Justified True Belief

(●) A woman whose real name nobody knows, shut for life in one room, wrote the earliest book in English known to be by a woman. + In May 1373 a thirty-year-old Englishwoman lay dying in a house in Norwich. A priest came and held a crucifix in front of her face, and over the next five hours she saw fifteen of the sixteen things she called shewings, which is her own spelling of showings and means simply the things she was shown. The sixteenth came the night after. There was blood running down from the crown of thorns, a small brown object in her palm that turned out to be the whole created world, a lord and a servant, and a voice telling her that all shall be well. Then she got better, and spent the rest of her life trying to understand what she had been shown. She is called Julian after the church her cell was built against, St Julian’s in Norwich, and that is almost certainly not the name her parents gave her. We do not know who her family were, whether she had been married, or whether the children she writes about so knowingly were ever her own. What survives is two books, one short and one long, and four wills in which money was left to the anchoress at St Julian’s, an anchoress being a woman who had taken a vow to live shut for the rest of her life in a single room built against a church. Here is the fact a reader will remember. Hers is the earliest book in English known to have been written by a woman. She wrote it in a country where putting theology into English was on its way to being a burning matter, in the ordinary speech of shopkeepers and weavers, and she said of herself that she was unlearned, feeble and frail, and no teacher. She has been in print without a break since 1901, and she is read today far more widely than she was in any century before the last one.

(●) c. 1342 AD: She was born in or near Norwich, and the plague reached the city before she was seven. + The birth year is arithmetic rather than record. She tells us she was thirty years old and a half in May 1373, which puts her birth in the closing months of 1342, and scholars who prefer a round figure write 1343. Nothing else about her beginning is known: no parents, no parish of baptism, no schooling. Every guess about her early life, including the pleasant one that she was educated by the Benedictine nuns at Carrow priory a short walk down the river, is a guess. The city she grew up in was the second or third largest in England, a place of wool and weaving and imported Flemish dye, with more parish churches inside its walls than any other English town. In January 1349 the Black Death arrived, and by the time it had passed through, something close to half the people she had been born among were dead. It came back in 1361, in 1369, and again in 1387. A child of that generation watched neighbours buried in batches and grew up with the arithmetic of sudden loss in her bones. When she later asked God, in so many words, why sin had ever been permitted to start, the question was not an academic exercise set by a tutor. It was the question her whole childhood had been putting to her.

(●) May 1373 AD: Dying at thirty, she watched the crucifix at the foot of her bed begin to bleed. + She had asked God, years before, for three gifts, and two of them were strange ones. She wanted to understand the suffering of Christ as though she had stood at the cross. She wanted a serious illness at about thirty, severe enough that everyone including herself would expect her to die. And she wanted three wounds, by which she meant not injuries but permanent dispositions: true sorrow for sin, real compassion, and an unshakable longing for God. The first two requests she made conditionally, if God willed it. The third she asked flat out. The illness came. She lay three days and three nights, received the last rites on the fourth, which are the prayers and the anointing the church gives to someone it expects to bury, and then hung on two days more. By the morning of the seventh her body was numb from the waist down, and her curate, the priest who did the daily work of that parish, arrived to be with her at the end. He set a crucifix in front of her face and said, in effect, look at this and take comfort. She would rather have looked straight up toward heaven, but her eyes would no longer lift, so she looked ahead at the cross instead. The room went dark around the edges, and the only light left in it was on the figure of Christ. Then the pain stopped. Blood began to run from under the crown of thorns, hot and fresh and plentiful, and the sixteen shewings began. Fifteen of them came one after another between about four in the morning and just after nine, and the sixteenth came the following night. The Paris and Sloane manuscripts both date the shewings to the thirteenth day of May 1373, though some modern accounts, and the Anglican calendar, keep the eighth. What she saw in five hours took her the rest of her life to unpack.

