Evelyn Underhill

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Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) was an English writer on mysticism whose 1911 book Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness became, for a generation of English readers, the standard introduction to its subject. Born in Wolverhampton on 6 December 1875, the only child of the barrister Arthur Underhill of Lincoln’s Inn, she was schooled mostly at home, spent three years at a private school in Folkestone, and read history and botany at King’s College for Women in London. She came to the contemplative writers not as a churchwoman but as a literary outsider fascinated by what they reported — and she wrote about them with a seriousness that lifted mysticism out of vague usage and into something that could be studied. The conviction that the contemplative life forms a single field of study, rather than a scatter of private oddities, is the thread that runs from her first novels through the great treatise to the retreat addresses of her last decade.

She belonged to no academy. The breadth that gives Mysticism its authority was self-assembled — French and Italian read in the original, the Latin contemplatives worked through with a barrister’s daughter’s appetite for the documentary record, the Continental editions tracked down and digested. She was, by temperament and by training, an organizer of other people’s testimony: the book’s six hundred pages are a structure built to hold a vast quantity of quoted experience without letting it dissolve into anecdote. That she did this work outside the universities, as a married laywoman in Kensington, is part of why the book reached a public the academic monographs of Inge or von Hügel never touched.

The 1911 book and its structure

The achievement of Mysticism was structural. Drawing on figures across the Western tradition — Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, the medieval and early-modern Christian contemplatives, with side-glances toward Sufi and Indian sources — Underhill argued that the testimony of the mystics, however scattered across centuries and languages, described a single recognizable movement of the self. She set it out in five phases: an awakening of the self to the reality of the divine; a purification or purgation that strips away what the self has loved in place of it; an illumination in which the contemplative sees by a new light; a “dark night of the soul,” the desolation and stripping that John of the Cross had named; and a final unitive life, in which the soul rests in God. She took the dark night and the unitive state from the Carmelite vocabulary, the ascent-by-stripping from the apophatic line, and the overall shape from her own wide reading rather than from any one master — which is why the book reads less as a doctrine to be argued than as a chart of reported experience.

The frame is heavily indebted to her sources. Behind the apophatic phases stands Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose stripping-away of names into a divine darkness she treats, with the Cloud-author who carried him into English, as the spine of the contemplative ascent — the apophatic movement that empties speech to make room for union. Behind the unitive language stand Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland preachers; behind the affective warmth, the English and Continental women of the fourteenth century, Julian of Norwich foremost among them. She treated these accounts as reports of experience to be charted rather than dogmas to be defended, and the book’s authority rested on the breadth of its reading: a long historical appendix amounted to a who’s-who of the Western contemplatives, and the bibliography indexed the early-twentieth-century editions then in print.

The five stages are not a ladder she invented but a synthesis. The dark night she names belongs to John of the Cross and the Spanish Carmelites; the unitive language draws on Eckhart and the Rhineland tradition that descended through Tauler and the Theologia Germanica into Protestant inwardness; the illuminative phase she fills with Julian of Norwich and the affective English writers. Underhill’s distinctive move was to set these against the developmental psychology of her own day — she leaned on the vocabulary of consciousness and the subliminal self, and on the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose élan vital gave her a way of describing the contemplative life as growth rather than as static attainment. The result was a book that read the saints as case histories of a single human capacity in development, ordered, intelligible, and in principle teachable.

That method placed her within a small, distinct moment in the study of the subject. Her Mysticism (1911) belongs beside William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which had isolated four marks of the mystical state — ineffability, a noetic quality, transiency, passivity; W. R. Inge’s Christian Mysticism (1899), which had run a Plotinian spine through the Christian centuries; and Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of Religion (1908), which insisted that mysticism untethered from institution and intellect curdles into error. Underhill’s contribution to that conversation was the developmental map — the sense that the testimonies, read together, traced a path with stages rather than a single momentary flash. The five-stage scheme passed into English-language comparative mysticism and into the literature of Christian spiritual direction, where it still circulates. Later scholarship treats both James’s marks and Underhill’s stages as useful heuristic grids whose universalist ambitions have not survived; Bernard McGinn, launching his own multi-volume history, expressly set his project apart from hers, shifting the operative category from experience to the consciousness of God’s presence and faulting her — as he faulted James — for selecting her quotations to fit a theory of mysticism formed in advance. Nicholas Watson has pressed a sharper point: that “the Middle English mystics,” the very grouping her editions helped to canonize, is a modern construct shaped for devotional and ecclesiastical reasons rather than a self-conscious medieval school. Her perennialism — the assumption of one mystical consciousness running through Christianity, Sufism, and the Indian traditions alike — is now read as a period mark of the years around 1910, the same years that produced the occult and esoteric revival out of which she came.

From the esoteric revival to the Church of England

Underhill’s own position shifted over time. Before the treatise she had written three novels saturated in symbol and quest — The Grey World (1904), The Lost Word (1907), The Column of Dust (1909) — and she had moved for a time within the period’s occult currents, taking part around 1905–1907 in the work of A. E. Waite’s branch of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where the contemplative and the ceremonial-magical were not yet sorted from one another. She came to regard the magical apparatus as a distraction from what had drawn her to it, and turned decisively toward the mystics. The pull toward Rome was strong; she did not convert, deterred in part by the Modernist crisis that broke over the Catholic Church after 1907, and she settled instead, by about 1921, into the Church of England as a practicing Anglo-Catholic.

