The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

by Evelyn Underhill

Julian’s account of what happened in her illness is extremely precise, and makes this part of her revelation an interesting psychological document. She fell ill early in May 1373; and on the fourth night was thought to be dying and given the last sacraments. For two days more she lingered, quite conscious and expecting death; and early in the morning of the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When the priest came to help her agony she was already speechless; but made her nurses prop her upright in bed, so that she could fix her failing eyes on the crucifix he held towards her. This she could see, though everything else grew dim to her sight. Then her head fell on one side, breath failed, and she was sure that the end had come.

With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of the involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended. She had passed into a new state of consciousness, in which her mind was clear and her body free of pain, “as whole as ever before or after.” In this condition her old and forgotten desires came back into her mind. The first, for sickness, had been granted. Now, she was impelled to ask the other, for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried wish, surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting-point of her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that these experiences had their pathological side. Her physical and psychic state were abnormal. With the perfect candour and common sense which add so much to our delight in her, she confesses that she at first mistook her revelations for delirium, and said to the monk who afterwards visited her that she had raved. There are, however, in these revelations, as in all visionary experience of any value, two distinct sides. One is the visual or auditory hallucination—the vision seen, the voice heard—the materials for which clearly come from the unconscious mind of the visionary, and can generally be traced to their source. The other is the intuitive spiritual teaching that accompanies it, and often far exceeds the visionary’s own knowledge or power. Julian, in her account of what happened to her, keeps these two elements perfectly distinct. “All the blessed teaching of our Lord God,” she says, “was shown to me by three parts—that is to say, by the bodily sight, by words formed in mine understanding, and by ghostly sight.”

The bodily vision, as she expressly affirms, she did not ask for; and here she agrees with all true mystics, who invariably distrust these quasi-physical experiences. Yet it was in such visionary hallucination that her revelations began. With her eyes still fixed on the crucifix, and apparently at the point of death, she suddenly saw red blood running down from the Crown of Thorns, as if in answer to her prayer for more feeling of the Passion of Christ. The Cross had become for her, as the shining pewter dish did for Jacob Boehme, or the running stream for St. Ignatius, a focal point on which to concentrate; and so a door to a deeper state of consciousness. Spiritual insight went side by side with the bodily vision, which was accepted without question by Julian as a direct message from Christ to strengthen her, “lest she be tempted of fiends before she died”; for in spite of her intuitive philosophic sense, we must remember that she lived in imagination in that Gothic world of concrete devils and angels which the cathedral sculptors reproduced. The double experience—outward pictures of the Passion, and inward teachings of the nature of God—continued for five hours, whilst she lay in a state of trance which her mother mistook for death. “The first began early in the morn, about the hour of four; and they lasted, showing by process full fair and steadily, each following other, till it was nine of the day overpassed.” In those five hours Julian received the whole substance of her teaching, afterwards divided by her into sixteen “revelations of love.” When they had passed, normal consciousness returned, or, as she says, she “fell to herself,” and knew that she must live. She lay for some time in weakness and depression, tormented by evil dreams; but she recovered from her sickness, and lived to a great age. Her careful account of that illness, and of the psychic experiences accompanying it, helps us to understand those experiences from the psychological as well as the mystical point of view. Seen thus, they are not unique; but classic examples of a type which turns up from time to time in medical history. Thus Dr. Edwin Ash, in Faith and Suggestion, has described a case which strikingly resembles that of Julian. Here, too, at the crisis of an apparently hopeless illness, the patient fell into a death-like trance, had visions of a religious type, and emerged cured. Her mind was far inferior to that of Julian, hence her experience had less beauty and significance and was of little value for other souls. Nevertheless, its general outline forces us to acknowledge that it belongs to the same class, and helps us to interpret the facts which lie behind Julian’s words.

Julian’s revelations have come down to us in two distinct versions, which have both been edited for modern readers. The best known is the long version, reproduced in Miss Warrack’s delightful edition: but our earliest manuscript of this only goes back to the sixteenth century, at least a hundred years after Julian’s death. Another, much shorter, is found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Museum, and this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford, who claims—I think with good reason—that it represents Julian’s first account of her visions, written or told while they were still fresh in her mind, and before her memory of them had been coloured by long meditation, or by the theological learning which she certainly acquired in later life. It briefly sets forth her chain of visions, and the “ghostly words” and inward teachings that accompanied them. These, she says, she has set down for the help of her fellow-Christians and because she saw it to be God’s will. “But,” she adds, “God forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a teacher: for I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a woman, unlearned, feeble and frail; but I know well that this that I say, I have it of the showing of Him that is Sovereign Teacher.” In the long version these deprecatory words are omitted. Julian no longer fears to be regarded as a teacher. On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle authority as one whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt, the established anchoress; the devout woman whose special vocation is known, and to whom people come for spiritual teaching. Moreover, she tells us in this book that only twenty years, less three months, after her vision was she inwardly taught the importance of all its details, however “misty and indifferent” they seemed. She was therefore past fifty when she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the fruit, not only of her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings by which the last atom of significance was extracted from it, the “enlightenings and touchings of the same Spirit,” which kept the revelation fresh in after life.

