The Present Time of Things Past: Julian of Norwich's Appropriation of St. Augustine's Generative Theory of Memory

Abstract

Reading Julian of Norwich through an Augustinian lens allows us to position her within extant rhetorical tradition while showing ways she revised that tradition. Engaging the Augustinian rhetoric of memory by focusing on the interpretive moves that Julian made to produce her texts reveals the important role of both memory and time in Julian's compositional process. Read this way, we see that Julian provided us with a hermeneutic for reading her texts within the vernacular tradition that reconceptualizes Augustine's generative theory of memory.

Notes

1I thank RR reviewers Andrew King and James Murphy, and also Stephen Schneider, James A. Andrews III, and my University of Alabama colleagues for their criticism of this article.

2As I note below, Augustine was an influence on many of the texts to which Julian's work is compared. I use Augustine's Confessions because of its influence on mystical writing. This is not to say that we could not look to other philosophers or theologians to place Julian's text within an extant tradition. There is nothing unique about her use of Augustinian heuristics, and this is precisely my point. She is part of a very long history of rhetoric that in recent scholarship is beginning to be ignored.

3In Pierre Hadot's terms, memory allows one to concentrate on the past self, yet that concentration produces knowledge that is the expansion of oneself and transformative for the future. This knowledge can be communicated to the self or a broader audience.

4A Revelation, the revised text, continues to be used as a spiritual guide for Christians, but a close study of how Julian's continued influence lies outside the scope of this article. For sake of brevity, I will note that Revelation is one of the more valued spiritual guides of The Order of Julian founded in 1985, for instance. They emphasize personal as opposed to institutional devotion that is largely a result of what has been called the Fourth Great Awakening in America.

5I use “authority over her texts” to refer to two veins in Julian scholarship. These two veins are concerned with the relationship Julian has with her text—the amount of input she had while writing and revising and the authenticity of the vision she revealed. One vein includes Lynn Staley Johnson's “The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe” and Liz Herbert McCavoy's Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, which address questions of textual authority caused by medieval scribes. Because scribes could often “project authorial personas” for women mystics, scholars question the control the scribes may have had over the women's texts (820). The other vein is in the tradition of Paul Molinari, who uses the term to denote the authenticity of Julian's revelation. He approaches the text through a medical/psychoanalytic lens, revealing information about “Julian the creature” and leaving out information about Julian “the interpreter.” For more on these traditions, see Nicholas Watson and Jaqueline Jenkins's introduction to The Writings of Julian of Norwich.

6See, for instance, Nicholas Watson and Jaqueline Jenkins's introduction to The Writing of Julian of Norwich or Brad Peters's “Julian of Norwich's A Vision and the Ancrene Riwle: Two Rhetorical Configurations of Mysticism” for textual comparisons.

7For the extended discussion on texts that may have influenced Julian, see Denise Baker's “Julian of Norwich and Anchorite Literature,” Mystics Quarterly 19 (1993): 148–60.

8See for instance, Brad Peters's article “Julian of Norwich's A Showing and the Ancrene Riwle: Two Rhetorical Configurations of Mysticism” and Cheryl Glenn's chapter “Medieval Rhetoric: Pagan Roots, Christian Flowering or Veiled Voices in the Medieval Rhetorical Tradition” in Rhetoric Retold.

9Carole C. Burnett, in her forthcoming article “Julian of Norwich” in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, speculates that Julian may have had access to the library of the Augustinian friary near St. Julian's church and that if she did not read him herself, she may have “absorbed his theology through meditation of Anselm of Canterbury or other theologians.” She also speculates that Julian could have heard sermons of Adam Easton. In this article Burnett calls for more research connecting Julian to Augustine, and my argument is one response.

10Two secondary mystical experiences in 1388 and 1393 may have allowed Julian to interpret the original experiences and hence reveal their significance.

11Watson's definition of “speculative vernacular theology” is fairly straightforward: “A Revelation is … a speculative vernacular theology, not modeled on earlier texts but structured as a prolonged investigation into the divine, whose prophetic goal is to birth a new understanding of human living in the world and of the nature of God in his interactions in the world, not just for theologians but for everyone” (3).

12To be clear, I am not claiming that Augustine caused Julian to think in the ways she does. God did this. I am, however, insisting that Christianity has a long history of ways to reveal God's speech to humans. Augustine discusses God's speech to humans through humans in the prologue to On Christian Teaching, for instance. My point, and Augustine's point as well, is that we are always influenced by our prevailing culture. It's important to acknowledge that in the Julian groups within Anglicanism today, the meditations are drawn from the core of the liturgy. They seek to make the received narratives intellectually and emotionally more compelling. They are concerned with our contemporary historical moment but use their antecedent, Julian, to come closer to God so that he might speak to them and so that they might continually express clearly what God continues to reveal.

13The idea of exclusionary and inclusionary histories is Glenn's, but I have configured it differently here. In Rhetoric Retold one of her goals is to reveal “broad definitions of rhetoric that move it from an exclusionary to an in clusionary enterprise” (4). The picture that Glenn, Peters, and Baker paint ex cludes rich readings of Julian within the paternal tradition. Julian should be in cluded in the long rhetorical tradition in which she participates even though these readings may not enable us to define her position in protofeminist terms.

14See Glenn pages 4–10 for her explanation of “re–mapping.”

15For instance, Plato's Phaedrus contains one theorization of the classical concept of memory related to the mystical tradition. Plato proposes that we gain knowledge through sensual experience, and the memory of those sensual experiences promotes just living. See Phaedrus 250a, for instance. The philosopher can uncover, indeed recover, forms of knowledge within the soul that were lost when it became embodied in human form. Instances in everyday life allow us to uncover these embedded truths. Outward experience, then, influences the soul, and the written word “remind[s] one who knows that which the writing is concerned with” (Plato 275.d). For Plato knowledge must precede the rhetorical act, and through memory knowledge is “written on the soul of the learner” (276.a). The written discourse becomes “a kind of image” from which discourse can proceed (276.a).