JULIAN
OF NORWICH, HER SHOWING OF LOVE AND ITS CONTEXTS ©1997-2008
JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY ||
JULIAN
OF NORWICH || SHOWING
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'COURTESY' AND
'HOMELINESS'
IN THE REVELATIONS OF JULIAN
OF
NORWICH
SISTER ANNA MARIA REYNOLDS, C.P.
n
his stimulating book on Jane Austen's language, Mr Norman Page writes,
'Surely the colour and flavour of a text are determined not by the
exceptional
words, unless these words taken together form a large class, but in the
main by the common words used by the author, the words used by him over
and over again?'(1) The remark serves as an apt introduction to the
purpose
of this essay, in which I intend to look closely at two sets of words
used
by Julian of Norwich. My aim is to recapture what Mr Page describes as
'the precise sense of the meaning carried by these words for the writer
and her contemporaries,' and in the light of this knowledge to identify
our responses to the truth which they enshrine.
Even a casual reading of
Julian's
book makes one aware of the frequency with which the words courtesy
and
homeliness, with their derivatives, are used in the Revelations:
their constant recurrence indicates that these two sets of words, the
warp
and the woof of her writing, express key-concepts in the anchoress'
experience
of God.
The provenance of the two
qualities
is very different. Courtesy is a word whose ramifications and
overtones
embrace the social, moral and literary history of Western Europe from
the
twelfth to the fifteenth century: the world of troubadors, minnesingers
and writers of romance, the world of the Roman de la Rose and
the
Courts of Love. It was a leisurely, aristocratic world, where
courtoisie
governed the whole pattern of social intercourse and relationships
between
men and women and between men and men.
During the twelfth and
thirteenth
centuries courtoisie had been closely connected with the convention of
Courtly Love. According to Richard Barber:
Any love worth his salt was at
once cortes, a word that meant both 'courteous' and 'courtly'
and
implied a knowledge of the conventions. Certain things were not
cortes:
Falsehood in love, miserliness, infidelity and lack of restraint or
secrecy.(2)
By the end of the thirteenth
century
the Minnesang had disappeared into contests of technique on the one
hand
and social satire on the other. The amours which had inspired the lyric
poetry of chivalry and the social convention of love attached to it,
were
becoming discredited. But the idea of 'love-service' survived well into
the fifteenth century, long after the social and poetic impulses which
gave it life, had died out. The decline was so slow, almost
imperceptible,
so that accepted ideas of knightly society as to love in 1250 would
have
been perfectly understood in 1450.
Towards the middle of the
fourteenth
century in England, chivalric fashions were set almost entirely by the
French, and the virtues of prowess, loyalty, largesse, franchise and
courtesy
were held above all to mark the good knight.(3)
Courtoisie, the
attainment
of all worldly virtues, becomes the keynote of chivalry. Much of courtoisie
was concerned with questions of manners: hospitality and a warm
welcome; debonairte
or gaiety and openheartedness seemed to be as essential as loyalty, and
generosity is as vital as compassion.(4)
Its characteristic and permanent
traits
are listed as follows by a modern scholar:
Observation du salut, du baiser
et du congeé, pratique de l'acceuil et de l'hospitalité,
soyauté et fidelité, bonté et pitié,
douceur,
liberalité et largesse, joie, souci de la renommée,
mesure,
amour et, dans l'amour même, application des vertues courteoises
s'ils n'en sont pas l'achèvement.(5)
By the fourteenth century courtoisie
had
become synonomous with curialitas, the nobilitas morum ,
'the cardinal virtue, so to speak, of the chevalier, the embodiment of
the social and ethic ideal of chivalry.'(6)
This aristocratic genealogy of
courtesy,
with all its associations and resonances, is clearly brought out in the
fourteenth-century English alliterative romance (whose author was a
contemporary
of Julian) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this poem,
according
to one critic, 'the central interest is not the Green Knight but Gawain
and the cortays Arthurian civilization he represents'.(7)
Gawain
is shown to be not only a brave man but one who is invariably well
bred,
polite and urbane in conversation and behavior, deferential to all
women,
tactful, gentle, modest and self-effacing. His cortayse is
implicitly
contrasted with vilaynye, the behaviour appropriate to a vilain
or peasant. Indeed, the courtly code is so important to Gawain that he
goes against his conscience rather than rebuff a lady - noblesse oblige.
Julian's use of the courtesy
concept
subsumes and sublimates all these earlier connotations: lordship,
prowess,
fidelity, gentleness, generosity, and service. The Christ of her
experience
is Lord, All-Mighty, All Wisdom, All Love:
See, I am God; see, I am in all
things: see, I do all things: see, I never lift my hands off my works,
nor ever shall, without end: see, I lead all thing to the end that I
ordain
it to, from without-beginning, by the same might, wisdom and love that
I made it with. How should anything be amiss?(8)
He is the glad giver who, with
supreme
tact,
ever taketh but little heed of
the thing that he giveth . . . And if the receiver take the gift gladly
and thankfully, then the courteous giver setteth at nought all
his
cost and all his woe, in return for the joy and delight that he hath;
for
he hath pleased and solaced him that he loveth.
