The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedJulian of Norwich
Title QuotedRevelations of Divine Love
Date (Year/Month/Day)1962/03/00
Imprint 
QuotationBut Julian is without doubt one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older, and whereas in the old days I used to be crazy about St. John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world and the Indies and all the Spanish mystics rolled up in one bundle. I think that Julian of Norwich is, with Newman, the greatest English theologian. She is really that. For she reasons from her experience of the substantial center of the great Christian mystery of Redemption. She gives her experience and her deductions clearly, separating the two. And the experience is of course nothing merely subjective. It is the objective mystery of Christ as apprehended by her, with the mind and formation of a fourteenth-century English woman. And that fourteenth-century England is to me and always has been a world of light, for I have almost lived in it. So many villages and churches of the time are still there practically without change, or were thirty years ago. One can still breathe the same air as Julian, with the admixture of a little smog and fallout, of course "¦
JournalWitness to Freedom: The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crisis.; Selected and edited by William H. Shannon. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1994, p. 43
Link to Merton's Copy