Julian offers us strikingly bold and original ways of thinking about God, about humanity, and about theological topics such as salvation, grace, mercy, and contrition.

I thought it might be helpful for anyone who loves Julian to look at the following books, to guide you in understanding and appreciating not only her towering wisdom as a spiritual guide, but also the nuanced theology that this mediæval visionary expressed in her writing. Julian, like any other great mystical theologian, ought to be studied as a theologian in order to appreciate her voice as a mystic. Many of the books she quotes by these Julian scholars are titles that I have found very helpful in my own study of Julian. I’m reading a book right now on Julian’s theology of grace, and the author mentions the work of scholars, especially over the last thirty years, who have made the case that Julian needs to be recognized not just as a mystic, but also as a theologian. The great mystics of the past would not have recognized such a division - it’s a problem of how we see things in our day.īack to Merton - and Julian. To be a mystic, at least within the Christian tradition, is to be a theologian as well.īecause we often associate theology with academic discourse, and mysticism with monastic or devotional discourse, it’s easy to assume that mysticism and theology are two different things, perhaps even mutually exclusive. Mysticism is not just an experience of God, it is a language of God (theology = “God-talk”) grounded in the Divine Mystery. It’s a reminder that, at least within Christian thinking, a proper name for mysticism is actually mystical theology.

I love this passage of Merton’s for many reasons, not the least of which is that he calls Julian a theologian. John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world… I think that Julian of Norwich is with Newman the greatest English theologian. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I get older and whereas in the old days I used to be crazy about St. Julian is without doubt one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. Consider what Thomas Merton once wrote, in one of his legendary Cold War Letters: It’s no secret to anyone who reads this blog that I consider Julian of Norwich to be one of, if not simply the, greatest of western Christian mystics.

Julian of norwich revelations