Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Somewhere in Norwich in May 1373, a thirty-year-old woman on what everyone around her believed was her deathbed received a sequence of sixteen visions — she called them 'showings' — of Christ's Passion and of the love that drove it. She spent the next twenty years thinking about what she had seen. The result is the earliest surviving book written in English by a woman, and one of the strangest theological documents in the Western tradition: not a systematic treatise but a record of sustained attention to a single, inexhaustible question — if God is love, what does that mean for a creature who suffers? Julian of Norwich does not answer abstractly. She watches the blood move on the crown of thorns. She attends to the color of Christ's dying face. She sits with the contradiction between what she sees and what the Church teaches about sin and damnation until something in her understanding shifts. This TAN Books edition makes the Showings available in a clean, readable format suited to readers who are coming to Julian for the first time — whether from a background in contemplative prayer, in theology, or simply in a desire to understand how a medieval woman made sense of pain. SECTION TWO - **Created**: Julian's central anthropological move is to insist that the soul in its 'substance' was never separated from God even by sin. This is not a denial of the Fall but a claim about the original architecture of the person: the imago Dei is not a quality added to human nature that sin then strips away, but the very structure of the person's existence in God. This maps onto the CCMMP's Created premise that the person's dignity is given in being, not earned in performance. - **Fallen**: Julian does not minimize sin or pain. She describes the Passion in clinical, bodily detail — the drying of Christ's flesh, the color changes in his face — and she refuses to soften the weight of human wretchedness. Her treatment of suffering as the actual site of divine disclosure, rather than an obstacle to it, engages the Fallen condition at its most serious: not as a moral bookkeeping problem but as a wound in the person that love enters rather than bypasses. - **Redeemed**: The recurring phrase 'all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well' is Julian's theological shorthand for what the CCMMP identifies as the Redeemed state: the restoration of the person's participation in divine life. Julian is careful to note that she does not understand HOW this is so — the tension with the reality of damnation is not dissolved — but she holds the promise as a fact given in the Showings, not as a sentiment. Grace here is not repair but the original creative love pressing through the wound. - **Redeemed (motherhood of God)**: Julian's extended meditation on what she calls the 'motherhood of God' offers a specific psychological mechanism: God's love is formative rather than coercive, shaping the person from within through nurture, correction, and patient accompaniment. This resonates with the CCMMP's concern for the unity of affective and rational formation — love that addresses the whole person, not only the will. - **Justice (adoration) and Prudence (docility)**: Julian models the virtue of adoration by sustained, bodily attention to the Passion rather than by abstract confession of God's goodness. She also models docility in the technical sense: she does not force the Showings into categories she already possesses but waits, for two decades, for understanding to come. This is the intellectual humility that Aquinas treats as integral to prudence — openness to being taught by what one encounters. SECTION THREE The Balthasar-adjacent corpus on the mysticism of love asks whether there is, in Christian revelation, a necessary link between love, the presence of the person in God, and God's presence in the person[^1] — exactly the question Julian spends the Showings working through from the inside of a single set of visions. Where that Balthasarian frame approaches the question speculatively, Julian approaches it somatically, through the body of the dying Christ, which is why the *Dilexit nos* passage on the heart of Jesus as the site where 'the infinite divine love' and 'the sensible love' are held together in a single living unity[^2] reads like a later theological gloss on what Julian was already doing. John Paul II's[^3] argument in *Dives in Misericordia* that redemption restores 'to love that creative power in man thanks to which he once more has access to the fullness of life and holiness that come from God' supplies the doctrinal structure that Julian's Showings enact experientially rather than propositionally — together they show how mystical literature and systematic theology need each other. ## References 1. Birot, prefacing Balthasar (n.d.). *La mistica del amor*. Prefacio. — 'quiconque aime a ete engendre de Dieu et connait Dieu... car Dieu est Amour' 2. Pope Francis (2024). *Dilexit nos*. — 'from the infinite horizon of his love, God wished to enter into the limits of human history and the human condition' 3. John Paul II (1980). *Dives in Misericordia*. — 'redemption involves the revelation of mercy in its fullness'
✓ Strengths
- ✓Julian's visions locate divine love as the first and final word about the human person — not a sentiment but an ontological fact about God's relation to his creatures — which maps precisely onto the CCMMP's Created premise that the person exists as gift rather than as achievement.
- ✓The Showings treat suffering not as anomaly but as the medium through which love is disclosed; Julian's sustained meditation on Christ's Passion engages the Fallen condition honestly, refusing to dissolve pain into easy consolation while refusing equally to let it be the last word.
- ✓The repeated refrain that 'all shall be well' is not optimism but a theological claim about Redemption: grace is not a repair patch on human nature but the original creative love of God pressing through the wound — a distinction that aligns with the CCMMP's Redeemed premise about the restoration of participation in divine life.
- ✓Julian's account of the 'motherhood of God' offers a specific anthropological mechanism — that God's nurturing, formative love mirrors the kind of creaturely love that shapes persons from within rather than commanding them from without — which bears directly on the CCMMP's concern with the unity of affective and rational formation.
- ✓The text models contemplative docility: Julian does not resolve the tension between divine goodness and human sin through argument but through sustained receptivity to the Showings, which functions as a school of what Aquinas would call the passive reception of practical understanding about ultimate ends.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠Julian's apophatic tendency — her willingness to let theological tensions stand unresolved — can be read, without careful guidance, as theological indifferentism; readers may need a companion text that supplies the doctrinal architecture (e.g., on sin, judgment, and purgation) within which her affirmations make sense.
- ⚠The absence of a scholarly apparatus in this TAN Books edition means that Julian's fourteenth-century Middle English categories (particularly her use of 'substance' and 'sensuality' to distinguish the soul's higher and lower parts) may be received as vague spiritualism rather than as precise Scholastic psychology with a distinct anthropological claim.