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Julian of Norwich‟s Feminized God and the Divine Sophia

Beautiful Mercies in Times of Turbulence

The divinity portrayed in Julian of Norwich‟s Revelations of Divine Love is deeply

maternal. Her master was not the livid Yahweh of the Old Testament who had rained wrathful

judgment on the Israelites or the stern medieval God whose displeasure toward the errant world

had manifested itself in suffering and the Black Death. Hers was a deity of love in whom the work

of salvation cancelled out traditional perceptions of holy damnation. Interestingly enough, the

Russian Symbolist movement of the late 1800s to early 1900s drew on a messianic figure similar to

the God of Julian of Norwich in the sense that it was a markedly feminine and infinitely gracious

answer to the upheaval rattling a pre-revolutionary, fin-de-siècle nation. The following paper

explores the feminine spirituality in Revelations of Divine Love and Russian Symbolist

consciousness as a means of weathering the uncertainty of the times in which these modes of

thought came into being.

The most conspicuous attribute of Julian of Norwich‟s God is his role as mother. In

Chapter 52 of Revelations of Divine Love, Julian refers to God as being maternal as well as

paternal—“God rejoiceth that He is our Father, and God rejoiceth that He is our Mother” (75).

Again in Chapter 62, God is described as the “very Father and very Mother of Nature” (93).

Although Julian does make specific references to the Virgin Mary, the boundaries differentiating

God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Mother remain blurred throughout much of the processes of

joyful salvation in the text. If God‟s children supplicate themselves to their “dearworthy Mother,

(…) He shall besprinkle [them] in His precious blood” (Julian of Norwich 94). Julian alternates

with such fluidity between the “Very Mother, Jesus” and the “[f]air and sweet Heavenly Mother”

(89) that it is difficult to determine whether she is referring separately to Christ and the Virgin or

to a God who is simultaneously father, mother, and son. The aspect of the mother, however, is
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interspersed throughout the text with such deliberate repetitiveness that it ultimately surfaces as

the most robust of these three.

God‟s motherhood is all the more accentuated by the emotional physicality and

mercifulness of his nature. Julian describes with great vividness Christ‟s sacrifice on the cross,

where through the blood and torment of the Son is made manifest the vastness of God‟s love for

mankind. “For the pains was a noble, worshipful deed done in a time by the working of love: but

Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending” (Julian of Norwich 31). Under this

God of love, sin was not the root of damnation. Rather, sin took on the role of a sorrowful but

acceptable path upon which God was pleased to lead his children to spiritual maturity. Its way

was to teach believers the basest depths of the human soul and imbue it with the humility and

goodness that would unite it with Christ‟s perfection. As would a mother in her ever-patient

tolerance and forgiveness of her children‟s faults and failings, God nestles his people in his arms

and nurtures them as if birthing them into this glorious state. “All shall be well: and thou shalt see,

thyself, that all manner of things shall be well. (…) Thus I understood that all His blessed

children which be come out of Him by Nature shall be brought again into Him by Grace” (Julian

of Norwich 95).

While a much more palpable woman than Julian‟s God, the Divine Sophia extolled in

the poetry of the Russian Symbolists touches on themes of feminine salvation seen in Revelations

of Divine Love. Poet and mystic theologian Vladimir Solovyov laid the groundwork for the

Russian Symbolist ideal of the Divine Sophia. Sophia, who made her first appearance in

Solovyov‟s poem entitled “Three Encounters,” is a woman of mysterious allure, queenly in her

magnificence, beauty, and compassionate wisdom. Sophia is the light that leads the human soul

blissfully forward into an exotic and spiritual realm, bringing to earth the eternal love of a higher

plain to which mankind must constantly aspire. True to the Symbolist belief that reality was
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greater than the scope of logic and emotion (Von Mohrenschildt 8), Sophia is delineated as a

whirlwind of brilliant color whose significance is often placed tantalizingly beyond one‟s grasp,

an entity of positive outcomes shrouded in a veil of multifaceted meaning.

[S]he interacts on multiple levels with reality in all its forms. We might say that

she is a tension, the energy that binds and transforms through the binding itself,

so that reality is altered—made better, truer, more beautiful—by her very

participation in all its parts. (…) She is both one and many, both divine and

human (…). (Kornblatt 8)

Solovyov‟s followers carried on the image of Sophia‟s beauteous if perplexing

multiplicity. Aleksandr Blok—one of the most notable contributors to the Symbolist movement—

waxed religiously reverential of her presence and the benevolent gifts she would bring, though he

not only renamed her the Lady Beautiful but also balanced his admiration with the doubts and

ironies of the mortal mind.

The majestic, Eternal She!

High above, on the cornice moldings,

Smiles, fables, and dreams run free.

Holy One—how kindly, those candles!

How consoling, the light of Thy brow!

Not a word, not a whisper… I tremble,

But believe: Thou art Gracious—Thou. (Blok 4)

Both Solovyov‟s Divine Sophia and Blok‟s Lady Beautiful were a medium of deliverance

from the apprehension characterizing the turn of an age. Russia at the time of the Symbolists was

rife with false Messiahs, strange prophets, and social unrest. After the disquieting Decembrist

Revolt of 1825, the disastrous emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and the political revolutions of
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the early 1900s, the intelligentsia in the country instinctively sensed an impending wave of

possibly catastrophic proportions. The Divine Sophia was their way of expanding on the Russian

concepts of eternal femininity and perpetually blessed womanhood as the fountain of all good

things. Thus, Blok‟s relationship with the Lady Beautiful eventually surpassed its dreamlike early

stages and burst into a state of excruciating awareness. He reinvented the Lady Beautiful as Russia

itself—a forgiving and kind mother headed toward definitive splendor bought by purifying

anguish. Soon after, the initiation of the Soviet government threw literary masters such as Boris

Pasternak into that very misery, which he, too, among many others, would overcome with the

loving help of the eternal feminine typified in Doctor Zhivago.

When Julian of Norwich recorded her revelations in 1373, the Europe she beheld was

one still reeling from the decimation of the deadly pestilence of 1347-1351—a material

counterpart to the psychological terrors present in late 19th to early 20th century Russia. During

the reign of the pestilence, analogies were drawn between the Black Death and the plagues

unleashed on Exodus-era Egypt after their Pharaoh refused to release the Israelites into freedom.

Everyday life roiled with the anxiety of infection, the sorrow of bereavement, and the seeming

reality of God‟s displeasure. Julian was likely aware of the fact that the pious terror which ran

rampant with the Black Death had been of little if any benefit in solving the quandaries of a

stricken society. Her God was an alternative to the angry Father of dominant medieval

theology—a breath of motherly understanding and hope which promised an exceedingly humane

tunnel out of darkness and despair and back into the light.
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Works Cited

Blok, Aleksandr. “Songs of the Lady Beautiful.” Trans. Robin Kemball. Russian Review 17.1

(1958): 56-59. JSTOR. Web. 5 November 2010.

Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Trans. Grace Warrack. Michigan: Christian

Classics Ethereal Library, 2002.

Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. “On Laughter and Vladimir Solov‟ev‟s „Three Encounters.‟” Slavic

Review 57.3 (1998): 563-584. JSTOR. Web. 4 November 2010.

Von Mohrenschildt, D.S. “The Russian Symbolist Movement.” PMLA 53.4 (1938): 1193-1209.

JSTOR. Web. 9 November 2010.