Revelations of Divine Love

By Julian of Norwich and Kaya Oakes

The fourteenth-century anchorite known as Julian of Norwich offered fervent prayers for a deeper understanding of Christ's passion. The holy woman's petitions were answered with a series of divine revelations that she called "shewings." Her mystic visions revealed Christ's sufferings with extreme intensity, but they also confirmed God's constant love for humanity and infinite capacity for forgiveness.
Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love have had a lasting influence on Christian thought. Written in immediate, compelling terms, her experiences remain among the most original and accessible expressions of medieval mysticism. This edition contains both the short text, which is mainly an account of the shewings and Julian's initial analysis of their meaning, and the long text, completed some 20 years later and offering daringly speculative interpretations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ixia Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780486845067

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Copyright

Foreword copyright © 2019 by Kaya Oakes

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Ixia Press edition, first published in 2019, is an unabridged republication of the 1952 second printing of the work Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Ankress by Name Julian of Norwich, edited by Dom Roger Hudleston, OSB, originally published by Burns, Oates & Washbourne, Ltd., London, in 1927. A new foreword, Julian of Norwich: An Introduction by Kaya Oakes, was written especially for this volume.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Julian, of Norwich, 1343– author.

Title: Revelations of divine love / Julian of Norwich.

Other titles: Revelations of divine love. English

Description: Mineola : Ixia Press, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019010999 | ISBN 9780486836089 | ISBN 0486836088

Subjects: LCSH: Devotional literature, English (Middle) | Love—

Religious Aspects—Christianity—Early works to 1800. | Private revelations—Early works to 1800. | Julian, of Norwich, 1343– | Mysticism—England—History—Middle Ages, 500–1500.

Classification: LCC BV4832.3 .J86 2019 | DDC 242—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010999

Ixia Press

An imprint of Dover Publications, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

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2019

Contents

Foreword by Kaya Oakes

Introduction

Postscript

1. Of the number of the Revelations particularly

2. Of the time of these Revelations, and how she asked three petitions

3. Of the sickness obtained of God by petition

4. Here beginneth the First Revelation of the precious crowning of Christ

5. How God is to us everything that is good, tenderly wrapping us

6. How we should pray, and of the great tender love that our Lord hath to man’s soul

7. How our Lady, beholding the greatness of her Maker, thought herself less: and how the most joy to man is that God, most high and mighty, is homeliest and most courteous

8. A recapitulation of that that is said, and how it was shewed to her generally for all

9. Of the meekness of this woman, keeping her alway in the faith of Holy Church; and how he that loveth his even-Christian for God loveth all things

10. The Second Revelation is of his discolouring, and of our Redemption, and the discolouring of the Vernacle, and how it pleaseth God that we seek him busily

11. The Third Revelation is how God doth all things except sin, never changing his purpose without end: for he hath made all things in fulness of goodness

12. The Fourth Revelation is how it liketh God rather and better to wash us in his Blood from sin, than in water: for his Blood is most precious

13. The Fifth Revelation is that the temptation of the fiend is overcome by the Passion of Christ, to the increase of our joy and of his pain, everlastingly

14 The Sixth Revelation is of the worshipful thanks with which he rewardeth his servants, and how it hath three joys

15. The Seventh Revelation is of oftentimes feeling of weal and woe: and how it is expedient that man sometimes be left without comfort, and that sin is not the cause of this

16. The Eighth Revelation is of the last piteous pains of Christ’s dying and discolouring of his face and drying of his flesh

17. Of the grievous bodily thirst of Christ, caused four-wise, and of his piteous crowning, and of the most pain to a kind lover

18. Of the spiritual martyrdom of our Lady and other lovers of Christ, and how all things suffered with him good and evil

19. Of the comfortable beholding of the crucifix, and how the desire of the flesh, without consent of the soul, is no sin, and the flesh must be in pain, suffering till both be oned to Christ

20. Of the unspeakable Passion of Christ, and of three things of the Passion always to be remembered

21. Of three beholdings in the Passion of Christ, and how we were dying on the cross with Christ; but his cheer putteth away all pain

22. The Ninth Revelation is the looking of three heavens, and the infinite love of Christ desiring every day to suffer for us if he might, although it is not needful

