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Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ

Spiritual Life, Winter 2001 by Caplin, Diane M

Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ. By Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt. Studies in Spirituality and Theology Series. University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dome, IN 46556, 1999. Pp. 290. Hardcover. $35.

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Bauerschmidt takes an original angle on the work of Julian of Norwich, and this approach is evident from the earliest statement of his thesis: "Julian should be read as one who theologically imagines the political" (p. 3). In this claim, Bauerschmidt is refreshingly out of step with current academic trends. The postmodern, Western world usually separates politics from theology in much the same way as politics and ethics have been mistakenly separated for centuries. Bauerschmidt recognizes that all human beings have commitments to some mythos that directs and inspires human activity. It is a critical step: "Central to my argument in this book is the contention that all politics is `imaginary,' in that all societies are 'founded' on a mythos, an ideological coding that makes the political entity what it is" tp. 5). In Bauerschmidt's exhaustive study of Julian's Revelation of Love, he demonstrates very well that her religious devotions yield political wisdom, and vice versa.

In Chapter 1, "Imagining the Political," Bauerschmidt explores the mythos out of which Julian was working in the fourteenth century. It is his contention that the transition between feudalism and modernism at the time left room for a new political image that was quite different from both: the mystical body politic of Christ. The greatest resource for this image, according to Bauerschmidt, comes from the regular ritual celebration of the Mass. Believing, as he does, that "culture shapes our understanding of the body, which in turn shapes our understanding of culture," Bauerschmidt sees in the "human body of the God-man, Jesus Christ" a resource for the body politic of medieval Europe (p. 17). The regular community action of the celebration of the Eucharist, which emphasized for Christians their unity in a common life of Christ, did much to shape the political imagination of the Middle Ages.

It is within this context that Julian herself sees the body of Christ as open and generative. In Chapter 2, "I Desired a Bodily Sight," Bauerschmidt demonstrates that Julian's image of the human body is different from those of her contemporaries. Living in an age that focused on Christ's humanity and an "affective devotion" to his suffering love, Julian transforms the image of the body. Her attention is not on the body's inferiority as a spiritual medium but on its capacity to unify all Christians with Christ's suffering body. This unity, in turn, invites participation in God's own nature.

While Chapter 3 continues the focus on the image of Christ's body, Bauerschmidt shifts emphasis here from Christology to Ecclesiology. This chapter contains a fascinating account of how a human body can function as a metaphor for a social body. In addition, it holds particular interest for feminist reflection for two reasons: (1) There is an interesting discussion of women on the margins of medieval life (pp. 73-76), and (2) Bauerschmidt also attends to Julian's development of the image of Jesus as mother (pp. 90-95).

As far as the marginalization of women is concerned, Bauerschmidt sees in that injustice a resource for women who sought to identify with Jesus the Christ: "Yet, within this misogynist tradition, certain women used their marginalization as a means by which they could follow and imitate Christ precisely because of the way in which marginal status is encoded within the image of Jesus himself, who, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, 'suffered outside the city gate" (p. 74). It is also possible that by seeing in Jesus a body that revealed female possibilities (i.e., as pain opens to generate new life), Julian did something to elevate the status of the female body in her time. In "view of the development in the long text of her understanding of Jesus as mother, it certainly seems possible that she had come to a more positive assessment of femaleness than normally prevailed in medieval England. While femaleness was still coded as marginal and dangerous, the margin and the danger were now mapped onto Christ's bodily humanity" (p. 76).

Bauerschmidt points out that Julian achieves the identification of Jesus with the female body, not by attending to social gender roles but by riveting her attention on physical, bodily evidence. So, it is not Jesus' gentleness or forgiving nature that reveals his femaleness, but his flesh itself is colder, more moist, and more vulnerable than male flesh. Female flesh (and especially the virgin female flesh from which Jesus' body was made) was thought to be very fragile. Yet this vulnerability is turned on its head by Julian's boundless love for the God-man. Though his human body is clearly male, Jesus is able to personify as well the qualities normally limited to women: "Within the body of Christ our mother is the infinite expanse of his empty womb, which is the shape of his desire for us" (p. 95). Julian's images do, at times, require a little mind-bending, but anyone interested in religious meanings of the male and female bodies will profit from wrestling with this material.

Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ

Spiritual Life, Winter 2001 by Caplin, Diane M

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