CHAPTER VI

ENGLISH MEDIZXVAL MYSTICS
RICHARD ROLLE—‘ THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING ”— WALTER HILTON—JULIAN OF NORWICH
Tue great English mystics form a fairly compact group. All their works were produced in the course of the fourteenth century. They begin with Richard Rolle, who died in 1349, the year of the Black Death. They end with Julian of Norwich, who seems to have completed her Revelations about 1393. It is a peculiarity of their writings that all are connected with the solitary or, as they called it, the “‘ singular life,” which seems at this period to have had a deep attraction for all who sought spiritual perfection. Rolle at his conversion chose the career of a hermit; Julian of Norwich was an anchoress. The Cloud of Unknowing and Scale of Perfection were apparently addressed respectively to a male and a female recluse. All wrote in the vernacular, and were indeed among the first so to do, for Latin was still the literary tongue. They did this in order to widen their circle of appeal, for they addressed themselves, as did St. Francis and his followers, not merely to the professional clergy nor even to the educated aristocracy—who spoke and read French at least until Wyclif’s day —but, as they said, to their ‘“‘ even-Christians ” ; Lie fe)
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that is, to the middle class, lay and religious, and especially the country population, always the home of our peculiar English earnestness.
Though Rolle is the first English writer to whom the name of mystic can reasonably be given, in the thirteenth century English religious works were already being produced, marked by impas- sioned Christocentric emotion. Such pieces as the well-known prose rhapsody 4 Talking of the Love of God or the immensely popular poem Sweet Fesu, now will I sing—an expanded imitation of the Fesu dulcis memoria, which includes the story of the Passion told in verse—show the trend of English personal religion in the Middle Ages. Already we notice in it that realism, homeliness, and tender feeling which shine in the mystics and constantly reappear in our devotional literature. Here, too, as with the first Franciscans, the romantic strain of contemporary secular literature, and espe- cially ideas connected with chivalry, were reflected in the religious sphere. Such a lovely and truly mystical poem as Quia amore langueo—an anony- mous fourteenth-century anticipation of The Hound of Heaven—has plainly and to its own advantage taken colour from the Anglo-Norman poetry of the time:
In a valley of this restless mind I sought in mountain and in mead, Trusting a true love for to find. Upon an hill then took I heed ; A voice I heard, and near I yede, In great dolour complaining tho : See, dear soul, how my sides bleed : Quia amore langueo, * * * %
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I am true love that false was never ; My sister, man’s soul, I loved her thus. Because we would in no wise dissever I left my Kingdom glorious. I purveyed her a palace full precious ; She fled, I followed, I loved her so That I suffered this pain piteous,
Quia amore langueo.
This stream of feeling, finding fullest expression in the wide-spread cultus of the Holy Name of Jesus, with its Franciscan ardour and intimacy, and distinguished by an intense concentration on the Passion, had been growing up since at least the twelfth century. Many important works, both in English and Latin, produced under its influence, are probably still in manuscript. Doubt- less owing much to the spread of St. Bernard’s writings, which so strongly affected the whole . course of medieval mysticism, and further encour- aged by the widely-circulated - Meditations of St. Anselm, and perhaps by infiltrations of Franciscan fervour, it constituted the emotional preparation for our great mystical epoch; helping to form the favouring soil in which the genius of Rolle and Hilton could grow.
