Skip to main content

Julian of Norwich: seen and unseen



Denys Turner's 'The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism' is a tour de force of interpretation, a challenging read that bears continuous fruit; and, places medieval mysticism in a context that properly allows it to speak out of its place across time in a way that, they, medieval mystics, would recognise. It makes people both stranger than they appear to modern eyes and more fruitful and challenging as a result.

So it was with expectation that I turned to his recent book on Julian of Norwich as theologian; that remarkable spiritual writer, the first women in the English vernacular to be so.

It is characteristically lucid and clear, and with much that is interesting to commend it, most especially his discussion of Julian's theology as a narrative of how the world is, just so and, more personally, on how thinking of ourselves as divided into parts, rather than woven out of competing desires, is usually unhelpful.

He defends Julian admirably from possible heterodoxies - indeed were she to be accused of heresy, Turner would have made a sterling advocate for her defence.

But the missing piece, the piece that would have granted an interesting text vitality, would have been an exploration of what this admirable clarification and defence is for. Julian is laid out as a skilled and compelling medieval theologian but that is not why she is read today. She is read as a compelling spiritual writer. What if anything is the connection between the two? And why should we read Julian as a compelling modern theologian? If we should?

There is no bridge (except of one's own speculation), not even a suggestive postscript. It is a disappointment.

One reason for reading her, I think, is one that Turner rather dismisses - she makes theology out of the contemplative regard for her visions. A contemplative regard that is both deeply felt and thought through (over probably twenty years between her short and long texts). The status of those visions Turner does not discuss except to say that modern theologians rarely have visions or dream dreams. It is a dismissive remark (and, as it happens, only partly true, possibly the greatest theologian of the last century, Hans urs von Balthasar, work was grounded in that of a visionary: Adrienne Von Speyer). Maybe we should pause to regret such a diminishment.

Vision matters, and the disciplined cultivation of vision is a neglected art within the Christian fold, leaving the field open to the unmediated paths of dry theological speculation or emotion charged fantasy.

Julian is an icon of the disciplined and felt imagination and as such an icon invaluable.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev