Chapter 2

In thus maintaining the healthiness and vigour of Mother Juliana's mind, we may seem to be implicitly treating her revelation, not as coming from a Divine source, but simply as an expression of her own habitual line of thought--as a sort of pouring forth of the contents of her subconscious memory. Our direct intention, however, is to show how very unlikely it is antecedently that one so clear-headed and intelligent should be the victim of the common and obvious illusions of the hysterical visionary. For her book contains not only the matter of her revelations, but also the history of all the circumstances connected with them, as well as a certain amount of personal comment upon them, professedly the fruit of her normal mind; and best of all, a good deal of analytical reflection upon the phenomena which betrays a native psychological insight not inferior to that of St. Teresa. From these sources we could gather the general sobriety and penetration of her judgment, without assuming the actual teaching of the revelations to be merely the unconscious self-projection of her own mind. But in so much as many of these revelations were professedly Divine answers to her own questions, and since the answer must ever be adapted not merely to the question considered in the abstract, but as it springs from its context in the questioner's mind; we are not wrong, on this score alone, in arguing from the character of the revelation to the character of the mind to which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and write above or beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but not so He who reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations were not addressed to the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she says, were addressed to herself and were primarily for herself, though most that was said had reference to the human soul in general. They were adapted therefore to the character and individuality of her mind; and are an index of its thoughts and workings. For her they were a matter of faith; but, as she tells us, she had no token or outward proof wherewith to convince others of their reality. Those who feel disposed, as we ourselves do, to place much confidence in the word of one so perfectly sane and genuinely holy, may draw profit from the message addressed to her need; but never can it be for them a matter of faith as in a Divine message addressed directly or indirectly to themselves. So far as these revelations are a clear and noble expression of truths already contained implicitly in our faith and reason, which it brings into more explicit consciousness and vitalizes with a new power of stimulus, they may be profitable to us all; but they must be received with due criticism and discernment as themselves subject to a higher rule of truth--namely, the teaching of the Universal Church.

But to determine, with respect to these and kindred revelations, how far they may be regarded as an expression of the recipient's own mind and latent consciousness, will need a digression which the general interest of the question must excuse.

There is a tendency in the modern philosophy of religion (for example, in Mr. Balfour's _Foundations of Belief_) to rationalize inspired revelation and to explain it as altogether kindred to the apparently magical intuitions of natural genius in non-religious matters; as the result, in other words, of a rending asunder of the veil that divides what is called "super-liminal" from "subliminal" consciousness; to find in prophecy and secret insight the effect of a flash of unconscious inference from a mass of data buried in the inscrutable darkness of our forgotten self. Together with this, there is also a levelling-up philosophy, a sort of modernized ontologism, which would attribute all natural intuition to a more immediate self-revelation on God's part than seems quite compatible with orthodoxy.

But neither of these philosophies satisfy what is vulgarly understood by "revelation," and therefore both use the word in a somewhat strained sense. For certainly the first sense of the term implies a consciousness on the part of the recipient of being spoken to, of being related through such speech to another personality, whereas the flashes and intuitions of natural genius, however they may resemble and be called "inspirations" because of their exceeding the known resources of the thinker's own mind, yet they are consciously autochthonous; they are felt to spring from the mind's own soil; not to break the soul's solitude with the sense of an alien presence. Such interior illuminations, though doubtless in a secondary sense derived from the "True Light which enlightens every man coming into this world," certainly do not fulfil the traditional notion of revelation as understood, not only in the Christian Church, but also in all ethnic religions. For common to antiquity is the notion of some kind of possession or seizure, some usurpation of the soul's faculties by an external personality, divine or diabolic, for its own service and as its instrument of expression--a phenomenon, in fact, quite analogous, if not the same in species, with that of hypnotic control and suggestion, where the thought and will of the subject is simply passive under the thought and will of the agent.

Saints and contemplatives are wont--not without justification--to speak of their lights in prayer, and of the ordinary intuitions of their mind, under the influence of grace, as Divine utterances in a secondary sense; to say, "God said to me," or "seemed to say to me," or "God showed me," and so on. But to confound these products of their own mind with revelation is the error only of the uninstructed or the wilfully self-deluded. Therefore, as commonly understood, "revelation" implies the conscious control of the mind by another mind; just as its usual correlative, "inspiration," implies the conscious control of the will by another will.

