“All Shall Be Well”: The Argument Behind Julian of Norwich’s Most Quoted Line

The sentence turns up on greeting cards, in sermons, and at the close of difficult conversations: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. It sounds like something a kind person says at a bedside. It is attributed, correctly, to the book of Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century Englishwoman.

Open the book to the place where it occurs, though, and three things are surprising. Julian does not say it. It is not offered as comfort for sorrow in general. And she does not simply accept it. The line is one side of an argument, and the argument is about the oldest difficulty in her religion.

The Woman and the Book

What is known of Julian comes almost entirely from her own text. In May 1373, by her account, when she was "thirty years old and an half," she lay so ill that she and those around her believed she was dying.¹ Over some hours she received a series of sixteen visions, which she calls "shewings," centred on the suffering of Christ. She recovered, wrote a brief account, and later lived as an anchoress, a religious recluse, in a cell attached to St Julian's Church in Norwich, where over decades she expanded her account into the much longer version read today.² It is described as the earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman.² Quotations here follow Grace Warrack's edition of 1901, a lightly modernised text made from one of the manuscripts, which introduced Julian to twentieth-century readers.²

The long version is what matters for this story, because it is a book of second thoughts. Julian reports what she saw, and then what she made of it after years of turning it over. Near the end she says that the meaning of the whole was given to her "fifteen years after, and more."³

A Small Thing in the Palm of Her Hand

Before the famous line, it helps to see how her visions work, and the clearest case is an early one. In the fifth chapter, she is shown "a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball." She wonders what it is. "And it was answered generally thus: it is all that is made."⁴

Her reaction is not awe at the size of creation but alarm at its fragility: "I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it."⁴ She sees in it three properties: "The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it."⁴

Notice the pattern, because it recurs. She is shown something. She raises a difficulty. She receives a short answer "in my understanding." The answer does not remove the difficulty so much as set it inside something larger. Everything that exists is small and precarious, and it persists because it is loved. Hold on to the shape of that exchange.

The Question She Was Not Supposed to Ask

In chapter 27, within what Warrack's edition numbers as the Thirteenth Revelation, Julian comes to the thing that has been troubling her. If God is as the visions show, all-wise and all-loving, why was sin allowed to begin? "If sin had not been," she reflects, "we should all have been clean and like to our Lord, as He made us."⁵

She is candid that this was not a devout thought. "This stirring was much to be forsaken," she writes, "but nevertheless mourning and sorrow I made therefor, without reason and discretion."⁵ She knew she ought to let the question go, and she did not.

The reply comes from Christ: "But Jesus, who in this Vision informed me of all that is needful to me, answered by this word and said":

"It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."⁵

So the famous sentence has a first half that is rarely quoted, and it is the harder half. "It behoved" is Warrack's rendering of a Middle English word, behovely, meaning something like necessary or fitting. Sin, Julian is told, had to be. Only then comes the promise.

What she says next shows how she tried to make sense of this. She reports that in all her visions she never actually saw sin: "I saw not sin: for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of."⁵ This is an old idea in Christian thought, that evil is not a thing in its own right but a lack or damage in something good, known by its effects. For Julian it is less a theory than an observation. What she was shown was pain, above all Christ's, and sin only as whatever lies behind pain.

The chapter ends not with resolution but with deferral. In Christ's words, she says, "I saw a marvellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in Heaven."⁵ She has been given a promise and told that the explanation is not available yet.

She Asks Again

A less scrupulous writer would have stopped there. Julian returns to the problem five chapters later, and this time she states the objection in its strongest form. "One point of our Faith," she writes, "is that many creatures shall be condemned," beginning with the "angels that fell out of Heaven for pride" and those who die "out of the Faith of Holy Church." Given that, "methought it was impossible that all manner of things should be well, as our Lord shewed in the same time."⁶

The answer she records is again brief: "That which is impossible to thee is not impossible to me: I shall save my word in all things and I shall make all things well."⁶

It is worth being precise about what this does and does not say. Julian does not claim that everyone will be saved. She does not deny the Church's teaching; she understood that she "should steadfastly hold me in the Faith as I had aforehand understood," and also "firmly believe that all things shall be well."⁶ She also does not soften the promise to fit the doctrine. She is told that both will hold, by some act she cannot foresee, and she writes down both and leaves the tension where it is. Modern readers have sometimes taken her as a teacher of universal salvation. The more careful statement is that she reports a promise whose scope she was not permitted to see, and declines to go beyond what she was shown in either direction.

What the Line Means in Its Place

Return now to the sentence on the greeting card. In Julian's book it is not a general reassurance that troubles pass. It is the answer given to a specific and rather bold question, why a good God permitted sin, and the answer has the same form as the answer about the hazelnut. She is not told how. She is told that the small, damaged thing is held.

That changes what kind of comfort it is. "All shall be well" in the usual sense asks the hearer to feel better. In Julian's sense it asks for something harder: to go on not understanding, without giving up either the question or the trust. Her own summary of the whole book, reached after those fifteen years, points the same way: "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."³

Whether the promise she recorded is true is a matter of faith, and this article does not judge it. What the text shows is how she handled it, and that is where her distinction as a writer lies. She left her own self-reproach in the record. She kept the half of the sentence that nobody quotes. She kept her objection, and the fact that the answer did not fully satisfy it. A reader who wants to see this for themselves can read chapters 27 to 32 in an hour, and will not hear the line the same way afterwards.