The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

by Evelyn Underhill

Now, intellect and feeling are not wholly ours to give. A rich mental or emotional life is not possessed of all men; some are naturally stupid, some temperamentally cold. Even those who are greatly endowed with the powers of understanding or of love have not got these powers entirely under their own control. Both feeling and intellect often insist on taking their own line with us. Moreover, they fluctuate from day to day, from hour to hour; they are dependent on many delicate adjustments. Sometimes we are mentally dull, sometimes we are emotionally flat: and this happens more often, perhaps, in regard to spiritual than in regard to merely human affairs. On such occasions it is notoriously useless to try to beat ourselves up to a froth: to make ourselves think more deeply or make ourselves care more intensely. Did the worth of man’s prayerful life depend on the maintenance of a constant high level of feeling or understanding, he were in a parlous case. But, though these often seem to fail him—and with them all the joy of spiritual intercourse fails him too—the regnant will remains. Even when his heart is cold and his mind is dim, the “blind intent stretching to God” is still possible to him. “Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.”

The Kingdom of Heaven, says the Gospel, is taken by violence—that is, by effort, by unfaltering courage—not by cleverness, nor by ecstatic spiritual feelings. The freedom of the City of God is never earned by a mere limp acquiescence in those great currents of the transcendent order which bear life towards its home. The determined fixing of the will upon Spiritual Reality, and pressing towards that Reality steadily and without deflection; this is the very centre of the art of prayer. This is why those splendid psychologists, the mediæval writers on prayer, told their pupils to “mean only God,” and not to trouble about anything else; since “He who has Him has all.” The most theological of thoughts soon becomes inadequate; the most spiritual of emotions is only a fair-weather breeze. Let the ship take advantage of it by all means, but not rely on it. She must be prepared to beat to windward if she would reach her goal.

In proportion to the strength and sincerity of the will, in fact, so shall be the measure of success in prayer. As the self pushes out towards Reality, so does Reality rush in on it. “Grace and the will,” says one of the greatest of living writers on religion, “rise and fall together.” “Grace” is, of course, the theological term for that inflow of spiritual vitality which is the response made by the divine order to the human motions of adoration, supplication, and love; and according to the energy and intensity with which our efforts are made—the degree in which we concentrate our attention upon this high and difficult business of prayer—will be the amount of new life that we receive. The efficacy of prayer, therefore, will be conditioned by the will of the praying self. “Though it be so, that prayer be not the cause of grace,” says Hilton, “nevertheless it is a way or means by which grace freely given comes into the soul.” Grace presses in upon life perpetually, and awaits our voluntary appropriation of it. It is accessible to sincere and loyal endeavour, to “the true lovely will of the heart,” and to nothing else.

So much we have said of will. What place have we left for the operation of feeling in prayer? It is not easy to disentangle will and feeling; for in all intense will there is a strong element of emotion—every volitional act has somewhere at the back of it a desire—and in all great and energizing passions there is a pronounced volitional element. The “synthesis of love and will” is no mere fancy of the psychologist. It is a compound hard to break down in practice. But I think we can say generally that the business of feeling is to inflame the will, to give it intention, gladness, and vividness; to convert it from a dull determination into an eager, impassioned desire. It links up thought with action; effects, in psychological language, the movement of the prayerful self from a mere state of cognition to a state of conation; converts the soul from attention to the Transcendent to first-hand adventure within it. “All thy life now behoveth altogether to stand in desire,” says the author of the Cloud of Unknowing to the disciple who has accepted the principle of prayer; and here he is declaring a psychological necessity rather than a religious platitude, for all successful action has its origin in emotion of some kind. Though we choose to imagine that “pure reason” directs our conduct, in the last resort we always do a thing because of the feeling that we have about it. Not necessarily because we like doing it; but because instinctive feeling of some sort—selfish or unselfish, personal, social, conventional, sacrificial; the disturbing emotion called the sense of duty, or the glorious emotion called the passion of love—is urging us to it. Instinctive emotions, more or less sublimated; Love, Hatred, Ambition, Fear, Anger, Hunger, Patriotism, Self-interest; these are the true names of our reasons for doing things.

If this be true of our reactions to the physical world, it is none the less true of our intercourse with the spiritual world. The will is moved to seek that intercourse by emotion, by feeling; never by a merely intellectual conviction. In the vigour and totality with which the heroes of religion give themselves to spiritual interests, and in the powers which they develop, we see the marks of instinctive feeling operating upon the highest levels. By “a leash of longing,” says the Cloud of Unknowing again, man is led to be the servant of God; not by the faultless deductions of dialectic, but by the mysterious logic of the heart. He is moved most often, perhaps, by an innate unformulated craving for perfection, or by the complementary loathing of imperfection—a love of God, or a hatred of self—by the longing for peace, the miserable sensations of disillusion, of sin, and of unrest, the heart’s deep conviction that it needs a changeless object for its love. Or, if by none of these, then by some other emotional stimulus.