There can be no doubt whatever but that Mother Juliana of Norwich considered her revelations to be of this latter description, and not to have been merely different in degree from those flashes of spiritual insight with which she was familiar in her daily contemplations and prayers. How far, then, her own mind may have supplied the material from which the tissues were woven, or lent the colours with which the pictures were painted, or supplied the music to which the words were set, is what we must now try to determine.

II.

Taking the terms "revelation" and "inspiration" in the unsophisticated sense which they have borne not only in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but in almost all the great ethnic religions as well, we may inquire into the different sorts and degrees of the control exercised by the presumably supernatural agents over the recipient of such influence. For clearness' sake we may first distinguish between the control of the cognitive, the volitional, and the executive faculties. For our present inquiry we may leave aside those cases where the control of the executive faculties, normally subject to the will and directed by the mind, seem to be wrested from that control by a foreign agent possessed of intelligence and volition, as, for example, in such a case as is narrated of the false prophet Balaam, or of those who at the Pentecostal outpouring spoke correctly in languages unintelligible to themselves, or of the possessed who were constrained in spite of themselves to confess Christ. In these and similar cases, not only is the action involuntary or even counter to the will, but it manifests such intelligent purpose as seemingly marks it to be the effect of an alien will and intelligence. Of this kind of control exercised by the agent over the outer actions of the patient, it may be doubted if it be ever effected except through the mediation of a suggestion addressed to the mind, in such sort that though not free, the resulting action is not wholly involuntary. Be this as it may, our concern at present is simply with control exercised over the will and the understanding.

With regard to the will, it is a commonplace of mystical theology that God, who gave it its natural and essential bent towards the good of reason, i.e., towards righteousness and the Divine will; who created it not merely as an irresistible tendency towards the happiness and self-realization of the rational subject, but as a resistible tendency towards its _true_, happiness and _true_ self-realization--that this same God can directly modify the will without the natural mediation of some suggested thought. We ourselves, by the laborious cultivation of virtue, gradually modify the response of our will to certain suggestions, making it more sensitive to right impulses, more obtuse to evil impulses. According to mystic theology, it is the prerogative of God to dispense with this natural method of education, and, without violating that liberty of choice (which no inclination can prejudice), to incline the rational appetite this way or that; not only in reference to some suggested object, but also without reference to any distinct object whatsoever, so that the soul should be abruptly filled with joy or sadness, with fear or hope, with desire or aversion, and yet be at a loss to determine the object of these spiritual passions. St. Ignatius Loyola, in his "Rules for Discerning Spirits," borrowed no doubt from the current mystical theology of his day, makes this absence of any suggested object a criterion of "consolation" coming from God alone--a criterion always difficult to apply owing to the lightning subtlety of thoughts that flash across the soul and are forgotten even while their emotional reverberation yet remains. Where there was a preceding thought to account for the emotion, he held that the "consolation" might be the work of spirits (good or evil) who could not influence the will directly, but only indirectly through the mind; or else it might be the work of the mind itself, whose thoughts often seem to us abrupt through mere failure of self-observation.

Normally what is known as an "actual grace" involves both an illustration of the mind, and an enkindling of the will; but though supernatural, such graces are not held to be miraculous or preternatural, or to break the usual psychological laws of cause and effect; like the ordinary answers to prayer, they are from God's ordinary providence in that supernatural order which permeates but does not of itself interfere with the natural. But over and above what, relatively to our observation, we call the "ordinary" course, there is the extraordinary, whose interference with it is apparent, though of course not absolute or real--since nothing can be out of harmony with the first and highest law, which is God Himself. And to the category of the extraordinary must be assigned such inspirations and direct will-movements as we here speak of. [5]

Yet not altogether; for in the natural order, too, we have the phenomenon of instinct to consider--both spiritual and animal. Giving heredity all the credit we can for storing up accumulated experience in the nervous system of each species, there remains a host of fundamental animal instincts which that law is quite inadequate to explain; those, for example, which govern the multiplication of the species and secure the conditions under which alone heredity can work. Such cannot be at once the effect and the essential condition of heredity; and yet they are, of all instincts, the most complex and mysterious. Indeed, it seems more scientific to ascribe other instincts to the same known and indubitable, if mysterious, cause, than to seek explanation in causes less known and more hypothetical. In the case of many instincts, it would seem that the craving for the object precedes the distinct cognition of it; that the object is only ascertained when, after various tentative gropings, it is stumbled upon, almost, it might seem, by chance. And this seems true, also, of some of our fundamental spiritual instincts; for example, that craving of the mind for an unified experience, which is at the root of all mental activity, and whose object is ever approached yet never attained; or, again, there is the social and political instinct, which has not yet formed a distinct and satisfying conception of what it would be at. Or nearer still to our theme, is the natural religious instinct which seeks interpretations and explanatory hypotheses in the various man-made religions of the race, and which finds itself satisfied and transcended by the Christian revelation.