In thinking of these mystics we must also remember how much the religious and secular atmosphere of the fourteenth century has affected them—the atmosphere in which flourished the Miracle plays, the Gothic sculpture, and the illumi- nations of the later Middle Ages. They are people of their time, keeping close to the simplest tradi- tional imagery, even when trying to convey to us their most profound experiences. It is probably to a disciple of Richard Rolle that we owe the
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little book called The Privity of the Passion, an English version of part of the popular Franciscan work of devotion called The Meditations of St. Bona- ventura, which greatly influenced late medizval art. In this book a detailed picture of some episode of the Passion is placed before the mind, and described with an intensity of realism intended to play directly on the feelings, and excite contrition and love. Often, as in the scene of the Scourging of Christ, the author by his own imaginative power almost compels us to visualization :
He stood naked before them, a fair young man shameful in shape and specious in beauty, passing all earthly men. He suffered the hard, painful beating of those wicked men in his tenderest flesh and cleanest. Flower of all flesh and of all mankind is now full of blow-beatings. . . . When they leased him from the pillar, he yode about seeking his clothes that were casten here and there when he was first naked. Behold him here busily, thus beaten and all trembling for cold: for, as the gospel says, the time was cold.
The fact that this bit of vivid prose comes to us from the English mystical school gives some idea of the food which nourished Rolle and his followers ; the religious conceptions which filled their minds. So, too, many close correspondences with contem- porary art can be found in Julian of Norwich, whose visions of the Passion have the same pictorial _ quality and often remind us of the paintings of the East Anglian school.
To these devotional and artistic influences, received by the English mystics from the Church _ within which they lived, and providing them with their spiritual landscape and atmosphere, we must add a third; that of the Christian culture of Western Europe. This reached them through the
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books they read, and deeply affected the way in which they tried to impart their experience of God. They were educated persons, acquainted with a wide range of literature, uniting them with the great body of Christian feeling and thought. Indeed, their work is so full of quotations from St. Augustine, St. Gregory, St. Bernard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, St. Bonaventura, and other favourite authorities, that only the most exact scholarship can separate their borrowings from their creations. Thus when the author of The Cloud of Unknowing suddenly says “‘ Short prayer pierceth heaven |”? we might suppose this to be one of the original epigrams which abound in his writing ; but he is merely translating St. Augustine word for word. So too with their other sources ; they take phrases and ideas from the great masters who have preceded them, and weave these dexterously into their own work. Above all, Rolle and Hilton are saturated in the language and imagery of the Bible, and a close knowledge of Scripture is needed if we are to understand all their words imply. They constantly insert texts from the Vulgate, and these texts they generally translate. In fact, Bible reading, sometimes considered peculiarly charac- teristic of English piety, is historically the child of mysticism. Richard Rolle was the first to translate the Psalter into English ; and exhorts his disciples that they ‘‘ be not negligent in meditating and reading holy Scripture, and most in those places where it teaches manners and to eschew deceits of the fiend and speaks of God’s love and contemplative living’”’ ; and we can get from the English mystics a considerable collection of ver- 114
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nacular Scripture passages, which they had put in circulation before Wyclif’s day. Thus the great English mystics were firmly rooted in the religious, social and artistic life of their time ; their lives and works were not merely individual expressions of fervour, but arose within, and contributed to the general Christian consciousness of the Church. Differing widely in temperament and so in outlook, this contribution had in each a special novelty and freshness of its own.
We may truly say of the first, Richard Rolle of Hampole, that he started a new stream of spiritual life in England ; and that all the others depend to some extent on him. A Yorkshire boy, prob- ably born in the reign of Edward I, he seems to have been well connected, had powerful friends, and became an Oxford scholar. His works—for he wrote much, both in Latin and English—show that he loved letters, that he was a natural poet, and that music was one of the passions of his life. He was on fire with spiritual ecstasy, and translated it best into musical form. ‘‘ My heart Thou hast bound in love of Thy Name, and now I cannot but sing it!”
Perhaps it was at Oxford that he came under the Franciscan influence which is recognizable in his life and work. He had many of the charac- teristics of St. Francis : the unconventional outlook, the alternating moods of penitence and joy, the mingled homeliness and transcendentalism, the love of song and of natural things, the intense devotion to the Holy Name. The sudden and thorough way in which he abandoned his whole worldly career and embraced poverty, his hauntings of
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country places, the combination in him of mission- ary and poet, the personal quality of his mysticism —all these seem like the transplanting into the bracing Yorkshire air of those dispositions which were shown in perfection at Assisi. Like Francis, Rolle never took orders ; he is, indeed, one of the most unclerical and independent of the Catholic mystics. True, he lacked the childlike and gentle outlook of his pattern, was combative as well as romantic, and perhaps deficient in personal charm. But the crucial act of his life had so Franciscan a character, that we are almost tempted to read into it the influence, direct or indirect, of the swiftly-spreading legend of the Saint.
