Julian the theologian

It’s rough to be a theologian of incredible insight and depth who is essentially forgotten or ignored for the first 550 years of your existence and then turned into a cliché for the last 100. Welcome to the 650th anniversary of the visions of Julian of Norwich, the woman who lived in an anchor-hold at St. Julian’s on the east coast of England and spent the second half of her long life writing two versions of the same book: A Revelation of Divine Love. Since her writings were rediscovered for a broader audience, she’s often been seen more as a spiritual curiosity than as a theologian whose thought deeply influences the tradition. We cite her in search of personal spirituality and often use her for spiritual comfort, but less often do we allow her ideas and her unique approach to the spiritual questions of her day to penetrate our theological understanding.

The outlines of Julian’s life are all that anyone really knows about her. She lived through two devastating plagues—one that killed 75 percent of the population of Norwich when she was a child and a second that killed 75 percent of the children there when she was a young woman of childbearing age. Eventually she took up residence in an anchor-hold at what we might call an inner-city church, surrounded by stockyards and a slaughterhouse and a very smelly tanner, not far from the charity hospital where the most desperate cases were cared for by nuns and beguines. She lived there for the rest of her life.

She gained a reputation for being a person of deep prayer and a good person to take your ordinary pains and struggles to. Her writings and one first-person account reveal her to be a woman of strong practical wisdom and an earthy sensibility, even when she is quoting Augustine or Jerome. We know people went to the anchor-hold to seek her advice and her spiritual care. In the anchor-hold, she was also writing a book about an experience from a time in her life when she had wanted desperately to die. She had a series of “showings”—as she later called them, searching for an English word that would express what she had seen—in which Christ revealed to her the depth of God’s love for humanity. She tried to pass on what she had seen through two versions of the same book. She was, as far as we know, the first woman to write a book in English.