“Povertate è nulla averee nulla cosa poi volere;ed omne cosa possedereen spirito de libertate.”
“Povertate è nulla averee nulla cosa poi volere;ed omne cosa possedereen spirito de libertate.”
“Povertate è nulla averee nulla cosa poi volere;ed omne cosa possedereen spirito de libertate.”
“Povertate è nulla avere
e nulla cosa poi volere;
ed omne cosa possedere
en spirito de libertate.”
It cost Angela many struggles before she fully accepted and acted upon this truth, and attained that which she calls the “liberty of poverty.” Self-knowledge, that hard essential of the soul’s re-education which Richard ofSt.Victor, and afterwardsSt.Catherine of Siena, made the starting-point of all mysticism, she recognized from the first as the true objective towards which her hard penances and long meditations must tend.
The eighteen “steps,” then, exhibit with extraordinary honesty her gradual progress in these two arts of self-knowledge and renunciation. At the first step, as we have seen, she was by something—we know not what—startled intoattention to the real, and terrified by the vision of her own naked reality stripped of its pleasant veils and self-deceits. Her first reaction to this vision was avoidance. She was ashamed to look her sins in the face, or confess them. But having prayed toSt.Francis, she was led by a dream—the form under which her unconscious mind most frequently controlled her—to seek a Franciscan friar and make a general confession of her sins. She performed his penance loyally, and became increasingly contrite for her faults: the sense of Divine Mercy touching her, and evoking an ever more humble and repentant grief. By the eighth step this contrition had become love, the passion for perfection triumphing over the hatred of imperfection. By that contemplation of the Cross which was specially dear to Franciscan devotion, and is the subject of one of Jacopone’s most splendid poems, she was led into an ever deeper understanding of the mystery of redemption by pain. Angela was now definitely committed to the mystic way. “In this beholding of the Cross,” she says, “I burned with the fire of love and remorse: so that standing before that Cross I divested myself of everything and offered myself to Him ... and the aforesaid fire compelled me, and I had no power to resist.” The special form which her renunciation took—that of a vow of chastity in deed and thought—suggests the direction in which her chief temptations lay; and this deduction is made more probable by the emotional quality of her visionary experience, in which the repressed ardours of her temperament found relief.
At the ninth step, this instinct for renunciation achieved more complete expression. “Enlightened and instructed”—doubtless by some member of the spiritual group—she learned that nothing less than a total sacrifice of friends, kindred, possessions, her very self, would serve her if she wished to tread the Way of Holy Cross. But in her acceptance of this bitter truth we still see something of the vanity, self-importance and narrow egotism of the old Angela. Thisis the one passage in all her writings which every one knows, and by which she is generally, and most unfairly, judged.
“I elected to walk on the thorny path which is the path of tribulation. So I began to put aside the fine clothing and adornments which I had, and the most delicate food, and also the covering of my head. But as yet, to do all these things was hard, and shamed me, because I did not feel much love for God, and was living with my husband. So that it was a bitter thing to me when anything offensive was said or done to me; but I bore it as patiently as I could. In that time, and by God’s will, there died my mother, who was a great hindrance to me in following the way of God; my husband died likewise; and in a short time there also died all my children. And because I had begun to follow the aforesaid way, and had prayed God to rid me of them, I had great consolation of their deaths, although I also felt some grief; wherefore, because God had shown me this grace, I imagined that my heart was in the heart of God and His will and His heart in my heart.”
This unfortunate paragraph outweighs for many minds the whole of Angela’s subsequent life and achievements. I do not deny that, taken alone, it appears to be a monument of spiritual egotism. But we must remember that it represents, not Angela the peaceful mystic, but Angela the worried and storm-tossed penitent at the most difficult moment of her career. The emotional centre of her life had shifted. An inexorable inner voice now urged her to a total concentration on God, and she knew that the way of penance and renunciation was her only hope. Yet living in a thoroughly discordant, thoroughly unspiritual environment, hemmed in on all sides by conventional existence and unsympathetic surroundings, this way seemed impossible to follow in its completeness; for she was not one of those who are able to harmonize the demands of both worlds. Moreover, these words were written by one who had long outlived the human sorrow which, as she sayshere and in another place, she felt at these accumulated bereavements. Now, looking back and seeing her past existence spread out before her, she recognized even this awful and drastic series of deprivations as a necessary factor in the life to which she was called.
After all, it is fair to acknowledge that family affection is not the strongest point in the character of the mystical saints. In the interests of their vocation, they are always ready to leave father, mother, brothers, and sisters; and moreover there is evangelical authority for this attitude. They are specialists, and are therefore bound, in the interests of the race, to give up many things which other men must develop and preserve. Artists are under much the same necessity. The vitality which we diffuse amongst many interests and loves, these must concentrate on the one object of their quest. HenceSt.Francis himself flung his family aside without scruple when it came to the parting of the ways. Hence Jacopone da Todi was warned that even spiritual friendships must be held lightly by the pilgrim on the way of the Cross. Angela was only following in their footsteps, though she doubtless expressed herself with unnecessary and ill-regulated vigour, when she recognized human ties and human affections as possible impediments of the spiritual life. An easy capitulation to love and friendship in their most engrossing aspects seems always to have been her standing danger. It caused her in later life to say that she “feared love more than all other things”; even regarding with suspicion the deep affection which unites teacher and disciples, or two fellow-initiates of the contemplative life.
It was after her release from the duties of family life, and her more complete concentration on the ascetic life, that her visionary powers began to develop. At first they were little more than waking dreams of a commonplace kind; imaginary pictures of the Passion, the Crucifix, the Sacred Heart, such as have been experienced by innumerable Catholicsaints. These vivid symbolic presentations of Divine love moved Angela to greater and more heroic heights of penitential love; and the passion for complete evangelical poverty came on her with renewed force. Her possessions enchained her, and she knew it. She made many efforts to screw herself up bit by bit to those heights of renunciation whichSt.Francis seems to have reached almost without effort.
