Very little is known about the personal life of this extraordinary woman. Both her given name and her surname have been lost to time. She acquired the forename Julian because that was the name of the small Benedictine church to which she was attached. Her surname, Norwich, is the name of the city in Norfolk located in the region of East Anglia where she resided her entire life. Hence, she is known as Julian of Norwich. Based on her writings it is believed that she was born in the year 1342 or 1343.
Sign up to be notified when we publish new content, like articles about atonement theology, the Virgin Mary, and early Christian beliefs about the nature of God.
Julian of Norwich: A Mystic in Turbulent Times
By the year 1345 Norwich was a bustling city boasting an imposing cathedral and a plethora of churches. However, because of Norwich’s proximity to the English Channel it was vulnerable to attack by pirates and invading armies, particularly from France. It was, therefore, decided to build a defensive wall around the city to prevent it from further incursion.
The construction of the wall began in 1294. By the time it was completed in 1343, the city’s wall was twenty-two feet high, and the twelve towers added to it allowed for careful monitoring of all egress and ingress. The forbidding wall made Norwich impregnable to attack.
Or, so it was believed.
The Black Death and Its Impact on Norwich
In June of 1348 Norwich was invaded by and then succumbed to the most savage and terrifying enemy of all. This silent fiend traveled on merchant ships transporting goods from Crimea, located on the northern coast of the Black Sea. It is thought that the port town of Messina in Italy was the initial point of attack. Once disembarked, the specter of death moved with incredible speed up through the country, killing millions before spreading to all corners of the European Continent.
This scourge was initially named the Great Mortality, and death was rapidly occurring between two and seven days following contamination. The name, Great Mortality, was changed to Black Death due to the appearance of black, swollen nymph nodes erupting on the bodies of the infected. Its modern name is Bubonic Plague. While only estimates of the death toll are possible, it has been suggested that this plague and its variants annihilated between 25 and 70 million people (30–50%) of Europe’s population. Twenty-two-foot walls and armed guards were no defense against it.
The lack of basic sanitation typical of most cities in England aggravated the speed with which the disease coursed through the country. Norwich’s ditches and waterways were continually clogged with raw sewage, rotting fish, and animal carcasses. Blood streamed out into the streets from butcher shops. Housemaids emptied the contents of chamber pots onto the streets–all of which encouraged the rapid spread of the plague.
It was originally believed that rats were the primary carriers as they were so numerous and are known to be carriers of disease. Recent research, however, has suggested that, given the speed at which the disease traveled, human contact, not rats, was responsible.
No one was inured to attack, not even the nobility sequestered in their castles. What human evil had been committed to have merited such divine wrath, leaving no family unscathed, must have been on everybody’s mind. The Bubonic Plague ravaged the country not only once in 1348 but returned, again wreaking havoc in the years 1361-63, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1389-93, and 1400.
Julian of Norwich’s Divine Visions and Calling
If the speculated date of Julian’s birth (circa 1343) is correct, she would have been a child of five or six years old at the onset of the first wave of the pandemic.
In 1373, aged about thirty years old, Julian of Norwich suffered a very severe illness. Whether it was the Plague is disputed. When it was thought her death was near, a priest was summoned to perform the rite of Extreme Unction, the Catholic sacrament given just before the death, dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries.
Jesus makes Julian a promise.
As the priest raised the cross for her to see the face of Jesus before her demise, Julian experienced a series of extraordinary visions in which the Savior was manifested.
During this first manifestation, Jesus makes Julian a promise, which she recognizes is not just for her. She has been called to be the messenger. The revelation ends with Christ sitting enthroned in each human soul. As she felt a charge to contemplate upon and share this vision and all future visions she received with all God’s children, she retreated to the seclusion of an anchorhold.
Life in the Anchorhold: Solitude and Spiritual Connection
An Anchorage or Anchor Hold (oftentimes simply called a cell) is the name of the room attached to a church within which the Anchorite chooses to reside for the rest of his/her life and is considered to be the highest religious calling.
