The Order of Julian of Norwich.

“JulianFest” Wisconsin USA 2024

Julian of Norwich and the Problem of Evil: Bodies, the Motherhood of

God and Compassion.

There are two great questions which have occupied the minds of people of many faiths,
cultures and traditions across languages and millennia. The first is “What happens to us
when we die?” and the second is this, “If God is so good and loving and perfect, wanting
the best for the human beings he has created, how is it that evil exists and that we
experience suffering day by day?” It is the second of these questions and how our beloved
Julian might help us tackle it that will occupy us today.

From the outset, let us be clear that this question cannot be properly and fully answered
which is why it has survived with little change ever since the ancient Greeks. We cannot
speak about the problem of evil directly. It is too big. But what we can do is to ask other
questions about who and what God is, who and what we are and how we can help each
other to live with evil in compassionate ways. By asking these perhaps somewhat smaller
but no less profound questions and in a certain way of living we might put ourselves in a
better place from which we may eventually stumble across other questions which draw us
closer to getting to grips with the Problem of Evil itself.

To ask these questions at “Julianfest 2024” is important for two reasons. It overcomes the
absolutism of our time when politicians and church people try to convince us that for every
problem there is a solution, theirs, and all we need to do is adopt it unquestioningly. It is
also central to the Biblical imperative we have as Christians that we be able to give an
account of the hope that is in us. (1 Pet. 3:15) which, it seems to me, is as important as
ever it was.

To do that we must, I think, look at the theologies of the physical human body, the
nurturing nature of God in his motherhood, and what it means for us to show compassion
for each other and ourselves.

The Long Test of Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love, perhaps unsurprisingly, helps us in
this task. We could spend hours discussing the relationship between the Short and the
Long Text and which of the many versions and translations we prefer. It is, of course, a
topic of endless fascination for anyone remotely interested in Julian but that is not to the
point here.

But just to declare my own preference; in what follows I will confine myself to the Long Text
in the revised edition of Grace Warrack’s translation of Revelations, produced by SPCK in
2017. I do so because it is the one I regularly use and because it is cogent, clear and well
set out.

Julian and the Body.

So let us begin with what Julian has to say about human bodies; what they are, what they
do and why they do what they do.

Julian’s understanding of our bodies in relation to suffering and evil is wholly different both
from the classical view she inherited from ancient philosophy and from the medieval
theology that surrounded her. Both disparaged the body as being inherently sinful and
likely to engage in evil because they are gendered. Bodies are sexual. They engage in
sexual acts - and women, it was thought, were especially licentious and had been since
Eve. Or as St Augustine of Hippo put it, I think in Confessions: “nothing casts down the noble
manly mind so much as the vain fondling of women and those bodily contacts which belong to the married
state.”

Women then, simply by being female bodies were a source of sin and evil. If you want to
know why evil exists, look at the nature of women “fast bound “as Wesley said of us all in
another context, “in sin and nature’s night. “

Julian saw this misogyny for what it was, and is, - a social and ideological construct, that is
a lived but false view of the world, worsened by its becoming a main-stream Christian
attitude. On this view the body, all bodies, is not only a source of evil but are themselves
evil. The tarnished body must be rejected in favour of the pure soul. Moreover on this view
the body must always be in conflict with the soul and seeks to destroy it. It is in the end a
gnostic, heretical, idea that rejects the world

Julian does not agree. She saw it as the pernicious nonsense it is. It needed to be tackled
in subtle and no less intellectual ways. That is way, again and again she sets up all sorts of
apparently innocuous traditional theological statements, often in triads, only to utterly
subvert them by feminising them. In this she was far more subtle, indeed far more
subversive than her Lollard counterparts and, perhaps because the inquisitors didn’t
understand what she was up to, escaped the charge of heresy. It is also why her feminism
is still greeted with surprise by some people even today. Her cleverness lasted the test of
time in ways which other more direct sloganising could not possibly have done.

