Under Construction @ Keele 2018 Vol. IV (II) | Page 16

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the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be
with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." 26
In addition to Mary Baker Eddy’s intriguing ‘empirical metaphysics’, other authors, such
as certain individuals among the many female mediaeval mystics, writing in what might be
thought of as either being purely a theological perspective, or even as a lay-member of the
church offering descriptions of their religious experiences, in reality include identifiable
concepts from a multiplicity of forms of idealism within their work. The first female author to
publish in English, Julian of Norwich (named after the church where she was an ‘Anchorite’),
is an example, despite simply writing an account of her visionary experiences of Christ. Her
work, Revelations of Divine Love, clearly introduced elements of philosophical idealism into
her descriptions of what she experienced and in her analysis of these encounters. 27 For
example:
“And [when] we fall again to our heaviness, and spiritual blindness, and feeling of pains
spiritual and bodily, by our frailty, it is God’s will that we know that He hath not forgotten
us. And so signifieth He in these words: _And thou shalt never more have pain; no
manner of sickness, no manner of misliking, no wanting of will; but ever joy and bliss
without end. What should it then aggrieve thee to suffer awhile, seeing it is my will and
my worship?” 28
This forms a rather pleasing left-hand parenthesis to Eddy’s denial of pain and
sickness: they exist, but for a finite time, which expressed as a fraction in relation to an infinite
duration without either is quite literally nothing.
Theodore, D Roosevelt, Address at The Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Methuen,1901), Chapter LXIV.
28 Ibid.
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