Julian of Norwichs Views on the Body and Christ as mother - Research Paper Example

Julian of Norwich’s Views on the Body and Christ as mother Introduction Julian of Norwich, a mystic living in fourteenthcentury Britain, is renowned for her visionary writings, considered unique for her times. Very little is known about her life, apart from the fact that she had a series of visions in May 1373 and that she lived in seclusion as an anchoress during a period of terrible plagues (Watson, 637). Julian’s works do not appear to have had much impact during her lifetime, and she remained largely unknown until the early twentieth century, when scholars began to study her writings. After a brief discussion of the genre of Julian’s writings, and the role of female mystics in the Middle Ages, this paper examines Julian’s perspectives on the body and Christ as mother. Her writings are compared with the mainstream theology of the Church in the fourteenth century and examined in the light of modern feminist theory in order to understand the purpose and importance of Julian’s particular approach to writing. Vision and Revelation. Julian’s writings survive in manuscripts which were written at a much later date than her own lifetime, and largely in dialects different from her own local East Anglian vernacular, which suggests that her original works were copied and passed on in religious communities which valued her particular contribution (Dinshaw and Wallson, 210). The famous “Vision” or “Revelation” that she received is preserved in a long and a short version. The earlier “Vision” has been described as “already a polished, gripping, scene by scene narrative of an experience it depicts as a dialogic, obscure, but in theory lucid communication between God and his people, with Julian herself acting as representative, and a medium” (Dinshaw and Wallace, 211). The later “Revelation” is expanded to about four times the length of the “Vision” and is described by the same authors as “part expansion, part commentary, part theological summa” (Dinshaw and Wallace, 213). There is narrative content in her works, but it there is also a didactic element: “Julian is not a mere ‘descriptive’ visionary. She penetrates the meaning of the Christian mystery and elucidates in an inimitable and original way” (Obbard, 123). These expansive descriptions reveal that modern critics have considerable difficulty in assigning Julian’s work to any recognizable genre. Originality was not generally regarded as an advantage in medieval religious writings, and the incongruity of Julian’s choice of form may well have contributed to the muted reception that her works appear to have had in her own lifetime and the years immediately afterwards. The role of female mystics in the Middle Ages Julian’s position as a woman presents her with considerable difficulty in approaching the task of writing. During the medieval era, the spiritual development of mystical women required the bridging of two antagonistic concepts at the same time. They were both revered as holy examples, and at the same time they were viewed as acquiescent to their male counterparts. Although they could receive redemption like any other men, their position was very definitely of secondary status. Thus, women were made to understand their position as both subservient and equal to men, hence turning their spiritual quest into an internalization of antithetic concepts. This created a situation where their experimental spirituality directed not only acceptance of the antithetic concepts but created a different form of control over them, which sometimes inverted all traditional spiritual norms. As two antithetic concepts pair, the opposites often combine to deliver a greater truth, which is inclusive in form brought about by the union of two inconsistent theories. During medieval era, the female mysticism represents paradox, akin to the Christian theological concept of Christ as a divine figure in a human form. There are, however, some advantages in approaching theology from the perspective of a woman. Submitting to and internalizing antithetic ideas allowed mystical women of the medieval era to develop a superlative conception regarding Christ. Owing to her gender a female mystic could adopt a poetic approach to the topic of union with divinity, which was not possible for the male theologians of that era. Adoption of antithesis to invert traditional religious edicts to make it more inclusive, gave a poetic role to the medieval female mystics. In this context, it has been claimed that during medieval period, “only in lyric poetry and mystical writings… does [medieval] woman remain a force for good” (Ferrante, 3). The lyrical poetry of antithesis thus becomes main tool of the female mystics as they tried to unite themselves and others with God. By considering their religious compositions as poetry, the texts can then be viewed as metaphors, thus, not excluding their readers through boundaries of stringent norms, dogmas or doctrines. Julian of Norwich is well known for composing revolutionary inversions within the realms of patriarchal doctrinal theology, associated with the formulation