EVELYN UNDERHILL

Phil
Jun 15
5 min read

Evelyn Underhill, born on 6th December 1875; died on 15th June 1941. Her journey from agnosticism to Anglo-Catholicism followed a fascinating and deliberate path: Initially drawn to Rome, she was captivated by the rich devotional history and sacramental life of the Roman Catholic Church. She famously frequented Carmelite chapels and wrestled heavily with a desire to convert.

Her potential reception into the Roman Catholic Church was halted by two major factors: her husband's horror at the idea, and the Catholic Modernist crisis, which caused her to balk at the Church's strict limits on intellectual and scholarly freedom.

She chose to stay in the Church of England because she felt called to labour where she was, famously comparing leaving the Anglican Church for Rome to "abandoning the trenches and going back to the barracks". Having nearly "crossed the Tiber" at least three times myself, I am encouraged by her tenacity in not giving up on the C of E, however frustrating the Church of England can be at times!

Settling fully into the Anglo-Catholic tradition, she became a towering spiritual figure. She was the first woman to conduct official retreats, and she built quite a reputation through her lectures to clergy, providing spiritual guidance that balanced rigorous intellect with a deep sacramentalism.

The only child of a prominent barrister, Evelyn Underhill was born in Wolverhampton

and grew up in London. She attended a girls’ school in Folkestone, where she was conﬁrmed into the Church of England. She had little other formal religious training, but her spiritual curiosity was naturally lively, and she read widely, developing quite early a deep appreciation for Catholic Christian mysticism. At sixteen, she began a life-long devotion to writing.

Evelyn had few childhood friends, but one of them, Hubert Stuart Moore, she eventually married. Other friends, made later, included such famous persons as T.S.Eliot (who shares Evelyn's love of cats!) Laurence Housman, Maurice Hewlett, and Sarah Bernhardt. Closest of all were Ethel Ross Barker, a devout Roman Catholic, and Baron Friedrich von Hügel, with whom she formed a strong spiritual bond. He became her director in matters mystical.

In the 1890’s, she began annual visits to the Continent, especially to Italy. There she became inﬂuenced by paintings of the Italian masters, and by the Roman Catholic Church as it was in Italy. She spent nearly ﬁfteen years wrestling painfully with the idea of converting to Roman Catholicism, but decided in the end that it was not for her. In 1921, Evelyn Underhill became reconciled to her Anglican roots, while remaining what she called a “Catholic Christian.” She continued with her life of reading, writing, meditation,

and prayer.

She had already published her ﬁrst great spiritual work, Mysticism. This was followed by many other books, culminating in her most widely read and studied book, Worship (1937).

She was much-sought after as a Spiritual Director, and was probably the first woman in the Church of England to be invited to lead retreats, which she did regularly at her favourite Retreat House, Pleshey, in Essex.

Evelyn Underhill’s most valuable contribution to spiritual literature must surely be her conviction that the mystical life is not only open to a saintly few, but to anyone who cares to nurture it and weave it into everyday experience, and also (at the time, a startling idea) that modern psychological theories and discoveries, far from hindering or negating spirituality, can actually enhance and transform it.

A real man or woman of prayer, then, should be a live wire,

a link between God's grace and the world that needs it.

In so far as you have given your lives to God,

you have offered yourselves, without conditions,

as transmitters of his saving and enabling love:

and the will and love, the emotional drive,

which you thus consecrate to God's purposes,

can do actual work on supernatural levels

for those for whom you are called upon to pray.

One human spirit can, by its prayer and love,

touch and change another human spirit;

it can take a soul and lift it into the atmosphere of God.

This happens, and the fact that it happens

is one of the most wonderful things in the Christian life."

(“Mysticism” p.55)

"The real Christian is always a revolutionary. To say day by day “Thy Kingdom Come” – if these tremendous words really stand for a conviction and desire – does not mean “I quite hope that some day the Kingdom of God will be established, and peace and goodwill prevail. But at present I don’t see how it is to be managed or what I can do about it.” On the contrary, it means, or should mean, “Here am I! Send me!” – active, costly collaboration with the Spirit in whom we believe."

“Penetrate these murky corners where we hide our memories and tendencies

on which we do not care to look,

but which will not yield freely up to you, that you may purify and transmute them. The persistent buried grudge,

the half-acknowledged enmity,

the private comfort we cling to,

the secret fear of failure,

which saps our initiative and is really inverted pride, the pessimism which is an insult to your joy. Lord we bring these to you, and review them

in your steadfast light.”

In her book "Worship", written in 1936, Evelyn Underhill says:

“. . . the whole visible action of Jesus at the Last Supper,

must be thought of as conditioned first by the Jewish religious background within which His earthly life was lived, and secondly by His own deep consciousness of His unique destiny.

The Eucharist is focussed upon an altar where there is perpetually set forth the redemptive offering of pure love; and in that eternal offering, all other movements of love and sacrifice are sanctified before God.”