the Cross, it was also the inward, sight by the higher part of her soul of the higher part of Christ’s life, that Heavenly Love that could only rejoice, that overcame her frailty of flesh unwilling to suffer, and made her choose “only Jesus in weal and in woe.” “Thou art my Heaven” (xix.-lv.). “All the Trinity wrought in the Passion of Jesus Christ,” though only the Son of the Virgin suffered, and in seeing this, Julian saw “the Bliss of Christ’s works,” “the joy that is in the blissful Trinity [by reason] of the Passion of Christ”; the Father willing all, the Son working all, the Holy Ghost confirming all.”
This complexity of the Divine-Human life in the Son of God, this union in Christ Jesus of serene untouched blessedness in the heavenly regions of His spirit with His bearing, in the active joy of a “glad giver,” all the sin and sorrow of the world, is revealed as the comfort and confidence of man, whose own deepest experience is love that suffers, whose highest worship therefore must be of Love that is strong to suffer.
It was a double joy that was shewn in Christ besides the bliss of the impassible Godhead, which is the bliss of Love without all time and beyond all deeds. For there was joy in the Passion itself: “If I might suffer more, I would suffer more,” and joy in its fruits: “If thou art pleased, I am pleased.” Thus, too, we are told of three ways in which our Lord would have us behold His Passion: first, “the hard pains He suffered on earth”; second, “the love that made Him to suffer passeth as far all His pains as Heaven is above earth”; third, “the joy and the bliss that made Him to be well-satisfied in it.”—“With a glad countenance He looked unto His wounded Side, rejoicing” (xxii., xxiii., xxiv.).
From the sight of Love that is higher than pain comes the sight of Love that is deeper than sin. Julian had had the mystical shewing that God is all that is good,{28} and is only good, is the life of all that is, and doeth all that is done, and she had reasoned, as others before her had reasoned, that therefore “sin hath no substance” and “sin is no deed.” But perhaps it is those that are most concerned with God in creature things, that suffer most shaking from the sight of evil. Those that seek God’s Kingdom in this present world, finding “the dark places of the earth” full of the habitations of cruelty, have continually the enemy as with a sword in their bones saying within them: “Where is now thy God?” “I saw,” says Julian, “that He is in all things. I beheld and considered, with a soft dread, and thought: What is sin?” (xi.). So also it is immediately after the coming of the mystical Shewing made “yet more highly “: “It is I, it is I, it is I that am all,” that the memory of her own experience is brought to her and she sees how in her longings after God, who is all the time so close about us, around us and within,—she had always been hindered from seeing and reaching Him fully by the darkening, disturbing power of sin. “And so I looked generally upon us all, and methought: If sin had not been, we should have all been clean, and like to our Lord as He made us” (xxvii.). Thus came again the stirring of that old question over which “afore this time often I wondered,” with “mourning and sorrow,” “why the beginning of sin was not letted—for then, methought, all should have been well.”
To this darkness, crying to God, the light came first as by a soft general dawning of comfort for faith. “Sin is behoveable (it behoved that sin should be suffered to rise) but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Yet Julian, unable to take comfort to her heart over that which was still so dark to her intellect, stands “beholding things general, troublously and mourning,” saying thus in her thoughts: “Ah good Lord, how might all be well, for the great hurt that is come by sin to the creature ?” (xxix.).
The answer to this double question as to sin and pain is the central theme of the Revelation, though much is still hidden and much is but dimly revealed as yet to faith. In brief account, the sight, enough for us now, is this: “Mercy, by love, suffereth us to fail [of love] in measure, and in as much as we fail, in so much we die: for it needs must be that we die in so much as we fail of the sight and feeling of God that is our life…. And grace worketh our dreadful failing into plenteous, endless solace, and grace worketh our shameful falling into high, worshipful rising; and grace worketh our sorrowful dying into holy, blissful life” (xlviii.). “By the assay of this falling we shall have an high marvellous knowing of love in God, without end. For strong and marvellous is that love that may not and will not be broken for trespass. And this is one understanding of our profit. Another is the lowness and meekness that we shall get by the sight of our falling” (lxi.). “And by this meek knowing after this manner, through contrition and grace, we shall be broken from all that is not our Lord. And then shall our blessed Saviour perfectly heal us and one us to Him” (lxxviii.).
Theodidacta, Profunda, Ecstatica—so Julian has been designated; perhaps she might in fuller truth be called Theodidacta, Profunda, Evangelica. She is indeed a mystic, evangelical, practical. With all her fellow-Christians and in the most deeply personal concern she looks with a tender mind on the redeeming work of God by Christ in the “glorious satisfaction” (“Asseth”), and in fervent response of love and thankfulness trusts in the blessed Passion of Christ, and in His sure keeping, and in all the restoring, fulfilling work by the Holy Ghost. But after the Mystical manner she seeks “the beyond”: that is, while in no way leaving the works of mercy and grace she seeks to go back to the ground or source of them, the Goodness of God,—yes, to God Himself. “I could not have perceived of the part of Mercy but as it were alone in Love.” “The Passion was a noble worshipful deed done in a time, but Love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ending.”
The Mystical Vision is that which in outward nature sees the unseen within the seen, but it is also that which in spiritual things sees behind and beyond the temporal means, the eternal causes and ends (vi.). And it is surely here in the spiritual things, in the heart and centre of human existence, in the stress of sin and suffering, rather than amongst the gentle growing things, and flaming lights, and songs, and blameless creatures of Nature that the Beatific Vision on earth is at its highest. For here are found united the Evangel and the Vision and the Life of love. “There the soul is highest, noblest, and worthiest, where it is lowest, meekest, and mildest”: it is not in nature’s goodness alone that we have our life, “all our life is in three,” in nature, in mercy, in grace; “whereof we have meekness, mildness, patience and pity” (lviii., lix.). Man’s “spirit,” the higher nature that Julian talks of, may indeed be there in the Heavenly places, as an infant’s angel lying in the Father’s arms, always beholding His Face in love’s silence of waiting; but here in earthly places is the Prodigal Son returning, here too is the Father’s embrace, and here is His earliest greeting of the son that was lost and is found. And already here in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth (where all grow pure in the sonship obedience of Jesus Christ), are those that are kept from the first as little children, taken up in His arms and suffered to sing their Hosannahs, which perfect His praise.
The Revelation of Love is all centred in the Passion, and looking on the Passion in time the soul sees, in vision, the Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world, the mind conceives how before all time the Divine Love took to itself in the Wisdom of God the mode of Manhood, and in time created Man in the same, and how thus God could be and do all that man could be and do, could exercise Love Divine in human Faith and Courage: could “take our flesh” and live on the earth as “the Man, Christ-Jesus,” “in all points tempted like as we are,” finding His daily Bread in the will of the Father, drinking with joy of the Wine of Life in the evening cup of Death. “Pain is passing,” says Julian, but in passing it leads forth love in man to its deepest living, its fairest height of pureness and strength and fulfilment. Thus it behoved the Captain of man’s salvation to have His perfection here through suffering. It is the Lamb in the midst of the Throne, the Almighty Love that was slain, that is Shepherd to the Martyrs, leading them unto living fountains of waters. He that bore the yoke gives rest to the heavy-laden; blessed is He that mourned: for He comforteth with His comfort.
So in the Mediaeval story,{29} the highest Mystical Vision, the sight of the Holy Grail, comes only to him that is pure from self, and looks on the bleeding wound that sin has left in man, and
