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Underhill, Evelyn, 1875-1941We have 2 books for this author.
Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875 – June 15, 1941), born in Wolverhampton, England, was a mystic, controversial Anglican writer on mysticism, novelist, pacifist and metaphysical poet. She was formally educated at King's College for Women in London, where she was later elected as a Fellow. Underhill was one of the most widely read writers on the spiritual life in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, and with her book Mysticism, published in 1911, no other book of its type met with such success until Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy of 1946.[1] An only child, her early mystical insights were described by her as "abrupt experiences of the peaceful, undifferentiated plane of reality—like the "still desert" of the mystic—in which there was no multiplicity nor need of explanation."[2] The meaning of these experiences became a lifelong quest and source of private angst, leading to her research and writing on the subject of mysticism. Both her father and her husband were writers (on the law), London barristers and yachtsmen. She and her husband, Hubert Stuart Moore, grew up together and were married on July 3, 1907. The couple had no children. She traveled regularly to the continent, primarily Switzerland, France and Italy where she pursued her interests in art and Catholicism, visiting numerous churches and monasteries. Neither her husband (a Protestant) nor her parents shared her interest in spiritual matters. Underhill was called simply "Mrs. Moore" by many of her friends, but was not without her detractors. She was a prolific author and published over thirty books either under her maiden name Underhill or under the pseudonym John Cordelier, as was the case for the 1912 book The Spiral Way. Initially an agnostic, she gradually began to acquire an interest in Neoplatonism and from there became increasingly drawn to Catholicism against the objections of her husband, becoming eventually a prominent Anglo-Catholic. Her spiritual mentor from 1921–24 was Baron Friedrich von Hügel, who was appreciative of her writing, yet concerned with her focus on mysticism and encouraged her to adopt a much more Christocentric view as opposed to the theistic/intellectual one she had previously held. She described him as "the most wonderful personality. ..so saintly, truthful, sane and tolerant," (Cropper, p. 44) and she was influenced toward more charitable, down to earth activities. After his death in 1925, her writings became more focused on the Holy Spirit and she became prominent in the Anglican Church as a lay leader of spiritual retreats, a spiritual director for hundreds of individuals, guest speaker, and radio lecturer/proponent of the power of contemplative prayer. Coming of AgeEvelyn came of age in the Edwardian era, at the turn of the century, and like most of her contemporaries had a decided romantic bent. The enormous excitement in those days, was mysteriously compounded of the psychic, the psychological, the occult, the mystical, the medieval, the advance of science, the apotheosis of Art, the re-discovery of the feminine and an unashamedly sensuous and the most ethereally 'spiritual'. Anglicanism seemed to her out-of-key with this, her world. She sought centre of life as she and many of her generation conceived it, not in the state religion, but in experience and the heart. This age of 'the soul', was one of those periods when a sudden easing of social taboos brings on a great sense of personal emancipation and desire for an El Dorado despised by an older, more morose and insensitive generation.[1] As an only child she was devoted to her parents, and later to her husband. She was fully engaged in the life of a barrister's daughter and wife - the entertainment and charitable work that entailed - and a daily regimen that included her own writing, research, worship, prayer and meditation. It was a fundamental axiom of Evelyn Underhill, that all of life was sacred - as that was what "incarnation" was about. EducationThough conferred with an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from Aberdeen University—and though named fellow of both King's College for Women and King's College—she possessed no degrees herself. Despite this fact, she was the first woman to lecture to the clergy in the Church of England as well as the first woman to officially conduct spiritual retreats for the Church. She was also the first woman to establish ecumenical links between churches and one of the first woman theologians to lecture in English colleges and universities, as she did frequently. Underhill was an award winning bookbinder, studying with the most renowned masters of the time. She was schooled in the classics, well read in Western spirituality, well informed (in addition to theology) in the philosophy, psychology, and physics of her day, and acquired the prestigious post as editor of The Spectator. Early WorkBefore undertaking many of her better known expository works on mysticism, she first published a small book of satirical poems on legal dilemmas, The Bar-Lamb's Ballad Book, which received a favorable welcome. Underhill then wrote three highly unconventional though profoundly spiritual novels. Like Charles Williams and later, Susan Howatch, Underhill uses her narratives to explore the sacramental intersection of the physical with the spiritual. She then uses that sacramental framework very effectively to illustrate the unfolding of a human drama. Her novels are entitled The Grey World (1904), The Lost Word (1907), and The Column of Dust (1909). In her first novel, The Grey World, described by one reviewer as an extremely interesting psychological study, the hero's mystical journey begins with death, and then moves through reincarnation, beyond the grey world, and into the choice of a simple life devoted to beauty, reflecting Underhill's own serious perspective as a young woman.