“For this cause—namely, to have the liberty of poverty—I journeyed to Rome, to pray the Blessed Peter that he would obtain for me the grace of true poverty. It seemed to me at last that I could not sufficiently do penance whilst I was possessed of worldly things ... so I determined to forsake everything. In my imagination I had a great desire to become poor, and such was my zeal, that I often feared to die before I attained this state of poverty. On the other hand, I was assailed by temptations, which whispered to me that I was still young, that begging for alms might lead me into shame and danger; that if I did this, I should die of hunger, cold, and nakedness. Moreover, all my friends dissuaded me from it. But at last Divine mercy sent a great illumination into my heart, which, as I believed then and do now, I shall never lose even in eternity.... So then I did resolve in good earnest.”
Here is the final, deliberate act of will: the turning once for all from the unreal to the real—under whatever form the charms of unreality appear to the growing self—which all mystics have to make. It was Angela’s eleventh step. Her mystical powers were now developing rapidly. They showed themselves in visions, dreams, and ecstasies. Not all of these, it is true, can be accepted as marks of spiritual growth: for some clearly represent the re-emergence under religious symbols of old emotions and desires. But the deep and vivid intuitions of spiritual realities which came to her more and more frequently, show that a steady sublimation of those emotions and desires was in progress, and that they tended more and more towards supersensual ends.
At the fifteenth step, with truly Franciscan thoroughness—though, oddly enough, the Friars Minor whom she consulted forbade her to do it—she distributed the whole of her possessions amongst the poor. “Because methought I could not keep anything for myself without greatly offending Him who did thus enlighten me.” With this crucial act she seems to have attained at last the true and full state of illumination. “Then,” she says, “I began to feel the sweetness of God in my heart”: that which other mystics have called the “sense of the Presence.” Also, “I began to have understanding of the visions and the words”; a new spiritual lucidity running side by side with the symbolic pictures and imaginary voices that she saw and heard with the inner eye and ear. This, too, is normal and characteristic. From this point, then, we must read the book ofVisions and Consolationsside by side with the book ofPenancesif we would understand Angela’s inner life; for these two forms of experience, which she has unfortunately chosen to treat separately, alternated with one another.
In the time of her total acceptance of holy poverty, Angela seems to have been living in a state of almost hermit-like simplicity with one companion, the Blessed Paschalina of Foligno; whom at first she found a “weariness,” but afterwards discovered to be a fellow traveller on the Mystic Way. Some years had now passed since her conversion; and she was already accepted—perhaps indeed celebrated—as a religious teacher among the members of the Spiritual group. Definitely vowed to the service of the Franciscan Order, she seems soon to have become likeSt.Catherine of Siena,St.Catherine of Genoa, and many other women mystics, the centre of a group of adoring disciples or “spiritual sons.” Yet her inner life was still in a state of confusion, the remaking of her character was still in progress. She was flung perpetually to the extremes of joy and anguish. She would rise to great heights of mystical passion “filled with the fire and fervourof Divine love,” only to fall back to her old temptations. The repressed instinctive life began to take its revenge, and tortured her by vicious suggestions which she had never known before. “I would have chosen rather to be roasted than to endure such pains.” Also the great strain put upon her nervous system by the growing spiritual faculties resulted in absolute physical illness, as has been the case with many of the mystical saints. “The torments of my body,” she says, “were veritably numberless. There remained not one of my members that was not grievously tormented, nor was I ever free from pain, infirmity, or weariness.”
We need not be afraid to recognize in this struggle a reflection of the stresses and difficulties—some physical—which attend on the complete sublimation of man’s psychic life; especially in persons of a strongly emotional temperament. In Angela’s case the visions and dreams that accompanied it assure us of the character of the crisis through which she was passing. Many of her symptoms at this time were undoubtedly hysterical. She cried aloud when she heard the name of God, and fell into a fever on seeing a picture of the Passion of Christ. Her tears were perpetual, and often she longed to tear herself in pieces. Unfortunately Franciscan piety of the more extreme sort encouraged emotional extravagances of this kind, as we may see by the account of Angela’s contemporaries given in the “Little Flowers,” and failed to appreciate Jacopone’s profound distinction between ordered and disordered love. It also gave unqualified approval to those public and grotesque acts of self-abasement which play so large a part in the legend of his penitence; and here again, Angela was true to type. Still grieved by the memory of her old hypocrisies, made more poignant by the reverence she received from her disciples, she went through the city and open places with meat and fishes hanging from her neck, and crying, “I am that woman full of evil and dissembling, slave of all vices and iniquities, who did good deeds that she mightobtain honour among men; and especially when I caused those bidden to my house to be told that I ate neither fish nor meat, and—being the while greedy, gluttonous, and drunken—feigned to desire nought but what was needful.”
Those familiar with the lives of the mystics will remember many parallels to this state of conflict: the ups and downs of Suso, his alternate illumination and despair, his great self-denials balanced by foolish little sins: the thirty years during which Teresa—already, like Angela, regarded as a great example—swayed between her mystical vocation and the claims of a more normal life. In Angela this inward battle culminated, she says, “some little while before the time of the pontificate of Celestino”—that is to say about 1294, when she was forty-six—and endured for more than two years. In it, in addition to bodily and mental agony, she was humiliated by recurrent temptations to sensual indulgence. Her depression was extreme, and her intellect often so clouded that she could not even recall the idea of God to her mind. It was her last lesson in humility and self-knowledge—an excellent antidote to the dangers of professional sanctity—and answered to that terrible period of final purification which other mystics have called the “Dark Night of the Soul.”
From this last purgation, in which all the elements of her character seemed flung back into the melting-pot, she emerged into that condition of spiritual equilibrium, of perfect harmony with transcendent reality, which is known to mystic writers as the Unitive Way. “A divine change,” she says, “took place in my soul, which neither saint nor angel could describe or explain. Wherefore I say again that it seems to me evil speaking or blasphemy if I try and tell of it.” Again, “I came not to this state of my own self, but was led and drawn thereto by God; so that though of my own self I should not have known how to desire or ask for it, I am now in that state continually.” Though the capacity forpain never left her, and is implied in many of her greatest revelations—for, like all the great Catholic mystics, she found the Christian paradox of joyous suffering at the very centre of truth—yet the last twelve years of her life seem to have been years of profound inward peace. “He hath placed within my soul,” she said, “a state which changes little, and I possess God in such fullness that I am no longer in the state in which I used to be; but I walk in such perfect peace of heart and mind that I am content in all things.”
