October 2, 2005 VENI, SANCTE SPIRITUS EVELYN UNDERHILL
Today we return to The Golden Sequence, by the English mystic, Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), perhaps the most mature of her books on the Spiritual Life. As you remember her book to some degree wraps itself around a 13th century Latin hymn, “Veni, Sancte Spiritus,” which she calls “the Church’s great hymn to the Spirit.”
Veni, Sancte Spiritus Come, Thou holy Paraclete, Et emitte coelitus And from Thy celestial seat Lucis tuae radium. Send Thy light and brilliancy.
The four sections of Underhill’s The Golden Sequence “represent in some sense the fourfold relation between the created spirit and that Spirit Incarnate” (ix). They cover, she says, “first the revelation of its reality and the movement of response which it incites in us, and then the two capital means without which our destiny as spiritual beings can never be fulfilled” (ix). These four sections are “Spirit,” “Spiritual Life,” “Purification,” and “Prayer.”
We move on this morning to “Spiritual Life,” trusting that some of the selected passages will stimulate your reflection, and speak to your mind and heart. Words, phrases, and clauses that strike me are in bold type, and you will have your own list.
Spiritual Life
I. Created Spirit
. . . “‘My God and all! What art thou and what am I?’ said St. Francis. What is man, the derived, created spirit? In what sense is that mysterious word to be applied to our strangely compounded human personality?”
“It is a platitude that man is amphibious, a creature of the borderland, ‘set between the unseen and the seen’. . . . like many other so-called platitudes, this one conveys a stupendous truth which is seldom fully realized by us: the truth of our unique status, our mysterious capacity for God (45).”
“. . . There is in us a ground and knowledge of Eternity, a thirst for ultimates, a penetrating sense of incompleteness which is the true cause of our secret unrest; whatever the disguises it may assume. A certitude, a dim but real experience of another world and level of life, in contact with our deepest selves, grows with our interior growth. . . . When we penetrate beyond the sensible, . . . we perceive ourselves to be derived (46) spirits, somehow akin to the holy Spirit of all spirits, God. . . . And here we find the basis in experience for all that religion means by prayer and grace—prayer, the Godward movement of the soul; and grace, the manward movement of God’s Love. . . .”
“Certainly our conscious hold on this spiritual heritage is still far less clear and certain than our hold on our physical heritage (47). . . . All descriptions of the spiritual life are thus tentative and symbolic. They are road maps, not representations of reality.”
“. . . When we ascend in prayer to the soul’s summit, we find we have come up to the frontiers of another life, in respect of which we are dependent, needy, dumb and dim of sight. Yet this abjection and this poverty are the very conditions of our happiness and wealth. Veni, pater pauperum-- ‘Father of the poor, draw near.’ (48).”
“. . . We realize, then, why the life of the spirit so often begins in a sense of personal incompleteness, of dependence and need: and why man’s progress in spirituality, his interior growth, is felt at its deepest far more as a response to that Spirit’s incitement than as a deliberate ascent to new levels of life. It is . . . an increasing surrender to the subtle pressure of that Power ‘which ever lifts and bears us’; not a self-actualized adventure of the independent will and heart. . . . “
“‘Unto Him who is everywhere’, says St. Augustine, ‘we come by love and not by navigation.’ . . . And the true life of the spirit requires such a gradual self-abandonment to that prevenient and all-penetrating Presence that we become at last its (49) unresisting agents; are formed and shaped under its gradual pressure, and can receive from moment to moment the needed impulsions and lights. Veni, lumen cordium—‘Come, the soul’s true radiancy.’”
“Here we find a place for that mysterious attraction or compulsion which is perhaps the most striking of the ordinary evidences of the Holy Spirit’s action on souls. The persistent inexplicable pressure towards one course—the curious attraction to one special kind of devotion or of service—the blocking of the obvious path, and the opening of another undesired path,--all these witness to the compelling and moulding power of the living Spirit; taking, and if we respond, receiving the gift of our liberty and our will (50).”
II. Man Natural and Supernatural
“If there is in us a depth and intensity of being, a ‘spark of the soul’ which inheres in God, there is none the less a ground of our life which is in close union with the animal realm and animal desire. In some, the tension between these two natures is acute; in others, one manifestly predominates (54).”
“. . . There is a deep heart in man, which the life of succession hardly stirs to consciousness, but which is maintained in a single undivided act of adherence to the Reality of God. . . . ‘In every soul, even that of the greatest sinner’, says St. John of the Cross, ‘God lives and substantially dwells. This sort of union between God (55) and all creatures is an enduring fact.’ . . .”
“’When we speak of the union of the soul with God, we set aside this substantial union common to all created beings, and have in view the transformation of the soul in God by love. . . . This communication is the fruit of grace and love, and all souls do not enjoy it. Those who do, do not all possess it in the same degree, since their love may be greater or less.’”
