The Practical Mystic: Evelyn Underhill and her Writings

By Raymond Chapman

An introduction to the works of Evelyn Underhill, Anglo-Catholic mystic and one of the most widely read spiritual writers of the early twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848254268

Book preview

1

Evelyn Underhill’s Life

Evelyn Underhill was born on 6 December 1875, in Wolverhampton. She was the only child of Arthur Underhill and his wife Lucy. Arthur was a barrister who later moved to London, became a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn and was knighted. He was a practical and energetic man, who found time in his profession for many activities, particularly sailing; a quality which his daughter inherited. His autobiography, published in 1938, contains what is probably the shortest reference to Evelyn in print. ‘I do not think anything worth noting occurred to me personally during the seventies of the last century, except my marriage in 1876 and the birth of my only child, now Mrs Stuart Moore (better known to the philosophical and intellectual class as Evelyn Underhill).’

From the start it is important to recognize Evelyn not as a withdrawn and shadowy mystic but as a woman who lived fully in the world and could enjoy its challenges and pleasures. She herself became an efficient sailor, who loved yachting and could draw her metaphors from life at sea. She had holidays abroad with her parents and developed a lifelong love for Italy. In her early womanhood she learned the craft of bookbinding from its doyen, T. J. Cobden Sanderson; her experience appears in a section of her novel The Grey World. She was fortunate in being born into the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with its growing recognition of women’s right to education, and opportunities previously closed to them. She was at first educated privately at home, then at a small boarding school in Folkestone. She went on to study history and botany at King’s College in the University of London: a combination of subjects that may seem unusual but foreshadows what was to come. She moved deeply into the history of the Church and its thinkers and kept a passionate love for the natural world, both for its own beauty and as an image of the divine.

Her first published work was a volume of humorous verse that she called A Bar-Lamb’s Ballad Book. Such a light piece may be a surprise to some readers who think of her as a rather austere and serious spiritual writer, but as many of the following extracts from her books reveal, she had a strong and sometimes impish sense of humour all her life. Her serious literary career began with the writing of short stories. These were stories of strange and supernatural events, not ghost stories in the style of M. R. James but rather anticipations of the later ‘supernatural thriller’ novels of Charles Williams. She came to know Arthur Machen, one of the leading writers of this genre. He and his wife Purefoy, Maurice Hewlett, Laurence Housman and Arthur Symons, were literary acquaintances who became friends. Her imagination soon demanded more scope than the short story could offer. She became a novelist at a time when the art of fiction was on the cusp of tradition and Modernism. In these years E. M. Forster published Howard’s End, Conrad Under Western Eyes, H. G. Wells Ann Veronica,  D. H. Lawrence his first novel The White Peacock and Galsworthy had already written the first volume of the Forsyte Saga. These were traditional in form, exploratory in themes and attitudes, while Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were within a few years of their first books.

She did not join the top flight of either traditionalists or innovators, but she found a way of developing through imagination many ideas that later became characteristic of her religious writing. Her first novel, The Grey World (1904), follows the life of a poor child who dies in a hospital and is reborn into a prosperous middle-class family. He never escapes from the memory of a time when he was wandering between two worlds, surrounded by the spirits of the dead who could find no resting place. After seeking enlightenment through various occult and quasi-mystic societies, Willy finds peace in a country retreat in the chaste company of a spiritually minded widow. Her second book, The Lost Word (1907), is perhaps her least successful. Paul Vickery, a priest’s son, moves through a discursive and sometimes obscure plot, with an agnostic period, a search for heightened mystical experience, and an eventual settlement for marriage and ordinary life. In The Column of Dust (1908) Constance Tyrrell, an assistant in an antiquarian bookshop, makes an occult experiment that lands her inescapably with the ‘Watcher’, an unquiet but benevolent spirit seeking to understand the strange ways of the human world. She learns and suffers much from this invisible companion, moves like Willy in the company of people seeking various ways to the truth, achieves a vision and perhaps possession of the Grail, and dies sacrificing her life for that of her illegitimate and disagreeable daughter. (Was the name of the protagonist a conscious or unconscious glance at the Modernist priest George Tyrrell?)

These brief outlines are not likely to tempt a modern reader into rediscovering her novels, and indeed it cannot be said that she made a great contribution to the art of fiction. Her principal characters are not ‘strong’ in the sense of carrying conviction and pointing to a broader human experience, but they can draw sympathy and, at least for a time, interest. She has some shrewd pictures of the social life of the period, gently satirical of the contemporary appetite for the strange and occult. She herself was partly drawn towards the attempts to look into the unknown that were strong in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1907 she seems to have undergone a kind of conversion experience that, while it did not yet make her a fully convinced Christian, brought her into rapport with the unseen world that could loosely be called, for good or ill, the ‘supernatural’. She may have joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, a society with many degrees and varieties; she was probably not so deeply into it as the young W. B. Yeats.