In these and like instances, we find will-movements not caused by the subjects' own cognitions and perceptions, but contrariwise, giving birth to cognitions, setting the mind to work to interpret the said movements, and to seek out their satisfying objects.

This is quite analogous to certain phenomena of the order of grace. St. Ignatius almost invariably speaks, not, as we should, of thoughts that give rise to will-states of "consolation" or "desolation," but conversely, of these will-states giving rise to congruous thoughts. Indeed, nothing is more familiar to us than the way in which the mind is magnetized by even our physical states of elation or depression, to select the more cheerful or the gloomier aspects of life, according as we are under one influence or the other; and in practice, we recognize the effect of people's humours on their opinions and decisions, and would neither sue mercy nor ask a favour of a man in a temper. In short, it is hardly too much to say, that our thoughts are more dependent on our feelings than our feelings on our thoughts. This, then, is one possible method of supernatural guidance which we shall call "blind inspiration"--for though the feeling or impulse is from God, the interpretation is from the subject's own mind. It is curious how St. Ignatius applies this method to the determining of the Divine will in certain cases--as it were, by the inductive principle of "concomitant variation." A suggestion that always comes and grows with a state of "consolation," and whose negative is in like manner associated with "desolation," is presumably the right interpretation of the blind impulse. [6] And perhaps this is one of the commonest subjective assurances of faith, namely, that our faith grows and declines with what we know intuitively to be our better moods; that when lax we are sceptical, and believing when conscientious.

Another species of will-guidance recognized by saints, is not so much by way of a vague feeling seeking interpretation, as by way of a sort of enforced decision with regard to some naturally suggested course of conduct. And this, perhaps, is what is more technically understood by an inspiration; as, for example, when the question of writing or not writing something publicly useful, say, the records of the Kings of Israel, rises in the mind, and it is decided for and in the subject, but not by him. Of course this "inspiration" is a common but not essential accompaniment of "revelation" or "mind-control,"--in those cases, namely, where the communicated information is for the good of others; as, also, where it is for the guidance of the practical conduct of the recipient. Such "inspiration" at times seems to be no more than a strong inclination compatible with liberty; at other times it amounts to such a "fixing" of the practical judgment as would ordinarily result from a determination of the power of choice--if that were not a contradiction. Better to say, it is a taking of the matter out of the jurisdiction of choice, by the creation of an _idée fixe_ [7] in the subject's mind.

Turning now to "revelation" in the stricter sense of a preternatural enlightenment of the mind, it might conceivably be either by way of a real accretion of knowledge--an addition to the contents of the mind--or else by way of manipulating contents already there, as we ourselves do by reminiscence, by rumination, comparison, analysis, inference. Thus we can conceive the mind being consciously controlled in these operations, as it were, by a foreign will; being reminded of this or that; being shown new consequences, applications, and relations of truths already possessed.

When, however, there is a preternatural addition to the sum total of the mind's knowledge, we can conceive the communication to be effected through the outer senses, as by visions seen (real or symbolic), or words heard; or through the imagination--pictorial, symbolic, or verbal; visual or auditory; or, finally, in the very reason and intelligence itself, whose ideas are embodied in these images and signs, and to whose apprehension they are all subservient.

Now from all this tedious division and sub-division it may perhaps be clear in how many different senses the words of such a professed revelation as Mother Juliana has left on record can be regarded as preternatural utterances; or rather, in how many different ways she herself may have considered them such, and wished them so to be considered. Indeed, as we shall see, she has done a good deal more to determine this, in regard to the various parts of her record, than most have done, and it is for that reason that we have taken the opportunity to open up the general question. Such a record might then be, either wholly or in part:

(a) The work of religious "inspiration" or genius, in the sense in which rationalists use the word, levelling the idea down to the same plane as that of artistic inspiration.

(b) Or else it might be "inspired" as mystic philosophy or ontologism uses the expression, when it ascribes all natural insight to a more or less directly divine enlightenment.

(c) Or, taking the word more strictly as implying the influence of a distinct personal agency over the soul of the writer, it might be that the record simply expresses an attempted interpretation, an imaginary embodiment, of some blind preternatural stirring of the writer's affections--analogous to the romances and dreams created in the imagination at the first awakening of the amatory affections.

