Feast Day of Julian of Norwich

Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich on the Episcopal Calendar. This is especially important to me as I am an associate of the Order of Julian of Norwich and we had a big festival mass this morning at the monastery.

A page of special materials from the order for the feast day may be found here.

Julian's writings are lesser known than many other Christian Writers, but her influence is vast. Thomas Merton once wrote:

"Julian is, without doubt, one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older, and whereas in the old days I used to be crazy about St. John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world and the Indies and all the Spanish mystics rolled up in one bundle. I think Julian of Norwich is, with Newman, the greatest English theologian."

David+

This is an excerpt from Fr. John-Julian's (OJN) upcoming book on the Episcopal Saints, Stars in a Dark World.

Saint Julian of Norwich

1342 - ca. 1420

May 8

We don’t know her true name; we don’t know her birthplace; we don’t know the exact date of her birth; and we don’t know the date of her death. All we know for certain about Saint Julian of Norwich is that she spent a significant portion of her life as an an­chorite, a recluse, at Saint Julian’s Church in England’s Norwich, that she was granted by God a series of sixteen visions or “showings” (as she called them) of the Crucified Christ, and that she was the first woman to write a book in English – her Revelations of Divine Love – which recounts her visions and her own twenty-year process of coming to understand their meaning.

Since almost all we know of Julian comes to us from her own book, we can surmise from that evidence that she was born sometime in late 1342. There are those who be­lieve that the grammatical pattern of her work suggests that she grew up in the north of England, but most agree that she was probably a Norwich native.

Since she became an anchorite – that is a recluse who was literally sealed in one closed room – adjacent to Saint Julian’s church in Norwich, it is likely that she came from a well-to-do or noble family (since virtually all female monastics at the time were of noble birth, and anchoresses had to prove that they had the means and income to support themselves before they could be enclosed). There is also some strong evidence that she may have been the daughter of Norwich’s eminent Sir Thomas Erpingham, a close friend and associate of King Henry V, and who (according to Shakespeare) com­manded the British longbows at the famous British victory at Agincourt. [1]

There is also some ambiguous evidence that Julian may have been a widow at the time of her seclusion – surviving local records from the time mention a gentlewoman “Julian” whose husband was killed in a duel only two weeks after their wedding. She may also have been a “Beguine” – that is, a woman who lived a pious, religious, and celibate life but did not take formal religious vows and lived in her own family home.

Finally, her name – Julian – may have been her original baptismal name, but it is just as likely that she followed the contemporary custom of taking as her name-in-reli­gion the name of the saint attached to whose church her anchorhold was built – that being Saint Julian of LeMans.

Although the anchoritic life of seclusion seems almost incomprehensible to us to­day, it was highly revered in Julian’s day, and parishes vied with each other to have “a saint” living in a cell attached to their church. We have record of some 1500 recluses in England, and over 50 in Julian’s Norwich alone. The life of an anchorite was considered the most holy, most ascetic, and most pious life possible in late medieval England, and historians often note that in those years in which the great organized religious orders were in decline and increasing corruption, often the truly devout soul needed to find a different and personal avenue of asceticism, the highest of which was the solitary an­choritic life.

Julian lived in Norwich, which in her day was England’s “second city” and central to the wool and cloth trade with Flanders. The Black Death hit Norwich in 1348 when Julian was about 6 years old, carrying away over half of the population (a higher pro­portion than elsewhere in England because of the close trade exchanges Norwich had with the Continent). And the plague struck again twice during her lifetime. In 1381, when Julian was about forty, Norwich was a primary center for the first popular rebel­lion in English history – the Peasant’s Revolt – which had been provoked by attempts to set a maximum limit on laborers’ wages and the imposition of a poll tax. The revolt was finally overthrown in London and in East Anglia when the local rebels were crushed by the militant (and military) Bishop of Norwich, Henry le Despenser, and their leader, John Litester, was executed.

In early May in her thirty-first year (confusion in surviving manuscripts makes it uncertain whether it was May 8 or May 13), Julian was struck with an apparently terminal illness. When she was expected to die, her parish priest was sent for and he placed a crucifix before her, telling her to cast her eyes upon her Savior. When Julian did so, the crucifix came alive for her and she began to receive the fifteen showings in which she experienced being present at the Crucifixion of Christ, and then listening to and speaking with Christ afterwards. She apparently wrote an account of her revela­tions shortly afterwards, and then twenty years later she expanded that short account to include the conclusions of her two-decade-long study and meditation on the meaning of her visions.

