Revelations of Divine Love

Introduction, Part I: The Lady Julian

Julian of Norwich was a 14th-century anchoress at St Julian’s Church in Norwich whose Revelations grew from a near-death illness in 1373 and twenty years of subsequent contemplation; her life and character — marked by compassion, intellectual depth, and serene faith — are reconstructed from sparse external records and from what she unconsciously reveals of herself within the text.

• Julian received her Sixteen Revelations on 13 May 1373 while gravely ill at age thirty and a half, and spent the following twenty years meditating on their meaning before completing her book around 1393.
  • She had previously prayed for three gifts: a bodily sight of Christ’s Passion, a near-fatal illness to purify her, and three wounds of contrition, compassion, and longing toward God.
  • The Fifteen consecutive Shewings lasted from about four o’clock to nine in the morning, and the Sixteenth came the following night as conclusion and confirmation.
• Julian lived as an anchoress attached to St Julian’s Church, Norwich, in a small cell with a window into the church and a parlour window for visitors, a life-form common in medieval England that combined enclosure with active pastoral counsel.
  • The Ancren Riwle (a 13th-century rule for anchoresses) describes the window arrangement and the duty of receiving visitors with charity and discretion.
  • Blomefield’s History of Norfolk records that in 1393 ‘Lady Julian, the ankeress here was a strict recluse, and had two servants to attend her in her old age’ and was ’esteemed one of the greatest holiness.’
• Julian consistently insists that the Revelations were given not for her personally but for all Christians, and that her own worth is nothing apart from the love of God they reveal.
  • “‘Because of the Shewing I am not good but if I love God the better: and in as much as ye love God the better it is more to you than to me.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • She directs readers to ’leave the beholding of a worthless creature it was shewed to and mightily, wisely and meekly behold God that of His special goodness would shew it generally.’
• Editor Grace Warrack situates Julian within the English mystical tradition alongside Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton, noting her distinctive blend of speculative depth, practical wisdom, tender beauty of expression, and thorough Christianity that avoids the Via Negativa of some continental mystics.
  • Unlike Rolle, Julian uses almost no Scripture quotations directly; unlike Hilton, she is less methodical but more poetically intense, with phrases that ‘stir in the reader a kind of surprised gladness.’
  • Angela di Foligno is contrasted as an eagle ‘baffled and blinded in its assault on the Sun, proclaiming the Light Unspeakable in anguished, hoarse, inarticulate cries,’ while Julian walks a ‘mountain-path between the abysses’ singing ‘All is well.’

Introduction, Part II: The Manner of the Book

The Revelations are distinguished from much mystical literature by their silence on ascetic method and on the via negativa, focusing instead on a comprehensive theological system of trinitarian correspondences — nature, mercy, and grace — woven through homely imagery to show God’s Goodness as the ground of all being.

• Julian’s book contains no systematic teaching of preparatory ascetic stages; the Revelation came as pure gift in response to her prayer for contrition, compassion, and longing toward God, and the ordinary means of grace it endorses are faith, prayer, and the teaching of Holy Church.
  • She sought three ‘wounds’ — contrition, compassion, and longing after God — as comprehensive of the Christian life and meant for all, not special preparations for visionary experience.
  • After the vision passed she was left ’neither sign nor token’ but only the Revelation to hold ‘in faith,’ and the Holy Ghost renewed its teaching through ordinary enlightenment over subsequent years.
• Julian’s theological system is structured around trinities: the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost corresponds to Might, Wisdom, and Love, which correspond to Nature, Mercy, and Grace, which correspond to man’s Being, Increasing, and Fulfilling.
  • Man is a ‘made-trinity’ of truth (which sees God), wisdom (which beholds God), and love (which delights in God), mirroring the unmade Trinity.
  • The ‘double’ nature of man — Substance (higher spirit) and Sensuality (spirit related to the body) — requires Christ as the ‘Mean’ who keeps them together and raises the Sensuality to union with the Substance.
• Julian’s style employs homely, concrete imagery — hazel-nut, herring-scales, mother and child, lord and servant, clothing — rather than allegorical biblical interpretation or abstract philosophical language, giving her writing an immediacy that communicates mystical truth accessibly.
  • “‘I saw Him and sought Him; I had Him, and I wanted Him’ — a phrase the editor calls one of the most condensed expressions of love’s insatiable desire in the English language.” —Julian of Norwich
  • The book forms ‘a great scheme: a network of ideas that cross and re-cross each other’ that is not in confusion but works out a single coherent theological vision of God’s Goodness.

Introduction, Part III: The Theme of the Book

The Revelations centre on one answer to the problem of sin and suffering: God is All-Love and works all things toward the soul’s fuller knowledge of that love; sin ‘is behoveable’ — it plays a necessary part — because the fall through sin opens the creature to a deeper experience of divine mercy, grace, and ultimate glory than would otherwise have been possible.

• Julian’s central mystical insight — ‘God is in all things’ — immediately raises for her the hardest theological question: what is sin, and why did God permit it, given that its hurt to the creature is so great?
  • “‘I saw that He is in all things. I beheld and considered, with a soft dread, and thought: What is sin?’ This question drives the entire Thirteenth Revelation.” —Julian of Norwich
  • Her answer is that sin ‘hath no substance’ and ‘is no deed’ in itself, but is known only by the pain it causes, and that pain purges and makes the soul long more deeply for God.
• The Revelation answers the problem of sin with the assurance ‘Sin is behoveable, but all shall be well,’ pointing toward a hidden ‘Great Deed’ God will accomplish at the Last Day that will reconcile all apparent contradictions, though its nature is kept secret from every creature beneath Christ.
  • “‘Mercy, by love, suffereth us to fail in measure … and grace worketh our shameful falling into high, worshipful rising; and grace worketh our sorrowful dying into holy, blissful life.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “At the Last Day ‘we shall all say with one voice: Lord, blessed mayst Thou be, for it is thus: it is well; and now we see verily that all things are done as it was then ordained before that anything was made.’” —Julian of Norwich
• Julian’s mysticism is inherently evangelical and practical: she does not separate the mystical vision from the redemptive work of Christ, insisting that the Passion is the centre and ground of the Revelation, and that God’s comfort is given for all her ’even-Christians,’ not for herself in special.
  • “‘The Passion was a noble worshipful deed done in a time, but Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • She calls herself not Theodidacta Ecstatica but effectively Theodidacta Evangelica: practical, compassionate, oriented toward the comfort of all mankind.

Chapter I

This opening chapter provides a numbered summary of the Sixteen Revelations, establishing that they all flow from the First — Christ’s crowning with thorns — and together comprehend the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Passion, the soul’s oneness with God, and the promise that we shall not be overcome.

• The First Revelation of the crowning with thorns is the ground and source of all the others, comprehending the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the unity of God with the human soul.
  • The Sixteenth and final Revelation confirms all the preceding ones: ’the Blissful Trinity, our Maker, in Christ Jesus our Saviour endlessly dwelleth in our soul … and we shall not be overcome of our Enemy.’
  • The Seventh Revelation introduces Julian’s key teaching that God keeps us ‘all as securely in Love in woe as in weal, by the Goodness of God.’

Chapter II

Julian introduces herself as ‘a simple creature unlettered’ who before the Revelations had prayed for three gifts — a bodily sight of the Passion, a near-fatal illness in youth, and three wounds of contrition, compassion, and longing toward God — the last of which she desired unconditionally and which stayed with her always.

• Julian’s three preparatory prayers were not requests for mystical experience as such, but for deeper participation in Christ’s suffering and for the purification of her own soul through illness and the wounds of contrition, compassion, and longing.
  • She desired the sickness ‘so hard as to death’ so she might receive all the last rites and be purged by mercy, ‘and afterward live more to the worship of God.’
  • The three wounds — contrition, compassion, longing toward God — were asked ‘without any condition,’ unlike the first two petitions which were conditional on God’s will.

Chapter III

Julian describes her near-death illness at age thirty and a half, her curate’s presentation of the Crucifix, her agreement to fix her gaze upon it rather than look upward to heaven, and the sudden removal of all her pain at the moment the First Revelation began.

• At the point of apparent death, Julian chose to keep her eyes on the Crucifix rather than look up to heaven, framing this as a foretaste of her whole spiritual disposition: ‘Thou art my Heaven,’ she would later say to Christ on the Cross.
  • Her body was dead from the middle downward and she was propped upright to have more freedom of heart to remain attentive to God while life lasted.
  • Suddenly all her pain was taken away, but she did not trust she would live, nor did the ease bring full comfort: ‘methought I had liefer have been delivered from this world.’

The First Revelation

Chapter IV

The First Revelation begins with a bodily sight of blood trickling from under the crown of thorns, which immediately opens into a spiritual sight of the Trinity filling Julian’s heart with joy, and a ghostly vision of the Virgin Mary in her humble youth.

• The vision of Christ’s bleeding head simultaneously reveals the Trinity, because wherever Jesus appears the blessed Trinity is understood; Julian’s first spontaneous response is not sorrow but joy.
  • “‘And in the same Shewing suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy. And so I understood it shall be in heaven without end to all that shall come there.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • The Virgin Mary is shown in her youth, small above a child, and her wisdom and truth caused her meek acceptance: ‘Lo me, God’s handmaid!’

Chapter V

Julian sees a hazel-nut in her palm representing all that is made, which lasts only because God loves it; she concludes that no soul can rest in anything less than God, and hears the soul’s natural yearning expressed: ‘God, of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself.’

