“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 full blissfully: 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 “XV Os,” which occur in the Sarum 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. The first 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 of St. 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 at St. 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.