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Evelyn Underhill
Wrote the standard book on Western mysticism at thirty-six, then spent thirty years arguing that mysticism is for ordinary people and produces work rather than withdrawal.
Who they were
Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) was an English writer on mysticism and spiritual practice whose Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (1911) became the standard English treatment for a generation and has never quite gone out of print.
She was the first woman to lecture on theology at Oxford, the first to conduct retreats in the Church of England, and by the 1920s and 30s was a working spiritual director corresponding with hundreds of ordinary people about their prayer lives. That second career matters as much as the first, and is far less known.
Where they came from
She was born in Wolverhampton to a barrister's family, educated at King's College London, and was for years a novelist and bookbinder as well as a scholar. Her early interests ran through the occult revival of the period — she had contact with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's orbit — before her attention settled on Christian contemplative sources.
Mysticism was published when she was thirty-six, and at that point she was not a practising member of any church. Her direction afterwards was toward rather than away from institutional religion. From 1921 she worked under the guidance of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the Roman Catholic philosopher of religion, whose insistence that mystical experience needs the discipline of an institution and the test of ordinary charity reshaped her thinking. She became a practising Anglican and increasingly wrote for practitioners rather than scholars.
She was a pacifist, and held to it publicly through the outbreak of the Second World War, which cost her a good deal of standing.
What they taught
The mystic way is a process, not an event. Her best-known contribution is a five-stage map of the contemplative life, assembled from the Western sources: awakening, purgation (the long unglamorous work of clearing what is in the way), illumination, the dark night of the soul, and union. Her insistence was that the middle stages are where almost everything happens and where almost every popular account skips to the end.
Mysticism is practical. Her central polemic, sustained across thirty years, was against the idea that the mystic is a dreamer withdrawn from the world. She read the historical record as showing the opposite: that the great contemplatives were founders, reformers, administrators and nuisances to authority, and that genuine union issues in energetic action. Teresa of Ávila reformed an order and argued with bishops.
It is not an elite pursuit. Her later work — Practical Mysticism (1915), written for what she called the ordinary person, and Worship (1936) — presses the claim that contemplative life is available inside an ordinary working life, without extraordinary experiences and without leaving anything.
What we can and cannot say
We can say Mysticism remains valuable as a synthesis and a doorway, and that her stage model is still a useful shape for reading the Western sources.
We can say the scholarship has moved past her method. She read across traditions in a way that assumed a common core and treated context as secondary — the perennialist habit described in perennialism and constructivism — and after Katz that approach cannot be used uncritically. Her sources are also overwhelmingly Christian and Western despite the universal framing, and her handling of non-Christian material is thin by present standards. Historians now read her as a period document as much as an authority.
We can say her practical claim has held up better than her theoretical one. The evidence that serious contemplative traditions produce engagement rather than withdrawal is reasonably strong, and it cuts against the modern picture of meditation as self-soothing — a point that connects directly to the material on spiritual bypassing, which she anticipated by several decades without the vocabulary.
We cannot say she was a neutral observer, and she would not have wanted the description. She wrote from inside the subject, which was normal in 1911 and became suspect afterwards. The honest reading is that her sympathy is what makes her good on what practice is actually like, and what makes her unreliable on whether the traditions are saying the same thing.
Further reading
- Mysticism (1911) — long; the stage-by-stage second half is the part still worth the time.
- Practical Mysticism (1915) — short, unpretentious, and the better introduction.
- Her collected Letters — the spiritual direction, and the most human thing she left.