Julian's Audacious Reticence: Perichoresis and the Showings

Here we ought to recall the value of the "relational distance" between the divine persons outlined by McIntosh.51 What Abbott terms "insecurity" is only such if one thinks of Julian as rather more prescriptive than she is, Julian knows well she is creating room for possibility, and is humble enough not to presume to know what new revelations that very "gap" will make room for. In this humility, one might argue, she pursues a kind of pneumatological model, one that operates analogously to the Holy Spirit's inherent "modesty." The Spirit, as McIntosh argues, is the Trinitarian person whose self-giving activity constitutes personhood within the life of the Trinitarian communion and also within the life of human persons participating in that divine life. "As God-in-the-other," writes McIntosh, "the Holy Spirit is the very source of the other's freedom to love and so to be a person. Far from taking the place of either the divine or the human other, the Holy Spirit makes others who they are, enabling the ecstatic self-giving of true communion-which is the person-constituting life of God and humankind."52 Refusing to open up a henneneutically bridged distance between herself and her reader would be to write contrary to the generative qualities of the Holy Spirit. Or, in more explicitly scriptural terms, Julian knows well that while the letter kills, the Spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3.6).53

Rowan Williams has warned us that theology "is perennially liable to be seduced by the prospect of bypassing the question of how it learns its own language."54 Julian is never one to succumb to such seduction. The comparatively "easy" language of "love" comes in the Showings only alter a great deal of reflection, even struggle, as she charts her own course in the largely unexplored, often even dangerous world of late medieval vernacular theology. Even as Julian seems to recognize all too well the tentativeness of any discovery of theological language, or any encounter between reader and text, she recognizes that very tentativeness to be its own kind of divine gift, and thus in its own way a source of power and endless discovery in love. Williams also writes that "to recognize a text, a tradition or an event as revelatory is to witness to its generative power."55 Julian witnessed just that, in the event of her revelation, and surely her text serves as further witness to such generative power as well. Julian's wisdom is to be found, in part, in her audacious reticence, in her daring willingness to leave that generative power open to the possibility and the joy of the new. Moreover, the perichoretic encounter Julian enables and affirms between her text and her audience always takes place for her with attention to the fullness of time, and the profound hope such a perspective lends to every one of Julians "evyn Christians." Anticipating a distinctly Anglican spirituality, Julian teaches us that:

God is grounde of oure kindly reson. And God is the techyng of holy chyrch. And God is the Holy Gost. And alle be sondry gyftes to whych he wylle we have grete regarde and according to us therto. For theyse wurke in us contynually alle te geder, and thoo be gret thinges, of whych gretnesse he wylle we have knowing here as it were in an A B C. That is to sey, that we may have a lytylle knowyng where of we shulde have fulhed in hevyn, and that is for to spede us.56