May 29, 2005 VENI, SANCTE SPIRITUS EVELYN UNDERHILL
Teresa of Avila tells us “that if you want to grow in openness to God, you ought to seek the company of God’s friends.” These include friends of God who lived in centuries previous to our own. T. S. Eliot suggests that “after a long search we may find that our closest friend is not among our contemporaries at all,” but “hidden away in some other century.
Almost four years ago, July 14, 2001, we had a lesson on one of my favorite dead friends, the English mystic, Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), recognized as one of Great Britain’s outstanding religious writers. She was both a scholar and a spiritual teacher who always balanced the claims of the mind with those of the heart, speaking yet sixty years after her death authoritatively to those on the spiritual quest. Today I want to return to her for I have just finished this week a slow read of one of her more mature books on the Spiritual Life, The Golden Sequence, published in 1933.
To some degree her book wraps itself around a 13th century Latin hymn, “Veni, Sancte Spiritus,” which she calls “the Church’s great hymn to the Spirit.” The first verse reads,
Veni, Sancte Spiritus Et emitte coelitus Lucis tuae radium.
John Mason Neale (1818-1866) translated this verse to read,
Come, Thou holy Paraclete, And from Thy celestial seat Send Thy light and brilliancy.
John Mason Neale, as we remember from our study of hymns, was an ordained English Anglican priest whose greatest achievement was his single-handed attempt “to return to the Church the earliest, best song, hymns by the Greek and Latin Masters which had been silenced by the Reformation.” Among his own compositions was the Christmas carol, “Good king Wenceslaus.”
Before we get to Underhill’s book, perhaps we should again briefly sketch her life. Evelyn was born December 6, 1875, and died, June 15, 1941. In 1907 she married Hubert Stuart Moore, an eminent London barrister who was unable temperamentally “to enter into her spiritual interest, although the couple was compatible in many other ways,” such as their mutual love for sailing. Their vacations, consistent with their station in British life, were spent on the Continent, particularly in Italy and France.
She was early a student of mysticism and published her classic and famous Mysticism in 1913. With this Evelyn Underhill gave herself to a career of writing, speaking, and to spiritual counsel. In 1911 she began a friendship with Baron Friedrich von Huegel who was the only living authority who had studied the mystics from the same viewpoint and with a greater depth of experience than Underhill. She very much wanted her classic work to be read, appreciated, and commented on by him. A significant transition in Underhill’s development as a Christian came with her submission to von Huegel’s spiritual direction beginning in 1921 and continuing until his death in 1925.
Her heritage was Anglican but she was a practicing Catholic until finally committing herself as a member of the Church of England in 1921. Three issues were intimately related in her spiritual development. Two of them, the Christocentric issue and the intellectual difficulty with full identification with the Roman Church, were rooted in a third, “Are Historical Happenings essential for religion and Christianity in particular?” That is, is the incarnation necessary for Christian faith? The years 1921-1925 under the direction of von Huegel were crucial at this point. In a letter written July 5, 1932 she sums up her transition from a theocentric position to being Christocentric in her spiritual orientation:
“You see, I come to Christ through God, whereas quite obviously lots of people come to God through Christ. But I/can’t show them how to do that—all I know about is the reverse route. The final result, when you have the two terms united, is much the same—‘the figure and the mountain are one’—but the process is quite different.
