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

Who Was Julian of Norwich?

Almost nothing is known about Julian of Norwich beyond what she tells us in her own book. We do not know her birth name. "Julian" is the name she took from St Julian's Church in Norwich, to which her anchorhold was attached. She was born around 1342 and was likely still alive in 1416, when a bequest was made to "Julian, anchorite at St Julian's in Norwich." She lived through the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years' War, and the Western Schism. She wrote in the East Anglian dialect of Middle English, which places her in a specific regional and cultural world, but beyond that, the historical record is nearly silent.

What we know is what she showed us. On 13 May 1373, when Julian was about thirty years old, she fell gravely ill. She had previously prayed for three gifts: a vision of Christ's passion, a bodily sickness unto death, and three wounds (of contrition, compassion, and longing for God). As she lay dying, with a crucifix held before her face by a priest who had come to administer last rites, she began to receive visions. Over the course of approximately five hours, she experienced sixteen distinct "showings," beginning with the sight of blood flowing from the crown of thorns and culminating in a vision of Christ enthroned in the soul.

She recovered from her illness. And then she spent the rest of her life trying to understand what she had been shown.

The Sixteen Showings: What Julian Saw

Julian's sixteen showings form a carefully structured sequence that moves from the passion of Christ through the nature of God, the problem of sin, and the final assurance that love will overcome all things. The first showing is the most physically vivid: Julian sees blood flowing from under the crown of thorns, "hot and freshly and very abundantly," as if it were happening in real time before her eyes.

The middle showings deepen in abstraction and theological complexity. Julian is shown the nature of prayer, the reality of the Trinity, the relationship between grace and nature, and the motherhood of God. The thirteenth showing contains the famous "all shall be well" passage. The fifteenth showing offers the parable of the lord and the servant, which Julian spent nearly twenty years interpreting and which contains her most original theological insight.

The sixteenth and final showing is a vision of Christ dwelling in the soul: "The place that Jesus takes in our soul he shall never remove from." This is Julian's conclusion and her ground of hope. Whatever happens in the external world, whatever sins we commit, whatever suffering we endure, the divine presence in the soul remains unshaken.

What strikes readers across the centuries is the quality of Julian's attention. She does not merely record what she saw. She questions it, struggles with it, returns to it again and again, tests it against Church teaching and her own experience, and refuses to smooth over contradictions. She is, in the fullest sense, a theologian: someone who thinks carefully and honestly about God.

The Hazelnut Vision: All That Is Made

In her first showing, Julian sees something small lying in the palm of her hand, "round as a ball," no bigger than a hazelnut. She looks at it with wonder and asks, "What can this be?" The answer comes: "It is all that is made."

"I marvelled how it could last," Julian writes, "for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing, it was so small. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it. And so have all things their being by the love of God."

This is one of the most famous passages in English mystical literature, and its power lies in its simplicity. The entire created universe, everything that exists, is the size of a hazelnut in Julian's palm. It is small. It is fragile. It could fall to nothing at any moment. And the only reason it does not is that God loves it.

Three properties belong to this hazelnut-sized creation, Julian tells us: "The first is that God made it. The second is that God loves it. The third is that God keeps it." These three truths, creation, love, and preservation, are the foundation of Julian's entire theology. Everything that follows in the Revelations is an elaboration of what she learned from a hazelnut.

"All Shall Be Well": The Most Radical Sentence in English Theology

In her thirteenth showing, Julian hears Christ say: "Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." The word "behovely" (sometimes translated as "necessary" or "fitting") is itself startling. Sin is necessary? But Julian does not explain this in the way one might expect. She does not offer a theodicy, an argument that justifies the existence of evil. Instead, she records a promise and then spends years trying to understand how it could be true.

The difficulty is real. Julian was a devout Catholic living in an age when the Church taught that many souls were damned to eternal punishment. She was also a woman who had witnessed the devastation of plague, war, and social collapse. She did not have the luxury of abstract optimism. When she pressed Christ on the question of how "all" could be "well" when so much was clearly not well, and when Church teaching held that many souls were lost, the answer she received was enigmatic: "What is impossible to thee is not impossible to me. I shall save my word in all things, and I shall make all things well."

Julian never resolved this tension. She did not claim to know how God would make all things well. She did not propose universal salvation as a doctrine. What she did was hold the tension between what she saw (the absolute encompassing love of God) and what the Church taught (the reality of damnation), and refuse to let go of either. "There is a deed which the blessed Trinity shall do in the last day," she wrote, "and what the deed shall be and how it shall be done, there is no creature beneath Christ that knows it, nor shall know it till it is done."

