Falling into a Mystical Ditch

First of all, my sophomore lit survey class proved again today just how bright they are–taking on a text that could not but be alien to them, they imagined their ways inside of it, and they made me look really good for Dr. Medine, who was observing my class for the sake of writing a letter of recommendation.

A while ago a student of mine asked why I went into English literature instead of academic theology, and Julian of Norwich is one of those reasons.? While Church History textbooks no doubt mention her as a specimen of Christian mysticism, today in English class we actually read her text together.? More precisely we read about a twenty-page excerpt of her Revelations of Divine Love, a devotional manual based on a vision of Christ that Julian had on her death bed.? (She wrote the book twenty years after that vision, so I suppose it wasn’t really her death bed, if one wishes to be precise.)? My Christian students and the rest had a bit of a time with Julian–she articulates a modified Boethian theory of sin in which sin is in fact a fall (and missing the mark, showing some awareness of the Greek idiom) but which does not derive from a rebellious will.? Instead, in the vision that she relates in our excerpt, humankind is like the servant of a great master who, rushing forth in enthusiasm to fulfill the role of a servant and do what pleases the master, stumbled and fell into a ditch.? Sin, therefore, is not a revolt born of pride but a condition brought about by capabilities not adequate to desire.

In other words, as I wrote in my lesson plan, God is not angry with the sinner.? He pities the fool.

That vision of Christian theology, that has almost no trace of the judicial, is quite alien to post-Reformation Christianity of all stripes, but as they did with Everyman, my students rose to the intellectual challenge, even as some voiced their displeasure with having to read all this Christian stuff.? (For what it’s worth, my Enlightenment class also asks why they have to read all that atheist stuff.)? As I noted to them, Luther’s grand questions of justification just weren’t on Julian’s radar screen; she was too busy contemplating the love of Christ to worry about what moments justify the declared-guilty sinner’s soul.

We then spent the rest of the period talking about Julian’s images of Christ-as-mother, and my students once again impressed Dr. Medine with their instinctive (I assume they’ve not read Elizabeth Johnson) hypotheses that, given the metaphorical character of all talk about the ineffable, Julian’s feminine Christ is not the product of some insidious “agenda” but the natural outgrowth of a very pious soul thinking about Christ not only in the terms she had read in books (though she is a formidable reader of Christian theology) but also in terms that her experience being around women and being herself a woman would yield.? In other words, in highlighting those bits of the Bible that the tradition tends to skim over, she articulated faithfulness to the tradition without merely echoing the same.

Next Tuesday we’ll finish up the unit on self-reflective verse with some Old English elegies, and then on to spring break.? I’m going to spend mine grading miderm exams.? How about you?