Julian's Audacious Reticence: Perichoresis and the Showings

Pinti, Daniel

Julian of Norwich's "Showings" manifests a number of characteristics commonly held to be intrinsic to a distinctively Anglican spirituality, not least a long-recognized tendency toward reticence. Her profound Trinitarianism has also been accorded much scholarly attention. What scholarship on Julian has yet to appreciate fully is the close relationship between these two qualities. The intersection of the theological and the rhetorical in the "Showings" is itself perichoretic. Julian writes a theology that not only articulates a perichoretic understanding of God, but also enacts itself perichoretically, by means of the way Julian humbly gives herself and her text over to her reader, particularly through the reticence of her text. Julian thereby actively and intimately involves the reader in the very construction of her theology.

Offering a concise afterword to over seven hundred pages of selections from Anglican spiritual writings spanning five centuries. David Hope, former Archbishop of York, suggests three "aspects of Anglican life" to which those writings collectively testify.1 The first is a tendency toward self-criticism, which, among other things, develops "a style of theology which can be intellectually challenging as well as devotioiuillv nourishing." He next mentions a close connection between "worship and popular devotion" which "gives Anglicanism a literary focus, and rightly so." Finally, he comments on the third aspect, not without some unintended irony at the end of so large an anthology: "reticence," by which he means a certain acceptance of "paradox" and "(on occasion) the humility to suspend judgement."2 Archbishop Hope gives us a thought-provoking summary that nonetheless warrants an important added clarification. However acceptable as a generalization regarding Anglicanism and its continually negotiable and negotiated via media, this last quality of "reticence" should not be thought of as marking an end-stop in spiritual dialogue, some sort of apophatic impasse. Reticence is not a matter of timidity. It can be spiritually productive, indeed generative, as many of the volumes writings bear witness.3

For understandable chronological reasons, the medieval mystic and theologian Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342-after 1416) is not to be found in this anthology. Yet were the tradition of a distinctively Anglican spirituality to be traced back beyond the sixteenth century, Julian would have to figure prominently.4 In her book the Showings (sometimes also called the Revelation[s] of [Divine] Love), Julian exhibits each of the tendencies of Anglican spirituality noted by Archbishop Hope. Thus she can be approached and understood rightly (though surely not exclusively) through a specifically Anglican lens. Certainly the Showings may be described as "intellectually challenging as well as clevotionally nourishing." Just as certainly, it is a literary work with deep ties to the popular devotion of its time. This essay, however, will focus primarily on the role of reticence in Julian's book. Although this reticence manifests itself in different ways throughout Julian's text, it is ultimately what I am calling an "audacious" reticence; Julian's mystical theology is characterized by her daring use of a reservedness that permits a particularly open-ended mode of theological discourse, a kind of sharing of authority and authorship, a "giving over" to the reader that draws the reader in. making her or him an active participant in the construction of theology. Julian thereby writes a theology that does not merely articulate a perichoretic understanding of God (although it does that), hut enacts itself perichoretically.

I shall begin by recalling some fundamental background on Julian and her Showings and demonstrating how this background points the way toward this distinctively perichoretic dimension of reading Julian. I shall also endeavor to position Julian's text within a critical framework that brings together two scholarly disciplines perhaps rarely in dialogue with one another: medieval literary studies (in particular the important work of Nicholas Watson on Julian) and the contemporary theology of spirituality (especially that of Mark McIntosh). My argument will then use a phenomenology of reading to analyze key passages from the Showings, bringing to the fore Julian's "audacious reticence" and the strategic role it plays in her perichoretic theology.

