Willful Illness, Crip-Time, and Curative Soteriology in Julian of Norwich's "A Revelation of Love"

In the opening paragraphs of _A Revelation of Love_, Julian of Norwich writes that she, “a simple creature unlettered, living in deadly flesh,” desired three gifts by the grace of God: “The first was mind of the passion. The second bodily sickness. The third was to have of God’s gift three wounds” (Watson 2006). _A Revelation of Love_ is the expansion and revision of Julian’s _A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman_; the earlier text is thought to have been completed around the year 1390 (over fifteen years after Julian dates the visions themselves, in 1373), while the completion of the longer _Revelation_ is dated to shortly before Julian’s death, after 1416. Altogether, _A Revelation of Love_ represents over thirty years of contemplation, writing, and revision following what Julian describes as period of extreme illness and suffering, during which she received sixteen revelations.

By including bodily sickness among the three gifts that she prays for God to deliver, and which, upon God’s intervention, inaugurate the mystical visions from which Julian writes her treatise, Julian aligns disease with the cultivation of mystical and theological knowledge. Julian’s willful illness is disabling in its physical manifestation and enabling as a devotional practice. This paradoxical dynamic of spiritual activity through physical limitation provides a troubling yet fascinating case to explore alongside disability studies, with the potential to both reassert the importance of disease as lived experience and theological _and_ disrupt diagnostic approaches to medieval mystical literature.

My interest in examining the medieval past with conceptual tools developed by the modern study of disability is, in part, motivated by Alison Kafer’s call to imagine disabled futurity in _Feminist, Queer, Crip_ (2013). As Kafer explains her plan to engage with disabled, or “crip,” futurity, she articulates that she feels the affective limitations of her own political goals when she entertains the idea of disability as a _desirable_ future. She writes: “As much joy as I find in communities of disabled people, and as much as I value my experiences as a disabled person, I am not interested in becoming more disabled than I already am” (Kafer 3). Though she writes from a vastly different cultural context, Julian of Norwich offers an example of someone making exactly this uncomfortable leap: she desires to be _more_ disabled.

Engaging with the historical past of disability, as well as its future, requires us to face uncomfortable scenes of desire, intention, and mortification. We also have to face the fact that an “elsewhen” found in disabilities’ past––a term which, as Kafer describes, names a temporal location “in which disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral,”––may not yield the political or ethical modes we would like to see disabilities’ future, even if they valorize experiences of impairment as authoritative sites from which to know, write, theorize, and experience the divine (3).

Ultimately, it is my contention that Julian of Norwich’s _A Revelation of Love_ offers a theological model for the joining of “crip” and “curative” temporalities. While “crip time” structures her meditations on the Passion of Christ, her incarnation theology, and her vision of contemplative union with God, she never completely rejects curative soteriology, framing the absolute elimination of bodily “imperfection” as the necessary aim of God’s plan for humanity and the ultimate expression of God’s love.

In _Feminist, Queer, Crip_ , Alison Kafer develops Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of “Queer Temporalities” to bring forward what she sees as the inherent but often-disavowed relationship between queerness and disability (34). She combines Freeman’s “queer temporalities” with work by Irv Zola and Carol Gill, whom she identifies as the first to use the term “crip time.” While Freeman herself views her use of bodily imagery as purely metaphorical, to Kafer, Freeman’s metaphoric makes the real connection between illness and disability obvious. As Kafer cites, “just as quickly as she names this dislocation or disability, however, she moves away from it, focusing only on queer temporalities” (34). But Kafer asks her readers to take up the opportunity offered by Freeman’s text in spite of her disavowal. She asks: “What happens, though, if we do not move “beyond somatic changes” but think about queer/crip temporalities _through_ such changes, through these kinds of skeletal dislocations, or illness, or disease?” (34).

Thinking with “crip time” or “crip temporalities” in the _Revelation_ of Julian of Norwich can help scholars of medieval Christianity understand how Christian eschatological and soteriological temporalities interact with––and rely upon––the reality of bodily sickness. When writing about time, Julian relies upon her somatic narrative of bodily illness and wounding (both in her own body and in Christ’s) and on her theological understanding of salvation. Julian’s narrative blending of bodily illness and the Passion constructs a type of “crip temporality,” in which Julian and Christ are united in their experience of time at the borders of death. However, Christs’ promise of eventual rest in salvation, epitomized in the famous line he offers Julian, “all shall be well,” reifies the idea that “pain is temporary” (ch. 64, lines 8-15). In her description of the outpassing of the soul, Julian imagines the rotting body of a dead person being abandoned by the soul in the image of a white and healthy child (ch. 64). Julian’s _A Revelation_ “expects and assumes” that with God’s intervention, and with Christ acting as a physician of the soul (in reference to the medieval “remedy” tradition), disease, suffering, and pain will eventually come to an end, closely mirroring Kafer’s notion of “curative” temporality.

When we explore medieval mystical literature as an “elsewhen” in the history of disability, we find new ways of understanding both the devotional lives of people who experienced bodily impairment and the theological systems that generate meaning through and around those experiences.  It ought to be the task of scholars of religion and disability to both attend to the experience of disability and devotion outlined in Julian’s text _and_ recognize the troubling political implications of her adherence to a curative soteriology.