of a belief in the feminine nature of Christ (Watson, 653). Julian worked within the boundaries of religious community and was valued there, while some of her contemporaries in contrast faced accusations of heresy for writing similar discourses. Despite the theme of duality being an integral part of Christianity, another woman mystic Marguerite Porete, who claimed to have experienced visionary spirituality, was charged with heresy and burned at the stake (Watson, 637). In this context, it has been claimed that “women in medieval Christendom bore a double burden: the inferiority of having been created from Adam’s rib and the guilt of having…lost Paradise and condemned the race to pain, sin and death” (Whitaker, xi). This feeling of guilt was only a part of the dual nature so evident within religious doctrines that was divided into “intellect/body, active/passive, rational/irrational, reason/emotion, self-control/lust, judgment/mercy, and order/disorder” (Bynum, 1986, 257), and this form of duality created large-scale inequalities within various social classes and groups. The Body in Julian’s Theology Through the externalized nature of her experiences of herself and of Christ, Julian managed to develop a holistic relationship with God, based on which she formulated a theology of the self and body, where God speaks to her about her ‘sensuality.’ With a positive appraisement of the self and body, Julian transcends the issues created over centuries by the Augustinian-Neoplatonic notions of dualism of matter and spirit, body and soul that is an integral part of Western Christianity. Julian’s anchorite and isolated existence helped her to achieve freedom and accept unique insights into a human body and its spiritual connotations. Furthermore, her own experiences that were at odds with the traditional religious dictates of the Church, allowed her to free herself of the prevalent patriarchal norms. Externalized channels of consciousness influenced almost all aspect of Julian's rationalizations, that included epistemology based on her own experiences of body, to the vocabulary that described self and emphasized on the sensuality of self, to conceptualization of Christ’s motherhood. Julian's theologies are radically incarnational in form as it takes into consideration the spirit that is left discarnate in the patriarchal and dualist versions of human personification. Julian allows God to possess her body via her visions and illnesses, to turn her body into an incarnation of the Christ. This theology of divine motherhood that is based on the use of female metaphors, such as God’s womb, the nurturing aspects of Christ, presents God with a female body. Among the various medieval mystics, Julian’s works are most significant as it emphasizes the incarnational perspective of Christ, with a focus on piety that is primarily Christocentric. Julian's bodily experiences, as regards her sickness, her healing, and her visions of God’s passion are evident in all her verses in her book of Revelations or Shewings. Her writings reflected theological insights into incarnation associated not only the concept of humanity but to the very fleshliness/physicality of divinity. Through her sickness, her flesh becomes fused with the sufferings of the Christ, and her writings turn into exegetical of the text, penned into her visions and body. From her epistemological viewpoint that is feminine in nature, Julian felt the necessity of gaining knowledge and wisdom through experience, which she refers to as the wisdom of the mother. For an incarnation, Julian wanted to intensify her own experiences of the physicality of Christ through three graces or transformative involvement: experiencing deeply Christ’s passion, suffering terrible sicknesses, and receiving three wounds of compassion, contrition, and a passionate desire for God. In these three transformations, Julian is delegating her alterations to her body, and each experience is linked to others using the body as a medium. The passion of Christ is taken in physically, in terms that it is viewed as a bodily image, which takes place during her illness. The physical experiences result in body ‘wounds,’ which even though are spiritual in nature carry the impression of their corporeal origin. Furthermore, here it is important that Julian desires the wounds of corporeal illness instead of asking for spiritual Blessure d' amour of Origen. Thus, Julian's bodily sickness acts as a kind of ‘ensoulment,’ and unlike other mystics that seek freedom from the body Julian perceives her body as the focal point of refining her spirit, and as the abode of God and his Holy Spirit. In her works, Julian expresses the feeling that until she feels with her entire body, in all her bones, her cells, her marrow the presence of Christ, there will be no basis for her to comprehend the greatness of God at all. All forms resistances toward learning, gaining knowledge and experiencing God remain within one’s body. In order to remove these resistances Julian asks for bodily sickness that would help her to unleash the spiritual energy of an incorporated consciousness. Here terrible illness that caused