Medieval anchorites practiced an extreme form of asceticism. After being declared dead to the world, they were permanently walled into a small room adjacent to a church. Although they guardedly interacted with people from the outside world through one window and par- ticipated in the liturgy through a porthole looking into the church, by and large, anchorites turned radically away from the world and devoted themselves to a rigorous process of ascetic self-fashioning, often involving performances of dread.60 The Ancrene Wisse, an early Mid- dle English rule for anchoresses, encourages its audience to use fear to eschew temptation:
Let no one who lives the life of sublimity imagine that she will not be tempted. The good, who have climbed up high, are more tempted than the weak; and this is natural,
60 For a detailed introduction to the anchoretic lifestyle, see Nicolas Watson and Anne
for the higher the hill, the stronger the wind on it. Since the hill of sublime and holy life is higher, the enemy’s blasts, the winds of temptations, are greater and stronger on it. If there is any anchoress who feels no temptations, she should fear greatly that at this very point she is being all too much and all too greatly tempted. (Anchoretic
Spirituality 114)61
As a dreadful “emotion script,” the Wisse asks the anchoress to re-imagine her temptations as strong winds that threaten to foil her spiritual ascension. It is precisely because there is a dis- juncture between the phenomenal promise of pleasure glimpsed in temptation and the meta- physical peril it “actually” signifies that the anchoress must take matters into her own hands and deliberately perform fear of temptation’s winds. Since the most dangerous type of temp- tation is that which is not felt as such, the anchoress ought to be extremely afraid at moments in which she feels least tempted. In order to resist temptation, she commits to a lifelong as- cetic program according to which both palpable temptation and a lack thereof necessitate the immediate production of dread. Since medieval devotees considered dread and love by no means mutually exclusive, however, they would not necessarily have considered a life of perpetual dread devoid of, or even lacking in, enjoyment.
After detailing various internal and external temptations, the Wisse offers several strategies for managing them. Among these are a series of “dreadful thoughts,” all of which situate the anchoress in grave, physical danger: “Think what you would do if you saw the devil of hell standing openly in front of you and gaping wide at you, as he does secretly in temptation; if people cried ‘Fire! Fire!’ because the church was burning; if you heard bur- glars breaking down your walls—these and other similar terrifying thoughts” (Anchoretic
Spirituality 136).62 The Wisse instructs the anchoress to stamp out her unwanted desires by conjuring dreadful thoughts. For Linda Georgianna, early Middle English anchoretic texts, unlike the monastic rules on which they are modeled, tend to be “descriptive rather than pre- scriptive” (9). Following Georgianna, Lara Farina suggests that “[t]his shift of form—from mandate to persuasion—can be seen as a response to the freedoms of the anchorhold. Ancho- rites had to be primarily self-policing, and the manuals written for them sought to condition the anchor’s inner disposition as much as his/her outer actions” (39). From a secular perspec- tive, the Wisse’s suggestion that jolts of deliberate fear eradicate obstacles in the anchoress’ pursuit of salvation might seem both sadistic and coercive. It is quite possible, however, that the anchoress derived a great deal of enjoyment from self-policing—sacrificing prospective, worldly pleasures in pursuit of an intensely erotic, enjoyment of God (Farina 38–39).63
The writings of England’s most famous anchoress, Julian of Norwich, evince a dis- tinct fascination with dread marked by Julian’s characteristic desire to reconcile her mystical experience with her understanding of Christian doctrine. Julian’s writings are framed within an overarching account of an intense revelation that she experienced in 1373. She composed
A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (hereafter VS) shortly thereafter, while the longer A Revelation of Love (hereafter RL) constitutes an elaborate revision of VS, on which Julian
may have continued working as late as 1416 (Watson, “The Composition” 637–83). Both VS and RL contain quadripartite taxonomies of dread including “dread of affray” (i.e. fear “that comes to a man suddenly by frailty”), “dread of pain” (i.e. fear of “bodily death” and “ghost- ly enemies”), “doubtful dread” (i.e. “a spice of despair” that doubts God’s capacity for salva-
62 cf. Ancrene Wisse 92.
tion), and “reverent dread” (i.e. a sublime fear that causes subjects “to hastily flee from all that is not good”).64 All of Julian’s dreads have obvious analogues in Sermon 11, as well as other Middle English treatises on dread and devotion such as Contemplations on the Love
and Dread of God (8–10). On the whole, however, Julian’s treatment of most forms of dread
is substantially less prohibitive than those found in other Middle English texts. For example, where RL states that dread of affray is positive insofar as it “helps to purge man as does bodi- ly sickness and other pain that is not sin; for all such pains help man if they be patiently tak- en” (117), Contemplations insists that “dread of man or of the world [. . .] is counted for naught” (8), and Sermon 11 vociferates that “they are false cowards that dread a manly world” (fol. 23v). Instead of making a sharp distinction between dread of death and dread of hellish punishment, moreover, Julian makes both sub-categories of the entirely productive dread of pain, which wakes the subject out of the “sleep of sin” and steers her to “seek com- fort and mercy from God.” Echoing the tradition of initial fear, Julian posits that dread of pain acts as an entrance (entre), enabling the subject to have contrition through the “blissful touching of the Holy Ghost.”65 Rather than designating dread of pain as a Gift of the Holy Spirit, Julian makes it a prerequisite of any communion with the Holy Spirit, arguably plac- ing the responsibility to fear worldly and infernal pain in pursuit of reverent dread on the sub- ject’s shoulders.
Although Julian’s theology is generally more accepting of worldly fears than those espoused by her contemporaries, she does not exclusively idealize dread. In fact, the mystic treats doubtful dread with marked disdain in VS: “For I am certain that God hates all doubtful
64 VS: 117–19; RL: 355–59.
dreads, and he wills that we have them departed from us with true knowing of love” (117). Here, Julian—who elsewhere staunchly refuses to ascribe any anger to God (269)—baldly states that God hates doubtful dread and he desires that Christian subjects expel it through knowing love. While she does not directly specify its proper object, by calling it a “spice of despair,” Julian associates doubtful dread with doubt of God’s capacity to forgive sin. In the conclusion of VS, Julian differentiates “false dread” that “travails and tempests and troubles” from “reverent dread” that “softens and comforts and pleases and rests,” asserting that the subject must “know them both and refuse the false, right as you would a wicked spirit” (118– 19). On one hand, Julian’s injunction to suppress fears that God is unable or unwilling to dis- pense mercy is uncharacteristically censorial. On the other, by sanctioning comfortable fears and forbidding tormenting ones, Julian ensures that the subject enjoys dreading God. Julian’s relatively scathing account of despair in VS and parts of RL is probably influenced by the Augustinian hermit William Flete’s Middle English psychological tract: Remedies Against
Temptations, which treats despair as an occupational hazard, often caused by demonic inter-
vention, afflicting “religious specialists engaged in contemplative living” (Watson, “Despair” 345). In addition to Julian, Flete’s pathological account of despair influenced a host of Mid- dle English devotional texts including Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, The Cloud of Un-
knowing and The Chastising of God’s Children (Watson, “Despair” 345). If Julian’s demon-
ization of doubtful dread is uncharacteristic, therefore, it was far from idiosyncratic. Unlike VS, which demands that its audience suppress fears that God is unable or un- willing to dispense mercy, RL contains “a striking about-face from [Julian’s] earlier warning about doubtful dread: [in RL] even despair-inducing doubtful dread turns out to do good” (Banchich 339). In a subtle but crucial emendation, Julian renders God’s grace, rather than
the subject, responsible for transforming the bitterness of doubt into love: “Doubtful dread, inasmuch as it draws one to despair, God will have it turned in us into love by true knowing of love: that is to say, that the bitterness of doubt be turned into sweetness of kind love by
grace. For it may never please our lord that his servants doubt in his goodness” (RL 355–56,
my emphasis). While it maintains VS’s vituperative stance on doubtful dread, RL does not mandate self-censorship. As B.A. Windeatt puts it, “[t]he fuller understanding [of Julian’s third dread] explored in A Revelation characteristically turns upon a transformation accom- plished by means of love, and through a realization that the two responses which seem at var- iance with each other are in truth interrelated within us” (112). In other words, RL renders doubtful dread a sort of affective felix culpa, since it is destined to be transformed into know- ing love by grace. In so doing, it flies in the face of a great deal of Middle English devotional literature that condemns despair outright (Watson, “Despair” 345; Snyder 23).66
Like Augustine, Julian distinguishes useful but imperfect fears from a reverent, lov- ing dread of deviating from divinity. Though RL does not call for the out-and-out repression of any class of fear, it certainly privileges reverent dread over all others:
For there is no dread that fully pleases God in us but reverent dread, and that is full soft, for the more it is had, the less it is felt, for the sweetness of love. Love and dread are brethren, and they are rooted in us by the goodness of our maker. [. . .] And it be- longs to us that are his servants and his children to dread him for his lordship and fa- therhood, as it belongs to us to love him for goodness. [. . .] All dreads other than rev-
66 In listing Julian as a Middle English opponent of despair, Watson and Snyder make no
mention of the subtle shift in Julian’s discourse on despair between VS and RL acknowledged by Banchich and Windeatt. Watson’s important essay on despair provides an interesting counterpoint to my own, since he addresses the Early Modern period largely overlooked
erent dread that are proffered to us, though they come under the color of holiness, they are not so true. And hereby may they be known asunder. The dread that makes us hastily to flee from all that is not good and fall into our lord’s breast, as the child into the mother’s bosom, with all our intent and with all our mind [. . .] that dread that brings us into this working, its kind and gracious and good and true. And all that is contrarious to this, is either wrong or melded with wrong. (357)
Julian’s loving dread, of course, owes a great deal to Augustine’s notion of chaste fear. Like Rolle, moreover, Julian describes holy fear as a flight, but where Rolle focuses on the ven- omous sin from which it flees, Julian focuses on God’s matronly bosom to which it flees. For Julian, knowledge of God ought to inspire infinite dread of his sovereign might and love of his consolatory mercy. Although she insists that subjects ought to perpetually dread God’s fatherhood, Julian defines reverent dread as a hasty flight towards God’s motherhood. In an empowering short-circuit, her hermaphroditic God eternally elicits dread as (s)he simultane- ously consoles it. Hardly felt through the love with which it is necessarily comingled, Jul- ian’s reverent dread is, above all, comfortable dread.
Julian’s discourse on dread, like that contained in Ancrene Wisse, is both constative and rhetorical: it both describes and solicits dread. As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton notes, however, Julian’s prose also possesses a distinctly “forensic” dimension absent from purely didactic tracts such as the Wisse: in addition to defining and advocating fear, Julian narrates her expe- rience thereof (315–23). For example, the mystic records her retrospective fear of demonic subterfuge after experiencing a vision of Christ’s tormented face: “I was sometime in a fear about whether or not it was a [divinely inspired] showing. And then diverse times our Lord gave me more sight, whereby I understood truly that it was” (159). Julian’s fear functions as
an emotional call for divine consolation—a call that God readily answers. By narrating her own doubtful dread successfully soliciting God’s consolatory verification of her mystical ex- perience, Julian furnishes forensic support for her theological claim that God’s grace turns despair into love. In doing so, she anticipates the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre, all of whom glean authenticity in despair.