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WorkJulian of Norwich

Revelations of Divine Love

Sixteen visions and the parable Julian needed to make sense of them: a servant falls, and his lord does not blame him.

by Julian of Norwich212 passages held

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First published
(aged 50)
Original language
English

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Overview

Twenty years save three months passed after the visions, by her own count, before Julian of Norwich was taught how to read one picture. In May 1373, aged thirty and a half and thought to be dying, she saw sixteen showings, as she calls them: the crucified Christ bleeding, and with that sight a set of assurances she could not reconcile with what she had been taught. The Church taught that sinners deserve blame and the anger of God. In the showings she saw no anger in God at all. She would give up neither, and she asked how both could be true. The only answer she received was the picture. A lord sends a servant on an errand; the servant runs off eagerly, falls into a hollow and lies there hurt, unable to see his master, who looks at him with pity and finds no fault in him. She came to read the servant as Adam and Christ at once. She adds that fifteen years and more passed before she was told that the meaning of the whole was love. Revelations of Divine Love is the record of those years. Its eighty-six chapters argue that sin is necessary, that all will be well, and that Christ is a mother who feeds his children with himself. The parable and the teaching on Christ as mother are both missing from Comfortable Words for Christ's Lovers, the short account she wrote first. A copyist added a warning at the end against taking one part of the book and leaving another, as heretics do. No medieval copy of the full text survives. It came down through English Benedictine nuns living in exile at Cambrai and Paris, who copied it in the seventeenth century. Serenus Cressy, a Benedictine monk who served them as confessor, printed it in 1670. It reached a wide public after 1901, when the Scottish editor Grace Warrack published a version in modern spelling from one of the nuns' manuscripts. In 1942 the poet T. S. Eliot worked into "Little Gidding", the last of his Four Quartets, Julian's assurance that all shall be well.

Key concepts

What are the 'two dooms' the book speaks of?

They are two judgments on the same person, 'doom' being the old word for a verdict. God judges by what she calls our substance, the self that is kept whole in him, and in that judgment she saw no blame assigned. The Church, like any human judge, looks at the changeable self that shows outwardly, now good and now bad, and finds sinners who deserve blame. She holds that both are true and that heaven will show how.

What is the servant sent to do in the parable?

To work as a gardener. There is a treasure in the earth that the lord loves, a food that pleases him, and he has only this one servant to fetch it. The servant must dig and ditch, sweat, turn the soil over and water the plants until the fruit is ready to carry back. She reads his worn labourer's tunic as the human flesh that Christ took from Adam.

What are the three kinds of motherhood in God?

Making, taking and working. The first is that human nature was made in Christ, whom she calls the Wisdom of the Trinity. The second is that he took that nature on in Mary's womb, which she calls the motherhood of grace. The third is the continuing work of a mother: feeding, which she finds in the sacrament, and bringing up a child that falls and is comforted. All three, she says, are one love.

What does 'oneing' mean?

It is her word for being made one with God. The soul, she says, is knit to God so closely that nothing stands between them, and this was so from its making. Sin makes a person unlike God in condition but does not undo the bond. Prayer 'ones' the soul to God again by bringing its will into line with his. The same word explains the parable: because of that oneing, when Adam fell, God's Son fell with him.

Why does she call God 'homely' and 'courteous'?

Homely means familiar, at home with someone, and courteous means gracious in the way of a great lord. Her example is a king who treats a poor servant as a friend, in private and in company, which honours the servant more than any gift would. God is like that, she says: awe-inspiring and yet at ease with a sinful creature. Of everything she saw, this comforted her most.

Themes of the book

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

No anger in God

The Church taught her that sinners deserve blame and anger, and in the showings she saw God blame no one. Can both be true, and what would have to be the case if they are?

Julian calls them two judgments, the higher one shown by God and the lower one learned in Holy Church, and refuses to drop either. The only answer given her is a picture. A servant runs to do his lord's will, falls into a hollow and cannot rise, and the lord sees no fault in him, only eagerness. Almost twenty years later she reads the servant as Adam and Christ in one figure, so that the Father can blame humankind no more than his own Son.

  • sin
  • mercy
  • grace
  • redemption
  • repentance
  • humility
  • self-knowledge
  • human nature
  • incarnation
  • christology
  • virtue

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How all can be well

Why did a wise God not stop sin at the start? Julian is told that sin had to be and that all shall be well, and she asks how that fits with the harm she sees.

She presses the promise harder than its fame suggests. The faith she holds says that fallen angels, the heathen and Christians who die out of charity are condemned without end, so she objects that all cannot be well. The reply is that what is impossible to her is not impossible to God, who will do a Great Deed on the last day that no creature can know beforehand. She keeps the doctrine and the promise side by side, and treats the gap between them as God's secret.

  • salvation
  • suffering
  • divine providence
  • hope
  • evil
  • faith
  • heaven
  • divine goodness
  • creation
  • revelation
  • religious experience

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God as near as a mother

What kind of love bears a person, feeds them and lets them fall without ever letting them be lost? Julian finds only one word for it, and gives it to Christ.

Motherhood is her name for the work of the Second Person of the Trinity: the Father wills, the Mother works, the Holy Ghost confirms. An earthly mother bears her child to pain and dying, she says, while Christ bears his to endless life and feeds them with himself in the sacrament. He lets a child fall so that it learns, and wants it to run to him afterwards as a hurt child runs to its mother. Prayer belongs here too, since God is the ground of the asking he then answers.

  • divine love
  • love
  • trinity
  • prayer
  • trust
  • compassion
  • soul
  • divine presence

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Within this work

passages held
212
distinct concepts
220
by passages held, corpus-wide
#339

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: “divine love” and “sin”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine lovesin16
divine lovesalvation14
gracesalvation13
gracesin13
divine lovesuffering9
divine providencesalvation9
divine lovehumility8
humilitysin8
salvationsin8
faithsalvation7
faithsuffering7
gracehumility7
humilitysalvation7
sinsuffering7
divine lovegrace6
gracesuffering6
salvationsuffering5
divine providencesin4
divine providencesuffering4
faithgrace4
divine providencefaith3
humilitysuffering3
divine lovedivine providence2
faithhumility2
divine lovefaith1
divine providencegrace1
faithsin1

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.

  1. 1373 Comfortable Words for Christ's Lovers

    The earlier and shorter of her two accounts of the visions of May 1373, in twenty-five chapters. She later expanded it into Revelations of Divine Love.

     EN
  2. 1393 Revelations of Divine Love you are here EN
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