Julian’s having spent most of her life in what could be described accurately as solitary confinement may be the reason she survived the frequent recurrences of the Bubonic Plague. Unlike hermits, the anchorite/anchoress lived within populated communities rather than in areas where there were very few residents.
We know very little about Julian’s personal life.
While we know very little about Julian’s personal or home life, there is a strict regimen to the life of an anchorite, which she would have followed and about which we do have information.
Anchorites, unlike other religions, did not live in convents or monasteries but in complete seclusion in what was called, appropriately, a “cell” or “anchor hold.” There was no door to allow ingress or egress for the anchorite or anyone else.
It did, however, have windows—three of them–albeit very small ones. Through a window opening into the chapel, Julian of Norwich would have been able to watch and participate in religious services and receive communion. A second window allowed for her maid to deliver food and remove refuse. The third window, which would have been street-facing, enabled conversation with people coming to her for council or seeking her prayers on matters of religious, familial or personal import.
This window, however, did not allow for face-to-face conversation as there were not one but two black veils between Julian and the petitioner, rather like a Catholic confessional—a cubicle within a church where a penitent sits opposite a priest separated by a lattice or screen to ensure privacy.
The “cell” was furnished with a private altar, a bed, and a crucifix.
Because the anchorite had made a vow of absolute confinement, the approval of the Bishop was essential to ensure that the candidate was both mentally and physically fit for such a lifestyle, sometimes including a probationary period before the permanent enclosure. As recent research has confirmed, long periods of solitary confinement can only be endured by those who have a very strong physical and mental capacity to survive such seclusion. That being said, there are not infrequent instances recounted of anchorites lapsing into insanity.
The fourteenth century saw the rise of many mystics throughout Europe, although comparatively few chose such confined living conditions. Most were members of convents or monasteries. It might be helpful in understanding Julian’s contributions to outline the trajectory of religious thought from early Christianity to the time of Julian of Norwich.
Early Christianity—especially the tradition rooted in the Johannine literature (The Gospel of John and 1 John)—emphasized the unprecedented understanding of God’s love made known in the life and person of Jesus. John’s essential claim had been that “It is only the Son…who has made [God] known” (1:18).
Before the coming of Christ, the author of the second-century Diognetus agrees, “What person had any knowledge of God at all?”1 Jesus embodied divine “persuasion, not compulsion,… as one calling, not pursuing,… loving not judging.”2
Through him, we see the true image of God as “not only tenderhearted but very patient, … kind, good, without anger.”3
Ignatius (ca. 35-108), one of the earliest church fathers and reportedly a disciple of John, was equally emphatic that Christ was the revelation of God and that he was “the God of the Old and the New Testament.”4 He writes to fellow believers in Ephesus that being bonded in “love” is the “end” and purpose of life itself.5
Irenaeus (150-200) was a student of the bishop and martyr Polycarp (69-155), who was himself a disciple of John. Irenaeus agreed that “only in Jesus Christ is God revealed” and that it is he “in whose human nature rather than behind it, we can see the invisible Father.”6
By the end of the second century, the most important voice in the Christian world was Clement (150-215), who founded and led a famous Catechetical School—the first-ever Christian institution of religious instruction. The school was in Alexandria, one of the greatest intellectual centers of the era. In this setting, Clement of Alexandria preached the same significance of Christ’s incarnation as Ignatius: He called Jesus “the Father’s face, being the revealer, through clothing in the flesh, of the Father’s character.”7
When Clement fled to Egypt to escape persecution, a youth of only eighteen took over as director of the Catechetical School. Origen (185-253) was the first Christian to attempt a systematic treatment of Christian doctrine.
“After Paul,” writes David Bentley Hart, “there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted.” He “laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought.”8 So passionate in his early devotion to Christ, he wanted to die a martyr with his father. Fortunately, his mother prevented his self-sacrifice by hiding his clothes until the soldiers leading his father away had passed.
Origen lent his considerable weight to the view of his predecessors. In his commentary on John, he gave focus and clarity to what, he felt, had been insufficiently comprehended until the Incarnation:9
It is indeed possible to agree that Moses and the prophets did not know the Father.
Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John: Books 13–32, trans. Ronald E. Heine, 1st pbck. repr., The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 89 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 173.
Into the seventh century, Maximus the Confessor was teaching the same significance of what Jesus revealed: “through his flesh he made manifest to men the Father whom they did not know” (emphasis added).
Christianity, he suggested, had veered away from this centeredness in a God whose love was the catalyst for human creation, the project of gradual deification, and universal access to God’s saving designs.
By the turn of the fifth century, however, sovereignty was displacing love as God’s paramount quality. A cosmic Christ as ineffable and remote as the invisible God was displacing the Incarnate, historical Jesus as the inspiration behind Christian life.
With the advent of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the twelfth century, new foundations were thoroughly in place that emphasized merit rather than transformation as the precondition of salvation and Christ’s sacrifice as the satisfaction of justice rather than the healing of human sin.
The miracle of Incarnation began to take second place to focus on Christ’s suffering and death. Optimism about the new creation initiated by the resurrection of Jesus took second place to pessimism about the corrupt human condition. Sermon and art alike instilled fears of a threatening judgment awaiting us all.
Julian of Norwich’s Theology: A Radical Vision of Love
It is against this background that Julian’s supernal visions appear on the scene like a sunburst in a darkened cathedral. In her book, “Showings,” she taught the reality and absolute consistency of God’s love.
Rather than the eternal separation from God, which many Christians feared awaited almost all the end of time, Julian teaches that at the end of our messy, painful lives, God reveals to her that “For since I have made well the greatest harm, then it is my will that thou know hereby that I shall make well all that is less.”
Julian provides a vision of hopefulness and optimism.
In her writings, Julian of Norwich compares Jesus to a mother. At her hands, the fundamental Christian drama shifts in focus from the kingdom of heaven to the plight of humanity. Christ is more approachable, and the concept of a permanent universal conflict shifts toward a journey toward a kinder, gentler God with emphasis on Jesus’s perceived human and/or feminine traits such as mercy, sorrow, and tears.
Against the contemporary backdrop emphasizing sin and judgment, God as king and judge, and original sin as enveloping and incapacitating the human family, Julian provides a vision of hopefulness and optimism. To read her visions is to sense a dramatic rupture with the church of the Middle Ages.
The Legacy and Enduring Influence of Julian of Norwich
Surprisingly, Julian’s work was not only countenanced—she became renowned as a holy woman, and her counsel and presence were also sought out by the powerful and the mighty. The unparalleled influence of this mystic—an influence that endures and seems to grow daily in our own time—can be best explained as the striking in the readers’ hearts of familiar chords, radically resonant with undeniable truth and appeal.
When one travels to the chapel associated with her name, where remnants of her anchor hold still exist, one finds placed for pilgrims a bowl of hazelnuts, which have become her emblem. They are not a relic but a sacred symbol of her visions that have inspired millions.
Early in the sequence, she describes the three great truths which God revealed to her:10
And in this vision he also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball, as it seemed to me. I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me in a general way, like this, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it seemed to me so small that it might have disintegrated suddenly into nothingness.
And I was answered in my understanding, ‘It lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the same way everything has its being through the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties: the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; the third is that God cares for it.
Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love (New York: Oxford, 2015), 6-7
Although few contemporaries were likely to have recognized the fact, Julian of Norwich was reconnecting with the tradition that was grounded in the witness of John and attested by generations of early Christians.
Her optimistic view of God and his relationship with humankind implies that the image of God within us is, at worst, tarnished but never destroyed. The human experience is not one of rebellion against God. Rather, it is one of emptiness, loneliness, alienation, and suffering. She radically reconstructs the story of the fall into a version taught by the early Christians Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa.