This transition was part of a larger one, to a historically grounded, incarnational, faith. For those of you who have more interest in this journey I add her earlier personal account in a letter written in 1922 which you can read at your leisure:
Until about five years ago I never had any personal experience of our Lord. I didn’t know what it meant. I was a convinced Theocentric, and thought Christocentric language and practice sentimental and superstitious. . . . I had from time to time what seemed to be a vivid experience of God, from the time of my conversion from agnosticism (about twenty years ago now). This position I thought to be that of a broadminded intelligent Christian, but when I went to the Baron he said I wasn’t much better than a Unitarian. Somehow by his prayers or something, he compelled me to experience Christ. He never said anything more about it—but I know humanly speaking he did it. It took about four months—it was like watching the sun rise very slowly—and then suddenly one knew what it was. Now for some months after that I remained predominantly Theocentric. But for the next two or three years, and especially lately, more and more my whole religious life and experience seem to centre with increasing vividness on our Lord—that sort of quasi involuntary prayer which springs up of itself at odd moments is always now directed to Him. I seem to have to try as it were to live more and more towards Him only—and it is this that makes it so utterly heartbreaking when one is horrid. The New Testament, which once I couldn’t make much of, or meditate on, now seems full of things never noticed—all gets more and more alive and compellingly beautiful. . . . Holy Communion which at first I did simply under obedience, gets more and more wonderful too. It is in that world and atmosphere one lives.”
Now to Underhill’s The Golden Sequence. Its four sections “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). The four sections are “Spirit,” “Spiritual Life,” “Purification,” and “Prayer.”
Rather than fully present the logic of her presentation, our approach within the framework of her outline, is to attempt to pick out a few passages that will perhaps stimulate your reflection, and hopefully speak to your mind and heart.
Spirit
I. What is Spirit?
. . . “Indeed it seems that only a life which has been slowly cleansed by the penetrating action of much prayer, can develop at all fully that sensitiveness in which Spirit is truly known, even though never understood” (2). For “all the studies of mystical theology ever written will give us less information here than one encounter with a contemplative saint” (3).
. . . “For it is the special function of prayer to turn the self away from the time series, and towards the eternal order; away from the apparent, and towards the significant; away from succession, and towards adoration and adherence. . . . And Spirit, in its most general sense, is our name for that world, life, Being, which is then apprehended by us; and for that quality in ourselves which is capable of such apprehension and response” (3).
II. God is Spirit
“’The Holy Spirit’, says St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘is God Himself as He is everywhere at all times’: and the very heart of all personal religion is the tendency of the created spirit to union with that Spirit-God. Thus the fact that our awareness of this Holy Spirit is so limited, fluctuating and sporadic, our understanding so coloured by apparent contradiction, is seen to be comparatively unimportant” (11).
He is present, regardless!
“For the doctrine of the Holy Spirit means that we acknowledge and adore the everywhere-present pressure of God . . . as a personal holy Presence and Energy, the Lord and Giver of Life—in this world and yet distinct from it, penetrating all, yet other than all, the decisive factor in every situation” (12).
“The decisive factor,” can this really be true?
. . . “’The Divine will’, says Caussade, ‘unites itself to our souls by a thousand different means; and that which it adopts for us is always the best for us’” (13).
III. Spirit as Power
“It is true that the Divine Action fills the universe and that the most free and vigorous of created spirits is but a darting shrimp in that unsounded sea. But the great Biblical writers owe their power to the fact that they knew deeper levels of spiritual experience than this. The compensating revelations of a terrible holiness and a profound tenderness, which gradually emerge in the Old Testament and are fully declared in the New, require as their background something very different from a merely immanental religious philosophy” (15): Veni, Sancte Spiritus—‘Come, Thou Holy Paraclete.’”
“To ‘receive the Spirit’ then, is not merely to open our eyes or even our souls on our real situation, penetrated and sustained as we are by the Being of God. It means a fresh situation, in which the first movement comes from the hidden world over against us; the passive reception of a more abundant life, which is never to be won by the creature’s deliberate efforts; the prophetic ‘gift’ of Spirit; the crucial Pauline change from psyche to pneuma” (16).
. . . “This sense of an imminent Act reaches its full intensity, and is expressed with poetic energy, in the prophetic and apocalyptic writers; but it is essential to all living Christianity. The life of prayer hinges on it” (17), that is on “the prophetic gift of the Spirit.”
Veni, Sancte Spiritus, Et emitte coelitus Lucis tuae radium.
IV. Spirit as Person
. . . “that Spirit . . . as St Thomas says, ‘both brings God to the soul and places the soul in God’” (21).