paralysis and slow healing some days later is a sign of metaphorical change that Julian undergoes, where here old and slothful body dies, giving rise to a body that is new and soulful. The significance of this transformation lay in the fact that it was Julian's fierce desire that started the process of spiritual transformation and lived experiences of her corporeal suffering unites the soul and body as one matter. Therefore, a suffering that is desired and voluntarily chosen (similar to Julian's), in a larger context of bearing and aspiration, changes into something better with more meaning. Julian, thus, moves from leading a superficial life (slothful, aimless, and frivolous) to living at the very core of her soul. It is curious to observe that Julian depicts her soul like that of city where Christ is at the Centre, bearing a wholeness derived from the union of masculine-feminine and a unity in antagonism, which appears as further deepening takes place. Thus, Julian's actual center found within an antithetical metaphor and derived through antithetical deepening, which her corporeal wounds consort, is Christ. A majority of Julian's revelations and visions are in corporeal form, and being more of a visionary rather than a mystic, she propagates the specific nature of her lived experiences. Julian clearly desires for a vision and writes that “I desyrede a bodylye syght, whare yn y myght have more knawynge of bodelye paynes of oure lorde our savyoure and of the compassyonn of oure ladye and of all his trewe loverse that were be levande his paynes that tyme and sythene; for I wolde have been one of thame and suffrede with thame” (Baker, 22). The bodily nature of her revelations and visions allows her to view within them apparently conflicting qualities, seen in her use of adjectives, such as quick, lovely, hideous, dreadful, sweet, all opposites often arranged together in a single sentence. This harmony in conflicting emotions within Julian’s corporeal visions makes her ready for later insights into antithetical nature of humanity and God. In fact, an inherent reading of her visions during her illness allowed Julian to conciliate her exposition through her body, which had become a vessel of deep wisdom and insight, and she views a direct connection between her corporeal experiences and the knowledge gained from it. Thus, Julian seeks to progress from blind faith to lived-in experience, from a second-hand and dogmatic knowing to believing in her inner self and authority, from conjecture to vision, and from theoretical supplementary faith to a lived-in corporeal experience that is more grounded in form. Complementary to the body as a catechistic basis for writing her revelations, is her powerful psychology on the inner self. In her affirmation of the self as substance, nature, grace, and sensuality, Julian highlights bodily principles neglected within patriarchal religious norms. She creates a dialectical vocabulary on the self and body that transcends all existing Augustinian theological norms. The significance of Julian's theology is in the fact that gives equal importance to grace and nature within all religious activities aiming at achieving salvation. While greatly enhancing notions of the self on its corporeal aspects, she does not perceive the self, disconnected from God's activities within it. However, Julian's theology on asceticism, unlike other medieval saints, does not take into consideration Spartan practices that aim at making the body suffer (Bynum, 1987, 294). Julian is balanced in her desire to seek a body-soul unity, and she refrains from desiring suffering for the sake of suffering only. She does not engage in Spartan practices that aim at austere penitence acts through flagellation or fasting, and she does not linger in her own sickness and revels in her sudden healing (Bynum, 1987, 294). As Julian recovers from her prolonged sickness, it produces a range of deep insights into God’s piety and goodness, ending with an insight where she deduces that her entire corporeal experience was actually Love, and the body is simply the vessel where one’s pain and suffering slowly fills with the purity of love. Women playing the role of a subordinate, had only one choice wherein she had to simply follow the trodden path, or the traditional way of imitating, where she was forced to assume a specified feminine role, and often this translated into converting subservience into a form of assertion (Irigary a, 76). Bynum claimed that medieval “women saw the humanity-physicality that linked them with Christ as in continuity with, rather than reversal from, their ordinary experience of physical and social vulnerability… [And] women reached God not by reversing what they were, but by sinking more fully into it” (Bynum, 1986, 274). In her theology, Julian expressed that suffering and pain were not a God inflicted punishment as was the common belief during those times. Popular theology during those times asserted that major catastrophes like Black Death and peasant revolts were punishments meted out by God for the wicked. On the other hand, Julian created a religion that was more merciful in nature