• The hazel-nut vision teaches that all created things are infinitely small relative to God and have only three properties — God made it, God loves it, God keeps it — so the soul will find no rest until it is wholly united to its Maker.
  • “‘It needeth us to have knowing of the littleness of creatures and to hold as nought all-thing that is made, for to love and have God that is unmade.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘God, of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself: for Thou art enough to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worship to Thee; and if I ask anything that is less, ever me wanteth,—but only in Thee I have all.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter VI

The Goodness of God is the highest prayer and the deepest ground of all petitions — including those offered through saints and sacraments — because all means of grace flow from and return to God’s Goodness, which encircles the soul more closely than flesh encloses bone.

• Prayer through mediators (saints, sacraments, the Passion itself) is good, but all these means are ordained by God’s Goodness and derive their efficacy from it; cleaving directly to that Goodness in faith is the highest and fullest prayer.
  • “‘For the Goodness of God is the highest prayer, and it cometh down to the lowest part of our need.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “God has no disdain to serve the body for the love of the soul: ‘as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter VII

Julian describes the bodily vision of the bleeding head in vivid detail — like pellets, herring scales, and rain-drops — and argues that this extraordinary shewing teaches the same truth as ordinary faith: God’s marvellous homeliness with the soul is the highest joy, and the special Shewing does not go beyond what faith holds.

• The central comfort of the First Revelation is not the spectacular blood but God’s ‘homeliness and courtesy’ — the paradox that the highest and most dreadful is also the lowest and most intimate.
  • The example of a great king who shows special homeliness to a poor servant illustrates that God’s condescension gives more joy than any gift given with formality.
  • “‘The Shewing, made to whom that God will, plainly teacheth the same, opened and declared … and therefore through the Shewing it is not other than of faith, nor less nor more.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter VIII

From the plenteous bleeding Julian draws six understandings — the Passion, the Virgin, the Godhead, all creation, God’s love as keeper of all things, and God as the goodness of everything good — and desires that all her fellow-Christians should see what she saw.

• All creation seen in the presence of its Maker appears small, not because it is worthless, but because God’s Goodness so overpasses it; the sight moved Julian to urgent charity for all her fellow-Christians.
  • “‘For to a soul that seeth the Maker of all, all that is made seemeth full little.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘God is all that is good, as to my sight, and the goodness that each thing hath, it is He.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter IX

Julian insists on the communal character of the Revelations: she was not shown to be specially beloved by God, and if her receiving the Shewing has value it is because she stands ‘in the person of all mine even-Christians,’ for in mankind that shall be saved all things — and the Maker of all — are comprehended.

• The Revelation is given generally for all Christians, not for Julian as an individual: she explicitly identifies herself as ‘right nought’ when regarded singularly, but as part of the oneness of charity with all her fellow-Christians she is the channel of universal comfort.
  • “‘For truly it was not shewed me that God loved me better than the least soul that is in grace; for I am certain that there be many that never had Shewing nor sight but of the common teaching of Holy Church, that love God better than I.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • The Shewing is triple: by bodily sight, by words formed in understanding, and by spiritual sight — and of the last she says she ‘cannot nor may not shew it as openly nor as fully as I would.’

The Second Revelation

Chapter X

The Second Revelation is a dim, troublous sight of Christ’s suffering face — like the darkened Vernacle of Rome — which teaches that God’s hiddenness is as spiritually profitable as His manifest presence, because seeking Him with faith and trust is as good as beholding Him.

• Julian’s inability to see Christ clearly is itself revelatory: God wills to be sought as well as found, and the soul that fastens itself to God with trust ’either by seeking or in beholding’ renders the highest worship possible.
  • “‘I saw Him, and sought Him; and I had Him, I wanted Him. And this is, and should be, our common working in this [life].’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘The seeking, with faith, hope, and charity, pleaseth our Lord, and the finding pleaseth the soul and fulfilleth it with joy … seeking is as good as beholding, for the time that He will suffer the soul to be in travail.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Third Revelation

Chapter XI

Seeing God ‘in a point’ — in the mid-point of all things — Julian understands that God does all things and that sin is therefore ’no deed’ with being of its own; God’s working is always right and full, and the soul should behold His sweet judgment rather than man’s blind condemning.

• Because God does all that is done and is in the mid-point of all things, sin has no substance or causal being of its own — it is known only by the pain it causes — while everything God does is rightful and full.
  • “‘See! I am God: see! I am in all thing: see! I do all thing: see! I lift never mine hands off my works, nor ever shall, without end.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “‘I saw full surely that he changeth never His purpose in no manner of thing, nor never shall, without end … all-thing was set in order ere anything was made, as it should stand without end.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Fourth Revelation

Chapter XII

The Fourth Revelation of the scourging and plenteous bleeding of Christ’s body leads to a lyrical proclamation of the three movements of His precious blood — descending into Hell to break its bonds, overflowing the earth to wash all sinners of goodwill, and ascending into Heaven to intercede ceaselessly.

• Christ’s blood is presented as cosmically plenteous — its fullness reaches Hell, Earth, and Heaven — and as more precious to God than water for bodily use, because it washes sin by virtue of His blessed Godhead and our own nature.
  • The blood overflowing the body in the scourging is so plenteous that had it been physical it would have made the bed ‘all one blood’; the vision teaches the infinite sufficiency of redemption.
  • “In Heaven the blood is in Christ, ‘bleeding and praying for us to the Father, and is, and shall be as long as it needeth; and ever shall be as long as it needeth.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Fifth Revelation

Chapter XIII

The Fiend is overcome by Christ’s Passion — this is the Fifth Revelation’s word — and Julian sees God scorning the devil’s impotent malice, which causes her to laugh aloud; all the tribulation the Fiend inflicts is turned to joy for souls and to greater shame for him.

• The Fiend’s power is wholly in God’s hand, his malice unchanged since before the Incarnation, but every soul that escapes him by Christ’s Passion increases his sorrow; God’s scorning of him is the proper Christian response.
  • “Julian laughed ‘mightily’ at the sight of God scorning the devil, and those around her laughed with her: ‘I saw not Christ laugh; for I understood that we may laugh in comforting of ourselves and joying in God.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘I see three things: game, scorn, and earnest. I see game, in that the Fiend is overcome; I see scorn, in that God scorneth him … and I see earnest, in that he is overcome by the blissful Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Sixth Revelation

Chapter XIV

The Sixth Revelation is of God’s worshipful thanking of those who serve Him: Julian sees the Lord reigning joyfully in His house, bestowing three degrees of bliss — private thanks, public honour before all Heaven, and eternal freshness of the reward — on every soul that willingly served God even for one day.

• God’s thanking of those who serve Him is shown as so high and worshipful that even if there were no further reward the soul would feel filled; youth offered to God’s service is especially and ‘passingly rewarded.’
  • “‘The age of every man shall be known in Heaven, and he shall be rewarded for his willing service and for his time.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • The Lord takes no place in His own house but ‘royally reigneth in His house, fulfilling it with joy and mirth, Himself endlessly to gladden and to solace His dearworthy friends.’

The Seventh Revelation

Chapter XV

The Seventh Revelation alternates between sovereign spiritual comfort and heavy desolation about twenty times, teaching Julian that God keeps us equally safe in woe and in weal, and that it is not His will that we follow feelings of pain with sorrow but pass over them quickly and hold to endless joy.

• The oscillation between consolation and desolation is itself a revelation: God wills us to know He keeps us secure in both states, so we should not compound suffering by mourning it but should ‘suddenly pass over’ to the beholding of God’s goodness.
  • In the time of joy Julian could have said with Paul ‘Nothing shall dispart me from the charity of Christ,’ and in the pain with Peter ‘Lord, save me: I perish!’
  • “‘Both is one love’: God both gives comfort and suffers us to be in woe for our profit, and the departures from feeling are not caused by sin.” —Julian of Norwich

The Eighth Revelation

Chapter XVI

The Eighth Revelation shows Christ’s face during the dying — the progressive discolouring from red to pale to blue-brown as blood and moisture fail — which Julian beholds as the most pitiable and painful sight of his Passion, particularly in the drying of His flesh.

• Christ’s dying on the Cross involved not only blood-loss but a prolonged drying caused by wind and cold from without and failing moisture within, making His flesh waste away over hours in a suffering Julian likens to seven nights of death.
  • “The four causes of drying were bloodlessness, following pain, hanging in the air, and the body’s need for liquid with nothing given: ‘Ah! hard and grievous was his pain, but much more hard and grievous it was when the moisture failed.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • Julian observes four colour-stages in Christ’s face: ‘fresh, ruddy, and pleasing’ becoming dry and brown-blue, tracing the passage from life through death.

Chapter XVII

Christ’s word ‘I thirst’ points to both bodily thirst from the drying of flesh and a spiritual thirst for souls that Julian will explore in Chapter XXXI; the contemplation of his pain fills her with such anguish that she repents having asked for it, but then recognises that no pain could exceed seeing one’s Love suffer.

• Julian’s identification with Christ’s pain is total — ‘How might any pain be more to me than to see Him that is all my life, all my bliss, and all my joy, suffer?’ — establishing compassion as the deepest form of love’s suffering.
  • She sees the thorns tearing and drying the scalp, the garland of blood hardening over the garland of thorns, and four kinds of drying; the detail is a theology of love expressed through bodily sight.
  • “‘I knew but little what pain it was that I asked; and, as a wretch, repented me, thinking: If I had wist what it had been, loth me had been to have prayed it.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XVIII

Julian sees a part of Mary’s compassion as the model of all creaturely compassion with Christ, and understands that when Christ was in pain we were all in pain — the firmament and earth failing in sorrow at their Maker’s dying — with Dionysius the Areopagite as a pagan witness to the cosmic disruption.