23. How Christ willeth that we joy with him greatly in our Redemption and desire grace of him that we may do so

24. The Tenth Revelation is that our Lord Jesus Christ sheweth in love his blessed Heart cloven in two, rejoicing

25. The Eleventh Revelation is an high ghostly shewing of his blessed Mother

26. The Twelfth Revelation is that the Lord our God is all Sovereign Being

27. The Thirteenth Revelation is that our Lord God willeth that we have great regard to all his deeds that he hath done in the great nobility of making all things, and how sin is not known but by the pain

28. How the children of salvation shall be shaken in sorrows, but Christ rejoiceth with compassion; a remedy against tribulation

29. Adam’s sin was greatest, but the satisfaction for it is more pleasing to God than ever was the sin harmful

30. How we should joy and trust in our Saviour, Jesus; not presuming to know his privy counsel

31. Of the longing and the ghostly thirst of Christ, which lasteth and shall last till Doomsday; and by reason of his body he is not yet fully glorified, nor all impassible

32. How all things shall be well, and Scripture fulfilled, and we must steadfastly hold us in the Faith of Holy Church, as is Christ’s will

33. All damned souls be despised in God’s sight, as the devils. These Revelations withdraw not the Faith of Holy Church, but comfort; and the more we busy [ourselves] to know God’s secrets, the less we know

34. God sheweth the privities necessary to his lovers; and how they please God much that receive diligently the preaching of Holy Church

35. How God doth all that is good, and suffereth all worshipfully by his mercy, the which shall shine when sin is no longer suffered

36. Of another excellent deed our Lord shall do, which, by grace, may be learned in part here; and how we should joy in the same, and how God yet doeth miracles

37. God keepeth his chosen full securely, although they sin; for that in these is a godly will, that never assenteth to sin

38. Sins of the chosen shall be turned to joy and worship. Examples of David, St Peter, and St John of Beverley

39. Of the sharpness of sin and the goodness of contrition; and how our kind Lord willeth not that we despair for often falling

40. The vileness of sin passeth all pains, and God loveth us well tenderly while we be in sin, and so us needeth to love our neighbour

41. The Fourteenth Revelation is as aforesaid; how it is impossible we should pray for mercy and want it: and how God willeth we pray alway, though we be dry and barren, for that prayer is to him acceptable and pleasant

42. Of three things that belong to prayer: How we should pray. Of the goodness of God that supplieth always our imperfections and feebleness when we do that which belongeth to us to do

43. What prayer doth when ordained to God’s will; and how the goodness of God hath great liking in the deeds that he doth by us, as if he were beholden to us, working all things full sweetly

44. Of the properties of the Trinity, and how a creature hath the same properties, doing that which it was made for, seeing, beholding, and marvelling at his God, so that he seemeth to himself as naught

45. Of the deep judgement of God and the variant judgement of men

46. We cannot know ourselves in this life but by faith and grace, but we must know ourselves sinners, and how sinful. God is never wroth, being most near the soul, it keeping

47. We must reverently marvel and meekly suffer, ever joying in God; and how our blindness, in that we see not God, is because of sin

48. Of mercy and grace and their properties; and how we shall rejoice that ever we suffered woe patiently

49. Our life is grounded in love, without the which we perish. Yet God is never wroth, but in our wrath and sin he mercifully keepeth us and treateth with us for peace, rewarding our tribulations

50. How the chosen soul was never dead in the sight of God; of a marvel upon the same; three things emboldened her to ask God the understanding of it

51. The answer to the doubt aforesaid, by a marvellous example of our Lord as a servant

52. God rejoiceth that he is our Father, Brother, and Spouse. How the chosen have here a medley of weal and woe; and how we may eschew sin

53. The kindness of God assigneth no blame to his chosen, for in these is a godly will that never consenteth to sin. For it behoveth the mercy of God to be knit to these, that there be a substance kept that may never be parted from him

54. We ought to rejoice that God dwelleth in our soul and our soul in God, so that betwixt God and our soul is nothing, but, as it were, all God; and how faith is the ground of all virtue in our soul by the Holy Ghost

55. Christ is our way, leading and presenting us to the Father, forthwith as the soul is infused into the body, mercy and grace working