Part of her inversion of traditional theological views of the body was to insist that women
are no more responsible for sin than men. Sin is not sexual, though there may be sexual
acts which are sinful. Indeed, sin is “no-thing”, it has no ontological existence. It is, like the
evil to which it so often gives rise, entirely negative. An absence. There is nothing positive
that can be said about it at all.

In bodily terms sin is like blindness. It is a spiritual blindness, a refusal to live according to
God’s commandments. Sin and evil are acts of rebellion and place us in exile from our true
selves and God, (Ezk. 2:1-5).

Blindness is often used in scripture as an analogy for those who reject God. It makes us
incapable of seeing the truth. This is a reason why scripture prophesies that only the
Messiah will cure blindness (Isa. 29:18, 35:5 and 42:7) and why only Jesus is able to
restore eyesight, (Matt. 11:5, 12:22-23 and, of course John 9.). But we should notice this,
Jesus’ cure for blindness is not the restoration of a lost ability; he gives a perception and
insght that we have never had before.

That is why spiritual blindness is the key metaphor in understanding Julian’s treatment of
the problem of evil. Chapter 47, in

“...spiritual blindness a person is no longer aware of God. For if he [a person] was aware of God, he would
no longer be inclined towards mischief, not towards any kind of temptation or craving which might lead him
into sin.”

Spiritual blindness is a sickness with two symptoms. Chapter 73:

“God showed me that we have two kinds of spiritual sickness; the first is impatience or sloth, because we
make such heavy weather of our hardships and suffering; the second is despair or doubting fear...he showed
me sin in general, in which everything is included, but these two particular ones were the only ones he
specified.”

This leads Julian to say that the body is beautiful and to be loved because it is enclosed,
her word, “be-clothed”, in the goodness of God. In Chapter 6 she says that

“For as the body is clad in clothing, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the
body’s core, so are we soul and body, clad in the goodness of God, and held closely to him.”

It is by the soul and body working together in harmony that we experience a joy in all
created things including our physical bodies; for God created it, loves it and keeps it in
being in and through his love. Our souls and bodies, as part of creation, are made, kept
and loved and it is the purpose of our humanity to bear witness to that to each other, thus
increasing the experience of joy.

Julian’s positive view of the material world and our humanity within it stems directly from
her view of the incarnation. Just as according to the Chalcedonian formula Jesus had two
natures, divine and human, so do we (body and soul) and in this way we are united,
Julian’s word, “knit” in him. It is this which makes us sensual. At Chapter 55:

“As soon as our soul is breathed into our body, thereby making us sensory beings, at once mercy and grace
begin to work, taking care of us and keeping us with pity and with love.”

We are connected to God, as it were, in our substance. But we are not the same thing.
There is an actual and epistemological distance set between God and people. Woe betide
anyone who attempts to pass over the barrier! Speech about God and speech about
people are not and can never be the same sort of language. Speech about God and
speech about people connect not only distantly, but in two important and key ways: from
the point of view of content, and from the point of view of knowledge itself. We see this in
her understanding of Mother_Christ which we will come on to in a moment. But
nevertheless according to this quotation we are intimately connected.

So it is that for Julian the “city of God” which, like Augustine of Hippo, occupies so much
of her theology is not some fabled abstract utopia beyond the world but is built in the very
core of our being - including our capacities for sin and to do evil. Again at Chapter 55
Julian insists that that enables Jesus to rule in our lives. His presence fills our dual nature
and grants the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit so that our body and soul are increasingly
bound together and seek and move towards an ever closer union with God.

Julian’s theology of the body began with images of the incarnation and was developed by
Jesus’ experience of destructive suffering on the cross shown in her visions. If suffering
and evil are redeemed by Jesus through his body on the cross this must imply and entail
that bodies have an inherent value worth dying with and for. Thus human bodies are
reconciled to God through the belief that what Christ did on the cross is the cure for
spiritual blindness and evil suffering. The cross changes everything. It gives us that
perception into the nature of God, ourselves and of Love that we never had before.