• The oneness of Christ and creation means that His suffering was universal suffering: even those who did not know Him felt desolation at the withdrawal of God’s sustaining power, while His true lovers suffered more than their own deaths.
  • “Dionysius the Areopagite, seeing the supernatural darkness, said ‘Either the world is now at an end, or He that is Maker of Kind suffereth,’ and wrote on an altar ‘This is the Altar of Unknown God.’” —Dionysius the Areopagite
  • “‘Here saw I a great oneing betwixt Christ and us, to mine understanding: for when He was in pain, we were in pain.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XIX

Julian refuses to look up from the Cross to the Father in Heaven, saying ‘Thou art my Heaven,’ choosing Christ in pain as her entire bliss; she analyses this as the inward part of her soul overmastering the outward reluctance of the flesh, and as a lesson to choose only Jesus in weal and woe.

• Julian’s refusal to leave the Cross demonstrates that the inward soul is ‘master and sovereign to the outward’ and that Christ’s drawing of the soul to Himself is stronger than the flesh’s desire to escape pain.
  • “‘Nay; I may not: for Thou art my Heaven. This I said for that I would not. For I would liever have been in that pain till Doomsday than to come to Heaven otherwise than by Him.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘That the outward part should draw the inward to assent was not shewed to me; but that the inward draweth the outward by grace, and both shall be oned in bliss without end, by the virtue of Christ, this was shewed.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XX

Christ’s suffering exceeds all human pain because He who suffered is the highest and most worthy, now most fully ‘made-naught’; He bore each saved soul’s sin and sorrow individually, and though now risen and impassible He suffers with us still in our pain.

• The magnitude of Christ’s Passion is measured not by its physical extent but by the dignity of the sufferer: the highest and worthiest was most utterly despised, and He saw and sorrowed over every individual’s sin and desolation.
  • “‘For as long as He was passible He suffered for us and sorrowed for us; and now He is uprisen and no more passible, yet He suffereth with us.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • All Christ’s pains ‘shall be turned into everlasting, o’erpassing joys by the virtue of Christ’s Passion’ for those souls that behold them by grace.

Chapter XXI

Christ’s countenance suddenly changes from pain to bliss — ‘Where is now any point of the pain?’ — revealing the three ways of beholding the Passion: the hard pains, the love that surpasses them, and the joy in which He was satisfied; Julian understands that we are with Him in His Cross now and shall be with Him in Heaven without any time between.

• The sudden change of Christ’s countenance from pain to mirth models the soul’s own passage: we are with Him in His Cross in this life, and at the last point He will change His cheer to us and we shall be with Him in Heaven — ‘betwixt that one and that other shall be no time.’
  • Christ brought to Julian’s mind: ‘Where is now any point of the pain, or of thy grief?’ — signifying that our present sufferings will be utterly annihilated by the joy of Heaven.
  • “‘For this little pain that we suffer here, we shall have an high endless knowing in God which we could never have without that. And the harder our pains have been with Him in His Cross, the more shall our worship be with Him in His Kingdom.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Ninth Revelation

Chapter XXII

The Ninth Revelation opens with Christ’s question ‘Art thou well pleased that I suffered for thee?’ and His answer ‘If I might suffer more, I would suffer more,’ revealing that His love is infinitely greater than His pains and that we are His bliss, His meed, His worship, and His crown.

• Christ’s love for humanity so far exceeds the pain of the Passion that He would willingly die as many times as there are souls to save — a number that passes all creature’s reason — because love never lets Him rest until it has done all it can.
  • “‘If thou art pleased, I am pleased: it is a joy, a bliss, an endless satisfying to me that ever suffered I Passion for thee; and if I might suffer more, I would suffer more.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “‘We be His bliss, we be His meed, we be His worship, we be His crown’ — this Julian calls ‘a singular marvel and a full delectable beholding.’” —Julian of Norwich
• Three heavens correspond to the three aspects of Christ’s joy: the pleasing of the Father, the worship of the Son, and the satisfying of the Holy Ghost — and all the Trinity worked in the Passion, though only the Son suffered.
  • Christ’s bliss ‘should not have been full, if it might any better have been done’ — the Passion was the best possible deed, perfectly ordered by divine love.
  • “‘The pains was a noble, worshipful deed done in a time by the working of love: but Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XXIII

The Trinity’s collective joy in the Passion is shewn through the image of ’the glad giver’ who takes little heed of his gift’s cost when his beloved receives it with thankfulness; Julian is instructed to share God’s joy in our salvation as fully as possible.

• The ‘glad giver’ image teaches that God’s joy in giving salvation is complete when we receive it gladly and thankfully — our enjoyment of salvation is the meed He desires from us in return for His travail.
  • The ‘cost and charge’ of redemption lasted only from the Incarnation to Easter morning; since then Christ ’endlessly enjoyeth’ the completed work.
  • “‘Jesus willeth that we take heed to the bliss that is in the blessed Trinity of our salvation and that we desire to have as much spiritual enjoying, with His grace, as it is convenient and speedful to us.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Tenth Revelation

Chapter XXIV

Christ looks rejoicingly at His wounded side and leads Julian spiritually within it, showing a fair and large place of rest for all mankind and saying ‘Lo, how I loved thee’ — the Tenth Revelation is the peace and love of the endless Love opened for humanity through the Passion.

• The wound in Christ’s side is a door into the divine heart — a space ’large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love’ — and Christ’s rejoicing look is the expression of the whole Revelation: ‘Lo, how I loved thee.’
  • “‘My darling, behold and see thy Lord, thy God that is thy Maker and thine endless joy, see what satisfying and bliss I have in thy salvation; and for my love rejoice with me.’” —Jesus Christ
  • Christ’s love for humanity is so great that He declares He would die again willingly, and everything He now asks is simply that His death might ‘well please’ us.

The Eleventh Revelation

Chapter XXV

Christ shews Julian His mother Mary in three successive visions — in her youth conceiving, in her sorrows at the Cross, and now in exaltation — teaching that love for Christ entails love for Mary, and that Mary is shown not for bodily veneration but so that Julian might learn her virtues: truth, wisdom, and charity.

• Christ shews Mary to Julian as the highest joy He can offer after Himself, and as a lesson about love: ‘Wilt thou see in her how thou art loved? For thy love I made her so high, so noble and so worthy.’
  • Julian’s desire to see Mary in bodily presence is not granted; she sees her ‘ghostly,’ first simple and meek, then ‘high and noble and glorious, and pleasing to Him above all creatures.’
  • “Julian is not taught to long for Mary’s bodily presence but for the virtues of her soul, ‘whereby I may learn to know myself and reverently dread my God.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Twelfth Revelation

Chapter XXVI

The Twelfth Revelation is Christ’s sovereign declaration ‘I it am’ — repeated across all that the soul loves, serves, seeks, and means — encompassing everything Holy Church preaches; Julian says the joy it gave her surpasses all that heart can wish.

• Christ’s sevenfold ‘I it am’ — highest, beloved, enjoyed, served, longed for, desired, meant, all — is the Twelfth Revelation’s single word: God is all that the soul’s life is built upon, and this knowledge brings the soul to its rest.
  • “‘I it am that is highest, I it am that thou lovest, I it am that thou enjoyest, I it am that thou servest, I it am that thou longest for, I it am that thou desirest, I it am that thou meanest, I it am that is all.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “The joy of this sight ‘passeth all that heart may wish for and soul may desire,’ yet Julian refrains from trying to declare what it comprehends, referring each reader to receive it directly in Christ’s meaning.” —Julian of Norwich

The Thirteenth Revelation

Chapter XXVII

Sin is ‘behoveable’ — it behoves that it be suffered — and yet ‘all shall be well’: this paradox, spoken tenderly by Christ, is the Thirteenth Revelation’s foundation, pointing to a hidden ‘marvellous high mystery’ in God about why sin was permitted, to be made known fully in Heaven.

• Christ’s answer to Julian’s anguished question about why sin was not prevented is not a philosophical explanation but a comforting promise rooted in love: sin and all its pain are comprehended within a divine mystery that will be revealed in Heaven.
  • “Julian had often ‘wondered, with mourning and sorrow without reason and discretion, why by the great foreseeing wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of’ — sin is known only privatively.” —Julian of Norwich
• Pain is ‘something’ for the time because it purges and brings self-knowledge and the desire for mercy, whereas sin itself has no being — the distinction allows Julian to affirm both the reality of suffering and the ultimate sovereignty of divine goodness.
  • “‘Pain purgeth, and maketh us to know ourselves and to ask mercy. For the Passion of our Lord is comfort to us against all this, and so is His blessed will.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “These words were ‘said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any that shall be saved’ — divine comfort does not require condemnation.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XXVIII

Compassion for fellow-Christians is itself Christ working in us — ’each brotherly compassion that man hath on his even-Christians with charity, it is Christ in him’ — and understanding that our tribulations will be turned to glory in Heaven is the beholding that saves us from murmuring.

