On the shelf: Love's Trinity: A Companion to Julian of Norwich

by Amy Frykholm

Perhaps, as Rowan Williams and Thomas Merton have both suggested, Julian of Norwich is the most important Christian thinker of the English language. But most readers of her Revelations of Divine Love will attest that her writing is also extraordinarily difficult to read. In his foreword to the newly released Love’s Trinity: A Companion to Julian of Norwich, Father John-Julian notes that Julian writes with “a theological acumen that is curiously almost as childlike as it is radical, almost as naive as it is complicated.” Her density has led many a reader (including this one) to fits.

Love’s Trinity is a book for anyone who has ever picked up Julian of Norwich and almost as quickly put it down. The text pairs John-Julian’s fluid translation of Julian’s Long Text with sparse but thoughtful commentaries by Frederick Roden, a gender, religion and literature scholar and an Order of Julian associate.

The commentaries are well done, but perhaps even better, they serve as pauses. They are opportunities for the reader to set the book down and think about what has just been said. I found Julian’s text far more readable with these built-in breaks. Also helpful is the way that the text is laid out on the page. Father John-Julian provides hints of Julian’s multilayered structure and verbal play with his own placement of line breaks and spaces.

Roden’s commentaries are not bent by an overly particular reading of Julian. They don’t engage in scholarly arguments about whether Julian was absolutely orthodox in her approach or a protofeminist. Instead, they try to make clear Julian’s relevance for our own day. They address enduring spiritual questions, practices and experiences without sentimentality.

The only way to read this book—or really any book that contains Julian’s text—is slowly and carefully. I have only just started it, and I imagine it will be months before I finish. But it is worth savoring.