and based more on God’s love than visions of hell, which spoke of universal salvation for humankind (Hick, 135-140). Despite Julian's revolutionary outlook, there were no challenges to her authority or theology, owing to her position as an anchoress. Julian’s writings were different from other theologians of her era in three main aspects: her notions on sin, her belief in a God that bestows only love, and her visualization of Christ as a mother. According to her theology, God plays a dual role of being both a father and mother, an idea first conceptualized by Francis of Assisi in 13th century, which has greatly influenced feminist theologies of 20th and 21st centuries. According to Julian’s theological notions, sins played an integral part in a man’s life as it helped him to acquire self-knowledge that lead to an acknowledgment of God’s role in one's daily life (Beer, 143). Furthermore, Julian suggested that human beings commit sin mainly because of their ignorance, and not because of their evilness, which was a commonly believed theology of the church during the middle ages (Beer, 144). She contended that common people in order to learn must first fail, which is achieved by committing a sin, and the suffering caused by sin is a process through one remembers sufferings of the passion of Christ. Thus, as per Julian’s theology, only when humankind suffers pain similar to Christ, they come closer to Him. In this context, the essay defends the thesis statement that her lived-in experiences about herself and Christ helped to create a more holistic conjunction with God, based on which she was able to compose a theology where God communicated with her on Body, physicality/sensuality and the Self. With positive valuation of the Self and Body, Julian was able to transcend all boundaries of dualism associated with spirit and matter, soul and body (pertaining to Augustinian -Neo-Platonist notions that formed a basis of traditional Christian religion). Julian, owing to her isolation from the church, family and religious communities, managed to became independent from various confinements of socio-religious bindings and their implications. Christ as mother With religious worship being based on readership during the medieval era, religious followers skillfully practiced commentary through interpretation of various signs in daily lives, books and manuscripts. Thus, quests for religious experiences were primarily based on theological writings, and for medieval Christian women, based on the story from Genesis, Eve (or any female’s) identity was derived from semantic acts, making “ontological status of woman…[which is] analogous to a form of poetic discourse” (Chance, 12). Thus, it is in the antithesis of a feminine body that binds Christ with the mystic, where Christ’s lowly human form is an imitation, reflected in weak creatures, as women (Irigary b, 199). This imaginative union with divinity necessitates the mystic’s participation in visionary experiences, both internally and externally, where the female mystic must conceptualize God through her own body, as a mirror reflecting Christ’s divinity (Lichtman, 264). However, this mirroring takes place only when there occurs an antithetical emptying of the self, where the mystic must claim, “I have become your image in this nothingness that I am, and you gaze upon mine in your absence of being…A living mirror, thus, am I” (Irigary b, 197). This mirror reflects the link that exists between Body and Consciousness, Soul and Self, since it changes Self into an indication of what the Self actually is. Thus, the mystic changes herself into a Christ’s signifier while her body indicates his divinity, and to achieve this fusion through paradox, medieval female mystics like Julian of Norwich utilizes antithesis of the body, as for example, bodies of the Church, God, and Self as a mirror that reflects divinity. This fusion is evident in Julian’s writings where Christ is depicted as parenting an individual’s soul, “he fires our understanding, he directs our ways” (like a father), while at the same time “eases our conscience [and] comforts our soul,” like that of a mother (Julian, quoted in Spearing, 203). This representation of both the parental aspects in Julian’s works show that Christ’s humanity is actually a male persona, while Christ as a mother does not represent complete feminization, but a general obscuring of gender differences. By assigning motherhood to Christ, Julian magnifies the scope of his humanity, in order to understand the infinite nature of God’s divinity. The basic theology of Christianity is grounded on the theological concept of the incarnation : Christ is understood as being divine and human both at the same time. During the councils of Chalcedon, the orthodox theologians ruled that Christ was simultaneously “truly God and truly man…of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood” (Council of Chalcedon - 451 A.D., 2013). Christ’s divinity and humanity both remain important to the Christian religion; however, there exists a conflict between the two. This conflict stems from the standard philosophical friction that exists between soul and