How to See a Vision: Contemplative Ethics in Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila

By Richard Norton

This book celebrates the 640th anniversary of Juilan's "Showings". It compares Julian's prayer life with that of Teresa of Avila and shows how this leads to a system of Contemplative ethics for us today as we explore questions of ecology, empowerment and equality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481797689

Richard Norton

I was born in the Detroit East Side General Hospital, one of the first babies born in that new hospital. My birth was one of the front page headlines in the Detroit News newspaper that day. It read: Beauty Queen Now Rules Nursery. A few years earlier, my mother had won the title of the most beautiful teen in America.

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© 2013 by Richard Norton. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 06/21/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9769-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9768-9 (e)

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CONTENTS

About Richard Norton

Preface

Introduction: How to See a Vision

Chapter One: Cracking the Hazel Nuts

Chapter Two: Julian’s Benedictinism: Paradox, Prayer and Trinity

Chapter Three: How to Seek Perfection

Chapter Four: How to Suffer—and Why

Chapter Five: How to be Intimate

Chapter Six: How to Love the World

Chapter Seven: How to Empower People and bring about Equality

Conclusions

To the eternal memory of my parents

Alan S Norton (1931-1999) and Con L Norton, nee Collier (1930-2012)

who had the faith to see the vision, the courage to bring it about and the loving grace to instruct me in both.

+ May they rest in peace and rise in glory.

ABOUT RICHARD NORTON

Richard Norton is an independent scholar who read theology at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth and the University of Bristol. He later studied Law in the University of Kingston. He has taught in Seminaries, University Colleges, and Public Schools in the UK, Sudan and Zimbabwe. He is a Reader in the Church of England in the Diocese of Southwark, a member of the Mystical Theology Network, the British Association for the Study of Spirituality and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

He is currently Joint Director of Studies of MONOS—the Centre for the Study of Monastic Spirituality and Culture and is conducting research into the ways in which classical Christian spiritualties influence the formation of and patterns of leadership in New (lay) Monastic Communities in the UK and the USA.

He is also employed as Head of Fundraising for an international children’s charity: ChildAid to Russia and the Republics.

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PREFACE

We commonly and rightly think of Christian Ethics as being concerned with thought about our duties, obligations and responsibilities in the performance of the corporal and spiritual acts of mercy.¹ But over concentration on this has bypassed another ethical tradition which arises from Contemplative Prayer in which ethics and moral behaviour flow from within an interior life of virtue lived in relationship with God, others and the world. It too yields the fruits of responsibilities and deeds.

The chapters which follow will argue that it is from this contemplative orientation that some of the greatest ethical precepts have been given form and substance, and that it is from them that contemporary Christians can reclaim and recover a specific kind of ethical consciousness which mirrors the Grace and Love which characterise the relationships between the persons of the most Holy Trinity. It is an ethical consciousness which is both dynamic and creative. Like the billowing wind of Ecclesiastes 1:6 it moves round and round in a circle. But unlike the wind of the preacher that very dynamism ensures that there is always something new under the sun, constantly renewing itself as the consciousness of the presence of God grows, deepens and expands. It begins in the formlessness of silent meditation and is made substantive and real in humility, asceticism and active loving compassion. Having received its form in the here and now it dissipates once more into formlessness to draw the contemplative and those s/he loves and serves into an ever closer union with God in order to be strengthened and renewed as it takes shape in our world once more.

This mirroring the interior life of the Trinity in the interior life of the contemplative knows no boundaries and is not content with a morally static universe dominated by hierarchy, filtered truths and our current obsession with pelvic moral issues both in the Church and out of it.

This much neglected strand of what I will call Contemplative Ethics will be explored through the themes of Perfection, Suffering and Intimacy, Love of the World and, finally, the Ethics of Empowerment and Equality as they appear in parts of the western tradition and especially in the writings of Julian of Norwich² and those of St Teresa of Avila.

INTRODUCTION:

HOW TO SEE A VISION

This book rests on the view that the increasing emphasis on cognition in Christian Theology in general, and in the study of Spirituality in particular, is preventing us from properly understanding the objects of our concern. Too often we accord a privileged position to the written word and assume that its verbal discourse is for sophisticated people, while discarding the visual as crumbs under the table for the semi-literate and unsophisticated to gather as best they may. We are in danger of forgetting that both the verbal and the visual are equally complex and multi-layered methods of reflection on abstract concepts.

Here in the Introduction I use extracts from the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing³ and a longer analysis of the Parable of the Lord and Servant in the Showings of Love⁴ to Julian of Norwich in order to set out one method by which I think we may recover a sense of the verbal and the visual (using different parts of the mind) as equal partners in our theologising. Indeed, I want to argue that each needs the other to be what it is and that when one is absent from the other both are diminished.

This is continued as a connecting theme in the first three chapters which demonstrate that the recovery of the visual with the verbal is fully consistent with significant and influential parts of the Christian tradition since the writings of John Cassian in the fifth century.

The remaining four chapters that follow show how the verbal is always accompanied by the visual in the writings of the two greatest female writers of the medieval period, Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. They do so by taking the themes of the Contemplative Ethics mentioned at the end of the Preface.

This book ends with a short summary of conclusions from the whole enterprise.

Let us begin then by making a quite obvious point, namely that extant medieval mystical and spiritual texts are the only means we have of recovering the spiritual heights and the sense of the presence of God that they wish to share with us. Their insights, however, are not the result of carefully reasoned argument using the principles of philosophical logic alone, but the fruit of using the mind (and often the body too) in ways which are creative, open, receptive and prayerful. So it is that the very texts themselves point beyond the verbal and the logical to the insight itself which can and often does seem quite chaotic, even to a specialist.

In the rise of Scholasticism, especially in its Thomistic form, in the monasteries and universities of the C13 and C14 we see an increasing fascination with the rational ordering of all knowledge in to neat, self-contained categories, each part forming and contributing to an intellectually satisfying whole. Yet its progress, leading to a final triumph in laying the foundation for much of the Enlightenment and the