Veni, pater pauperum, Veni, dator numerum, Veni, lumen cordium.
Father of the poor, draw near; Giver of all gifts, be here; Come, the soul’s true radiancy.
“Thus we reach a truth of the transcendental order which, once accepted, must transform and control our whole attitude to the natural order. For it means first that we, knowers and beholders of that natural order, cannot fulfil our lives by a correspondence, however perfect, with the natural alone. . . . ‘Spirit’ in (25) its unearthly beauty, its overwhelming demand, breaks in from another world, which is over against us and yet within us; to possess, purge and transform. . . . Moreover, this penetrating action of God takes place, above all, through and in human spirits; and along the paths of the common life’ (26).
. . . “The pendulum swing of religious experience. . . . Sometimes it is God’s utter distinctness which is overwhelmingly felt. . . . Sometimes, on the other hand, it is God’s immanence in, and total possession of, the soul which is most actual to us. . . . Only the Christian theology of the Holy Spirit seems able to safeguard the deep truths in both these extremes, and by carrying them up to a higher synthesis, to create a landscape wide enough and rich enough for all the varied experiences of the spiritual life” (27).
V. The Revelation of the Spirit
. . . “’God works man’s perfection according to man’s nature. He begins with that which is lowest and most external, and ends with that which is highest and most interior.’” . . . How has man, a sense-conditioned creature committed to succession, come to be aware of this supersensual and unchanging Reality? And we have already replied that this knowledge comes not by our own explorations but by the prevenient action and incitement of God-Spirit, by the entry (33) of the Spaceless into space—in a broad sense, by revelation” (34).
. . . “As a vast area of supernatural truth, still unexhausted by us, is condensed, focused, and flooded upon the natural world through the person of Christ—so, limited incarnations of Spirit take place through the symbolic and sacramental acts of religion. . . . Hence the wise tenacity with which historical Christianity has clung to liturgic and sacramental embodiments of the Holy, and surrounded them with mystery and awe, is justified” (35).
“Christians must regard the historical Incarnation as the greatest of all such insertions of Spirit into history; and the transfigured lives of the Saints as guaranteeing its continuance in the world. . . . ‘God the incomprehensible makes Himself comprehensible in this humanity,’ says Berulle, ‘God the (36) ineffable becomes audible in the voice of His Word incarnate, and God the invisible is seen, in the flesh which He has united with the very nature of His Eternity’” (37).
. . . “’This compels us to treat the things and mysteries of the Gospel, not as things past and dead, but as things living and present, and even eternal, from which we also must gather a present and eternal fruit’” (38).
Is not here the secret of an effective devotional life and the secret of a pulpit that is anointed with a touch of the holy?
O Lux Beatissima, O Thou Light, most pure and blest, Reple cordis intima Shine within the inmost breast Tuorum fidelium. Of Thy faithful company.
Sine tuo numine, Where Thou art not, man hath naught; Nihil est in homine, Every holy deed and thought Nihil est innoxium. Comes from Thy divinity.
To be continued whenever Isaiah refuses to cooperate! October 2, 2005 VENI, SANCTE SPIRITUS EVELYN UNDERHILL: Part Two Continued
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).”
BEGIN NEW LESSON HERE
FAITH--DARKNESS
Dionysius the Areopagite’s “brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.” How she would precisely relate to Denys’ thought I am not sure, but some of the language and concepts are similar. The issue is does she continue his dialectic or is she speaking only in terms of a psychology of religious experience?
“I wish your nature craved less for emotional satisfactions; for it is that very largely which causes this intense suffering in you. After all the sense of Christ’s presence, though a joy and support, is not the essence of religion. Nor would the Cross be the Cross without that feeling of darkness and abandonment by God. You can, you know, turn all this into a redemptive sacrifice; and if you are able to do that, it is worth all the consolations in the world. But you must do it quietly, and check the propensity to dwell on your own spiritual pain” (329, Sunday before Ascension, 1926).