The importance of her novels is not in their quality as fiction, or in their vignettes of recondite societies. They explore themes which were to be seminal in her later writing. Her characters live on the edge of reality, experiencing glimpses of the unseen world that give new meaning to the daily life known through the senses and constrained by inescapable routines. In her spiritual writings she returns continually to the search for the ultimate Reality that is obscured by the daily life we think of as ‘reality’. In fiction the characters find expected beauty and an apprehension of the divine in ordinary things, particularly in contact with the natural world and its multiform kinds of life. So too, she maintains, we can accept the living between two worlds, even if the acceptance is sometimes painful as well as glorious. We reach out as best we can to the supreme and transcendent divine power that is calling us.

These were things to come; she managed through the discipline of the novel to give expression to the complex development of her personal beliefs. She had been confirmed in the Church of England in 1891, but for years she was a restless Anglican. Her interest in the occult and in a broad rather than a focused mysticism brought her near to agnosticism. Attraction to Plotinus and Neoplatonism held her on the fringes of Christianity for a time. The immanence of the divine in this world, a belief that never left her, was not yet reconciled with the concomitant belief in a transcendent God. When the union was made, her life’s work could begin. She read and thought her way from pantheism to theism and at last to Christianity. She came to see that any kind of ‘magic’ could never bring the human spirit to fulfilment. It was grace, not secret power, that made a person whole.

During this time, two very different men entered her life. In 1907 she married Hubert Stuart Moore, the son of family neighbours whom she had known for some time. Some of her early letters to him have survived; they show a deep affection, and also the humorous view of the world that she never lost and that would later add a light touch to both her personal and general spiritual direction. At this time she was being drawn towards the Roman Catholic Church, encouraged by R. H. Benson. Hubert, in common with many non-Catholics of that time, was by no means favourable to Roman claims, and what might have been her conversion was set aside in consideration for him. Perhaps her husband was a useful excuse, for she was still having difficulties about the detailed claims of Christian history and the formation of dogma. She feared the loss of her intellectual freedom if she went over. However, she continued to attend Roman Catholic services, and she once mentioned a kind of conversion experience in 1907 that had drawn her to Roman practice rather than to complete Christian commitment. She attended a Papal audience during a visit to Rome in 1910.

The other man was von Hügel, whom she met in 1911 and who later became her spiritual director. Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) was the son of a German father and a Scottish mother, who spent most of his life in England. A firm Catholic, he was also a polymath whose studies led him towards the Modernist movement in the Church. The Modernists were a diverse set of thinkers, often disagreeing among themselves, but generally committed to the new critical approach to the Bible and emphasis on the active reality of the Church rather than its historical origins. Such ideas were being expressed in the Church of England, from the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860, and Lux Mundi in 1889. In fact von Hügel was probably more influential in the non-Roman churches, although he escaped the excommunication imposed by Pius X on some other Modernist writers. His concern about the historicity of Christianity and his emphasis on the divine transcendence were particularly congenial to Evelyn Underhill. She read his two-volume Mystical Element in Religion when it was published in 1908. From 1911 until his death, von Hügel was a major spiritual influence on her, often mentioned and quoted in her published work.

Between her marriage and her meeting with Von Hügel she was writing her first major work. With the publication of Mysticism in 1911 she became associated with the word that would for ever after be taken as her characteristic interest, though as the extracts from her extensive writings show, it does not adequately represent the range of her thought and teaching. It is the longest of her books, set out in two parts. The first part is a general introduction to the subject, attempting a definition of what mysticism can mean, and having defined it then relating it to other aspects of human experience. The second part explores the nature and development of the spiritual sense, drawing on historical data and records of mystical experience. It refers to a great number of mystical writers, sometimes almost overwhelming in its intensity, continually emphasizing that the true mystics follow the way in which they are personally led, seeking to learn for themselves and not merely to read about what others have done.

It would be a mistake to approach Mysticism as a textbook or a work of reference. For all its factual information, it is not an objective study, but an expression of Evelyn's own enthusiasm for a field she was discovering, in which her quest for truth drew her to wide reading and close analysis. Although published at a time when many were exploring extra-physical experience, whether through the occult, vague spirituality or the Christian approach, it stood apart from most contemporary works. From that time on, she would insist that deep spiritual experience was open to anyone who would seek it with faith and diligence. A more specifically Christian attitude would develop in her later work. She was still partly sceptical about formal organized religion, a reservation she never entirely lost, but she was already free from the tendency to monism or pantheism.

