DIVINE PLENITUDE PART II
La valee de Iarmes, Gustav Dore. Public domain.
In memory of David L. Riggs, 1967-2022: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive..and the life of the human is the vision of God ”; (1)
and for all who are haunted by others’ suffering
Part 1 of this essay ended by asking us to contemplate God’s eternal intention for creation as the peaceable community promised by the visions of Revelation 21-22. Rather than making evil the foundation for our reasoning, how might recognizing this divinely appointed end reorient our entire sense of divine justice?
2. Divine justice compels not punishment but restoration. Trying to understand the horrors of her own age, Julian writes, “I thought I needed to see and know that we are sinners who do many evil things that we ought to avoid, and leave many good deeds undone that we ought to do. So that we deserve both pain and wrath.” (2) In response, God grants her a vision where a servant rushing to obey their superior trips and falls into a ditch. For comfort and direction, the servant needs to gaze upon the superior’s face of love and compassion, which the servant’s fall does not alter. Yet the boggy ditch makes it impossible for the servant to lift and turn their head, and so they remain stuck, writhing in turmoil. (3) Nevertheless, Julian insists that the superior remains steadfastly connected to the servant, not leaving them to their suffering but “abiding” with them by sharing a “loving and merciful gaze” that fills the entire earth and even reaches “down to hell.” (4) The oneness of God with the servant means that sin does not destroy God’s connection with us; rather it distracts us from fully realizing our end of the relationship granted by creation.
It may seem as if this approach to sin waves away its devastating results, but Julian is no permissive pushover. Rather, she identifies sin’s very real, painful effects as the compounding outcomes of its self-referential cycle. Distracted from our Maker by the ditch of struggle, terror, and despair, we cannot properly behold God, ourselves, or others. From our trapped position, we can only imagine more strife, unrest, and indeed wrath. This presumption of continued violence, rooted in our sins and their consequences, distorts all our behavior. Ivan’s relentless protests expose how this orientation constricts our moral capacities. When he recites the terrors that the powerful visit upon the helpless, he whips Alyosha into such a state that even he, the would-be monk, promotes execution before falling silent like Peter at the third cock crow. (5)
Alyosha’s pious hypocrisy reveals our own depravity: our sense of justice is trapped within a calculus of retribution within which we are all implicated. In fact, positing eternal suffering for the damned, in whose failings as well as punishments the redeemed must understand themselves to remain at least partially complicit, destroys the very standard of justice it claims for its base. As Hart presses, “[a]fter all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us?...[I]f the memories of others are removed, or lost, or one’s knowledge of their misery is converted into indifference or, God forbid, into greater beatitude, what then remains of one in one’s last bliss?” (6) If justice equates to punishment, there can be no heaven, no final escape from the hell we make of our world.
But our boggy location clouds our sense of God’s character as well as of justice. If we define God based on these experiences, we simply project our own sin onto the Divine. Instead, the Incarnation reveals who God really is: the One who makes, keeps, and sanctifies humanity in a love always prior to and greater than our sin. As Julian’s vision progresses, the superior becomes the servant and restores connection with itself by living both ends of the relationship. This rescue shows us God’s character of one-ing love, the love that is the Trinity from which creation is made and to which creation is called. (7) Redemption does not entail divine mercy triumphing over divine wrath, for God cannot be so internally conflicted. (8) God can only give who God is: plenteous Divine Love. Thus Julian eventually realizes, “it is utterly impossible that God should be wroth. For wrath and friendship are two opposites. He who wastes and destroys our wrath, making us meek and mild, must accordingly be ever in the same love, meek and mild, which is contrary to wrath.” (9)
Julian concludes that the entire meaning of her revelation is this love in which God holds us from before we were made, “which love was never slaked, nor never shall be.” (10) This love is true justice, and it compels us to collaborate with it. Julian notes, “we will never be fully safe and know our endless joy till we be finally in peace and love; that is to say, fully pleased with God and with all his works and all his judgments, loving and at peace within ourself and with our fellow Christians and with all them that love God.” (11) To become fully pleased with God, God’s work, and God’s judgments is no simple feat. It requires that, with Ivan, we learn to unflinchingly recognize what has gone wrong, and that with Alyosha, we persevere in redirecting our own unfaithfulness, for as long as it takes, even to “the ages of the ages.” To be fully pleased with God and lovingly at peace with self and others may indeed require a fire that refines every bit of sin and error.
Even here, though, God’s eternal justice outstrips our knowing. Consider how if Jesus’ entire earthly existence brings eternity into creation, Holy Week especially illuminates this compression of the eschaton into chronological time. God’s revelation of being for us in Jesus cannot ever be stopped at the cross but ever continues on to the glory of Easter. Thus in Holy Saturday’s time outside of time, Jesus’ descent among the dead accomplishes the transition between Revelation’s fiery lake of Good Friday and its healing garden city of resurrection—not just once long ago, but in an everlasting now that remains ever ours. Celebrating Holy Saturday with Dame Julian reminds us to rest in this ever-available, never-ceasing love, which works our redemption even when evil has seemingly crushed all our will, faith, or even life. At the last, as Hart summarizes, “if God is God…evil itself must disappear in every intellect and will, and hell must be no more. Only then will God, both as the end of history and as that eternal source and end of beings who transcends history, be all in all.” (12) Or in Julian’s words, God’s love makes all well: “[f]rom him we all come, in him we are all enclosed, into him we are all going; and in him we will find our full heaven in everlasting joy…For before he made us, he loved us… And in this endless love we are led and kept by God and never shall be lost.” (13)
The quote is a paraphrased loose translation of Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 4.20.7, which David often employed as a shorthand introducing undergraduates to early Christian theology. Problems with adopting this common paraphrase lifted out of its context, as well as an explanation of the full quote in its context, can be found in this blogpost well worth one’s time: https://theologish.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/theological-misquotes-irenaeus-and-the-man-fully-alive/.
Revelation chapter 46; Skinner 91.
Revelation chapter 47; Skinner 92-93.
Revelation chapter 51, Skinner 104-5.
See The Brothers Karamazov, Book V/Chapter 4; 218-26.
See Hart, That All Shall be Saved, 78-9. See also 87: “The ultimate absence of a certain number of created rational natures would still be a kind of last end inscribed in God’s eternity, a measure of failure or loss forever preserved within the totality of the tale of divine victory.”
Revelation, chapters 54 and 58; Skinner 119-20 and 128-30.
Revelation chapter 47; Skinner 92-93.
Revelation chapter 49; Skinner 96-97.
Revelation chapter 86; Skinner 181.
Revelation chapter 49; Skinner 96-97.
Hart, That All Shall be Saved, 195.
Revelation chapter 53; Skinner 118-9.