It was that state of which Jacopone has written:
“La guerra è terminatade le virtú battaglia,de la mente travagliacosa nulla contende.La mente è renovatavestita a tal entaglia,de tal ferro è la magliaferuta no l’offerende.”
“La guerra è terminatade le virtú battaglia,de la mente travagliacosa nulla contende.La mente è renovatavestita a tal entaglia,de tal ferro è la magliaferuta no l’offerende.”
“La guerra è terminatade le virtú battaglia,de la mente travagliacosa nulla contende.La mente è renovatavestita a tal entaglia,de tal ferro è la magliaferuta no l’offerende.”
“La guerra è terminata
de le virtú battaglia,
de la mente travaglia
cosa nulla contende.
La mente è renovata
vestita a tal entaglia,
de tal ferro è la maglia
feruta no l’offerende.”
Angela has two claims to the title of a great mystic: that of her life, which we have briefly considered, and that of the revelations and experiences which she reports; our chief evidence of the unique nature of her consciousness. What then was the nature of these visions and revelations? There are signs in her book that she ran through the whole gamut of mystical experience. She practised, and described, all those degrees of contemplative prayer which are analyzed bySt.Teresa andSt.John of the Cross. She heard interior voices. She saw visions. She was an ecstatic. Moreover, at least after her achievement of spiritual equilibrium—for it would be unfair to take into account the morbid states from which she suffered during the period of readjustment—her ecstasies were of that rare and supernal kind which, far from being signs of mental or nervous disease, actually renew and invigorate the physical life of those who experience them. There is a beautiful passage in the life ofSt.Catherine of Genoa in which she is described as coming joyous and rosy-facedfrom the ecstatic encounter with God’s love. So Angela says: “Because of the change in my body, therefore I was not able to conceal my state from my companion, or from other people with whom I consorted; because at times my face was all resplendent and rosy, and my eyes shone like candles. When the soul is assured of God and refreshed by His presence, the body also receives health, satisfaction, and nobility.”
Her revelations were of two kinds. First we have a long series of “imaginary visions”: pictures, no doubt representing deep and imageless intuitions, resulting as it were from some communion with reality, but taking their form—as distinct from their content—from the memory and imagination of the visionary. Though many of these must be classed as dreams, and some indeed were received in sleep, others were definite experiences; seen, as she says, with the eyes of the mind, far more clearly than anything can be seen with the eyes of the body. Nevertheless we are bound to consider them less as objective revelations than as vivid artistic reconstructions; symbols of something that she has felt and known. Angela’s religious beliefs and romantic leanings are both clearly reflected in them. Some deal with the physical accidents of the Passion—always a favourite subject of the mediæval visionary—and these closely resemble the series of Passion-pictures seen by Julian of Norwich. Others are inspired by her devotion to the Eucharist. One or two seem, like the Visions ofSt.Gertrude, to anticipate the later cult of the Sacred Heart. In virtue of these visions Angela belongs to the great family of women Catholic mystics; women possessing a rich emotional life, and, largely by means of that emotional life, actualizing and expressing their communion with the spiritual world.
We see this emotional character clearly in one of Angela’s most celebrated experiences; the one of all others which seems to have set the seal on her career as a religious teacher, andwhich is placed at the beginning of her book of visions and revelations, though there was no vision involved in it. I mean the beautiful scene in which she talked with the Holy Ghost, walking on “the narrow road which leads upward to Assisi, and is beyond Spello.” That sense of heavenly intimacy, of divine communion, of a destiny pressed upon her from the spiritual sphere, which then took possession of her consciousness, was translated by the surface-mind of the natural Angela—whose nearest parallels to such an experience were found amongst the emotional incidents of human love—into the wonderful imaginary conversation in which, as she climbs the path between the vineyards, she is wooed by the Holy Spirit, and assured of His peculiar interest and affection. “I will bear thee company and speak with thee all the way,” He says to her. “I will make no end to My speaking, and thou wilt not be able to attend to anything save Me.” “Then did He begin to speak the following words to me, which persuaded me to love after this manner, ‘My daughter, who art sweet to Me, My daughter who art My temple, My beloved daughter, do thou love Me, for I love thee greatly, and much more than thou lovest Me.’ And very often He said to me, ‘Bride and daughter! sweet art thou to Me; I love thee better than any other in the valley of Spoleto.’ These and other similar things did He say to me. Then when I heard these words, I counted my sins, and I considered my faults; how that I was unworthy of so great a love. And I began to doubt these words; for which cause, my soul said to Him who had spoken to it, ‘If thou wert indeed the Holy Spirit, thou wouldest not speak thus; for it is not right or proper, because I am weak and frail and might grow vainglorious thereat.’ He answered, ‘Think and see if thou couldst become vainglorious because of the things for which thou art now made glad....’ Then I tried to grow vainglorious, that I might prove if He spoke truth; and I began to look at the vineyards, that I might learn the folly of my words. And wherever I looked, He saidto me, ‘Behold and see! this is My creation’: and at this I felt ineffable delight.”
This is the poetry of mysticism, an artistic reduction of supernal intuitions, and is to be interpreted in poetic terms. But there is another, and rarer, form of spiritual perception: that imageless intuition of pure truth, whichSt.Teresa and other mystics call intellectual, but which would be better named metaphysical vision. Angela’s real importance amongst the mystics comes from the fact that she possessed this power in a high degree of development. In virtue of her immediate apprehensions of transcendent reality, she belongs to the rarest and highest type of mystic seer: a class in which Plotinus holds perhaps the first place, and of which Ruysbroeck is the most conspicuous mediæval example. The poetry of Jacopone da Todi shows us that he too knew the secret of those strange astounding regions, “beyond the polar circle of the mind,” where Angela tasted of unconditioned reality, and the language in which he describes them often reminds us of her. It is an interesting question, whether these two great Franciscan contemplatives directly influenced one another, or must be regarded as the twin stars of a school of “Seraphic wisdom” which taught the deepest mysteries of the spiritual life.