Julian's book may be seen as the literary fruit of a mystical experience she had in 1373 as she lay dying (so she thought). We do not know for certain whether she was a layperson when she had this visionary experience, but at some point in her life, certainly by 1413, she became an anchoress, living in a cell attached to St. Julian's church in Norwich, England; hence the name by which this otherwise anonymous woman is still known. While staring at a crucifix held before her face by her priest, Julian received a series of revelations, sixteen in all, on which she seems to have reflected recurrently for most of the rest of her life. This reflection led to writing, and Julian, the first known woman author in the English language, composed two accounts of her visions and her meditations on them: the Short Text (seemingly composed between 1373 and 1388) and the Long Text (composed between 1393 and some time during the second decade of the fifteenth century).5 Comparatively "sketchy," the Short Text focuses primarily on the visionary experience itself-a reporting more than an analysis of an experience.6 The Long Text, however, represents a very different project. Julian's transition from "a visionary to a theologian" involves radically different modes of rhetorical construction of both author and audience.7 Lynn Staley neatly summarizes the difference in question:

Both the Long Text and the Short Text of the Showings are designed as communal texts, in the sense that they are intended to participate in the ongoing life and debate of a particular community. But where the Short Text suggests a narrower audience and one whose interests are inevitably more private, the Long Text gives evidence not simply of a broader field, one that would include thinkers and writers as well as devotees, but a greater sense of the risks involved in taking on such a project.8

Staley reminds us of the "communal" dimension of mystical writing, something too easily forgotten when examining a genre often associated either with private devotion or more public but not necessarily more "communal" didacticism. Furthermore, Staley approaches the Showings from the perspective of authorship and authority in the context of the dangerous climate posed for vernacular theology in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. Thus she characterizes Julian's response to these "risks" as a development of "techniques of indirection."9 Such techniques, however, serve an additional and rather different purpose when read in terms of Julian's spirituality. "Indirectness" might be another word for the "reticence" Julian calculatedly weaves into her text for the purpose of involving her reader in an extension of the mystical experience. In other words, the kind of communality Julian's text constructs is closely linked to, even a product of, her indirectness or reticence.

"Involving" her reader, however, is rather too vague a way of conceptualizing what Julian is doing, not only as a literary artist but also as a theologian. "Involvement" needs to be specified in terms of the perichoretic dimensions of the Showings. But because perichoresis is above all away of understanding the Trinity, it is important to look first at the most intensive and influential work on Julian's Trinitarianism. Nicholas Watsons seminal article on Julian's "Trinitarian hermeneutic" is part of a particular strand of Julian scholarship that examines Julian's direct or indirect knowledge, use, and level of agreement with Augustine.10 Watson starts with a fundamental question: "How does the Revelation of Love describe and interpret the [mystical] experience that forms its starting point?" He goes on to explore how "hermenentic enquiry is basic to Julian's entenprise,"11 Julian makes repeated references to two triads: "those of the human memory, reason and will on the one hand, and of the traditional attributes of the persons of the Trinity-respectively might, wisdom and love-on the other." Watson demonstrates how these references point toward Julian's employment of a distinctively Trinitarian hermeneutic for her experience that serves both to authenticate that experience and authorize her text. Watson writes:

Just as the Trinity consists of three persons whose activities are ultimately indistinguishable, since they are united in a single godhead, so her revelation, and the book in which she embodies it, consist of three "propertes" which are indistinguishably united in one showing. In other words, her written account of the "revelation of love" is authentic not in spite of the fact that, but because, revelation and interpretation are impossible to disentangle.12

While Watson never uses the term "perichoresis," he is articulating a version of it-albeit a limited and potentially misleading one, as his emphasis on the "godhead" and the "indistinguishable" nature of the divine persons implies. Moreover, Watson does not discuss the importance of this hermeneutic for Julian's readers interpretation of her text, although he comes close to acknowledging it. As he states, Julian's "account of her experience must potentially have the same relation to her readers as the experience itself has to her. For the slow, deliberative and prayerful reader, the written Rerelation of Love must be, or be meant to become, the showing."13 I would suggest that Watson overlooks the full importance of the readers experience because of his misjudgment of Julian's experience. That is, because for Watson (although not, I think, for Julian) the divine persons are "indistinguishably united," the very distinguishable difference between reader and writer can be conceived here in only limitedly perichoretic terms. It is precisely at this point that a subtler understanding of the Trinity is needed in order to perceive and delve into the readerly implications of Julians "Trinitarian hermeneutic."14