• The Shewing reveals that God lays tribulation on those He loves not as punishment but as a means of freeing them from vain affections and raising them to bliss; the compassion we feel for them in this is Christ’s own compassion moving through us.
  • “‘A great thing shall I make hereof in Heaven of endless worship and everlasting joys … our Lord joyeth of the tribulations of His servants, with ruth and compassion.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “‘I shall wholly break you of your vain affections and your vicious pride; and after that I shall together gather you, and make you mild and meek, clean and holy, by oneing to me.’” —Jesus Christ

Chapter XXIX

Julian stands troubled, asking ‘How might all be well, for the great hurt that is come by sin?’ and Christ’s comforting answer is that since He has made well the most harm — Adam’s sin — He will make well all lesser harms too.

• The ‘glorious Satisfaction’ (Amends-making) Christ made for Adam’s sin — the most harm ever done — is so much more worshipful than the sin was harmful that it becomes the ground for trusting all lesser evils will also be made well.
  • “‘Since I have made well the most harm, then it is my will that thou know thereby that I shall make well all that is less.’” —Jesus Christ
  • Julian does not receive a philosophical resolution but a promise anchored in the greater fact of redemption, requiring trust rather than understanding.

Chapter XXX

God’s truth divides into two parts: the open part — our Saviour and our salvation — which we are to dwell in with rejoicing, and the hidden part — all beside our salvation — which belongs to God’s royal lordship and is not for us to seek, for God has pity on those who busy themselves with His secret counsels.

• The proper posture toward the mystery of God’s providential will is to rejoice in what is revealed (salvation through Christ) and to leave undisturbed what is hidden — seeking the secrets further makes them more remote, not less.
  • “‘It belongeth to the royal lordship of God to have His privy counsel in peace, and it belongeth to His servant, for obedience and reverence, not to learn wholly His counsel.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “The saints in Heaven ‘will to know nothing but that which our Lord willeth to shew them’ and so should we: ‘we shall nothing will nor desire but the will of our Lord, as they do.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XXXI

Christ’s ‘Spiritual Thirst’ is His love-longing for the full number of saved souls to be brought home to Him — a longing that began before the Incarnation and will last until the Last Day — and this divine longing is the source of the corresponding longing in every soul that seeks heaven.

• Christ’s thirst (‘I thirst’) has a spiritual dimension that exceeds the bodily: it is His desire for all humanity to be gathered into His bliss, a longing that keeps Him at work until the last soul is brought up, because as Head His body is not yet fully glorified.
  • “‘I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well, and I shall make all thing well; and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “The five terms — may, can, will, shall, thou shalt see — correspond respectively to Father, Son, Holy Ghost, the Trinity’s unity, and the oneing of all mankind to God.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XXXII

There is a ‘Great Deed’ that the blessed Trinity will do at the Last Day — unknown to every creature beneath Christ — which will make well all that is not well and reconcile the apparent contradiction between ‘all shall be well’ and the Church’s teaching that some shall be condemned.

• Julian holds in tension the Church’s teaching about condemnation and Christ’s promise that all shall be well, not resolving the contradiction but accepting God’s response: ‘That which is impossible to thee is not impossible to me: I shall save my word in all things and I shall make all things well.’
  • The Great Deed is ’treasured and hid in His blessed breast, only known to Himself’ and will be done at the Last Day — Julian is told it will be but not what it will be.
  • “God wills that we ‘be the more eased in our soul and set at peace in love, leaving the beholding of all troublous things that might keep us back from true enjoying of Him.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XXXIII

Julian desired to see Hell and Purgatory for learning but received no sight of them beyond the First Shewing’s condemnation of the devil; she concludes that the more we seek God’s secret counsels the further we are from knowing them, and we should desire only what the saints in Heaven desire.

• The Revelations shew goodness and make little mention of evil not because evil is denied but because dwelling on God’s deeds is the proper occupation of the soul; seeking the secrets of judgment beyond what is needed leads away from, not toward, understanding.
  • “‘I saw soothly in our Lord’s teaching, the more we busy us to know His secret counsels in this or any other thing, the farther shall we be from the knowing thereof.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • Julian maintains full faith in Holy Church’s teaching about hell and condemnation while acknowledging that this was not shewed to her in the Revelations.

Chapter XXXIV

God has two kinds of secrets: those He wills to remain hidden until Heaven, and those He wills to make known to us through Shewings and the preaching of Holy Church — and the second kind are kept from us not by His will but by our blindness, for which He has great compassion.

• The distinction between God’s intentionally hidden counsels and things presently secret only because of human ignorance implies that God actively works to increase our knowledge through revelation, teaching, and grace wherever we are ready to receive it.
  • “‘For all things that are speedful for us to learn and to know, full courteously will our Lord shew us.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • God is Himself the Ground, Substance, Teaching, Teacher, End, and Meed of Holy Church — the institution is not separate from its divine foundation.

Chapter XXXV

Julian sought a singular shewing about the fate of a particular person she loved and was answered that it is more worship to behold God in all things than in any special thing — individual concerns are comprehended within the general beholding of divine goodness, in which all shall be well.

• God’s rightfulness (which does all good) and His sufferance (which permits all evil that is permitted) together ensure that all things are led to their best end; the soul that beholds both in God’s sight is ‘well pleased with both and endlessly enjoyeth.’
  • ‘Take it generally, and behold the graciousness of the Lord God as He sheweth to thee: for it is more worship to God to behold Him in all than in any special thing.’
  • “Mercy ceases when sin has no more leave to pursue rightful souls — at that point ‘all shall be brought to rightfulness and therein stand without end.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XXXVI

God will do a deed — begun on earth and continuing into Heaven until the Last Day — that He will do Himself while we can do nothing but sin; this deed of mercy and grace is the ground of humble rejoicing, since it shews that our sin cannot hinder His goodness working.

• The coming ‘deed’ God will do for the general man is disclosed not in its content but in its properties — it will be worshipful, profitable, begun here, continuing into Heaven, and marvellous — and is distinguished from the ‘Great Deed’ of the Last Day as an earlier, partial revelation.
  • “‘Behold and see! Here hast thou matter of meekness, here hast thou matter of love, here hast thou matter to make nought of thyself, here hast thou matter to enjoy in me.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “Miracles — which come after tribulation — shew God’s might and give evidence of heavenly joys; God wills us not to be ‘borne over low’ by sorrow since miracles follow.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XXXVII

God shewed Julian that she should sin, and thereby taught the universal truth: in every soul that shall be saved there is a ‘Godly Will’ that never assented to sin and never shall, and this higher will is the ground of our standing in God’s loving sight even amid actual failures.

• Every saved soul contains a Godly Will in its higher nature that is wholly good and never consents to evil, alongside a ‘beastly will’ in the lower nature that can will no moral good; the distinction preserves both moral responsibility and the soul’s fundamental lovability to God.
  • “‘I keep thee full surely’ — said with ‘more love and secureness and spiritual keeping than I can or may tell.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “‘For failing of love on our part, therefore is all our travail’ — the source of all sin and suffering is not God’s withholding but creaturely failure in love.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XXXVIII

Sin shall be no shame but worship in Heaven: the token of sin is turned to honour there, as shewn in David, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, and especially John of Beverley, whose fall and gracious restoration made him more beloved and more fruitful than if he had not fallen.

• For each sin there is a corresponding bliss in Heaven proportioned to the pain it caused the soul on earth — wounds become worships — and the saints ‘known in the Church in earth with their sins’ demonstrate that contrition and mercy transform failure into glory.
  • “Saint John of Beverley is cited as a ‘dear neighbour’ whom God brought to Julian’s mind: ‘He suffered him to fall, mercifully keeping him … and afterward God raised him to manifold more grace, and by the contrition and meekness that he had … God hath given him in Heaven manifold joys, overpassing that he should have had if he had not fallen.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • David, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, and the Apostles of India are all mentioned as souls known by their sins yet now worshipped in Heaven.

Chapter XXXIX

Sin is the sharpest scourge any soul can suffer, yet through contrition, compassion, and longing toward God — the three ‘medicines’ that bring the soul to Heaven — its wounds are turned to worships, and God never despairs of us because our falling does not prevent His love.

• The three medicines of contrition, compassion, and longing toward God are the path by which every sinner reaches Heaven; these wounds, once healed, appear before God not as wounds but as worships.
  • “‘By contrition we are made clean, by compassion we are made ready, and by true longing toward God we are made worthy. These are three means … whereby all souls come to heaven.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Our courteous Lord willeth not that His servants despair, for often nor for grievous falling: for our falling hindereth not Him to love us. Peace and love are ever in us, being and working.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XL

True love teaches us to hate sin only for love’s sake, not from fear; Julian insists that to a ‘kind soul’ — a naturally-loving human soul — no pain is worse than sin, and God’s will is that we endlessly hate sin while endlessly loving the soul, just as He does.

• The more deeply any soul sees God’s courteous love, the more it loathes sin — not out of fearful dread but out of love for the Good that sin opposes; recklessness about sin is the work of the enemy, not the implication of divine mercy.
  • “‘To me was shewed no harder hell than sin. For a kind soul hath no hell but sin.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘He willeth that we endlessly hate the sin and endlessly love the soul, as God loveth it … no more than His love is broken to us for our sin, no more willeth He that our love be broken to ourself and to our even-Christians.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Fourteenth Revelation

Chapter XLI

The Fourteenth Revelation concerns prayer: God is the Ground of all beseeching — He first wills the prayer, then makes us will it, then makes us ask it — so that our prayer cannot fail; and thanksgiving, whether spoken aloud or silent, is prayer’s necessary companion.

