Mysticism and the Atonement: Experiential insights from Evelyn Underhill

Introducing Evelyn Underhill

The English theologian, spiritual director and novelist, Evelyn Underhill, was born in 1875 and died in 1941. This year we celebrated the 75th anniversary of her death. As well as receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, Underhill was the first woman to be invited to give the Upton lectures in theology at Oxford University. After her death, The Times described her theology lectures as ‘unmatched by any of the professional teachers of her day’. ¹ Underhill was made a fellow of King’s College, London, and was the first woman to officially conduct spiritual retreats for the Anglican Church. She is commemorated liturgically by the Church of England on 15th June each year.

The Catholic layman, Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925), was Underhill’s spiritual director between 1919 and 1925. Underhill emphatically stated, regarding von Hügel, ‘I owe him my whole spiritual life.’ ² After von Hügel died, Underhill waited nearly two years, then received spiritual direction from von Hügel’s friend Bishop Frere, and later from Reginald Somerset Ward. However, despite this, nearly 20 years after von Hügel’s death, Underhill still described von Hügel as her ‘“final court of appeal” on all questions of the inner life’. ³

After the Baron’s death in 1925, Underhill played a crucial role in ‘diffusing’ and ‘interpret[ing] the influence of Baron von Hügel’ and guiding mysticism ‘along the paths of Christian theology’. ⁴ Few, if any, in the British Anglican church in the 1920s and 1930s did more than Underhill to ‘help people grasp the priority of prayer in the Christian life and the place of the contemplative element within it’. ⁵

But Underhill’s mysticism was not always Christocentric. Originally part of Arthur Waite’s Hermeneutic Order of the Golden Dawn of the Golden Dawn, in 1905 Underhill sat and passed exams, and had the occultist pseudonym ‘Soror Quaerens Lucem’, which translated as ‘the sister who is seeking enlightenment’. ⁶ Armstrong writes that the Golden Dawn was:

the kind of society which a young woman taking an interest in the lively meta-phys-ico-mystical scene at the time and detached from the official churches, might have felt drawn to … the emphasis was … contact with ultimate realities through the deliberate deployment of incantations and rituals, drawn from various sources …. ⁷

Underhill wrote her celebrated book, Mysticism, in 1911. In her preparation for Mysticism, she had ‘turned over a large number of mystical writings both printed and unprinted, both in English and in other languages’. ⁹ She thereafter ‘worked hard to popularise the lives and writings of the mystics’. ¹⁰

A ‘mystical revival’ was under way in Britain:

partly [as] a reaction to the material success and ‘external ideals’ of the Victorian age …. Victorian optimism was a thing of the past …. [People] were now becoming introspective and interested in the great question of the value of life which is bound up with the nature of consciousness and its relation to the universe. ¹¹

Mysticism and the doctrine of the Atonement

In her article on mysticism and the Atonement, Underhill went ‘to the heart of a problem which many would say is endemic in a mystical interpretation of the Christian Gospel’. ¹³ For ‘if Christ is the one sufficient atonement of [hu]mankind … what room is there left for … the whole “apparatus” of mysticism?’ ¹⁴

To engage with this discussion we need to understand how Underhill defines her ‘mystical view of Christianity.’ She states: it ‘lays special emphasis on the growth and experience of the individual soul, its ascent to union with God – helped doubtless by grace’. ¹⁵ In her article, Underhill argues that mysticism is usually seen as leaving ‘no room’ for the doctrine of the Atonement. ¹⁶ In fact, she goes as far as arguing that mysticism is often seen as being completely at odds with this idea of the ‘atoning act’ of Christ’ which Underhill argues has ‘its implications of reconciliation and vicarious suffering, of the divine life humiliating itself, in order to do within the temporal order something for man which man cannot do for himself’. ¹⁷ Underhill even asserts that ‘certain extreme views of the Atonement’ are ‘hopelessly irreconcilable with the mystical view of religion … finding the whole meaning and reason of the Incarnation in the one historical “propitiatory act” of Calvary.’ ¹⁸ She argues that simply focusing upon the Atonement, this ‘something done once for all to the soul – to the world – from outside’ is usually completely at odds with mysticism, the ‘idea of a life perpetually welling up in the soul, of growth, movement, organic change’. ¹⁹ But having set mysticism and Atonement in ‘opposition’, Underhill flips and suggests that in fact mysticism and the Atonement can be ‘regarded as two sides of a greater whole’. ²⁰ She recognizes ‘a curious similarity between these two apparently opposite views’. ²¹

St Paul becomes the focus of Underhill’s argument. She sees him as ‘the greatest of all Christian mystics – soaked … in the idea of grace and of growth in grace, and deeply impressed with the fact of the soul’s individual responsibility’ yet ‘also supremely the theologian of the Atonement’. ²² Underhill argues that Paul’s doctrine on the Atonement was:

first called forth by the practical need of finding some meaning in the tragedy of the crucifixion, it is yet a development of that profound conception of His own death as a filling up to the brim of the cup of sacrifice and surrender, which seems to have inspired Christ Himself. If there were indeed a fundamental inconsistency between these two ideas in their pure and original form, then St Paul would be inconsistent; for he certainly held them both. ²³

Just as we can never truly capture the three and one of the Trinity, or the two natures and one person of Christ, so with the Atonement, we can never really pin it down and understand it intellectually. As Underhill argues:

[Paul’s]… extremely rich, deep view of life … refuses to be hammered into a consistent system, and we can never manage to embrace it all at once. Always bits get left out, and hence there is apt to be a certain distortion in all our views of the Pauline universe … Any paradoxes and inconsistencies which we find in his statements are the inevitable result of an effort to express the enormous sweep, the living multiplicity, and (to borrow a word from William James) the thickness of his vision of Reality. ²⁵

