Moreover, the means that in general she looks to for realising God’s nearness, in whatever measure or manner the revelation of it may come to any soul, is the immediate one of faith as a gift of nature and a grace from the Holy Ghost: faith leading by prayer, and effort of obedience, and teachableness of spirit, into actual experience of oneness with God. The natural and common heritage of love and faith is a theme that is dear to Julian: in her view, longing toward God is grounded in the love to Him that is native to the human heart, and this longing (painful through sin) as it is stirred by the Holy Spirit, who comes with Christ, is, in each naturally developed Christian, spontaneous and increasing;—“for the nearer we be to our bliss, the more we long after it” (xlvi., lxxii., lxxxi.). “This is the kinde [the natural] yernings of the soule by the touching of the Holy Ghost: God of Thy goodness give me Thyself: for Thou art now to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worshippe to Thee.” God is the first as well as the last: the soul begins as well as ends with God: begins by Nature, begins again by Mercy, and ends—yet “without end”—by Grace. Certainly on the way—the way of these three, by falling, by succour, by upraising—to the more perfect knowing of God that is the soul’s Fulfilment in Heaven, there is a less immediate knowledge to be gained through experience: “And if I aske anything that is lesse, ever me wantith,” for “It needyth us to have knoweing of the littlehede of creatures and to nowtyn all thing that is made, for to love and have God that is onmade.” But this knowing of the littleness of creatures comes to Julian first of all in a sight of the Goodness of God; “For [to] a soule that seith the Maker of all, all that is made semith full litil.” By the further beholding, indeed, of God as Maker and Preserver, that which has been rightly “noughted” as of no account, is seen to be also truly of much account. For that which was seen by the soul as so little that it seemed to be about to fall to nothing for littleness, is seen by the understanding to have “three properties”:—God made it, God loveth it, God keepeth it. Thus it is known as “great and large, fair and good”; “it lasteth, and ever shall, for God loveth it.”—Yet again the soul breaks away to its own, with the natural flight of a bird from its Autumn nest at the call of an unseen Spring to the far-off land that is nearer still than its nest, because it is in its heart. “But what is to me sothly [in verity] the Maker, the Keper and the Lover,—I cannot tell, for till I am Substantially oned [deeply united] to Him, I may never have full rest ne very blisse; that is to sey, that I be so festined to Him, that there is right nowte that is made betwix my God and me” (v., viii.). This “fastening” is all that in Julian’s book represents that needful process wherein the truth of asceticism has a part. It is not essentially a process of detaching the thought from created things of time—still less one of detaching the heart from created beings of eternity—but a process of more and more allowing and presenting the man to be fastened closely to God by means of the original longing of the soul, the influence of the Holy Ghost, and the discipline of life with its natural tribulations, which by their purifying serve to strengthen the affections that remaining pass through them. “But only in Thee I have all.” On the way this discovery of the soul at peace must needs be sometimes a word for exclusion, in parting and pressing onward from things that are made: in the end it is the welcome, all-inclusive. And Julian, notwithstanding her enclosure as a recluse, is one of those that, happy in nature and not too much hindered by conditions of life, possess for large use by the way the mystical peace of fulfilled possession through virtue of freedom from bondage to self. For it is by means of the tyranny of the “self,” regarding chiefly itself in its claims and enjoyments, that creature things can be intruded between the soul and God; and always, in some way, the meek inherit the earth. “All things are yours; and ye are Christ’s.”
The life of a recluse demanded, no doubt, as other lives do, a daily self-denial as well as an initiatory self-devotion, and from Julian’s silence as to “bodily exercises” it cannot of course be assumed that she did not give them, even beyond the incumbent rule of the Church, though not in excess of her usual moderation, some part in her Christian striving for mastery over self. Nor could this silence in itself be taken as a proof that ascetic practices had not in her view a preparatory function such as has by many of the Mystics been assigned to them during a process of self-training in the earlier stages of the soul’s ascent to aptitude for mystical vision. It is, however, to be noted that neither in regard to herself nor others do we hear from Julian anything about an undertaking of this kind. To her the “special Shewing” came as a gift, unearned, and unexpected: it came in an abundant answer to a prayer for other things needed by every soul.{13} Julian’s desires for herself were for three “wounds” to be made more deep in her life: contrition (in sight of sin), compassion (in sight of sorrow) and longing after God: she prayed and sought diligently for these graces, comprehensive as she felt they were of the Christian life and meant for all; and with them she sought to have for herself, in particular regard to her own difficulties, a sight of such truth as it might “behove” her to know for the glory of God and the comfort of men. According to Julian the “special Shewing” is a gift of comfort for all, sent by God in a time to some soul that is chosen in order that it may have, and so may minister, the comfort needed by itself and by others (ix.). In her experience this Revelation, soon closed, is renewed by influence and enlightenment in the more ordinary grace of its giver, the Holy Ghost. But a still fuller sight of God shall be given, she rejoices to think, in Heaven, to all that shall reach that Fulfilment of blessed life—the only mount of the soul set forth in this book. Thither, by the high-road of Christ, all souls may go, making the steep ascent through “longing and desire,”—longing that embodies itself in desire towards God, that is, in Prayer.
Nothing is said by Julian as to successive stages of Prayer, though she speaks of different kinds of prayer as the natural action of the soul under different experiences or in different states of feeling or “dryness.” Prayer is asking (“beseeching”), with submission and acquiescence; or beholding, with the self forgotten, yet offered up; it is a thanking and a praising in the heart that sometimes breaks forth into voice; or a silent joy in the sight of God as all-sufficient. And in all these ways “Prayer oneth the soul to God.”
To Julian’s understanding the only Shewing of God that could ever be, the highest and lowest, the first and the last, was the Vision of Him as Love, “Hold thee therin and thou shalt witten and knowen more in the same. But thou shalt never knowen ne witten other thing without end. Thus was I lerid that Love was our Lord’s menyng” (lxxxvi.). Alien to the “simple creature” was that desert region where some of the lovers of God have endeavoured to find Him,—desiring an extreme penetration of thought (human thought, after all, since for men there is none beyond it) or an utmost reach of worship (worship from fire and ice) in proclaiming the Absolute One not only as All that is, but as All that is not. Julian’s desire was truly for God in Himself, through Christ by the Holy Spirit of Love: for God in “His homeliest home,” the soul, for God in His City. Therefore she follows only the upward way of the light attempered by grace, not turning back to the Via Negativa, that downward road that starting from a conception of the Infinite “as the antithesis of the finite,”{14} rather than as including and transcending the finite, leads man to deny to his words of God all qualities known or had by human, finite beings. Julian keeps on the way that is natural to her spirit and to all her habits of thought as these may have been directed by reading and conversation: it does not take her towards that Divine Darkness of which some seers have brought report. Hers was not one of those souls that would, and must, go silent and alone and strenuous through strange places: “homely and courteous” she ever found Almighty God in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Julian’s mystical sight was not a negation of human modes of thought: neither was it a torture to human powers of speech nor a death-sentence to human activities of feeling. “He hath no despite of that which He hath made” (vi.). This seer of the littleness of all that is made saw the Divine as containing, not as engulfing, all things that truly are, so that in some way “all things that are made” because of His love last ever. Certainly she passes sometimes beyond the language of earth, seeing a love and a Goodness “more than tongue can tell,” but she is never inarticulate in any painful, struggling way—when words are not to be found that can tell all the truth revealed, she leaves her Lord’s “meaning” to be taken directly from Him by the understanding of each desirous soul. So is
