Julian of Norwich and Other Tibetan Lamas

After this my sight began to faile, and it was all darke aboute me in the chamber as if it had ben night, save in the image of crosse, wherein held a common light, and I wiste not how. All that was beseid the cross was oglye and ferful to me, as if it had ben mekille occupied with fiends. ₁

In Chapter Two of A Revelation, Julian expresses her desire for a “bodely sight” through which she could have “more knowing” of the physical suffering of Jesus in his passion and the spiritual suffering, the “compassion,” of his Blessed Mother and the “true lovers” of Jesus who “saw” his pains. ₂ And in the quotation above, Julian begins to describe how her prayerful desire was fulfilled. She reports that as her vision failed, a darkness like that of night came to fill in almost all of her field of vision, except for the crucifix which had been placed before her by her priest. The anchorite explains that this “image of the crosse” held “a comon light,” which has been translated as a “natural” or an “ordinary” light. ₃ Julian depicts all that was peripheral to the cross as dark, ugly, and frightening, as if “occupied” with demons. And scholars Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins affirm that all of the visions that Julian will subsequently report as “bodely sights” will “take place inside the narrow circle of clarity her tunnel vision leaves her.” ₄

As was mentioned in an earlier reflection, by the time the priest arrives at her bedside, Julian had directed her eyes upward into heaven. However, she recounts that she then redirected them straight ahead toward the crucifix after the priest bade her to do so. Of this ascent on Julian’s part Christopher Abbott writes: “Whatever else it might represent, Julian’s fixing of her gaze on the cross is an act of obedience to ecclesiastical authority.” ₅ For the medieval Church, the crucifix was the focal object toward which the gaze of all spiritual and religious practitioners should be turned, as scholar Eamon Duffy explains:

This was the age when, as Emile Male wrote, ‘the Passion became the chief concern of the Christian soul.’ The liturgical centrality of the Crucifix in the surroundings of late medieval English men and women was matched by a similar emphasis on the Passion as the centre of their private devotion. In England as elsewhere the Bernardine tradition of affective meditation on the passion, enriched and extended by the Franciscans, had become without any rival the central devotional activity of all seriously minded Christians …. There was more than the arousal of mere emotion to all this. Behind such affective devotion was a Christology which traced itself back at least to St. Anselm, and which found in Christ’s suffering not merely a theme for grateful and penitent reflection, but the ultimate manifestation of his human nature, and therefore his credentials as Saviour of humankind. The theory of atonement contained in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? involves the notion that Christ, as perfect man, on behalf of sinful men, makes to God the satisfaction due to him for the dishonor done to his majesty by sin. It is thus central to the Christological claim of the Cur Deus Homo?, that the god-man Jesus is representative of humanity, that he is our brother …. The Crucifix was the icon of Christ’s abiding solidarity with suffering humanity. ₆

The “tunnel vision” which Julian describes above allows as its object only “the image of the cross” which was provided to her by her priest, the representative of the larger Church: “I have brought thee the image of thy saviour. Looke thereupon and comfort thee therwith.” ₇ This sets the stage for – and, in a sense, authorizes – the visions that Julian will experience in relation to that sacred object – and graphic text. For in her descriptions of her visions, Julian does not present herself as seeing “an independent vision of Christ’s passion which makes the crucifix in front of her redundant, but the same crucifix mysteriously animated.” ₈ Here thus are also anchored in ecclesiastical sanction the interpretations of her visions which Julian will present over the course of A Revelation. And these interpretations will re-envisage a primary discourse with which the Crucifix had come to be inscribed, namely, the soteriology of Anselm of Canterbury and his Cur Deus Homo? In this way, it is interesting to note the insights of scholar David S. Ruegg in his discussion of the “intellectual and spiritual struggles” of Tsongkhapa, and his coming to feel “dissatisfied with certain views and interpretations current among his Tibetan predecessors and contemporaries.” In this discussion, Professor Ruegg acknowledges Tsongkhapa’s being “indebted” to “visionary encounters” meditated to him by other masters, and the role these experiences had in his negotiating his inner “struggles”: “The topos of visionary encounter and teaching may perhaps be understood as implicitly alluding … to a felt need for both conservative traditionalism and restorative and renovative interpretation.” ₉ For her part, Julian continuously presents loyalty to the institutional Church and its doctrinal corpus as a critical component in the practice of Christianity. Indeed, in the very first sentences of A Revelation, the anchorite states: “[God] will that we kepe vs in the fayth and truth of holie church.” ₁₀ And yet, her interpretations of this faith and truth, meditated as they are by her visionary encounters with the crucified Christ, will be “radical.” Bernard McGinn writes: “[Julian] is radical, however, in the truest sense of a thinker who has penetrated to the roots of the mystery of love …” ₁₁   

Endnotes

1. Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, Eds, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, Chapter 2, lines 24-27, page 133.
2. Regarding Julian’s the term “bodely sight,” editors Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins translate it to mean a “physical vision” and they note that Julian uses it to mean a “vision, conceptualized here as an actual experience of an event, rather than a mere meditation.” (Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, Eds, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, page 126.)
3. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins translate “comon” as “natural.” (Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, Eds, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, page 126.) Edmund Colledge and James Walsh translate it to mean “ordinary.” (Julian of Norwich, Showings. Translated from the critical text with an introduction by Edmund College, O.S.A. and James Walsh, S.J. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978, 180).    
4. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins translate “comon” as “natural.” (Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, Eds, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, page 126.
5. Christopher Abbott, “His Body, The Church: Julian of Norwich’s Vision of Christ Crucified.” The Downside Review. 115 (1997), page 2.
6. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, pages 234-237.
7. Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, Eds, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, Chapter 2, lines 19-20, page 131.
8. Christopher Abbott, “His Body, The Church: Julian of Norwich’s Vision of Christ Crucified.” The Downside Review. 115 (1997), page 4.
9. David Seyfort Ruegg, The Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle: Essays in Indial and Tibetan Madhyamaka, Boston: Wisdom Publications, pages 381-382.
10. Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, Eds, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, Chapter 1, lines 37-38, page 125.
11. Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism: 1350-1550. The Presence of God, Volume 5. A History of Western Christian Mysticism. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2012, page 470. Of the great 14^th Tibetan philosopher, Professor Ruegg writes: “The life’s work of Tsong kha pa … as thinker and writer has been variously described as that of a reformer, an innovator (to the extent perhaps of even having been something of a maverick), and a conservative traditionalist.” (David Seyfort Ruegg, The Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle: Essays in Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka, Boston: Wisdom Publications, pages 380.)