Between 2018 and 2024 I worked intermittently on writing an ambitious series of essays in moral theology, which was eventually serialized on Where Peter Is. I think I made an important argument, but I am not sure in retrospect that I made it well; I wish I were not vain enough for that to bother me as much as it does. The upshot of the Poachers in the King’s Domain series was that a very generous teaching on culpability—notwithstanding strict orthodoxy on moral principles—flows naturally from a fundamental paradox of humans’ relationship with the world. We are called to act as prudent stewards of the world, and yet are subject to the same pressures and necessities as all other forms of life. The examples that I explored in order to illustrate this mostly had to do with matters of violence and nonviolence. The basic thrust, however, supported one of the central ideas of the late, great Pope Francis’s moral theology, which was most controversial as applied to subjects involving sexuality and the family.
I was gratified to learn recently, on rereading a text that I had not had occasion to read in about a decade, that a similar conclusion was being drawn almost two hundred years before the Council of Trent. The interpretation of Amoris Laetitia’s moral theology that I did my best to provide at the end of the Poachers series and that Pedro Gabriel and Adam Rasmussen have also suggested—that God’s grace is always sufficient to avoid mortal sin, but not necessarily to avoid grave matter—is all but explicitly stated in this text, “and in English, too.”[1]
I’m referring to Julian of Norwich’s Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, which I have also discussed on Where Peter Is in the past. The Tridentine divines were likely not familiar with the Revelations. Even if they were, it is far from clear that they appreciated them, or treated their arguments as having much weight. In any case, they clearly did not use Julian as a source for Chapter XI of the First Decree on Justification, which condemns the idea that God’s grace is insufficient for salvation. So Julian’s ideas cannot be classified as “capital-T Traditional” in the usual sense of pertaining to, contributing to, or flowing from Trent. Nevertheless, Julian is deeply traditional in the broader sense of belonging to the pre-Tridentine Church, and, as I have said before, she remains an especially important source against the idea that to emphasize ideals of generosity and mercy is mere modern “niceness.”
The relevant passages to our set of questions about culpability appear, in Julian’s Long Text, in chapters 52 and 82. We read:
And in spite of all this, I saw and understood that our Lord’s meaning was that in this life we may not keep from sin in such full and complete purity as we shall in heaven. But through grace we may well keep ourselves from the sins which, as Holy Church teaches us, will lead us to eternal suffering, and avoid venial sin, as far as our strength allows; and if through our blindness and our wretchedness we ever fall, we are taught to rise again quickly, recognizing the sweet touch of grace, and earnestly amend our life on the basis of Holy Church’s teaching and according to the grievousness of the sin, and go at once to God in love.[2]
Later on, towards the end of the text and well after most of its best-known passages (the hazelnut; “all shall be well”; the parable of the servant falling in a ditch), she returns to this subject.
‘I know well that for love of me you wish to live cheerfully and gladly, bearing all the suffering that may come to you, but insofar as you do not live without sin, you are willing to suffer for love of me all the tribulation and distress that can come to you. And this is true. But do not be too troubled by the sins that you commit unwillingly.’ And here I understood that the lord considers his servant with pity and not with blame, for in this passing life we are not expected to live quite free from blame and sin….But this was shown: that in falling and in rising we are always tenderly protected in one love; for as God beholds us we do not fall, and as we behold ourselves we do not stand, and both these seem to me to be true, but our Lord God’s view is the highest truth: so we are much indebted to God for showing us this great truth while we are still in this earthly life.[3]
God always protects us in our battles with sin, but not necessarily in the way that we would expect from a straightforward theology of grace-as-prior-restraint. (Possibly this is because it is no skin off God’s nose, only off our own; Julian was avowedly of the view that, if we understand sin properly, we are more upset and wounded by our own sins than God is.) Her qualification about avoiding venial sin “as far as our strength allows,” and her language about “sins that you commit unwillingly,” suggest that her basis for this view involves what later moral theologians might recognize as concerns about full knowledge and full consent. The former, in particular, would probably deeply upset many traditionalists and other critics of Pope Francis’s moral theology today.
While this way of looking at things clearly did not carry the day at Trent, it is evident that similar views remained acceptable through the Tridentine “manualist” period. We see them both in the writings of the Counter-Reformation’s brightest light, Saint Teresa of Ávila (more on her later), and in those of the last great Tridentine-era theologian, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. In Garrigou-Lagrange’s Christian Perfection and Contemplation According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross, we read:
God is not obliged to remedy our voluntary faults, especially when they are repeated. The truth of the matter is that He often does remedy them, but not always. Therein lies a mystery.[4]
Later, and even more pointedly for our purposes (emphasis mine):
It is this last perfection which is peculiar to the perfect. They still commit venial sins through frailty or surprise, but they avoid deliberate venial sin and also slight, conscious, and voluntary imperfections.[5]
This being the case, it is perhaps best to say that the controversy over Amoris Laetitia and what it implies on this subject is a controversy of degree, not of kind. Evidently the view that God’s grace does not always suffice against venial sin remained thoroughly acceptable as a matter of theological opinion even in a period in which it was far from encouraged. The question is how far this extends, and when looked at that way, the controversy over applying it the way Amoris does loses some of its seeming importance and urgency.
For Julian, however, on a deeper level, all this flows not so much from her ideas about culpability as from her ideas about the Fall, which are one of the keysprings of her mystical thought. The Revelations contain detailed meditations and lengthy parables about the relationship of the Fall to Christ taking on human flesh and the relationship of both to God’s forgiveness of our sins; popularizations of Julian’s thought tend to heighten this focus even further, if anything. Her thinking about culpability, a word that she may not even have recognized, is grounded in, and perhaps even reducible to, her thinking about these other topics.
