Again, Julian speaks of things that are _double_, and this double state
seems to be one of imperfection, though she does not explicitly say
so. Man's nature, she says, was created "double": "_Substance_" or
Spirit essential from out of the Spirit Divine, and "_Sensuality_" or
spirit related to human senses and making human faculties, intellectual
and physical. These two, the Substance and Sense-soul, in their
imperfection of union through the frailty of created love (which needs
the divine in its might to support it), became partially sundered
by the failing of love. "For failing of love on our part, therefore,
is all our travail"--from that comes the falling, the dying, and the
painful travail between death from sin and life from God--both in the
race and the individual. But Christ makes the double into trinity:
for Christ is "the Mean [the medium] that keepeth the Substance and
Sense-soul together" in his Eternal, Divine-Human Nature, because of
His perfect love; and Christ-Incarnate in His Mercy, by this same
perfect love brings these two parts anew and more closely together;
and Christ uprisen, indwelling in the soul thus united, will keep them
forever together, in oneness growing with oneness to Him. Moreover, Man
being double also as "soul and body," needs to be "saved from double
death," and this salvation, given, is Jesus-Christ, who joined Himself
to us in the Incarnation and "yielded us up from the Cross with His
Soul and Body into His Father's hands."
In a mere reading of the Book these repeated correspondences may be
felt as wearisome, formal, fantastic,--or rather they may seem so when,
as here, they are brought together and noted, for Julian herself simply
speaks of these different groups as they come in her theme. But when
one tries to follow the _thought_ of this book amongst the heights
and depths of the things that are seen and temporal and the things
unseen and eternal, these likenesses, found in all, seem to afford
one guidance and surety of footing, like steps cut out in a steep
and difficult path. And as one goes on, and the whole of the meaning
takes form, these significations of something all-prevailing give one a
partial understanding such as Julian perhaps may have had: the feeling,
the "Mind," of a certain half-caught measure in "all things that are,"
a proportion, a oneness. We are amongst free nature's mountains, but
they do not rise haphazard: they shew a strange, a balanced beauty
of line and light and shade, as convincing, if not as clear in its
intention as the sunrise-lines and colouring of the euphrasy flower
at our feet. We hear as we walk the wandering sound of "the vagrant,
casual wind," but there is something in its rise and fall, and rising
again, that has kinship with the flow and ebb and onrush of the
lingering, punctual waves on the shore. _Sursum Corda._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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