This is not naive optimism. It is the most demanding kind of hope: a hope that acknowledges everything that seems to contradict it and still holds firm. T.S. Eliot quoted Julian in "Little Gidding," the last of his Four Quartets: "And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well." He understood that Julian's words carried their full weight only when spoken in full awareness of fire, suffering, and death.

God as Mother: Julian's Theology of Divine Maternity

Julian's theology of God as Mother is her most distinctive and, for many modern readers, her most compelling contribution. She develops this theme primarily in chapters 57 through 63 of the Long Text, and she does so with a precision and depth that goes far beyond metaphor.

"As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother," she writes. She applies the title of Mother specifically to the Second Person of the Trinity, to Christ, whom she sees as the one who gives us birth, feeds us, and tends us through our growth. "The mother can give her child to suck of her milk," Julian writes, "but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament, that is the precious food of true life."

This is not a simple feminization of God. Julian is drawing on a tradition that has roots in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 66:13, "As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you") and in earlier Christian writers including Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux, both of whom used maternal imagery for Christ or God. But Julian develops the theme far beyond any of her predecessors.

She describes three aspects of divine motherhood: the motherhood of nature (in our creation), the motherhood of grace (in our redemption), and the motherhood of working (in our ongoing spiritual growth). Christ as mother labours in giving birth to us, feeds us with the sacraments, and patiently tends us through all our stumbling and falling. When we fall, the mother does not reject us. "The mother may allow the child to fall sometimes and be distressed in various ways, for its own benefit, but she can never allow any kind of peril to come to her child, because of her love."

Sin Has No Substance: Julian's Understanding of Evil

Julian's treatment of sin is one of the most philosophically interesting aspects of her theology. She was shown, she tells us, that "sin has no substance, no manner of being, nor could it be known except by the pain that it causes." Sin is real in its effects but has no positive existence of its own. It is an absence, a wound, a privation. This places Julian in a theological tradition that goes back to Augustine, who also argued that evil has no independent being, but Julian develops the insight in her own distinctive way.

God, Julian was shown, does not blame us for our sins. This is stated repeatedly throughout the Revelations and clearly troubled Julian, because it seemed to contradict Church teaching on judgement and punishment. She resolves the tension (partially) through the parable of the lord and the servant in her fourteenth showing, which she spent nearly twenty years interpreting.

In the parable, a lord sends a servant on an errand. The servant, eager to do his lord's will, runs off so quickly that he falls into a ditch and injures himself. The lord looks on the fallen servant not with anger but with pity and compassion. Julian was shown that this parable applies simultaneously to Adam (the first human who fell) and to Christ (who descended into human nature to rescue the fallen servant). The fall and the redemption are, in some sense, one event.

"I saw that only pain blames and punishes," Julian writes, "and our courteous Lord comforts and sorrows. He always regards the soul that he loves with a friendly expression, and with a sweet, gracious countenance." This is a God who grieves with us in our suffering rather than standing above it in judgement. It is an understanding of divine love that has no equivalent in the medieval period and that anticipates certain strands of twentieth-century theology, particularly the work of Jurgen Moltmann on the suffering God.

The Anchoress Life: Enclosure as Freedom

Julian lived as an anchoress, a woman permanently enclosed in a small room (anchorhold) attached to St Julian's Church in Norwich. The ceremony of enclosure included prayers from the Office of the Dead, symbolizing the anchoress's death to the world. The cell was sealed. Julian would never leave it.

The anchorhold typically had three windows. One opened into the church, allowing the anchoress to see the altar and receive communion. One opened to an outer room where a servant brought food and removed waste. The third, the most socially significant, opened to the outside world, allowing visitors to seek the anchoress's spiritual counsel.

This third window made Julian a public figure. An anchoress was understood to be a kind of living saint, someone whose withdrawal from the world gave her access to spiritual authority that was otherwise unavailable to women. The Book of Margery Kempe records a visit to Julian around 1413, in which Margery sought Julian's advice on her own mystical experiences. Julian gave her careful, measured counsel, advising her to test her experiences against the teaching of the Church and the fruits they produced in her life.

It is worth pausing on the paradox of Julian's situation. She was enclosed in a cell and yet produced one of the most intellectually free works of medieval theology. She was silenced by her gender and yet found a form of authority that allowed her to teach, counsel, and write with a boldness that few men of her era matched. The anchorhold was a prison and also a liberation. Freed from the demands of domestic life, institutional politics, and social performance, Julian could give her entire attention to the one thing that mattered to her: understanding what God had shown her.

Short Text and Long Text: Twenty Years of Contemplation

Julian wrote two versions of her Revelations. The Short Text, written soon after her visions in 1373, is a relatively straightforward account of what she experienced. It runs to about 11,000 words and has the immediacy of a first report. The Long Text, completed around 1393 (twenty years later), is approximately four times longer and represents Julian's mature theological reflection on the meaning of her showings.

