05/09/2024
A "Hazelnut" for the Feast of Julian
Seeing and knowing
By the time Julian writes about the curious matter of our “substance” and “sensory being” in chapter 45 (through 57) she has already been mulling over all this for years, and is setting up her workbench carefully.
Chapter 45 is a significant chapter in that regard: here, Julian begins to grind the glass that in chapter 52 she will neatly fix into a new set of spectacles. And the grinding begins with this: how God judges us, how people (including the Church) judge us, and the reason this differs. Which leads to the first iteration of the issue and the question that will dominate chapter 50 and lead to the parable of the Lord and the servant: how to reconcile these two judgments—that we are both grievous sinners and yet—God does not blame us?
Before she even gets there, though, she pauses to talk about mercy, God’s lack of anger or forgiveness and how God is continually at work in us to bring us to peace. It’s not really a digression, because it both shows the nature of God’s judgment and makes the contrast between the judgments all the more profound. This in turn sharpens the requirement she makes in chapter 50: “…either I needed to see in God that sin was completely done away with, or else I needed to see in God how he sees it, so that I might truly know how I ought to see sin and what sort of blame is ours.”
And it is exactly the question of seeing and its basis in our two “levels” of being—higher/lower, substance/sensory being—that the parable illumines. The fallen servant’s problem included that “he neither sees clearly his loving lord, who is most meek and kind to him, nor does he truly see what he is himself in the sight of his loving lord.”
Julian—having reflected on this for years—adds: “And this was a beginning to the teaching revealed to me at this time, through which I might come to know how he regards us in our own sin.”
In chapter 52, she presents the solution, as much as possible, tying into it her understanding of our unchangeable “substance” and our changeable “sensory being.” It is a matter of accepting both ways of seeing/two judgments together, leading to a practical course of action, in part: “our Lord wants us to accuse ourselves exactly in this way, willingly and truly seeing and acknowledging our fall and all the harm that comes of that [due to our changeability], seeing and knowing that we can never make it good, and at the same time that we willingly and truly see and know his everlasting love which he has for us, and his abundant mercy.” As she puts it in Chapter 78, “by humbly recognizing this, through contrition and grace, we shall be sundered from everything which is not our Lord, and then our blessed Saviour will perfectly heal us and unite us to himself.”
Finally, in chapter 72, she frames the spectacles thus: “It is for us to have three kinds of knowledge: the first is to know our Lord God; the second is to know ourselves, what we are through him in nature and grace; the third is humbly to know ourselves with regard to our sin and weakness. And, as I understand it, the whole revelation was made for these three.”
