Julian of Norwich in Her Phenomenology

1 Julian of Norwich presents her short summary of this theology of sin and salvation, in relationship to nature and grace (cf. Barry Windeatt, ed., Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 131) in her Long Text [LT 63/1–13], and continuing until that chapter’s conclusion [LT 63/38–39]: “Thus I understode that al his blissid children which ben comen out of him be [by] kinde [nature] shal be browte ageyn into him be [by] grace.”

2 As examined by David Aers (cf. David Aers, “Sin, Reconciliation, and Redemption: Augustine and Julian of Norwich,” Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), pp. 133–171) this also contrasts with a central paradox of Julian’s theology (p. 170): “Julian systematically ignores our freedom to disobey the covenant offered by the source of life, to destroy others and ourselves, individually and collectively, as we strive to shore up the power of the earthly city we inhabit … Julian’s theology does not, probably cannot, address collective life and its domination by will and power alienated from God and the covenants.”

3 Jean-Luc Marion points the way by two certainties of method (cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness & Revelation, translated by Stephen E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 60): “the Spirit of truth” and “charity”: “The Holy Spirit sets the method of interpretation for the saturation of the phenomenon of Revelation. A second certainty follows: we must always consider that that which reveals itself in the saturated phenomenon of Revelation involves, as its alpha and omega, a single and unique excess: that of charity.”

4 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 4th edition (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1979/1991), pp. 187–253, “Section III: Exteriority and the Face”; for there also is an ethical dimension to the experience that calls forth action: “to meet the other, to see this person’s face, is to hear a voice summoning me” (as Max Van Manen has summarized Levinas, in Phenomenology of Practice (London: Routledge, 2014/2016), p. 116.

5 The Holy Bible: The New Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).

6 Christina M. Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014). Gschwandtner notes (p. 7): “Saturated phenomena are identified precisely through the effect they have on the person who witnesses them.”

7 Marion has distinguished between “revelation” (as possible phenomenon) and “Revelation” (as actuality of God by himself), delimiting philosophy and theology as separate regions of science (Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 367 (endnote 90)). Marion’s theology regarding “Revelation” is necessarily Trinitarian (Jean-Luc Marion, “A Logic of Manifestation: The Trinity,” in Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness & Revelation, 2016, p. 99).

8 See §24, To Give Itself, to Reveal Itself: The Last Possibility – the Phenomenon of Revelation, in Jean-Luc Marion, [“Etant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation”] Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 234–247.

9 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, edited by John D. Caputo, translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 152: “For ‘grace [charité] and truth came through Christ Jesus’ (John 1:17), and we have seen him, see him, and will see him, at once and indissociably, ‘saturated with love and with truth’ (John 1:14; trans. modified).”

10 Ciro García, “Il metodo fenemenologico della Teologia spirituale,” Mysterion 6, No. 2 (2013): 172–186, p. 178.

11 Charles André Bernard (1913–2001) has originated a theological and phenomenological framework for a scientific discipline of Christian spirituality [cf. Charles André Bernard, “La teología spiritual como disciplina científica,” in Teología Espiritual: Hacia la plenitude de la vida en el Espíritu [Teologia spirituale, 6th edition, 2002], 87–120, translated by Alfonso Ortiz and Vincente Hernández (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 2007), whose more developed presentation and crowning achievement was his Teología Mística, published after his death in Rome on 1 February 2001 (cf. Charles André Bernard, Teología Mística [Théologie Mystique, 2005], edited by Maria Giovanna Muzj (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2006)). In his Teología Mística (pp. 18–47), and clearly applicable to Julian of Norwich’s rationale for her spiritual texts, Charles André Bernard has described: (1) the general principles of spirituality, including the communication of the divine life and the life of grace; (2) the experiential subject of the spiritual life, including the sensible activity of the Spirit and its relation to affective life; (3) the realization of the interpersonal dialogue between God and humankind, including the human response in charity to the transcendence of God by action and prayer; and necessarily, (4) the progressive life in the Spirit, in terms of its development and its mystical dimension. Likewise, Bernard Lonergan’s phenomenological and epigenetic theological method in its dialectic (cf. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, 2nd edition, reprinted (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute, 1973/2013), pp. 235–266; Jean Piaget’s L’épistémologie génétique, 1950) is consistent with Jean Piaget’s epistemological critique of Edmund Husserl where both had criticized Husserl’s “highly purified empiricism,” based upon the necessary and interactive relationship between “insight” and “activity” (cf. Jean Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy [Sagesse et illusions de la philosophie, 1965], translated by Wolfe Mays (New York: World Publishing Company, 1971), p. 104; Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 3, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th edition revised and augmented, and reprinted, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Lonergan Research Institute, 1957/1992/2013), p. 440).

