The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

by Evelyn Underhill

Ca essa scrittura me fa en natura

ed en filosofia conventato;

O libro signato che dentro se’ aurato,

e tutto fiorito d’amore!”

That Cross gives the Infinite a colour which it did not have before. So, even from the point of view of the most hardened and thorough-going psychologist, Paul’s statement that “through one act of righteousness, the free gift came unto all men” is literally accurate. It is true—and that not in any conjuring-trick sense, but in a sense which fulfils on highest levels life’s basic laws—that “by the grace of one man” “the gift has abounded to the many,” entincturing and altering the whole universe, and hence the whole experience, of every receptive soul; atoning for the faulty attitude, the imperfect love, of average man.

But still this is not all. There are other laws of life gathered up in, and redistributed from, this great lens. Essentially the idea which the Christ of the Gospels seems to have had of His own death is the idea of a making good of some general falling-short on life’s part: a “filling-up of the cup” of sacrifice and surrender, to balance the other overflowing cup of error and sin. It is not only man’s unaccomplished aim, but God’s unaccomplished aim in life, which He is represented as fulfilling; and the fact that this conception owes a good deal to Old Testament prophecy need not invalidate its mystical truth. If we accept this idea, then, as well as showing individual man the way to perfect union with God—“building the bridge and reforming the road which leads to the Father’s heart,” as St. Catherine of Siena has it—Christ in His willing death is somehow performing the very object of life, in the name of the whole race. The true business of an atoner is a constructive one. He is called upon to heal a disharmony; bridge a gap between two things which, though separate, desire to be one. Even the sacrificed animal of primitive religions seems most often to be a reconciling victim, the medium of union between the worshipper and his deity. In religions of a mystical type, then, the Atoner or Redeemer will surely be one who makes patent those latent possibilities of man which are at once the earnests of his future blessedness and the causes of his present unrest. He will achieve the completion and sublimation of our vague instinct for sacrifice and love, and thus bridge the space between that which is most divine in humanity and that which is most human in divinity; filling up the measure of that “glory,” that real and divine life, of which we all fall short, yet without which we can never be content. Is not this again what St. Paul feels that Christ did? What he seems, at bottom, to see in the Passion—though the imagery by which he tries to communicate it often sounds harsh in our ears—is, the mysterious fulfilment of all cosmic meanings; the perfect surrender to infinite ideals of Man, the compound inhabitant of two possible orders of reality, who by this painful self-loss achieves perfect identification with the Divine will. This fulfilment was, as he distinctly says, the duty and destiny of the human soul. All creation looks for it “with outstretched neck.” But all have fallen short. Christ, the perfect man, does it, does what man was always meant to do; and because of the corporate character of humanity, in His utter transcendence of self-hood and of all finite categories He inevitably lifts up, to share His union with God, all who are in union with Him. The essence of the Atonement, then, would not lie so much in the sacrificial act as in the lift-up of the human spirit which that act guarantees; the new levels of life which it opens for the race. “Much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved in his life,” says Paul.

“In his life” a new summit has been conquered by humanity. But are we to stop there? Is not the attainment of that same summit, the achievement of that life-giving surrender to the Universal Spirit—“a life-giving life,” Ruysbroeck calls it—just what the great mystics, following as well as they can the curve of the life of Christ, try to do according to their measure? Theirs, after all, is the vision which sees that “there is no other way to life but the way of the Cross,” and that the human life of Christ is “the door by which all must come in.” Thus the spiritual victory of the Cross is for them not so much a unique, as a pioneer act. It is the first heroic cutting of a road on which they are to travel as far as they can; not merely the vicarious setting-right of the balance between God and man, upset by man’s wilful sin. In their ascent towards union with God, are not they road-makers, or at any rate road-menders, too? Are they not forging new links between two orders of reality, which are separate for the once-born consciousness? If so, then we may regard each one of them as a bit of the slowly achieved atonement of the race; that gradual pressing-on of humanity into the heart of the Transcendent Order. For Christians, this movement was initiated by Christ. But surely it is continued and helped by every soul in union with Him, even those who knew not His Name; and Julian of Norwich was right when she said that she knew she was “in the Cross with Him.”

