Order, freedom, and "kindness" Julian of Norwich on the edge of modernity

Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian

Theology Today 60 (2003): 63-81

What is it about a fourteenth-century English anchoress that could be so appealing to people living at the beginning of the second millennium?1 Every time I turn my mind to Julian of Norwich, I note, with unabated astonishment, her immense current popularity. The torrent of both popular and scholarly books about her, as well as new translations of her work, far outstrips that of any other religious or, with the exception of Chaucer, secular writer from the fourteenth century. Though there are different possible ways of accounting for this popularity, in the end I must say that I do not know why Julian is so popular; I cannot say why people read her. But I will say why Christians today should read her, and this is because Julian, like us, lived at the edge of modernity and thus, as a fellow boundary-dweller, offers an invaluable resource for thinking about how to live on that edge.

Let me state clearly that the attempt to locate both Julian and ourselves on the edge of modernity is not an exercise in nostalgia or repristinization of the past, in which Julian becomes a cipher for the wisdom of the premodern era. I am inclined to agree with Louis Dupre's claim that "the cultural revolution of the modern age was an event of ontological significance" and therefore there is no way to put the genie of modernity back into the bottle.2 Rather, I shall argue that Julian's relevance derives from the ways in which her thinking belongs neither to modernity nor to premodernity, but presents a distinctive, if not unique, articulation of Christian belief that is both at home in, and alien to, any era or location.

In what follows, I will characterize modernity and premodernity by adopting a pair of truisms that, I believe, just happen to be true. The first truism is that the premodern world conceived of the universe as in some sense an organic whole or, in other words, a "cosmos." The second truism is that the modern world is born out of the dissolution of the premodern cosmos (under the pressure of intellectual shifts, scientific discoveries, technological innovations, and indeed of Christian faith itself) and the enthroning of freedom in the place once occupied by order. Let me briefly elaborate these two characterizations.

ORDER

Obviously the very term "premodern" defines those various cultures in terms of their deficient-or at best incipient-modernity. Similarly, the notion of the premodern is misleading, obliterating as it does the specificity and variety of thought and practice in a range of times and places. While acknowledging these difficulties, I believe that it is still possible to show how premodern or "traditional" cultures conceived of the world as an ordered whole in a way that distinguishes them from modern cultures.

Let us begin with the notion of the universe as cosmos. Louis Dupre has argued that the ancient Greek term cosmos, which originally meant "order," is a comprehensive term that includes not simply the order of the physical universe but also "the ethos of personal conduct and social structures, the nomos of normative custom and law, and the logos, the rational foundation that normatively rules all aspects of the cosmic development."3 Dupre goes on: "If there is one belief Greek thinkers shared, it must be the conviction that both the essence of the real and our knowledge of it consists ultimately of form. Basically this means that it belongs to the essence of the real to appear, rather than to hide, and to appear in an orderly way."4 Christianity had to make some modifications to this notion of cosmos, particularly since the Greeks conceived of the gods as located within the cosmos, while Christians (like Jews and, later, Muslims) believed in a God who created and therefore transcends the cosmos. But late ancient and medieval Christians, like their pagan forebears, still saw this creation as a manifestly ordered place from which human beings could take guidance for the ordering of self and society.

Let us pursue this notion of cosmos by looking at the ordering of society. Medieval Europe conceptualized the ordering of society chiefly in terms of three "orders" or "estates": clergy, nobility, and peasantry.5 The estate into which one was born was thought to be a divinely determined manifestation of the ordering of the cosmos. As the twelfth-century abbot Philip of Harvengt wrote to a French count, "whatever station in life you have been awarded is determined by Fortune, as the pagans would have it, or by the grace of God, which is what Christian authors teach."6 The estates were conceived of as mutually dependent, so that the well-being of society as a whole depended on one performing the duty appropriate to one's estate: The peasant and noble depended on the prayers of the cleric; the noble and cleric depended on the food grown by the peasant, and the cleric and peasant depended on the military prowess and protection of the noble. John of Salisbury, writing in the twelfth century, says: