Weal and Woe: Suffering,Sociology, and the Emotions of Julian of Norwich

The power which narratives of mystical experience exert on our thinking derives from the central place of emotions within them. These narratives are crucial to the phenomenon of healing: not as cure, but as a means of accepting, understanding, and minimising suffering. Contemporary religious thought draws heavily on social theory but this paper shows not only that mystical emotions have escaped the attention of sociology, but also that sociology is unable to provide an adequate account of them or of their place in overcoming pain of all kinds. It does so by comparing three very different books about the emotions: Deborah Lupton's The Emotional Self (1998), Jack Barbalet's Emotions, Social Theory and Social Structure (1998), and the fourteenth century Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. The last of these illuminates what the other two call the extra-discursive, embodied and unconscious dimensions of emotions. The first part of the paper makes a general comparison and the second turns to a range of specific emotions: shame and guilt, sorrow and depression, anger, fear, and anxiety, and the positive emotions of joy, love, and desire. This comparison helps explain how people live with chronic suffering and transcend it. It also shows that sociology, by making society itself a thing and elevating it to God-like status, cannot provide the critique of theology which was one of its original intentions, nor fully account for the healing influence of mystical phenomena.     

Prayer and the Theologian of the Cross: Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther

This article constructs a dialogue between Julian of Norwich and the concept of “theologian of the cross,” as found in Martin Luther and his recent interpreters. Since she is Catholic and medieval, one might begin by suspecting that her theology is not acceptable to someone who follows Luther's teaching in the Heidelberg Disputation. However a closer look will suggest that what she has to say is largely in accord with Luther's standard for a theologian of the cross. Put more positively, Julian is a theologian of the cross, in spite of her use of different language and concepts from those of Luther. The focus of the article is the subject of prayer: what Julian teaches about it, and what may be inferred about prayer from Luther's dramatic theses in his disputation.