A wide range of feeling states—some, it is true, merely self-seeking, but others high and pure—influence the prayerful consciousness; but those which are normal and healthy fall within two groups, one of subjective, the other of objective emotion. The dominant motive of the subjective group is the self’s feeling of its own imperfection, helplessness, sinfulness, and need, over against the Perfect Reality towards which its prayer is set; a feeling which grows with the growth of the soul’s spiritual perceptions, and includes all the shaded emotions of penitence and of humility. “For meekness in itself is naught else but a true knowing and feeling of a man’s self as he is.” The objective group of feelings is complementary to this, and is centred on the goodness, beauty, and perfection of that Infinite Reality towards which the soul is stretching itself. Its dominant notes are adoration and love. Of these two fundamental emotions—humility and love—the first lies at the back of all prayer of confession and petition, and is a necessary check upon the arrogant tendencies of the will. The second is the energizing cause of all adoration: adoration, the highest exercise of the spirit of man. Prayer, then, on its emotional side should begin in humble contrition and flower in loving adoration. Adoring love—not mere emotional excitement, religious sentimentality or “spiritual feelings”—but the strong, deep love, industrious, courageous and self-giving which fuses all the powers of the self into one single state of enormous intensity; this is the immortal element of prayer. Thought has done all that it may when it has set the scene, prepared the ground, adjusted the mind in the right direction. Will is wanted only whilst there are oppositions to be transcended, difficult things to be done. It represents the soul’s effort and struggle to be where it ought to be. But there are levels of attainment in which the will does not seem to exist any more as a separate thing. It is caught in the mighty rhythms of the Divine will, merged in it and surrendered to it. Instead of its small personal activity, it forms a part of the great deep action of the Whole. In the higher degrees of prayer, in fact, will is transmuted into love. We are reminded of the old story of the phœnix: the active busy will seems to be burned up and utterly destroyed, but living love, strong and immortal, springs from the ashes and the flame. When the reasonable hope and the deliberate wilful faith in which man’s prayer began are both fulfilled, this heavenly charity goes on to lose itself upon the heights.

Within the normal experience of the ordinary Christian, love should give two things to prayer; ardour and beauty. In his prayer, as it were, man swings a censer before the altar of the Universe. He may put into the thurible all his thoughts and dreams, all his will and energy. But unless the fire of love is communicated to that incense, nothing will happen; there will be no fragrance and no ascending smoke. These qualities—ardour and beauty—represent two distinct types of feeling, which ought both to find a place in the complete spiritual life, balancing and completing one another. The first is in the highest degree intimate and personal; the second is disinterested and æsthetic.

The intimate and personal aspect of spiritual love has found supreme literary expression in the works of Richard of St. Victor, of St. Bernard, of Thomas à Kempis, of our own Richard Rolle, Hilton, and Julian of Norwich, and many others. We see it in our own day in its purest form in the living mystic who wrote The Golden Fountain. Those who discredit it as “mere religious emotionalism” do so because they utterly mistake its nature; regarding it, apparently, as the spiritual equivalent of the poorest and most foolish, rather than the noblest, most heroic, and least self-seeking, types of human love. “I find the lark the most wonderful of all birds,” says the author of The Golden Fountain. “I cannot listen to his rhapsodies without being inspired (no matter what I may be in the midst of doing or saying) to throw up my own love to God. In the soaring insistence of his song and passion I find the only thing in Nature which so suggests the high soaring and rapturous flights of the soul. But I am glad that we surpass the lark in sustaining a far more lengthy and wonderful flight; and that we sing, not downwards to an earthly love, but upwards to a heavenly.” Like real human love, this spiritual passion is poles asunder from every kind of sentimentality. It is profoundly creative, it is self-giving, it does not ask for anything in exchange. Although it is the source of the highest kind of joy—though, as à Kempis says, the true lover “flies, runs, and rejoices; is free, and cannot be restrained”—it has yet more kinship with suffering than with merely agreeable emotions. This is the feeling state, at once generous and desirous, which most of all enflames the will and makes it active; this it is which gives ardour and reality to man’s prayers. “For love is born of God, and cannot rest save in God, above all created things.”

But there is another form of objective emotion besides this intimate and personal passion of love, which ought to play an important part in the life of prayer. I mean that exalted and essentially disinterested type of feeling which expresses itself in pure adoration, and is closely connected with the sense of the Beautiful. Surely this, since it represents the fullest expression of one power in our nature—and that a power which is persistently stretched out in the direction of the Ideal—should have a part in our communion with the spiritual, as well as with the natural world. The Beautiful, says Hegel, is the spiritual making itself known sensuously. It represents, then, a direct message to us from the heart of Reality; ministers to us of more abundant life. Therefore the widening of our horizon which takes place when we turn in prayer to a greater world than that which the senses reveal to us, should bring with it a more poignant vision of loveliness, a more eager passion for Beauty as well as for Goodness and Truth. When St. Augustine strove to express the intensity of his regret for wasted years, it was to his neglect of the Beauty of God that he went to show the poignancy of his feeling, the immensity of his loss. “Oh Beauty so old and so new! too late have I loved thee!”

It needs a special training, I think—a special and deliberate use of our faculties—if we are to avoid this deprivation; and learn, as an integral part of our communion with Reality, to lay hold of the loveliness of the First and Only Fair. “I was caught up to Thee by Thy beauty, but dragged back again by my own weight,” says Augustine in another place; and the weight of the soul, he tells us, is its love—the pull of a misplaced desire. All prayer which is primarily the expression of our wants rather than our worship, which places the demand for daily bread before instead of after the hallowing of the Ineffable Name, will have this dragging-back effect.