Another quality which set her apart from much similar contemporary writing was her awareness of, and interest in, psychological study. It was a time when psychology was becoming a popular subject, regarded by some as a liberation of the human spirit. The depths of the human mind were being explored, and concomitant theories published, by Freud, Jung, Adler and, more specifically applied to religious experience, William James. While many religious believers saw such studies as dangerous or even harmful, Evelyn recognized their importance for a deeper understanding of human nature, without regarding them as infallible guides. She was ‘capable of understanding the mental climate of her age’ (Barkway, p. 10). For all these reasons, as well as the clear and persuasive style of her writing, the book was successful and went through five editions by 1914. It was admired by men as diverse as von Hügel, Henri Bergson and Rabindranath Tagore, with the last of whom she collaborated on an English edition of the fifteenth-century Indian poet Kabir. Charles Williams, himself a fine presenter of the mystical in fiction, poetry and formal writing, later wrote, ‘It is a great book precisely not because of its originality, but because of its immediate sense of authenticity’ (Charles Williams, Introduction to her Letters, p. 17).

But, Mysticism is not the best introduction to Evelyn’s thought for a new reader. Its length, its numerous references to writers, some little known, and the sense that she herself is still exploring, may be exciting but can sometimes be difficult to absorb, and make it less suitable for a first continuous reading. In 1913 she published The Mystic Way, which is less detailed but more accessible and more closely related to the Christian faith. She was still doubtful about some dogmas and historical evidence, looking for proof to the prompting of the inner Spirit, and seeing Christianity beginning as a mystical movement, with the mystical approach still dominant in the New Testament and the early Church. The ideas explored at length in Mysticism were now developed and given a firmer shape. She continued to explore the demanding but potentially creative tension between the absolute and unchanging divine Reality, and the world that continually changes yet reaches towards the state of ultimate Being. It is a more assured work, conveying that greater peace of mind she would later share with many anxious seekers.

Her Christian commitment was now absolute, and never faltered again, although she maintained a certain impatience, often ill-concealed, with the more speculative theologians. The Incarnate Lord was the pattern to follow; in him divinity itself had experienced the growth of human conspicuousness and the link between the two worlds. Every experience of Jesus in this world was to be contemplated, and as far as possible shared by his followers. The Church, for all its limitations, is a living reality, accepting and accommodating our dependence. She also came to accept the veracity and importance of the New Testament as a historical record. From now on her approach would be less theoretically mystical, though still rooted in deep spiritual experience, and more sacramental.

She came to dislike The Mystic Way, possibly because she thought it did not fully express the direction in which she was moving. Von Hügel, however, praised it for the more historical and sacramental approach  it already presented. In 1922 she asked him to be her spiritual director, a relationship that continued until his death three years later. It was probably he more than anyone who helped her to still deeper acceptance of the historicity and empirical truth of the Christian faith. He had already tried to advise her about her anxiety over whether to make a formal submission to Rome. In the event, she remained a firm and steadily rooted Anglican, after what may be seen as a second ‘conversion’ experience in 1922.

During these years, she was by no means confined in an ivory tower of mystical exploration. Her first book gave her a reputation as a serious scholar, and in 1913 she became a Fellow of the Queen’s College for Women, which had been founded in 1848 by Frederick Denison Maurice to further the education of women. Her personal devotion, then and thereafter, impelled by the practical and energetic nature she inherited from her father, led her to visiting in the slums of London and support for practical means of relieving the poverty that in some places was as severe in the early years of the twentieth century as it had been 50 years earlier.

The outbreak of war in 1914 changed her way of life as it did for millions. She worked in Naval Intelligence, mostly on translating documents. She also wrote some articles about the war, which do not appear in later collections of her work. She basically shared the patriotic attitude that then united England; her later attitude to war was that of Christian pacifism. At the same time she maintained that the true mystic can fully support his nation, prepared to be courageous and defend the right, but never losing the vision of ultimate peace and harmony. She stated her position in an article published in The Quest and reprinted as a pamphlet, Mysticism and War, in 1915. She saw the war as a real test of faith. The great mystics and spiritual writers were not always calm and peaceful, but knew doubt and fear as we do. True peace comes only though ‘struggle and pain’. The patriotic response can be ‘a spiritualisation of our common humanity’. Much good may come from our testing and the need to endure.

Already a new way of life is budding to take the place of that which until now the war has seemed to sweep away. The angels who spoke to us in the past keep their ancient places: only the look which they bend on us is more solemn, less joyous than of old. The Eternal Powers watch, although their message may not reach our bewildered ears, deafened as they are by other sounds.