Understanding the relationship between the divine persons as perichoretic goes back at least to the Cappadocian fathers, although its revival has had a seemingly pervasive impact on contemporary Trinitarian theology.15 As Miroslav Volf explains, "Perichoresis refers to the reciprocal inferiority of the Trinitarian persons. In every divine person as a subject, the other persons also indwell; all mutually permeate one another, though in so doing they do not cease to he distinct persons."16 In contrast to Watsons insistence on "indistinguishableness," the idea of perichoresis thus "enables theology to preserve both [he one and the many in dynamic interrelations."17 Rather than an utter loss of distinctiveness, dynamic relationality provides exactly the analogy for the text-reader relationship needed to understand Julian's authorial and theological (particularly Christological) ideas and strategies.18 That relationality, it must be remembered, is in fact constituted by self-giving. Each divine person is who it is in and through the giving of itself to the other.19 Mark McIntosh claims that this "going out" of the divine persons involves creation as a whole: "In a sense we could say that the whole cosmos and its responsivity to God are embraced within the infinitely fecund giving of the Divine Persons to each other."20 If this is right, then surely it can be said to involve the responsmty of the reader to the mystical text. Here Rowan Williams's application of Paul Ricoeur is especially useful in understanding how this might be so:

In an important essay on the hermeneutics of the idea of revelation, [Ricoeur] has attempted to link the concept with a project for a "poetics," which will spell out the way in which a poetic text, by offering a frame of linguistic reference other than the normal descriptive/referential function of language, "restores to us that participation-in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects as opposed to a subject."21

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.

As the very "homeliness" of the hazelnut reference implies, Julian's concern is ever for her "evyn Christen" ("fellow Christians"), and she describes the motive force behind her writing in terms of love and sharing: "In alle this I was much steryde in cheryte to myne evyn Christen that they myght alle see and know the same that I sawe."27 Union with Cod for Julian, it seems, necessarily entails union with her fellow Christians, the Body of Christ. This authorial sharing can become rhetorically problematic, however, to the point of Julian's almost seeming to want to disavow the necessary first-person pronouns in her autobiographical text:

Alle that I say of me I mene in person of alle my evyn Cristen, for I am lernyd in the gostly shewyng of our Lord God that he meneth so. And therefore I pray yow alle for God's sake and counceyle yow for yowre awne profyght, that ye leve the beholdyng of a wrech that it was shewde to and myghtely, wysely, and meekly behold in God. that of his curteyse love and endlesse goodnesse wolld shew it generally in comfort of us alle. For it is Goddes wylle that ye take it with a grete joy and lykyng as Jhesu hath shewde it to vow.28

Julian's efforts at self-effacement represent something other than conventional (or even particularly medieval female) modesty. Even as she implores her reader to turn his or her attention away from her, Julian does maintain the role of "counselor." The experience and the text which grows from it are ultimately hers for all. Received "with a grete joy and lykyng," the text will find itself and Julian in accord with "Goddes wylle." The paradox in question here is localized in Julians use of "leve" ("I pray yow . . . that ye leve the beholdyng of a wreche"), a word which can mean "believe" or "leave." The ambiguity allows Julian to direct her audience to her and at the same time away from her; the reader is simultaneously to believe her and leave her behind. In fact, Julian's articulation of the very humility which enables her self-effacement is an invitation itself to readerly communion: "For I am suer ther be meny that never hath shewying ne syght but of the comyn techyng of holy chyrch that love God better than I. For yf I looke svngulery to my selfe, I am ryght nought. But in generall I am, I hope, in onehede of cheryte with alle my evyn Cristen."29 Not only do we see Julian insisting that the mystical way is not necessarily the only or best way to loving God; we also hear Julian implicitly finding her true (personal) self in that unity ("onehede") of love with her fellow Christians, including her audience. It is as if that very "onehede" is what saves her (or anyone) from being "ryght nought."