There are eight of these great visionary experiences recorded in Angela’s book. In them she says that she apprehended God successively under the attributes of Goodness, Beauty, Power, Wisdom, Love, Justice; and that after this she beheld the totality of the Godhead “darkly”—a way of describing her perceptions which is of course traceable to the “Divine darkness” of Dionysius the Areopagite. Finally she beheld it, “as clearly as is possible in this life.” All these visions seem to have come to her when she was in a state of ecstasy or trance. She speaks of being “exalted in spirit,” “rapt to the first elevation”; lifted to wholly new levels of consciousness. She describes them as well as she can, yetplainly she is only able to tell us a fraction of her experience. Over and over again she declares the hopeless inadequacy of human speech, the impossibility of “speaking as she saw.” Her state is like that of Dante at the end of theParadiso, save that her wings were fitted for these flights.
“I beheld the ineffable fullness of God; but I can relate nothing of it, save that I haveseenthe fullness of Divine Wisdom, wherein is all goodness.” Again, “inasmuch as this was a supernatural thing, I cannot express it in words.” “Many other things were clearly set forth to me; but I neither can nor will relate them.” “All that I say of this, seems to me to be nothing. I feel as though I offended in speaking of it, for so greatly does the Good exceed all my words that my speech seems to be but blasphemy.”
Those things, however, which she does contrive to relate, have an astonishing suggestive quality, a great philosophic sweep, combined with an intimate appeal to our own deepest intuitions, which place them, so far as mystical history is concerned, on a level with some of the greatest passages in Jacopone da Todi and in Ruysbroeck; and in my opinion far beyond the more celebrated intellectual visions ofSt.Teresa.
Thus she says, “the eyes of my soul were opened and I beheld the plenitude of God, by which I understood the whole world both here and beyond the sea, the abyss, and all other things. And in this I beheld nothing save the Divine Power, in a way that is utterly indescribable, so that through the greatness of its wonder the soul cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘The whole world is full of God.’ Wherefore I understood that the world is but a little thing; and I saw that the power of God was above all things, and the whole world was filled with it.”
Here we are reminded of Julian of Norwich—“He showed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut. I looked thereon with the eye of my understanding and thought; Whatmay this be? and it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.”
“After I had seen the power of God, His will and His justice,” says Angela, again, “I was lifted higher still; and then I no longer beheld the power and will as before. But I beheld aThing, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I cannot say, save that I have often said already, namely, that it was all good. And although my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that indescribableThing, it was itself filled with indescribable joy, so that it was taken out of the state it was in before, and placed in this great and ineffable state. I know not whether I was then in the body or out of the body. It is enough to say that all the other visions seemed to me less great than this.”
Again, “One time in Lent ... the eyes of my soul were opened, and I saw Love advancing gently towards me, and I saw the beginning but not the end. There seemed to me only a continuation and an eternity thereof, so that I cannot tell its likeness nor colour; but directly this Love reached me I beheld all these things more clearly with the eyes of the soul than I could do with the eyes of the body. This Love came towards me after the manner of a sickle. Not that there was any actual and measurable likeness; but when first it appeared to me it did not give itself to me in such abundance as I expected, but a part was withdrawn. Therefore I say, after the manner of a sickle. Then I was filled with love and a great satisfaction, but although it satisfied me, it generated within me so great a hunger that all my members were loosened; and my soul fainted with longing to attain to the All.”
I give one more, particularly interesting to English students because of its parallels with our own great mystical work,The Cloud of Unknowing: “There was a time when my soul was exalted to behold God with so much clearness that never before had I beheld Him so distinctly. But I did not here see Love sofully; rather I lost that which I had before, and was left without love. Afterwards I saw Him darkly, and this darkness was the greatest blessing that could be imagined, and thought can conceive nothing equal to this.... Here likewise I see all Good.... The soul delights unspeakably therein, yet it beholds nothing that can be spoken by the tongue or conceived by the heart. It sees nothing yet sees all, because it beholds the Good darkly; and the more darkly and secretly the Good is seen, the more certain it is, and excellent above all things. Wherefore all other good that can be seen or imagined is doubtless less than this, and even when the soul sees the Divine wisdom, power and will of God (which I have seen marvellously at other times), it is all less than this most certain Good. Because this is the whole, and those other things are but part of the whole.... But seen thus darkly, the Good brings no smile to the lips, no fervour of love to the heart; for the body does not tremble or become moved and distressed as at other times; because the soul sees, and not the body, which rests and sleeps, and the tongue is dumb and speechless. All the many ineffable kindnesses which God has shown me, all the sweet words and divine sayings and doings, are so much less than this that I saw in the darkness, that I put no hope in them.... But to this most high power of beholding God ineffably through great darkness, my spirit was uplifted three times only and no more.”
“This cloud,” saysThe Cloud of Unknowing, of that same Divine Dark, “is evermore between thee and thy God ... therefore shape thyself to abide in this darkness so long as thou mayest, evermore crying after Him whom thou lovest, for if ever thou shalt feel Him or see Him (in such sort as He may be seen or felt in this life) it behoveth always to be in this cloud or darkness.” So Angela: “When I behold and am in that Good, although I seem to see nothing yet I see all things.” In this achievement she reaches the goal of the mystic experience, the ecstatic communion with the Absolute One.
I have called her a Franciscan mystic. If by Franciscan mysticism we mean that exquisite sense of the Divine immanence in nature, that poetic temperament, that peculiar and elusive charm, which we associate withSt.Francis himself; then, perhaps, there seems little that is characteristically Franciscan in Angela. But if, looking past the special character of the Founder, we try to seize the essence of that secret he was seeking to impart, then, allowing for the inevitable development which any idea undergoes when it enters the world of change, we may regard her as a typical Franciscan of the second generation. She was indeed conditioned at all points by the Franciscan environment in which her religious life developed; that ardent society of “Spirituals,” mostly recruited from the devout laity, which sprang up in her time in the Italian cities. This society, with its advanced contemplative tradition, its demand for a close imitation of Christ, was a forcing-house of the mystical life. Angela shows her close connection with it in the character of her penitence, in her passionate devotion to the Cross and Passion, and also in the metaphysical quality of her greatest mystical apprehensions. These three outstanding characteristics, corresponding in a general sense to the three great phases of the mystical life, are again seen in the poetry in which her contemporary Jacopone discloses to us the stages of anguished contrition and of uncontrolled fervour through which he moved to the heights of union with God. These two great converts and initiates of love illuminate and explain one another: for in them we see an identical tradition of the spiritual life interpreted by different temperaments. For each the Way is an education in love, and Jacopone speaks for both of them when he says of it:
“Distinguese l’amore en terzo stato:bono, meglio, sommo, sublimato;lo sommo sí vole essere amatosenza compagnia.”
“Distinguese l’amore en terzo stato:bono, meglio, sommo, sublimato;lo sommo sí vole essere amatosenza compagnia.”
“Distinguese l’amore en terzo stato:bono, meglio, sommo, sublimato;lo sommo sí vole essere amatosenza compagnia.”
“Distinguese l’amore en terzo stato:
bono, meglio, sommo, sublimato;
lo sommo sí vole essere amato
senza compagnia.”
IIIJULIAN OF NORWICH.
All that we know directly of Julian of Norwich—the most attractive, if not the greatest of the English mystics—comes to us from her book,The Revelations of Divine Love, in which she has set down her spiritual experiences and meditations. Like her contemporaries, Walter Hilton and the author ofThe Cloud of Unknowing, she lives only in her vision and her thought. Her external circumstances are almost unknown to us, but some of these can be recovered, or at least deduced, from the study of contemporary history and art; a source of information too often neglected by those who specialize in religious literature, yet without which that literature can never wholly be understood.
Julian, who was born about 1342, in the reign of EdwardIII, grew up among the surroundings and influences natural to a deeply religious East Anglian gentlewoman at the close of the Middle Ages. Though she speaks of herself as “unlettered,” which perhaps means unable to write, she certainly received considerable education, including some Latin, before herRevelationswere composed. Her known connection with the Benedictine convent of Carrow, near Norwich, in whose gift was the anchorage to which she retired, suggests that she may have been educated by the nuns; and perhaps made her first religious profession at this house, which was in her time the principal “young ladies’ school” of the Norwich diocese, and a favourite retreat of those adopting the religious life. During her most impressionable years she must have seen intheir freshness some of the greatest creations of Gothic art, for in Norfolk both architecture and painting had been carried to the highest pitch of excellence by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The great East Anglian school of miniature painting had already produced its masterpieces and was in its decadence. But if we look at these masterpieces—the wonderful manuscripts illuminated at Gorleston near Yarmouth, and other religious houses of the district—and remember that these are merely the surviving examples of an art which decorated the walls of the churches as richly as the pages of its service-books, we begin to realize the sort of iconography, the view of the Christian landscape, from which Julian’s mental furniture was derived. Some of the best of these manuscripts are in the British Museum; and those who wish to understand the atmosphere in which the mediæval mystics flourished would do well to study Julian’sRevelationsin their light. There they will find expressed in design that mixture of gaiety and awe, that balanced understanding of the natural and the divine, which is one of her strong characteristics. She, like these artists, can afford to wreathe her images of supernatural mysteries in homely details drawn from the common life. Moreover, the more pictorial her revelations become, the more closely they approximate to the pictures in the psalters and Books of Hours of her time. From this source came her detailed visions of incidents in the Passion—the blood that she saw running down under the garland of thorns, the dried, discoloured body, the gaping wounds, and “rueful and wasted” face of Christ—and those of the Blessed Virgin as a “little maiden,” as “Mater Dolorosa,” and as the crowned Queen of Heaven. All these were common subjects with the miniature artists and wall painters of the time, and the form which they took in Julian’s revelations must be attributed to a large extent to unconscious memory of those artists’ works.
Another more inward aspect of contemporary religion hasalso affected her: the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus. This beautiful devotion was specially characteristic of English personal religion in the late Middle Ages, and is strongly marked in the writings of the mystics; especially Hilton and Rolle. The great popularity in England of the hymnJesu Dulcis Memoria, and the many vernacular imitations of it current in Julian’s day, helped in the spread of this cult; with which was associated that intense and highly emotional preoccupation with the physical accidents of the Passion so constantly reflected in her visionary experience. “O good Jesu!” cried Rolle, “my heart thou hast bound in love of Thy Name and now I cannot but sing it”; and he spoke not for himself only but for all the best religious lyrists of the early fourteenth century, whose characteristic mood was that of personal, intimate, and sorrowing love of Jesus.
“Sweet Jesu, now will I singTo thee, a song of love longing.Teach me, Lord, thy love songWith sweet tears ever among.”
“Sweet Jesu, now will I singTo thee, a song of love longing.Teach me, Lord, thy love songWith sweet tears ever among.”
“Sweet Jesu, now will I singTo thee, a song of love longing.Teach me, Lord, thy love songWith sweet tears ever among.”
“Sweet Jesu, now will I sing
To thee, a song of love longing.
Teach me, Lord, thy love song
With sweet tears ever among.”
Thus, one of these Middle English poets could write:
“Jesu, well owe I to love theeFor that me showed the roodë tree,The crown of thorns, the nailës three,The sharp spear that through-stong thee,Jesu of love is sooth tokeningThy head down-bowed to love-kissing,Thine arms spread to love-clipping,Thy side all open to love-showing.”
“Jesu, well owe I to love theeFor that me showed the roodë tree,The crown of thorns, the nailës three,The sharp spear that through-stong thee,Jesu of love is sooth tokeningThy head down-bowed to love-kissing,Thine arms spread to love-clipping,Thy side all open to love-showing.”
“Jesu, well owe I to love theeFor that me showed the roodë tree,The crown of thorns, the nailës three,The sharp spear that through-stong thee,Jesu of love is sooth tokeningThy head down-bowed to love-kissing,Thine arms spread to love-clipping,Thy side all open to love-showing.”
“Jesu, well owe I to love thee
For that me showed the roodë tree,
The crown of thorns, the nailës three,
The sharp spear that through-stong thee,
Jesu of love is sooth tokening
Thy head down-bowed to love-kissing,
Thine arms spread to love-clipping,
Thy side all open to love-showing.”