body, the necessity to conform spiritual quests to physical needs. This conflict is of great significance for mystics, who aim at uplifting the spirit within the confines of their physical bodies and sometimes this conflict may even lead to debasement of the physical body. However, not all mystics believe in overcoming humanity to attain union with divinity and some of the stronger images of Christ embrace his divinity along with humanity. Amongst these images, one picture is that of Christ as a mother, where humanity is reflected through physical suffering and bleeding, and spirituality is reflected in terms of the life that Christ gives, which is divine and eternal. This representation of Christ is conceptualized and expanded in Julian’s writings complied in the book Revelations of Divine Love. Christ as a mother is seen as a core theme in almost all of Julian’s writings, based on the concept of a mother’s love that leads to the path to salvation. Furthermore, Christ as a mother shows the union of male and female in a single body, which reveals a God that is beyond all divisions created by man. Therefore, the mystic must cross all boundaries of gender divisiveness in order to unite with a genderless God. While Julian’s version helps us to associate with male and female aspects of the Christ and to the higher divinity of God, Christ’s image as mother was initially created under different standings, and with different ramifications. Religious heads like St Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St Thierry, and St Anselm used only certain images of motherhood to denote the affectionate qualities that are generally associated Christ, primarily linked to breasts. This was evident in St. Bernard’s verse “For your breasts are better than wine, smelling sweet of the best ointments” (Bynum, 1982, 117). This presents a picture that implicated spiritual suckling as is evident in the “When she said, then, ‘Your breasts are better than wine,’ she meant: ‘The richness of the grace that flows from your breasts contributes far more to my spiritual progress than the biting reprimands of my superiors’” (Bynum, 1982, 117). The notions of femininity and gentleness associated with Christ tends to end here as regards Cistercian theology, however they also play significant role within the Cistercian religious community, where monks like St. Bernard, refer to themselves as females to express their complete dependence on God (Bynum, 1982, 166). Julian of Norwich in her writings extends this very idea maternal love going beyond the relationship of monk to abbot, and instead attributed it to the relationship that exists between humankind and God. From her viewpoint, the world is “a little thing, the size of a hazelnut… [That] lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God” (Spearing, 179). Furthermore, Julian suggested that since all things are reliant on God’s love, it can be derived naturally that this love must be unconditional, all-encompassing and eternal. In Julian’s theology God’s love forms to be the basic foundation, and in all her writings maternal language is evident, “we are redeemed by the motherhood of mercy and grace and brought back into our natural dwelling where we were made by natural love; a natural love which never leaves us” (Spearing, 201). According to Julian, Christ makes this love more objective, and she refers to him as “this fair, lovely word ‘mother,’ so sweet and so tender in itself…to the nature of motherhood belong tender love, wisdom, and knowledge, and it is good, for although the birth of our body is only low, humble, and modest compared with the birth of our soul, yet it is he who does it in the beings by whom it is done” (Spearing, 203). Therefore, it is clear that Julian crosses the Cistercian conceptual limits of Christ’s motherhood (through simply breastfeeding) in her works, and suggests that “our tender mother Jesus, he can familiarly lead us into his blessed breast through his sweet open side” (Spearing, 202). She builds up the feeling of devotion in terms of child birth, where she depicts Christ “in labour for the full time until he suffered the sharpest pangs and the most grievous sufferings… and…had born us into bliss” (Spearing, 202). This clear representation of Christ’s physicality depicts the significance of his humanity, even though his motherhood remains placed higher, than all divinity. Thus, according to Julian through spiritual birth, Christ presents us with “some degree of knowledge and love of his blessed Godhead, with awareness through grace of his precious Manhood and his blessed Passion, and with courteous wonder at his great and surpassing goodness” (Spearing, 203). This sense of ‘goodness,’ and the notions of unconditional love that God has for humankind, helps Julian to use to a rebellious approach and solve various theological issues, mainly related to that of salvation. Julian had problems with the conflict that exists between an idea of a God with unconditional love for his world who assures the welfare of entire humankind and religious doctrines of the Church that propagate notions of heretics, fires of hell, and devils. Julian