(d) Or, the matter being in no way from preternatural sources, the strong and perhaps irresistible impulse to record and publish it, might be preternatural.

(e) Or (in addition to or apart from such an impulse), it might be a record of certain truths already contained implicitly in the writer's mind, but brought to remembrance or into clear recognition, not by the ordinary free activity of reason, but, as it were, by an alien will controlling the mind.

(f) Or, if really new truths or facts are communicated to the mind from without, this may be effected in various ways: (i) By the way of verbal "inspiration," as when the very words are received apparently through the outer senses; or else put together in the imagination. (ii) Or, the matter is presented pictorially (be it fact or symbol) to the outer senses or to the imagination; and then described or "word-painted" according to the writer's own ability. (iii) Or, the truth is brought home directly to the intelligence; and gets all its imaginative and verbal clothing from the recipient.

Many other hypotheses are conceivable, but most will be reducible to one or other of these. We may perhaps add that, when the revelation is given for the sake of others, this purpose might be frustrated, were not a substantial fidelity of expression and utterance also secured. This would involve, at least, that negative kind of guidance of the tongue or pen, known technically as "assistance."

Mother Juliana gives us some clue in regard to her own revelations where she says: [8] "All this blessed showing of our Lord God was showed in three parts; that is to say, by bodily sight; and by words formed in my understanding; and by ghostly sight. For the bodily sight, I have said as I saw, as truly as I can" (that is, the appearances were, she believed, from God, but the description of them was her own). "And for the words I have said them right as our Lord showed them to me" (for here nothing was her own, but bare fidelity of utterance). "And for the ghostly sight I have said some deal, but I may never full tell it" (that is to say, no language or imagery of her own can ever adequately express the spiritual truths revealed to her higher reason). As a rule she makes it quite clear throughout, which of these three kinds of showing is being described. We have an example of bodily vision when she saw "the red blood trickling down from under the garland," and in all else that seemed to happen to the crucifix on which her open eyes were set. And of all this she says: "I conceived truly and mightily that it was Himself that showed it me, without any mean between us;" that is, she took it as a sort of pictorial language uttered directly by Christ, even as if He had addressed her in speech; she took it not merely as _having_ a meaning, but as designed and uttered to _convey_ a meaning--for to speak is more than to let one's mind appear. Or again, it is by bodily vision she sees a little hasel-nut in her hand, symbolic of the "naughting of all that is made." Of words formed in her imagination she tells us, for example, "Then He (i.e., Christ as seen on the crucifix) without voice and opening of lips formed in my soul these words: _Herewith is the fiend overcome_." Of "ghostly sight," or spiritual intuition, we have an instance when she says: "In the same time that I saw (i.e., visually) this sight of the Head bleeding, our good Lord showed a ghostly sight of His homely loving. I saw that He is to us everything that is comfortable to our help; He is our clothing, that for love wrappeth us," &c.--where, in her own words and imagery, she is describing a divine-given insight into the relation of God and the soul. Or again, when she is shown our Blessed Lady, it is no pictorial or bodily presentment, "but the virtues of her blissful soul, her truth, her wisdom, her charity." "And Jesus ... showed me a _ghostly_ sight of her, right as I had seen her before, little and simple and pleasing to Him above all creatures."

Just as in the setting forth of these spiritual apprehensions, the words and imagery are usually her own, so in the description of bodily vision she uses her own language and comparisons. For example, the following realism: "The great drops of blood fell down from under the garland like pellets, seeming as it had come out of the veins; and in coming out they were brown red, for the Blood was full thick, and in spreading abroad they were bright red.... The plenteousness is like to drops of water that fall off the eavings after a great shower of rain.... And for roundness they were like to the scales of herrings in the spreading of the forehead," &c. These similes, she tells us, "came to my mind in the time." In other instances, the comparisons and illustrations of what she saw with her eyes or with her understanding, were suggested to her; so that she received the expression, as well as the matter expressed, from without.

But besides the records of the sights, words, and ideas revealed to her, we have many things already known to her and understood, yet "brought to her mind," as it were, preternaturally. Also, various paraphrases and elaborate exegeses of the words spoken to her; a great abundance of added commentary upon what she saw inwardly or outwardly. Now and then it is a little difficult to decide whether she is speaking for herself, or as the exponent of what she has received; but, on the whole, she gives us abundant indications. Perhaps the following passage will illustrate fairly the diverse elements of which the record is woven: