Rereading Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism

For the past twenty years, an annual Quiet Day retreat has been held at Washington National Cathedral in honor of Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), best known to scholars of Christian Spirituality as the author of Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s [sic] Spiritual Consciousness.¹ Underhill is on the calendar of saints in the Episcopal Church, and the event is traditionally held near June 15, the date of her death in 1941. The gathering always draws some people for whom Underhill is a new discovery, along with long-time devotees. Usually one or two have read Mysticism, but more have come to Underhill’s work through the retreat addresses she gave in the 1920’s and 30’s or through a number of popular anthologies of her work. People comment especially on Underhill’s capacity to convey a profound conviction about the reality of the spiritual/mystical life, in a voice that validates the religious experience of “ordinary people.”

For someone familiar with the scholarship of Christian mysticism, the participants’ responses to Underhill’s work might seem to blur and blend categories that scholars have wanted to keep distinct. Some at the Quiet Days have admired Underhill’s account of mysticism as a universal human experience, transcending theology and religious traditions; but they share the day of prayer with others who celebrate the distinctively Anglican and “catholic” cultural and theological context that frames Underhill’s most vivid accounts of the mystics of the Church. The complementary views expressed by these readers point to the richness and complexity of Underhill’s engagement with the mystics, an engagement that has much to offer contemporary scholars of mysticism and the spiritual life. What can the mystics teach us, she asks—and we are still asking—about the spiritual life and the experience of ordinary people? More particularly, should we view mysticism as a universal human experience of the Absolute, beyond religious traditions, as a Romantic or a modern psychological approach might suggest? Or should mysticism be understood as a particular, textually mediated experience shaped by religious and cultural context and language—a view more congenial to our postmodern age? And what is the theology, the understanding of God that underlies the mystics’ “reports”? Underhill navigates these kinds of questions for an audience of seekers and scholars alike, and this may be what has kept Mysticism one of the most widely read works on Christian mysticism in the twentieth century, continuously in print since its first publication in 1911.² I would like to suggest that Mysticism as well as Underhill’s work as a whole invites a rereading in our time, one that takes into account and considers specificity of the original context in which she wrote and also considers questions important to recent scholarship on Christian mysticism and spirituality. I believe scholars and practitioners in these fields are uniquely positioned to appreciate the surprising contemporaneity of this voice from the Edwardian era, and to discover in Underhill’s work a lively, complex and creative framing of questions that continue to engage serious students of Christian mysticism and the spiritual life.

Evelyn Underhill, Courtesy of Retreat House, Pleshey

Scholars have often expressed ambivalence toward Underhill’s work in Mysticism, expressing both an appreciation for the breadth of her account of the mystics, but also noting a lack of rigor in the scholarly analysis she offers. She is usually classified with her contemporary William James among twentieth-century scholars focused primarily on religious experience, and particularly among those who see the mystical experience as expressing a “common core” in human religious experience, transcending particular religious and cultural expressions. Underhill’s orientation to this discussion can be seen in her preface to the first edition of Mysticism, where she writes: “All mystics . . . . speak the same language and come from the same country. As against that fact, the place which they happen to occupy in the kingdom of this world matters little.”³ A statement like this—and one could cite many others—would indeed seem to put her...