Faith in God naturally leads us to an acceptance and delight in our bodies as not only
capable of reconciliation and redemption but worthy of it, such that we are imagio dei (=the
image of God) engaging in an imitatio dei (=Imitation of God) in and through our bodies.
Ultimately this provides us with a message of Hope in those times when we suffer or
experience evil. It gives a bodily solace, not just a spiritual one. For Julian the body is
good because it, like all created matter, was created through God’s goodness to manifest
God’s goodness and in this she overcomes the body-soul divide in so much theology and
indeed the mind-body problem that haunts so much of modern philosophy.

Above all, it helps us to appreciate that our human destiny is a sharing in the divine life of
God as spiritually embodied beings. Our physical sensual bodies become a divinely
appointed means of reaching spiritual perfection. The supposed inherent holiness of the
soul untouched by sin and evil needs the holiness of the body, and vice versa. Holiness by
definition is one, bringing the whole self into unity with the love of God.

To conclude this section: so far I have argued that Julian’s positive view of the body
provides a crucial foundation not only for her own pastoral concerns for those who visited
her in her cell but makes an essential, though overlooked, contribution to our getting to
grips with the smaller questions we must ask and answer if we are to get to get nearer to
thinking about the problem of evil systematically and lovingly.

This is seen again in her notion of the Motherhood of God to which I now turn.

Julian and the Motherhood of God.

Julian’s theology of the Motherhood of God in Christ is an essential response to the key
questions about the nature of God posed by the problem of evil. Julian famously used
maternal imagery to describe the nature of God – a notion that is controversial in some
quarters even today.

Despite widespread claims about this, Julian was by no means the first medieval
theologian to have employed maternal imagery in their thinking about God. Walter Hilton
does so extensively in his Scale of Perfection, for example. But unlike Hilton, Julian does
not merely substitute God’s motherhood for his fatherhood. She does not use motherhood
as some more approachable, cuddly version of God, for God is not gendered. Julian knew
that, accordingly, neither male nor female language can apply, providing useful analogies
and predicates. God is not a mother, God is like a mother.

Julian sees three ways in which God as Trinity can be understood as “mother”. From
Chapter 59:

“I understand that there are three ways of looking at the motherhood of God; the first is rooted in the fact of
our nature’s making; the second is his taking our nature- and this is the start of the motherhood of grace; the
third is that motherhood of working -and in this activity the same grace is spread forth over everything,
everlasting in its length, and breadth, height and depth. All this springs from one Love.”

Making, God. Taking, Jesus, Working, the Holy Spirit. One love, One truth. In Jesus the
whole Trinity is revealed and known. In Chapter 59:

“...for where Jesus appears, the blessed Trinity is understood to be as I see it. “

Jesus, fully a person fully God, enclosed in the Trinity, “beclothed” in our flesh, is our true
mother because as Julian reminds us in her next chapter, 60:

“This lovely word mother is so sweet and so much more in nature of itself that it cannot be used of anyone
but him.”
As Christ, Jesus incorporates all people into himself and thus for Julian we are in utero of
our Mother-Christ. Our union and enclosure within Mother-Christ is our union with and
enclosure in the Trinity – and no where else. In a beautiful passage she tells us that we fall
into the womb of Mother Christ. This image of our being in utero leads, I think, into
profound insights for human beings as greatly cherished recipients of divine love and,
despite evil and sin, of being capable of being drawn into relationship with the Trinity and
there find our wholeness.

Julian’s analogy of Mother-Christ is strengthened by its biological dimension: nurturing,

sustaining and compassionate breastfeeding. Just as a post partum mother breastfeeds
her baby so the post-resurrected Jesus feeds us with his real self in the Eucharist. Still in
Chapter 60:

“The human mother may suckle her child with her milk but our precious mother, Jesus, feeds us with
himself...with the Blessed Sacrament, that is the precious food of my life; and with all the sweet sacraments
he strengthens us with his mercy and grace in great measure.