• Prayer cannot be in vain because God is its ground: He first ordains what we need, then gives us the will and the act of asking for it, so that the asking is already the guarantee of receiving.
  • “‘I am Ground of thy beseeching: first it is my will that thou have it; and after, I make thee to will it; and after, I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?’” —Jesus Christ
  • “‘Pray inwardly, though thee thinketh it savour thee not: for it is profitable, though thou feel not, though thou see nought … in dryness and in barrenness, in sickness and in feebleness, then is thy prayer well-pleasant to me.’” —Jesus Christ

Chapter XLII

Prayer and trust must be ‘alike large’ because insufficient trust dishonours God and torments the soul; Julian teaches that when prayer seems delayed it is because God is preparing a better time, more grace, or a better gift, and that prayer is itself ‘a right understanding of that fulness of joy that is to come.’

• Prayer should accompany the sight of God’s working — neither prayer without beholding nor beholding without prayer is adequate; the soul must both see that God does and pray for what He does, because in this dual act God is most worshipped and the soul most helped.
  • “‘Prayer is a right understanding of that fulness of joy that is to come, with well-longing and sure trust.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • We ought to understand that the greatest deeds are already done — creation, redemption, the continual guidance of grace — and pray for what is ’now in doing’: to be ruled and led to bliss.

Chapter XLIII

Prayer unites the soul to God; when God shews Himself the soul’s only work is beholding, but when He is not clearly seen the soul’s prayer is itself the response to need, making it pliable to God while God does not change — until at death the soul dies ‘in longing, for love’ and comes to see God face to face.

• The soul’s relationship with God alternates between the soul following God (in contemplation when He manifests) and God following the soul (in mercy when it struggles), but the goal is unceasing movement toward the final fullness where all five senses of the spirit are satisfied in God.
  • “‘Prayer oneth the soul to God. For though the soul be ever like to God in kind and substance, restored by grace, it is often unlike in condition, by sin on man’s part.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “The fullness of the spiritual life is described through all five senses: ‘Him verily seeing and fully feeling, Him spiritually hearing, and Him delectably in-breathing, and of Him sweetly drinking.’” —Julian of Norwich

Anent Certain Points in the Foregoing Fourteen Revelations

Chapter XLIV

Truth sees God, Wisdom beholds God, and from these two comes Love’s holy marvelling delight — the soul’s three properties mirror the Trinity’s own Truth, Wisdom, and Love, and the soul’s endless work is to see, behold, and delight in its Maker.

• Man’s soul is a ‘made creature’ possessing the same properties as God — Truth, Wisdom, Love — though in created form; these properties act endlessly: the soul sees God, beholds God, loves God, and in this God and creature delight in each other endlessly.
  • “‘Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “God is ’endless sovereign Truth, endless sovereign Wisdom, endless sovereign Love, unmade; and man’s Soul is a creature in God which hath the same properties made.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XLV

There are two judgments — God’s judgment of our Nature-Substance (always righteous and blissful) and man’s judgment of our Sense-soul (changeable, sometimes grievous) — and Julian is left in tension between them until the parable of the Lord and Servant in Chapter LI begins to resolve it.

• Julian cannot yet reconcile the Church’s teaching that sinners deserve blame and wrath with God’s Shewing of no blame at all; she asks to see both judgments together ‘as one’ and is given only the mysterious parable of the Lord and Servant as a partial answer.
  • God’s higher judgment belongs to our Nature-Substance kept in Him whole and safe; man’s lower judgment belongs to our Sensuality, which appears sometimes good, sometimes evil.
  • “‘For all heavenly, and all earthly things that belong to Heaven, are comprehended in these two dooms’ — getting their right relationship is crucial to knowing both God and the self.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XLVI

Julian holds together the Church’s teaching that we are sinners deserving pain with the Shewing that God is never wroth; the reconciliation lies in the nature of God as pure Goodness — His Clarity and Unity make wrath impossible — while anger belongs only to our part.

• God cannot be wroth because He is Goodness itself, and between God and the soul oned to Him there can be no wrath nor forgiveness — wrath is a ‘forwardness and contrariness to peace and love’ that exists only in the creature.
  • “‘He is God: Good, Life, Truth, Love, Peace; His Clarity and His Unity suffereth Him not to be wroth. For I saw truly that it is against the property of His Might to be wroth.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “Julian holds both the Shewing and the Church’s teaching without abandoning either: ‘I yield me to my Mother, Holy Church, as a simple child oweth.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XLVII

Julian describes the five workings felt during the Shewing — enjoying, mourning, desire, dread, and sure hope — and acknowledges that continuous sight of God is not possible in this life, so we fall back into ourselves and find there only contrariness rooted in the elder root of the first sin.

• The soul’s alternation between glimpsed sight of God and return to its own blind contrariness is the normal pattern of this life; the five workings experienced in vision — joy, mourning, desire, dread, hope — are the soul’s true register of spiritual reality.
  • “‘We fail oftentimes of the sight of Him, and anon we fall into our self, and then find we no feeling of right — nought but contrariness that is in our self.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “Even during the Shewing, the high sight was ‘but small and low in comparison with the great desire that the soul hath to see God.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XLVIII

Mercy and Grace are two properties of one love — Mercy belonging to the Motherhood in tender keeping and Grace to the royal Lordship in rewarding and raising — and together they turn our dreadful falling into plenteous solace and our sorrowful dying into holy blissful life.

• Wrath exists only in the human creature as the contrariness of a will turned from God; God works continually through Mercy (keeping, quickening, healing) and Grace (raising, rewarding, overpassing) to restore peace, never abandoning the ‘sweet eye of pity and love.’
  • “‘Mercy worketh: keeping, suffering, quickening, and healing; and all is tenderness of love. And grace worketh: raising, rewarding, endlessly overpassing that which our longing and our travail deserveth.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Grace worketh our dreadful failing into plenteous, endless solace; and grace worketh our shameful falling into high, worshipful rising; and grace worketh our sorrowful dying into holy, blissful life.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter XLIX

Where God appears, peace is taken and wrath has no place; the soul is made fully safe — not just kept from perishing but brought to bliss — only when it is fully at peace in itself and with all that God loves, and this peace is God’s own continuous working in us.

• If God could be wroth even for an instant we should have no life nor being, because our existence is rooted in the same Goodness that precludes wrath; the soul is securely kept even in unpeace but is only blissfully safe in the fullness of peace and love.
  • “‘Suddenly is the soul oned to God when it is truly peaced in itself: for in Him is found no wrath.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • All the soul’s tribulation and contrariness is taken by God and ‘sent up to Heaven’ where it is ‘made more sweet and delectable than heart may think or tongue may tell’ — found ready there as ’endless worships.’

Chapter L

Julian wrestles with the paradox that the blame of sin continually hangs upon us by Holy Church’s teaching, yet in all the Shewings God assigned no blame; she cannot rest in either side alone and presses God for a reconciling answer.

• Julian’s intellectual honesty demands that she hold both truths simultaneously — our genuine sinfulness and blameworthiness, and God’s complete absence of wrath — and she refuses to abandon either for comfort, calling the question the most pressing issue for her faith.
  • “‘I see Thee that art very Truth; and I know in truth that we sin grievously every day and be much blameworthy; and I may neither leave the knowing of Thy truth, nor do I see Thee shew to us any manner of blame. How may this be?’” —Julian of Norwich
  • She confesses she was drawn to ask precisely because it is ‘so low a thing’ (not beyond her), ‘so common’ (not just her problem), and necessary for living well.

Chapter LI

The parable of the Lord and Servant is Julian’s most complex and sustained theological vision: the Servant is simultaneously Adam (fallen man) and Christ (who fell into the Virgin’s womb to rescue mankind), showing that God’s Fatherly gaze sees not blame but the loving desire that caused the fall, and that the Son’s restoration brings humanity to greater glory than it had before the fall.

• The Servant falls not from disobedience but from the haste of love in running to do the Lord’s will; the Lord looks on him with a double regard — outward pity and inward joy at the coming restoration — and assigns him no blame, only the intention to reward him above his original wholeness.
  • “‘Lo, lo, my loved Servant, what harm and distress he hath taken in my service for my love, yea, and for his goodwill. Is it not fitting that I award him for his affright and his dread, his hurt and his maim?’” —Lord in the Parable
  • “The Servant’s worst suffering is ‘failing of comfort: for he could not turn his face to look upon his loving Lord’ — spiritual darkness is worse than physical pain.” —Julian of Norwich
• The Servant comprehends both Adam and Christ in one figure: Adam fell from life to death into the deep of the world and then hell; God’s Son fell with Adam into the deep of the Virgin’s womb, taking on Adam’s ‘old kirtle’ of human flesh, making the two but one man — Christ’s virtue and goodness, Adam’s weakness and blindness.
  • “‘In the Servant is comprehended the Second Person in the Trinity; and in the Servant is comprehended Adam: that is to say, All-Man.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Thus hath our good Lord Jesus taken upon Him all our blame, and therefore our Father nor may nor will more blame assign to us than to His own Son, dearworthy Christ.’” —Julian of Norwich
• After the Resurrection Christ sits at the Father’s right hand richly clad, crowned with us as His crown, while the Father waits no longer in wilderness; the whole parable decodes into a complete theology of fall, Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and glorification.
  • “Christ’s ragged white kirtle (human flesh, poverty, Adam’s labour) is made ‘fair, new, white and bright and of endless cleanness; loose and long; fairer and richer than was then the clothing which I saw on the Father.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Now is the Spouse, God’s Son, in peace with His loved Wife, which is the Fair Maiden of endless Joy.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LII

There is a ‘marvellous mingling’ of weal and woe in every saved soul on earth — both the risen Christ and Adam’s falling dying live in us simultaneously — and yet by the Holy Assent of the Godly Will we stand in God even in the midst of our medley, for God is lastingly with us in three manners: in heaven drawing us, on earth leading us, in our souls dwelling.