(●) Soon after 1373 AD: She wrote down what she had seen, in English, and insisted she was no teacher. + The first account is short, about twenty-five brief chapters, and it reads like someone getting the thing down before it fades. It is usually placed within a few years of the illness, though some scholars read the evidence for a date in the 1380s or later. It survives in a single manuscript, and one passage in it did not make the second book. Her English is four centuries older than ours and looks stranger to the eye than it sounds to the ear, so it helps to read it aloud. Speaking to whoever might pick the book up, she says, in the Middle English that Watson and Jenkins print from that manuscript: "Botte God forbade that ye shulde saye or take it so that I am a techere. For I meene nought so, no I mente nevere so. For I am a woman, lewed, febille, and freylle." Lewed means unlettered rather than coarse. So the sentence is saying that she is a woman, unschooled, weak and easily broken, and that she is not setting up as an instructor of anybody. It is worth understanding why she bothered to say it. Paul’s instruction that a woman is not to teach or exercise authority over a man (1 Timothy 2:12) was read in her century as barring women from the pulpit and the theology faculty, and the church courts enforced that reading. So she does not claim the office, and the way she gets round it is to separate the office from the errand. A messenger is not a teacher. She was handed something and is passing it on, and what she knows, she says, she has of the shewing of him who is the sovereign teacher. There was a second and sharper reason for caution. John Wycliffe had been arguing that Scripture belonged in English in the hands of ordinary people, and by the 1380s his followers, the Lollards, were being hunted. In 1401 Parliament made obstinate heresy a burning offence, and constitutions drawn up by Archbishop Thomas Arundel in 1407 and published in 1409 forbade any new English translation of Scripture, or the use of a recent one, without a bishop’s licence. Julian wrote English theology through those years, and said nothing that anyone was ever able to charge her with.

(●) By the 1390s AD: She was sealed into a cell built against a Norwich church, and never came out. + The ceremony that put her there was a funeral. The bishop read the office of the dead over her, the prayers he would otherwise have read over a body, she walked into the cell on her own feet, and in some rites the door was bricked or bolted behind her. That is what it meant to be made an anchoress: a woman who has taken a vow to live permanently enclosed in a single room attached to a church, the word coming from the Greek for withdrawing. An anchorite is the same vow under its general name, used of men and women alike, and the Norwich wills use it of her. What was left of ordinary life after the door closed ran on three openings. A narrow slanted window called a squint looked into the church so she could see the altar and receive communion. A second window onto the street, curtained with a black cloth, was where people came to talk. A third served a servant who cooked, fetched, and dealt with the world. Her cell stood against the wall of St Julian’s church in Conisford, in the poorer end of Norwich down toward the river quays. The earliest firm mention of her is a will of 1394 leaving money to an anchorite named Julian; a will of 1404 names "Julian, anchoress of the church of St Julian, Conisford," and leaves eight pence to Sarah who lived with her; a will of 1415 leaves money to the anchoress and to her maid and to Alice, her former maid. Sarah and Alice are the only servants of hers anyone thought to name. The point of the arrangement was not escape. An anchoress was a fixed spiritual resource for a working parish, the way a doctor’s surgery is fixed, and the street window was open to anyone. She kept her whole vocabulary in that world: her book is addressed to her "even-Christians," her fellow believers, and she is plain that no revelation made her more loved than the least soul in a state of grace. As she puts it, if she looks at herself on her own she is nothing at all; it is in the general body that she is anything.

(●) c. 1393 AD: After twenty years of turning one vision over, an answer came, and she began the long book. + One of the sixteen shewings had refused to make sense, the one she calls the lord and the servant. She had been given a picture of a lord seated in state and a servant standing beside him, and the servant, sent on an errand, ran off so eagerly that he fell into a ditch and could not get up. Any of us could finish that story, and we would finish it the same way: the master is put out, the servant has himself to blame. What stopped her was the lord’s face. He looked at the fallen servant with nothing but tenderness. No annoyance, no reckoning, no blame. That would not fit with what she had been taught and believed, which is that sinners are blameworthy and God is right to be angry. So she waited. "For twenty years after the time of the Shewing, save three months, I had teaching inwardly," she writes, and the teaching told her to go back over every detail of the picture. When she did, she saw that the servant was two people at once. He was Adam, which in her reading means humanity gathered into one man, the whole family in the person of its first member, falling into the pit of this world. And he was Christ, who ran willingly into that same pit to fetch Adam out. The Father does not blame the servant because the servant, in the end, is his own Son. She had waited fifteen years for one other answer, the answer to what the whole thing had meant, and roughly twenty for this one, and only then wrote the long version: eighty-six chapters, perhaps six times the length of the first, with the visions now carrying decades of thinking. It is one of the few books in English that can be dated by its author’s own patience.