He was eighteen when, abruptly returning from Oxford to his Yorkshire home, he abandoned the career of scholarship, made himself a hermit’s gown of grey and white from two of his sister’s old tunics, and, as he afterwards said, “‘ fled that which me confused,” obeying the overwhelming desire of the religious genius for a lonely and simple life in which his spiritual instincts could find room to grow. Years afterwards he described his state of mind in words which almost seem to give us the very accents of Francis :
In the beginning truly of my conversion and singular purpose I thought I would be like the little bird that for love of its lover longs ; but in her longing she is gladdened when he comes that she loves. And joying she sings, and singing she longs, but in sweetness and heat. It is said the nightingale to song and melody all night is given, that she may please him to whom she is joined. How mickle more with greatest sweetness to Christ my Jesu should I sing, that is spouse of my soul, by all this present life that is night in regard of clearness to come.
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From this time Rolle seems to have lived the life of a hermit-missionary, sometimes wandering from place to place preaching and giving counsel, some- times sitting long hours in his cell immersed in communion with the love that filled his mind, as he said, with ‘‘ heavenly melody.” It seems cer- tain that the early stages of his spiritual life were marked by abnormal psychological experiences. He tells us that nearly three years after his “‘ life- changing ”—years doubtless spent in self-discipline and moral struggle—the ‘“‘ heavenly door” was opened to him, “so that the eyes of the heart might behold and see what way they might seek my Love.”
The door stayed open ; and about a year later he experienced the first of the three states of spiritual joy which he calls Heat, Sweetness, and Song. As he sat meditating in a chapel he suddenly felt in his heart “‘a merry heat and unknown” ; so intense, that at first he “ groped his breast,” thinking it had a material origin. Such a trans- lation of emotional fervour into physical terms, though not common, is mentioned by many ascetic writers and explained by psychology. Rolle had continued for fifteen months in this “ feeling of burning love,” when he developed his character- istic form of mystical experience. Sitting one evening in the same chapel, saying his psalms, and ‘‘ praying to heaven with his whole desire,” suddenly he felt within himself the welling up of a mysterious heavenly music, which dwelt con- tinually in his mind, so that his prayers and meditations were turned into song. Henceforward his communion with the spiritual world was most
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often expressed in musical terms, as an outpouring melody of joy and praise. From this burning love and “‘inshed melody ”’—for he realized that it could not be produced by his own powers—pro- ceeded the ‘‘ sweetness untrowed ”’ which completed the transfiguration of his soul.
In these three, that are tokens of love most perfect, the high perfection of Christian religion without all doubt is found... nevertheless to the saints that have shone in them I dare not make myself even, for they peradventure more perfectly them have received. Yet shall I be busy with virtue that I may more burningly love, more sweetly sing, the sweetness of love more plenteously feel.
There seems no reason why we should refuse to accept this account of the “‘ happy heat, sweet- ness desired, and joyful song’”’ which expressed Rolle’s adoring apprehensions of God. He was a genuine religious genius, intensely susceptible to spiritual impressions, and easily giving them sensible form. His mystical life was full and well balanced, moving between the poles of stern discipline and thrilling joy. We might call him the Shelley of English mysticism: most fully expressing the delight of a poet who has found the untarnished source of beauty and love. Rolle’s exclamation, ““Nought merrier than grace of contemplation | ”’ may strike oddly on the modern ear, but we cannot doubt that it represents his own attitude. Yet this ardour and poetry conceal a strong, sane and well-nourished spirituality ; a robust and practical moral sense. Rolle developed and taught the three-fold response to God which is charac- teristic of the full religious nature, finding Him immanent in other men—since, ‘‘if our love be pure and perfect, whatever our heart loves, it is
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God”; fully realized and adored in terms of self-giving personality in the worship of the Holy Name; and finally discerned dimly in His trans- cendent mystery in the “divine ignorance”’ of contemplation. ‘‘ As we standing in darkness see nothing, so in contemplation that invisibly lightens the soul, no light is seen.”
