Julian of Norwich and the Ecological Crisis – Book Review
Julian of Norwich and the Ecological Crisis: Restoring Porosity, by Claire Gilbert, July 2024. Routledge, ISBN 9781032593340, 190 pages. RRP £145 (hardback)
The Revelations of Divine Love is taken to have been written by a 14th century woman who lived a solitary life of prayer in a cell attached to a church in Norwich. We call that woman Julian, though it was also the name of the church. If the authorship is correct it is the earliest surviving English-language text attributed to a woman. Its insights remain startlingly radical, opening us to a God more intimately and expansively loving than our human condition expects, to a divine love that enfolds all things and holds us all in unconditional acceptance. Many have found the Revelations of Divine Love to be personally transformative. Claire Gilbert explores how it is that Julian’s writings so marvellously invite us to enter empathically into what she was shown and how that can affect us so deeply. Gilbert previously wrote a wonderful fictional book which convincingly reconstructs the life of Julian (Julian, Hodder & Stoughton 2023).
But this latter book is about the text rather than its author. Gilbert articulates the power of this text to engage the reader in such a transformative way with the help of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). Ricoeur developed the understanding that a written text has an independence apart from its author, original setting, and first readers. Gilbert explains, “I accept Ricoeur’s concept of the power of the poetic text to transform the reader’s subjectivity and his account of the summoning of the reader to the text.” Using Ricoeur’s hermeneutical method Gilbert offers a three-pillared explanation of how the Revelations have the power to be so transformative. First, it invites our performative engagement, that is, through letting ourselves be drawn into the narrative. This both requires and brings about in us a porosity of self, which is the second pillar. The reader is literally made porous to the text, which Gilbert contrasts with the Gestell mindset. The Gestell approach is to let ourselves be enclosed within self-referencing spheres which we expect to provide answers to all problems and meaning-seeking. The third pillar identifies the world, or “niche” of experience which the reader brings to the text and which is then transformed by it.
But what does a 14th century religious text have to do with the ecological crisis of the 21st century? Gilbert recognises that this crisis is precisely a symptom of the Gestell, because that keeps us in “a ‘buffered’ seeing of all nature as … objective, functional and expendable.” “Humanity”,she writes, “has to cease its arrogant attitude of control and return to an attitude of service, an intentional porosity that is characterised by humility.” She looks closely at three key parts of the Revelations: Julian’s asking for the three wounds of contrition, compassion and longing for God; the eighth revelation of Christ’s passion; and the falling of the servant who loves his Lord in the fourteenth revelation. Gilbert encourages us to read this text with her and so to increase our own porosity as no less than “a route to freedom from enslavement” which “engenders a recognition of the sacred in creation”. It is a demanding read, but truly eye-opening.
Andrew Norman
Green Christian Chaplain
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