Julian's mystical sight was not a negation of human modes of thought:
neither was it a torture to human powers of speech nor a death-sentence
to human activities of feeling. "He hath no despite of that which He
hath made" (vi.). This seer of the littleness of all that is made saw
the Divine as containing, not as engulfing, all things that truly are,
so that in some way "all things that are made" because of His love last
ever. Certainly she passes sometimes beyond the language of earth,
seeing a love and a Goodness "more than tongue can tell," but she is
never inarticulate in any painful, struggling way--when words are
not to be found that can tell all the truth revealed, she leaves her
Lord's "meaning" to be taken directly from Him by the understanding of
each desirous soul. So is it with the Shewing of God as the Goodness
of everything that is good: "It is I--it is I" (xxvi.). Certainly
Julian looks both downward and upward, sees Love in the lowest depth,
far below sin, below even Mercy; sees Love as the highest that can
be, rising higher and higher far above sight, in skies that as yet
she is not called to enter: "abysses" there are, below and above,
like Angela di Foligno's "double abyss"; but here is no desert region
like that where Angela seems as "an eagle descending"[3] from heights
of unbreathable air, baffled and blinded in its assault on the Sun,
proclaiming the Light Unspeakable in anguished, hoarse, inarticulate
cries; here is a mountain-path between the abysses and the sound as of
a chorus from pilgrims singing:
"Praise to the Holiest in the height
And in the depth be praise";--
'ALL IS WELL: ALL IS WELL: ALL SHALL BE WELL.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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