It is this commitment to communion with her fellow Christians and with God that motivates her theological reticence. A good example may be found in Julian's threefold description of how her revelations came to her. In her final comments on her first vision of the crucified Christ's crown of thorns, Julian writes, "All this was shewde by thre partes [in three ways], that is to sey, by bodily syght [vision], and by worde formyde in my understondyng [intellect], and by goostely syght [ spirit]."30 Julian insists on a degree of ineffability to the spiritual sight she received, but even as she insists on her limitations as an intermediary between her experience and her audience, she trusts in God's intermediary role. As Julian puts it, "the goostely syght I can nott ne may shew it as openly ne as fully as I would, but I trust in our Lord Cod almightie that he shall of his godnes and for iour love make yow to take it more ghostely and more sweetly then I can or may tell it."31 God's mediation can lift the reader to an even higher level of spiritual understanding than the mystical text alone makes possible. The text becomes a site for, its reading an experience of, a communal encounter between mystic, reader, and God. This mutual indwelling of Christians and God as an outgrowth of this specifically incarnatioual vision is quite natural for Julian since, as she has already written, "where Jhesu appireth the blessed Trinitie is understand as to my sight."32 As Brant Pelphrey remarks in his discussion of the Eastern Orthodox dimensions of Julians perichoretic theology, "While the perichoresis of the Trinity defies ordinary logic, it is revealed in the incarnation. In the incarnational perichoresis, the eternal Logos is located 'in' humanity and human nature is now located permanently 'in' God."33 The unity between humanity and Christ is perceptible-for Julian, capable of being experienced-in the Crucifixion ("Here saw I a greet onyng [uniting] betwene Grist and us to my understondyng. For when he was in payne, we ware in payne").34 This unity at once signifies and is taken in by the perichoretic unity of the Trinity.

This ontological unity is given memorable literary expression by Julian in her account and explication of her vision of a lord and a servant, a theological lynchpin of sorts in the Showings. The lord in Julian's vision sits "in rest and in pees," regarding his servant "full lovely and swetly and meekly." The lord sends the servant to do his will, and the servant runs off to do it in such haste that "anon he fallyth in a slade [valley]" and he "gronyth and monyth and wallowyth and wryeth [twists], but he may nott ryse nor helpe hym selfe." The servant suffers in his predicament, the only cause of his falling being "hys good wyll and his grett desyer," and the lord beholds him lovingly. Then Julian sees even more "gostly . . . with a ledying of my understandyng in to the lorde," how much the lord's joy comes from the "wurschypfull restyng and noble" that he will bring his servant to by his "plenteous grace." Julians understanding is then led back to the fall, and she remains "both kepyng in [her] mynd."35

Julian's reticence before the profundity of her vision sets the tone for the remainder of her reflections on this parable. She admits to being unable to understand it fully at the time of receiving it, in no small part because even though she realizes the servant represents Adam, there were many aspects of the vision that did not relate to Adam alone. Julian's comfort comes from the insight she does receive, but she recognizes that the "mysty example of pryvytes [secrets] of the revelacyon" remained, and perhaps yet remain, "moch hyd." Indeed, as she insists, "every shewying is full of pryvytes."36 Eventually however-"twenty yere after the tyme of the shewyng save thre monyths"-Julian receives "techyng inwardly" regarding the vision. Adam, she discovers, represents all humanity, not just one person, "For in the syghte of God alle man is oone man, and oone man is alle man."37 In fact, the servant is to he understood as Christ as well. It is important to note, however, that Julian does not construct a linear allegory in which the servant is to be replaced by Adam who is subsequently replaced by Christ. Rather, the unity of meaning is dialogic, mutually responsive, even circulatory:

In the servant is comprehended the Seconde Person of the Trynyte, and in the servaunt is comprehendyd Adam, that is to sey, all men. And, therfore, whan I sey the Sonne, it menyth the Godhed, which is evyn with the Fader. And whan I sey the servaunt, it nienyth Crystes manhode, whych is ryghtfull Adam. By the nerehede of the servaunt [to the lord in the initial vision] is understand the Sonne, and by the stondyng of the lyft side is understond Adam. The lorde is God the Father, the servant is the Sonne Jesu Cryst, the Holy Gost is the evyn love whych is in them both.