• God rejoices simultaneously as our Father, Mother, Spouse, Brother, and Saviour — five joys of relationship — and the soul’s complex ‘medley’ of Christ’s risen life and Adam’s failing dying is held together by the Godly Will’s holy assent to God.
  • “‘We have in us our Lord Jesus uprisen, we have in us the wretchedness and the mischief of Adam’s falling, dying. By Christ we are steadfastly kept, and by His grace touching us we are raised into sure trust of salvation.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “The mightily joyful conclusion: ‘mightily He joyeth in his falling for the high raising and fulness of bliss that Mankind is come to, overpassing that we should have had if he had not fallen.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LIII

Every soul that shall be saved contains a Godly Will that never sinned and never shall, knit to God before the world began; God ‘began never to love mankind,’ for the same love that will fulfil us in Heaven has been there without beginning, and Christ as Mid-Person willed to be the ground and head of all human nature from eternity.

• God’s love for humanity has no beginning because it is prior to creation itself: ‘Ere that He made us He loved us, and when we were made we loved Him’ — this original oneness, though damaged by sin, is never destroyed and is the ground of all redemption.
  • “‘The Mid-Person willed to be Ground and Head of this fair Kind: out of Whom we be all come, in Whom we be all enclosed, into Whom we shall all wend, in Him finding our full Heaven in everlasting joy.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “Man’s soul is made of ’nought that is made’ — created entirely by God with nothing material used — and thus the nature-made is ‘rightfully oned to the Maker, which is Substantial Nature not-made.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LIV

Faith is ‘a right understanding, with true belief and sure trust, of our Being: that we are in God, and God in us, Whom we see not’; the soul’s dwelling in God’s Substance and God’s dwelling in the soul are the two complementary truths of mystical theology, each requiring the other.

• There is no separation between the dwelling of the blessed Soul of Christ in the Godhead and the souls of all that shall be saved, because God makes no distinctions of love between them; our faith is grounded in this invisible oneness.
  • “‘Highly ought we to rejoice that God dwelleth in our soul, and much more highly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwelleth in God.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “The Trinity is present within the soul in a mutual enclosing: ‘We are enclosed in the Father, and we are enclosed in the Son, and we are enclosed in the Holy Ghost: and the Father is enclosed in us, and the Son is enclosed in us, and the Holy Ghost is enclosed in us.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LV

Christ is our Way, bearing us in His body to Heaven; because Mankind is ‘made double’ — Substance and Sensuality — it required the Second Person to take on the lower part (Sensuality) while the higher (Substance) was already His, so that in Christ both natures are united and mankind is saved from double death.

• Our Sensuality is the City of God ordained from eternity; the soul in its lower nature is the place where God dwells on earth while the Substance rests in God above, and both are knit by Christ who is the Mean between them.
  • “‘Our Soul is so deep-grounded in God, and so endlessly treasured, that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God’ — knowledge of the self requires prior knowledge of God.” —Julian of Norwich
  • “The soul is a ‘made-trinity’ of Reason, Mind, and Love corresponding to Truth, Wisdom, and Goodness — the image of the unmade Trinity.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LVI

God is nearer to us than our own soul — He is the Ground in whom it stands — yet we cannot know our soul fully until we know God, nor know God fully until we know our own perfected soul in Heaven; the two knowings are ultimately one, and the Holy Ghost leads us toward both together.

• The soul’s Substance rests in God while God dwells in the soul’s Sensuality — these are two complementary truths that require each other for completeness; neither ascending mysticism nor descending kenosis alone captures Julian’s vision.
  • “‘God is nearer to us than our own Soul: for He is the Ground in whom our Soul standeth, and He is Mean that keepeth the Substance and the Sense-nature together so that they shall never dispart.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘We may never come to full knowing of God till we know first clearly our own Soul’ in its full powers — which only happens in Heaven.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LVII

In our Substance we are made noble and full, in our Sensuality we fail; Christ joins these two parts through the Incarnation — taking on our Sensuality while His Godhead remains oned to our Substance — and thus in Christ our two natures are oned and we are born through Him as Mother.

• The Second Person of the Trinity is our Mother in both Nature (creating the Substance) and Grace (taking on the Sensuality), so that our Lady Mary is our mother in the order of nature but Christ is our ‘Very Mother in whom we be endlessly borne’ in the order of grace.
  • “‘Our Lady is our Mother in whom we are all enclosed and of her born, in Christ; and our Saviour is our Very Mother in whom we be endlessly borne, and never shall come out of Him.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “He ‘willeth that we be His helpers, giving to Him all our entending, learning His lores, keeping His laws, desiring that all be done that He doeth; truly trusting in Him.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LVIII

Julian’s systematic account of the Trinity’s motherhood: the Father is our Nature’s Father (Being), the Son is our Nature’s Mother (Increasing), and the Holy Ghost is our Lord who rewards and gives (Fulfilling) — summed as Nature, Mercy, and Grace — and in this oneing God is also our ‘Very True Spouse.’

• All three Persons of the Trinity exercise a form of Motherhood toward humanity: the Father gives Being, the Son (as Wisdom) gives Increasing through Mercy and Reform, and the Holy Ghost gives Fulfilling through rewarding and giving — these are ‘all one God, one Lord.’
  • “‘For all our life is in three: in the first we have our Being, in the second we have our Increasing, and in the third we have our Fulfilling: the first is Nature, the second is Mercy, and the third is Grace.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘He saith: I love thee, and thou lovest me, and our love shall never be disparted in two’ — God as Spouse united to the soul as His loved Wife.” —Jesus Christ

Chapter LIX

Jesus Christ is our ‘Very Mother’ in the most essential sense because He does good against evil — the defining property of Motherhood — and the soul’s being, keeping, and longing all have their ground in Him; God is as truly our Mother as our Father.

• The Motherhood of God in Christ is not metaphorical decoration but a systematic category: there are three modes — Motherhood of making (Nature), of taking our nature (Grace), and of working (the forthspreading of grace in length and breadth and height and deepness without end).
  • “‘As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed He in all, and especially in these sweet words where He saith: I it am.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘There the soul is highest, noblest, and worthiest, where it is lowest, meekest, and mildest: and out of this Substantial Ground we have all our virtues.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LX

Christ as Mother feeds us with Himself in the Blessed Sacrament, leads us into His wounded side to shew us the Godhead, and tends us as a wise nurse who adapts her care to the child’s age — but it is He alone who can fully execute the office of Motherhood, for all earthly mothers bear to pain and death while He bears us to endless life.

• The Eucharist is the supreme act of Christ’s Motherhood — ’the precious food of my life’ — by which He feeds us with Himself, as an earthly mother feeds with milk but Christ feeds with His own substance through the Sacraments and His Word.
  • “‘The mother may give her child suck of her milk, but our precious Mother, Jesus, He may feed us with Himself, and doeth it, full courteously and full tenderly, with the Blessed Sacrament.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “Christ sustains us ‘within Himself in love; and travailed, unto the full time that He would suffer the sharpest throes and the most grievous pains that ever were or ever shall be; and died at the last.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXI

It is necessary for us to fall, and necessary to see it, because only through the assay of falling do we gain ‘an high marvellous knowing of love in God without end’ — the love that may not and will not be broken for trespass; our Mother Christ raises us with a ’lovely calling’ but when we are ashamed directs us to run to Him like a child to its mother.

• The permission of falling serves the soul’s education in love: we learn our own feebleness, and we learn the unbreakable strength of divine love — a knowledge impossible without the experience of failure and restoration.
  • “‘My kind Mother, my Gracious Mother, my dearworthy Mother, have mercy on me: I have made myself foul and unlike to Thee, and I nor may nor can amend it but with thine help and grace.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “When the individual soul is ‘broken’ it should take refuge in the whole Body of Holy Church, ‘which was never broken, nor never shall be, without end’ — the community sustains the individual through its own wholeness.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXII

God is Nature in His being — the ground, substance, and Naturehood of all things — and as true Father and Mother of all natures He will restore to Himself through the salvation of mankind all the diverse natures He made to flow out of Him; the fullness of all nature is found in Man and in Holy Church.

• All natures created in partial form across the diversity of creation are found whole in Man, and the salvation of mankind therefore gathers all natures back into their divine source — creation’s redemption is caught up in human redemption.
  • “‘God is Kind in His being: that is to say, that Goodness that is Kind, it is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is Nature-hood.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “We need not ‘seek far out to know sundry natures, but to Holy Church, unto our Mother’s breast: that is to say, unto our own soul where our Lord dwelleth; and there shall we find all.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXIII

Sin is not only unclean but ‘unkind’ — against nature itself — because Grace was sent to save Nature and destroy sin and bring Nature back to God with more nobleness; the highest stature in this life is Childhood, and Christ feeds and tends His children until they are brought to the Father’s bliss.