The mother may put her child tenderly to her breast, but our tender mother Jesus simply lead us into his
Blessed breast, through his sweet open side, and there shows us a glimpse of the Godhead and the joys of
heaven, with spiritual certainty and eternal blessings.”

This sort of imagery occurs so frequently in Revelations that we are constantly reminded
that we are “clasped”, “enclosed”, “enfolded”, and “wrapped” in love. These are sensual,
tactile ways in which we are united with Mother-Christ as a piece of clothing is made to
measure. Chapter 5:

“...our Lord gave me a spiritual sight of his homely loving. I saw that he is to us everything that is good and
comfortable for us; he is our clothing that in love wraps us, clasps us and encloses us in love, such that he
will never leave us; being to us everything that is good, as far as I see it.”

Building on Romans 8:31-39 Julian insists nothing, no sin, no evil, no pain, no horrendous
evil can separate us from the love of God and is demonstrated in the torture and suffering
of Jesus on the cross. Where is mother-Christ in Israel or Gaza or Russia or Ukraine of
the countless other places in the world where the voice of the victims is stifled and
silenced? Where is God when evil occurs and when you and I suffer? Where is Mother-
Christ when we are fearful or wake in the wee small hours hardly knowing who we are?
Right there, right now, in us, with us, alongside us, suffering as we suffer.

Apart from her famous parable of the Lord and the Servant, Julian is very clear on this
point. Chapter 31:

“And I conceived a creeping fear. And to this Our Lord answered “I keep you utterly safely.” This word was
said with more love and security and spiritual keeping than I can or may tell. For as it was shown that I
should sin, right so was the comfort showed; security and comfort for all my fellow Christians. What can
make me more eager to love my fellow Christians than to see in God that he loves all who will be saved as if
they were one soul?”

So now we may ask, how precisely does this idea of Mother-Christ help in our
understanding of the problem of evil and sin?

To speak of Mother-Christ is to believe that God as Love needs us as the objects of his
affection. Only one of us can save us and that is the reason for his becoming a person in
Jesus. It is to believe that there is an absolute and eternal bond between God and us and
it is due to this inseparable union finally forged on the cross, that God can never be angry
towards sinners and their sin, nor ever will. Sin and evil, therefore do not indicate Gos’s
wrath towards us. They are not some form of divine punishment – ever.

God demonstrated his total love, solidarity and compassion on the cross and it is our task
as Christians and, I think especially us as Julians, that we manifest that same compassion
in the world day by day. And this, you’ll be pleased to know, brings me to my final section.

Compassion.

When Julian writes about Compassion she is not talking about an emotion, an empathy, a
kind of pity. No. Compassion, for Julian, is an active divine phenomenological force and as
such is another foundation of our relationship with God and other people. It is a
companionship. God in Christ and human beings journey together suffer together and
experience the humiliation of evil together. But that is not the end of the story, for as the
Psalmist says at psalm 36:9 “in your light we see light” At Chapter 29 Julian makes this clear;

“And then I saw that each instance of natural compassion that we feel for our fellow Christians...is Christ
acting in us. That same abnegation that was shown in his passion was shown here again in his compassion.
In this were two manners of understanding what our Lord meant. One is the blessing we are brought to,
because of which he desires us to rejoice. The other is for comfort in our pain; for he desires us to realise
that this pain will be turned into glory and benefit by virtue of his passion, and that we also realise that we
suffer not alone but with him...and that we understand his suffering...to surpass so far anything we may
suffer...”