When Adam felle, Godes Sonne fell. For the ryght onyng whych was made in hevyn, Goddys Sonne myght nott be separath from Adam, for by Adam I understand alle man.38

As many critics have noted, Julian's story functions as a distinctive and perhaps deliberately anti-Angustinian exegesis of Genesis 3, one that responds to the persistent dualism of dominant medieval interpretations of the Fall. Sandra McEntire reminds us, "It is instructive that she never mentions Eve or her role in the Fall, nor does she assign blame to either party. . . . The post-lapsarian Adam has a dual identity of substance and sensuality. And in the new Adam, the sensuality is redeemed."39

On the one hand, Julian continues to view the experience of revelation as a starting rather than an ending point, and theological reflection, speculation, and insight seem to he always provisional: "Also in thys merveylous example I have techyng with in me, as it were the begynnyng of an A B C, wher by I may have some understondyng of oure Lordys menyng."40 On the other hand, Julian does not refrain from probing for deeper understanding and insight, often with a startling confidence. We might consider her explanation of the ontological and substantial union of God and human beings, triggered by the lord/servant parable discussed above:

And I saw no dyfference betwen God and oure substance, but as it were all God. And yet my understandyng toke that oure substance is in God, that is to sty that God is God and oure substance is a creature in God. For the almyghty truth of the Trynyte is oure Fader, for he made us and kepyth us in hymn. And the depe wysdome of the Trynyte is our Moder, in whom we be closyd. And the hye goodnesse of the Trynyte is our Lord, and in hym we be closyd and he in us. We be closyd in the Fader, and we be closyd in the Son, and we are closyd in the Holy Gost. And the Fader is beclosyd in us, the Son is beclosyd in us, and the Holy Gost is beclosyd in us, all mighty, alle wysdom, and alle goodnesse, one God, one Lorde.41

Contrasting with Watson's view of the Trinity and the "indistinguishable" commonality of the divine persons cited earlier, this passage reveals how carefully Julian attempts to maintain the distinct but shared personhood of each. Moreover, the passage also sets up just why Julian's sense of the real but nonetheless provisionally expressible truth of revelation is so central for her. The very intimacy of the "beclosyd" relationship between God and us makes knowing cyclical and therefore less than absolute. Her ontology is at once the foundation and the qualifier of epistemology. Julian's sense of the reason for this problem is found shortly after the passage above:

And thus I saw full suerly that it is redyer to us and more esy to come to the knowyng of God then to know oure owne soule. For oure soule is so depe growndyd in God and so endlesly tresoryd that we may nott come to the knowyng ther of tylle we have furst knowyng of God, whych is the maker to whome it is onyd [united].42

Knowing God comes first; self-knowledge follows. But because the two are united, greater self-knowledge-hard as it is to come by in Julian's estimation-leads to deeper knowledge of God, which in turn enables even greater knowledge of one's self. This circulation of knowledge from God to self and back is a fundamental element in the Trinitarian hermeneutic of Julian's Showings.

This perichoretic exchange between knower and known has its analogue, as I have tried to show, in the exchange between reader (knower) and text (known), and I believe Julian wants such a parallel to be discerned and experienced. Julian's conception and encouragement of the (ideally) perichoretic experience of reading her book is perhaps most clearly brought out at its end, when Julian prepares her reader to finish a book that is, it turns out. perhaps never to be "finished." Julian begins her book's conclusion with a striking claim about its only having been just begun: "This boke is begonne by Goddys gyfte and his grace, but it is nott yet performyd as to my syght."43 "Performyd" here means something like "completed" or "accomplished," but the sentence alone begs the question of how such completion might be possible. What immediately follows only hints at an answer, but does so in a pointedly revelatory way: "For charyte we pray we alle to gedyr with Goddes wurkyng, thankyng, trustyng, enjoyeng, for this wylle oure good Lord be prayde by the understanding that I toke in alle his owne menyng and in the swete wordes where he seyth fulle merely, I am grownd of thy besechyng."44 Julian's expression here is difficult, to be sure, but well worth unpacking even as we avoid the temptation to tame or simplify it. We pray "for charyte" in the double sense of simultaneously praying "for" it and "on account of" it. We pray "with Goddes wurkyng" in us; the Trinity for Julian is, after all, love. The gerund "wurkyng" leads to a series of either more gerunds expanding on God's working (his enjoying, and so on) or, perhaps more likely, present participles describing the nature of our praying (thanking, trusting, and enjoying God). The slippage allows for a greater sense of divine involvement in the very movement of our own prayer. Julian underscores this involvement by hearkening all the way back to her forty-first chapter, reminding us of Christ's assurance that he himself is the very foundation of our prayer.45 And, we are all to pray "to gedyr."