“. . . ‘What is a spiritual life?’ It is the life of a human creature which is being transformed in God by the joint action of His energetic grace and its own (56) faithful love. . . . Hence this life as it grows brings ever wider ranges of our complex nature within the transforming sway of Holiness; which enters the sanctuary of each human personality, there . . . to transform the crude substance of the ego as yeast transforms dough.”
“. . . And once more, if we are to make sense of our experience, this germ of absolute being—which we humbly trust to be our (57) truest selves—must in some way be distinguished from the ‘I’ of our surface activity and response. ‘Souls, human souls,‘ says Von Huegel, ‘do not even begin to attain to their true unity . . . until they are divided up—until the spirit within them begins to discriminate itself against the petty self’ (58). . . .”
Deep in every soul there is a little chamber, where great stillness reigns and the torrent of succession seems to cease. And though the term of our spiritual growth must surely be . . . the opening of the door of the inner fastness so that the music of its quiet reaches every corner of the home—it does begin in the clear recognition of this cleavage, this difference in kind between the life of spirit tuned to eternity and the life of sense tuned to time. For the life of sense is always at the mercy of inward passion and external accidents. . . . But in the ‘upper region of the soul’, says Caussade, ‘God and His Will produce an Eternity always even, always uniform, always still. In this wholly spiritual region . . . we abide in peace even though the senses be given over to the storm’ (59).”
“. . . Bit by bit the all-demanding Spirit must achieve undivided sway over the surface-I, as well as over the eternal Me: harmonize and weld them into a single instrument of the Will. The life of the Me is an essential prayer (61).”
III. Creative Spirit
“We cannot, as Von Huegel said, find God’s Spirit ‘simply separate’ from our own spirit; since the one impossibility of thought is the leaving of the thinking self behind. Still less can we isolate and observe that spirit . . . apart from the supporting, spaceless, penetrating God. To speak of our spiritual life and our spiritual growth, then, is to speak not of ourselves but of Him (63).”
“. . . And though news of this steadfast creative action, this supporting and stimulating presence of God must . . . enter the field of consciousness through the senses or the intellect, translating intuition into concepts and sensible signs; these only partly reveal and certify that deep action of Spirit upon and within our spirits, which is literally the life of our life (64).”
“. . . Spiritual life begins with . . . a willing response to that Spirit already intimately present within us, Who ‘first creates and then sustains and stimulates’ our childish souls, balancing each gift by a demand. It is, above all, the touch of this Creative Spirit acting on and through us, that we mean when we speak of our ‘experience of God.”
“What this experience can be in depth and richness for a fully expanded religious sense, is realized when we read . . . St. Teresa [who] tells us that it marked an epoch in her spiritual life when she ‘learned that God was present in and with her Himself; and not, as she had been told, by His grace’” (67).
IV. Life Finite and Infinite
“As we watch life, we realize how deeply this double fact of God’s inciting movement and the response it evokes from us, enters into all great action; and not only that which we recognize as religious. . . .”
“Were we more sensitive to the delicate forces that enmesh and penetrate us, we should feel the operation of that Spirit within all circumstance. . . . For the Spirit does not work on our small spirits by way of suppression, but by way of enhancement. . . . The saints are not examples of limp surrender. In them we see dynamic personality using all its capacities; and acting with a freedom, originality and success which result from an utter humility, complete self-loss in the Divine life (71). . . . Even more truly we might say that the human spirit, transformed by love, is the most adequate instrument known to us of the Holy Spirit of God—the active energy of the Divine love operating in time (72). . . .”
“Thus a constant balance of surrender and initiative, a God-impelled action and a God-desiring contemplation, in ever-varying degrees and forms; this is the mark of spiritual maturity. And because this ceaseless tension so easily overstrains us, and so easily opens the door to self-willed interpretation of the Creative Will, some corporate action and submission to the common judgment is needed too (73). . . .“
”We see then that the working of the Spirit on human personality . . . can never be identified with the abnormal phenomena or cataclysmic conversions too often described as ‘religious experience’. We have indeed no reason to suppose that the supernatural world is less steady, less dependable in its operation than the natural world. Anything abrupt or sensational in our realization of the Spirit is rather to be attributed to our weakness and instability, our sense-conditioned psychic life, than to the deep and quiet working of the Power of God (74). . . .”
“Thus the ‘coming of the Holy Spirit’, whether understood as a historic or a personal experience, does not mean any change in the Presence and Action of God; but does mean a change in the attitude and capacity of men.
O Lux beatisima, O Thou Light, most pure and blest, Reple cordis intima Shine within the inmost breast Tuorum fidelium. Of Thy faithful company.
