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

Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian

To put this another way, Julian refuses the nominalist implication that God's will is a contentless capacity for spontaneous action, which seems to place a gulf between God's will and God's hidden nature. For Julian, in contrast, God's will is always in accord with God's nature, God's kindness. Thus, the root problem she addresses-our lack of faith that God "is all love and will do all"-can be overcome by reintegrating our understanding of divine will and divine nature. God's freedom is not the freedom of modern spontaneity; God is free precisely and only to be who God is as Father, Son, and Spirit-a communion of love. To quote Karl Earth, "It is not that God first lives and then also loves. But God loves, and in this act lives."29

In all this, Julian does not deny that creation is an act of divine will, nor claim that God's nature requires that God create. Her vision of God's creation as "a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut in the palm of my hand" that "lasts and ever shall because God loves it" (ch. 5) makes the contingency of creation clear. But Julian's emphasis falls equally upon the claim that the diversity of kinds that flow forth from God participate and find their ground in God's own kindness. Julian's theology of God as uncreated nature in which all created natures participate gives a highly "realist" cast to her thought; things most truly are what their natures are because those created kinds participate in kindness itself.

This insight illuminates a striking difference between Julian's thought and the typical nominalist understanding of sin. On the whole, nominalists saw sin as a violation of divine legislation-the laws ordained by God. There is no intrinsic necessity to these laws, and God could conceivably have ordained different laws. What makes an act sinful is nothing in the nature of the act itself, but simply the fact that God has forbidden it. Thus Ockham's notorious claim that God could, in theory, make hatred of God right rather than wrong. This is related to Ockham's claim that God could, again in theory, save someone without their possessing the habitus of chanty. God's justification of the sinner requires only the exercise of God's will in accepting the sinner; it does not require any change in the sinner. While Ockham thinks that God has ordained that no one can be saved without the habitus of charity, this is so only because of God's contingent decree and not because of any intrinsic necessity. Marilyn McCord Adams's description of Ockham's position hints at the way in which a secularized version of nominalist theology manifests itself today:

[R]efusing to identify worthiness with any such natural property or privation, [Ockham] insists that the divine acts themselves confer the property of worthiness on a person or act, just as the act of a king or government confers commercial value on coins or paper, and just as linguistic conventions confer semantic properties on spoken and written words. And just as the property of commercial value is logically independent of the natural value of the coins or paper, and the property of conventional signification of any natural properties and similarities belonging to a sound or mark, so worthiness of eternal life or eternal punishment is logically independent of any created thing, whether naturally or supernaturally.30