Christ s Dear Flesh Dying: the Value of the Physical Experience in Julian of Norwich s Showings

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1 Literature and Culture of the Middle Ages: Mapping Medieval Women May 8, 2006 : the Value of the Physical Experience in Julian of Norwich s Showings In a culture where book learning and study of the church fathers was considered the highest scholarly pursuit, Julian of Norwich brought her gaze back to physical experiences and the corporeal world. The church emphasized the intellectual sphere as the proper place for theology (and men,) and denigrated the physical world and the lessons that could be learned from it as base or simple. Julian turned this formula on its head in her Showings, and the theory that she built upon her experienced visions of Christ s suffering and death challenge the authority and importance of the Church as the seat of spiritual knowledge. Julian places so much value on her physical experience that she claims there is no need for an intermediary, and she believes that her visions will give her more spiritual truth than studying with the priests. What is interesting is that God did not simply come to her and tell her what the meaning behind Christ s death was; he simply showed Julian what Jesus death looked like and the interpretation came to her directly from her senses. Scholars have debated the role and importance of mystics for centuries. Julian is held up as one of the most important and influential of medieval mystics, but it s just as conceivable that she could have been tried for heresy and killed or excommunicated, if one examines her theology and its basis. One scholar of mystics describes the state of mystical union in this way: that state in which the mystic experiences the presence of God in union in an overwhelming and - 1 -

2 indescribable manner it becomes the focal point for the rest of the mystic s life (Tuma 6). Julian was never a nun, and though she certainly was exposed to Christian writing and thought, she did not study them exclusively. Her visions of Christ s death were her text and the subject of her study, not only the writings of the Church and the Bible. Another scholar goes further, saying that mysticism has been identified with the attitude of the religious mind that cares not for dogma or doctrine, for Church or sacraments (Coleman (12). Julian surely had to be very careful, because she wasn t just telling people about her experiences; she actually became one of the Christian writers that she was in some ways reacting against. It s a wonder that she was not persecuted, but indeed she went on to become one of the most influential of those writers form the medieval period. This is nothing if not a testament to the power and subtlety of her book. Julian s descriptions of her visions in Showings are characterized by a level of detail bordering on obsession with the essential physicality of Christ. This focus on details is evidenced most clearly when she describes the moment of Jesus death in chapters 16 and 17 of the long text. In these chapters, she uses language to paint a vivid portrait of Christ s face and body as it passes from life to death. In her vision, she saw his dear face as it was then, dry and bloodless with the pallor of death (64). She focuses on this face in the beginning of the chapter, describing his color as it went more ashen blue, then darker blue, as the flesh mortified more completely (64). The focus on color is interesting; these are the sorts of details that a more traditional scholar may ignore because they don t seem - 2 -

3 to have much relevance to theology. The colors are significant because they reveal her obsessive attention to detail in order to bring her audience to a more personal understanding of the very reality of the physical experience. It is this obsession with details that reminds the reader that she is watching all of this, and her senses are part of the narrative strategy for a reason. Julian s gaze in chapters 16 and 17 is very conspicuous, she describes Christ s body as though she is actually looking at it, and the emphasis is on the senses themselves. Julian repeatedly mentions the face of Jesus in her visions, and more specifically his lips; there [she] saw these four colors, though before they appeared to [her] fresh, red-tinted and lovely (64). It is no mistake that her description of his lips feminizes Jesus. Furthermore, the change of color on Jesus face and lips from white to black is an indication that Julian was fully aware of Galenic/Humoral medicine, and was using it to great effect. White is associated with purity, hence the medieval belief in semen and breast-milk as purified or refined blood, while dark blue and black represent physical corruption and decay. The discoloring of his lips, which had been beautiful, is one of the details that strikes Julian as particularly disturbing. It s hard to imagine that this sort of feminized language would be used with a masculine figure without the implication of female characteristics being applied to him, which is indeed the case throughout her work she will later famously pronounce that Jesus is like our mother. This initial objectification of Jesus primes the pump for Julian s assertion that he has many feminine characteristics. Jesus is made into an object of the narrator s gaze, - 3 -