Of such poetry as this—with which she was probably familiar—Julian often reminds us; and sometimes her parallels with it are close. Thus she says in her tenth Revelation: “Then with a glad cheer our Lord looked into his side, and beheld rejoicing. With his sweet looking he led forth the understanding of his creature by the same wound into his side within. And then he showed a fair delectable place and large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love.... And with this our good Lord said fullblissfully: Lo! how that I loved thee.” In such passages as this, in her highly visualized meditations on the Crown of Thorns and the Precious Blood, and in such phrases as “I liked none other heaven than Jesus, who shall be my bliss when I am there,” and other ardent expressions of religious love, she is speaking the common devotional language and using the common devotional imagery of her own day. Hence those merely visionary experiences with which her book opens and which form by far the least important part of it, can be accounted for as the result of unconscious memory, weaving new vivid pictures from the current religious and artistic conceptions in which she had been reared. A correspondence has indeed been detected between the order of these fifteen “showings,” and the fifteen prayers on the Passion known as the “XVOs,” which occur in theSarum Horæ. They are, in fact, dreams of which any devout and imaginative person of that time was capable; and need not be taken too seriously when estimating the character of Julian’s mysticism.
This, then, was the religious, artistic, and emotional environment in which she grew up; an environment to which new sombre colour and new realization of pain had been given by the Black Death which swept through Norfolk when she was a child. More important, however, than any external influence, was the part her own temperament played in her special apprehension of God. It is plain that she was from the first of an intensely religious, meditative disposition. As a girl, she says, she asked of God three things. The first was, that she might have a keen realization of Christ’s Passion; because although she had great feeling of it, she desired more, and specially a bodily sight of His pains. The second was bodily sickness, much esteemed in the Middle Ages as a means of grace; and this she wished to suffer at thirty years of age. The third was, that as Saint Cecilia was pierced by three wounds, so she might be pierced with the three wounds of contrition, compassion, and eager longing towards God. Thefirst two desires she forgot for a while; but the three wounds she prayed for continually. When she was thirty years old, the gift of sickness was granted her, and it was exactly such a sickness, “so hard as unto death,” as she had asked: a fact which tells us a good deal about Julian’s mental make-up, revealing her as the possessor of an extremely active “psychic background.” By the law of association we may be sure that her illness brought back to mind the other forgotten prayer, for a deeper insight into, and vision of, the Passion. It is supposed that she was at this time already an anchoress, shut in that tiny room against the south wall ofSt.Julian’s church at Norwich, of which the foundations can still be traced. But nothing in her own account suggests this, and the presence of her mother and “other persons” round her sick bed is rather against it. At the same time, a single woman of strong religious bent is hardly likely in that period to have remained in the world till she was thirty. Julian was perhaps a Benedictine nun at Carrow, and after her vision sought a life of greater seclusion and austerity atSt.Julian’s, which was the property of the Carrow convent. The anchoress was often, but not always, a professed nun: and though no reminiscences of cloister life can be traced in Julian’s writings, such a life would account in part for the theological knowledge and familiarity with dogmatic language which those writings display.
Julian’s account of what happened in her illness is extremely precise, and makes this part of her revelation an interesting psychological document. She fell ill early in May 1373; and on the fourth night was thought to be dying and given the last sacraments. For two days more she lingered, quite conscious and expecting death; and early in the morning of the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When the priest came to help her agony she was already speechless; but made her nurses prop her upright in bed, so that she could fix her failing eyes on the crucifix he held towards her. Thisshe could see, though everything else grew dim to her sight. Then her head fell on one side, breath failed, and she was sure that the end had come.
With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of the involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended. She had passed into a new state of consciousness, in which her mind was clear and her body free of pain, “as whole as ever before or after.” In this condition her old and forgotten desires came back into her mind. The first, for sickness, had been granted. Now, she was impelled to ask the other, for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried wish, surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting-point of her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that these experiences had their pathological side. Her physical and psychic state were abnormal. With the perfect candour and common sense which add so much to our delight in her, she confesses that she at first mistook her revelations for delirium, and said to the monk who afterwards visited her that she had raved. There are, however, in these revelations, as in all visionary experience of any value, two distinct sides. One is the visual or auditory hallucination—the vision seen, the voice heard—the materials for which clearly come from the unconscious mind of the visionary, and can generally be traced to their source. The other is the intuitive spiritual teaching that accompanies it, and often far exceeds the visionary’s own knowledge or power. Julian, in her account of what happened to her, keeps these two elements perfectly distinct. “All the blessed teaching of our Lord God,” she says, “was shown to me by three parts—that is to say, by the bodily sight, by words formed in mine understanding, and by ghostly sight.”
The bodily vision, as she expressly affirms, she did not ask for; and here she agrees with all true mystics, who invariably distrust these quasi-physical experiences. Yet it was in such visionary hallucination that her revelations began. With hereyes still fixed on the crucifix, and apparently at the point of death, she suddenly saw red blood running down from the Crown of Thorns, as if in answer to her prayer for more feeling of the Passion of Christ. The Cross had become for her, as the shining pewter dish did for Jacob Boehme, or the running stream forSt.Ignatius, a focal point on which to concentrate; and so a door to a deeper state of consciousness. Spiritual insight went side by side with the bodily vision, which was accepted without question by Julian as a direct message from Christ to strengthen her, “lest she be tempted of fiends before she died”; for in spite of her intuitive philosophic sense, we must remember that she lived in imagination in that Gothic world of concrete devils and angels which the cathedral sculptors reproduced. The double experience—outward pictures of the Passion, and inward teachings of the nature of God—continued for five hours, whilst she lay in a state of trance which her mother mistook for death. “The first began early in the morn, about the hour of four; and they lasted, showing by process full fair and steadily, each following other, till it was nine of the day overpassed.” In those five hours Julian received the whole substance of her teaching, afterwards divided by her into sixteen “revelations of love.” When they had passed, normal consciousness returned, or, as she says, she “fell to herself,” and knew that she must live. She lay for some time in weakness and depression, tormented by evil dreams; but she recovered from her sickness, and lived to a great age. Her careful account of that illness, and of the psychic experiences accompanying it, helps us to understand those experiences from the psychological as well as the mystical point of view. Seen thus, they are not unique; but classic examples of a type which turns up from time to time in medical history. Thus Dr. Edwin Ash, inFaith and Suggestion, has described a case which strikingly resembles that of Julian. Here, too, at the crisis of an apparently hopeless illness, the patient fell into a death-like trance, had visionsof a religious type, and emerged cured. Her mind was far inferior to that of Julian, hence her experience had less beauty and significance and was of little value for other souls. Nevertheless, its general outline forces us to acknowledge that it belongs to the same class, and helps us to interpret the facts which lie behind Julian’s words.