• Nature and Grace are of one accord because both are God — Nature and Grace do not conflict but co-operate, Grace being sent to restore what sin has disordered in Nature and raise it higher than it was before.
  • “‘As verily as sin is unclean so verily is it unnatural, and thus an horrible thing to see for the loved soul that would be all fair and shining in the sight of God, as Nature and Grace teacheth.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘I understood none higher stature in this life than Childhood, in feebleness and failing of might and of wit, unto the time that our Gracious Mother hath brought us up to our Father’s Bliss.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Fifteenth Revelation

Chapter LXIV

The Fifteenth Revelation brings the promise ‘Suddenly thou shalt be taken from all thy pain’ and a vision of a small, radiant Child springing from a swollen body of stinking mire — the soul’s purity released from mortal flesh — accompanied by Christ’s invitation: ‘Thou shalt come up above, and thou shalt have me to thy meed.’

• Julian is taught to hold the beholding of heavenly bliss as her primary orientation — ‘set the point of our thought in this blissful beholding as often as we may’ — and to take her earthly troubles ‘as lightly as we may’ because the sudden passing into bliss will end all pain absolutely.
  • “‘Suddenly thou shalt be taken from all thy pain, from all thy sickness, from all thy distress and from all thy woe. And thou shalt come up above and thou shalt have me to thy meed, and thou shalt be fulfilled of love and of bliss.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “The vision of the child springing from the mire teaches: ‘It is more blissful that man be taken from pain, than that pain be taken from man; for if pain be taken from us it may come again.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXV

Whoever chooses God firmly in this life is loved without end, and that endless love works grace in them; true ‘reverent dread’ — the holy courteous dread of a creature before its marvellous Lord — is inseparable from love, and both together are the full content of the soul’s security.

• The love of God creates such unity among Christians that ’no man can part himself from other’ — salvation is communal, and each soul is to think that God has done for it personally all that He has done for all.
  • “‘It is God’s will that I see myself as much bound to Him in love as if He had done for me all that He hath done; and thus should every soul think inwardly of its Lover.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “All dread except reverent dread — which is ‘full soft, for the more it is had the less it is felt for sweetness of love’ — is to be set among ‘passions and bodily sickness and imaginations.’” —Julian of Norwich

The Sixteenth Revelation

Chapter LXVI

After the Fifteen Shewings close, Julian’s pain returns and she ‘raves’ to a visiting religious, denying the Cross had bled; then overnight she is tormented by nightmarish visions of the Fiend but is delivered by fastening her eye on the Cross and her heart on Holy Church, until rest and peace return.

• Julian’s self-disclosure of doubt and denial — ‘I raved to-day’ — is a frank acknowledgement of ordinary human frailty overwhelming visionary grace; it serves as a dramatic contrast to the Sixteenth confirming Revelation that follows.
  • “‘Ah! lo, wretch that I am! this was a great sin, great unkindness, that I for folly of feeling of a little bodily pain, so unwisely lost for the time the comfort of all this blessed Shewing of our Lord God.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “She overcame the Fiend’s second assault ‘by the virtue of Christ’s Passion: for therewith is the Fiend overcome, as our Lord Jesus Christ said afore.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXVII

The Sixteenth Revelation opens Julian’s spiritual eye to her soul as a vast and blissful city with Christ sitting in its midst in majesty and peace — ’the place that Jesus taketh in our soul He shall never remove it, without end’ — and the soul cannot rest in anything beneath itself, not even in itself, but only in God who dwells within.

• The soul is revealed as God’s most worshipful dwelling — ‘His homliest home and His endless dwelling’ — making the indwelling of God in the soul not an occasional grace but a permanent, structural reality that is the ground of all spiritual life.
  • “‘I saw the Soul so large as it were an endless world, and as it were a blissful kingdom. And by the conditions that I saw therein I understood that it is a worshipful City.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Our soul may never have rest in things that are beneath itself. And when it cometh above all creatures into the Self, yet may it not abide in the beholding of its Self, but all the beholding is blissfully set in God that is the Maker dwelling therein.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXVIII

‘Thou shalt not be overcome’ — spoken with final authority — is the last and confirming word of all the Revelations, parallel to the first word ‘Herewith is the devil overcome’; God does not promise absence of temptation or travail but certainty of not being overcome.

• The Sixteenth Revelation confirms all preceding ones by repeating their essential word in a different register: the Passion overcame the devil, and the indwelling God overcomes for us — not by removing all pain but by ensuring its ultimate failure to overcome.
  • “‘Wit it now well that it was no raving that thou sawest to-day: but take it and believe it, and keep thee therein, and comfort thee therewith, and trust thou thereto: and thou shalt not be overcome.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “The word is ‘said full clearly and full mightily, for assuredness and comfort against all tribulations that may come’ — not conditional but absolute.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXIX

The Fiend returns with heat, stench, and mocking noise to stir Julian to despair; she overcomes him by fixing her bodily eye on the Cross, her tongue on Christ’s Passion and the Faith of Holy Church, and her heart on God — and in the morning he departs leaving nothing but stench.

• The practical means of overcoming spiritual assault are the same as the ground of faith itself: the Passion of Christ and the common belief of the Church, held together in a practical act of will despite sensory horror.
  • “‘Wouldst thou now from this time evermore be so busy to keep thee from sin, this were a good and a sovereign occupation! For I thought in sooth were I safe from sin, I were full safe from all the fiends of hell.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Thus was I delivered from him by the virtue of Christ’s Passion: for therewith is the Fiend overcome.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXX

The Shewing is kept by faith, not by sign or token; God re-shewed it within Julian’s soul with blessed words — ‘It was no raving that thou sawest this day’ — and the six commands following (‘Take it, believe it, keep thee therein…’) are meant to fasten the Revelation faithfully in every Christian heart unto life’s end.

• Faith, not continued visionary experience, is the proper keeping of the Revelation; above faith ‘is no goodness kept in this life’ and beneath faith ‘is no help of soul’ — it is the medium in which the soul is held and within which all spiritual growth occurs.
  • God shewed the Revelation again ‘within in my soul with more fulness, with the blessed light of His precious love’ after Julian had denied it — an act of mercy that established the Revelation more firmly in faith than the original vision had.
  • “‘For above the Faith is no goodness kept in this life, as to my sight, and beneath the Faith is no help of soul; but in the Faith, there willeth the Lord that we keep us.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXI

God has three manners of countenance toward us: the Passion (mournful but glad for He is God), Ruth and Compassion (shewn in the time of our sin), and the Blissful Cheer (shewn oftenest and longest) — and He draws our outer countenance toward His inner by drawing us into His own joy.

• The triple mode of God’s Regard — suffering, compassionate, and blissful — corresponds to the three conditions of this life: tribulation, sinfulness, and the grace of contemplation; by mingling all three God sustains the soul through every condition.
  • “‘He beholdeth us ever, living in love-longing: and He willeth that our soul be in glad cheer to Him, to give Him His meed.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “The Blissful Cheer is shewn ‘by gracious touching and sweet lighting of the spiritual life, whereby that we are kept in sure faith, hope, and charity, with contrition and devotion.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXII

Sin is the most contrary thing to the soul’s highest bliss — the Blissful Cheer of God — because as long as we are ‘meddling with any part of sin’ we cannot see it clearly; yet sin is deadly only for a short time in creatures of endless life, and God is never absent even in our darkness.

• The soul’s longing for the Blissful Countenance of God is never satisfied here — even the greatest comfort is inadequate — because what is desired is the fullness that no creature or created gift can supply, only the clear sight of God Himself.
  • “‘As long as we be meddling with any part of sin, we shall never see clearly the Blissful Countenance of our Lord.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Ever the more clearly that the soul seeth this Blissful Cheer by grace of loving, the more it longeth to see it in fulness’ — clarity of vision increases rather than satisfies longing.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXIII

God shews two principal sicknesses of the spiritual life — impatience or sloth, and despair or doubtful dread — and connects them to a fundamental failure to believe that God is All-Love and will do all: most people believe His might and wisdom but ’there we stop short’ at His love and will.

• Doubtful dread taken as humility is in fact ‘a foul blindness and a weakness’ because it does not trust the love of God who forgives as completely as He judges — just as He forgives our sins, He wills that we forgive ourselves of ‘unskilful heaviness and doubtful dreads.’
  • “‘Some of us believe that God is Almighty and may do all, and that He is All-Wisdom and can do all; but that He is All-Love and will do all, there we stop short. And this not-knowing it is, that hindereth most God’s lovers.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “Heavy sorrow at repeated sin ‘maketh us so sorry and so heavy, that scarsely we can find any comfort’ — but this heaviness is itself a sin against the love that never condemns beyond contrition.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXIV

Julian distinguishes four kinds of dread — startling fright (useful for purging), dread of pain (awakening from sin’s sleep), doubtful dread (to be turned to love), and reverent dread (the only one fully pleasing to God) — and concludes that love and dread are ‘brethren’ inseparably rooted together in the soul’s nature.

• Reverent dread is the most perfect form of creaturely response to God because it grows sweeter the more it is felt — love and dread are not opposites but co-inherent virtues, both given by God and both required for complete worship.
  • “‘That dread that maketh us hastily to flee from all that is not good and fall into our Lord’s breast, as the Child into the Mother’s bosom … that dread that bringeth us into this working, it is natural, gracious, good and true.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Love and Dread are brethren, and they are rooted in us by the Goodness of our Maker, and they shall never be taken from us without end.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXV

God has three longings — to teach us, to have us, to fulfil us — and at the Last Day we shall see the cause of all He has done and permitted; the sight will be so great that even the pillars of Heaven will tremble in marvelling joy, and creatures will have a reverent dread of God overpassing all they have known.

