The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

by Evelyn Underhill

The Soul is naturally that of the author. Lady Love is his instructress, and all the most beautiful passages are given to her. Reason’s rôle is interrogatory. He catechises Love sharply though respectfully, and represents the invariable attitude of common sense confronted by the claims of mysticism. Sometimes he goes too far; Love or the Soul is driven to put him in his place. “Oh, understanding of Reason!” says this soul noughted, “what thou hast of rudeness! Thou takest the shell or the chaff and leavest the kernel or the grain. Thine understanding is so low, that thou mayst not so highly reach as them behoves that well would have understanding of the Being that we speak of.” In general, however, the figure of Reason is used with great art to elucidate the hard sayings of Love. The alert intelligence of the writer notes all possible objections to his doctrine, and states and refutes them out of the mouths of his characters. “O Lady Love, what is this that you say?” says the shocked voice of Reason whenever the argument becomes paradoxical or abstruse. “Reason,” says Love to this, “I will answer for the profit of them for whom thou makest to us this piteous request. Reason,” says Love, “where be these double words that thou prayest me to discuss ... it is well asked, and I will,” says Love, “answer thee to all thy asking.”

What, then, is the doctrine which these discussions put before us? It is the doctrine of the soul’s possible ascent from illusion to reality, from separateness to union with the Divine: the primal creed of all mysticism, here stated in its most extreme form, and pressed to its logical conclusion. It offers, not a chart of the way to a distant heaven of beatitude and recompense, but initiation into that state of being wherein we find our heaven here and now. “I took Jesus for my heaven,” said Julian of Norwich. So the writer of the Mirror: “Paradise is no other thing than God Himself ... why was the thief in Paradise anon as the soul was departed from his body?... He saw God, that is Paradise; for other thing is not Paradise than to see God. And this doth she [the soul] in sooth at all times that she is uncumbered of herself.” The super-essential and unknowable Godhead, whose nature is but partially revealed in the Blessed Trinity, is the only substance of reality, and the only satisfaction of the soul’s desire. “Though this soul had all the knowledge, love and learning that ever was given, or shall be given, of the Divine Trinity, it should be naught as in regard of that that she loves and shall love ... for there is no other God but He that none may know, which may not be known.” The history of human transcendence is the history of the soul’s transmutation to that condition of love in which it is, as the author is not afraid to say, deified; and so merged in the Reality from which it came forth, that it is no longer aware of its own separate experience but is “all one spirit with its Spouse.”

“I am God,” says Love, “for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of love, and I am God by nature divine. And this is hers by right-wiseness of love. So that this Precious, loved of me, is learned and led by me out of herself, for she is turned to me, in me.”

This process is set forth by the writer of the Mirror under three chief heads: those of Liberty as the aim, the Will as the agent, and Surrender as the method of the spiritual quest.

In the conception of Liberty as the supreme aim of the spiritual life we have what is perhaps the most original feature of his work: though it is a conception which is of course implicit in the New Testament. Where most contemplatives lay emphasis on the glad servitude of love, and use the symbols of wedlock to express the willing subjugation of the soul to its Divine Bridegroom, the key of this book is the idea of spiritual freedom; and that freedom as consisting in the liberation of man’s will from finite desires that it may rejoin and lose itself within the Will of the Infinite. We are to learn, it says in the first chapter, something of “the pure love, of the noble love, and of the high love of the free soul; and how the Holy Ghost has His sail in his ship.” With our “inward subtle understanding”—that spiritual intuition which is the instrument of all real knowledge—we are to follow its progress from the bondage of desire to the point at which, purged of self-will, perfected in meekness and love, “noughted and abased,” it reaches the “Seventh Estate of Grace,” and participates in the perfect liberty of Pure Being, wherein “the soul has fulhead of perception by divine fruition in life of peace.” “Not-willing” is the secret of liberation, and lord of our true life. “And this not-willing sows in souls the Divine Seed, fulfilled of the divine will of God. This seed may never fail, but few souls dispose them to receive this seed.” Though this emancipation is only attained by the utter surrender of all personal desire and achievement, yet throughout the book the dominant note is of glad liberation, of flying, of a rapturous ascent. As we read, we seem to hear from every page “the thunder of new wings.” The free soul is “six-winged like the seraphim.” She is “the eagle that flies high: so right high and yet more high than does any other bird; for she is feathered with fine love, and she beholds above other the beauty of the sun, and the beams and the brightness of the sun. Dame Nature,” says she, “I take leave of you: Love is me nigh, that holds me free of him against all without dread. Then,” says Love, “she afraies her nought for tribulation, nor stints for consolation.”