Julian’s revelations have come down to us in two distinct versions, which have both been edited for modern readers. The best known is the long version, reproduced in Miss Warrack’s delightful edition: but our earliest manuscript of this only goes back to the sixteenth century, at least a hundred years after Julian’s death. Another, much shorter, is found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Museum, and this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford, who claims—I think with good reason—that it represents Julian’s first account of her visions, written or told while they were still fresh in her mind, and before her memory of them had been coloured by long meditation, or by the theological learning which she certainly acquired in later life. It briefly sets forth her chain of visions, and the “ghostly words” and inward teachings that accompanied them. These, she says, she has set down for the help of her fellow-Christians and because she saw it to be God’s will. “But,” she adds, “God forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a teacher: for I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a woman, unlearned, feeble and frail; but I know well that this that I say, I have it of the showing of Him that is Sovereign Teacher.” In the long version these deprecatory words are omitted. Julian no longer fears to be regarded as a teacher. On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle authority as one whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt, the established anchoress; the devout woman whose special vocation is known, and to whom people come for spiritual teaching. Moreover, she tells us in this book that only twenty years, less three months, after her vision was she inwardlytaught the importance of all its details, however “misty and indifferent” they seemed. She was therefore past fifty when she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the fruit, not only of her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings by which the last atom of significance was extracted from it, the “enlightenings and touchings of the same Spirit,” which kept the revelation fresh in after life.
As she says herself—for her introspective powers were remarkable—the “first beginnings” and subsequent “ghostly teachings” at last became so merged in her understanding that she could not separate them. There is a parallel to this in the life of Boehme. He says that in the abnormal state which was induced by gazing at the polished pewter dish he “understood the Being of all Beings”—even as Julian “saw God in a Point”—but this stupendous revelation only left him dazed and inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during which he felt the seed of truth “unfolding within him like a young plant,” was he able to describe it.
When we compare the two versions of Julian’s work, we find many differences which remind us of this confession. Although the whole doctrine of the long book is really implied in the short book—for it is, in Boehme’s phrase, an unfolding of the plant from that one seed—we see that the most beautiful and poetical passages are found in the long version only. They are the fruit of meditation upon vision. The workings of Julian’s unconscious mind in her trance have only provided the raw material, as the inspiration of the poet gives only the crude beginnings of the poem. Moreover, with age her character deepened and grew richer. She used her talent to help other souls, and it increased. She studied, too, and found language of great subtlety and beauty in which to express her vision of truth. Though even the first version of her book shows theological knowledge which would put to shame most present-day Christians, in the later work this knowledge is much increased. Reading was part of the duty of an anchoress,being regarded as an essential element in the life of prayer; and intelligent reading has clearly nourished Julian’s deep meditations on the character of God. In her there was an almost perfect balance between the intellectual and the emotional life, and there are few women mystics of Whom we can say this.
The question of her literary sources is an interesting one. A careful examination of her revelations makes it plain that even when the short version was written, she was already acquainted with many theological conceptions; whilst the meditations with which the long version is enriched, and its fuller descriptions of her spiritual “Showings,” reveal her as possessing at least by middle life a considerable knowledge of the language of Augustinian theology and of the root-ideas of Christian mysticism. As used by her, many of these ideas have the special colour which was given to them by Meister Eckhart and his school; and suggest that Julian at one time or another had come into contact with the characteristically Dominican type of mysticism which is best known to us in the works of Suso and Tauler. In her teaching on sin—“I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no substance nor any part of being”—she is following, indeed almost quoting, Eckhart’s saying that “evil is nothing but a privation of being; not an effect, but a defect.” So, too, Eckhart’s daring assertion that sin has its place in the scheme—“Since God, in a way, also wills that I should have committed sins, I do not wish not to have committed them”—appears to be echoed in gentler form in Julian’s view of sin as a purifying scourge, and of the scars which it leaves on the redeemed soul as being “not wounds but worships.” Her beautiful saying that we are God’s bliss, “for in us He enjoyeth without end,” seems like a deduction from the Eckhartian paradox, “God needs me as much as I need Him.” She has received, perhaps from the same source, the antique mystical notion of the soul’s precession from and return to God. “The soul,” said Eckhart, “is created that itmay flow back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain whence it came forth.” “Thus I understood,” says Julian, “that all His blessed children which be come out of Him by nature shall be brought again into Him by grace”; and again, “all kinds that He hath made to flow out of Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him.” Here, again, the naked Eckhartian monism seems to be transmitted through a more human and more spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the German mystics in her doctrine of God as the “ground of the soul.” “Our soul is so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God.... God is nearer to us than our own soul, for He is the ground in whom our soul standeth, and He is the mean that keepeth the substance and the sensuality together so that they shall never depart.” So Tauler says, “A man who verily desires to enter in will surely find God here, for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him and he will find and enjoy eternity here.”
Julian’s revelation was received in 1373, and the long text as we have it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart had died in 1329, Tauler in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck, whose mysticism owes much on its speculative side to Eckhart’s philosophy, in 1381. The influence of their teaching spread rapidly, and few preaching friars of an inward disposition can have escaped it. To these preaching friars was committed in the fourteenth century the special duty of giving solid theological teaching to nuns. This was commonly done by way of vernacular sermons and instructions, of which Tauler’s surviving sermons are types: and it was possibly through such instructions given in the Carrow convent that Julian obtained that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism, those contacts with Augustinian and Victorine thought, on which the more philosophic side of her revelation seems to depend. The parallels with her great contemporarySt.Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund Gardner has noted, are probably due to the fact that both women drew their ideas from some earlier source. Her likenesses to Ruysbroeck can also be accounted for. HisSeven Cloisters,Kingdom of God’s Lovers, andOrnaments of the Spiritual Marriagewere all completed before 1350, and knowledge of them would reach East Anglia quickly, through the Flemish colony established at Norwich. Several close correspondences with him can be traced in Julian’s work; especially her conception of God’s eternal thirst and love-longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck’s “hungry yet generous love of God,” and the opening phrase of her Third Revelation, “After this I saw God in a Point,” which reminds us of the great definition in theSeven Cloisters, “That Point in which all our lives find their end.” Julian thus represents the first emergence in English literature of a stream of tradition which is not represented in the classic school of English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this school she does not appear to have been greatly influenced; there is little in her that reminds us of it, or of that group of contemplatives who produced theCloud of Unknowingand its companion works. Her true affinities are with the Christian Platonism whichSt.Augustine introduced into theology, and its developments in the works of Erigena and Eckhart. But when we have given full weight to the effects upon her work of oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work only becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her speculative mind, and helped her to understand and express her own experience; but this experience in its essence was independent of intellectual knowledge. It was the fruit of a deeply mystical and poetic nature, brooding on the conception of God common to mediæval Christianity. Julian had in a high degree constructive religious genius; and for such a nature an evocative phrase is enough to waken the “ghostly sight.”