Von Hügel’s ‘de-intellectualising’ influence on Underhill

Let us recall von Hügel’s words to Evelyn when she first came to him for spiritual direction: ²⁷

You badly need de-intellectualising, or at least developing homely, human sense and spirit dispositions and activities … it will, as it were, distribute your blood – some of your blood – away from the brain, where too much of it is lodged at present. ²⁸

Thus, von Hügel repeatedly warned his directees against an excess of the intellectual element. He told one directee, Frances Lillie, about two movements of the soul:

The safer one is a circular motion around the central truths of life like pigeons circling around their pigeon house. The other movement is unsafe alone. It is that of the intelligence, moving on and on, fascinated by the lure of further knowledge, following a certain distant life. It is apt to be feverish. ²⁹

Thus von Hügel’s spiritual directee, Frances Lilley, was encouraged to have both the mind of ‘the scientist’, plus her ‘religious instincts’, gaining infused mystical knowledge through prayer. ³⁶ Von Hügel emphasized ‘the palace of the soul must have somehow two lifts – a lift which is always going up from below, and a lift which is always going down from above’. ³⁷ But though he stressed the importance of ‘both movements’, the shift from persons to God, was less valued than the ‘lift … going down from above’, truth directly revealed by God through mystical encounter. Rather than standing above God, trying to stuff the Atonement into a small box, where the reality is reduced and essentially lost, the mystic stands and gazes up from below, expectant and attentive.

To gain an experiential knowledge of God and God–human realities, von Hügel taught his directees about the humble, receptive posture necessary for gaining such infused knowledge. This was clearly expressed in his letter to Violet Norrie:

We get to know such realities … only if we are sufficiently awake to care to know them, sufficiently humble to welcome them, and sufficiently generous to pay the price continuously which is strictly necessary if this knowledge and love are not to shrink but to grow. We indeed get to know realities, in proportion as we become worthy to know them, – in proportion as we become less self-occupied, less self-centred, more outward moving, less obstinate and insistent, more gladly lost in the crowd, more rich in giving all we have, and especially all we are, our very selves. ³⁸

Underhill’s mystical experiences of Christ

Though Underhill wrote her paper about mysticism and Atonement in 1914, it was not until 1922 that Underhill actually experienced Christ. In 1927, Underhill wrote:

Until about five years ago I never had any personal experience of our Lord. I didn’t know what it meant. I was a convinced Theocentric, and thought Christocentric language and practice sentimental and superstitious … when I went to the Baron he said I wasn’t much better than a Unitarian. Somehow by his prayers or something, he compelled me to experience Christ. He never said anything more about it – but I know humanly speaking he did it. It took about four months – it was like watching the sun rise very slowly – and then suddenly one knew what it was … for the next two or three years, and especially lately, more and more my whole religious life and experience seem to centre with increasing vividness on our Lord – that sort of quasi involuntary prayer which springs up of itself at odd moments is always now directed to Him …. The New Testament, which once I couldn’t make much of, or meditate on, now seems full of things never noticed – all gets more and more alive and compellingly beautiful …. Holy Communion, which at first I did simply under obedience, gets more and more wonderful too. ⁴³

Given Underhill’s mystical encounters from 1922 onwards, it is interesting to note that she does not have any sustained discussion about the Atonement in the rest of her corpus of writings. Her focus is more upon adoration of Christ and participation in what Christ is doing in the world. For example, she records:

Going to Communion this morning I saw so clearly all the suffering of the world and the self-giving of Christ to heal it – and that Communion and the life of union mean and involve taking one’s own share in that – not being rescued and consoled, but being made into part of His rescuing and ever-sacrificed body. And in the sacrificial life one accepts that obligation. ⁵²

Contemplation and adoration

Underhill’s response to these revelations of Christ is adoration and wonder. She writes in The Golden Sequence:

the events of Christ’s life – alike the most strange and the most homely – are truly ‘mysteries.’ They contain far more than they reveal. They are charged with Spirit and convey the supernatural to those who are content to watch and adore. Because of this, Christian devotion moves to and fro between adoring and intimate prayer; passing through the incarnational veil to the Absolute Beauty shining through the incarnate veil. ⁵⁴

The praying theologian

So what can we as theologians learn from Underhill? T. S. Eliot writes that Underhill recognized ‘the grievous need of the contemplative element in the modern world’. ⁶⁰ She exemplifies what Barth describes as the need for theologians to have a ‘skylight … opened by heaven’ rather than being ‘locked in a closed, barren, stuffy and unlit room’. ⁶¹ Our attempts as theologians are ‘set in the proper light by prayer’. ⁶² We all gain from engaging in ‘a Sabbath day … inserted and celebrated’ where we can stop and wonder and turn to God. For in prayer we ‘turn away’ from our ‘own efforts’ to ‘recollect’ and ‘stand before God’, ‘draw near to Him’ and listen to Him. ⁶³

And in that recollection and listening, we are drawn into and participate in the redeeming work of Christ. In the Book of Prayers that Underhill wrote and used for leading spiritual retreats at the Diocesan Retreat House at Pleshey, she writes:

Are ye able to drink the Cup that I drink of? Lord! we know not! We dare not answer for ourselves! This only we know: that we owe ourselves to Thee! We are not our own. We are bought by the price of Thy blood. One thing only we dare to ask for as the Vision of Thy Cross comes before us. Whatever be our past sins & our present weakness, so we kneel here with our hearts open to Thee, Thou Knowest, Lord, we love Thee! ⁶⁴

I conclude with these words from James Houston:

mystics are a rebuke for those who theologise without praying, who talk and organise religious life without much inward evidence of practising the faith. So in times when the faith becomes too scholastic, or too intellectualised, or too professionalised, they are living witnesses to the need to live by the Gospel. ⁶⁵