Revelations of Divine Love

"Julian of Norwich is something else. She is writing about the same sort of time. We don’t know anything about her. Some people think that, but I think that’s rather ridiculous: she probably was called Julian. She lived in the little cell which you visit when you go to Norwich. She had a weird experience in the reign of Edward III and wrote up a very short version. Then, much later in life, because she thought she was going to die, she wrote the long version, which is what most of us read. That was at about the time Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales . I don’t know what the illness was. She doesn’t describe the symptoms, but she was obviously going to die when she was quite young. It was quite easy to die in those days. It is still quite easy to die, but it was even easier in those days. She is remarkable on many levels. One is that she was the first English, female writer— indeed the first female writer of prose. The other is that she completely removes from Christianity the concept of punishment and anger, the anger of God. It’s revolutionary. She says it is inconceivable that a God of love could be angry and that all the bits of the Bible with anger are myth, basically. So she is rather radical. When I used to do book reviews in the Sunday Telegraph, the literary editor was Nicholas Bagnall. He sent me a biography of Frank Buchman, who started the ‘Moral Re-Armament’ movement and thought he could convert Hitler . He believed that all that mattered was to become personally pure. I wrote a review of the book which was really quite kindly and Nicholas took me out to lunch and said, ‘I’m going to publish your review. But it really is complete and absolute twaddle and I’d like you to know why.’ I asked why and he said, ‘Because the best book ever written about Christianity is Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love .’ The famous line in it is the one that TS Eliot transports into the Four Quartets, that sin is necessary, or as she says, “sin is behovely, and all manner of things shall be well.” You’ve got to accept a fact which Buchman—and probably Hitler—didn’t accept: which is that we are all utterly fallible. She’s profoundly Augustinian. She owes everything to Augustine. Our sinfulness, our fallibility, the fact that we are absolutely filled with imperfection is inescapable; you will never get rid of it. It is absolutely illusory to think that Christianity is something that, once you’ve embraced, will make you a pure, perfect, shining saint. It won’t. You will still go on being. You can’t be punished — but that’s where she is almost unique. She gazes in what many modern people, particularly non-Christians, would think of as a terribly morbid way, at the crucifixion. What she realises happened in her revelation was that the crucifixion was a sign of God taking all human sin upon himself. So there isn’t any punishment: what you’ve got to do is accept. It wouldn’t be for me to say. They’ve been tremendously helpful to me, but I’m not like them. They’re very mainstream, I think, but with one exception, which we’ll come onto in a moment. But Julian of Norwich grows and grows and grows. If all Christians in the world read her, it would totally transform the world of Christianity: a lot of those people in America who think that God hates gays or whatever it might be. They are punishment freaks. Of course punishment freaks are attracted to religion, particularly to Christianity, with its whips and chains and mortifications. She releases one from the necessity of trying to be a punishment freak. She was famous in the way that hermits could be in the Middle Ages. For instance, Margery Kempe describes going to see her. People did go and talk to her. She was rediscovered in the 20th century."