Irenaeus, writes one historian, saw Adam’s choice as “barely a crime, as it is no more than the unseasonable performance of an act that, at a later stage, could not have been left undone if the education of the race was to be completed. His strongest term of reprobation is parekbasis, which signifies a mere deviation or trespass; within a century of his death, however, it had become the custom … to describe the impetuosity of Adam as the fatal flaw dragging all of humanity to hell, except for a select few.11
Another voice of the fourth century taught the educative nature of the fall. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote in words that Latter-day Saints hear again in Alma that “God allows death to exist but turns it against corruption and its cause, sin, and sets a boundary both to corruption and death. Thus, he relativizes the fall. His original plan for man’s eternal and blessed life in him remains intact.”
Shortly after Gregory, Augustine successfully created a new doctrine of original sin and a catastrophic fall inherited by all of us. Julian’s daring reinterpretation takes us back to the primitive Christian view. In her telling, Adam (humankind) rushes to fulfill the earthly errand God has sent him and stumbles in his haste.
In other words, Adam sins.
To her surprise and joy, God does not respond with anger or disappointment but with loving concern. God then promises Adam (representing all of humanity) a reward greater than if the servant had never attempted to do his Father’s will. With hints of a premortal past and projecting a future glory greater than paradise, Julian of Norwich refashions the human saga as one of continual growth and spiritual maturity under God’s loving direction.
Julian of Norwich’s Message for All Generations
Most memorably, Julian of Norwich conveys the threefold assurance to all who labor in this world of sorrow seeking respite. In words rendered famous in the poetry of T. S. Eliot (Little Gidding), Julian and all people are promised:
All shall be well, and all shall be well
And all manner of things shall be well.
Half a millennium later, the Restoration would rediscover some of these truths of incomparable beauty that Julian of Norwich had revealed.
As Brigham Young stated, “[God] is compassionate to all the works of His hands, the plan of His redemption, and salvation, and mercy, is stretched over all; and His plans are to gather up and bring together, and save all of the inhabitants of the earth” (CDBY 559-559).
Did you enjoy this article?
Sign up to be notified when we publish new content!
About the Author
Fiona Givens has written extensively about the love of God in theology, including the overlooked role of the mystic Julian of Norwich. She was born in Kenya, educated in British convent schools, and holds an M.A. in European History. Givens is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Christ Who Heals, The Crucible of Doubt, and The God Who Weeps.
Further Reading
- How Did the English Reformation Impact Christianity?
- What Did Early Christians Believe About the Nature of God?
- Who Was the Virgin Mary?
- Who Was Mary Magdalene?
- How Do Grace and Works Affect Salvation?
Saint Julian of Norwich Resources
- The Shewings of Julian of Norwich (Medieval Institute Publications)
- Julian of Norwich: ‘A Theologian for Our Time’ (Anglican Journal)
- Reflections on the Divine (The LDS Women Project)
- The Shock of Love (Wayfare Magazine)
- How Julian of Norwich’s Writings on Suffering Have Helped Me As a Cancer Patient (America Magazine)
- Atonement: From Penal Substitution to Radical Healing (Faith Matters)
Sources
- Diognetus 8.1, Apostolic Fathers, 707.
- Diognetus 7.4-5, Apostolic Fathers, 707.
- Epistle 8, Apostolic Fathers, 707. Bird and Mackerras agree that the epistle is filled with “Johannine tropes,” though they emphasize Pauline elements. “The Epistle,” 317.
- Ignatius, To the Philadelphians, 5 (ANF 1:82).
- Ignatius, To the Ephesians, 14 (ANF 1:55).
- John Behr, The Way to Nicaea, The Formation of Christian Theology, v. 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 114.
- Clement, Stromata 5.6.
- David Bentley Hart, “Saint Origen,” First Things (October 2015), https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/10/saint-origen.
- Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John: Books 13–32, trans. Ronald E. Heine, 1st pbck. repr., The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 89 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 173.
- Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love (New York: Oxford, 2015), 6-7
- Edwards, Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church, 42, 53.
- Nellas, Deification in Christ, 65.