12 Francesco Asti, Teologia della Vita Mistica: Fondamenti, Dinamiche, Mezzi (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009).

13 Francesco Asti, “Teologia spirituale ed esperienza spirituale Cristiana,” Mysterion 5, No. 2 (2012): 76–102, p. 93.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 101.

16 Ibid.

17 Domenico Sorrentino, L’esperienzia di Dio: Disegno di teologia spirituale (Assisi: Cittadella, 2007).

18 Ibid., pp. 62–63.

19 Ibid., p. 130.

20 Ibid., pp. 117–118, 138.

21 Jesús Manuel García, “Lo statuto epistemologico della Teologia spirituale in contesto interdisciplinare,” Mysterion 5, No. 2 (2012): 48–75, pp. 62–67; Jesús Manuel García Gutiérrez, “Il metodo ‘teologico esperienziale’ della teologia spirituale,” Mysterion 9, No. 1 (2016): 5–17.

22 Jesús Manuel García, “Lo statuto epistemologico,” p. 62.

23 Jesús Manuel García Gutiérrez, “Il metodo ‘teologico esperienziale,’” p. 6.

24 Ibid., p. 7.

25 Ibid., p. 8.

26 Ibid.

27 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness & Revelation (p. 64): “In order to see the uncovered mystērion, it is thus necessary to pass from our spirit to the Spirit of God, so as to see it as God sees it [my emphasis]. This is nothing less than an overturning of intentionality: taking the intentional gaze of God on God, instead of claiming to retain our intentionality in front of the intuition of the mystērion.” Marion has said the same for the hermeneutics of biblical text [Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte, 2nd edition [Dieu sans l’être: Hors-texte, 1982], translated by Thomas A. Carolson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991/2012), p. 149: “The text results, in our words that consign it, from the primordial event of the Word among us; the simple comprehension of the text … requires infinitely more than its reading … it requires access to the Word through the text [which is a divine revelation, not revealed by humankind, but by the Spirit of God]. To read the text from the point of view of its writing: from the point of view of the Word [my emphasis].”

28 Cf. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, Collected Works, Vol. 3, translated by Waltraut Stein (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), p. 64. Also see: Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, translated by F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1913/1983), p. 363: “The intersubjective world is the correlate of intersubjective experience, i.e., <experience> mediated by ‘empathy’ … above all, however, we are referred to the novel factor of empathy and to the question of how it plays a constitutive role in ‘Objective’ experience and bestows unity on those separated multiplicities.”

29 Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena [De Surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés, 2001], translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), p. 159: “The intention (concept or the signification) can never reach adequation with the intuition (fulfillment), not because the latter is lacking but because it exceeds what the concept can receive, expose, and comprehend”; and (pp. 161–162): “First, the excess of intuition is accomplished in the form of stupor, or even of the terror that the incomprehensibility resulting from excess imposes on us […] Access to the divine phenomenality is not forbidden to us; in contrast, it is precisely when we become entirely open to it that we find ourselves forbidden from it – frozen, submerged, we are by ourselves forbidden from advancing and likewise from resting. In the interdiction, terror attests the insistent and unbearable excess of the intuition of God. Next, it could also be that the excess of intuition is marked – strangely enough – by our obsession with evoking, discussing, and even denying that of which we all admit to having no concept.”

30 Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, translated by John W. Harvey, revised with additions (London: Oxford University Press, 1923/1936), pp. 25–30. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological and theological framework of “givenness” provides a contemporary solution for Otto’s classic problem in the context of the three paths offered in “mystical theology” (Denys “the Areopagite”), those corresponding to the affirmative (kataphasis), negative (apophasis), and hyperbolic (eminence). For the latter way, of via eminentiae, in an analogy to the pragmatics and perlocutions of erotic discourse, Marion states (cf. Jean-Luc Marion, “What Cannot Be Said,” in The Visible and the Revealed, 101–118 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 116): “It is no longer a question of a discourse about beings and objects, about the world and its state of affairs, but rather the speech shared by those who discourse about these things when they no longer discourse about them but speak to one another.” It is a matter of “de-nomination” (cf. Jean-Luc Marion, “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of It,” in In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena [De Surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés, 2001), 128–162 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 134–142) within its description as saturated phenomena (ibid., p. 160): “Excess [of intuition] conquers comprehension and what language can say […] in short, God remains incomprehensible, not imperceptible – without adequate concept, not without giving intuition.” Accordingly (ibid, p. 162), “The Name – it has to be dwelt in without saying it, but by letting it say, name, and call us. The Name is not said by us; it is the Name that calls us. And nothing terrifies us more than this call … because we hold it to be a fearful task to name with our proper names the One … to whom God has bestowed the gift of the name above all names.”

