¹ I am grateful to the Sisters of the Congregation of La Retraite—Ireland UK, whose support for the “Love and Suffering” project made possible the completion of this paper.

² Turner, Denys, in Julian of Norwich, Theologian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011)Google Scholar draws attention, among other things, to Julian's marginality as an anchoress. He suggests that ’all these forms of marginality contribute to a freedom of vocabulary and image, an expansiveness of thought, and a singularity of theological emphasis that set her apart from mainstream styles of medieval theology’ (16).

³ In Balthasar: a (very) critical introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2012)Google Scholar I have suggested that this set of circumstances contribute to an ‘unfettered’ quality in Balthasar's theology, which might be construed as both its strength and its weakness.

⁴ ‘Theology and Sanctity’ in Explorations in Theology Volume I: The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁵ The two cases are slightly different. The final volume of the Theo‐drama quotes very heavily from Speyr's writings, and in this sense the influence is unmissable. Balthasar's reliance on Speyr in relation to Holy Saturday and the descent into Hell is not so explicit textually, but most commentators presume that there must be a connection between his quite novel and idiosyncratic proposals and her annually repeated experiences during Holy Week.

⁶ Watson, Nicholas and Jenkins, Jacqueline, The Writings of Julian of Norwich (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. ixGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Cf. Fergus Kerr's Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians (Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2006)Google Scholar for a discussion of nuptial theology and an indication of its striking novelty against the background of earlier 20^th century Catholic thought.

⁸ These statements are found in chapters 57 and 60 of Julian's Long Text. All quotations from Julian in this article are from this Long Text, and for ease of reading, they are drawn from Penguin Classics translation by Spearing, Elizabeth, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Penguin Books, 1998)Google Scholar. Where my argument depends on issues of detail, the Middle English text (from Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, eds., The Writings of Julian of Norwich (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press, 2006) will be given in the notes.

⁹ Cf. Balthasar's Dare We Hope ‘That All Men shall be Saved’? with A Short Discourse on Hell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988)Google Scholar for his reflections on the question of universal salvation. Julian mentions a desire for a complete vision of hell and purgatory but then writes ‘as for this desire, I could learn nothing about it’ (33). However, alongside the absence of a vision of Hell, the denial of anger in God, and the radically positive affirmation of God's love, stands her repeated insistence that she accepts the faith of the Church in its entirety, and this, as she understands it, includes an insistence that there is indeed a (populated) hell.

¹⁰ Cf. for instance Gerard O'Hanlon's excellent The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

¹¹ I first drew attention to the suffering‐laden atmosphere of Balthasar's theology in Chapter 5 of Balthasar: a (very) critical introduction.

¹² Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 169Google Scholar, emphasis added.

¹³ Elucidations (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998) p. 84Google Scholar.

¹⁴ The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 70Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ In this connection, see also Ben Quash's discussion of the role of Gelassenheit in Balthasar's thought, in Theology and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Further examples are given below.

¹⁸ “…For I wolde that his paines were my paines…”

¹⁹ ‘For I wiste welle he sufferede but onys…’.

²⁰ ‘For the paine was a noble, precious, and wurshipfulle dede done in a time by the working of love. And love was without beginning, is, and shall be without ende.’

²¹ ‘Alle that he hath done for us, and doeth, and ever shalle, was never cost ne charge to him ne might be, but only that he did in our manhede, beginning at the swete incarnation, and lasting to the blessed uprising on Ester morrow. So long dured the cost and the charge about our redemption in deed, of which dede he enjoyeth endlessly, as it is befor said’.

²² Explorations in Theology II: Spouse of the Word, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 179, 16, 14, 114, 188, 27, 30, 25Google Scholar.

²³ ‘In Retrospect: 1965’ from My Work: In Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993) p. 88Google Scholar.

²⁴ Something fundamental about his thought, in other words, is captured in the following aphorism: ‘The more we come to know God, the more the difference between joy and suffering becomes tenuous: not only do both things become engulfed in the One Will of the Father, but love itself becomes painful, and this pain becomes an irreplaceable bliss.’ Grain of Wheat, 13.

²⁵ Theo‐Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory Volume IV: The Action (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 325Google Scholar.

²⁶ Wherfore me behoved nedes to grant that alle thinges that is done is welle done, for our lord God doth all.’

²⁷ Ibid. ‘And here I saw sothly that sinne is no dede, for in alle this, sinne was not shewde’.

²⁸ It might be supposed that by introducing the concept of privatio boni, I am changing the subject—I have shifted the grounds of the debate from suffering to sin. In fact, however, the two cannot be tidily separated in Julian's thought. Sin is in her view the greatest kind of suffering for a Christian. For Balthasar, a similar kind of intertwining applies, at least as regards the grounds of both sin and suffering in the eternal life of the Trinity.

²⁹ Cf. Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Blackwell: Oxford, 1988) for a discussion of the general patterning of premodern Christian thought along these lines, and the second chapter of Turner's Julian of Norwich, Theologian for an exploration of this point specifically in relation to Julian.

³⁰ ‘ Sinne is behovely, but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and all maner of thinge shalle be wel’. ‘Appropriate’ might be another translation of “behovely. Turner argues that ‘behovely’ is Julian's equivalent of the (equally difficult to translate) Latin ‘conveniens’.

³¹ While I am in general following Denys Turner in emphasising the centrality of the (unresolved) intellectual struggle around the ‘fittingness’ of sin in Julian, one place where my reading of Julian diverges from his is in the significance given to this ‘deed’ beyond our knowing. On Turner's reading, there is nothing more to expect after the Cross, which is ‘the final outcome of that [final] conflict,’ the conflict ‘between sin and love’ (21). Beyond the cross, Turner asserts, ‘there is no concluding Resurrection narrative in Julian, no further episode of dénouement’ (20). He sees the Cross, for Julian, as ‘sin's defeat of love,’ but this is in turn sin's own defeat, ‘its power being exhausted by its very success’. The meaning of the Cross, which is the Resurrection, is ‘that the vulnerability of love…is stronger than sin's power to kill’ (21). What Turner outlines is a compelling account in its own right, but I do not myself detect in Julian any sense of love as ‘vulnerability,’ and while it is true that the cross is enormously central for Julian, I do not take it to be, for her, the conclusion of the whole drama: not only does her insistence on a great, secret deed work against this, but also the care which she takes, discussed above, to contain the cross and the associated suffering to a clearly finite period in time.

³² What about the parable of the Lord and the Servant? Does this, one might ask, not provide precisely a kind of unifying vision? I think Christopher Abbot is right to say that the vision of the Lord and the Servant does not offer ‘a rationally appropriable formula.’ It may be true that in her exploration of this elusive image Julian sets out ‘ to produce an integrated, large‐scale interpretation of sinful humanity's relation to God, and to one another, through Christ,’ but this does not mean she arrives at an understanding of why God permits sin. Abbot, Christopher, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999) p. 90Google Scholar.