Again, he was an exacting moralist, keenly aware that the healthy inner life is based upon ethics, and unpurified ardours must always be suspect. ‘To read his moral treatises or those of his disciples is to re-enter the world of the late Middle Ages in the company of an acute and often amusing guide, and find much we can recognize in the way of weakness or excess. Whilst never disguising his own preference for a purely con- templative life “‘ set towards the light unseen with great desire,’’ yet his love compelled him to action. He taught, wrote, gathered disciples ; and required that he who was really ‘“‘ kindled by God’s fire” should not only “‘ pay Christ praise in ghostly music, but also stir others to love.’’ ‘This indeed he did and still can do. His mysticism was not only personal, but creative; the whole English school really descends from it, and, at least in the north, it brought into being a genuine revival of the spiritual life.
Rolle represents for his day almost the extreme of individualism possible to a mystic who remained obedient to the Church. He passionately pro- claimed liberty of conscience, declaring himself to be directed by the Holy Ghost ; and the Lollards of the next generation claimed for their doctrines the support of his words. Though his teaching
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is solidly based on St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Bernard, Richard of St. Victor, still all is coloured by his ardent temperament. He was, and remained, something of a free lance.
The next great English mystic, probably writing towards the end of Rolle’s life, was of a different type. If Rolle represents the emotional and poetic extreme of mysticism, he represents its philosophic pole. He was certainly a theologian, perhaps a cloistered monk, and his chief work, The Cloud of Unknowing, was addressed to a young recluse who had chosen, like Rolle, “‘ singular living.” He also wrote four little tracts on special aspects of the inner life, and was probably the author of Dionise Hid Divinite, an English translation of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, which had an immense influence on the develop- ment of our native mysticism.
The author of The Cloud was clearly a great contemplative, loving silence and tranquillity ; yet also an experienced director of souls, full of the sturdy English practicality, here carried into the most secret places of the spirit, and a keen and humorous—even irritable—observer of his fellow- men. If Rolle and Hilton show us the English layman of the fourteenth century as his spiritual teachers saw him, we get from this nameless mystic a vigorous and amusing picture of the fourteenth- century cloister, with its ardent, sanctimonious, hypocritical, fidgety, and variously tiresome in- habitants. We see through his eyes the “‘ young presumptuous disciples”? whose conceited mysti- cality “will with curiosity of imagination pierce the planets, and make an hole in the firmament.
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to look in thereat”; the religious emotionalists who “travail their fleshly hearts outrageously in their breasts, and hurt full sore the silly soul and make it fester in fantasy feigned of fiends.” Both types are offensive to that sober sense of reality by which he proves himself a true mystic. He likes a quiet style in spiritual persons, but seldom gets it. Basing his remarks upon a passage in Hugh of St. Victor, he describes the mannerisms of his fellow-religious in a spirit hardly consistent with that “ charity of meekness ” which he recom- mends :
Some persons are so cumbered in nice curious customs in bodily bearing that when they shall aught to hear, they writhe their heads on one side quaintly, and up with the chin; they gape with their mouths as they should hear with their mouths and not with their ears. Some when they should speak point with their fingers, either on their fingers or on their own breasts or on theirs that they speak to. Some can neither sit still, stand still nor lie still, unless they be either wagging with their feet or else somewhat doing with their hands. Some row with their arms in time of their speaking, as them needed for to swim over a great water. Some be ever more smiling and laughing at every other word that they speak, as they were giggling girls and nice japing jugglers lacking behaviour.