The Lost Word and The Column of Dust are also concerned with the problem of living in two worlds and reflect the writer's own spiritual challenges. In the 1909 novel, her heroine encounters a rift in the solid stuff of her universe:
Underhill's novels suggest that perhaps for the mystic, two worlds may be better than one. For her, mystical experience seems inseparable from some kind of enhancement of consciousness or expansion of perceptual and aesthetic horizons—to see things as they are, in their meanness and insignificance when viewed in opposition to the divine reality, but in their luminosity and grandeur when seen bathed in divine radiance. But at this stage the mystic's mind is subject to fear and insecurity, its powers undeveloped. The first novel takes us only to this point. Further stages demand suffering, because mysticism is more than merely vision or cultivating a latent potentiality of the soul in cosy isolation. According to Underhill's view, the subsequent pain and tension, and final loss of the private painful ego-centered life for the sake of regaining one's true self, has little to do with the first beatific vision. Her two later novels are built on the ideal of total self-surrender even to the apparent sacrifice of the vision itself, as necessary for the fullest possible integration of human life. This was for her the equivalent of working out within, the metaphorical intent of the life story of Jesus. One is reunited with the original vision—no longer as mere spectator but as part of it. This dimension of self-loss and resurrection is worked out in The Lost Word, but there is some doubt as to its general inevitability. In The Column of Dust, the heroine's physical death reinforces dramatically the mystical death to which she has already surrendered to. Two lives are better than one but only on the condition that a process of painful re-integration intervenes to re-establish unity between Self and Reality.[1] All her characters derive their interest from the theological meaning and value which they represent and it is her ingenious handling of so much difficult symbolic material that makes her work psychologically interesting as a forerunner of such 20th century writers as Susan Howatch, whose successful novels also embody the psychological value of religious metaphor and the traditions of Christian mysticism. Her first novel received critical acclaim, but her last was generally derided. However her novels give remarkable insight into what we may assume was her decision to avoid what St. Augustine described as the temptation of fuga in solitudinem ("the flight into solitude"), but instead acquiescing to a loving, positive acceptance of this world. Not looking back, by this time she was already working on her magnum opus. Writings on MysticismUnderhill's greatest book, Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, was published in 1911, and is distinguished by the very qualities which make it inappropriate as a straightforward textbook. The spirit of the book is romantic, engaged, and theoretical rather than historical or scientific. Underhill has little use for theoretical explanations and the traditional religious experience, formal classifications or analysis. She dismisses William James' pioneering study, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and his "four marks of the mystic state" (ineffability, noetic quality, transcience, and passivity). James had admitted that his own constitution shut him off almost entirely from the enjoyment of mystical states thus his treatment was purely objective. Underhill substituted (1) mysticism is practical, not theoretical, (2) mysticism is an entirely spiritual activity, (3) The business and method of mysticism is love. (4) mysticism entails a definite psychological experience. Her insistence on the psychological approach was that it was the glamorous science of the pre-war period, offering the potential key to the secrets of human advances in intelligence, creativity, and genius, and already psychological findings were being applied in theology (i.e.,William Sanday's Christologies Ancient and Modern).[1] She divided her subject into two parts; the first an introduction, and the second, a detailed study of the nature and development of human consciousness. In the first section, in order to free the subject from confusion and misapprehension, she approached it from the point of view of the psychologist (new science at the time), the symbolist and the theologian. To separate it from its most dubious connection she included a chapter on mysticism and magic. At the time, and still today, the subject is associated with the occult, magic, secret rites, and fanaticism, while she knew the mystics throughout history to be the world's spiritual pioneers. She divided her map of "the way" into five sections; the "Awakening of Self," quoting Henry Suso (disciple of Meister Eckhart):
Suso's description of how the abstract truth, once remembered (related to each soul's true nature and purpose), contains the power of fulfilment was the starting point of Underhill's own path. The second stage she presents as psychological "purgation of self," quoting the Theologia Germanica (14th c. anonymous) regarding ego (Underhill's "little self") transcendence:
The third stage she titles, "Illumination," and quotes William Law:
The fourth stage she describes as the "dark night of the soul" (which her correspondence leads us to believe she struggled with throughout her life) where one is deprived of all that has been valuable to the lower self, and quoting Mechthild of Magdeburg:
And last she devotes a chapter to the unitive life, the sum of the mystic way:
Where Underhill struck new ground was in her insistence that this state of union produced a glorious and fruitful creativeness, so that the mystic who attains this final perfectness is the most active doer - not the reclusive dreaming lover of God.