“And anyhow ‘nude faith’ is surely the really solid, splendid and convincing thing? I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God” (200, February 12, 1932).
“God can’t be clear to us all the time—if He were, He would not be great enough to worship” (221, November 1933).
“God holds you when you cannot hold Him” (213, July 20, 1933).
“Yes, it is ‘of faith’ that God dwells in our souls ‘by essence of grace.’ . . . The mystics always say He indwells the ‘ground of the soul’ below the level of everyday consciousness, utterly distinct from and yet more present to us than we are to ourselves” (245, April 8, 1935).
“We are always in His presence but He not always in ours, isn’t it so?” (267, May 10, 1938).
BALANCE
“Go gently, however, don’t concentrate on ‘Catholic’ practices, keep your Christianity wide as well as deep” (211, April 1933).
EUCHARIST: LORD’SUPPER
MISCELLANEOUS
CHURCH: “The Church must provide for all her children at every level of culture and this is a discipline which it is often hard for the educated to accept! It provides splendid training in charity and humility” (273, April 27, 1939).
The “Guidelines” highlighted by Durkin were (1) Underhill’s insistence that a truly spiritual life be founded on prayer, (2) her stress on the will as the really important thing in spiritual life, (3) her teaching that prayer was to permeate the whole of ordinary daily life, and (4) that “to minister to others requires the virtue of patience.”
Kieran Kavanaugh, O. C. D. and Otilio Rodriguez, tran. The Collected Works of Teresa of Avila, Volume One (Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1976), 202. Evelyn Underhill, The Golden Sequence: A Fourfold Study of the Spiritual Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 19330. Stephen Langton may be the author, but the Scottish Psalter and Church Hymnary (1929), 186, does not list an author. Ronald Blythe, Divine Landscapes (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanofvich, Publishers, 1986), 243. The following biographical material is taken from the July 14, 2001, study. See Margaret Cropper, Life of Evelyn Underhill. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958. “With a Memoir of Lucy Menzies” by Lumsden Barkway. Ibid., 241. On the Baron see Douglas V. Steere, Spiritual Counsel and Letters of Baron Friedrich von Huegel (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964). I have in my library P. Franklin Chambers, ed., Friedrich von Huegel: Selected Writings (London: Collins, 1945). Von Huegel, a Roman Catholic, was a native Austrian who had taken up residence in London with enough of an inheritance to give full time to his intellectual and religious pursuits. Charles Williams, ed., The Letters of Evelyn Underhill (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1943), 205. Cropper, Life, 98. Pages in parentheses are references to The Golden Sequence. “Come Thou holy Paraclete,/ And from Thy celestial seat/ Send Thy light and brilliancy. 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. Here she is quoting John of the Cross. Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629), diplomatist, reformer of the clergy, and cardinal, was the founder of the French school of spirituality, who evolved a powerful christocentric spirituality of adoration. She is quoting Berulle again here. 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. Herb Prince, “The Legacy of a Name,” (Lesson from July 7, 2002, Come and Go), 3. Herb notes that a line from one of Denys’ arguments indicates the direction of his life: “My argument . . . rises from what is below up to the transcendent and the more it climbs, the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond the ascent; it will turn silent completely since it will finally be at one with Him who is indescribable.” 2. Denys is known now as Pseudo Dionysius. I suspect that there may be some discontinuity with the dialectical balance of Denys. In the fascinating analysis that Herb introduced us/me to, Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Evelyn Underhill is not in the index, but as she reflects The Cloud of Unknowing and John of the Cross in her language and concepts there is a possibility that she escapes the transformation of classical apophatic mysticism into what Turner calls “experientialism” that is not classical mysticism as is much that is popularly called mysticism today. Perhaps our reading of the selections will afford us a clue. See Turner, 226-227. Durkin writes that she “frequently stressed the sacramental value of the finite and temporal in mundane activities, the importance of seeing or finding God in everyday life.” 239. Ibid., 240.
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May 29, 2005 Frank G. Carver