31 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 323.

32 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness & Revelation, 2016, pp. 104–106. God is not subject to finite knowledge, or to the idolatry of any attempted reduction, because God is not an object and God cannot be reduced to a concept. However, Otto’s alleged “wholly other” of the divine is not completely so: for knowledge of God is possible: (1) from the Father (the invisible of the Son), by virtue of the soul’s spiritual life, which is gifted and shared from the divine spirit; (2) from the Son (the visible of the Father), by virtue of the material incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, the God-Man; and (3) from the Holy Spirit (The icon shows the Son as the Father only if God gives the grace, the art, and the manner of seeing it as it should be seen; and God gives it as the Holy Spirit, as the one who remains invisible in the icon because he shows it), by grace.

33 Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, Hors-Texte, 2nd edition, translated by Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1991/2012), p. 104: “Distance lays out the intimate gap between the giver and the gift, so that the self-withdrawal of the giver in the gift may be read on the gift, in the very fact that it refers back absolutely to the giver.”

34 God as the “absolute given” always gives himself entirely. Yet, what gives itself of God is yet to be fully realized within the soul’s material limitations of existence. We encounter here the mystery of “incarnation” for human salvation (cf. Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, translated by Karl Hefty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000/2015, p. 260): “Because ‘God engenders himself as myself,’ and because ‘God engenders me as himself,’ then, truly, because it is his life that has become my own, my life is nothing other than his own: I am deified, according to the Christian concept of salvation.”

35 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 323.

36 Kees Waaijman, Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods, translated by John Vriend (Leuven: Peters, 2002), p. 707.

37 Kees Waaijman, Spirituality, 2002: p. 707: from Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Exposé sur le Cantique des cantiques, par Jean-Marie Déchanet (collection « Sources Chrétiennes », n° 82) (Paris, 1998), p. 141.

38 Kees Waaijman, Spirituality, 2002, pp. 707 & 727; and Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, ibid, pp. 147 & 149.

39 Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess, 2002, pp. 115–116: “We tell each other nothing in a certain (constative) sense, yet by speaking this nothing, or rather, these nothings, we place ourselves (pragmatically) face to face, each receptive to the (perlocutionary) effect of the other, in the distance that both separates and unites us. Constative and predictive (locutionary) or even active (illocutionary) speech definitely gives ways to a radical pragmatic (perlocutionary) use: neither saying nor denying anything about anything, but acting on the other and allowing the other to act on me.”

40 Christina M. Gschwandtner, Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014, p. 146: “Somewhat surprisingly, the final chapter of In Excess, which really should examine the possibility of a phenomenon of revelation if it consistently followed the outline of the five kinds of saturated phenomena (event, idol, flesh, icon, revelation) as presented in Being Given and the first chapter of In Excess, instead examines the kind of language appropriate for the divine. This language turns out to be prayer or praise. In some sense, then, this simply continues the earlier distinction between an idolatrous and an iconic way to approach the divine. Yet, formulated as a response to Derrida on negative theology, it is a much more conscious articulation of the linguistic element in prayer.”

41 As Pope Benedict XVI notes in his encyclical Verbum Domini (30 September 2010, 17): “Although the word of God precedes and exceeds sacred Scripture, nonetheless Scripture, as inspired by God, contains the divine word (cf. 2 Tim 3:16) “in an altogether singular way.” Scripture cannot be understood [interpreted] as text alone, apart from the magisterium and the living community of believers, apart from the living faith, which originates in God; so its hermeneutics is part of the ongoing temporal and living tradition of the church, which is both historical and communal; beyond simply words, scripture is living and divine [Logos]: namely (cf. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, p. 149): “The theologian must go beyond the text to the Word, interpreting it from the point of view of the Word.” Ultimately, both hermeneutics and revelation are linked by the decision of faith, by the gift to believe in Christ, where believing is seeing (cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness & Revelation, pp. 41–42): “We believe in God when we will it, clearly; but we will it only when we love that which we desire; and in the case of God, we receive this desire (desire for pleasure) from God alone … for without the hermeneutic decision, there is nothing to see, nothing to believe, and nothing revealed.”

42 Julian of Norwich, ST 6/42–43 (cf. Barry Windeatt, Ed., Revelations of Divine Love, 2016, p. 7): “Thane schalle ye sone forgette me that am a wrecche, and dose so that I lette yowe nought, and behalde Jhesu that ys techare of alle.” There is only one Teacher, the Word. Implicitly, “But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brethren” (Mt 23:8); and also, in Julian’s social obligation for writing her texts, “You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (Jn 13:13-14).