After this I saw God in a Point, that is to say, in mine understanding which sight I saw that He is in all things.  I beheld and considered, seeing and knowing in sight, with a soft dread, and thought:  What is sin? (Ibid, p. 26).

Here is the age-old difficulty.  God, so the mystic sees, is “in the Mid-point of all thing,” and yet, as Julian says, it is “dertain He doeth no sin.”  The solution given to her is that “sin is no deed,” it “hath no part of being,” and it can only be known by the pain it is cause of.  Sin is a negation, a failure, an emptiness of love, but pain is something it is a purification.  Sin brings with it pain, “to me was shewed no harder hell than sin”; but we must go through the pain in order to learn, without it we could never have the bliss.  As a wave draws back from the shore, in order to return again with fuller force; so sin, the lack of love, is permitted for a time, in order that an opening be made for an inrush of the Divine Love, fuller and more complete than would otherwise be possible.  It is in some such way as this, dimly shadowed, that it was shown to Julian that sin and pain are necessary parts of the scheme of God.  Hence God does not blame us for sin, for it brings its own blame or punishment with it, nay more, “sin shall be no shame to man, but worship,” a bold saying, which none but a mystic would dare utter.  When God seeth our sin, she says, and our despair in pain, “His love excuseth us, and of His great courtesy He doeth away all our blame, and beholdeth us with ruth and pity as children innocent and unloathful.”

It would be pleasant to say more of Julian, but perhaps her own words have sufficed to show that here we are dealing with one of the great mystics of the world.  Childlike and yet rashly bold, deeply spiritual, yet intensely human, “a simple creature, unlettered,” yet presenting solutions of problems which have racked humanity, she inherits the true paradoxical nature of the mystic, to which is added a beauty and delicacy of thought and expression all her own.

There were many other mystical works written about this time in England.  Of these the best known and the finest is The Scale, or Ladder, of Perfection, by Walter Hylton, the Augustinian, and head of a house of canons at Thurgarton, near Newark, who died in 1396.  This is a practical and scientific treatise of great beauty on the spiritual life.[66] An interesting group of writings are the five little treatises, almost certainly by one author (c. 1350-1400), to be found in Harleian 674, and other MSS.  Their names are The Cloud of Unknowing, The Epistle of Prayer, The Epistle of Discretion, The Treatise of Discerning Spirits, and The Epistle of Privy Counsel.  We find here for the first time in English the influence and spirit of Dionysius, and it is probably to the same unknown writer we owe the first (very free) translation of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius, Deonise Hid Divinite, which is bound up with these other manuscripts.