Shrine of Julian, St. Julian’s Church, Norwich, England (photo by Carl McColman).

As someone who has long been interested in the Christian mysticism, I consider Julian of Norwich to be one of, if not simply the, greatest of western mystics.

I’m not alone in this assessment. Consider what Thomas Merton once wrote, in one of his legendary Cold War Letters:

Julian is without doubt one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I get 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… I think that Julian of Norwich is with Newman the greatest English theologian.

I love this passage of Merton’s for many reasons, not the least of which is that he calls Julian a theologian. It’s a reminder that, at least within Christian thinking, a proper name for mysticism is actually mystical theology. Mysticism is not just an experience of God, it is a language of God (theology = “God-talk”) grounded in the Divine Mystery. To be a mystic, at least within the Christian tradition, is to be a theologian as well.

Because we often associate theology with academic discourse, and mysticism with monastic or devotional discourse, it’s easy to assume that mysticism and theology are two different things, perhaps even mutually exclusive. The great mystics of the past would not have recognized such a division — it’s a problem of how we see things in our day.