Julian of Norwich: All Shall Be Well and the Showings of Divine Love

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Who Was Julian of Norwich?

We do not know her name. The name Julian comes from St Julian's Church in Norwich, where she lived as an anchoress for most of her adult life. Her real name has not survived, and she may have taken the church's name as her own when she was enclosed. This anonymity is not accidental: Julian herself discouraged focus on her person, directing readers consistently to the showings rather than to the showings' recipient.

She was born around 1342, probably in Norwich or the surrounding area. She mentions that she was thirty and a half years old when she received the showings in May 1373, which places her birth in late 1342 or early 1343. What she did before her enclosure is not recorded. She refers to having had a mother present at her near-death illness, but makes no mention of a husband, children, or prior religious vocation, though she may have been a nun before becoming an anchoress.

Norwich in the fourteenth century was the second largest city in England, a major wool trade center and home to a rich religious culture. It also suffered: the Black Death arrived in England in 1348, when Julian was around six years old, and returned in waves throughout her lifetime. By 1373, when the showings came, she had lived through three or four major plague outbreaks. This context matters. Julian's insistence that all shall be well was not written in comfortable circumstances. It was written by someone who had watched her city emptied of a third of its people, repeatedly, and who had herself nearly died.

The Sixteen Showings of May 1373

On the night of May 8, 1373, Julian fell gravely ill. Her condition deteriorated over several days until, by the morning of May 13 (by traditional dating), she appeared to be dying. A priest was called to administer last rites and held a crucifix before her face as her sight failed from the feet upward. Julian fixed her gaze on the crucifix, and at that point, the showings began.

She received sixteen showings over roughly 24 hours. The first fifteen came in rapid succession on the morning of May 13; the sixteenth came the following night. The showings included visions of Christ's Passion in intense physical and spiritual detail, direct communications about the nature of divine love, the hazelnut image, Christ speaking the words "all shall be well," the image of Christ's joy at the soul's creation, and a showing that has become known as the Parable of the Lord and the Servant.

After the showings ended, Julian experienced a brief period of doubt and darkness (her "temptation") in which she wondered if she had been deceived. A demonic figure appeared to her. She turned to the faith of the Church and recovered. This episode is theologically significant: Julian does not present her experience as self-validating. She subjects it to the criterion of orthodox faith, and it is only when it passes that criterion that she allows herself to trust it fully.

Short Text and Long Text: Twenty Years of Meditation

Julian wrote two versions of her account. The Short Text was written relatively soon after the 1373 showings, probably within a few years. It is a more direct narrative, roughly 25 chapters, and more cautious in its theological interpretation. Julian opens it with the famous self-deprecating disclaimer: she is "a woman, lewd, feeble and frail." Many scholars read this not as genuine self-deprecation but as a necessary protective strategy. Women's theological writing in the late fourteenth century was not automatically welcomed. The qualifier "lewd" in Middle English meant "uneducated," not its modern meaning.

The Long Text, written approximately twenty years after the showings, is a substantially expanded and more theologically developed work, comprising 86 chapters. In those twenty years, Julian meditated on the showings, and particularly on the Parable of the Lord and the Servant (the thirteenth showing), which she describes as having puzzled her for many years before its meaning opened to her. The Long Text contains everything in the Short Text, substantially reworked, plus the full development of the Mother Jesus theology, the Godly Will, the extended treatment of prayer, and the more sustained exploration of the paradox of sin and salvation.

The Hazelnut: All That Is Made

In the first showing, Julian saw in the palm of her hand "a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut." She writes: "I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was generally answered thus: It is all that is made."

She marvelled how it could endure, being so small it seemed it might fall to nothingness. The answer came: "It lasteth, and ever shall last: for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God."

Julian draws three properties from the hazelnut: God made it, God loves it, and God keeps it. The whole of creation, with its apparent size and complexity and permanence, is as small as a hazelnut in the hand of God. The image does not diminish creation but reframes it: its existence depends entirely on being held in love. Remove that love, and nothing remains.

All Shall Be Well: Sin, Love, and the Great Deed

The phrase "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" comes from the thirteenth showing. Christ speaks it to Julian directly. Immediately she faces a theological problem: how can all be well when the Church teaches that sinners face damnation, and when she herself sees the reality and harm of sin?

Julian does not pretend the problem is not real. She states it plainly: "In this I had a great desire to see in what manner our Lord beheld sin." And she is shown only this: "Sin is behovely." The Middle English word "behovely" means necessary, inevitable, fitting, or useful. Julian does not conclude that sin is good. She concludes that it plays a role within the larger pattern of love's working that she cannot yet fully comprehend.

