Julian's book of her "shewings," as she calls them, is an extended set of meditations on a central problem, or set of problems, that personally beset her: she is painfully troubled by her experience of evil, and of that consciously evil human behavior that she calls, generically, "sin"—as who would not be who was alive and capable of reflection upon conditions in what must be the nastiest century, the fourteenth, in recorded western history after our own recent twentieth, ravaged as it was by inter-personal violence, disease, death, war, moral collapse and economic decline. Julian herself, at the age of eight or nine, had survived a great plague, the so-called "Black Death," which in the space of two years took the lives of one third of the population of England and of the European mainland. And in face of her experience of the reality of evil of all kinds she is told in her showings that God does not see sin, that for God sin is "no thing," and that, contrary to all her own experience of evil, and especially of human sinfulness, that "all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well." So Julian is confronted with a dilemma: in view of the conjunction of her own intensely painful experience of sin (she says she experiences its presence in our world as a "sharp pain") and of the assurance that God does not admit to noticing it at all, she is compelled to seek some intellectual space within which the two conflicting propositions might be reconciled. You cannot sweep away the evil with some gesture towards the compensating goodness of God. Sin, she says, is real: it may be the source of, or even may consist in, every sort of illusion to which humans are prone, whether about themselves, about others or about God. But there is no sort of unreality in the fact of our thus misrelating: the complex reality is that, on account of the world's sin, unreality is the pervasive medium of our actual relationships, this condition being the meaning of what Julian and Christians generally call the "fall." And so the question that dominates her reflections is simple: why, given a good God, who is omnipotent and all good, is there sin at all? But it is a question that calls for the resolution of a dilemma by other means than the Humean elimination of one of its horns. The propositions that the omnipotent and unfailing love of God created the world, and that there is sin, are, she believes, both undeniably true. There is, for Julian, no simplifying Humean way out of the apparent conflict between them. So then what? Most philosophers of our times in the Christian tradition seem to think it just eccentric to raise the question "why is there sin?" that Julian sees is forced upon her in consequence of her insisting that her dilemma cannot be resolved by simply cutting off one of its horns. And it is worth noting why her question seems so important to her and so odd to the philosophers and theologians today. For the assumption widespread among those who concern themselves with such issues, whether philosophers or theologians, is that the one thing of which you don’t need an explanation is that sin happens and is bound to. It seems to them, as it did to Hume, too obvious to be worth debating that if you create a world of free agents, where freedom must at least allow for the choice between good and evil actions, then necessarily some evil choices are going to be made. Nor is that “necessarily” a hyperbolic statement of what is no more than a very strong likelihood. For it is a view almost universally maintained among philosophers that although a world of completely free agents none of whom ever choose evil actions is certainly describable, by strict logical necessity such a world is uncreatable even by an almighty God. For, it is argued, were God to cause such a world to exist, then God’s causing there to be no sinful choices in it would thereby rob those innocent choices of their freedom, it being assumed that no action of mine can be free if any one or thing other than I is the cause of it. And that "anything other" includes God. A world without sin, though it may be described, is therefore impossible to create even for an omnipotent Creator. Necessarily, then, there is sin because God cannot create a world guaranteed to be without it, and Julian’s question “Why is there sin?” is redundant. Such is the view of the Calvinist philosopher, Alvin Plantinga. But Julian insists: God could have created that world of free human beings in which not only as it happens no one sins, but one such that no one freely chooses to sin. In fact there is a vast spiritual, as well as intellectual, chasm between Plantinga, who evidently thinks that the human will could be free only if it occupies a space evacuated of the divine causal agency, and the medieval anchoress for whom, as for Augustine and Aquinas, our free choices are precisely where the presence of God’s agency is most evidently and directly working. You can see God acting directly in our free actions, so Augustine and Aquinas say, for precisely insofar as they are free they are not subject to determination by natural causes: between my will, its free causality, and God’s agency nothing intervenes. For it is true that God's acting in the natural world is always indirect, for therein it is always mediated by natural, worldly causes. For it may be that nature, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, is charged with "God's grandeur;" but the visibility of God is there reflected, as the medieval theologians put it, as in a mirror, there seen not directly, not immediately, as it is in our free actions. By contrast it is just because of her view that God is the direct and unmediated cause of our free choices that Julian thinks that there is a real question why God did not create a world of free agents who freely choose not to sin. (Excerpted from ch 1)
