Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ

Church History, Sept, 2000 by Denise N. Baker

Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ. By Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt. Studies in Spirituality and Theology 5. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. xii 290 pp. n.p.

The phrase "Mystical Body Politic of Christ" in Frederick Bauerschmidt's title yokes together two realms we usually consider antithetical: the theological and the political, the spiritual and the secular. Furthermore, he addresses two audiences that are often at odds in their approaches to Julian of Norwich--scholars and practitioners of spirituality. Indeed, Bauerschmidt acknowledges that he is arguing "for what is perhaps, at least initially, a counterintuitive claim: Julian should be read as one who theologically imagines the political" (3). His thesis is predicated on two axioms: "that all politics is `theological' and that all theology is `political'" (3). As he develops this thesis using contemporary social, critical, and religious theory, he presents an intriguing and inspiring interpretation of Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love that bridges the gap between the medieval text and its implications for present-day communities of faith, between academic analysis and committed action.

After announcing his thesis, Bauerschmidt devotes the rest of chapter 1 to defending the two axioms informing his argument by tracing the historical emergence of the modern Western assumption that politics and theology should be separate and distinct and by demonstrating "that the political is structured by a `metaphysical image'" or theological mythos (5). He then contrasts two alternative characterizations of the fourteenth century: the feudal mythos, based on the metaphysics of organic ordering expressed in eucharistic rituals, and the modern, exemplifying the new metaphysics of freedom initiated by the nominalists.

Bauerschmidt argues that Julian of Norwich imagines "the counter-mythos of Christ's kingdom ... in the inter-space between feudalism and modernity" (33) and expresses this metaphysical image in her vision of the crucified body of Christ. In chapters 2 and 3 he examines the language of her bodily showings to reveal how she develops a participatory model of knowing, distinct from both affective and contemplative spiritualities, through which she comes to imagine the "mystical body politic of Christ" as the grotesque body described by Bakhtin: open, mutable, fecund, and degraded. Within this suffering body are enclosed all those who will be saved. Bauerschmidt relates Julian's emphasis on the divine capacity to love to her claim that "all shall be well" and her concept of Jesus as a mother.

In chapters 4 and 5 Bauerschmidt focuses on the example of the lord and servant, which Julian receives to resolve the apparent contradiction between the teachings of the church and of her revelation about the issue of God's wrath toward sinners. The second half of his book moves from the image of Christ's body, which structures the social group, to the feudal image of the lord and servant, epitomizing the social "grid--rules which relate one person to others" (125). Through a careful explication, Bauerschmidt demonstrates how Julian comes to read this mysterious example according to the different levels of scriptural exegesis, the sensus litteralis and the sensus mysticus. He links the two Adams of this example to Julian's characterization of the two aspects of the soul, the substance and the sensuality, and correlates these concepts to the two-part model of the church as the "mystical body politic of Christ"--the eternal union of the elect in the Logos and the temporary union of humans in a historical city of God.

In the last section of chapter 4, Bauerschmidt asks whether Julian's revelation, especially given the feudal image of the lord and servant, is a politically conservative one: "In short, is the promise that all shall be well in the end simply an opiate of the masses?" (162). In responding to this question, he invokes the concept of "theo-drama" proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar, according to which "the eternal God has appeared as an actor--as the actor--on the time- and space-bound stage of human history" (164). By emphasizing the dramatic rather than the allegorical genre of the example of the lord and servant, Bauerschmidt argues that Julian transforms the relationship of the two actors from the hierarchy of power found in historical feudalism to the exchange-of-gifts model exemplified in Trinitarian reciprocity. The servant Adam is exalted into Christ. "What Julian gives us in vignette," concludes Bauerschmidt, "is something that is neither feudal `stability' nor modern `liberty' but a trinitarian `charity'" (189).

Bauerschmidt's brief conclusion takes Julian's statement near the end of her Revelation that this book is begun, but is not yet performed, as a call to her "evyn cristen" to enact this mythos of charity in their own lives through their participation in the "mystical body politic of Christ." Here he puts forward Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, as a twentieth-century example of how Julian's theology can be manifest in the historical community.