The book ends with an extremely valuable appendix, a kind of who's who of mysticism, which shows its persistence and interconnection from century to century. InfluencesUnderhill's life was greatly impacted by her husband's resistance to her joining the Catholic church to which she was powerfully drawn. At first she believed it to only be a delay in her decision, but it proved lifelong. He was, however, a writer himself and was supportive of her writing both before and after their marriage in 1907, though he did not share her spiritual affinities. Her fiction was written in the six years between 1903-1909 and represents her four major interests of that general period: philosophy (neoplatonism), theism/mysticism, the Roman Catholic liturgy, and human love/compassion.[1] In her earlier writings Underhill often wrote using the terms "mysticism" and "mystics" but later began to adopt the terms "spirituality" and "saints" because she felt they were less threatening; she was often criticized for believing that the mystical life should be accessible to the average person. Her fiction was also influenced by the literary creed expounded by her close friend Arthur Machen, mainly his "Hieroglypics" of 1902, summarised by his biographer:
In Underhill's case the quest for psychological realism is subordinate to larger metaphysical considerations which she shared with Arthur Machen. Incorporating the Holy Grail into their fiction (stimulated perhaps by their association with Arthur Waite and his affiliation with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), for Machen the Holy Grail was perhaps "the" hieroglyph, "the " crystallisation in one sacred emblem of all man's transcendental yearning, "the" gateway to vision and lasting appeasement of his discontents. For her is was the center of atonement-linked meanings as pointed out to Margaret Robinson in a letter responding to her criticism of Underhill's last novel:
Two contemporary philosophical writers dominated Underhill's thinking at the time she wrote "Mysticism": Rudolf Eucken and Henri Bergson. While neither displayed an interest in mysticism, both seemed to their disciples to advance a spiritual explanation of the universe. Also, she describes the fashionable creed of the time as "vitalism" and the term adequately sums up the prevailing worship of life in all its exuberance, variety and limitless possibility which pervaded pre-war culture and society. For her, Eucken and Bergson confirmed the deepest intuitions of the mystics. (Armstrong, "Evelyn Underhill") Among the mystics, Ruysbroeck, was to her the most influential and satisfying of all the medieval mystics, and she found herself very much at one with him in the years when he was working as an unknown priest in Brussels, for she herself had also a hidden side.
One of her most significant influences and important collaborations was with the Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian mystic, author, and world traveler. They published a major translation of the work of Kabir ("100 Poems of Kabir") together in 1915, to which she wrote the introduction. He introduced her to the spiritual genius of India which she expressed enthusiastically in a letter:
They did not keep up their correspondence in later years, both suffered debilitating illnesses in the last year of life and died in the summer of 1941, greatly distressed by the outbreak of World War II. Evelyn in 1921 was to all outward appearances in an assured and enviable position. She had been asked by the University of Oxford to give the first of a new series of lectures on Religion, and she was the first woman to have such an honour. She was an authority on her own subject of Mysticism and respected for her research and scholarship. Her writing was in demand, she had an interesting and notable set of friends, devoted readers, happy marriage and affectionate and loyal parents. At the same time she felt that her foundations were insecure, that her zeal for Reality was resting on a basis that was too fragile. After returning to the Anglican Church, and perhaps overwhelmed by her knowledge of the achievements of the mystics and their perilous heights, her ten year friendship with Catholic philosopher and writer, Baron Friedrich von Hugel, turned into one of spiritual direction. Charles Williams wrote in his introduction to her Letters: 'The equal swaying level of devotion and scepticism (related to the church) which is, for some souls, as much the Way as continuous simple faith is to others, was a distress to her. ..She wanted to be "sure." Writing to Von Hugel of the darkness she struggled with:
In a later letter of July 12 the Baron's practical concerns for signs of strain in Evelyn's spiritual state are expressed. His comments give insight into her struggles:
Although Underhill continued to struggle to the end, craving certainty that her beatific visions were purposeful, suffering as only a pacifist can from the devastating onslaught of World War II and the Church's powerlessness to impact events, she may well have played a powerful part in the survival of her country through the influence of her words and the impact of her teachings on thousands regarding the power of prayer. Surviving the London Blitz of 1940, her health disintegrated further and she died the following year. More than any other person, she was responsible for introducing the forgotten authors of medieval and Catholic spirituality to a largely Protestant audience and the lives of eastern mystics to the English speaking world. As a frequent guest on radio, her 1936 work The Spiritual Life was especially influential as transcribed from a series of broadcasts given as a sequel to those by Dom Bernard Clements on the subject of prayer. Fellow theologian Charles Williams wrote the introduction to her published Letters in 1943, which reveal much about this prodigious woman. Upon her death, The Times reported that on the subject of theology, she was "unmatched by any of the professional teachers of her day." Since 2000 the Church of England commemorates her liturgically on June 15. Books(partial list)
References
External links
This biographical information was gathered from the Evelyn_Underhill page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project. BooksThe Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayPractical Mysticism A Little Book for Normal People |
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