.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ God, which is the Maker, to whom it is oned.” And yet, “we may never come to full knowing of God till we know first clearly our own soul” (lvi.). The knowledge begins with God, but it begins with Him in the lowest place of the soul rescued from sin by mercy and entered by grace. “For Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all” (lxxx.). To the soul that looks on Christ a remembrance rises of its own “fair nature” made in His image; yet “our Lord of His mercy sheweth us our sin and our feebleness by the sweet gracious light of Himself” (lxxviii.). Thus in the working of grace the soul comes to the knowledge both of its higher and lower parts. For in finding in itself both a natural response to the working of grace by its love and its longing after God, and a contrariness to the goodness of grace by its often failing and falling, it experiences both the action of the “Godly Will” (which is within it as a part of, and a gift from, its higher nature, “the Substance”) and the action of a “beastly will” (from the simple animal nature) which can will no moral good and which, “failing of love,” falls into sin: whereby comes pain, with all the “travail” of good and evil in conflict during the course of restoration. But it is only when the Sensesoul (wherein the higher will must overcome the lower) is at last brought up to heaven, enriched by all the profits of tribulation, and is united to the Substance waiting there, “hid with Christ in God,” that we come to the perfect knowledge of God. For that knowledge, perfect in kind though always growing, can only begin when, being in our “full powers” and “all fully holy,” we come to know clearly our own united perfected Soul. This seems to be Julian’s view (lvi., etc.).

      Julian says elsewhere that we have in us here such a “medley” of good and evil that sometimes we hardly know of others or of ourselves wherein we stand, but that each “holy assent” that we make (by the Godly Will) to the grace and will of God, is a witness that we are of God. A witness to our sonship, it might be said’, and perhaps, taking Julian’s view for the time, we might think that as the Lost Son “came to himself,” so the soul comes to the consciousness of the Godly Will; that as he arose and came to his Father and found Him, or rather was found by his Father, so the soul receives the healing of Christ in Mercy and the leading of the Holy Ghost in Grace; and that as at last, the son not only found his father but found his lost sonship—yet a better sonship than ever he had known before—so the soul comes at last to find, more and more fully, that new sonship which is of its nature, yet is more than its nature. For it finds the nature oneness which by creation it had with the Son of God, enhanced and for ever sustained by grace.

      Sometimes, truly, the Mystical doctrine leads by tracks that are not easily followed, but it is perhaps only when her views are regarded in single parts, that any harm could be found in Julian’s statements—all qualified as they are by her “as to my sight.” At first indeed it may startle one to read of her saints that are known in the Church and in Heaven “by their sins,” to hear that the wounds left by sin are made “medicines” on earth and turned to “worships” in Heaven; but then we remember the joy that shall be in Heaven over “one sinner that repenteth,” the love that loves much because much is forgiven. And yet we remember the little children in their high faith and love and innocent days; and of such is the Kingdom of God. But the Child, with many “fair virtues,” albeit imperfect, was likewise Julian’s type of the Christian soul: “I understood no higher stature in this life than Childhood.”

      “To know our own soul”—it behoveth us to know our own soul—our high-nature soul, which is enclosed in God, and also our soul on the earth which Christ-Jesus inhabits, which has in it the “medley”: “we have in us our Lord Jesus uprisen, we have in us the wretchedness and the mischief of Adam’s falling, dying” (iii.). But elsewhere Julian gives this name “our own soul” to the Church, seeing the Church likewise as the dwelling and working-place of Christ (lxii.). She has been speaking of the Divine Wisdom being as it were the Mother of the soul, and now she seems to lead us to the Church as to the Nursery where He tends His children. “For one single person may oftentimes be broken, but the whole Body of Holy Church was never broken, nor ever shall be, without end. And therefore a sure thing it is, a good and a gracious, to will meekly and mightily to be fastened to our Mother, Holy Church, that is Christ Jesus. For the Food of Mercy that is His dearworthy blood and precious water is plenteous to make us fair and clean; the sweet gracious hands of our Mother be ready and diligently about us. For He in all this working useth the office of a kind nurse that hath not else to do but to entend about the salvation of her child” (lxi.). Each soul is indeed the soul of a person and most intimately knows itself in its personal experience, through which indeed alone it can come to knowledge of others. Yet the single soul knows itself best in the souls of all the saints, in the fellowship of the “Blessed Common,” where every virtue is found, not in each, at this time, but in all—not now in the perfect height nor the fairest flowering, but at growth in that ground where each plant holds some likeness to Christ.

      With Julian the Christian Faith is not a thing added to the Mystical sight: these are, as again and again she says, seen both as one. It is the inherent Christianity of her system that makes her teaching always, in a large way, practical. For the system came at first to be seen by prayerful searching made out of her practical need of an answer to the problem of sin and sorrow; the Mystical Vision came with “contrition, compassion, and longing after God,” those wounds that her contrite, pitiful, longing heart had desired should be made more deep in her life. It is through the work of grace that Julian reaches back to the gift of nature, its ground; and from the depths of this root-ground she rises soon again to the “springing and spreading” grace. So in the First of her Shewings the “higher” truth is seen: “we are all in Him beclosed,” but in the Last—the conclusion and confirmation of all—the lower, yet nearer, truth, which all may know: “and He is beclosed in us.” And speaking of this dwelling within the soul she speaks of His working us all into Him: “in which working He willeth that we be His helpers, giving to Him all our entending, learning His lores, keeping His laws, desiring that all be done that He doeth; truly trusting in Him” (lvii.).

      Julian had prayed to feel Christ’s dying pains, if it should be God’s will, in order that she might feel compassion, and the visionary sight of His pain in the Face of the Crucifix filled her with pain as it grew upon her. “How might any pain be more to me than to see Him that is all my life, all my bliss, and all my joy suffer?” Yet the Shewing of Pain was but the introduction to, and for a time the accompaniment of, the Revelation; the Revelation, itself, as a whole, was of Love—the Goodness or Active Love of God. So the First Shewing, as the Ground of all the rest, was a large view of this Goodness as the Ground of all Being. Although through these earlier Shewings the Saviour’s bodily pain is felt by Julian so fully in “mind” that she feels it indeed as if it were bodily anguish she bore, it is in this very experience that the shewing of Joy is made to her spirit. So when in the opening of the Revelation she tells of beholding the Passion of Christ, her first unexpected word is of sudden joy from the inner sight of the Love that God is: the sight of the Trinity:—“And in the same Shewing suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy. (For where JESUS appeareth, the blessed Trinity is understood, as to my sight.)” And even as Julian finds afterwards that the Last Word of the Revelation is the same as the First: “Thou shalt not be overcome” so the opening Sight already shews her that which shall be revealed all through, for learning of “more in the same,” and uplifts her heart to the fulness of joy that is shewn at the close. For she feels that this shock, as it were, of Revelation—this sudden joy of seeing Love in the midst of earth’s evil, beyond and beneath and in the pain that is passing, is the entrance into the joy of the Lord. “Suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart with utmost joy And so I understood it shall be in heaven without end to all that shall come there” (iv.). So at the close, when the vision was not of the Love Divine in that bending Face beneath the Crown of Thorns, but of the human love that shall spring up to meet the Divine out of the lowness of earth,—the vision of how from this body of death, as from an unsightly, shapeless, and stagnant mass of quagmire, there “sprang a full fair creature, a little Child, fully shapen and formed, agile and lively, whiter than lily; which swiftly glided up into heaven”—the spiritual shewing to the soul is this: “Suddenly thou shaft be taken from all thy pain…. and thou shalt come up above and СКАЧАТЬ