(The reference to angels echoes a line in Francis Thompson’s poem ‘In No Strange Land’: ‘The angels keep their ancient places/Turn but a stone and find a wing’.) In her volume of poems published in 1916 she included a poem more reminiscent of Kipling or Newbolt than of the author of Mysticism.

The Naval Reserve

August 4, 1914

From the undiscovered deep

Where the blessed lie at ease –

Since the ancient navies keep

Empire of the heavenly seas –

Back they come, the mighty dead,

Quick to serve where they have led.

Rushing on the homeward gale,

Swift they come, to seek their place

Where the grey flotillas sail,

Where the children of their race

Now against the foe maintain

All they gave their lives to gain.

Rank on rank, the admirals

Rally to their old commands:

Where the crash of battle falls,

There the one-armed hero stands.

Loud upon his phantom mast

Speak the signals of the past.

Where upon the friendly wave

Stand our squadrons as of old,

Where the lonely dead and brave

Shall the ancient torch uphold,

Strive for England, side by side,

Those who live and those who died.

(Theophanies, p. 107)

Although the war work took up most of her time in the following four years, in 1916 she produced a volume of poems entitled Theophanies, a word that encompasses her belief in the continual experiences of the divine in the world of the senses, often unnoticed but rich in experience for those who grasp them. Much religious poetry was being produced at the time, impelled partly by the losses and suffering of the war. The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse was published in 1917 and contained some of her poems. A second collection of her poetry, Immanence, was published in 1920.

She had stated some of her conflicting ideas about war and patriotism in the preface to Practical Mysticism, published in 1914. It is a book that some of her admirers have thought to be below her best, perhaps too colloquial or too condescending in its approach to the ‘ordinary’ person. Others have praised it as fulfilling the promise of its title and making accessible experiences that might seem to be only for a chosen few. Her thesis is that some degree of mystical experience is not only possible but basically natural. Direct knowledge of God can be attained by people who think their lives are too busy for ‘religious’ exercises, if they will learn to attend to the spiritual aspects that are already in their lives but not explored.

When the end of the war released her for more of the work she loved, she entered a life of activity as well as writing, the love of Christ more fully realized both in prayer and in works. In 1921 she gave the Upton Lectures on Religion at Manchester College, Oxford, being the first woman from outside the University to appear on the Oxford lecture list. The lectures were published in the next year as The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today. She gained recognition in another area scarcely yet opened to women when she was invited to speak at the Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1923. She spoke again at the 1927 Congress, when her subject was ‘Sacraments and Mysticism’. She developed her abiding theme that mysticism was not the sole way of approach to God, a belief that could lead to the undervaluing of liturgical worship. Her cousin Francis Underhill was a priest, later Dean of Rochester and then Bishop of Bath and Wells. He was a firm Anglo-Catholic, one of the leaders of the Congress movement, and had quoted from her Essentials of Mysticism at the first one in 1921.

Before the war she had begun the work of spiritual direction, talks and retreat addresses. Now this work was more frequent and in 1921 she began an association that became deeply important in her life. She went to a retreat at Pleshey, near Chelmsford in Essex, now the Chelmsford Diocesan Retreat House. She led a retreat there during Lent in 1924, and continued to do so for the rest of her life. It was a place she loved, where she gave addresses that contain some of her finest thought. She gave many other talks – to clergy, to teachers and to the growing audience for the new radio broadcasting. She attended the COPEC conference at Birmingham in 1924. This was a ‘Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship’, ecumenical though with a late-Roman Catholic withdrawal, presided over by William Temple and addressing the new wave of Christian social thinking. In 1927 she was made a Fellow of her old college, King’s College, London.

She also continued to write copiously in the world of journalism. She wrote reviews for the Criterion, the literary journal edited by T. S. Eliot, and for the woman-run Time and Tide, and in 1928 was the religious editor of the Spectator. However, in these inter-war years she was still giving most of her attention to book-length writing. In 1925 The Mystics of the Church further developed her belief that mystic experience is not an esoteric mystery but inherent in all personal encounter and loving communion with God. Although herself active in social work and aware of the public dimension of Christianity, she included in Man and the Supernatural in 1927 some attacks on excessively ‘social Christianity’ and the pragmatic approach to every problem as if it were quite new. It is a rather neglected work, which contains some valuable observations on the philosophy of religion. She was troubled by the controversy over Prayer Book revision in that year, which led to the eventual rejection of the proposed changes, although the ‘deposited book’ was widely used. In an article in the Spectator titled ‘The Hill of the Lord’, she warned of the divisive consequences if none of the warring parties in the Church would accept compromise. In 1932 The Golden Sequence explored the progress of the soul in twin acts of purification and prayer. The rules of poverty, chastity and obedience were to be honoured not only by those under religious vows but by all who sought to live a life of faith.

