All Shall Be Well

ALL SHALL BE WELL

The Visions, the Wisdom, and the Magnificent Stubbornness of Julian of Norwich

c. 1343 – c. 1416

In the year 1373, a thirty-year-old woman in Norwich lay dying. Or at least, everyone thought she was dying. Her priest had already arrived to administer the last rites, which in medieval England was less a hopeful sign than a polite farewell. Then something extraordinary happened. Instead of obligingly departing this mortal coil, she had sixteen visions of such staggering theological depth and emotional complexity that she spent the next twenty years writing about them.

She called these visions her Shewings.

We call her Julian of Norwich, and she was, without question, one of the most remarkable thinkers the English-speaking world has ever produced, which makes it all the more baffling that most people learn about her, if at all, from a fridge magnet.

You have almost certainly encountered Julian's most famous line: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” It appears on tea towels, motivational posters, and the kind of Instagram accounts that pair mystical wisdom with photographs of sunsets.

In this context, it sounds like the medieval equivalent of “good vibes only". Pleasant, vague, and about as theologically rigorous as a fortune cookie. Julian, it must be said, would have been deeply unimpressed by this reading. She was a woman who stared into the abyss, found it staring back, and then wrote two books about the phenomenology of the experience.

She was not doing wellness content.

Setting the Scene: The World in Which Julian Refused to Die

To understand Julian, you must first understand what an act of almost deranged optimism her central message actually was.

She was born around 1343, a date scholars treat with the caution one applies to all medieval biographical claims, and she lived through what historians cheerfully describe as one of the worst centuries in European history. The Black Death had arrived in England in 1348 and would return multiple times during her lifetime, eventually killing somewhere between a third and a half of the population. The Hundred Years’ War ground on interminably. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 erupted with shocking violence. The Western Schism meant that Christendom simultaneously had two, and at one point, three, competing popes, each enthusiastically excommunicating the others.

In Norwich specifically, 1349 was so catastrophic that the city’s records essentially gave up for a while. Julian grew up in a world saturated with death, uncertainty, and institutional chaos. And yet, and this is the point that tends to get lost beneath the tea towels, she sat in a small stone cell attached to a church and concluded, with rigorous theological argument, that love was the fundamental nature of reality. This is not naïve optimism. This is a woman who had done the mathematics and arrived at an answer that surprised even her.

A Note on the Name:  We don’t actually know what she was called. “Julian” almost certainly derives from the church of St Julian in Conisford, Norwich, to whose wall her anchorage was attached. She may have been born Margaret, or Alice, or something else entirely. Medieval women’s biographies have a way of dissolving at the edges, a commentary that is itself rather pointed on whose lives were considered worth recording.

The Visions: Not What You Might Expect

The precipitating event of Julian’s entire intellectual life was her near-death illness in May 1373, during which she received her sixteen Shewings, revelations concerning Christ’s passion, the nature of God’s love, and the problem of sin and suffering. She subsequently wrote two accounts: a shorter text apparently composed soon after the experience, and a longer, vastly more theologically developed text produced over the following two decades of contemplation. The longer text, known as the Revelations of Divine Love, is the first book in the English language to be attributed to a woman. She got there first, and she did it from a twelve-foot cell.

The visions themselves are viscerally physical in a way that surprises modern readers expecting medieval piety to be rather more ethereal. Julian describes in unflinching detail the physical sufferings of the crucifixion. The drying of Christ’s body, the discolouration of his skin, and the cold. Medieval mysticism was not squeamish. The body, for Julian, was not an embarrassing obstacle to spiritual experience but the very medium through which revelation occurred. She received her visions whilst gazing at a crucifix held before her failing eyes. The divine spoke to her not in spite of embodiment but through it.

“He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted,’ but said: ‘Thou shalt not be overcome.’ - Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

This is the Julian that gets lost in the fridge-magnet version. Not the purveyor of comfortable reassurance, but the careful thinker who distinguishes between the promise that things will be easy and the promise that you will endure. The distinction matters enormously. Julian never claims suffering won’t happen. She claims it won’t win. These are very different theological propositions, and conflating them does her a considerable disservice.

The Anchoress: Choosing the Wall

At some point after her visions, we cannot date it precisely, Julian became an anchoress, a religious vocation so radical in its commitment that it deserves a moment’s consideration. An anchoress was literally enclosed within a small cell, or anchorage, attached to a church. The enclosure ceremony involved rites drawn from the funeral liturgy. You were, in a meaningful sense, being buried alive in the service of contemplation. The cell typically had three windows: one into the church for the sacraments, one to the outside world through which a maid would pass food and necessities, and one through which Julian could offer counsel to those who sought it.

It would be easy, and wrong, to read this as a withdrawal from the world. Julian’s anchorage at St Julian’s Church in King Street, Norwich, placed her at the centre of a busy medieval city. Norwich was, in the fourteenth century, the second largest city in England. People came to her window constantly. Margery Kempe, that other great figure of English medieval mysticism and arguably history’s most exhausting spiritual pilgrim, records visiting Julian and receiving counsel. Julian was not hiding from the world. She was positioning herself as a fixed point within it: the still centre that the turning world could come to find.

