Evelyn Underhill
"You don't have to be peculiar to find God." Evelyn Underhill is most widely known for her book Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, which has long been referred to as the classic text on the subject of mysticism. Mysticism is the philosophy and practice of a direct experience of God and it was Underhill who first established this as a wider focus of study in the West. She became one of the most widely read authors on spirituality in the first half of the twentieth century. Although she covered a wide range of philosophers in her study, including names like Aquinas, Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Kant, Eckhart and many other Christian saints, she did not consider herself to be a philosopher in the strict sense of the word. "I need hardly say that this book is not written by a philosopher, nor is it addressed to students of that imperial science. Nevertheless, amateurs though we be, we cannot reach our starting-point without trespassing to some extent on philosophic ground." |
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Underhill may have spoken with humility in this sense. Her book is written in a very practical and academic manner which helped to give the subject of mysticism a more serious ground from which it could eventually flourish in the West. This was possibly her greatest achievement, that she made mysticism into a more respectable field by returning it to a solid ground through philosophy, psychology and religion. The book is broken into several sections so as to give the student an orientation of different levels of spiritual development. Devotees are said to go through successive stages such as the Illuminative Stage, Dark Night of the Soul and the Unitive Life. The book thereby serves as a developmental map for adult spiritual growth. In addition to establishing mysticism as a classic field of study, Underhill showed a living enthusiasm for her subject matter and gave her readers the sense that mysticism was also very alive and visceral. She pointed out the limits of religion in this sense.
Regardless of this recognition about the limits of religion, Underhill also recognized that practicing mystics tended toward the strange and overly sentimental such that a reconnection with the structure of the institution often became increasingly valuable.
By showing the importance of the inner life in connection with the value of intellectual and religious institutions, Underhill placed mysticism on a solid ground so that students could turn to it as a serious field of study previously exclusive to the odd, peculiar and strange. References Underhill, Evelyn, (1999), Mysticism; The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, Oneworld Publications |