The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

by Evelyn Underhill

non vai rompendo legge; nante, l’observe tutto.”

said Jacopone da Todi; that natural rebel who deliberately submitted himself to an uncongenial religious authority, and there found perfect freedom.

Next, the solid sense of the community, the mere fact that it always lags behind the more vivid spirits, that the forward-moving shepherd who sees new pastures has got to take account of the slowest sheep—all this is a valuable safeguard against the notorious extravagances of a mysticism unfettered by authority. It is significant that the greatest mystics in all communions have ever raised up their voices most earnestly against spiritual license; have been most eager to submit their soaring intuitions to the witness of their Scriptures or the corporate feeling of their church. They realize the fact that they owe to this church the huge debt which every individual owes to the tradition of his art or of his trade. The church represents a complete spiritual civilization, a conserver of values; were it not for her, every new spiritual genius who arose would have to begin at the beginning, at the Stone Age of the soul. Instead of that, he finds himself placed within a social order enriched by all the contributions of his great predecessors. The bridges are built; the roads are made and named; his own experiences and discoveries are made more valid, less terrifying, more comprehensible to him, because others have been this way before. Compare the clarity, the sure-footedness as one may say, of Ruysbroeck, of St. Catherine of Siena, of St. Teresa, with the entanglements, the sense of wandering in beautiful but trackless places, which one feels when reading even Boehme, Fox, or Blake; and others are far less coherent than they. Man needs a convention, a tradition, a limitation, if he is not to waste his creative powers; and this convention the mystics find best and most easily in the forms of the church to which they belong.

So we see that the corporate life of his church gives the mystic a good deal. What does he, on his part, give to it?

Those who see in the mystic chiefly one who rebels against, or has no use for, the corporate religious life, and acknowledges no authority but that of his own spiritual intuitions, usually conceive of his experiences as having value for himself alone. He cannot, they say, communicate them or teach others to share them. Often, therefore, he is spoken of as useless, selfish, other-worldly: a “lonely soul.” These phrases suggest that those who use them have a very narrow view of usefulness, a very materialistic view of the Body of Christ, and a very unevangelical view of the relative positions of Mary and Martha. As a matter of fact, the mystic, instead of being useless, selfish, and other-worldly, is useful, unselfish, and this-worldly. He is a creative personality, consecrated to the great practical business of actualizing the eternal order within the temporal; and although the pursuit of this business brings him hours of exquisite joy, it brings him hours of great suffering too—suffering which is gladly and patiently endured. He does it, or tries to do it, not because he seeks the joy, but solely for love—love of God, love of his fellow-men—for he is perpetuating in a certain sense the work of Christ, mediating between his brethren and Divine Reality. Hence, where he is fully developed, he will, as Ruysbroeck tells us, swing like a pendulum between contemplation and action, between adoration of God and service of man. In him life has evolved her most powerful spiritual engine; and she uses it not for the next world, but for this world, for the eternalization of the here and now, the making of it more real and more divine, more fully charged with the grandeur of God. Often the mystic’s special work is done in a positive and obvious fashion which should satisfy the most practical mind, and which is yet wholly actuated by his central intention, that of raising up—as he sometimes says—new children of the Eternal Goodness, bringing back the corporate life to a closer contact with God. “My little children, of whom I travail,” says St. Paul to his converts. There is a typical mystic speaking of his life-work. Can we call St. Francis of Assisi, the most devoted and original of missionaries; St. Joan of Arc, re-making the consciousness of France by the most active of methods; St. Catherine of Siena, purifying the Italian Church; St. Teresa, regenerating the whole Carmelite Order, and leaving upon it a stamp it has never lost; “lazy contemplatives”? Or St. Catherine of Genoa, the devoted superintendent of a great hospital, who never permitted her hours of ecstatic communion with God to interfere with her duty to the sick?

Taken as a class, the Christian mystics are distinguished by nothing so much as by their heroic and unselfish activities; by their varied and innumerable services to the corporate life of the church. From their ranks have come missionaries, preachers, prophets, social reformers, poets, founders of institutions, servants of the poor and the sick, patient guides and instructors of souls. We sometimes forget that even those known chiefly by the writings they have left behind them have sacrificed to the difficult task of reducing their transcendent experience to words, hours in which—were the popular idea of the mystic a true one—they might have been idly basking in the Divine Light. But these practical activities, though often great, are only a part of the mystic’s contribution to the corporate life. If his special claim to communion with the Transcendent be true at all—and this argument is based on the assumption that there is at least some truth in it—then he does really tap a source of vitality higher than that with which other men have contact. In the language of theology, he has not merely “efficient” but also “extraordinary” grace; a larger dower of life, directly dependent on his larger, more generous love. This is a claim to which his strange triumphs over circumstance, his conquests over ill-fortune, ill-health, oppositions and deprivations of every kind, give weight. Not many strong and normal persons would willingly face, or indeed endure, the hardships which St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Joan of Arc, St. Teresa, gladly and successfully embraced.