It is clear to the writer that only certain persons are capable of this complete freedom in love: and it is to them—the natural mystics, the people with a genius for reality—that his book is addressed. They are “of that lineage that be folks royal,” “called without fail of the Divine goodness,” and it is on their spiritual intuition, their transcendent knowledge, that “all Holy Church is founded”; a suspicious statement in the eyes of orthodox theology. They possess, or are able to possess, the incommunicable gift of spiritual vision.

“This gift is given,” says Love, “sometimes in a moment of time. Who that has it, keep it: for it is the most perfect gift that God gives to creature.” So removed is the resulting perception of reality from human wisdom that no one can teach the illuminated soul anything. “Now for God,” says Reason, “Lady Love, say what is this to say? This is to say,” says Love, “that this soul is of so great knowing that though she had all the knowing of all creatures that ever were, be or shall be, she would think it naught in regard of that that she loves.” Yet, true to Neoplatonic principles, she is aware that her highest perceptions are nothing, and her “right great and high words” but “gabbynge” or idle talk, compared with the ineffable reality. She “wots all and wots naught,” and is content it should be so. “He only is my God that none can one word of say, nor all they of Paradise one only point attain nor understand, for all the knowing that they have of Him.”

But though the Transcendent God is unknowable, the free soul, in singular contradiction to contemporary asceticism, finds Him everywhere immanent in the world. “And for this, that He is all in all, this soul, says Love, finds Him over all. So that for this all things are to this soul covetable, for she nor finds anything but she finds God.” So Meister Eckhart: “To it all creatures are pure to enjoy; for it enjoyeth all creatures in God and God in all creatures.”

The preliminary discipline of the mystic, the hard acquirement of that “very charity” which is “the perfection of virtues” and “dwelleth always in God’s sight ... obeying to nothing that is made but to love” is little dwelt on by the author of the Mirror; who did not write for beginners in the contemplative life, but for the mature soul whose love has made him free, and who therefore needs “nor masses nor sermons nor fasting nor orisons, and gives to nature all that he asks, without grudging of conscience”—a practical application of St. Augustine’s dangerous saying, “Love, and do what you like.” M.N., however, interpolates a prudent reminder that “by this way and by sharp contricion souls must go, or than they come to these divine usages.”

The author’s own instructions are really reducible to one point: the complete and loving surrender of the individual will to the Primal Will—detachment, or, as he calls it, the “noughting” of the soul. This is that “peace of charity in life noughted,” which constitutes the higher life of love; in contrast to the active life of virtue, struggling to keep unbroken its attitude of charity to God and man. In it the soul dwells, as do the Seraphim, within the divine atmosphere, and has direct access to the sources of its life. “This is the proper being of Seraphim: there is nought mediate between their love and the Divine Love; they have always its tidings without means. So hath this soul, that seeks not the divine science amongst the masters of the world, but the world and herself inwardly despises. Ah, God! what great difference it is between a gift given by means, of the Loved to the Lover, and the gift given without means of the Loved to the Lover. This book says sooth of this soul. It says she hath six wings as have the Seraphim. With two she covers the face of our Lord: that is to say, the more knowledge this soul hath of the Divine Goodness the more she knows that she knows not the amount of a mote as in regard to His Goodness, the which is not comprehended but of Himself. And with two she covers His feet: this is to say, the more that this soul hath knowledge of the sufferance that Jesu Christ suffered for us, the more perfectly she knows that she knows naught, as in regard of it that He suffered for us, the which is not known but of Him. And with two she flies, and so dwells in standing and sitting: this is to say, that all she covets and loves and prizes, it is the Divine Goodness. These be the wings that she flies with, and so dwells in standing, for she is alway in the sight of God: and sitting, for she dwells alway in the Divine Will. Whereof should this soul have dread, though she be in the world? An the world, the flesh, and our Enemy the Fiend, and the four elements, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, tormented her and despised her and devoured her if it might so be, what might she lose if God dwelled with her? Oh, is he not Almightiful? Yea, without doubt: He is all might, all wisdom and all goodness, our Father and Brother and our true Friend.”