“’Your opening and His entering . . .are one moment’ (75). . . .”
V. The Gifts of the Spirit
“’LOVE’, says John of the Cross, ‘is an inclination of the soul: an outgoing force or faculty, which makes it capable of ascending towards God.’ . . . Love then, says St. John again, ‘is the medium which unites the soul to God. Thus love is the substance of a spiritual life. . . . So, each stage in the soul’s growth in love represents a fresh centre, each more interior than the last, wherein she can dwell in God. It is thus we can interpret the words “In my Father’s house are many mansions” in their relation to the life of prayer’ (78).”
“. . . There is a new gift, and a new revelation of reality each time the soul reaches a new centre of love.”
“. . . When theology speaks . . . of the ‘gifts’ of the Spirit, as the essential marks of the spiritual man, the reference seems to be to the emergence of these peculiar qualities in those in whom there is established the habitude of other-worldly love. They are qualities alien to the normal temper of the sense-conditioned creature, that they seem indeed to be gifts infused from another level of reality; involving correspondence with another kind of life. Da tuis fidelibus, Fill Thy faithful, who confide , In te confidentibus, In Thy power to guard and guide, Sacrum septenarium (81).” With Thy sevenfold mystery.
VI. The Twofold Life
“. . . The first term of the spiritual life must always be God’s hidden but felt Presence and action, His absolute priority; not the little soul He moves and incites to seek Him, still less the soul’s interests, feelings, or experiences. And this hidden Presence, itself unchanging, discloses Itself in many ways and on many levels; from that which we call wholly natural, to that which, lying beyond our comprehension, we refer to the ‘supernatural’ world. So too the response that is asked from Its child and creature may involve the extreme of world-renouncement, or may seem to pin down the soul to the (91) most homely duties of the natural level, and possess none of the characters we attribute to the contemplative life. Yet even so, lived toward God, based upon that ground where Spirit guides and sustains us, each response, whatever its appearance, will have the quality of prayer.”
“Thus we see that this life . . . must in its own small way enter that balanced rhythm of rapt communion and self-spending love which ruled the earthly life of Christ; a life in which the soul expands to embrace and love and serve the greatest possible number of persons, contacts and events, and calls in it faculties to find again their meaning and their poise in God (92). . . .”
“His Spirit comes to us, as Caussade said, in ‘the sacrament of the present moment’. Joy and pain, drudgery and delight, humiliation and consolation, tension and peace—each of these contrasting experiences reaches us fully charged with God; and does, or should incite us to an ever more complete self-giving to God. But each experience, as such, is neutral when seen only in natural regard. It is then merely part of that endless chain of cause and effect of which our temporal lives are made. It can only touch our deepest selves, help or hinder the growth of the spirit, in so far as we do or do not direct our wills through it in love and reverence to Him. There is only one life—the ‘spiritual’ life consists on laying hold on it in a particular way; so that action is charged with contemplation, and the Infinite is served in and through all finite things (93).”
“. . . In this world, such a life must always involve a certain tension between the two movements, a nailing to the Cross of the restless will, and constant failures in adjustment and acceptance which keep the individual painfully aware of incompleteness, and ever open to the wholesome and purifying experience of penitence. Yet thus tension, this acceptance of suffering and limitation is the price of all real life: every new entrance (95) into the creative order, every union with Reality, however feeble and incomplete. No servant of truth or beauty, in art, exploration, science or thought, can escape the ascetic law. If our response to circumstance consists mainly in an unchecked yielding to the attractions and repulsions of sensitive nature, given over like a restless sea to ‘the winds of pain and pleasure, hope and fear’, then we wholly miss the interior significance of that web of events . . . which can at every point convey God (96).” Evelyn Underhill, The Golden Sequence: A Fourfold Study of the Spiritual Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1933. Our first lesson on The Golden Sequence was May 29, 2005. Stephen Langton may be the author, but the Scottish Psalter and Church Hymnary (1929), 186, does not list an author. We follow the translations of John Mason Neale (1818-1866) whom we remember from our study of hymns as an ordained English Anglican priest whose greatest achievement was his single-handed attempt “to return to the Church the earliest and best hymns by the Greek and Latin Masters that had been silenced by the Reformation. Pages in parentheses are references to The Golden Sequence. We make no attempt to modernize her language in line with contemporary “political correctness.” Rather we prefer to read her in her own time and place. The original has the Latin on a separate indented line in regular type for these one line quotations.. In this section she is recognizing “the distinction which was first made by the Platonists, and runs through the spiritual literature of Christendom, between our ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ nature, our “superior’ and ‘inferior’ powers. . . . In one form or another . . . we are obliged to adopt a two-story diagram of human nature in any attempt to describe the characters and incidents of the spiritual life.” 53-54.
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October 2, 2005 Frank G. Carver