Evelyn Underhill
“[Mysticism] requires to be embodied in some degree in history, dogma and institutions if it is to reach the sense-conditioned human mind. [… T]he antithesis between the religions of ‘authority’ and of ‘spirit,’ the ‘Church’ and the ‘mystic,’ is false. Each requires the other.”
This quotation taken from the preface (1930) to the twelfth edition of Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (first published in 1911) reveals the tensions at work in accounts of mysticism in the age of modernism. The study to which the preface is attached reconstructs a mystic’s progress through the stages of purgation, illumination and final union with God, using the psychological terminology Underhill discovered in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Underhill’s Mysticism attends to the ‘rearrangement of the psychic self’ through the mystical journey and examines how the emergence of the ‘spark of the soul’, a term taken from the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart and which Underhill locates in the subconscious mind, reorientated a mystic’s life. The original study itself side-lines the emphasis the later preface places on ‘history, dogma and institutions’ and, through its emphasis on direct transformation of the individual psyche and deployment of a scientific register, Underhill’s Mysticism itself contributes to the ‘antithesis between the religions of “authority” and of “spirit,” the “Church” and the “mystic”’ that the preface opposes.
Underhill’s later understanding of the reciprocity between the institutional and the mystical came to her through her spiritual director, Friedrich von Hügel. Von Hügel’s study The Mystical Element of Religion situated his titular element alongside two more: the institutional and the rational. A healthy personal religion, Hügel contended, required ‘the harmonious blending of the three elements’ (Cuthbert Butler, ‘Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit’, in ‘Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit’ with Other Essays [London: Sheed & Ward, 1930], pp. 16–46 [p. 44n]). Underhill’s preface thus represented more than a change of mind. It is indicative of a response from institutional religions (and thinkers allied to them) to the challenges posed and opportunities represented by fascination in the age of modernism with new forms of mysticism and spirituality, which often drew on non-Christian sources, whether they be scientific, occult or other world religions. Modernism and Religion examines this cultural tension and positions modernist poetry within it.
Image: Evelyn Underhill in the conductor’s room at Pleshey. Photograph by the author of a plate in Margaret Cropper, Life of Evelyn Underhill (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 89.
