Julian's Audacious Reticence: Perichoresis and the Showings

For Julian, God works in us continually, in different but ultimately complementary and fulfilling ways, and whatever "lytylle knowyng" we have here and now, however much our collective insights can be but a primer to the overflowing abundance of heavenly truth and love, we can rest humbly and quietly assured that the great revelations are in fact yet to come.

1 Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams, eds., Love's Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 761.

2 Howell et al., Love's Redeeming Work, 761-762.

3 Garret Keizer argues thus in his very interesting "Slow to Answer: The Reticence of Jesus," The Christian Century, April 5, 2005, 26-27.

4 Claiming Julian for the Anglican spiritual tradition is hardly original to this essay. Urban T. Holmes, for instance, discusses Julian as an "example of Anglican consciousness" on the second page of What is Anglicanism? (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Publishing, 1982). The editors of Love's Redeeming Work acknowledge in their preface that they would have liked to have included selections from Julian. For introductions to the Anglican spiritual tradition, see A. M. Allchin, "Anglican Spirituality," in John Booty and Stephen Sykes, eds., The Study of Anglicanism, rev. ed. (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1988), 351-364; and William L. Countryman, The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual Tradition (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1999).

5 Most scholars favor the earlier dates in both cases, but in "The Composition of Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Divine Love" (Speculum 68, no. 3 [July 1993]: 637-683), Nicholas Watson has argued compelling for later dates (1382-1388 for the Short Text and the early fifteenth century for the Long Text). All quotations from the Showings in this essay will be taken from the Long Text as edited by Denise N. Baker, The Showings of Julian of Norwich (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2005). In Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2000), Grace M. Jantzen provides a good introduction to Julian, along with background and context on the anchoritic life.

6 This contrast does not deny Mark McIntosh's assertion that "mystical texts are more adequately understood not as descriptions of experiences but culls towards a new framework for having any experiences whatsoever." Mark McIntosh, Mystical Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 135. He posits that the mystical text evokes an "interpretive framework" for readers' participation in their own encounter with God (p. 124). Julian's Showings may be the ideal text to illustrate McIntosh's claims.

7 Baker, Showings, xiii.

8 Lynn Staley, "Julian of Norwich and the Late Fourteenth-Century Crisis of Authority," in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 131.

9 Staley, "Julian of Norwich." 126

10 Nicholas Watson, "The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love," in Sandra J. McEntire, ed., Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998), 61-90; originally published in Marion Glasscoe, ed., The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium V: Papers Read at the Devon Centre, Dartington Hall, July 1992 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 79-100. Joan M. Nuth argues for Augustine as a major source for Julian, in particular his De Trinitate (Wisdom's Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich [New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1991], 10-1-116). Jantzen (108-115) also provides good comments on the basics of Julian's Trinitarianisin and its relation to Augustinian theology.