• The fullness of eschatological knowledge — seeing the cause of all things God has done and all He has permitted — will produce not satisfaction but an immense increase of reverent dread, because the greater the knowledge of God the greater the perception of the infinite distance between Creator and creature.
  • “‘The pillars of heaven shall tremble and quake. But this manner of trembling and dread shall have no pain; but it belongeth to the worthy might of God thus to be beholden by His creatures, in great dread trembling and quaking for meekness of joy.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “God gives three things man needs in this life: love-longing to draw him to heaven, pity to keep him now, and teaching to grow in knowledge of Him.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXVI

The soul that beholds the fair nature of Christ hates no hell but sin; looking at other men’s sins creates a mist before the soul that obscures God unless it is looked at with contrition and compassion for the sinner, and the most foolish thing is to flee from Christ when fallen rather than run to Him.

• The Enemy uses our record of sin and broken covenants to push us away from God with false dread, but the sovereign friendship of Christ demands that we cleave to Him especially when foul — ‘for weal nor for woe He willeth never we flee from Him.’
  • “‘The beholding of other man’s sins, it maketh as it were a thick mist afore the eyes of the soul, and we cannot, for the time, see the fairness of God, but if we may behold them with contrition with him, with compassion on him, and with holy desire to God for him.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Especially into sloth and losing of time. For that is the beginning of sin, as to my sight, and especially to the creatures that have given them to serve our Lord with inward beholding of His blessed Goodness.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXVII

God wills that we not accuse ourselves overmuch in tribulation nor think our woe all our fault; ‘all thy living is penance profitable’ because God is with us in it, and the proper remedy is not elaborate self-imposed penances but meekly bearing what God gives, fleeing to Him, and living ‘gladly and merrily for love’s sake in our penance.’

• The true penance is not self-chosen austerity but the natural penance of this mortal life received meekly, including sin’s darkness, tribulation, and bodily suffering — taken with ‘mind of His blessed Passion’ and oriented toward the comfort He promises.
  • “‘Accuse not thyself overdone much, deeming that thy tribulation and thy woe is all for thy fault; for I will not that thou be heavy or sorrowful indiscreetly. For I tell thee, howsoever thou do, thou shalt have woe.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “‘This place is prison and this life is penance, and in the remedy He willeth that we rejoice. The remedy is that our Lord is with us, keeping and leading into the fulness of joy.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXVIII

God shews our sin and feebleness through the sweet gracious light of Himself, not through the darkness of self-accusation; four things He wills we know — His groundedness in us, His merciful keeping among enemies, His courteous correction, and His unchanging regard — and true meekness requires both the high contemplative sight and the sight of our own falling.

• Even those ‘highly lifted up into contemplation by the special gift of our Lord’ still need knowledge and sight of their own sin, because without this they cannot have true meekness, and without meekness they cannot be saved.
  • “‘Our Lord of His mercy sheweth us our sin and our feebleness by the sweet gracious light of Himself; for our sin is so vile and so horrible that He of His courtesy will not shew it to us but by the light of His grace and mercy.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “By meek knowing of sin, ’through contrition and grace we shall be broken from all that is not our Lord. And then shall our blessed Saviour perfectly heal us, and one us to Him.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXIX

Julian was taught to see her own sin rather than others’ — except when it may comfort or help them — and to dread for her own unsureness while being assured that God’s love and her soul shall never be ‘disparted in two’; the homely Shewing of Christ keeps her from both presumption (by dread) and despair (by love).

• The Shewing that Julian should sin was meant generally for all mankind, not singularly for her; the appropriate response is dread of one’s own frailty without knowing the measure or greatness of one’s sins, balanced by the certainty of God’s unchanging love.
  • “‘I was learned to see mine own sin, and not other men’s sins but if it may be for comfort and help of mine even-Christians.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘In the dread I have matter of meekness that saveth me from presumption, and in the blessed Shewing of Love I have matter of true comfort and of joy that saveth me from despair.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXX

Three things keep and sustain the Christian life — natural reason, the common teaching of Holy Church, and the inward gracious working of the Holy Ghost — and all three are from one God; Christ alone does all the work of salvation, now dwelling with each soul until He has brought every last one to His bliss.

• God’s indwelling care for each soul is so intimate that if only one soul remained on earth He would be with it alone until He brought it to bliss — ‘Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all.’
  • “When Julian says God ‘abideth sorrowfully and moaning,’ she means ‘all the true feeling that we have in our self, in contrition and compassion’ — Christ’s sorrow is experienced by us as our own contrite feeling.” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘Love suffereth never to be without pity: and what time that we fall into sin and leave the mind of Him and the keeping of our own soul, then keepeth Christ alone all the charge.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXXI

God beholds all our living as penance because our nature-longing for Him is itself a lasting penance; He shows Himself in diverse manners on earth but takes no dwelling except in man’s soul — His ‘marvellous and stately resting-place’ — and wills that we live gladly and merrily for His love in our penance rather than sorrowfully.

• The soul’s longing for God — painful because of the distance sin creates — is itself the form of penance God has ordained, requiring no added self-punishment; the soul’s proper response is to set its heart in the ‘overpassing,’ the exceeding bliss that is coming.
  • “‘He beholdeth us so tenderly that He seeth all our living here a penance: for nature’s longing in us is to Him aye-lasting penance in us, which penance He worketh in us and mercifully He helpeth us to bear it.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘His love maketh Him to long for us; His wisdom and His truth with His rightfulness maketh Him to suffer us to be here.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXXII

God shews that He knows Julian would suffer all pain for His love, yet in His compassion tells her not to be greatly aggrieved by the sin that falls against her will; the conclusion is that ‘in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kept in one Love,’ and the higher beholding of God is the truer sight though neither should be abandoned.

• The two beholdings — of God (which keeps us in spiritual solace) and of self (which keeps us in healthy dread and shame) — must be held together, but with greater emphasis on the higher, because ’the Beholding of our Lord God is the highest soothness.’
  • “‘I love thee, and thou lovest me, and our love shall not be disparted in two: for thy profit I suffer these things to come.’” —Jesus Christ
  • “‘In the Beholding of God we fall not, and in the beholding of self we stand not; and both these be sooth as to my sight.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXXIII

The strength and effect of all the Revelation rests in three properties of God — Life, Love, and Light — in which there is homeliness, courtesy, and endless Naturehood respectively; Julian’s Reason is itself grounded in God as Father, and faith is the light by which Christ and the Holy Ghost lead us through the night of this life.

• Faith is not a second-best substitute for vision but a light by nature coming from God — it is the mode of knowing appropriate to this life, carrying in it the soul’s grounding in the eternal Day that is God Himself.
  • “‘Our faith is a light by nature coming of our endless Day, that is our Father, God. In which light our Mother, Christ, and our good Lord, the Holy Ghost, leadeth us in this passing life.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “‘At the end of woe, suddenly our eyes shall be opened, and in clearness of light our sight shall be full: which light is God, our Maker and Holy Ghost, in Christ Jesus our Saviour.’” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXXIV

Charity is the light by which all spiritual life is measured and sustained: ‘Charity keepeth us in Faith and Hope, and Hope leadeth us in Charity, and in the end all shall be Charity’; and Charity has three forms — unmade (God), made (the soul in God), and given (the virtue by which we love God for Himself).

• The light of faith is charity rightly measured: not so large as to see full heavenly Day nor so small as to leave us in darkness, but exactly enough for meedful living — earning the endless praise of God through faithful travail.
  • “‘Charity unmade is God; Charity made is our soul in God; Charity given is virtue. And that is a precious gift of working in which we love God, for Himself; and ourselves, in God; and that which God loveth, for God.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “The Sixth Revelation — God’s thanking of His servants — is recalled as the shewing that grounds the teaching of charity as meed-earning light.” —Julian of Norwich

Chapter LXXXV

At the Last Day no soul will wish that anything had been otherwise, for all will say with one voice ‘Lord, blessed mayst Thou be, for it is thus: it is well; and now see we verily that all things are done as it was then ordained before that anything was made’ — the eschatological vindication of divine providence.

• The final revelation of God’s providence in Heaven transforms every apparent accident, injustice, and tragedy into transparent order; the universal chorus of praise replaces every ‘if only’ with a ‘blessed be God’ because the whole pattern is seen for the first time.
  • “God has loved us in His endless purpose from without beginning, and in this love ‘He keepeth us and never suffereth us to be hurt in manner by which our bliss might be lost.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • The ending of Charity — that in the end all shall be Charity — is the horizon toward which all three chapters (lxxxiii-lxxxv) point.

Chapter LXXXVI

The whole Revelation is summarised in the answer Julian received fifteen years later to her question about its meaning: ‘Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end.’

• Love is the ground, content, giver, and purpose of the entire Revelation — and the sole meaning of all divine action — so that knowing more ‘in the same’ is the only possible progress, because there is nothing else without end to know.
  • “‘And I saw full surely that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in this love He hath done all His works; and in this love He hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting.’” —Julian of Norwich
  • “The book ‘is begun by God’s gift and His grace, but it is not yet performed, as to my sight’ — Julian acknowledges that the teaching remains incomplete, pointing the reader forward into the same love.” —Julian of Norwich