In the last couple of years, given an unexpectedly idle moment between meetings, or when seeking spiritual refreshment or a sense of perspective, I’ve dipped from time to time into the writings of Evelyn Underhill. Underhill (1875-1941) was a distinguished scholar of mystical traditions, a novelist and a poet, an active Anglican—though there was, earlier on, a dalliance with Roman Catholicism—and a pioneering leader of spiritual retreats.
In the past decade her work seems to have attracted something of a renaissance of interest of the kind that might come around once a generation or so. Accordingly, there’s plenty now to read about the circumstances of her life and intellectual development, the major influences upon her thought, and her practice of spiritual formation. Underhill was also the compiler of a very handy book of prayers, now reissued—a book I imagine my students and colleagues groan at the sight of, because it has been for a while my go-to source for a fitting word at the beginning of a class or the start of a meeting.
Recently I came across Underhill’s The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (1922). I searched out a copy, curious about what her profound study of myriad mystical texts and her broad experience as a spiritual director might have yielded in comment on the realities of her time. The book explores the spiritual life from historical and psychological angles, and then turns to both institutional and individual dimensions—a characteristic and complementary pairing in Underhill’s work. But the chapter I was particularly keen to read was the last, which promised to address “The Life of the Spirit and the Social Order.”
I’ll be honest—having worked through over 200 pages by this point, I was a bit disappointed by how brief a treatment the theme receives. Underhill acknowledges that the proportions seem off: while “many things have been said about the life of the Spirit, not a great deal seems to have been said about … the life of to-day—and especially about those very important aspects of our modern active life which are resumed in the word Social” (206).
And, when I at last arrived at the chapter, I was a little deflated by the opening line of argument. Underhill is clear that the book’s proportions are deliberate, the “avoidance” of the social “at least in part, intentional” (206). Why? Because in her time she has perceived “a violent revulsion from the individualistic type of religion,” a revolt against “Victorian individualism in political and economic life.” Underhill, we infer, does not share this revulsion, or she thinks the revolt has gone too far.
The Christian religion of the day, so the argument says, has little time for matters of the soul. On Underhill’s account it is all about active service, the transformation of the social order:
Those who come much into contact with students, and with the younger and more vigorous clergy, are aware how far this revolt has proceeded: how completely, in the minds of those young people who are interested in religion, the Social Gospel now overpowers all other aspects of the spiritual life. Again and again we are assured by the most earnest among them that in their view religion is a social activity, and service is its proper expression: that all valid knowledge of God is social, and He is chiefly known in mankind: that the use of prayer is mainly social, in that it improves us for service, otherwise it must be condemned as a merely selfish activity. (206-07)
It turns out, however, that Underhill’s real concern in all this is more subtle, and more promising—she wants to draw our attention to the danger of forgetting the basis upon which any social movement can be spiritually sustained. The question is not one about whether we should retreat from the concerns of social reform and renewal. She is dead set against quietism, which cannot be truly derived from the Gospel: “Christ, it is true, gives nobody any encouragement for supposing that a merely self-cultivating sort of spirituality… is anybody’s main job” (208).
In fact, a constant theme in Underhill’s work is the notion—expressed in terms taken from the Flemish mystical theologian Jan van Ruusbroec—that “love is not lazy.” And she is no individualist, going on, as she does, to talk in a striking way of the need for “a social penitence,” “a corporate realization of the mess we have made of things … as much a direct movement of the Spirit, and as great an essential of regeneration, as any individual movement of the broken and contrite heart” (214).
What is at stake, instead, is the fact that “since we can only give others that which we already possess, this presupposes that we have got something of Reality as a living, burning fire in ourselves” (208). What vision of justice or practice of peacemaking, what work of solidarity or commitment to truth-telling, will we have to offer without “the inner life of prayer and meditation, lived for its own sake and for no utilitarian motive” (208)? Without it, she suggests, “neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the channel of Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in the world of to-day” (208).
Now that may sound a little numinous. But I wonder if it has something to say to anyone worn out by an activism that has become arid in the absence of spiritual refreshment, or troubled by the diminishing returns of an application of ethical or political principles growing ever more remote from their spiritual and theological wellsprings. Underhill’s diagnosis is acute: “even our noblest teachers often show painful signs of spiritual exhaustion, and tend to relapse into the formal repetition of a message which was once a burning fire” (225).
The kind of integrated life Underhill instead envisages will resonate with anyone who has yearned for that “mixed life” of spirituality and service held up by Christian writers through the centuries, from Gregory the Great, to Bernard of Clairvaux, to Teresa of Avila, to Howard Thurman. For Underhill, a “sustained double movement” characterizes all authentic life in the Spirit, in which we, following Ruusbroec’s image, “both ascend and descend with love” (209). One commitment makes possible the other: “It is because St. Augustine is the man of the Confessions that he is also the creator of The City of God” (209). With her characteristic eye for family resemblance across Christian traditions, Underhill also points to St. Francis, John Wesley, and George Fox.
But what, more practically, might it look like to sustain this kind of life today? Underhill’s prescriptions can seem fairly removed from everyday existence, and certainly much of her language can appear a little eccentric or even esoteric a century on. But as the chapter continues, we learn she intends a pretty concrete way : “communities” of spiritual fellowship and practical organising, “oases of prayer and clear thinking,” that “might be created in our social wilderness” (223). These are not in any sense enclaves; this is not some crude “Benedict Option.” They are communities of shared worship and prayer, diverse gifts and personalities, and various forms of life, gathered in attentiveness to the work of the Spirit, in order that they may serve in surprising but vital ways as “centres of regeneration” (224).
Maybe it’s just me, but I have taken this to be a word of encouragement and sustenance for our time. In different idioms, similar instincts and much wisdom are to be found in Jean Danielou’s Prayer: The Mission of the Church or most recently Andrew Prevot’s brilliant Thinking Prayer. “Ethics and Mysticism” is a neglected connection in Anglican divinity, as Jane Shaw highlights in her essay of that title, with particular reference to Kenneth Kirk. But connections between the life of the Spirit and the social order can and should be a constant source of reflection across traditions—there’s still much to be written about Pentecostal practice and political witness, for instance.
But let me leave you with Underhill’s provocation, within which we can discern an invitation for each one of us: “It is only out of the heart” of our “own experience” that a person “really helps” the neighbor: “and thus there is an ultimate social value in the most secret responses of the soul to grace” (208).
Samuel Tranter, PhD is McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life, Christ Church, Oxford University. Previous appointments include Academic Dean at Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, in Durham, England, and an Honorary Research Fellow of Durham’s Department of Theology and Religion.