56. It is easier to know God than our own soul, for God is nearer to us than that: therefore, if we will have knowing of it, we must seek into God

57. In our substance we be full, in our sensuality we fail, which God will repair by mercy and grace. How our kind which is the higher part is knit to God in the making, and Jesus is knit to our kind in the lower part, in our flesh-taking. Mary is our mother

58. God was never displeased with his chosen wife. Of three properties in the Trinity: Fatherhood, Motherhood, and Lordhood. How our substance is in every person, but our sensuality is in Christ alone

59. Wickedness is turned into bliss by mercy and grace in the chosen, for the property of God is to do good against ill, by Jesus our Mother in kind grace

60. Of our sweet, kind, ever-loving Mother, Jesus: and of the property of motherhood. Jesus is our very Mother, not feeding us with milk, but with himself; opening his side to us, and challenging all our love

61. Jesus suffereth us to fall and happily raiseth us; not breaking his love for our trespass, for he willeth that we have the property of a child, fleeing to him alway in our necessity

62. The Love of God never suffereth his chosen to lose time, for all their trouble is turned into endless joy

63. Sin is more painful than hell, and vile and hurting to kind, but grace saveth kind and destroyeth sin

64. The Fifteenth Revelation is as it is shewed. How the absence of God in this life is our full great pain, beside other travail

65. How he that chooseth God for love, with reverend meekness, is sure to be saved: which reverend meekness seeth the Lord marvellous great and the self marvellous little; and it is God’s will we dread nothing but him

66. The Sixteenth Revelation is a conclusion and confirmation to all Fifteen. Of her frailty and mourning in dis-ease, and light speaking after the great comfort of Jesus: yet the devil, after that, had great power to vex her

67. Of the worshipfulness of the soul, which is so nobly made that it might not better be made; in which the Trinity rejoiceth everlastingly. The soul may have rest in nothing but God, which sitteth therein ruling all things

68. Of soothfast knowing that it is Jesus that showed all this and it was no raving; and how we ought to have sure trust in all our tribulations that we shall not be overcome

69. Of the second long temptation of the devil to despair; but she mightily looked to God and to the faith of Holy Church, rehearsing the Passion of Christ, by the which she was delivered

70. In all tribulation we ought to be steadfast in the faith, trusting mightily in God

71. Jesus willeth our soul to be in good cheer to him; and how he sheweth us three manner of cheer

72. Sin in the chosen souls is deadly for a time, but they be not dead in the sight of God

73. Of two ghostly sicknesses, of which God willeth that we amend us, remembering his Passion, knowing also that he is all love

74. There be four manner of dreads: but reverent dread is a lovely fear that never is without meek love, and yet they be not both one

75. Us needeth love, longing, and pity. Of three manners of longing in God which are in us

76. A loving soul hateth sin for vileness more than all the pain of hell: and how the beholding of other men’s sins, unless it be with compassion, letteth the beholding of God

77. Of the enmity of the Fiend, which loseth more in our uprising than he winneth by our falling, and therefore he is scorned

78. Our Lord willeth that we know four manner of goodness that he doeth to us: and how we need the light of grace to know our sin and feebleness

79. We must be mindful of our sin, and not of our neighbours’, but for their help. If we fall we must hastily rise, or else we are greatly unkind to God

80. By three things God is worshipped and we saved

81. This blessed woman saw God in divers manners, but she saw him take no resting place but in man’s soul

82. God beholdeth the mourning of the soul with pity and not with blame, and yet we do naught but sin

83. Of three properties in God, life, love, and light, and that our reason is in God according

84. Charity is this light, for faith and hope lead us to charity

85. God loved his chosen from without beginning. How privities now hidden shall be known in heaven, wherefore we shall bless our Lord that everything is so well ordained

86. The good Lord shewed that this book should be otherwise performed than at the first writing; for, fifteen years after, it was answered that the cause of all this shewing was love. Which may Jesus grant us. Amen.