She articulates what has become one of the most sophisticated treatments of the problem of evil in medieval theology. She holds two truths simultaneously without forcing them into resolution: the Church teaches that many souls are lost, and in the showing she received that all shall be well. She calls this one of the "great deeds yet to be done" by God, a deed that will make plain the reconciliation of these two truths, a deed so great that human understanding cannot now contain it.

This refusal to resolve the tension is not intellectual weakness. It is a form of theological maturity that few writers achieve: holding genuine contradiction in patient faith rather than collapsing it into a comfortable answer on either side.

Mother Jesus: The Feminine Face of Christ

Julian's most theologically original contribution, and the one most frequently cited by contemporary scholars and spiritual writers, is her sustained development of Christ as our true Mother. This is not decorative feminine imagery. It is a carefully constructed theological argument that occupies several chapters of the Long Text.

Julian identifies three modes of motherhood in God. The Father is the ground of our nature. The Second Person, the Son, is motherhood in grace, taking our humanity in the Incarnation as a mother takes a child into herself. The Holy Spirit works as maternal activity throughout time, bringing the soul to its fulfilment.

Julian is aware she is saying something unusual. She grounds her argument in the Incarnation: the Word took flesh, and flesh is of woman. The most fundamental act of divine love in taking human nature was an act of becoming embodied through a maternal process. The motherhood of Christ is, for Julian, the theological implication of the Incarnation, not an add-on but a consequence of what it means for God to become human.

Most modern discussions of feminine language for God treat it as a contemporary theological development. Julian's Mother Jesus is a reminder that this language has deep medieval roots, and that it was developed not to accommodate modern sensibilities but from the interior logic of one of the most rigorous theological minds in fourteenth-century England.

The Godly Will and the Practice of Beholding

In the fourteenth showing, Julian receives what she calls the Parable of the Lord and the Servant, the vision that puzzled her longest and that she returns to most extensively in the Long Text. A servant falls into a pit while running on his lord's errand. The lord looks on with compassion. Julian sees in this parable the whole of the Fall and Redemption: the servant is simultaneously Adam (fallen humanity) and Christ (who descended into human nature to restore it). The lord's look is only compassion, not blame.

From this Julian develops the concept of the Godly Will or Godly Substance. She teaches that the soul has two parts: the sensuality (the aspect of the soul that interfaces with bodily and temporal experience) and the substance (the soul's higher nature, its grounding in God). In the substance, Julian insists, the soul has never sinned and never shall. The Godly Will within the soul is the aspect that remains forever oriented to God, even when the sensual self falls repeatedly.

The beholding practice also operates in the other direction: Julian insists that God beholds us with constant loving attention. The soul that practices beholding is, in Julian's theology, not creating something new but participating in a gaze that is already directed toward it. This bilateral beholding, God gazing on the soul, the soul learning to gaze back, is the structure of contemplative life in Julian's framework.

Rudolf Steiner and Julian's Vision of Christ

Rudolf Steiner addressed medieval Christian mysticism in several lectures and texts, most directly in GA 8 (Christianity as Mystical Fact, 1902) and in later Karma lecture cycles (GA 235-236, 1924). His perspective on figures like Julian is nuanced: he recognized genuine supersensible perception in the medieval mystics, while also identifying the limitations of that perception as a function of the consciousness evolution of their time.

In Steiner's framework, the fourteenth century stands at a particular phase in the post-Atlantean development of human consciousness. The intellectual soul was becoming more active, but the older capacity for direct spiritual experience (which Steiner calls a form of atavistic clairvoyance) had not yet entirely withdrawn. Some exceptional individuals in this period, through intense Christ-centred devotion and the dissolution of the normal ego boundaries in contemplative practice, could receive genuine supersensible impressions of the Christ being and the spiritual world connected to him.

Julian's maternal Christ theology also has resonances in Steiner's work. In several lectures, Steiner discusses the cosmic Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom-being who works in intimate relationship with the Christ. While Steiner does not develop the Mother Jesus concept in Julian's terms, his recognition of a feminine principle operating in the spiritual work of redemption points toward the same dimension of spiritual reality that Julian's showings revealed to her from the inside.

What Steiner would add to Julian's framework, and what she could not have had access to, is the conceptual structure that allows the content of the showings to be placed within a larger picture of human spiritual evolution. Julian knew what she experienced. Steiner's spiritual science can help explain why such experiences were possible in that period, what they were perceiving, and how their content relates to the broader story of human and cosmic development.

How to Practice Julian's Contemplative Beholding

Julian does not provide a step-by-step method. Her practice is described through the record of her experience rather than as explicit instruction. The following draws on what she describes doing during the showings and what she recommends in the chapters on prayer in the Long Text.

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