(●) c. 1413 AD: Margery Kempe came to the window for advice and stayed for days. + Margery Kempe of Lynn was about thirty years younger, the mother of fourteen children, and a person almost nobody found restful. She wept loudly and publicly, claimed conversations with Christ, and was repeatedly accused of being either a fraud or a Lollard. Before sailing for Jerusalem she was told, she says, to go to an anchoress in Norwich called Dame Jelyan, because the anchoress was expert in such matters and could give good counsel. The advice Julian gave her is the only report of her speaking that anybody wrote down. Test the impulse, she said, by what it does: an inward prompting that runs against love cannot be the Holy Spirit, because the Spirit is all charity and will not contradict himself; an inward prompting that leaves the soul steady in the faith is another matter. Then she told Margery to expect abuse and to be patient under it, since patience is where a soul is kept. Margery records that the two of them talked for many days. It is a small scene and an unusually clear one. A woman famous for uncontrolled emotion goes for help to a woman famous for calm, and the calm woman does not tell her to stop crying. She gives her a test she can apply herself, and sends her on. The account is in Kempe’s own book, Book I, chapter 18.

(●) After 1416 AD: A countess’s bequest names her for the last time, and then the record goes quiet. + On 26 September 1416, Isabel, Countess of Suffolk, left twenty shillings to "Julian recluz a Norwich." She was then about seventy-three. After that there is nothing certain: a bequest of 1429 goes to an unnamed anchoress at St Julian’s, which may be her or may be a successor, and the Lady Julian who turns up in Norwich wills from 1427 onward, Julian Lampet, was an anchoress at Carrow priory and a different woman altogether. Nobody wrote down when she died or where she was buried. The cell was pulled down in the 1530s, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and the religious houses of England were emptied and sold off, and the church kept going without it. On the night of 27 June 1942 a German bomb hit St Julian’s and took down everything except the north wall. When the parish rebuilt in 1953, to a design by the architect A. J. Chaplin, the diggers uncovered foundations on the south side that were taken for the anchorhold, which is the name for the cell itself, and a chapel was put up on them; not everyone is sure the cell stood there rather than on the shaded north side, but it is a place of pilgrimage now, with a plain door where the street window would have been. She would have found the attention funny. In her own account of herself she is not the point at all, and she says so with some force: what God showed her he showed for everyone, and if the reader loves God the better for it, it is more to the reader than it ever was to her.

What She Taught

(T1) Everything that exists is small enough to hold in one hand, and it lasts only because God loves it. + Pick up a hazelnut. It is about the size of a marble, brown, unremarkable, the sort of thing a child finds in a hedge in October. Julian says she was shown one lying in her palm, round as a ball, and when she asked what it was the answer came back that it was everything that has ever been made. Her first reaction was that a thing that small and that fragile ought to have crumbled already. The answer she was given is the whole of her doctrine of creation in nine words: it lasts, and always will, because God loves it. She draws three properties out of the picture. God made it, God loves it, God keeps it. Notice that the keeping is not a separate maintenance contract added after the making. The reason a universe goes on existing from one second to the next is the same reason it started, which is that God wants it to. Paul puts the same thing to the Colossians when he says that "in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). Then she turns it around, and this is where it stops being an abstraction. If everything that is made is the size of a hazelnut, no created thing is big enough to rest in. That, she says, is exactly why we are restless: we keep trying to settle into things that are too small to hold us. It is the same diagnosis Augustine had made a thousand years earlier, arrived at from a different direction and put in language a weaver could follow.

(Q) "He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made." + Source: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 5 (Grace Warrack’s 1901 rendering of the Sloane manuscript, in the public domain). This is the first shewing, and it follows immediately on a sentence about God as our clothing, wrapping and enclosing us for tender love. The line that completes the picture comes a few words later: she marvelled that it did not simply fall to nothing, and was answered that it lasts, and ever shall, because God loves it (T1).

(T2) Sin plays a necessary part in the story, and the story ends well. + Her most famous sentence is usually quoted with the first half cut off, which turns a hard-won conclusion into a slogan on a tea towel. What she actually asked was the oldest question there is, and she admits she had asked it often and foolishly: given that God saw everything coming, why was sin not simply stopped at the start? Then none of this would have happened. The answer has two halves joined by a "but." The first half turns on a Middle English word, behovable, which means needful, a thing that plays a part it had to play. Notice how much that word is not saying. It does not mean sin is good, and it does not mean God caused it. What it means is that sin has a place in the shape of what God is doing, the way the servant in her parable of the lord and the servant fell into the ditch and the fall turned out to be the occasion of a reward greater than anything he would have had if he had stayed on his feet. Then comes the second half, repeated three times: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. She is careful about what she does not claim. Pressed on how this could square with the church’s teaching that some are lost, she says she was given no answer except that what is impossible to us is not impossible to God, and that there is a deed the Trinity will do on the last day which no creature beneath Christ knows or will know until it is done. She holds the promise and the mystery together without resolving them, and she says plainly that she is doing so. Paul does something similar when he tells the Romans that all things work together for good for those who love God (Romans 8:28), a promise about the whole without a schedule for the parts.

(Q) "It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." + Source: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 27 (Warrack, 1901). The thirteenth shewing. The Middle English of the Sloane manuscript reads "Synne is behovabil, but al shal be wel & al shal be wel & al manner of thyng shal be wele." She adds, in the same chapter, that the words were said very tenderly, and showed no manner of blame to her or to any that shall be saved (T4).

(T3) Jesus is our Mother as truly as God is our Father. + A mother in her century fed her child from her own body, and if the child grew reckless she let it take the bruises it needed to take, and her love did not alter as her handling did. Julian builds her boldest teaching out of exactly that ordinary knowledge, and she keeps the comparison running longer than any earlier writer we know of. A mother, she says, can feed a child with her milk; Jesus feeds us with himself. A mother lays a child to her breast; Christ leads us into his, through the wound in his side. Two things keep this from being a modern importation. The first is that she is not renaming God or adding a person to the Trinity. She assigns motherhood to the Second Person, which is the church’s shorthand for the Son, Jesus Christ, and she assigns it to what he does rather than to what he is called: he carried us, laboured for us, and the labour was the cross. Her formula is that our Father wills, our Mother works, and the Holy Spirit confirms. The Trinity is exactly where it was. The second is that the language is not hers to begin with. Isaiah has God saying "As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you" (Isaiah 66:13), and Jesus compares himself to a hen gathering her chicks (Matthew 23:37). Anselm of Canterbury, three centuries before Julian, prayed to Christ as a mother sheltering her chickens under her wings. What Julian does is take a strand of imagery the church already had and give it six chapters instead of a sentence, which is a difference of degree that feels like a difference of kind.

(Q) "As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother." + Source: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 59 (Warrack, 1901). It comes in the second of the six chapters on the motherhood of Christ, which run from 58 to 63, and she grounds it at once in a phrase she heard in the shewings, "I it am," which is Middle English for "It is I." God names himself the might and the goodness of the Fatherhood and the wisdom of the Motherhood in the same breath, which is her way of saying that neither is a second thought (T3).

(T4) She was shown no wrath in God and no blame laid on the soul, and she could not make it agree with what she had been taught. + This is the most difficult thing in her book, and the honest thing about her is that she found it difficult too. Across all sixteen shewings she never once saw God angry. She says she looked for it. What she saw instead was a God to whom anger is as impossible as it would be for light to be dark, on the grounds that our whole existence rests in his love and an instant of divine wrath would simply end us. She goes so far as to say that God cannot forgive in the way we forgive, because he was never offended in the way we are offended. Set beside that is everything she had been taught since childhood and believed without reservation, that we sin badly and daily and are genuinely to blame. Here she does the thing that makes her worth reading, which is to refuse to drop either one. She will not say we are innocent, because she knows better and so does everyone. Neither will she say she saw blame in God, because she did not, and inventing it would be a lie about a vision. What she ends up holding is two judgments at once, the church’s judgment in which we stand guilty and the judgment she was shown in which no blame appears, and rather than choosing between them she puts the contradiction to God as a straight question and waits. The answer she got was the picture of the lord and the servant, and it works by relocating the blame rather than cancelling it. The servant is Adam and Christ at once, and in Christ the Father looks at humanity and sees his own Son, so there is nothing left to assign. What she is describing in fourteenth-century English is close to what Paul states when he says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). Where she leaves a reader uneasy is that she reaches this conclusion by way of what she was not shown, and the New Testament does speak of a wrath she never saw.

(Q) "Good Lord, I see Thee that art very Truth; and I know in truth that we sin grievously every day and be much blameworthy; and I may neither leave the knowing of Thy truth, nor do I see Thee shew to us any manner of blame. How may this be?" + Source: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 50 (Warrack, 1901). She is praying, not lecturing, and the chapter around it records how long she was stuck: caught between two things she could not deny, with no rest and no patience, until the parable of the lord and servant came (T4). It is one of the few places in medieval devotional writing where a writer lets the reader watch the difficulty instead of the solution.

(T5) Trouble is promised; defeat is not. + The last thing she was told, at the close of the sixteenth shewing, was not a doctrine but a piece of reassurance, and she spends a chapter making sure the reader does not hear more in it than was said. The words were: trust this, and you shall not be overcome. Anyone who has ever been handed a comforting sentence at a hospital door knows how quickly it can be stretched into a guarantee nobody made, and she seems to have known it too, because she stops and spells out what the promise does not include. It does not say you will not be tempested. Her word means storm-tossed, the way a small boat is. It does not say you will not be travailed, which is the word for hard labour and for a woman in childbirth. It does not say you will not be afflicted. The promise leaves every one of those in place and guarantees only the outcome. She notes that this comfort is general, meant for all her fellow Christians and not for her privately, which for her is the whole reason it was worth writing down. Christ says the same thing to the disciples on the last night, in the same order: "In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). The trouble is stated first and not withdrawn. What is added is that it will not have the last word, which is a different and more durable thing than being told it will not happen.

(Q) "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." + Source: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 68 (Warrack, 1901), where it stands as the chapter’s heading and is repeated in the text. The sixteenth shewing came on the night after the other fifteen and was, she says, the conclusion and confirmation of them all. It arrived at a bad moment for her. Earlier that day a religious man had asked how she did, and she had told him she had raved; he laughed out loud, and she was left sore ashamed of herself, until the Lord answered her that night that it was no raving she had seen (T5).

(Q) "Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love." + Source: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 86 (Warrack, 1901), the last chapter of the book. She had wanted to know for fifteen years what the whole thing had been about, and this is the reply, arriving as a catechism with one answer. John says it in three words, that "God is love" (1 John 4:8); Julian arrives at the same place by way of a sickbed, a crucifix, and half a lifetime of thinking, and she ends the book one sentence later with the observation that before God made us he loved us, and that love has never slackened since.

What the Church Made of Her

(†) For nearly three centuries almost nobody read her, and exiled English nuns kept the book alive. + Julian’s book had one of the narrowest escapes of any major work of English devotion. She wrote before printing reached England, her cell was demolished in the 1530s, and the monastic libraries that would normally have copied a book like hers were broken up in the same years. Not one manuscript in her own hand survives. The short version comes down in a single copy, made around the middle of the fifteenth century, a generation or so after her death, and bound up with other mystical writing. The long version was saved by English Catholics living abroad because they could not live at home. Benedictine nuns in exile at Cambrai, whose spiritual director from 1624 was the English Benedictine monk Augustine Baker, a man who made a point of putting the old English mystics back into circulation, copied and preserved it, and the daughter house their community later founded in Paris carried on the work. Every complete manuscript of the long text that we have was made in that exiled world, the earliest of them perhaps as far back as about 1580 and the latest in the early eighteenth century. It is worth doing the subtraction. She finished writing around 1393, and the oldest complete copy of what she wrote is roughly two centuries younger than she is, made by women who had left the country to keep such things going. In 1670 Baker’s disciple Serenus de Cressy, who had already gathered Baker’s own writings into print, published Julian for the first time, under the title Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love. It did not catch on. Cressy’s edition was reprinted once in 1843 and was a rarity by 1900. For most of the period between the Reformation and Queen Victoria, the earliest surviving book in English by a woman was known to a few dozen people.

(†) The twentieth century handed her back to the whole church at once, Protestant and Catholic together. + The turn came with two editions. Henry Collins printed a modernised text from the Sloane manuscript in 1877, and in 1901 a Scottish woman named Grace Warrack published the version that did the work: readable, lightly modernised, with an introduction that treated Julian as a theologian rather than a curiosity. It went through edition after edition and is still among the most quoted renderings in English. What followed was unusually broad. T. S. Eliot ended Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets, by weaving her sentence about all manner of thing being well into the close of the poem, which came out in October 1942, the year a German bomb took down her church. Anglicans put her in the calendar and keep her day on 8 May. Roman Catholics, who have never formally canonised her, which is to say never declared her a saint by the church’s own legal process, hear her quoted from Rome all the same: Benedict XVI devoted a general audience to her on 1 December 2010, one of the weekly addresses a pope gives to whoever has come to listen, and singled out her willingness to compare God’s love to a mother’s. Evangelical readers, who have no institutional stake in medieval mysticism at all, quote the hazelnut and the line about not being overcome. The breadth is not an accident. Almost everything she teaches is ordinary Christian doctrine, said by someone with no position to defend and no faction to please.

(†) Her language of God’s motherhood was older than she was, and she never let it loosen the Trinity. + When readers meet the motherhood chapters for the first time, the usual reaction is that this must be a recent idea read backwards into an old book. It is worth checking the dates. Isaiah has God comforting his people as a mother comforts a child; Jesus likens himself to a hen with her brood; Anselm of Canterbury, who died in 1109, addressed Christ in prayer as a mother gathering chickens under her wings; Bernard of Clairvaux used maternal language for Christ and for abbots. Julian inherited a strand of imagery that the church had been using for a thousand years. What she did with it was to make it structural. Others reached for the image in a sentence and moved on; she works out three kinds of motherhood, in the making of our nature, in the taking of our nature at the Incarnation, which is God the Son becoming a human being in Jesus of Nazareth, and in the daily work of grace, and she threads all three through six chapters. The result is a piece of teaching about the Second Person that is warm without being vague. She is also careful in a way that later imitators have not always been. She never calls the Father our Mother, never suggests a fourth person, and never uses the language to soften anything the creeds say. The persons keep their names and their relations: our Father wills, our Mother works, the Holy Ghost confirms. That is why the church has been able to receive the teaching without a quarrel, and why Benedict XVI could commend it from the same podium where he commended Augustine.

(†) Where her own record invites caution: a God she was shown without wrath, and a question she was never answered. + Two things in her book have troubled careful readers, and in both cases she raised the difficulty first. - The wrath she did not see. She reports that in all sixteen shewings she saw no manner of wrath in God, neither for a short time nor a long one, and she builds on it: God cannot be angry, because anger and friendship are contraries. Scripture is less accommodating. Paul writes that "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men" (Romans 1:18), and John says of the one who refuses the Son that "the wrath of God remains on him" (John 3:36). Christians have long distinguished God’s settled opposition to evil from the flaring temper the word suggests in us, and Julian is plainly reaching for that distinction. But she states her side of it much more firmly than she states the other, and a reader who took her chapters on wrath as the whole account would be missing something the New Testament says without embarrassment. - The deed she could not describe. Her promise that all shall be well sits beside her own acknowledgement that the church teaches that some are finally lost, and she does not pretend to reconcile them. She says she asked and was given no answer but that what is impossible to us is not impossible to God, and that a great deed is reserved for the last day which no creature will understand until it is done. Some later readers have taken her toward universal salvation, the view that everyone is saved in the end. Her own text blocks that inference: she states the church’s teaching on the lost as her own belief and leaves it standing. What she offers is not a solution but a promise with its contents withheld, and readers who want the solution will not find it in her. Neither of these is a hidden fault that had to be dug out. She wrote both down in her own book, said she could not see to the bottom of either, and went on believing what she had been taught while reporting exactly what she had been shown. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it is a large part of why the church has trusted her.