It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account ofher teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent consciousness of God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing reality; a conception at once philosophic and practical. For Julian, as for the Platonists, God is the sum of the highest spiritual values—“He is all-thing that is good to my seeming, and all-thing that is good, it is He.” Her perception of the Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and expressed in the strongest terms. “God is kind (nature) in His being: that is to say, that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is kind-head,” and again, “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensuality God is ... for it is His good pleasure to reign in our understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell in our soul endlessly, us all working into Him.” But this vivid sense of Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is closely bound up with her devotion to the person of Christ. Her theological path, like her mystical experience, lay through the human to the Divine, through emotional realization of the Passion to intellectual vision of the Godhead. In the first revelation of all we get these two aspects of truth sharply contrasted; for there her vision of the bloodstained Crown of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart, is balanced by her other interior sight of “the Godhead seen in mine understanding.” The long version of her book elaborates this simple intuition of the Deity into a very beautiful description of the Holy Trinity—always one of Julian’s favourite subjects—but the whole is really implied in the first brief statement, which strikes at once her characteristic chord of intimacy and awe, or, as she puts it, “the dread and the homeliness of God.” In the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, which was never far from her thoughts, she found the link between these personal and impersonal apprehensions. That half-Platonic notion of Christ the Eternal Wisdom as “Mother” of the soul, which is one of her most original conceptions, heretakes its place side by side with the other, more metaphysical intuition of that unconditioned Deity in whom “All-thing hath the Being.” “For all our life 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. For the first I understood that the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in nature and in our substantial making.... All the fair working, and all the sweet kindly office of dearworthy motherhood is impropriated to the Second Person ... and all is one Love.”
This blend of personal and metaphysical vision is not unique. We find it again in the Franciscan contemplative, Angela of Foligno. But Julian’s nature is richer and more mellow, and the doctrine of love which she deduced from her experience is more profound. Here, in this harmonized consciousness of the most human and most philosophic aspects of religious experience, she is typical of Christian mysticism at its best. She avoids on the one hand the excessive intellectualism of the Neoplatonist, and on the other the unpleasant exuberance of the religious emotionalist, yet draws from the apprehensions of both the heart and the head all the elements needed to feed a full spiritual life. The human element brought in by Christianity, with all the emotional values belonging to it—however symbolic this side of contemplation must necessarily be—redeems philosophic mysticism from the clear coldness, the lofty superiority, thatSt.Augustine condemned in the Platonists. But, equally, it is the philosophic background, the austere worship of that trinity of Light, Life, and Love, in whom, as Julian says, we are clad more closely than a body in its clothes, which saves mystical fervour from its worst extravagances. Here she is and will ever be one of the safest guides to the contemplative life.
Another special quality of Julian’s teaching is its healthy,vigorous, affirmative character. The only two sins she sternly condemns—and she calls them not sins, but sickness—are sloth or lack of zest, and doubtful dread or lack of hope. Zest and hope she regards as essential factors in the life of the soul. The Light, Life, and Love which form her ultimate definition of triune Reality—the Mother, Brother, and Saviour, which are her nearest images for Christ’s relation with man—these are conceptions which kill the sort of pious moods that R. L. Stevenson called “dim, dem, and dowie.” God’s attitude to man is “courteous, glad, and merry,” and we do Him less honour by solemnity than by “cheer of mirth and joy.” To her, only the good is the true, and evil is a void, a lack of the only reality; a Platonic notion which has always been dear to the mystics. “In this naked word Sin,” says Julian, “our Lord brought to my mind generally all that is not good ... but I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of.” It follows that our attention should not be given to the avoidance or consideration of sin, but to the understanding and enjoyment of the good and the real. “The beholding of other men’s sins, it maketh as it were a thick mist before the eyes of the soul,” says Julian. Her strongest condemnation is given to morbid pondering of past sins and mistakes. “Right as by the courtesy of God He forgets our sins when we repent, right so will He that we forget our sin, and all our heaviness and all our doubtful dreads.” This world, after all, is only a nursery for heaven, and its inhabitants mostly spiritual babies who need not be taken too seriously. “I understood no higher stature in this life than childhood;” and the attitude of God to our infant souls is that of “the kindly loving Mother that witteth and knoweth the need of her child and keepeth it full tenderly as the kind and condition of Motherhood will.”
No modern psychologist could be more emphatic than this fourteenth-century recluse on the foolishness of worry, theduty of confidence, gaiety, and hope. “Notwithstanding our simple living and our blindness here, yet endlessly our courteous Lord beholdeth us in this working rejoicing; and of all things we may please him best, wisely and truly to believe, and to enjoy with Him and in Him.” She brings back the primitive Christian insistence on joy—confident happiness—as the one sure sign of the spiritual life. If we have not got this, it is because we lack the faith and common sense which sees life in a universal and disinterested light. Once, Julian says, she was inclined to worry about God’s work in the soul of a friend whom she loved, and she was answered in her reason “as it were by a friendly man,” “Take it generally! and behold the courtesy of thy Lord God as He shows it to thee, for it is more worship to God to behold Him in all than in any special thing.” In those words we have a complete prescription for happiness and inward peace. All that is made, as Julian saw in her vision, is but “a little thing the quantity of an hazel nut” in comparison with the Divine life that creates, keeps, and loves it, and may be known in those sudden glimpses of perfection which we call the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. These, in her language, are “God’s courteous showings of Himself,” and we are most likely to encounter them when we take the worlds of nature and grace “generally,” and refrain from partial or egoistic criticisms and demands. Failure in this simple rule, she thinks, is the true cause of human misery and unrest. “This is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul; that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, and All-good.”