The Mystic Way:

A Psychological Study in Christian Origins

Evelyn Underhill

pub J.M. Dent, 1913

Section Two: The Baptism and Temptation

[p.83]THE first events which all three Synoptists report, as at once historical and significant, are of course the preaching of John the Baptist, his baptism of Jesus of Nazareth, and the phenomena which attended it. Though it is at least highly probable that the youth of Jesus exhibited the presence and growth of those qualities which controlled His public career, here it is that these qualities first declared themselves in their splendour and power. Here, definitely and visibly, for the first generation of Christians, the new era began. This, they said, was the Epiphany, the revelation of God; and they gave to it an honour, invested it with a crucial meaning, which was afterwards transferred to the story of the Nativity.[1]

John the Baptist is a figure not difficult to realise or understand, when we have learnt to shift our point of view from the conceptual and edifying categories of tradition to the rich actualities of life. He is the supreme example of a general law : of the fact that all great changes in the worlds of spirit and of thought have their forerunners; minds which perceive the first significant movement, the sword of the spirit stirring in its sheath, long before the new direction is generally perceived or understood. John was a "prophet" — that is to say, a spiritual genius — with that intuitive knowledge of the immediate tendencies of life often found in those who are possessed of an instinct for Transcendent Reality. The span of a great mind, a great personality, gathers up into its [p.84] "Now " and experiences "all at once" a number of smaller rhythms or moments which are separate experiences for lesser men. As we, in our wide rhythm of perception, gather up the countless small and swift vibrations of the physical world and weld them into sound or light ; so the spiritual genius gathers up into his consciousness of a wide present, countless little tendencies and events. By this synthetic act he transcends the storm of succession, and attains a prophetic vision, which seems to embrace future as well as past. He is plunged in the stream of life, and feels the way in which it tends to move. Such a mind discerns, though he may not understand, the coming of a change long before it can be known by other men; and, trying to communicate his certitude, becomes a "prophet" or a "seer."

John the Baptist, then, that strange figure watching and waiting in the desert for some mighty event which his heightened powers could feel in its approach but could not see, is the real link between two levels of humanity. Freed by his ascetic life from the fetters of the obvious, his intuitive faculties nourished by the splendid dreams of Hebrew prophecy, and by a life at once wild and holy, which kept him closer than other men to the natural and the supernatural worlds, he felt the new movement, the new direction of life. Though its meaning might be hidden, its actuality was undeniable. Something was coming. This conviction flooded his consciousness, "inspired" him; became the dominant fact of his existence. "A message from God came upon John," [2] speaking without utterance in the deeps of his soul. He was driven to proclaim it as best he could; naturally under the traditional and deeply significant images of the Jewish Scriptures and apocalyptic books. Hence he was really its Forerunner, the preparer of the Way.

The Synoptics are agreed as to the form which the Baptist's preaching took. His message was simple and yet [p.85] startling. He said perpetually, "Change your minds, for the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand." [3] "A new form of life is imminent — there is One coming after me mightier than I — therefore prepare its thoroughfare, make its highway straight, lest it crush those things it finds upon its path. It will not travel along the old, easy paths of perception. The crooked places shall be turned into straight roads, and the rugged ways into smooth. . . . Live lives which shall prove your change of heart." [4]

For John, whatever the apocalyptic form which his religious education caused him to give to these intuitions, it is plain that there was newness in the air. This, after all, is the important matter; this intuitive grasp of novelty. Here consciousness lays hold on life. The unimportant matter is the symbolic picture into which the brain translates it. "The baptism of the Spirit and of Fire " — the vitalising wind, the fierce and purging flame — he cries in the strange, poetic, infinitely suggestive language of prophecy. If he is to be taken as a true harbinger, as an earnest of the quality of the Christian life; then, how romantic, how sacramental — above all, how predominantly ascetic — that life must seem! Nothing here forecasts the platitudinous ethics of modern theology. Deliberate choice, deep-seated change, stern detachment, a humble preparation for the great re-making of things: no comfortable compromise, or agreeable trust in a vicarious salvation.