He is the knight par excellence,
who,
deprecating his great deeds,
of his great courtesy .
. . doeth away all our blame, and beholdeth us, with ruth and pity, as
children innocent and loveable.
He manifests the welcoming
joyfulness
characteristic of the perfection of chivalry:
Then our courteous Lord
sheweth himself to the soul cheerfully with glad countenance, with a
friendly
welcome.
There is a divine munificence in
his
working:
Grace worketh with mercy, by
lifting
up, rewarding, endlessly surpassing all that our loving and our travail
deserveth, spreading abroad and making plain the high abundance and
largesse
of God's royal Lordship in his marvellous courtesy.
Knightly pity is transformed into
divine
compassion:
I saw that only pain blameth
and
punisheth; but our courteous Lord comforteth and soccoureth.
And again:
Our Lord of his mercy sheweth
us
our sin and our feebleness, by the sweet gracious light of himself. For
our sin is so foul and so horrible that he, of his courtesy,
willeth
not to show it us except by the light of his mercy.
He is the personification of
fidelity
and trustiness:
Also, our courteous
Lord,
in that same time, shewed full sweetly and full mightily the
endlessness
and immutability of his love.
But this courteous Lord of might
and
majesty is also the Lord who condescends to treat with his own
creatures
as with an equal:
The place that Jesus taketh in
our soul-he shall never remove therefrom without end. For in us is his homeliest
home and his endless dwelling.
Homely
and
homeliness
have no such distinguished and scintillating history as courteous and courtesy:
their associations, literary and social, are at the opposite end of the
knightly spectrum - the equivalent, in fact, of vylanye in
knightly
estimation.
The words derive, of course,
from
home, of Old English origin, and though in modern English homely
and homeliness convey a mild suggestion of patronage and in
their
meaning of 'plainness ', and 'simplicity', in Julian's day the usual
meaning
of homely was 'familiar'; or 'intimate'. The word homeliness
occurs
in Rolle and is used of
Christ
by Wyclif with the sense
'familiar'.
Significantly, these words do not occur in Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight. Indeed, there appears to be no literary precedent for
Julian's
coupling of homeliness with that of courtesy ; the
words
belonged to different worlds and had less in common that have the
connotations
of 'nature' and 'nurture' for present-day readers.
The homeliness of God
is
a paradox which filled Julian with astonishment and delight:
For truly, it is the greatest
joy
that could be, as I see it, that he who is highest and mightiest,
noblest
and worthiest, is the lowest and meekest, homeliest and most courteous
.
What this homeliness of
our
Lord involves is carefully explained by Julian:
He cometh down to us, to the
lowest
part of our need. For he despiseth nothing of what he hath made. And he
disdaineth not to serve us in the simplest offices that belong, in
kind,
to our body, for love of the soul that is made to his own likeness. For
as the body is clad in clothes, and the flesh in skin, and the bones in
flesh, and the heart in the breast, so are we, soul and body, and more
homely: for they all vanish, wasting away. But the good of God is ever
whole and most neart to us, without any compassion.
Homeliness, therefore,
implies
nearness - more, an active, loving presence to us and in us on God's
part;
not the aloofness, formality and reverence of the courteous knight, but
the closeness, warmth and tenderness of the loving mother whose service
is always 'nearest, readiest and surest'.
Julian actually uses the words
'God
is our Mother' and expounds the implications of this (ultimately
scriptural)
image with a wealth of detail:
This office no one might nor
could
ever do to the full, except he alone. We know that all our mothers bear
us to pain and dying; a strange thing, that! But our true Mother,
Jesus,
he alone beareth us to joy and to endless living . . . Thus he
sustaineth
us within him in love and in travail, unto the full time in which he
willed
to suffer the sharpest throes and most grievous pains that ever were,
or
ever shall be; and he died at the last. Yet all this might not fully
satisfy
his marvellous love.
The fusion is complete. Courtesy
and
homeliness
become
one in the single daring image, 'our true Mother, Jesus'. Only in
Christ,
Redeemer as well as Creator, can the qualities both of the perfect
knight
and of the perfect mother be combined.
It remains now to see
what
the response of good souls should be to the courteous and homely
action of God in Julian's words:
It is his office to save us. It
is his worship to do it and it is his will that we know it. For he
willeth
that we love him sweetly and trust in him meekly and mightily. And this
showed he in these gracious words 'I keep thee full surely'.
Early on in her book Julian
had given us a reason for this trust in God, his courtesy and homeliness
:
He will be trusted, because he
is full courteous and homely. Blessed may he be.
Later, she makes clear that our
attitudes
to God should also reflect the courtesy and homeliness
with
which he treats us:
And thus we shall, in love, be homely
and near to God, and in dread, gentle and courteous to God both
qualities united equally.
She goes on to say:
For our courteous Lord
willeth
that we be as homely with him as heart can think or soul desire.
She adds, however, a timely
warning:
But we must beware lest we take
this homeliness so recklessly as to forsake courtesy.