As Denys Turner points out in one of my favorite recent theological and philosophical essays dealing with Julian,[6] she does not hold the now-widespread idea that sin logically must have come into existence as a function of our free will. In fact, I would add, she seems to think that that position constitutes excuse-making. She might have thought of it as crypto-Pelagian, if she had been familiar with the term “Pelagian.” Teresa—quoted in the same book of Garrigou-Lagrange’s cited above—provides an interesting support for this point as well (emphasis mine):
In the account of her conversion (Life, chaps. 8, 9), she says: “I used to pray to our Lord for help; but, as it now seems to me, I must have committed the fault of not putting my whole trust in His Majesty, and of not thoroughly distrusting myself. . . . There was no one to give me life, and I was not able to take it. He who could have given it me had good reasons for not coming to my aid, seeing that He had brought me back to Himself so many times, and I as often had left Him. … I implored Him to strengthen me once for all, so that I might never offend Him any more. … I had a very great devotion to the glorious Magdalene. … I seem to have made greater progress: for I was now very distrustful of myself, placing all my confidence in God. It seems to me that I said to Him then that I would not rise up till He granted my petition. I do certainly believe that this was of great service to me, because I have grown better ever since” (Life, chap. 9). “Now our Lord set me at liberty, and gave me strength also to use it” (Life, chap. 24). As someone has well said, in the face of this formidable mystery, against which so many heresies have arisen, and over which there have been so many sad controversies, even among true children of the Church, the Seraphic Virgin bows with serenity and gratitude. “O my God,” she exclaims, “well is it for me that Thou didst not leave such a wretch as myself at liberty to fulfil or to frustrate Thy will. Mayest Thou be blessed forever, and may all creation praise Thee” (The Way of Perfection, chap. 32). “The more difficult things are to understand, the more devotion they inspire in me, and this in proportion to their difficulty” (Life, chap. 28).[7]
Instead of this now-familiar focus on free will that both Julian and Teresa see as seriously problematic, Julian describes sin as “behovely,” i.e. that for whatever reason it just happens to suit God’s purposes that some amount of it take place. However, she cautions against inquiring too deeply into this or using it as a reason to consider our own sins justifiable. Although these were certainly not uncontroversial ideas even in the Catholicism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, she was not alone in thinking about the economy of salvation this way, especially not in her medieval English ecclesial setting.[8]
Again, the way Julian in the Revelations works out her thoughts on the unavoidability of sin—not necessarily its “behoveliness,” a genuinely bold take, but its pervasiveness—is amply supported by theology from times far closer to our own than is her medieval English world. Her thinking is also not unique or original to that world. She develops it and expresses it especially boldly, but there are antecedents for it. I will leave off this brief sidestep into her thinking on culpability with this, from Saint Ephrem the Syrian:
How many times hast Thou enlightened my darkened mind; yet every time I return again to base thoughts! My whole body trembles when I contemplate this; yet every time sinful sensuality reconquers me.
How shall I recount all the gifts of Thy grace, O Lord, that I the pitiful one have received? Yet I have reduced them all to nothing by my apathy—and I continue on in this manner. Thou has bestowed upon me thousands of gifts, yet miserable me, I offer in return things repulsive to Thee.
Yet Thou, O Lord, inasmuch as Thou containest a sea of longsuffering and an abyss of kindness, do not allow me to be felled as a fruitless fig tree; and do not let me be burned without having ripened on the field of life. Snatch me not away unprepared; seize not me who have not yet lit my lamp; take not away me who have no wedding garment; but, because Thou art good and the lover of mankind, have mercy on me.[9]
Notes
[1] The Big Lebowski, directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen, featuring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, and Steve Buscemi (Working Title Films, 1998).
[2] Julian of Norwich, trans. Elizabeth Spearing, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Penguin Classics: 1998), 126.
[3] Ibid., 175-176.
[4] Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, trans. M. Timothea Doyle, Christian Perfection and Contemplation According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross (St. Louis and London: B. Herder Book Co., 1937; reprinted Binghamton, NY, Vail-Ballou Frees, Inc. 1958), 87
[5] Ibid., 168.
[6] Denys Turner, “All Will Be Well: Julian of Norwich, David Hume, & the problem of evil,” Commonweal, January 31, 2021.
[7] Op. cit., Garrigou-Lagrange, 111 (fn). I’m not sure why Garrigou-Lagrange refers to Teresa as the Seraphic Virgin, a term for her that I have rarely seen elsewhere, but this could be merely a gap in my own knowledge.
[8] An especially strong and striking version of the very old felix culpa idea is stated in the Christmas carol “Adam Lay Ybownden,” which can be found in many English poetry anthologies, is still sung in some aesthetically traditionalist churches at Christmas (especially Anglican churches), and dates from ca. 1400, i.e. during Julian’s lifetime. British Library, Sloane MS 2593, ff. 10v-11. One wonders if this kind of thinking in late medieval English spirituality has any connection to the earlier English focus on the Harrowing of Hell.
[9] Spiritual Psalter, 120. In A Spiritual Psalter, or Reflections on God, Arranged in the Manner of the Psalms of David (Yonkers, New York: Saint John of Kronstadt Press, 2004), 191.
Image: “Christ in Limbo with Adam and Eve” by Marcantonio Raimondi, after Francesco Francia. From Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky—a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution—works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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