this wisdom and faithfulness …
moved her to say very humbly to Gabriel, 'Behold the handmaid of
the Lord.' With this sight I really understood that she is greater in
worthiness and grace than all that God made below her.

Now there are a couple of things to notice about this. One is that
the vision is in her mind, not before her eyes - the distinction is
very clear, and this accords with Augustine's description and also
the sense of clarity that characteristically goes with mystical
experience. What I mean by this is that these visions can be
compared facetiously to drug experiences with some actual
accuracy; but on the other hand, drug experiences are to most
people simply confusing and chaotic, and distinctly unreal. But the
mystical vision is deeply clarifying; and this is what Stace means
when he summarizes one characteristic of the experience as "a
sense of objectivity or reality." There are visions which occur to
the outer eye, and visions which occur to the inner eye.
The inner eye "sees" an image, sort of in the way you can right at
this moment picture what you had for lunch today, but something
else occurs in Julian's vision, and that is that she apprehends, or
understands, or has an intense experience of, several moral virtues
which she names meekness, simplicity, wisdom, faithfulness,
humility and "the truth of [Mary's] soul." In other words, through
the "Imaginary" vision, Julian finds herself in direct contact -
having direct experience - of Mary's moral being. In the mystical
tradition, the virtues are real things, not just abstractions, and
when Julian says she "understands" Mary's various virtues, she is
telling us that she has had direct contact with that moral reality.
Although she does not say so explicitly in this passage, Julian is
applying specific words to the virtues and signaling that the vision
of Mary arises through "words formed in my understanding" (or
Augustine's Imaginary vision). It is "seen in the mind," in other
words, and not only visualized but "understood." The experience
transcends "seeing," and involves understanding. Understanding is
the experience.
And to keep the discussion connected to my earlier remarks, we
understand this again as an example of a mystic in Underhill's
Illuminative stage - Julian is in a sense having a dialogue with a
divinity, even though in the Christian tradition Mary is not a
goddess but rather an agent of the divine. Julian's "understanding"
of Mary's moral qualities is a sign of intensely heightened increase
in the energy of her intuitional self.
Next in Chapter 5, p. 47, an image appears which makes a
transitional figure for this discussion:

In this vision he also showed me a little thing, the size of a
hazel-nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I
looked at it with my mind's eye and thought, 'What can this be?'
And the answer came to me, 'It is all that is made.' I wondered
how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly
have disappeared. And the answer in my mind was, 'It lasts and
will last forever because God loves it; and everything exists in the
same way by the love of God.' In this little thing I saw three
properties: the first is that God made it, the second is that God
loves it, and the third is that God cares for it. But what the maker,
carer and lover really is to me, I cannot tell; for until I become one
substance with him, I can never have complete rest or true
happiness; that is to say, until I am so bound to him that there is no
created thing between my God and me.

This is an Imaginary vision which presents an image to her inner
eye - "a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand,
and it was as round as a ball," and it develops immediately in
words "formed in her understanding."
But this vision presses even further than the image of Mary and
the understanding of her moral virtues. For Julian introduces it by
saying it was, ultimately, a "spiritual vision" - at p. 47 the chapter
begins: "our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar
love. I saw that for us he is everything that we find good and
comforting." This is a direct expression of Julian's unique (for her
time) theme of God as personal, protective and sympathetic rather
than stern and vengeful. And for the purposes of this discussion,
the note here is that her immediate way of speaking of the "vision"
is in abstract moral terms - she "sees" God's love, goodness and
comforting qualities. The inner, Imaginary vision may carry visual
images but it is moreover an understanding and an experience of
moral reality which becomes spiritual, in her terms.
To this point the passages we've looked at show examples of
Corporeal and Imaginary visions which signal Julian's state of
Illumination, or in a sense her apprehension and proximity to the
Absolute, or the divine. But this vision, which is still "Imaginary"
in the sense that she visualizes a small round object, points to the
mystical sense of unity in ways the visions of Mary and of the
suffering Jesus do not. Roundness is a perennial, cross-cultural
symbol of wholeness and indeed unity. The image here symbolizes
Julian's growing apprehension that the universe is not a collection
of many different things, but one unified whole. This is the essence
of mystical understanding: Everything is related, and indeed the
same. Julian's revelation about this unity is that it is derived from
God, and that all is unified in God's love. This sensibility is not
unique to Julian. One of the widely recurrent mystical themes is
that love binds the universe together. Julian's unique Christian
view of this, for her time in the 14th century, is that God's love is
kindly and embracing, rather than vengeful toward those who
mistakenly try to split off from the whole or view themselves
(blindly) as separate.
In this vision Julian becomes intensely aware of the unity of
everything, but she does not experience mystical union, in Stace's
sense. Indeed she says that she can never have happiness until she
"become[s] one substance with him." She is still separate - but she
sees, or understands the spiritual reality.
The same sensibility arises in Chapter 11 in another startling
image which looks a lot like a development of the hazel-nut ball
image. At p. 58 she says: "I saw God in an instant, that is to say, in
my understanding, and in seeing this I saw that he is everything."
Here I'll give an alternate translation because the translator of our