Our
Lord Himself is sovereign Homeliness. But as homely as
he
is, even so courteous he is; for he is very Courtesy.
Such loving, reverent dependence
is
very pleasing to God:
The highest wisdom is for a
creature
to do according to the will and counsel of his highest sovereign
Friend.
This blessed Friend is Jesus; it is his will and counsel that we hold
us
with him, and fasten us, homely, to him evermore, in what state
so ever we be.
In other words, to quote a modern
spiritual
writer, we must be willing to live the following truth:
The daily life of the Christian
is summed up in the word receive. Every challenging thing that God
demands
of me - long-suffering, meekness, humility, goodness, holiness, joy -
is
not something I am or something I do, or some virtue I acquire or
attain
to. It is Christ in me. Each is the manifestation of Him.
(9)
When we are weak, then we are
strong,
provided we are firmly fastened to God: this is the supreme message of
the Revelations. Characteristically, Julian expresses it in
concrete
terms which recall the 'unless you become
as little children . . . ' of the Gospel:
And I understood that there is
no higher stature in this life than childhood-in the feebleness and
failing
of might and understanding-until the time that our gracious Mother hath
brought us up to our Father's bliss. And there shall truly be made
known
to us his meaning, in the sweet words where he saith: 'All shall be
well;
and thou shalt see it thyself that all manner of thing shall be well'.
We have come a long way from the
convention
of the Courts of Love and the sophistication of the Roman de la Rose
; yet Julian was a product of the age and of the culture which revelled
in both. She understood her world, however, saw what was good in it but
realized, too, that it had gone astray in divorcing human from divine
love.
Julian's special blessedness
lies
in this, that she learnt from experience that Divine Love embraces,
enriches
and ennobles human love:
God is all that is good, as I
see
it. And God hath made all that is made; and God loveth all that he hath
made. Thus he that loveth the whole - all his even-christians - for
God,
loveth all that is. (For in mankind that shall be saved is comprehended
all, that is to say, all that is made, and the Maker of all. For in man
is God, and in God is all.) He that loveth thus, loveth all.
Perhaps this message too, is of
particular
significance for our own day: 'He that has
ears to hear, let him hear'.
Sister Anna Maria Reynolds,
C.P.
Cross and Passion Convent
22 Griffith Avenue
Marino, Dublin 9
EIRE
Notes
This essay was first published
in
the Fourteenth-Century English Mystics Newsletter, 2 (1979),
12-20,
and is republished with the kind permission of that Journal's editors
and
of the author.
1.
Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1972), p. 56.
2.
Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (London, 1970), p. 78.
3.
Gervase Matthew, 'Ideals of Knighthood in Late Fourteenth-Century
England',
Studies
in Medieval History , ed. R.W. Hunt (Oxford, 1948), p. 360.
4.
Barber, p. 148.
5.
Quoted, A.J. Denomy, 'Courtly Love and Courtliness', Speculum 28(1953),
48.
6.
Denomy, p. 48.
7.
A.C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London, 1964), 38.
See also J. Lafitte-Houssat, Troubadours et Cours d'Amours (Paris,
1966), Ch. IX, 'L'Amour courtois: ses caractères'.
8.
Quotations from the Orchard edition of the Revelations, ed.
James
Walsh, S.J. (London, 1961); Penguin edition, ed. C. Wolters (London,
1966),
offers a completely modernized text.
9.
Watchman Nee, Changed Into His Likeness (London, 1971), p. 82.
See also:
Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P.,
Some
Literary Influences in Julian of Norwich;
Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P.,
The
Passion in Julian of Norwich;
and The
Julian
Summit
Julian
of Norwich, Showing of Love , definitive edition and
translation,
Firenze: SISMEL, 2001, available from SISMEL or
from
Julia
Bolton Holloway. Scholar/ Contemplative/
General/
To see an example of a page inside with
parallel
text in Middle English and Modern English, variants and explanatory
notes,
click
here.
To Julian
of Norwich, Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translation,
ed. Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P. and
Julia
Bolton Holloway (ISBN 88-8450-095-8), 848 pages, 18 full colour
plates
of the manuscripts, from University of Florence, SISMEL Edizioni del
Galluzzo,
2001, 191 euro, e-mail
galluzzo@sismel.itaor
Julia
Bolton Holloway
JULIAN
OF NORWICH, HER SHOWING OF LOVE AND ITS CONTEXTS ©1997-2008
JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY ||
JULIAN
OF NORWICH || SHOWING
OF LOVE || HER TEXTS || HER
SELF || ABOUT HER TEXTS || BEFORE
JULIAN || HER CONTEMPORARIES || AFTER
JULIAN || JULIAN IN OUR TIME || ST
BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN || BIBLE
AND WOMEN || EQUALLY
IN GOD'S IMAGE ||
MIRROR
OF SAINTS || BENEDICTINISM ||
THE
CLOISTER || ITS
SCRIPTORIUM || AMHERST
MANUSCRIPT ||
PRAYER ||
CATALOGUE
AND PORTFOLIO (HANDCRAFTS, BOOKS ) ||
BOOK
REVIEWS || BIBLIOGRAPHY
||