One of her most important books, Worship, appeared in 1933 as part of ‘The Library of Constructive Theology’ edited by W. R. Matthews, Dean of St Paul’s. Like the earlier Mysticism, it falls into two parts. The first defines and analyses the principles of public worship, while the second takes a historical and synchronic survey of the approaches of the different Churches. Her position was now fully Christian, and Catholic in an Anglican commitment. The theology of the book is incarnational, with a new respect for the institutional strength of the Church, albeit still subject to criticism in some respects. She shows liturgy to be a way opened to God by his grace, and therefore a system that the universal Church has a duty to maintain. Her regard for tradition did not close her mind to innovation. She favoured what she called the ‘corporate’ rather than the ‘hieratic’ mode of worship, and welcomed the contemporary enthusiasm for liturgical reform, as working to promote the shared fellowship of all Christians. This book won many admirers, including W. H. Frere (1863–1938), Bishop of Truro, who became her spiritual director. She also consulted Reginald Somerset Ward (1881–1962), an Anglican priest who after parish work devoted himself to spiritual direction. Years later, she and Ward have been commemorated in carvings over the West door of Guildford Cathedral, as four notable Christians, filled with the Holy Spirit; the others are Bede Griffiths and Michael Ramsey.

While she was being active and influential in the public life of the Church, she maintained her work of retreat addresses and individual spiritual advice. She admired the asceticism and sacrifices of the great saints and mystics, but was gentle and encouraging with those whom she directed. Always firm in calling for the highest standards of devotion, she allowed for human frailty and when necessary would advise, often with a touch of relieving humour, a relaxation of excessive personal demands. Greatly valuing the spiritual support she received, especially from von Hügel and Frere, she was cautious about depending too much on human support in the spiritual life. She would not impose a specific rule or method on anyone; all could share the mystical experience, but each was an individual soul. She seems to have been anxious about her own inner sincerity, fearing involuntary deception of herself – a concern which has troubled many of the spiritual masters, but that did not damage her effectiveness as a director.

These were busy years, far from the secluded life that one might imagine for one so totally committed to deep religious experience. She answered many requests for guidance, continued her visiting of the poor, and was continually busy in her London life. Yet perhaps she had few really close friends. One was Laura Rose, whom she met when visiting in North Kensington, an invalid who could not share in her active work but supported her in love and prayer. Another was Sister Maria, the Superior of a small religious community in Italy, with whom she set up in 1920 the Confraternity of the Spiritual Entente. It was ahead of its time as an ecumenical group, seeking to unite its members in living and praying the love of Christ. She had shown a growing attraction to the Orthodox Church in Worship, and she joined the ecumenical Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. In 1939 the University of Aberdeen conferred on her the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity.

She reacted to the impending war and its outbreak in 1939 differently from the firm if qualified patriotic fervour of 1914. Her position now was that of Christian Pacifism; she joined the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. She wrote a pamphlet, Into the Way of Peace, and an article in Church and War. In 1941 she wrote Fruits of the Spirit, containing some of her retreat addresses, and letters to a group of young women who had come to London in 1939 to study theology but had been scattered by the war.

It was the last of her 33 books and many articles. Her health had never been very strong; as early as 1907 she had written to Hubert about a doctor who ‘having found my bronchial tubes rather stuffy, he at once called it bronchitis and I have now been kept 5 days in bed’ (Letters, p. 117). Early in the war she was suffering increasingly from chronic asthma, and withdrew from public speaking and retreat addresses. She had always conveyed a sense of deep inner serenity, and now she remained calm and peaceful as death approached. She died on 15 June 1941, possibly from a thrombosis. The Church of England commemorates her on this day in its currently authorized calendar. She was buried in the churchyard of St John’s Church, Hampstead. Her memorial plaque in the chapel at Pleshey that she had loved for so many years has a quotation from John Donne: ‘Blessed be God that He is God, only and divinely like Himself’.

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Evelyn Underhill’s Writings

The name of Evelyn Underhill is inextricably associated with mysticism. It was the title of her first book, and the words ‘mysticism’ or ‘mystic’ appear in the titles of several later works. As the extracts in this book will show, her thinking was by no means limited to the kind of detached and somewhat esoteric contemplation that mysticism immediately suggests. Yet it is true to say that the spirit of mysticism informed all that she wrote and supported the extensive spiritual direction which she gave.

It is well therefore to begin with some consideration of the idea of mysticism,