[Underhill here is quite specifically challenging the conventional perception of the role of the crucifixion: "an agreeable trust in a vicarious salvation." DCW]

As a matter of fact, in the lives of that small handful in whom the peculiar Christian consciousness has been developed, the demands of John the Baptist were always fulfilled before the results promised by Jesus were experienced. Asceticism was the gateway to mysticism ; and the secret of the Kingdom was only understood by those who had "changed their minds"

[p.86]It was clear to John, contrasting the austere splendour of his vision with the mean curiosity and fear of the crowds who ran to his preaching, that this imminent newness which overshadowed and "inspired" him, was destined to make a sharp division in the world of life. Some would ascend to the new levels now made plain; others, incapable of the necessary struggle and readjustment, would fall back. A new sorting-house was here set up; a new test was established of the spirit's fitness to survive."His fan is in his hand, thoroughly to cleanse his threshing-floor, and to gather the wheat to his garner; but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire." [5] Tame words to us, dulled by long use; but terrible upon the lips of a man who had given up everything which we thmk desirable in order that he might speak them.

Yet, according to Mark and Luke — who here represent the most trustworthy tradition — when the new life actually approached him, came within his field of perception, John, tuned up to the expectation of some amazing event, did not recognise it: so complete was its identification with that great stream of Becoming which it was destined to infect and control. The Forerunner turns on his own tracks, to become the unconscious initiator of Him whose Way he had prepared; for the baptism of Jesus marks the definite emergence of His consciousness of a unique destiny, a unique relation to Reality. It revealed Him to Himself, and paralleled upon transcendent levels the psychological crisis of "mystical awakening" or conversion; the change of mind which is experienced in various degrees of completeness by all those who are destined to follow the Mystic Way and reach the levels of consciousness known as "union with God."

"Now when all the people had been baptised," says Luke, "and Jesus also had been baptised and was praying, the sky opened and the Holy Spirlt came down in bodily [p.87] shape like a dove upon Him, and a voice from Heaven which said, Thou art My Son, dearly loved: in Thee is My delight." [6]

Matthew and Mark make clear the subjective nature of this vision by saying, "He saw the Spirit of God descending," and "He saw an opening in the sky." [7] Moreover, the words of the message are compounded of two texts from the Hebrew Scriptures, suddenly heard within the mind and invested with a special meaning and authority. They are instances of audition, of the "distinct interior words" whereby the spiritual genius commonly translates his intense intuition of the transcendent into a form with which his surface mind can deal. The machinery of this whole experience is in fact natural and human machinery, which has been used over and over again in the course of the spiritual history of mankind.

[This has been a commonplace of my experience - an insight that takes the form of a biblical text charged with a significance previously unrealised. Joel Goldsmith refused to teach on any subject where he had not experienced this "realisation". The revealed significance is not necessarily very different at all from conventional wisdom: what is different is the authority that now invests one's understanding of it. DCW]

A crucial moment had come. The strange, new life, latent in Jesus of Nazareth, suddenly flooded His human consciousness. That consciousness was abruptly lifted to new levels; suddenly became aware of Reality, and of its own complete participation in Reality.

[Underhill's basic position, spelt out again and again: Reality, with a capital R, is not available to normal non-mystical perception. DCW]

Such a realisation, so vast an intuition, transcended all the resources of that mental apparatus with which our incarnate spirits are fettered and equipped. Yet it must be seized, and crushed into some limiting concept, if it were ever to be expressed. Artistic symbols, the image of the dove — a type for Semitic thought of the creative, fertilising power brooding upon the surface of life [8] — the fragment of poetry heard with the inward ear and now invested with a new and intense significance, the "vision" and "audition" which form the links between spiritual and sensuous experience : these came into play. To acknowledge this is only to acknowledge the completeness of the humanity of Christ; who "came, not to destroy but to fulfil" the slow-budding potentialities of the race.