This larger and intenser vitality the mystic does not and cannot keep to himself. He infects with it all with whom he comes in contact, kindles the latent fire in them: for the spiritual consciousness is caught, not taught. Under his influence—sometimes from the mere encounter with his personality—other men begin to live a more real, a more eternal life. Ruysbroeck says that the Spirit of God, when it is truly received into a soul, becomes a spreading light; and history confirms this. Corporate experience of God always begins in a personal experience of God. The rise of Christianity is the classic illustration of this truth; but Hindu and Moslem religious history also declare it. Round each of the great unitive mystics little groups of ardent disciples, of spiritual children, have grown up. This is true both of those who remained within and those who seceded from the official Church—for instance, St. Bernard, Eckhart, St. Francis, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, Boehme, Fox. Nor did their influence cease with death.

Further, in reckoning up the value of the mystics to the church as a whole, we sometimes forget the extent to which that church is indebted to mystic intuition for the actual data upon which her corporate life is based. Christianity, it is true, is fundamentally a historical religion; but it is also a religion of experience, and its very history deals quite as much with the events which attend human intercourse with the Transcendent and Eternal as with concrete and visible happenings in space and time. The New Testament is thick with reports of mystical experiences. The Fourth Gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul depend for their whole character on the soaring mystical genius their writers possessed. Had St. Paul never been caught up to the third heaven, he would have had a very different outlook on the world, and Christianity would have been a different religion in consequence. Had the Fourth Evangelist never known what it was to feel the sap of the Mystic Vine flow through him, his words would have lacked their overwhelming certitude. So, too, the liturgies bear the stamp of mystical feeling, and most of the great religious concepts which the church has gradually added to her store come from the same source. If we ask ourselves what the history of the church would be without the history of her mystics, then we begin to see how much of her light and colour emanates from them; how much of her doctrine represents their experience translated into dogmatic form. That communion with—that feeding on—the Divine Life which she offers to every believer in the Eucharist is the central fact of their existence. From Clement of Alexandria downwards, again and again they appeal to Eucharistic images in order to express what it is that really happens to the soul immersed in contemplative prayer. “I am the food of the full-grown,” said the voice of God to St. Augustine. “Every time we think with love of the Well-beloved, He is anew our meat and drink,” says Ruysbroeck. So, too, the church’s language concerning new birth, divine sonship, regeneration, union with Christ, and the whole concept of grace, regarded as a transcendent life and love perpetually pressing in on humanity—all this is of mystical origin, and represents not the speculations but the concrete experience of the great mystics. They are pushed out, as it were, by the visible church like tentacles, to explore the unseen world which surrounds her, and drawn back again to her bosom that they may impart to the whole body the more abundant life which they have found. Were it not for the unfailing family of the mystics, thus perpetually pushing out beyond the protective edges of the organism, and bringing back official Christianity into direct touch with the highest spiritual values, and so constantly reaffirming the fact—by them felt and experienced—of the intimate correspondence, the regenerating contact of God with the soul, the church would long ago have fallen victim to that tendency to relapse into the mechanical which dogs all organized groups. Then the resistance which she has sometimes offered to the freshness and novelty, the adventurous quality of the mystical impulse, where it has appeared without preparation and sought to correct by its own overwhelming certitude the spiritual conventions of the day, would have become that hopeless inertia which is the precursor of death.

So we may best look upon the great Christian mystic as a special organ developed within the Christian body for a special use. His peculiar sensibilities, like those which condition artistic genius, are the gates through which messages from the Transcendent come to man. He is finding and feeling the Infinite; not for himself, but for us. His achievement, bridging the gap which lies between the normal mind and the supersensuous world, makes more valid and more actual to us the assumptions upon which external religion is built; vindicating the church’s highest claim, and hence the soul’s highest claim—the claim that achievement of Eternal Life, communion with ultimate reality, is possible to the spirit of man. More, since all human lives interpenetrate, and isolation is impossible save in death, the more we, the social group, are willing to accept the claim of the mystic, and receive what he tells us in a spirit of humility instead of a spirit of criticism; the more completely he will be able to share his treasure with us, the more deeply we shall be able to enter into that consciousness which he represents, which he brings in his own person into the human scheme.

This, of course, the Christian church has said far more beautifully and exactly in her doctrine of the Communion of Saints; and that doctrine, rightly understood, is indeed the key to the connection between the great mystics and the corporate life within which they arise. Were the activities of these more vital spirits wholly hidden from us, wholly silent and supersensual—as they are not—it would be a grossly materialistic and violently un-Christian judgment which concluded from this that their lives were useless save to themselves. How can a life which aims at God be useless, if we believe that achievement of Him is the final destiny and only satisfaction of every soul? It would be an implicit denial of the efficacy of prayer, of the “prevailing merits” of sanctity, its value to the society which produces it—the power of a great and loving spirit to help, infect and reinforce more languid souls—did we agree that the life of the most strictly enclosed contemplative was wasted. Christians, who believe that the world was redeemed from within the narrow limits of Palestine, should not thus confuse space with power, or character with the manner of its self-expression. Without the ardent prayers of the mystics, the vivid spiritual life they lead, what would the sum of human spirituality be? How can we tell what we owe to the power which they liberate, the currents which they set up, the contacts which they make? The land they see, and of which they report to us, is the land towards which humanity is going. They are like the look-out men upon the cross-trees, assuring us from time to time that we are still upon our course. Tear asunder their peculiar power and office from the office of the whole, and you will have on one side a society deprived of the guides which God has raised up for it; on the other, an organ deprived of its real perfection and beauty, because severed from the organism which it was intended to serve.