Two things are perpetually emphasized in modern presentations of religion. First, the stress tends more and more to be upon experience. Nothing which authority tells us is done for us truly counts, unless we feel and realize it as done in us. In so far as this is so, the tendency is to a mystical concept of religion; and, speaking generally, to just the concept of religion which is supposed to conflict with the idea of atonement as usually understood. But, secondly, the social and corporate character of Christianity is strongly emphasized; and, where this corporate character is admired more than it is understood, mysticism is harshly criticized as the religion of the spiritual individualist, a “vertical relation,” the “flight of the alone to the Alone.” St. Paul’s “completing opposites,” in fact, are still in the foreground of our religious life; and so perhaps some re-statement of the solution by which he found room for both of them, and hence both for personal responsibility and atonement, may be possible and fruitful for us, too.

And first we notice that those enthusiasts for the corporate idea who condemn the mystics as religious egoists seem to forget that they are contradicting themselves; that if their vision of the Church of Christ as a mystical body be true, then the mystic’s ascent to God cannot be a flight of the Alone. The poisonous implication of that phrase—true in its context but always misunderstood—has stuck like mud to the white robes of the saints. But the mystic is not merely a self going out on a solitary quest of Reality. He can, must, and does go only as a member of the whole body, performing as it were the function of a specialized organ. What he does, he does for all. He is, in fact, an atoner pure and simple: something stretched out to bridge a gap, something which makes good in a particular direction the general falling-short. The special kind of light or life which he receives, he receives for the race; and, conversely, the special growth which he is able to achieve comes from the race. He depends on it for his past; it depends on him for its future. All are part of life’s great process of becoming; there are no breaks. Although there is perfect individualization, there is interpenetration too. His attainment is the attainment of the whole, pressing on behind him, supporting him. Thus—to take an obvious example—the achievement of peculiar sanctity by the member of a religious order is the achievement of that order in him; and this not in a fantastic and metaphorical sense. The support of the Rule, the conditions of the life, the weight of tradition, the special characters which each religious family inherits from its Patriarch, have all contributed something to make the achievement possible; and are factors governing the type which that achievement assumes. We recognize the Cistercian stamp upon St. Bernard, the Dominican on Suso and Tauler, the Carmelite on St. John of the Cross. Each such case vindicates once more the incarnational principle; it is the true spirit of the community, flowering in this representative of theirs, which we see. Thus, as we may regard Christ from one point of view as supremely ideal Man incarnate—the “heavenly man” as Paul calls Him—summing up, fulfilling, lifting to new heights all that came before, and therefore actualizing all that humanity was ever intended to do, and changing for ever more the character of its future achievements; so, in a small way, we may regard St. Teresa as Carmel, the ideal Carmel, incarnate. Each is a concrete fact which atones for the falling-short of a whole type, and yet is conditioned by that type. The thought of what the Carmelite life was meant to do, the pressure of that idea seeking manifestation, did condition Teresa’s achievement. Are we not also bound to say that the thought of the Jewish visions of an ideal humanity, of the Son of Man and the Suffering Servant, did condition the external accidents of the life and death of Christ?

So as to the past. Still more as to the future are the corporate and individual aspects of spiritual life inextricably twined together. As that done by one is an outbirth of the whole, so that done to one may avail for the whole. Only by staying within the circle of this thought—a thought which surely comes very close to the doctrine of Atonement—can we form a sane and broad idea of what the mystic, and the mystic’s experience, mean for the race. Consider again the case of Teresa. As, even in a time and place of considerable monastic corruption—for no one who has read her life and letters can regard the Convent of the Incarnation as a forcing-house of the spiritual life—still the idea of her order conditioned her great and Godward-tending soul, and her dedicated life filled up the measure of its glory; yet more has Teresa’s own, separate, unique achievement conditioned the spirit of her order ever since. All the saints which it has nourished have been salted with her salt. All that she won has flowed out from her in life-giving streams to others. She has been a regenerator of the religious life, has achieved the ideal of Richard Rolle, and become a “pipe of life” through which the living water can pass from God to man. Is not this, too, rather near the idea of Atonement, a curiously close and faithful imitation of Christ; especially when we consider the amount of unselfish suffering which such a career entails?