The differences between the two texts reveal the depth of Julian's contemplative process. The Long Text contains extensive theological development that does not appear in the Short Text, including the full articulation of God as Mother, the detailed interpretation of the lord and servant parable, and the most sustained reflection on the "all shall be well" theme. Julian did not simply add material. She rethought her entire experience in light of twenty years of prayer, study, and interior work.

This twenty-year gap is itself a teaching. Julian did not rush to publish. She did not treat her visions as self-interpreting. She sat with them. She questioned them. She struggled with the parts that did not make sense to her. She allowed the meaning to unfold slowly, through sustained contemplative attention. In an age that values instant interpretation and quick takes, Julian offers a model of patient, receptive thinking that is increasingly rare and increasingly needed.

Julian's Historical Context: Plague, War, and Heresy

Julian's theology was formed against a backdrop of catastrophe. She was born around 1342, six years before the Black Death reached Norwich in 1348. The plague killed approximately one-third to one-half of the population of England, and Norwich was among the hardest-hit cities. Further outbreaks followed in 1361 and 1369. Julian would have grown up in a world shaped by mass death, social disruption, and theological crisis.

The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 reached Norwich, where rebels attacked the local priory and killed several people. The Hundred Years' War dragged on. The Western Schism (1378-1417) split the papacy, with rival popes in Rome and Avignon, each claiming sole legitimacy. The Lollard movement, inspired by John Wycliffe, challenged Church authority and was met with increasing repression. In 1401, England passed the statute De Heretico Comburendo, authorizing the burning of heretics.

Julian wrote her Long Text in this atmosphere of crisis and suppression. Her theology of radical divine love, her insistence that God does not blame us, her refusal to accept that any soul is ultimately lost, these were not safe positions to hold. She navigated the danger carefully, insisting on her submission to Church teaching while quietly maintaining conclusions that went well beyond (and in some respects against) official doctrine.

Julian's Legacy and Contemporary Relevance

Like Hildegard before her, Julian was largely forgotten for centuries after her death. The Revelations of Divine Love survived in only a handful of manuscripts. The Short Text exists in a single copy (British Library MS Additional 37790). The Long Text was preserved primarily through recusant Catholic circles and a seventeenth-century edition by Serenus de Cressy.

The modern recovery of Julian began in the early twentieth century and accelerated dramatically from the 1970s onward. Grace Jantzen's 1987 study Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian was a watershed, arguing that Julian should be taken seriously as a systematic thinker rather than merely a pious visionary. Denys Turner, in Julian of Norwich, Theologian (2011), went further, placing Julian alongside Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart as one of the medieval period's most significant theological minds.

Julian's influence on modern literature and spirituality has been substantial. T.S. Eliot's quotation of "all shall be well" in Four Quartets introduced her to a wide audience. Thomas Merton was deeply influenced by Julian. The feminist theologian Grace Jantzen drew on Julian's work for a theology of "becoming divine." More recently, the novelist Maggie Ross has published extensive scholarship on Julian, and the theologian Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) has written about her with admiration and insight.

Her cell in Norwich was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries and damaged further during the Blitz. It has been rebuilt and is now a place of pilgrimage. The Julian Centre, adjacent to St Julian's Church, serves as an ecumenical centre for prayer and spiritual direction. People come from around the world to sit in the small reconstructed cell where Julian lived and wrote, seeking some trace of the presence that produced one of the most hopeful and demanding theological works in the English language.

Practising Julian's Wisdom Today

Julian's theology is not a system to be studied from a distance. It is an invitation to a specific kind of spiritual practice: patient, contemplative attention to the presence of God in the midst of ordinary and often painful life.

Her hazelnut vision suggests a meditation practice. Hold a small object (a stone, a seed, a bead) in your hand and consider: this small thing exists because God made it, God loves it, God keeps it. Everything that exists shares this condition. You share this condition. The practice is not about generating feeling but about allowing a truth to settle into awareness: that existence itself is an expression of love.

Her understanding of sin as "no substance" offers a framework for self-compassion that avoids both denial and self-punishment. When you fall, when you fail, when you do harm, the response Julian models is not self-flagellation but turning to the divine presence the way a child turns to its mother. "He did not say: you shall not be tempested, you shall not be travailed, you shall not be distressed," Julian wrote. "But he said: you shall not be overcome."

The Hermetic Synthesis Course places Julian within the broader contemplative traditions of the West, exploring how her vision of divine love connects with the Hermetic understanding of the cosmos as a living expression of the One.