4 just as women are often portrayed by male authors. By placing the central figure of Christian ideology in a woman s position (object of study, nurturer, mother,) Julian is inverting the hierarchy that privileges male thought and masculine roles, and consequently the Church itself. Julian repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the physical embodiment and experience of Christ s death in order to drive home her inverted philosophy, as the corporeal or physical experience is associated with women and therefore is more simplistic in the eyes of the Church fathers. Julian insists that Jesus loss of moisture is the reason that he was transformed so dramatically at the moment of his death. She says: I saw Christ s dear flesh dying, seemingly bit by bit, drying up with amazing agony (65, emphasis added), and her obsession with this loss of moisture as one source of his pain says some interesting things about his feminine nature. Moisture has often been associated with femininity in the medieval medical model. The two qualities most associated with women in humoral medical models were moisture and cold, which both figure heavily into Julian s image of Jesus death. Medieval texts on medicine abound with references to moisture and coldness as the reason for many of the physical traits of women. In Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, for instance, we find the humors used to explain why women have no beards: in women, the excess of cold and moist humours rendered impossible the formation of the vapour which opened the pores and solidified into hair on contact with the air outside (Jacquart, Thomasset 73, - 4 -

5 emphasis added). Medieval philosophers and healers who followed Galen s model would only generally associate moisture with men when it came to either sexuality or sexual dysfunction. How odd then that Julian is so clear about the issue of Jesus and moisture? Jesus did not officially die, in her vision, until he had been robbed of all of his moisture by the elements and loss of blood. Even after Jesus had bled as much as was possible, he still had some moisture within him. The reader is not encouraged to think of this moisture as associated with sexuality in this case, so we are left to assume that his moisture was somehow feminine. This essential moistness is eventually overcome by a mixture of four different factors, and the point when he has lost all moisture is the moment Julian attributes to his death. While he had some moisture left within him, he was able to feel pain. Julian is famous for feminizing Jesus, and the passages describing his death could certainly support that argument in the way that her gaze focuses on Jesus as a body, foremost. Modern feminist critics have pointed out that the gaze reveals a great deal about the narrator, and the way that a masculine gaze makes female characters passive attests to women s lack of agency. The moment of Christ s death in the Showings is a fine example of Julian s tendency to feminize Jesus as he is made immobile, helpless against the forces that are at work against him. Jesus final words or actions are not the focus, as they had been in more traditional Christian dogma; instead Jesus body becomes the focal point, and Julian s act of experiencing it becomes her source of theological truths. Saint Bonaventure had - 5 -

6 written a very influential text that also dealt in part with Christ s passion and death, and it offers a fine contrast to Julian s account. In some ways, Saint Bonaventure also emphasizes Christ s body, he describes the scourging of Jesus in this way: His innocent, tender, pure, and lovely flesh. The Flower of all flesh and of all human nature is covered with bruises and cuts (328). One might compare this with Julian s own vision of Jesus as he appeared to her covered with open wounds, but let s look now to the crucifixion itself. Bonaventure spends a long time laboring over his description of Christ s death, but he does so as a modern journalist might, recounting Jesus last words, complete with numbered phrases, and a play-by-play account of his actions. For example, speaking about what Jesus said: The fifth [word] was when He said, I am thirsty, in which word there was the great compassion of the mother and her companions (336), and then Bonaventure goes on to explain what this means. The most physical the description gets is to describe some of Christ s final actions. In comparison with Julian, his telling is dry, simplistic, and altogether founded on and entrenched within existing dogma. He even states this clearly a little earlier in the text: I do not intend to affirm anything in this little book that is not asserted or said by Holy Scripture or the word of the saints or by approved opinion (318). His stated goal is to encourage people to think about Christ s death by telling them what happened during the passion. This is very different from Julian s version, which focuses on the passion itself and her visions - 6 -

7 of it, and all other meaning and interpretation is done afterwards, after years of meditation and rumination. Julian extrapolates from her vision certain theological arguments, making interpretations based upon it in much the same way as theologians before her did with the texts of the bible and their predecessors. She makes Jesus body her text, just as other medieval texts compare a woman s body to a text. The concept of Christ s body as a text is not exclusive to Julian, extant examples include the Charter of Christ, a painting which literally makes Jesus a page upon which text is written; there are also maps where Jesus is the canvas that the world is drawn upon. The difference here is that Julian is reading Jesus, and specifically the image and sense of his death, as compared with Bonaventure who read the events and circumstances surrounding Jesus death before. By making him a text, an object of study and her gaze, Jesus is feminized here just as surely as he is later when she calls him our mother. But more than simply being feminized, the very fact that she places so much importance on the senses and the act of experiencing the physical sensations makes her stand out from other medieval theologians. She mixes the high-minded theological reflections on Christ s martyrdom and what that means for his followers with the low-minded experiential, sensorial worldliness often associated with women and simple people. By placing so much value on the physical experience itself the way Christ looked as he died and suffered she is also taking some of the authority of the Church away or - 7 -