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

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

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.

11 Watson, "Trinitarian Hermeneutic," 62-63.

12 Watson, "Trinitarian Hermeneutic," 81. As Watson notes earlier, "The words with which the Long Text opens are apparently meant to he applied literally not merely to the original 'showings,' narrowly defined, but rather to the work as a whole: 'this is a revelation of love"' (74-75).

13 Watson, "Trinitarian Hermeneutic," 77.

14 In a fascinating article published some years later, incorporating his ongoing reflections on Julian, Watson admits to discovering his own (perichoretic?) participation in Julian's hermeneutic project; "It was Julian of Norwich who made me see, with shock, how much I had learned as a scholar from her and others like her-how far my approach to the past had become infused, through a sort of hermeneutic osmosis, with her own. I had not imagined learning from the past. ... I had not even seen clearly how my analysis of [the past] . . . quite straightforwardly used a small part of the past to work through [personal] issues and anxieties associated with my present." Nicholas Watson, "Desire for the Past," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 5997, at 94 (italics mine). As he puts it, in Julian's "visionary theology, in which Cod and the soul already lie kernelled within one another, truth is not too distant to grasp but too close to know clearly" (p. 91).

15 A perichoretic understanding is also implicit in the theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, whose pivotal place in the mystical (particularly apophatic) tradition is well known. See "Trinity, doctrine of the" in F L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1997). 1641. Of course, not all understandings of perichoresis are the same. See Sarah Coakley, "Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity," in Sarah Coakley and David A. Pailin. eds., The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 29-56.

16 Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, Mich. and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 209.

17 Colin K. Gunton, The One the Three, and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993), 163-164.

18 Compare F. Gerald Downing "Theological Breadth, Interconnection, Tradition, and Gender: Hildegard, Hadewijch. and Julian Today,". Anglican Theological Review 86, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 423-450. Downing suggests that "By comparison with the male thinkers [of the Middle Ages], Christology in all three of the women theologians [Hildegard, Hadewijch, and Julian] involves much more reference to the Trinity and to the relationality of the divine persons" (p. 433).

19 Compare McIntosh, Mystical Theology, 164.

20 McIntosh, Mystical Theology, 181. McIntosh makes this connection explicitly in terms of the interpretive process as analogous to the "apophasis of the Cross" (p. 136). I find much merit in McIntosh's point here, especially insofar as he stresses the "inherent integrity of Christian spirituality and theology" (p. 136), but I would emphasize less than he does the connection between apophasis and the reader's hermenentic process per se. As I will try to show, Julian's hermeneiitic praxis vis à vis her experience eventually leads her to a type of apophatic moment, but it is at that point that she yields interpretation to the reader whose responsive participation to, with, and in the text makes that moment of apophasis dialogically productive.

21 Rowan Williams. "Trinity and Revelation," in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell. 2000), 131-147, at 133. Williams is quoting Paul Ricoeur, "Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation," in Lewis S. Mudge. ed., Essays in Biblical Interpertation /Ricoeur (Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1980), 101-102.

22 Nicholas Watson, "Trinitarian Hermeneutic." 77.

23 With an eye toward Balthasar's understanding of the mystical experience, McIntosh urgnes that "it is the relational 'distance' of the divine persons one to another which permits the human soul's entrance into this limitlessness of eternal love without thereby being dissolved as person" (p. 110).