Yet in this case even more than in all other cases, the cerebral pantomime of voice and vision, the vivid light which is nearly always the brain's crude symbol of that expansion and illumination of consciousness in which Reality breaks in upon it, or it breaks in upon Reality — these things could but represent a fraction of the whole, real experience of the mind: as a poem tells but a fraction of the ecstatic adventure of the poet. "The brain state," says Bergson, "indicates only a very small part of the mental state; that part which is capable of translating itself into movements of locomotion." [9] Behind this lies a vast region of perceptions and correspondences which elude the image-making powers of the surface consciousness. Pure perception must be translated into such images by the brain, If thought is to lay hold of it ; but the more transcendent the perception, the less of it the image will contrive to represent. This is the explanatlon of the obvious discrepancy between such events as the baptismal vision of Jesus, the conversion vision of St. Paul, the "Tolle, lege" of St. Augustine, the voices heard by Joan of Arc, and the immense effects which appear to flow from them. Such visions are true sacraments, crude outward signs of inward grace, of a veritable contact between the soul and its Source. In the case of Jesus, the outward expression accompanies a sudden and irrevocable knowledge of identity with that Source; so complete, that only the human metaphor of sonship can express it.[10]

[p.89] This difficult idea of "Fatherhood,"central for Christian mysticism, yet so easily degraded into anthropomorphism of the most sentimental kind, has been beautifully treated by the great nameless mystic of the Theologia Germanica.

"Christ hath also said: 'No man cometh unto Me, except the Father, which hath sent Me, draw him.' Now mark: by the Father, I understand the Perfect, Simple Good, which is All and above All, and without which and besides which there is no true Substance, nor true Good, and without which no good work ever was or will be done. And in that it is All, it must be in All and above All. . . . Now behold, when this Perfect Good, which is unnameable, floweth into a Person able to bring forth, and bringeth forth the Only-begotten Son in that Person, and itself in Him, we call it the Father " [11]

There is one deeply significant difference between this psychological crisis in the life of Jesus and its lesser equivalent in the lives of Christian and other mystics. I mean the total absence of the the "sense of sin". [12] In such rare moments of illumination the normal self becomes conscious of Divine Perfection: a perfection transcending not merely all that it may be, but all that it may dream. This consciousness is always and inevitably balanced by [p.90] a terrible consciousness of personal imperfection: of disharmony with that which is beheld. Thus the seeing self is torn between adoration and contrition; the joy of discovered Reality soon fades before the sense of something frustrated and unachieved, which results from the first collision between temporal actualities and eternal possibilities in man's soul.

"For whilst the true lover with strong and fervent desire into God is borne, all things him displease that from the sight of God withdraw." [13]

He is, to use once more Augustine's image caught up by Perfect Beauty and dragged back by his own weight. In the case of Jesus, the exact opposite is reported to us. "Here there is no collision: only a discovery. His predominant conviction, expressed by the inward voice, is of identity with that which He sees: of a complete harmony, a "sonship" never to be lost or broken, which normal man can only win in a partial degree by long efforts towards readjustment.

"God is the only Reality, and we are real only so far as we are in His order and He is in us." [14]

The declaration of sonship, the descent of the dove, imaged this truth, and revealed to the surface consciousness of Jesus His unique reality among the sons of men.

Yet this reality, since it was expressed through and by human nature, could not without conflict grow and declare itself. Body and mind must be adjusted to it. Elements, not evil yet recalcitrant, must be subdued. Even here, there are paths to be made straight. Consciousness must face this new situation, this immense increase of power, must unify itself about this centre now declared. "At once the Spirit impelled Him to go out into the desert,"[15] forsaking for a time the world He was destined to renew. The swing of ascending consciousness between [p.91] affirmation and negation had begun. "The road to a Yea lies through a Nay, we must separate in order again to unite, and must depart from our ordinary state in order again to return to it. There enters thus a negative element into the work of life; all definite departure on the new road follows through toil and struggle, doubt and pain." [16] Thus, though much that the mystics include in the Way of Purgation — the difficult struggle with vices, the stress and turmoil, misery and despair in which their consciousness is re-made in the interests of new life — seems to have been absent from the experience of Jesus, yet He necessarily trod that Way. Solitude, mortification, the crucial and deliberate choice between Power and Love, both within the reach of those who possess a genius for reality: these are the outstanding features of the 'temptation" as recorded by Matthew and Luke.

[This "crucial and deliberate choice between Power and Love" is at the centre of my own experience, contained in the parable of the prodigal son. DCW]

The psychological accuracy of their report is evidence that, though obviously expressed in symbolic and poetic language, it is founded upon fact rather than upon pious tradition.