It is probable that Julian was not an enclosed anchoress at the time of her visions, but became so thereafter, spending between 20 and 50 years in her anchorhold and living to be over 70 years old. The peripatetic mystic, Margery Kempe, records a visit to Julian in about 1413 to ask her advice, and she adds “she was excellent in such coun­seling”.

Julian’s book was apparently not broadly circulated during her lifetime or for some years afterwards. We do know that it was published in its first printededition in 1677 by Serenus Cressy who wrote in his introduction: “I was desirous to have told thee somewhat of the happy Virgin, the Compiler of these Revelations: But after all the search I could make, I could not discover anything touching her, more than what she occasionally sprinkles in the Book itself.” We also know that Julian’s book was carried to the Continent by some of the 16th-century Roman Catholics who fled England. After that, very little is heard about Julian’s writing for almost 300 years until 1911 when Grace Warrack published the first modern edition. Then in 1979, Father Robert Llewe­lyn, a retired Anglican priest became chaplain of the Julian Shrine Chapel at St. Ju­l­ian’s, and interest in Julian began to build. Since then there have been at lest six new translations of Julian’s Middle English manuscripts and a virtually uncountable num­ber of commentaries, as well as the establishment of the Anglican Order of Julian of Norwich, a contemplative, mixed monastic community of monks and nuns in the U.S.

The uniqueness of Julian’s writings includes her incredible optimism in the face of the cultural chaos and confusion of her day, and her ability to transcend that confusion. Her phrase, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” is not a Pollyanna-esque blindness to reality, but the results of a deep faith that God is indeed in control of all, even in the midst of apparent evil. Julian repeatedly states that there is no wrath or anger in God, a proposition that is upsetting to Puri­tans and biblical literalists. And preceding modern psychology by centuries, she points out that the wrath we think we see in God is really in ourselves.

Julian may be most famous for her unapologetic treatment of Christ as Mother, no doubt the finest and most sophisticated treatment of the subject in all of Christian lit­erature. What is absolutely unique in Julian is her protestation that it is not that Christ is like a mother, but that all mothers are like Christ: Christ is the proto-mother and all earthly motherhood is an imitation and reflection of Him.

Sin, which so absorbs so many ecclesiastical writers, is given short shrift by Julian when she declares with the Scholastics that sin has “no manner of essence nor any por­tion of being”, that it is “no deed”, but is rather an absence of goodness. She declares that all human beings have a “godly will” within them which “never consented to sin nor ever shall” and “is so good that it can never will evil, but always good.” She fre­quently uses “blindness” as the analogy for human weakness.

As great a spiritual master as Thomas Merton has written: “Julian is without doubt one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older…” Our last evidence of Julian’s life is in 1416, and her death is usually assumed at about 1420.

Bennet, Judith M.; Women in the Medieval English Countryside…; Oxford U.P; Oxford; 1987.

Cowan, Tom; The Way of the Saints; G.B. Putnam’s Sons; NY; 1998.

Cross, F.L. & Livingstone, E.A., eds.; The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church; Oxford U.P.; Oxford; 1988.

Dupré, Louis & Wiseman, James A., eds.; Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism; Paulist; Mahwah, NJ; 1988.

John-Julian, tr.; A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich; iUniverse; NY; 2000.

King, Ursula; Christian Mystics: The Spiritual Heart of the Christian Tradition; Simon & Schuster; NY; 1998.

Ollard, S.L. & Crosse, Gordon (eds.); A Dictionary of English Church History;Mowbray; Oxford; 1912.

Rolt-Wheeler, Ethel; Women of the Cell and Cloister; Methuen; London; 1913.

Ward, Maisie, ed.; The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman; Sheed & Ward; London; 1933.

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[1] There is some evidence that Mother Julian mayhave been Julian Erpingham, the sister of the famed knight Sir Thomas Erpingham. If this is true, she would have been married twice and had three children before becoming an anchorite. Her revelations (and the “Short Version” of her book) would have happened at the time of the death of her first husband in a duel (1373), and the “Long Version” and her entering the cell would have happened shortly after the death of her second husband (c. ±1393). He death would have come in 1414, meaning that she would have spent about 21 years as an anchorite.

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