Notes

Endnotes

Glossary

Foreword

Julian of Norwich: An Introduction

IN THE medieval imagination, God was a god of contradictions: warrior and protector, shelter and journey, and in the visionary mind of a female English mystic named Julian of Norwich, God is mother and father both. Early in 2018, when I wrote an essay on the wisdom of medieval mystic women like Julian and her contemporary Hildegard of Bingen for the spiritual conversations website On Being , I experienced a series of contradictions. The essay went viral, in spite of the fact that many of its readers were not religious themselves and had never previously encountered the work of medieval mystics. Yet many of On Being ’s readers might be described as seekers. Their search for truth, consolation, and spiritual resonance led them to my work and, through it, to Julian. What resonated with readers was the notion that even in dark, frightening times, prophetic female voices like Julian’s can be a beacon lighting our way forward.

To talk about visions, or revelations as Julian called them, requires putting her in a series of contexts, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. The real name of the woman we call Julian is unknown to us. She lived most of her life as an anchoress, voluntarily dwelling in a cell attached to the side of a church, like a barnacle clinging to a whale. Julian is the author of the first book by a woman written in English during a time when the church conducted its services and scholarship in Latin and considered the English language vulgar and ordinary.

Around the age of thirty, Julian asked God to strike her down with a grave illness so that she would come close to death, and in that illness, she experienced a series of vivid and at times gruesome images of the suffering Christ. She also heard the voice of God.

Mysticism, the practice of contemplation in order to reach a oneness with God, has a history of visionaries like Julian. But while her desire to be sickened until near the point of death in order to attain those visions may seem bizarre today, it’s a desire shared with many of the greatest holy figures across religious traditions. Gandhi also fasted to the point of seeing visions, the Buddha meditated without food or drink until the same happened to him, the prophet Muhammed confined himself to a remote cave to fast and pray, and the Hebrew Bible is full of prophecies achieved through self-deprivation. In many ways, mystics like Julian were conducting a kind of extended psychological experiment. Illness, fasting, and other forms of self-deprivation were ways of testing their limits, of experimenting to see what kind of encounters with the divine could rise out of being in a state of physical and mental extremes.

Wrapped around Julian’s revelations, however, is the context in which she lived, a time so full of violence and disease that the visions frequently experienced by medieval mystics like her begin to make more sense. They were a coping mechanism. Nearly a third of the English population was wiped out by waves of the plague that arrived over the course of Julian’s lifetime. She never knew a Europe that was not at war. And she lived in an era when women suffered particularly cruel fates.

Medieval women were married at fifteen and could only hope to survive until the age of forty given the high rates of death during and after childbirth. Their world was dangerous and gory, and they fully expected to only live for a brief moment, so they clung to religion as consolation. We may escape into our imaginations today via the Internet, television, and movies, but medieval people escaped into a religious imagination.

We also can wrap Julian in the few scraps of biographical information that exist about her or that have been reconstructed by scholars. While many women of Julian’s time were illiterate, women of the merchant and noble classes did learn to read and write, though their educations were typically terminated in adolescence because they were not allowed to attend universities or seminaries like their male peers. Julian’s literacy indicates she came from at least a semiaffluent background, perhaps a child of the merchant class that dominated her home town of Norwich.

Some scholars also have considered the possibility that since almost every woman who did not enter a convent was married by the age of fifteen, Julian may have been widowed by the plague or the wars. If so, she was most likely also a mother to children who had died by the time she entered the anchorage. Julian’s visions of God and Christ as mother figures and of a body giving birth to the full, fair creature of a child suggest she may have had firsthand familiarity with that experience. This also may explain why she refers to both God and Jesus as father and mother, with a repeated emphasis on the qualities of compassion, empathy, and care both of them emulate, qualities many people associate with motherly love.

Julian was thirty when she received her revelations, but she did not write them down until several decades later. Her English contemporary and fellow mystic Margery Kempe relates a story of visiting Julian’s anchorage and reports that Julian had a steady stream of visitors who sought her wisdom and counsel. This is why, in many accounts, she is referred to as Mother Julian. It’s possible that some of those acolytes heard Julian’s stories of her visions and urged her to write them down. But while we will never know what brought her to finally transcribe them, we do know that by the time it happened, she had outlived most medieval women. A fifty- or sixty-something Julian in the mid-1300s would be the equivalent to a woman in her eighties or nineties today.

While our modern culture is obsessed with youth, more ancient strains in our collective