Julian of Norwich

Julian tells us that in her thirty first year she fell gravely ill, that on the fourth night she was given the last rites, and that on the seventh day, when all feeling had left her body and a priest held a crucifix before her face, the pain suddenly stopped and she began to see. Sixteen revelations followed over a period of about a day, most of them centred on the crucifix in front of her.

They are extremely concrete. She sees the blood on the crown of thorns, hot and freely flowing, and compares it to rain from the eaves and to the scales of a herring. She is shown something small in the palm of her hand, round like a hazelnut, and told that it is everything that is made, and she wonders how it can last, being so little, and is told that it lasts because God loves it.

She wrote a short account soon afterwards. Then she became an anchoress, enclosed in a cell attached to the church of St Julian at Norwich, from which she took the name by which we know her, since her own is lost, and over the next twenty years she wrote the showings again at nearly four times the length, with the theology worked out. That long text is the earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman, and she is candid about the difficulty of the position, asking whether she should be believed because she is a woman, frail and feeble.

The line everyone knows, that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, is not a reassurance about circumstances. It is the answer she is given to a specific and unbearable question. She asks why sin was permitted at all, since without it everything would have been fine, and the answer she reports is that sin is necessary, behovely, and that this is nevertheless true.

She does not pretend the answer resolves the difficulty, and the honesty is what makes the book hold up. She states plainly that she saw no anger in God, none at all, and then sets that against the teaching of the church, which she also holds, that sinners are condemned. She does not harmonise them. She reports both, says she was shown a parable of a lord and a servant which she could not interpret for nearly twenty years, and eventually reads it as showing that what looks like the servant's fault is seen from above as the servant's injury.

The other thing she is known for is worked out at length rather than dropped as a figure of speech. Christ is our Mother: he bears us, feeds us with himself as a mother feeds with her own body, and does not leave a child that is hurt. She develops the theme across chapters, with the ordinary Trinitarian language beside it. Her book was almost unknown for five centuries and survived in a handful of manuscripts; it is now the most widely read work of English mysticism.