Was Lady Julian Eastern Orthodox?
Being an introduction to the August Material Mysticism at Comment
Warning: if you, like a normal person, don’t have a taste for academic theology, please skip the first three paragraphs of this.
Melting Scandinavian icebergs may not be encouraging environmental news, but it has been encouraging to watch the chilly relationship between Lutheran and Orthodox traditions melt thanks to the Finnish school of Lutheranism in the last fifty years that emphasizes our real participation in Christ. This used to just be an interesting Seminary factoid for me, but now, working my way through some of the remarkable volumes, from both the Lutheran (Jensen & Braaten, to the Mannermaa translation, through his student Kärkkäinen, and now both of Jordan Cooper’s irenic, principled books) and Orthodox sides (what a gift Bradley Nassif gives us, along with the fresh translation of Mark the Monk and approaches to Palamas much less barbed than Meyendorff, helpful as I continue to find him), this convergence is becoming more of a lived reality. For both the Lutheran and Orthodox traditions, salvation—which is to say, deification—is both an event and a process, both declarative and transformative. If physicists tell us that light is both particle and wave at once, maybe something similar can be said about our participation in God’s uncreated light. The difference is in emphasis, and the emphasis does matter.
Anglicans are poised to benefit from these developments, offering their own contributions to the doctrine of deification. Mark McInory, for example, shows how Richard Hooker (1554-1600) insists that “God hath deified our nature,” and “by virtue of this grace man is really made God.” McInroy also shows that for Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), “real holiness is our participation in God and our resemblance of him… this makes us really deiform.” Andrewes and Hooker, moreover, manage this without surrendering the Reformation distinctive of justification (on that score, thank you Davenant Institute, for reissuing a classic). Deification also pervades the nineteenth century Oxford Movement. For Pusey, those who are “faithful, by His amazing condescension, become what they receive, the Body of Christ.” Then there is C.S. Lewis and A.M. Allchin in the century after that.
Deification in Lutheranism and Anglicanism can be surprising to those who assume it to be an “Eastern” doctrine. But McInroy also reveals, undeniably in my opinion, how the retroactive “branding” of deification (whether negatively by F.C. Baur or positively by the venerable Vladimir Lossky) appears increasingly untenable. It is not Orthodox property as much as it is a common treasury shared by the entire Church. The doctrine is “ancient, not Eastern” (265). To believe otherwise is to be (unintentionally) duped by liberal German Protestants like Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. In light of all these developments, Paul Gavrilyuk’s ecumenical hopes around this doctrine are anything but naive, even if popular reporting on the convergence completely (deliberately?) ignores the robust Protestant contributions (which are happily on offer in the marvelous Oxford Handbook of Deification itself).
Because a predilection for such refined theological discussions is rare, I’ve tried to translate them into a material key, in what I hope is a lively pilgrimage account from Chicago to Norwich where the anchorage of the first known woman to write in English has been so lovingly reconstructed. On the way, I engage the Jesus Prayer and some of the history of Orthodox/Anglican relations. I examine recent Orthodox attempts to adopt the English anchoress, and conclude—in conversation with Julian herself—by allowing Anglican sterility (horrible, really) and Orthodox warmongering (more horrible still) to be eclipsed by the deifying grace proclaimed by the woman who appears to have anticipated all of these developments more than six centuries before they took place. The saints are always ahead.
And I saw no dyfference between God and oure substance, but as it were all God. And yet my understandyng toke that oure substance is in God, that is to sey, that God is God and oure substance is a creature in God (Long Text, Ch. 54, p. 84).
Our soul is made trynyte lyke to the unmade blessyd Trynyte (Long Text, ch. 55, p. 286).
[W]e are all bounde to God for kynd [i.e. nature], and we be bounde to God for grace (Long Text, ch. 62, p. 92).
Ironically, the very same passages that cause some to conclude that Julian “reproduces insights of the great theologians of the Eastern Church” (and hence everyone should become Orthodox), might cause others to conclude that the deifying impulses retroactively labeled “Orthodox” are in no way limited to the East, enabling us to contentedly remain in Western traditions. That having been said, God’s call on others is (of course) not my call to make. When glaciers melt, hitherto concealed pathways emerge; may our mutual Lord guide the footsteps of each of us as we make sense of this softening terrain.
At any rate, the essay I’m introducing, so patiently edited by the extraordinary folks at Comment (without whom it would be tediously breezy and unhinged), is entitled Julian for Everyone. I can’t wait to meet her (if I can bear to get close enough). You can can sign up for more from your wannabe theological Jacques Cousteau either by subscribing here at substack or through the monthly Material Mysticism. Thank you sincerely for reading.
I think the true answer to the question "was Julian of Norwich Eastern Orthodox" is clearly no--simply espousing a doctrine or teaching which agrees with the theology of Orthodoxy does not make one Orthodox; an Orthodox Christian is one who is a member of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy is "right worship"--and to worship rightly, one must worship with and in the one true Church. While I appreciate that you bring to light the presence of deification doctrines in certain Protestant/Anglican Western practices, I think this approach to the term "Orthodoxy" is far too generalizing and inaccurate to historical Christianity.
With Briksdalsbreen and the facade of Norwich Cathedral in this post, two favorite places for me, how could I not love this? Even if you hadn't mentioned Hooker or Julian.