In May 1373 a woman in Norwich, England, was dying. She was thirty and a half years old, by her own careful count, and a priest had propped a crucifix in front of her face so she’d have something holy to look at as her sight failed. Then the pain left her, and over the next day or so she saw sixteen visions.
We don’t know her name. She’s called Julian because she later lived walled into a cell attached to the Church of St Julian in Norwich, as an anchoress, praying for the town through a window. She spent about twenty years thinking over what she’d seen and wrote it down twice, in a short version and a long one. The long one, usually called Revelations of Divine Love, is often described as the first book in English we know was written by a woman.
I’ve been reading it alongside a much older text that she could never have seen. The Gospel of Truth was buried in the Egyptian desert about a thousand years before Julian was born, and it stayed there until 1945. The two have almost nothing in common historically.
They do share one stubborn conviction, and it’s an unusual one for any century. Neither of them can find an angry God.
What Julian Expected to See
Julian was a faithful daughter of the medieval church, and she says so over and over. She expected the visions to confirm what she’d been taught, including the part about divine judgment. Sin is real, and a holy God has to be furious about it.
So she kept looking for the anger, and it wasn’t there. In the long text she reports, almost with embarrassment, “I saw no wrath but on man’s part, and that forgiveth He in us.” The anger in the picture belonged to us. God’s side of the picture held none.
It bothered her for years. She couldn’t square it with the church’s teaching, and she says so honestly. The resolution she eventually reached is one of the strangest stories in Christian writing.
The Servant in the Ditch
To explain it, Julian tells a parable she received in the visions. A lord sends his servant on an errand. The servant loves him and runs off so eagerly that he falls into a ditch and gets badly hurt. He lies there groaning, unable to get up, and the worst part of his pain is that he can’t turn his head to see his lord, who is standing right there.
Then she looks at the lord, and he isn’t blaming the servant at all. He sees a man who fell because he was in a hurry to do good, and he’s already planning how to reward him for the injury.
Julian came to read the servant as Adam, meaning all of us, and also as Christ, who falls into the ditch of human life on purpose. The failure is real and so is the damage. What’s missing is the verdict. The only person in the scene who thinks the servant should be punished is the servant.
A Sermon Where Error Gets Angry
Now put the Gospel of Truth beside that. It’s a second-century sermon, probably from the circle of the teacher Valentinus, and possibly by him, though nobody can prove it. I’ve walked through it before. What struck me this time was where the anger shows up.
The sermon’s story is about forgetfulness. The beings who came from the Father lost track of him, and their confusion congealed into a fog. A figure called Error grew out of that fog and built a fake world, “a substitute for truth.” When Jesus came to teach, Marvin Meyer’s translation says, “Error was angry with him and persecuted him.”
So there is rage in this text. It belongs to Error. The Father, meanwhile, is described in terms that sound like a pastoral letter. Near the end the sermon says those who know him do not think of him “as insignificant or bitter or angry, but as free of evil, unperturbed, sweet.” The word “sweet” turns up again and again, and the fall itself gets treated as something closer to a mistake than a crime:
“It is something that has fallen, and something that can readily be set upright through the discovery of the one who has come to what he would restore.”
Set upright. That’s the servant in the ditch, more or less, written in Egypt a thousand years earlier.
The Doctor and the Mother
Both texts reach for the same kind of image when they explain how God responds to failure. Neither of them picks a judge.
The Gospel of Truth uses a doctor. “For a doctor rushes to where there is sickness, since that is the doctor’s wish,” it says, and the sick person doesn’t hide the illness, because the doctor has what the patient needs. Being in need is what draws the help. Nobody gets lectured for having a fever.
Julian goes further and uses a mother. Her best-known chapters on this call Christ “our Mother,” who feeds us from himself and lets a child fall so it can learn, without ever letting it go. Readers sometimes think she invented the idea. She didn’t, since the image has roots in Anselm and in older writers, but she pushed it harder than anyone before her.
And here’s the odd part. The Gospel of Truth, without explaining itself, speaks of the Word returning everything “to the Father, to the Mother, Jesus of infinite sweetness.” A second-century Gnostic sermon and a fourteenth-century English anchoress both land on a mothering Jesus, and neither one stops to apologize for it.
Where They Part Ways
It would be dishonest to make them twins. They disagree about important things.
Julian loves the created world. In her most famous vision, she’s shown something the size of a hazelnut in the palm of her hand and told that it’s everything that has been made. She wonders why it doesn’t fall to nothing, it’s so small, and she’s told it lasts because God loves it. Creation for her is fragile and held.
The Gospel of Truth is cooler toward the world. Einar Thomassen’s introduction in Meyer’s edition points out that this sermon has a more negative view of the cosmos than most Valentinian writing. The world is “mere appearance,” the fog given a shape. When knowledge comes, it says, the world of appearance “will disappear in the harmony of unity.”
They also disagree about sin. Julian keeps the word and takes it seriously, even though her God won’t condemn it. The Gospel of Truth talks much more about ignorance and forgetting.
For the sermon, the cure is remembering where you came from. For Julian, it’s being held while you heal. Those overlap, but they aren’t the same medicine.
All Shall Be Well
Julian’s most quoted line comes out of all this. She’d been asking why God allowed sin at all, and the answer she received was that sin is “behovely,” an old word meaning fitting or needed, and then:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
People sometimes hear it as cheerful optimism, which is a misreading. Julian wrote it while still convinced that sin did real damage. It’s a promise about the ending, made by someone who has looked straight at the ditch.
The Gospel of Truth makes a similar promise in its own voice. Error “is empty,” it says, “there is nothing within her,” and “as soon as the Father comes to be known, forgetfulness will cease to be.” Neither text pretends the fall didn’t happen. Both are sure it won’t get the last word.
It’s worth comparing this with the Gnostic myth of Sophia’s fall, which has the same structure on a cosmic scale. A mistake made out of longing, followed by grief, followed by restoration. The God of these texts keeps treating failure as an injury.
Trying It Out
Here are a few things I’ve been doing with these two texts, none of which require you to settle any doctrine first.
- Look for the anger in the picture. Next time you’ve messed something up, notice who in your head is furious about it. In my experience it’s mostly me. Julian would say that’s the only place the wrath was ever located.
- Read the ditch parable slowly. It’s in chapter 51 of the long text, and it’s short. Picture yourself as the servant. Then picture the lord’s face and see if you can let it look the way Julian describes.
- Try the doctor’s frame for a week. When you catch a failing in yourself or someone else, ask what it needs instead of what it deserves. The question changes faster than you’d think.
- Carry a hazelnut. I mean a literal one, in a coat pocket. Julian’s vision is about how small and breakable the world is, and how carefully it’s held. A nut you keep bumping into makes a pretty good reminder.
If you liked the pairing of Meister Eckhart and Thomas, this one works the same way. Two witnesses with no contact, giving matching testimony on a single point.
Julian’s long text ends with her waiting more than fifteen years to understand what the whole thing had meant. When the answer came, it was one word. In her account she asks what the Lord meant, and the reply is that “Love was His meaning.” Put her book on the desk next to a sermon written in Egypt a thousand years before her, and on that one point they say the same thing.
The Gospel of Truth (NHC I,3) is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), and the notes on its authorship and view of the cosmos come from Einar Thomassen’s introduction in the same volume. Julian of Norwich is quoted from the familiar modernized English of the long text of Revelations of Divine Love (chapters 27, 48, and 86), with the hazelnut vision, the parable of the lord and the servant, and the chapters on Christ as Mother paraphrased.
