Evelyn Underhill

Evelyn Underhill was an English writer, born in 1875 in Wolverhampton and a Londoner for most of her life, and she came to God the long way round. She was a woman of letters first, learned and modern and a little skeptical, drawn to the mystics as a scholar is drawn to a fascinating subject rather than as a believer is drawn to a master. In 1911 she published the book that made her name, MysticismMysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness — Dover Publications unabridged edition, a large and careful study of the contemplative tradition from the ancient world through the great Christian mystics, and almost overnight she became the leading English interpreter of a subject the Protestant world had quietly filed away as Catholic excess.

The strange thing is what happened next. The scholar of the mystics slowly became one of the people she studied. Under the patient direction of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a wise and demanding guide of souls, Underhill moved from studying union with God to seeking it, and her writing changed with her: it grew warmer, more practical, more pastoral, aimed less at the library and more at the ordinary anxious Christian. She gave the rest of her life to that ordinary Christian. She became a spiritual director when few women held such a place, the first woman invited to lead retreats in the Church of England, and she spent herself in letters and quiet days and patient counsel, convinced that what she had found was not a rare gift for the spiritual athlete but the plain inheritance of every baptized soul.

That was her great correction to her age. The world thought the spiritual life was an escape from ordinary existence, or a luxury for those with the leisure for it. Underhill insisted it was neither. The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of thingsThe Spiritual Life — Morehouse Publishing edition, she wrote; it is part of every person's life, and no one is fully human until he has entered into it. She defined her whole subject as something humble and within reach, calling mysticism simply the art of union with Reality. And she rooted it all in worship, the subject of her major study of 1936Worship — Wipf & Stock edition. A committed pacifist, she held to that conviction even through the gathering of another war, and she died in London in 1941. She left the church a gift it had mislaid and she had recovered: the knowledge that the deepest things of God are not locked away for specialists, but offered to anyone who will turn and seek them.