There is also something quietly subversive about the anchoritic vocation for a woman of intellectual ambitions in the fourteenth century. Within her cell, Julian was beyond the ordinary reach of ecclesiastical oversight in a way that a woman in conventional religious life was not. Her abbess could not redirect her reading. Her confessor could not limit her thinking. She had, in enclosing herself, created a paradoxical freedom. The freedom of the scholar who has removed all competing obligations and can simply think.

The Theology: Remarkably, Profoundly Unusual

Julian’s theological thought is where things become genuinely extraordinary, and where the gap between popular understanding and actual content becomes most embarrassing. She was not, to put it plainly, orthodox in the way that word is usually understood. She pushed the boundaries of acceptable medieval theology in several directions simultaneously, and the fact that she was never called before any ecclesiastical tribunal suggests either that the authorities hadn’t read her carefully or that the cell offered more protection than one might suppose.

Consider her treatment of sin. Julian is deeply troubled, in her visions, by the apparent contradiction between God’s absolute love and the reality of human sinfulness. In a moment of revelation that she finds as surprising as anyone, she reports being told by the divine:

Sin is behovely — sin is necessary, or fitting. Not that sin is good, but that it is somehow part of a larger pattern that love will ultimately resolve.

This is not comfortable theology. It is theology that takes the problem seriously rather than explaining it away, and it places Julian in interesting company with later theodiceans who would wrestle with the same questions.

Then there is her famous image of God as Mother.

Julian develops, over several chapters of the long text, a sustained theological argument that the second person of the Trinity — Christ — can be understood through the image of motherhood. The mother carries the child, feeds the child, and suffers for the child. The nursing of the Eucharist becomes, in her imagery, a divine feeding.

This was not without theological precedent; Anselm of Canterbury had used similar language, but Julian develops it with a depth and systematic care that goes considerably beyond precedent. In the fourteenth century. In a cell. Whilst probably considered by most of her neighbours to be doing something rather quieter.

A Small Puzzle: 

Julian repeatedly refers to herself as “a simple creature unlettered” — yet the sophistication of her theological analysis, her evident familiarity with scripture and patristic thought, and the structural complexity of her longer text all suggest someone of considerable education. The disclaimer may be genuine humility, rhetorical convention, or shrewd self-protection on the part of an author who knew perfectly well that learned women attracted uncomfortable attention. Possibly all three simultaneously.

“All Shall Be Well”: What She Actually Meant

We return, inevitably, to the tea towel. The phrase all shall be well appears in the context of Julian’s anguished questioning about the problem of sin and damnation.

If God is love, and love desires the good of the beloved, how can souls be damned?

She does not receive, or at least does not record, a tidy doctrinal answer.

What she receives instead is a promise: that there is a “great deed” that shall be done at the last day, not yet revealed to her, by which all the contradictions will be resolved. All shall be well is not a denial of suffering or evil or complexity. It is a claim about the ultimate trajectory. It is eschatological, not anodyne.

The philosopher in Julian is honest about the tension. She holds the Church’s teaching on damnation and her visionary conviction of God’s universal love simultaneously, and she does not pretend that the tension resolves. She simply trusts that it will.

This is a genuinely sophisticated epistemological position, the acknowledgement that one can hold irresolvable propositions in productive tension, that mystery is not the same as ignorance, and that love can be a valid epistemic ground as well as an emotional state.

For the Rational Mystic, this is Julian’s most enduring contribution. She models what it looks like to think rigorously about the things that resist neat resolution; to bring the full force of intellectual honesty to bear on experience that overflows every available category, and to neither falsify the experience to fit the category nor abandon the categories in a rush of uncritical enthusiasm. She was, in the best sense, a philosopher who happened to have had mystical visions. Or a mystic who happened to think with unusual precision. The distinction may not matter as much as we assume.

Why Julian Now?

Julian died, probably around 1416, having outlived most of the people she knew. Her work then largely disappeared from view for several centuries, suppressed, overlooked, and considered too marginal for the mainstream tradition. It was rediscovered seriously in the twentieth century, and T.S. Eliot, who knew a good mystic when he encountered one, wove her words into the final movement of Four Quartets: “And all shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well.”

From Eliot, the phrase entered general culture, increasingly detached from its context, increasingly deployed as spiritual comfort food.

But the real Julian, the one who lay down to die and instead had the temerity to spend twenty years thinking carefully about what she’d seen, who lived in a city ravaged by plague and concluded that love was the ground of all being, who articulated a theology of divine motherhood six centuries before feminist theology became a field, that Julian has rather more to offer us than reassurance.

She offers a model of intellectual courage combined with spiritual depth, of holding complexity without collapsing it, of refusing the false choice between rigorous thought and genuine wonder.

In an age of easy answers, algorithmic reassurance, and the industrialised production of spiritual comfort, Julian of Norwich is quietly, stubbornly radical. She looked at a world that was, by any reasonable assessment, comprehensively terrible, and she did not flinch from the evidence. She simply went deeper — deeper into the experience, deeper into the tradition, deeper into the love that she was convinced lay beneath the surface of things. And then she wrote it all down, in clear and beautiful English, from a twelve-foot cell.

All shall be well. She meant it. She earned the right to say it. The least we can do is understand what she meant.

“Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore was it shewed? For Love.”— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love — the final word on the matter

Alan /|\