These tricks, he allows, are not great sins; but he mentions them because they are “tokens of unstableness of heart and unrestfulness of mind.” He particularly dislikes the clerical manner, “‘ with many meek piping words and gestures of devo- tion.” Real spirituality, he thinks, makes people so pleasant “that each good man that them saw should be fain and joyful to have them in com- pany,” and this natural courtesy and seemliness ought also to mark their religious behaviour.
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behaviour as well in body as in soul, and snatch not over hastily, as it were a greedy greyhound, hunger thee never so sore.”
So much for the human interest of this writer. His mystical teaching is based on “ Dionysius the Areopagite,”” whose profound conception of God as transcending all thought and all categories he translates into practical terms. The Divine Presence is hid in a “cloud of unknowing,” which can only be pierced by “‘a sharp dart of longing love . . . speedily springing unto God as a sparkle from the coal.” That strange outstretching of the soul in prayer to Something which is beyond itself—which can, as it were, be apprehended as a whole “by the true lovely will of the heart” ’ but never be conceived by the mind—is wonder-
fully suggested by him :
For of all other creatures and their works, yea, and of the works of God’s self, may a man through grace have full-head of knowing, and well he can think of them: but of God Himself can no man think. And therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think. For why; He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never. And therefore, although it be good sometime to think of the kindness and the worthiness of God in special, and although it be a light and a part of contempla- tion : nevertheless yet in this work it shall be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And thou shalt step above it stalwartly, but listily, with a devout and a pleasing stirring of love, and try for to pierce that darkness above thee. And smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love; and go not thence for thing that befalleth.
But this austere Neoplatonic conception of the unknowable Godhead is transformed by the English genius for homeliness ; which is nowhere more
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strikingly apparent than in this transcendental book, with its distrust of ‘“ curiosity of clergy and letterly cunning as in clerks,” and its constant recourse to simplest human imagery. ‘Take, for instance, the beautiful little passage which pic- tures the Divine mercy descending on a despair- ing soul “‘ for to take thee up, and cherishly dry thine ghostly eyen, as the father doth the child that is in point to perish under the mouths of wild swine, or wode biting bears.”
The writer’s constant dissociation of spirituality from the categories of space and time, reminding us that “‘ nowhere bodily is everywhere ghostly,” that “‘ heaven ghostly is as nigh down as up and up as down,” and “the high and the best way thither is run by desires and not by paces of feet,” his refusal to attribute value to “‘ any long psalter unmindfully mumbled in the teeth,” his sturdy, constant demands for “ listy” behaviour—namely eager, willing activity, the opposite of listless— with the crisply practical advice to ‘“‘ do forth ever more and more, so that thou be ever doing ” and “look now forwards, and let be backwards ”’ since “‘a good will is the substance of all perfec- tion ”’—all these characters give him a marked individuality among the mystics.
The language and attitude of Richard Rolle were coloured by poetry ; those of the writer of The Cloud by mystical philosophy. The third of the great English mystics, Walter Hilton, occupies a central position between them. An educated theologian, he is familiar with the work of both his predecessors, and with their literary sources too, especially SS. Augustine, Gregory and Ber-
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nard ; but his attitude is more pastoral, his language even more warmly Christocentric than theirs, his writing more saturated with Biblical imagery. Hilton was in the strict sense neither monk nor recluse. He was an Augustinian canon, an inmate of the important priory of Thurgarton, and familiar with the normal social life of his day. His career covered the second half of the fourteenth century, and he died in 1396. He was thus contemporary with Julian of Norwich, who was born about 1342 and still living in 1413, and her work shows traces of his influence. He lived through the period of Wyclif, and echoes of the Lollard controversy can be detected in his chief book.
The Cloud of Unknowing was addressed to those who had chosen a contemplative life and had a natural disposition for it: to others, its author says, “‘this matter accordeth nothing.’’ And as to ordinary imperfect humanity he was even more emphatic: ‘‘Fleshly janglers, open praisers and blamers of themselves or of any other, tellers of trifles, gossips and tattlers of tales, and all manner of pinchers, cared I never that they saw this book.” But Walter Hilton, though his principal work, The Scale of Perfection, was addressed to an anchoress, shows a more tolerant and genial spirit. He is a real shepherd of souls ; and in his Treatise on Mixed Life has given us the perfect guide to the mysticism of ordinary men. Less of a poet than Rolle, he is far more of a psychologist—a deep, wide, tender, yet delicately discriminative mind. The Scale of Perfection is a complete way-book of the spiritual life, from its simplest beginnings to its ineffable end. Hilton thinks of it, character-
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istically, under two complementary metaphors : as a complete re-making of human personality, or “re-forming ” of the lost divine image in the soul, and as a journey, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem ‘“‘which betokeneth the perfect love of God set on the hill of contemplation.’ Under the one he is able to emphasize the need for a drastic purification of character, under the other the courage and un- divided concentration of purpose demanded of those who undertake the adventures of the mystic way. He knows, and never forgets, the facts of human nature, and often startles us by his shrewd analysis of our common weaknesses and self- deceptions, his uncanny psychological insight. He looks past conduct to its source, and insists on a drastic purification of motive; refusing to be satisfied by outward renunciations and good deeds if “the great spring of love unto thyself’ still rises secretly in the soul. In this case ‘‘ Thou art like unto a man which had in his garden a stinking well with many runnels from it. He went and stopped the runnels and left the spring whole, and weened all had been secure. But the water sprung up at the ground of the well and stood still, so mickle that it corrupted all the fairness of the garden.” It is not surprising that The _ Scale of Perfection remained for centuries the most popular of English spiritual works, for most of its counsels are still as appropriate to our needs as to those of the fourteenth century. With his master, St. Augustine, Hilton bases the spiritual life on the twin virtues of meekness and love; - conceiving of man’s entrance into union with God as a gradual education in these. Meckness, he 125
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thinks, is simply spiritual realism, or self-know- ledge ; love, ‘* that is both the Giver and the gift,”’ the one quality that is both human and divine. ‘“‘ Therefore shape thee for to be arrayed in His likeness, that is in meekness and charity, which is His livery ; and then will He homely know thee, and show to thee His privity.” Such a mysticism is not merely philosophic, cloistered, nor ecstatic ; it invites the ordinary man or woman, and bears upon the simplest duties of existence. Hilton condemns the spirituality which neglects practical tasks—care of children, servants, tenants or the poor—in order to luxuriate in contemplation ; calling it bluntly, as St. Augustine had done, “‘ tending God’s head and neglecting His feet.” ‘‘ Surely He will more thank thee for the humble washing of His feet, when they are very foul and yield an ill savour to thee, than for all the curious painting and fair dressing or decking that thou canst make about His head by devoutest remembrance ?’’ Nevertheless this robust spiritu- ality has behind it a heavenly vision, and I think we must add a heavenly experience, not dissimilar from that which inspired Richard Rolle. Most of Hilton’s mystical pieces are still in manuscript ; but one, the lovely Song of Angels, was published by Wynken de Worde and has since been reprinted. It shows that the sense of the musical quality of spiritual joy which was Rolle’s most famous charac- teristic was also felt by his successor. Its language proves how entirely Hilton must be reckoned a disciple of Rolle, whose favourite phrases he often repeats, and whose insistence on the need of dis- criminating between the self-deceptions of the 126
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sham mystic, and the real perception of spiritual things, he emphasizes in this piece. ‘‘ Sometimes,” says Hilton, “‘a man gathereth his own wits by violence to seek and to behold heavenly things... and over travaileth by imagination his wits and by indiscreet travailling turneth the brains in his head. ... And then for feebleness of brain he thinketh that he heareth wonderful sounds and songs, and that is nothing else than a fantasy, caused of troubling of the brain.” And, as the final expression of that sanctified common sense which is always a mark of the real mystic, he con- cludes on these golden words: ‘It sufficeth to me for to live in truth principally, and not in feeling.”
The last of our four great English mystics, Julian of Norwich, stands out with peculiar dis- tinctness. As the first real English woman of letters, she has special interest for us: the more so when we consider the beauty of character, depth of thought, and poetic feeling which her one book displays. In her mingled homeliness and philosophic instinct, her passion for Nature, her profound devotion to the Holy Name, she represents all the best elements of English mysti- cism. We feel in her the literary culmination of the Gothic spirit: the sense of mystery, delicate beauty, and robust contact with the common life, which meet us in the cathedrals ; the vivid human sympathy with the mysteries of the Passion, yet the natural gaiety and homeliness, which inspired those miniature painters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who form part of the cultural surroundings in which her genius flowered.
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Apparently the most subjective, Julian is really the most philosophic of our early mystics: an attractive and also an astonishing figure. Internal evidence proves that she was a Norfolk gentle- woman of considerable education, though she humbly describes herself as simple and unlettered. She was born about 1343, in the reign of Edward III. In spite of the wonderful atmosphere of joy which transfigures her writing, her invul- nerable conviction that the universe, when we come to understand it, will be found to be good and rational through and through, her early life was not happy. She says she often desired death because ‘‘ for sloth and weakness I liked not to live and travail, as fell me to do.” As a girl she prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and closer understanding of the Passion. ‘The illness came at the right time: a fact which indicates Julian’s psychic suggestibility. At its crisis she fell into a trance lasting five hours, and in this received the visions of the Passion and the spiritual revelations which form the foundation of her book. All that she after- wards wrote was the result of meditation on this experience; in which she found ever more meaning with the passing years, and her own growth in insight and knowledge.
It is a mistake to regard Julian’s book as the mere outpouring of an ecstatic, the uncriticized record of the working of her subconscious mind. Like her predecessors, St. Hildegarde and Angela of Foligno, she was intelligent and well-informed, and pondered much upon her mystical experience. Her Revelations of Divine Love exist in two forms :
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a short version, perhaps writtert soon after the visions were received, a long version, composed twenty years after this experience. Analysis shows how greatly Julian’s outlook had developed in the interval ; how numerous the literary sources drawn upon in order to explicate the meanings she had discovered in the “ghostly words” heard long before in her mind. The difference between the first experience and the finished product is much like the difference we must presume between St. Augustine’s highly finished Confessions and the actual events they record. As an anchoress, she was obliged by her rule to spend part of each day in such reading as her education allowed ; and it is clear that from such reading, sermons, or conversation she had learned a considerable amount of that Christian Platonism which came through St. Augustine into the medieval Church. She obviously knew Hilton’s work, and sometimes reminds us of her great contemporaries, Suso, Tauler and Ruysbroeck.
In her combination of soaring philosophy with homely simplicity Julian resembles and excels the great Franciscan mystics. She is truly Christian in her power of including transcendence and humanity in her sweep, and this she is able to do because of her peculiar and vivid consciousness of the changeless, all-penetrative, yet simple action
of God.
In this same time our Lord showed me a ghostly sight of His homely loving. I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us; He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, claspeth us and all becloseth us for tender love, that He may never leave us ; being to us all-thing that is good, as to mine understanding.
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. . . And after this I saw God in a point, that is to say in mme - understanding, by which sight I saw that He is in all things. . . . Wherefore me behoveth needs to grant that all-thing that is done, it is well done: for our Lord God doeth all. For in this time the working of creatures was not shewed, but of our Lord God in the creature: for He is the mid-point of all thing and all He doth. . . . God is nature in His being, that is to say, the goodness that is in nature, this is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is Naturehood.
In such passages we are with the philosophers. But it is a vivid picture of home life, not the lofty speculations of Christian metaphysic, which Julian gives us when she says :
A child, when it is a-hurt or adread, it runneth hastily to the mother for help, with all its might. So willeth He that we do, asa meek child saying thus, ‘‘ My kind mother, my gracious mother, my dearworthy mother, have mercy on me! I have made myself foul and unlike thee, and I nor may nor can amend it but with thy help !
This sweet and homely sense that most men are spiritual babies, and that human sins and mistakes are best dealt with from this point of view, is found in Julian again and again. It is part of her tender-hearted and generous sense of humanity. Men, she thinks, are all thoroughly lovable, in spite of their weaknesses and sins. A “saint” is not, to her seeing, an anemic, thin creature, the amateur of an impossible perfection; but a real human being who has often done real bad things, yet whose sins and imperfections have been trans- cended, and become in her paradoxical phrase “not wounds but honours.”” ‘‘ Mine understand- ing,” she says, “was lifted up into heaven, and then God brought merrily to my mind David and others in the old law without number ’—per-
sonages, we must agree, not distinguished by a 130
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prudish moral sense. It was a great joy to Julian to feel that heaven was as wide and tolerant as her own great heart. Yet she never minimizes evil or descends to a merely sentimental optimism. ‘ Our failing,” she says, ‘‘is dreadful, our falling is shameful, and our dying is sorrowful. But in all this the sweet eye of pity and love cometh never off us, nor the working of mercy ceaseth not.”’ In this last quotation we have an example of the perfect fusion of feeling and expression which Julian displays in her best passages. She is a great stylist, in spite of the fact that we see in her that passion for significant numbers which is so often allied with the mystical temperament. Her arguments and images always fall into threes. “‘ For all our life,’”’ she says, “‘is in three. In the first we have our being, in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilling. The first is Nature, the second is Mercy, and the third is Grace.” And in her culminating vision
of reality she declares its properties to be three : Life, Love and Light.
In life is marvellous homeliness, and in love is gentle courtesy and in light is endless Nature-hood. ‘These properties were in the Goodness: unto which Goodness my reason would be oned, and cleave to it with all my might.
Julian’s work forms a fitting crown to the golden period of English mysticism. ‘Though she seems, and indeed is, so strongly individual, yet she is also in the best sense fully traditional. Even her loftiest flights do not represent an escape from the common religious environment, but rather the artist’s power of feeding on it and
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discovering in it more and more beauty, reality and depth.
‘““From the beginning to the end,” she says in a passage which well describes the classic relation of the mystic to the Church, “‘ I had two manners of beholding. The one was endless, continuant love, with secureness of keeping and _ blissful salvation, for of this was all the shewing. The other was of the common teaching of Holy Church in which I was afore informed and grounded, and with all my will having in use and understanding. And the beholding of this went not from me: for by the shewing I was not stirred nor led there- from in no manner of point, but I had therein teaching to love it and like it: whereby I might, by the help of our Lord and His grace, increase and rise to more heavenly knowing and higher loving.”
ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS Cloud of Unknowing, The. Edited by E. Underhill. London, 1912. Gardner, Edmund. ‘The Cell of Self-Knowledge : Seven Old English Mystical Works. London, 1910. Hilton, Walter. ‘The Scale of Rerfection. Edited by E. Underhill. London, 1923. Horstman,C. Richard Rolle of Hampole and his Followers. 2 vols. London, 1895. Fulian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Edited by Grace Warrack. London, 1go1. Comfortable Words for Christ’s Lovers. Edited by the Rev. Dundas Harford. London, 1911. Rolle, Richard. The Fire of Love and the Mending of Life. Edited by F. Comper. London, 1914. The Form of Perfect Living. Edited by Dr. Geraldine Hodgson. London, 1910. 132