All Shall Be Well

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Julian is one of the most important figures in this archive because she provides the most sustained and most personally grounded account of the love of God as the answer to the problem of suffering. Her theology is not abstract but rooted in specific visions of the Passion, and her most famous sentence is not optimism but a claim about what the Passion means.

Love as the Meaning of All Things

Julian’s most famous theological formulation comes in the final chapter of the longer text, when she asks what the meaning of the revelations is and receives the answer: “Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore was it shewed? For Love.” This is not a vague spiritual sentiment but a precise theological claim: that the interpretive key to all of the revelations — and by extension, to all of human history — is the love of God.

This claim grounds the famous “All shall be well.” Julian was not unaware of suffering; she had visions of the Passion in the most visceral possible terms, and she wrestled for years with the theological problem of how all shall be well in a world that contains so much that is manifestly not well. Her answer is not a denial of the problem but a claim about the power of the love that is addressing it: that the God who suffered in Christ has already done what is necessary, and that the working out of that accomplishment, however long it takes, is guaranteed by the nature of the one who accomplished it.

What the Hazelnut Reveals

One of the most celebrated images in Julian’s text is the vision of a small thing — the size of a hazelnut — held in God’s hand. When she asks what it is, she is told: “It is all that is made.” When she asks how it can continue to exist, she is told: “It lasts, and ever shall last; for God loves it.” The entire creation, in all its fragility, exists because God holds it and loves it. Its existence is an act of continuing divine love.

This image is one of the most compressed and most beautiful statements of the doctrine of creation in Christian literature. It renders in a single image what the opening of Genesis states in narrative: that the world exists not by necessity but by the free and continuing act of a God who loves it into being and holds it in existence moment by moment.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict whose resolution Julian perceived, in her visions of the Passion, with unusual clarity. The cross is not a defeat but the accomplishment of the seed of the woman’s work: the crushing of the serpent’s head, achieved at the cost of the bruised heel, in the most specific and most concrete historical event. Julian’s theology is grounded in this event — in the specific suffering of the specific body on the specific cross — and her confidence that “all shall be well” is grounded in her perception of what that event accomplished.

She lived in the aftermath of the Black Death, in a Norwich that had lost perhaps half its population within her lifetime. She knew, from the most immediate possible experience, that things are not well. Her “all shall be well” is spoken against this knowledge, not in ignorance of it, and it is therefore not optimism but faith — the specific, grounded, costly faith of a woman who had seen the Passion and believed what she saw.