Julian of Norwich's Theology of Eros

Recent studies have elucidated Julian of Norwich's systematic theology, probing her thought in many of the traditional areas such as theology, anthropology, Christology, and soteriology.¹ Yet it seems to me that there is still a great deal more that we can learn from Julian, at both the theoretical and practical level. For in Julian we see one of the fullest medieval expressions of a theology of eros, one that provides context and nuance for all of her theological assertions. It does not go too far, I believe, to suggest that eros is the grounding principle of Julian's spirituality and systematic theology. Yet this is not instantly apparent in her works, because she makes no significant reference to the Song of Songs or to other texts and metaphors that the Christian mystics have traditionally used to describe the human-divine relationship in erotic terms. In this essay I shall highlight some of Julian's contributions to the Christian understanding of eros. Most notably, I will argue that her incarnational theology enables us to approach and appreciate eros as the foundational unitive principle—of God and humanity, of body and soul, and of human persons bound up in the mystical body of Christ.

The term eros has many levels of meaning, and, as will become clear, Julian's operative understanding of eros functions at all such levels, serving as a way to draw together our many experiences of relationality: the desire to live a meaningful life; to be present to one another; to integrate mind, body, and spirit; and to create communities that embody the loving message of Christ, making it more tangible in our day-to-day living. Our passion for beauty, peace, harmony, and, above all, the urge to express care, compassion, tenderness, and support are intrinsic to eros, a love that, in reaching outside itself toward another, expresses a relational bond that is part and parcel of the reality created by the God who is Love. Thus when I use the term eros I refer to the deeply human urge to form connections, to merge lives, to create and delight in beauty, to work together, to reach beyond oneself and dissolve boundaries of selfhood, to bind up wounds and restore life, to move from fragmentation toward wholeness, to generate and nurture new life. Eros is at the heart of all curiosity and desire, all creative activity, all commitments to sustain and enhance life, all attempts to share who we are with others, all community building, and, ultimately, any human evolution toward goodness.

In Julian's thought, the desire for union, eros, characterizes both God and humanity. God's being is love; God is known through the outpouring of God's own being in loving activity. In and through Christ all creation is invited into a unitive bond of love that infuses life into all that is. Eros is the force, in humanity, which stirs us to seek God—an echo of God's movement toward humanity in Christ. None of these ideas is entirely original to Julian. But Julian's extensive reflection on God's outpouring of love expressed in the passion of Christ provides us with a critical theological point to contemplate as we explore what it is to imitate Christ. Incarnating God's erotic love for humanity is part and parcel of the Christian life: as we learn to stretch ourselves erotically—that is, to pour ourselves out, in love—toward others, we make more manifest the body of Christ in our own time and space. Although I want to focus here specifically on the unique contributions Julian makes to a Christian theology and spirituality of eros, it is important to recognize that her understanding of eros is consistent with the deepest of theological reflections on eros in the Christian tradition, even as she adopts and develops a much more incarnational view of the erotic, indicative of the late medieval milieu in which she lived and wrote.

Eros as Creative, Binding Love

A good starting place, as we explore Julian's systematic theology of eros, is her ontology, presented...