Julian of Norwich Quotes on Virtue
Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (Showings, completed in two redactions late in the fourteenth century) gave late medieval English mystical theology one of its most distinctive treatments of virtue under the framing primacy of divine love. The central commitments — that the human soul has a substantial higher part eternally united to God, that the lower self acquires the virtues through its slow conformation to that higher part under the divine pedagogy of mercy and grace, and that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well even amid the actual realities of sin and suffering — articulate a virtue ethics in which divine love rather than fear of judgment supplies the constitutive motivation. The framework, recovered through the modern editions of the Revelations and the broader twentieth-century retrieval of medieval women’s mystical writing, shaped contemporary contemplative theology through Thomas Merton, Denise Levertov, and the wider ressourcement of female mystical voices.
Quotes
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“He said not, 'Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted'; but He said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome.'”
Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 68 -
Attributed to Julian of Norwich:
“He did not say: 'You shall not be tempest-tossed, you shall not be over-strained, you shall not be disquieted'; but He said: 'You shall not be overcome.'”
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“We are kept all as securely in Love in woe as in weal, by the Goodness of God.”
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“Our Lord is the Ground of our Prayer. Herein were seen two properties: the one is rightful prayer, the other is steadfast trust; which He willeth should both be alike large; and thus our prayer pleaseth Him and He of His Goodness fulfilleth it.”
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“We shall suddenly be taken from all our pain and from all our woe, and of His Goodness we shall come up above, where we shall have our Lord Jesus for our meed and be fulfilled with joy and bliss in Heaven.”
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“These two desires of the Passion and the sickness I desired with a condition, saying thus: Lord, Thou knowest what I would, — if it be Thy will that I have it — and if it be not Thy will, good Lord, be not displeased: for I will nought but as Thou wilt.”
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