The decisive personal influence of those years was Friedrich von Hügel, the Roman Catholic lay theologian, who from 1921 until his death in 1925 served as her spiritual director. Under his guidance the visionary breadth of the early work was disciplined toward the ordinary and the incarnate; his three-element account of religion, his caution against monism, and his insistence on the small daily duties all left their mark on her later writing and on the revisions of Mysticism she carried through twelve editions to 1930. From 1924 she began conducting retreats for the Church of England, becoming the first woman invited to lead retreats for Anglican clergy; she was made a fellow of King’s College London in 1927 and given an honorary doctorate of divinity by the University of Aberdeen in 1939. The later books turn from mapping the contemplative life from outside to guiding people through it from within: The Mystic Way (1913), the brief and much-loved Practical Mysticism (1914), and the mature Worship (1936), with the small devotional volumes The Spiritual Life (1937) and Abba (1940) at the end. The governing claim of this later work is pastoral and almost plain — that the contemplative path is not the preserve of a gifted few but, in some real measure, open to ordinary belief and ordinary practice.

The retreat work mattered as much as the books. From the mid-1920s Underhill led addresses at houses such as Pleshey in Essex, year after year, to clergy, ordinands, and laypeople who had no expectation of visions and no leisure for the heroic ascesis her early sources described. To them she preached an adapted gospel: that prayer is the orientation of an ordinary life toward God, that worship is the proper work of the creature, and that the dark night and the unitive state stand at the far end of a road whose first steps are attention, patience, and the duties of the day. Worship (1936), her most substantial late book, treats the corporate liturgy of the church — Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, Free — as the school in which this orientation is formed, a marked turn from the solitary contemplative of 1911 toward the praying community. The shift answered von Hügel’s lesson that mysticism untethered from institution and intellect goes wrong; it also answered her own pastoral experience, which had shown her that ordinary people, given a frame, could pray. In her last years she came to a settled pacifism, joining the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship and holding that the worship of God and the making of war could not finally be reconciled — a conviction she held to as the second war began, against the current of her church and her country.

The library labors

Two strands of her work survive as direct service to the texts she loved. The larger was editorial: between 1912 and 1923 Underhill brought several of the medieval contemplatives back into readable English. Her A Book of Contemplation the which is called The Cloud of Unknowing (1912; second edition 1922) collated the British Museum’s Harley 674 against further manuscript witnesses to produce the modernization that, more than any other, reintroduced the fourteenth-century Cloud to twentieth-century readers; her introduction set the anonymous English treatise within the apophatic line descending from Dionysius. Her Scale of Perfection by Walter Hilton (1923), built from ten manuscripts, became — in Thomas Bestul’s judgment — the foundation of most later scholarship and translation of that text. She supplied the introduction to Frances Comper’s modernization of Richard Rolle’s Fire of Love (1914) and edited the English Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage (1916). Across these she effectively assembled, and named, an English mystical school — the achievement that later historicists both credit to her and treat with suspicion.

The second strand reached east. In 1915 she contributed the introduction to Rabindranath Tagore’s English versions of the songs of Kabir, the fifteenth-century weaver-poet of Banaras whose verse the Sant and devotional traditions of North India carried for centuries. The volume — drawn not from any of the classical Kabir recensions but from Kshitimohan Sen’s transcripts of the folk-Kabir of Birbhum — shaped the early Anglophone reception of a poet whose own register lay closer to the Persian and Indian poetic lyric of divine love than to the Latin contemplatives, and it stood for the breadth of her interest: the conviction, running through all her work, that the contemplatives of different centuries and faiths were describing recognizably related country.

Both labors share an editor’s instinct to make a difficult inner text legible to an ordinary reader without flattening it — the same instinct that made Mysticism a doorway rather than a wall. That book has never gone out of print. Whatever its dated assumptions, generations of Anglophone readers have met Eckhart and Julian, the Cloud-author and Hilton, first through Underhill’s pages, and much later writing on the inner life still works within the chart she drew. The retreat conductor of the 1920s and 1930s, who told tired clergy and ordinary parishioners that the life of prayer was meant for them and not for specialists, was making the same argument by other means — that the country the mystics described is open, and that the map exists to be walked.

Scholarship and editions

The standard public-domain text of the treatise is the first edition, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen; New York: Dutton, 1911), with the Christian Classics Ethereal Library maintaining a corrected paginated transcription at ccel.org/ccel/u/underhill/mysticism; the twelfth, much-revised edition appeared in 1930. Her One Hundred Poems of Kabir with Tagore (Macmillan, 1915) is hosted as a source text and mirrored at sacred-texts.com/hin/sok. For the life and its development the principal studies are Margaret Cropper, Evelyn Underhill (London: Longmans, Green, 1958), the first full biography by a friend; Christopher J. R. Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941): An Introduction to Her Life and Writings (Mowbray, 1975); and Dana Greene, Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Infinite Life (New York: Crossroad, 1990), the standard modern account, which traces her path from a Bergsonian vitalism through perennialism to confessional Anglicanism; Greene’s essay “The Mystic and the Church” sets out that trajectory in brief. The decisive scholarly reassessment is Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350–1550 (vol. 5 of The Presence of God; New York: Crossroad, 2012), which credits Underhill with reintroducing the English contemplatives while distancing his own method from her experience-centered, perennialist frame; Nicholas Watson’s work on vernacular theology supplies the parallel critique of the “Middle English mystics” as a modern category. The Evelyn Underhill Association maintains a continuing scholarly literature and newsletter archive on her life and reception.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · Songs of Kabir (Tagore & Underhill, 1915)

→ Related: Christian Mysticism · Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Mysticism · Comparative Mysticism · William James · Johannes Tauler · Meister Eckhart · Julian Of Norwich · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Apophatic Theology · Persian Poetic Mysticism · Protestant Mysticism · Occultism · Rabindranath Tagore