Revelation as Exposure in Julian of Norwich's Showings

Without the public and historical revelation the private experience of God would remain poorly defined and subject to caprice. Without the private revelation of God, the public and historical revelation would not gain credence.

—Reinhold Niebuhr

However strange it may seem to begin this essay on a mystic with a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr,² who was no admirer of mysticism, it helps to highlight one of the great strengths of what I shall argue is Julian of Norwich's doctrine of revelation. In her Showings—which she herself called "a revelation of love that Jesus Christ our endless bliss made in xvi showings"³ —Julian offers an understanding of revelation that accounts for both "public and historical revelation" and "private" revelation. Given the recent trend to read Julian as a theologian and not exclusively as a mystic, it is rather striking that scholars have not attended to her understanding of revelation. ⁴ If we neglect the central role of revelation in her experience and consequently in her theology, then we also miss some of the strongest evidence for the claim that, as one scholar puts it, "Julian deserves to be considered a theologian."⁵ I shall argue that, in writing her Showings, Julian was operating with a developed notion of the nature of revelation, not simply recounting the particular visions given to her.

The chief aim of this essay is to make the case that Julian of Norwich had a sophisticated and capacious doctrine of revelation. There are at least two difficulties in making such a case. One difficulty is the possible objection that the very idea of a "doctrine of revelation" is a modern one.⁶ In reply, I would argue that Julian's is properly to be considered a doctrine of revelation not in that it addresses a twentieth-century problematic but in that it is coherent and does definite, consistent, and integrative work in her theology. It is also doctrine because it has to do with teaching: she herself was instructed by means of revelation without any intermediary, and she instructed others about that "revelation of love."⁷

The second difficulty is that much of Julian's doctrine of revelation is not explicit at all and therefore must be carefully elicited from the text. Its implicit nature is further aggravated by the consistent translation of the middle English shewe (show) as reveal, which only serves to bury her understanding of revelation deeper—both because some of the semantic range and richness of shewe get lost and because our own associations with reveal tend to be too confining. I maintain that reading Julian's shewynges as exposures (and the verb shewe as expose) can help us discover and draw forth implicit aspects of her understanding of revelation and, in doing so, demonstrate just how far-reaching and multi-dimensioned her doctrine of revelation is.⁸

I import into Julian's Showings terms—expose, exposure—which do not appear in the text and which indeed did not enter the English language until a century or more after Julian. My thesis is that the various forms and meanings of expose provide a potent heuristic device that opens up Julian's understanding of revelation to view, showing that it has a complex and compelling integrity in its own right, that it is the presupposition for much of the rest of her theology, and that it is integral to her Christology and anthropology. The risk of using any heuristic device is that it will fail or that it will import too many meanings so foreign to the text that it is little more than a speculative, indulgent exercise. In the present case, the introduction of the term expose is not entirely arbitrary, since in many cases it actually retrieves many meanings of, and creates many of the same associations as, shewe. In contrast, I would argue the semantic meaning of reveal is much narrower in scope; and, in translating the Middle English shewe as reveal, the translators of Showings are themselves making an interpretive decision and are importing into the text a word which...