uses maternal love and tries to solve the conflict that exists between salvation and sin, and in her works depict that as a mother permits her child to commit mistakes, God also permits humans to commit sins, “to be beaten to break down vices so that the child [or human] may gain in virtue and grace” (Spearing, 203). Therefore even though one’s life may be full of sins and not easy, God continues to assure that everything would ultimately turn good (Spearing, 186-187). This assurance along with the endless, constant and unconditional maternal love that God shows towards the world helps Julian to propagate the concept of universal salvation. Without directly rejecting Church doctrines, by taking help of direct spiritual experiences of a connection with Christ, Julian allows for mystic abandon, which helps her to actually bypass the rigid theological doctrines (Bynum, 1982, 265). Julian in her writings emphasized on the democratic nature of God’s love. Like a perfect mother who has equal love for all her children, God also directs equal love for all living things in this world. By depicting Christ as a mother (in spiritual and physical terms) and by showing the maternal aspects in God’s love, Julian revalues the mother’s role in Christianity as assayed by the Virgin Mary and goes even beyond that. While portraying Christ as a mother, Julian links women to a feminine ideal, “by insisting on the relevance of human motherhood to the spiritual motherhood of Christ, and by expanding motherhood to include emotional as well as physical experiences”(Williams, 126). In Julian’s works there is also a fusion of the female and male in image she creates of Christ as a mother, demonstrating especially the easy movement within gender divisions while dealing with the all-encompassing, omnipresent God. This fusion is evident in her verses where she depicts Christ parenting one’s soul, where he guides like a father and comforts compassionately like a mother. In Bynum’s studies that involve medieval theological texts dealing with the use of female images there are suggestions that “women tended to fuse male and female images more than did men…[and] a sharply defined sense of the male as superior was unimportant in women’s writings and visions”(Bynum, 1986, 169). Therefore, it is evident that female mystics of the medieval era did not consider themselves as subservient to their male counterparts, primarily because they viewed themselves as human beings in front of God. This feeling is seen in many of Julian’s writings where the language of motherly emotions are used to represent God’s eternal and unconditional love for the world, and where God is shown to be “our clothing, wrapping and enveloping us for love, embracing us and guiding us” (Spearing, 178). Thus, by ascribing a mother’s role to Christ his masculine form of humanity is given a balance by this feminine touch, and after donning both the genders, Christ in a certain sense turns genderless, and as Bynum suggested, “images of male and female alike [become] insipid and unimportant in the blinding light of the ultimate asymmetry between God and creation” (Bynum, 1986, 179). This creation of a humanity, which goes beyond all superficial and man-made expository categories, is what is seen depicted in Julian works, “If I look solely at myself, I am really nothing; but as one of mankind in general, I am in oneness of love with all my fellow Christians for upon this oneness of love depends the life of all who shall be saved; for God is all that is good, and God has made all that is made, and God loves all that he has made” (Spearing, 181). Motherhood, in Julian’s writings, offers “a clearer (and possibly less threatening model for women’s access to power” (Williams, 115) which emphasizes the roles of nurturer and mediator rather than the more academic teacher role that was dominant in the formal Church hierarchy. The kind of authority that Julian represents is altogether more suited to the family: a gentle admonishing in the vernacular, such as is found in the confines of a Christian home, rather than the overtly didactic sermonizing that is found in Church. Conclusion From a study of her revelations and visions it can be suggested that what Julian presents to us is a non-dualistic theology of the body in the form of spirit but is also an epistemology of the body, which is a corporeal revelation of God as and in the body. In her theology, there exists an incarnational assertion of the self as physicality, which is God-informed and here she focuses on bodily principles, neglected within patriarchal theological tradition. Julian's reconciliation of antithetic conform a unique theology and psychology that believes in Christ’s all-encompassing love. Such revolutionary visions during the medieval era were possible owing to her equally revolutionary axioms of femininity that she placed at the core of her surrounding reality. As the notions of femininity within theological principles try to fuse conflicting elements, Julian’s notions on the self are God-informed while her convictions are intensely personal. 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