As she says herself—for her introspective powers were remarkable—the “first beginnings” and subsequent “ghostly teachings” at last became so merged in her understanding that she could not separate them. There is a parallel to this in the life of Boehme. He says that in the abnormal state which was induced by gazing at the polished pewter dish he “understood the Being of all Beings”—even as Julian “saw God in a Point”—but this stupendous revelation only left him dazed and inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during which he felt the seed of truth “unfolding within him like a young plant,” was he able to describe it.

When we compare the two versions of Julian’s work, we find many differences which remind us of this confession. Although the whole doctrine of the long book is really implied in the short book—for it is, in Boehme’s phrase, an unfolding of the plant from that one seed—we see that the most beautiful and poetical passages are found in the long version only. They are the fruit of meditation upon vision. The workings of Julian’s unconscious mind in her trance have only provided the raw material, as the inspiration of the poet gives only the crude beginnings of the poem. Moreover, with age her character deepened and grew richer. She used her talent to help other souls, and it increased. She studied, too, and found language of great subtlety and beauty in which to express her vision of truth. Though even the first version of her book shows theological knowledge which would put to shame most present-day Christians, in the later work this knowledge is much increased. Reading was part of the duty of an anchoress, being regarded as an essential element in the life of prayer; and intelligent reading has clearly nourished Julian’s deep meditations on the character of God. In her there was an almost perfect balance between the intellectual and the emotional life, and there are few women mystics of Whom we can say this.

The question of her literary sources is an interesting one. A careful examination of her revelations makes it plain that even when the short version was written, she was already acquainted with many theological conceptions; whilst the meditations with which the long version is enriched, and its fuller descriptions of her spiritual “Showings,” reveal her as possessing at least by middle life a considerable knowledge of the language of Augustinian theology and of the root-ideas of Christian mysticism. As used by her, many of these ideas have the special colour which was given to them by Meister Eckhart and his school; and suggest that Julian at one time or another had come into contact with the characteristically Dominican type of mysticism which is best known to us in the works of Suso and Tauler. In her teaching on sin—“I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no substance nor any part of being”—she is following, indeed almost quoting, Eckhart’s saying that “evil is nothing but a privation of being; not an effect, but a defect.” So, too, Eckhart’s daring assertion that sin has its place in the scheme—“Since God, in a way, also wills that I should have committed sins, I do not wish not to have committed them”—appears to be echoed in gentler form in Julian’s view of sin as a purifying scourge, and of the scars which it leaves on the redeemed soul as being “not wounds but worships.” Her beautiful saying that we are God’s bliss, “for in us He enjoyeth without end,” seems like a deduction from the Eckhartian paradox, “God needs me as much as I need Him.” She has received, perhaps from the same source, the antique mystical notion of the soul’s precession from and return to God. “The soul,” said Eckhart, “is created that it may flow back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain whence it came forth.” “Thus I understood,” says Julian, “that all His blessed children which be come out of Him by nature shall be brought again into Him by grace”; and again, “all kinds that He hath made to flow out of Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him.” Here, again, the naked Eckhartian monism seems to be transmitted through a more human and more spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the German mystics in her doctrine of God as the “ground of the soul.” “Our soul is so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God.... God is nearer to us than our own soul, for He is the ground in whom our soul standeth, and He is the mean that keepeth the substance and the sensuality together so that they shall never depart.” So Tauler says, “A man who verily desires to enter in will surely find God here, for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him and he will find and enjoy eternity here.”

Julian’s revelation was received in 1373, and the long text as we have it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart had died in 1329, Tauler in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck, whose mysticism owes much on its speculative side to Eckhart’s philosophy, in 1381. The influence of their teaching spread rapidly, and few preaching friars of an inward disposition can have escaped it. To these preaching friars was committed in the fourteenth century the special duty of giving solid theological teaching to nuns. This was commonly done by way of vernacular sermons and instructions, of which Tauler’s surviving sermons are types: and it was possibly through such instructions given in the Carrow convent that Julian obtained that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism, those contacts with Augustinian and Victorine thought, on which the more philosophic side of her revelation seems to depend. The parallels with her great contemporary St. Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund Gardner has noted, are probably due to the fact that both women drew their ideas from some earlier source. Her likenesses to Ruysbroeck can also be accounted for. His Seven Cloisters, Kingdom of God’s Lovers, and Ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage were all completed before 1350, and knowledge of them would reach East Anglia quickly, through the Flemish colony established at Norwich. Several close correspondences with him can be traced in Julian’s work; especially her conception of God’s eternal thirst and love-longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck’s “hungry yet generous love of God,” and the opening phrase of her Third Revelation, “After this I saw God in a Point,” which reminds us of the great definition in the Seven Cloisters, “That Point in which all our lives find their end.” Julian thus represents the first emergence in English literature of a stream of tradition which is not represented in the classic school of English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this school she does not appear to have been greatly influenced; there is little in her that reminds us of it, or of that group of contemplatives who produced the Cloud of Unknowing and its companion works. Her true affinities are with the Christian Platonism which St. Augustine introduced into theology, and its developments in the works of Erigena and Eckhart. But when we have given full weight to the effects upon her work of oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work only becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her speculative mind, and helped her to understand and express her own experience; but this experience in its essence was independent of intellectual knowledge. It was the fruit of a deeply mystical and poetic nature, brooding on the conception of God common to mediæval Christianity. Julian had in a high degree constructive religious genius; and for such a nature an evocative phrase is enough to waken the “ghostly sight.”

It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account of her teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent consciousness of God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing reality; a conception at once philosophic and practical. For Julian, as for the Platonists, God is the sum of the highest spiritual values—“He is all-thing that is good to my seeming, and all-thing that is good, it is He.” Her perception of the Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and expressed in the strongest terms. “God is kind (nature) in His being: that is to say, that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is kind-head,” and again, “I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensuality God is ... for it is His good pleasure to reign in our understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell in our soul endlessly, us all working into Him.” But this vivid sense of Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is closely bound up with her devotion to the person of Christ. Her theological path, like her mystical experience, lay through the human to the Divine, through emotional realization of the Passion to intellectual vision of the Godhead. In the first revelation of all we get these two aspects of truth sharply contrasted; for there her vision of the bloodstained Crown of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart, is balanced by her other interior sight of “the Godhead seen in mine understanding.” The long version of her book elaborates this simple intuition of the Deity into a very beautiful description of the Holy Trinity—always one of Julian’s favourite subjects—but the whole is really implied in the first brief statement, which strikes at once her characteristic chord of intimacy and awe, or, as she puts it, “the dread and the homeliness of God.” In the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, which was never far from her thoughts, she found the link between these personal and impersonal apprehensions. That half-Platonic notion of Christ the Eternal Wisdom as “Mother” of the soul, which is one of her most original conceptions, here takes its place side by side with the other, more metaphysical intuition of that unconditioned Deity in whom “All-thing hath the Being.” “For all our life is in three: in the first we have our being, in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilling: the first is nature, the second is mercy, and the third is grace. For the first I understood that the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in nature and in our substantial making.... All the fair working, and all the sweet kindly office of dearworthy motherhood is impropriated to the Second Person ... and all is one Love.”

This blend of personal and metaphysical vision is not unique. We find it again in the Franciscan contemplative, Angela of Foligno. But Julian’s nature is richer and more mellow, and the doctrine of love which she deduced from her experience is more profound. Here, in this harmonized consciousness of the most human and most philosophic aspects of religious experience, she is typical of Christian mysticism at its best. She avoids on the one hand the excessive intellectualism of the Neoplatonist, and on the other the unpleasant exuberance of the religious emotionalist, yet draws from the apprehensions of both the heart and the head all the elements needed to feed a full spiritual life. The human element brought in by Christianity, with all the emotional values belonging to it—however symbolic this side of contemplation must necessarily be—redeems philosophic mysticism from the clear coldness, the lofty superiority, that St. Augustine condemned in the Platonists. But, equally, it is the philosophic background, the austere worship of that trinity of Light, Life, and Love, in whom, as Julian says, we are clad more closely than a body in its clothes, which saves mystical fervour from its worst extravagances. Here she is and will ever be one of the safest guides to the contemplative life.