Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: An Appreciation

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) published her best-known work Mysticism in 1911. It has never gone out of print.¹ In fact, Bernard McGinn has judged that it is one of the best-known books on Christian mysticism ever to be published in the English language.² The year 2011 marked the one hundredth anniversary of its publication; so it seems like an opportune moment for making a critical reassessment of her work. Such a reassessment will also serve, I believe, to help us judge the actual state of scholarship on the tangled topic of Christian mysticism. That the title of this essay uses the word “appreciation” should not be taken to mean that the book is without deficiencies. Still, I think Underhill’s book deserves appreciation both because it accomplished as much as it did, given the limitations of scholarship at the time, and because it has found an appreciative audience for a century.

The very word “mysticism” only entered the English lexicon in the mid-eighteenth century. Nor has it been used uniformly in a positive sense. Indeed, Underhill herself, as if she were summarizing the popular use of the term, tells her readers in her preface that she does not intend the word to mean: “an excuse for every kind of occultism, for dilute transcendentalism, vapid symbolism, religious or aesthetic sentimentality, and bad metaphysics. On the other hand, it has been freely employed as a term of contempt by those who have criticized those things.”³ What Underhill describes in this passage is how the term was vulgarly used in her day.

Underhill’s work was not a single flower blooming in an indifferent desert. There was already an increasing interest in Christian mysticism during the Edwardian period. Dean William Ralph Inge delivered the Bampton Lectures on Christian mysticism in 1899. Three years before Underhill’s work was published, Baron Von Hugel published, in two-volumes, The Mystical Element in Religion, which, despite its somewhat idiosyncratic nature, was a highly influential work. Von Hugel, in fact, would later become Underhill’s spiritual director, a few years after the publication of Mysticism, orienting her more firmly into relationship with the person of Christ and encouraging her active participation into the life of the church.⁴ Underhill admired Rufus Jones, the American Quaker, whose book, Studies in Mystical Religion, was published a few years before her own, and she was also familiar with the classic work of William James (Varieties of Religious Experience), though she found his analysis of mysticism wanting.⁵

Evelyn Underhill, Courtesy of Retreat House, Pleshey

Mysticism is divided into two large sections. The first, entitled, “The Mystic Fact” argues that there is a form of consciousness that we can rightly call “mystical.” Underhill roughly categorizes mystics as falling under three broad categories: those who are seekers or pilgrims; those who cultivate an interiority of the heart; and, finally, those who follow the ascetic path.⁶ The second half of the book develops under the rubric “The Mystic Way.” The former section takes as its point of departure an exposition of vitalism. Influenced by her reading of Henri Bergson, she traces this mystical consciousness in psychology and investigates its relationship to theology and symbolics while, at the same time, carefully distinguishing it from “magic” (the term that was then used in anthropology). The latter part of the book is a kind of synthesis of her capacious reading in the literature of the mystics themselves. This literature was mostly Christian, but some was also from non-Christian traditions (e.g. The Upanishads, Sufi poetry).

When one consults letters from the period she was doing research for Mysticism, it is astounding to find how much she read when such literature was not easily obtainable in critical translations.⁷ She read the work of Saint Teresa of Avila in French and engaged a friend to translate some of the German texts on mysticism, including the work of Meister Eckhart. She relied on anthologies for some sources and used Paul Sabatier for analysis of Franciscan sources. She knew...