Julian's Audacious Reticence: Perichoresis and the Showings

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2006 by Pinti, Daniel

In other words, as with the divine persons, there is an important mutual "fixing" in the relationship between author and reader, one that challenges or even undermines a subject-object relationship between reader and text. That "giving" may be denied, resisted, or downplayed by different authors and in different genres. But in Julian's Showings, it is developed to the end of allowing Julian s spiritual experience-both the vision itself and her hermeneutic engagement with it-to interact profoundly with the readers spiritual experience of the encounter and hermeneutical engagement with the text itself. Once again, as Watson puts it (without attention to the full theological or spiritual implications of his insight), for the "deliberative and prayerful reader, the written Revelation of Love must be, or be meant to become, the showing" in its own right.22 Such can only be possible, however, through a properly relational understanding of the divine persons, one that allows for inter-personbood without either opposing the subject and object or losing the subject, be that subject the mystic or the reader.23

From a more rhetorical point of view, this "translation" of Julians book from text to experience is made possible in part through what I have termed her reticence, and it is time now to see it at work. One of Julians more famous passages, her memorable comparison of the hazelnut, is a worthwhile starting point for analyzing the theological implications of the delicate interplay between the writers authority and humility as a means of sharing both with the reader. As part of a vision of Christ crowned with thorns, head bleeding "plentuously and lively," Julian says "our good Lord shewed a ghostly sight of his homely [intimate] loving" which led her to see that "he is all thing that is good as to my understanding."24 Julian then is shown something else by the Lord Himself:

And in this he shewed a little thing, the quantitie of an haselnott, King in the palme of my hand, us me semide, and it was us rounde as a balle. I looked theran with the eye od my understanding and thought, "What may this be?" And it was answered generaelly thus: "It is all that is made." I marvayled how it might laste, for me thought it might sodenly have fallen to nawght for littlenes. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth and ever shall, for God loveth it. And so hath all thing being by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw iii properties. The first is that God made it; the secund, that God loveth it; the thirde, that God kepyth it. Rut what behyld I, verely, the maker, the keper, the lover. For till I am substantially unyted to him, I may never have full reste ne verie blisse, that is to say, that I be so fastned to him that there he right nought that is made betweene my God and me.25

Julian's own subjectivity is prominent as she inscribes at once the power and the limitations of her vision, as well as her profound engagement and interactivity in the event. The passage is a prime example of what Barry Windeatt describes as Julians characteristic "juxtaposition of narrative report and of meditation, of event and inteqiretation."26 The hazelnut image serves only for purposes of comparison, to draw the reader in with an everyday illustration that is almost immediately discarded for a short dramatization of Julian's reflective process, a process into which we are able to enter. Julian's thinking becomes our own: "What may this be?" In holding the hazelnut. Julian herself holds "all that is made"-the creature in the position of the Creator-even as she can do little other than "marvayle" at it without the answers provided to her questions. As is often the case in the Showings, this image-in itself it is barely even that, simply a "thing" that is the size of a hazelnut-is read in Trinitarian terms, a revelation of Kather/Creator, Son/Lover, and Spirit/Sustainer. Yet even with the answer in her "understanding," and the truth of her vision of God's sustaining love notwithstanding, Julian hints at the limitations of that vision when she claims she will have neither rest nor true bliss until she is united with God.