Julian's Audacious Reticence: Perichoresis and the Showings

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2006 by Pinti, Daniel

Julian continues her explanation of the divine meaning in terms similarly communal and open-ended:

For truly I saw and understode in oure Lordes menyng that he shewde it, for he wyll have it knowyn more than it is. In whych knowyng he wylle geve us grace to love hym and cleve to hym, for he beholde his hevynly tresure and solace in hevynly joye, in drawyng of oure hartes fro sorow and darkenesse whych we are in.46

Julian interprets God's will as sharing, and this very sharing becomes a means of grace. The more intimately the text of the Showings is known, the more God is known, not because God is better understood as an object "out there," but because his grace flows more surely and completely into us. God delights in the very "drawyng" of our hearts from darkness to light, and he does so by indwelling us. The readers "taking in" of Julian's text, of Julian herself in a sense, is a constitutive element of this communal and loving unity of author, audience, and God.47

It is only after the reader has actively, perichoretically participated in the dialogue of meaning that Julian offers and has struggled with the holy mystery the text creates that Julian will recast her whole theology into its simplest yet richest terms:

And fro the tyme that it was shewde, I desyerde oftyn tymes to wytt in what was oure Lord's menyng. And xv yere after and mor I was answeryd in gostly understondyng, seyeng thus, "What, woldest thou wytt the Lordes menyng in this thyng? Wytt it wele, love was his menyng. Who shewyth it the? Love. Wherfore shewyth he it the? For love. Holde the therin, thou shalt wytt more in the same, But thou schalt nevyr witt therin other withoutyn ende."48

The chronological distance between the initial visionary experience and the "confirming" revelation of love creates a sense of infinite possibility: no experience, no revelation, no writing of a mystical text and no reading of it can be entirely closed or final. Julian's book, as she puts it earlier, is begun but not yet "performyd." It is an unfinalizable text awaiting its next answer.49 As this unfinalizability is translated from textual to theological terms, that next answer prompts deeper understanding, which itself spurs still greater exchange of divine energy, of love, in a ceaseless, abundant, productive, perichoretic form of Christian life. This point is of major importance when contrasting more conventional literary-critical responses to the Showings. For instance, the tentativeness discussed here and the relational distance between Julian and her audience out of which it arises represent an insurmountable problem for Christopher Abbott, who argues that the

separateness implicit in Julian's authorial subjectivity means that she cannot obliterate the gap between herself and her audience. Her writing points to and, in an important sense, sustains this gap. . . . [Her] rhetoric eannot securely underwrite . . . a link between the theological and the personal, nor can it in any sense necessitate the desired response in the reader. The relation between Julian and her audience, of which her text is the occasion and the sign, has this intrinsic insecurity.50