24 Baker, Showings, 8-9.

25 Baker, Showings, 9.

26 Barry A. Wintleatt, "The Art of Mystical Loving: Julian of Norwich," in Marion Glasscoe, ed., The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at the Exeter Symposium, July 1980 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1980), 56.

27 Baker, Showings, 15.

28 Baker, Showings, 15.

29 Baker, Showings, 16.

30 Baker, Showings, 16.

31 Baker, Showings, 16,

32 Baker, Showings, 8.

33 Brant Pelphrey, "Leaving the Womb of Christ: Love, Doomsday, and Space/ Time in Julian of Norwich and Eastern Orthodox Mysticism," in McEntire, ed., Julian of Norwich, 293. See also Christopher Abbott's comment that "[Julian's] distinctively incarnational theology . . . comes in a striking way to posit the individual person, by virtue of his or her participation in the primary humanity of Christ, as irreducibly and integrally a sphere of active divine mystery." Christopher Abbott, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 179.

34 Baker, Showings, 30.

35 Baker, Showings, 70-71.

36 Baker, Showings, 72.

37 Baker, Showings, 72.

38 Baker, Showings, 75-76.

39 Sandra J. McEntire, "The Likeness of God and the Restoration of Humanity in Julian of Norwich's Showings," in McEntire, ed., Julian of Norwich, 13. Julian's willingness to wrestle in faith with the teachings of the Church is well known. Compare her comments immediately preceding the lord/servant vision: "For I knew be the comyn techyng of holy church and by my owne felyng that the blame of oure synnes contynually hangyth uppon us, fro the furst man in to the tyme that we come uppe in to hevyn. Then was this my merveyle, that I saw oure Lorde God shewyng to us no more blame then if we were as clene and as holy as angelis be in hevyn" (p. 69). Julian's vision and her interpretation of it challenge not only received church teaching but also her own intuition on the question of sin. Julian is more than willing to let revelation transform her thinking in ways that challenge and open to revision not only institutional but personal authority.

40 Baker, Showings, 77.

41 Baker, Showings, 85.

42 Baker, Showings, 87.

43 Baker, Showings, 124.

44 Baker, Showings, 124.

45 "And all this broughte our Lorde sodenly to my mynde and shewed theyse wordes and seyde, I am grounde of thy besekyng. Furst it is my wylle that thou have it. And sythen I make the to wylle it. And sythen I make the to beseke it, and thou sekest it. How schoulde it than be that thou shuldyst nott have thy sekyng? And thus in the furst reson with the thre that folowe oure good Lorde shewyth a mighty comfort, as it may be sene in the same wordes" (Baker, Showings, 56).

46 Baker, Showings, 124.

47 Compare Pelphrey on Julian's understanding of love: "Julian's most important realization through her revelations is that love is an ontological reality, not merely a psychological one. Divine love is identical with divine being. More specifically, love is Being-in-communion, the mode of being of the Trinity" (p. 292). One aspect of Julian's "Anglican" ethos is her ability to reach beyond her specific tradition toward Eastern Orthodox theological understandings, as do more recent Anglican theologians. See Michael Ramsey, The Anglican Spirit, ed. Dale Coleman (New York: Church Publishing, 2004), 127-134.

48 Baker, Showings, 124.

49 I am adopting "unfinalizabilty" from the usual translation of literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin's Russian word nezavershennost', an extremely common word in his theoretical lexicon. See Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 36-37.

50 Abbot, Julian of Norwich, 182-183.

51 McIntosh, Mystical Theology, 110.

52 McIntosh, Mystical Theology, 163.

53 I am greatly indebted to John Colacino, Associate Professor of Ascetical Theology at Bexley Hall Seminary, Rochester, New York for comments helping me see these pneumatological implications of what Julian is doing as a writer.

54 Williams, "Trinity and Revelation," 131.

55 Williams, "Trinity and Revelation," 134.

56 Baker, Showings, 119.

DANIEL PINTI*

* Daniel Pinti is Associate Professor of English at Niagara University, where he teaches medieval and classical literature. He is a student at Bexley Hall in Rochester, New York. Currently he is working on a study of the modern reception of Julian of Norwich's Showings.

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