A long footnote to a lecture on Julian of Norwich's mysticism
"Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Tradition" was given as a lecture to University of Maine Honors Program students in March 2004.
I was invited to provide a brief two-hour introduction to Western mysticism, for a second time. This year I was asked to use Julian of
Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love as the exemplary text. I had argued at some length to be allowed to use Julian rather than
Hildegaard of Bingen. The teaching committee had been intent on using a text by a female author, and one professor had pressed for
Hildegaard because he had written articles on her art. My only reason for preferring Julian, which did not seem to make any impression
on the committee, was that Julian describes full-blown unitary mystical experiences, while Hildegaard does not report any unitary
experience, at least that I could find, but instead reports strange, intense visions, which are different. The unitary experience is central to
the understanding of mystical literature and philosophy they asked me to explain. I had the impression that the committee overrode the
professor in deference to the fact that I was the lecturer and should choose my own text from their suggestions.
The lecture had two parts. In the first part, I explained, as I have to similar groups many times, categories and characteristics of mystical
experience. The categories are based on Arthur Clements' analysis in Poetry of Contemplation and on the writings of W.T. Stace, W.H.
Auden and Evelyn Underhill. The second part of the lecture was the paper posted at www.dwildepress.net/critica, illustrating the
categories and characteristics of mystical experience with passages from Revelations of Divine Love. It is not a groundbreaking statement,
but a serviceable, reliable basic reading in this framework. The lead Honors professor told me afterward that the two-part approach had
worked very well, and seemed genuinely pleased by the performance.
During the lecture, the vast majority of students paid no attention whatsoever. Laptop computers were open on desks all the way up to
the rafters of the lecture hall, and few eyes beyond the third or fourth row from the front met mine during the two hours. Some people in
the front rows, mostly professors but also some students, paid close attention. Some thoughtful and interesting comments emerged during
the question period at the end.
But there also was a somewhat discouraging exchange. A young woman dressed in the uniform certain female college students have been
wearing since about the late 1970s - baggy, grungy dark sweater, dirty jeans, running shoes, disheveled hair - in a mildly challenging voice
asked why Julian's writings waited so many years before being published. I said I did not know the history, and mentioned again, as I had
at the outset of the lecture, that I was an expert in neither Julian's writings nor 15th century Christian literature. The young woman
nonetheless pressed for an answer to her history question, and so I mentioned a few facts I did know about Julian's life and suggested that
answering the question might make a useful research project. She dismissed this with an air bordering on disgust, saying she had already
been to the library and could not find out. The implication of her tone was clearly that I had failed to provide any useful information at
all.
I later learned that in one of the study sections, the discussion of Julian had revolved around the question of why her writings had been
suppressed. This has several implications. One is that, although the students and instructor had little historical knowledge of Julian, they
proceeded on the assumption that since her writings had not been immediately published, they must have been suppressed. They also
assumed that the reason publication was suppressed was that Julian was a woman. In addition, while the course syllabus called for readings
and a lecture on mysticism, the study section focused on a point of history. In other words, for the study section, the important point
involved, not Julian's mysticism, but her gender and her political situation - the important point about a mystical writer is how she might
have been politically or socially oppressed. Since I offered no information on this subject, the young woman became disgusted with my
failure to answer her question. To her, I had missed the point completely.
To me, this is an example of the erosion and destruction of the study of literature. The purpose of literature is not to disclose and comment
on social injustice, although it of course sometimes does that. The purpose of literature is first, to entertain, and second, to awaken the
human spirit. But in the last roughly 30 years, those purposes have been whittled at and obscured. In their place is the false and severely
limiting notion that the purpose of literature is to serve social causes, and that the reason for reading - some people explicitly believe the
only legitimate reason - is to engage in social activism.
This is wildly destructive. Literature reveals and examines human life, all human life. And descriptions of mystical experience reveal the
origins of our moral sensibilities. Those moral sensibilities underlie, and drive, the preoccupation with gender, social and race issues that are
being taught as the only legitimate subjects for literary discussion. Early in the lecture, I had made this point about the moral implications
of mystical experience when I talked about Plato's cave as the central figure in Western mystical literature and philosophy. But that point
was no doubt generally lost that day, because the proponents of race, class and gender as the primary - and only - legitimate topics for
thediscussion of literature, history and philosophy have totally lost track of the fact that their moral frameworks have origins; and
moreover, they seem in some cases not even to be aware that they operate from intensely moral frames of reference. They appear to
have no interest in where their morality of race, class and gender originates. They seem only to want to enforce it.
As I was packing up my computer and notes, another young woman came to the desk, thanked me for the lecture, and then asked with a
pleasant but knowing South Asian smile: "But why do we talk about these ancient things when there are so many important issues
happening all around us today?" I said I had tried to suggest those reasons early in the lecture, then said that those who do not understand
the past are doomed to repeat it, thinking this platitude might be as close as I could come to saying something she might remember and
someday, long from that day, understand.
I was not asked back the next year to give the lecture. Although I do not know, I imagine this was because the general judgment was that
I had spoken on the wrong topic - on mysticism rather than on the oppression of women in late medieval Britain.
- Dana Wilde