Christ suffers with us, not for us. That means his presence enables us to show com -
passion, a suffering with, everything that suffers. To do so we must open ourselves to
God’s suffering love. Julian again at Chapter 29:

“I saw how Christ has compassion on us because...of sin. And right as I was before in the Showing of the
Passion of Christ filling me with pain and compassion, in the same way in this sight I was filled, in part, with
compassion for all my fellow Christians”

This is not an off the cuff remark, but the necessary result of Julian’s reflection on the three
prayers she prayed long before she entered her cell as an anchorite. Spiritually naive as
the young Julian may have been in praying them, she did not pray them separately for
their own sake or to see what would happen if she prayed them as some sort of spiritual
experiment. Far less did she think that they would be answered by profound mystical
contact with God. She notes each of her prayers in Chapter 2. The link between them is, I
think, an attempt to see sin and suffering and evil from a divine perspective insofar as and
in the degree to which that is ever possible for a human being.

The first, you’ll remember, was to understand the passion of Christ, as it were from the
inside. The second was to suffer extreme physical illness perhaps to the point of death and
the third was to receive three wounds; true contrition, loving compassion and a longing to
do God’s will.

The first wound, true contrition, was an intentional refocusing of herself from her self-
regarding motives and ego towards God. Only in this way can genuine compassion for
suffering people, the last the least and the lost among us become possible.

The second wound, loving compassion, is inextricably tied up with the first prayer seeking
to understand and identify with the suffering of Christ. The second prayer is really a
practical outpouring of the first.
And then there is the third prayer which, again, seems to logically flow from the other two.
Julian’s overwhelming desire is for her and all her fellow Christians to be “on-ed”, united,
or in her remarkable image “knitted” into Christ – with all the dropped stitches too.

But let us notice this: it is not an attempt to flee from social responsibility or involvement in
the messy bits of the world. To the contrary.

As Julian’s, it should inspire and inform our practical mission and ministry where we are
and in what we can do. However little that may appear to be at times. Julian, even as an
anchorite did not have a mandate to flee the world and neither do we if we are to faithfully
obey our calling and follow her teaching and example. We cannot hope to approach those
two big questions with which we began – especially not the problem of evil if we do. To the
contrary. Just like Julian herself we are called to be concerned, no, com- passionate,
journeying together with all who suffer and experience evil, seeking to continually manifest
the unfailing, protecting and nurturing love of Mother- Christ.

So to sum up.

Conclusions.

Our bodies are the means through which God in Christ unites us with himself. In the
incarnation he joined the material and the spiritual; our bodies and our sous. This not only
denies the tendency in Christianity and elsewhere to take a negative view of bodies and
what bodies do and with it a negative view of the world, it also insists that human beings
with all their fragility are loving kept and held in the palm of God’s hand. That is what the
famous hazelnut passage is all about. This is the basis on which Julian strongly affirms
the beauty and intrinsic worth of our bodies. Only by becoming a body, as one of us, could
God save us. For Julian it is not that we have bodies but that we are bodies and when we
sin, commit evil or are caught up in instances of evil and its effects, God looks in us with
pity not with blame, for God IS Love.

On this basis alone The Revelations of Divine Love is an essential tool in approaching the
enduring problem of evil. That so many people in the Church and in the universities have
neglected to use this tool has produced what, in my view, is the somewhat dire state of
affairs in trying to understand the problem of evil as it confronts us as we approach the
second quarter of the twenty-first century.

But there is more...

In Julian’s notion of Mother-Christ and the com-passion which flows from it we have a
summary of her entire theology and certainly her whole approach to suffering and pain. It
is the key, to untying the knotty problem of evil. Julian’s purpose in constructing this image
is to express that inseparable and mystical unity between God and all people everywhere.

Mother-Christ is the one to whom we must turn when in trouble, sorrow or confusion and
find there hope in our desolation and encouragement in our despair. We can only do that if
we always and everywhere recognise that we are greatly loved as the people we have
been, the people we are now and the people who through divine grace and mercy might
become.

May that be true of us as we continue to pursue our vocation as Julians, now and always.
Thank you.