Comfortable Words for Christ's Lovers

Julian's first telling of her visions, with a passage her longer book leaves out: her answer to the objection that a woman may not teach.

by Julian of Norwich50 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1373(aged 30)
Original language: English

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Overview

For almost five centuries a single handwritten copy held all that was left of this account, and hardly anyone knew it existed. The copy sits in a volume of devotional texts made in the middle of the fifteenth century, beside works by the English hermit Richard Rolle and the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec. A heading says that the vision was shown to a devout woman named Julian, a recluse at Norwich, and that in 1413 she was still alive. The British Museum bought the volume in 1910 at the sale of Lord Amherst's library, and the clergyman Dundas Harford printed the text the next year. The text is the shorter and earlier telling of the visions Julian of Norwich had in May 1373, when she was thirty and a half and thought to be dying. Her account of them is the earliest surviving book in English known to be written by a woman, and this is its first form. It stays close to the sickroom. A priest comes with a child and holds a cross before her face; her mother reaches out to close her eyes, thinking her dead. Julian sees the crucified Christ bleed, sees everything that is made lying in her palm no bigger than a hazelnut, and is told that sin is necessary and that all will be well. From this she argues that the fear which troubles a soul does not come from God, who wants people secure in love. She also answers the objection that a woman may not teach. She denies that she is a teacher and calls herself unlearned and frail, and then asks whether being a woman is a reason to keep silent about what God showed her. The longer version she wrote later, Revelations of Divine Love, leaves that passage out. It contains what this one lacks: the parable of a lord and a servant, and the teaching on Christ as mother. The date of the short account is disputed. The usual view places it soon after the illness; the scholar Nicholas Watson has argued for the 1380s.

Key concepts

What is a 'showing', and in how many ways does it come?

A showing is something God made known to her during the illness, and it came in three ways. Bodily sight is what her eyes saw, such as blood running from under the crown of thorns on the crucifix held before her. Words were formed in her understanding without any voice. Ghostly sight is spiritual insight, such as seeing all creation as small as a hazelnut, and she says she can never fully put it into words.

Who are the 'even-Christians' the book keeps addressing?

They are her fellow Christians, her equals before God, and the book is written in their name. Whatever was said to her, she says, was meant for all of them, and she asks them to stop looking at her and look at God. The idea carries a rule: whoever withholds love from a single fellow Christian loves nothing, because love that leaves someone out is not love of all.

What are the three wounds she prayed for?

Contrition, compassion and a willed longing for God. The idea came from hearing the story of Saint Cecilia, who died of three sword wounds in the neck. She had also asked to see the Passion and to fall gravely ill, but only on condition that God wanted it. The three wounds she asked for without condition, and that wish, she says, stayed with her when the other two had passed from her mind.

What does 'noughting' mean in this book?

It means counting everything created as nothing in order to have God, who is not created. The reason is given with the small thing in her palm: people look for rest in a world that is too little to give it. No soul is at rest, she says, until it is 'noughted' of all that is made. The same word describes Christ on the cross, the highest of all made nothing and despised.

Why does the book say that sin is nothing?

Because in everything she was shown, she never saw it. She saw that God does all that is done, and concluded that sin has no substance of its own and can be known only by the pain it causes. Near the end she addresses it directly: 'Thou art nought.' This does not make it harmless. She would choose every pain of hell and earth before sin, since a soul can have God in any pain except that one.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Shown to one, meant for all

What gives a woman with no learning and no office the right to pass on what she saw? Julian's answer is that the sight was never hers alone, and that keeping it back would be the real fault.

Julian denies that she is a teacher and calls herself unlearned, feeble and frail. Then she asks whether, because she is a woman, she should keep quiet about the goodness of God when she saw that he wants it known. The vision does not make her better than anyone, she says, and many who never had one love God more. She asks her fellow Christians, her 'even-Christians', to forget her and look at what was shown. She also records that she first called it raving.

religious experience
charity
love
compassion
devotion
contemplation
faith
death

Enter a dialogue

Held safe in comfort and in pain

If God is love, where does the dread come from that makes a believer feel lost? Julian sorts fear into four kinds and finds that only one of them is welcome to God.

Everything made appears in her palm as small as a hazelnut, and lasts because God loves it: he makes, loves and keeps. From that keeping she reads her own swings, about twenty of them, between joy and a weariness she had done nothing to deserve. Both are sent in love, and feelings prove nothing about where a soul stands. Against the dread that passes for humility she sets the last words spoken to her, 'Thou shalt not be overcome', and she notes that they do not promise there will be no storm.

suffering
sin
divine love
salvation
fear
trust
creation
divine will
divine providence
evil
hope
despair
repentance
grace
peace
prayer
redemption
spiritual rest
union with god
divine goodness
heaven
trinity

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 50
distinct concepts: 99
by passages held, corpus-wide: #655

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “salvation” and “suffering”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 57 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
salvation	suffering	5
compassion	suffering	4
compassion	religious experience	3
divine love	salvation	3
divine love	suffering	3
faith	suffering	3
love	salvation	3
love	suffering	3
salvation	sin	3
divine love	religious experience	2
divine love	sin	2
religious experience	suffering	2
sin	suffering	2
compassion	love	1
compassion	salvation	1
compassion	sin	1
divine love	faith	1
faith	salvation	1
faith	sin	1
love	religious experience	1
love	sin	1
religious experience	sin	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1373 Comfortable Words for Christ's Lovers you are here EN
1393 Revelations of Divine Love
The book she is read for, eighty-six chapters built over two decades on the short account she wrote first. It is read here in Grace Warrack's modernised text of 1901, which made her widely known.
EN

— or open another of their works