8 diminishing it. Even though she repeatedly emphasizes that she believes the Church is important, her message clearly calls it to question. If we assume that God didn t value physical experience or worldly concerns, as the Church s official doctrine asserted, then why would he grant visions of the crucifixion in such detailed, sensorial ways to Julian? She makes a great deal of use from these visions as the inspiration for her beliefs, emphasizing the compassion, joy, and love of Christ in response to her experiences. This undermines the basic message of the Church that a follower must learn with the priests, read the doctrine as interpreted by the fathers of the Church, and receive their salvation as well as their wisdom directly form the Church. That is to say: everything must be mediated through the Church. Julian does not follow this protocol, and this makes her dangerous to the stability of the governing Church. If she can make meaning from her visions, as she does in the long text of the Showings, then anyone could receive visions without an intermediary and make their own interpretations of their experiences. In chapters 32, 33, and 34 Julian deals directly with the incongruity of her own convictions in comparison with the teachings that she received from the Church. She clearly had realized that what she was saying could be used against her by some members of the Church, as had been done to others in the past, and she sought in these chapters to assert that her teachings were not necessarily in conflict with theirs because we cannot understand perfectly God s intentions and machinations. She did go so far as to say that one point in our faith is that many - 8 -

9 shall be damned (86), which does not seem to match Jesus message to her that all shall be well which she interpreted to mean that all will be saved. She avoids the conflict only by invoking God s mystery: what is impossible to you is not impossible to me (86). In all of these arguments, she is setting up Jesus and what she learned from her visions in opposition to the Church and its doctrine. She doesn t only challenge the Church, however; any challenge to the Church is also a challenge to an exclusively masculine world-view. Julian exalts experience of the senses in her Showings, which in turn inverts the view of the masculine authorities that worldly concerns are more simple or base than purely intellectual ones. She bases most of her views and interpretations directly off of the physical appearance and condition of Jesus as he is dying; not only using his body as a text, but making it the highest text that one can study. She is holding up the corporeal world and the manifested body of Jesus as the ultimate learning tool, even over the bible or the teachings of the Church. She never apologizes for her view, as indeed her feminization of Jesus at the moment of his death only reinforces her argument that the feminine concern for worldly phenomenon is valuable and can engender spiritual insights in its own right. By focusing so closely on her sensed visions of Jesus passion, Julian brings the perspective back to the physical and the experiential. She feminizes Jesus by directing her gaze upon him, emphasizing his feminine features much as a man typically sees only the physical characteristics of women. She also makes - 9 -

10 associations between Jesus and other feminine characteristics, emphasizing his moistness. She uses her felt experience as a text to draw her theological conclusions, adding that there is no intermediary between God and her. By celebrating the physical experience, Julian is contradicting both the Church s dogmatic stance and the masculine concept of worldly things being base and feminine. It is no coincidence that Jesus is feminized, and that the feminine view is celebrated as having equal value to the masculine, traditional viewpoint of the Church. Her two-sided approach makes it very possible to imagine this text as a feminist treatise, carefully calculated and argued to make a case that there is value to be found outside of the constraints of the male-dominated Church

11 Works Cited and Consulted Bonaventure, Saint. Meditations on the Life of Christ. Trans. Isa Ragusa. Ed. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green. Princeton: Princeton UP, Coleman, T W. English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century. 2nd ed. Westport, Conneticut: Greenwood P, French, Roger. Medicine Before Science: the Rational and Learned Doctor From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenmnet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Trans. Matthew Adamson. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity P, Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Trans. Elizabeth Spearing. London: Penguin Books, Tilley, Maureen A., and Susan A. Ross, eds. Broken and Whole: Essays on Religion and the Body. New York: College Theology Society, Tuma, George W. The Fourteenth Century English Mystics: a Comparative Analysis. Salzburg, Austria: Institut Fur Englische Sprache Und Literatur,