It is a natural instinct in those who have received a revelation of Reality, under whatever form it may have disclosed itself, to retreat from the turmoil and incessant changes of daily life, and commune alone with the treasure that they have found. A love which is both shy and ecstatic, ,a deep new. seriousness which conflicts with the incorrigible frivolity of the world, has awoke in them. They long to go away and be alone with it : to develop, in a rapt communion where wonder and intimacy dwell side by side, their new consciousness of Spirit, Beauty, or Love. Though men may distract, here it seems that nature helps them; so they go with the Hindu ascetic to the jungle, with the Sufi to a preparatory life of seclusion. With St. Francis they love the sohtude of La Verna, with St. Ignatius they solve their problems best whilst gazing alone at the flowing stream. So the artist, the lover, the poet in the time of inspiration, is notoriously unsocial. [p.92] Still more the soul which has received a direct revelation of the Divine. " Abandon life and the world that you may behold the Life of the World," says the great Persian mystic.[17] "Just as some one waiting to hear a voice that he loves," says Plotinus, "should separate himself from other voices, and prepare his ear for the hearing of the more excellent sound when it comes near; so here it is necessary to neglect sensible sounds, so far as we can, and keep the soul's powers of attention pure, and ready for the reception of supernal sounds." [18]

"In the wilderness," says Rolle, "speaks the loved to the heart of the lover : as it were a bashful lover, that his sweetheart before men entreats not, nor friendly-wise, but commonly and as a stranger he kisses." [19] Need we feel surprised that one in whom such a consciousness of heavenly intimacy assumed its intensest form, whilst the human elements of character also assumed their intensest form, felt impelled by this same necessity? Moreover, knowledge of self, says Richard of St. Victor, is the Holy Mountain, up which man must first climb on his way towards union with God: and knowledge of ourselves, which we too easily confuse with knowledge of our sins, means accurate consciousness of our powers as well as of our deficiencies. It means the bringing of all the levels of our nature into the field of consciousness: a complete review of the available material. Such an investigation is the equivalent of a "temptation"; that is to say, it is a testing, a proving, an opportunity of choice, a revelation of various ways in which we may lay hold of life, various paths on which we are able to move. "We live and are in God," says Boehme, "we are of His substance we have heaven and hell in ourselves; what we make of ourselves, that we are. [20]If this is so for the little normal [p.93] human creature, how much more for the spirit in which the utmost possibilities of humanity, reinforced by a "something other" which we call an immediate contact with Divine Reality, are present in their fulness, untainted and unwarped ?

"Perfect man" means something very different from "sinless man"; something richer, deeper, more positive, blazing with colour and light "so unspeakably rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above us precisely in being so divinely near." [21] It means a deep and accurate instinct for an infinite number of possible paths on which life can move, an infinite number of possible atttainments, and the power of free choice between them; for human and spiritual perfection is never mechanical, will and love are the essence of its life. It means a synthesis of opposites: patience and passion, austerity and gentleness, the properties of dew and fire. It means high romantic qualities, daring vision, the spirit of adventure, the capacity for splendid suffering, and for enjoyments of the best and deepest kind; for only those capable of Life are also capable of God, only those capable of romance are capable of holiness.

Such complete and deeply vital spirits cannot but see before them many and different possibilities of greatness. They feel within themselves the power of transcending and subduing to their use the intractable physical world — yet their destiny is towards supra-sensible conquests: the power of dominating and governing men, "the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them," — yet surrender is to be their highest good. They feel themselves to be freed from the anxieties and limitations of humanity; so central is the Invisible for their consciousness, so securely is their life founded in Reality, that anything might happen, yet all would be well. But their destiny is to accept in their fulness the burdens and limitations of the race. Not self-cultivation aloof on super-human levels, but self-donation [p.94] in the interests of the All is their vocation. The greatest mystic is not he who " keeps his secret to himself "," pouring himself out toward God in a single state of enormous intensity "; but he who most perfectly realises the ideal of the "leaven which leaveneth the lump."

This fact is the very heart of Christian mysticism: and Christian mysticism was born in the wilderness, when its Author and Finisher " alone with the wild beasts," faced the unique and stupendous possibilities of His own nature. The world-renouncing ascent to Pure Being, which Indian and Platonic mysticism attempts and sometimes perhaps attains, was within His reach; as it has never been within the reach of any other of the sons of men.

[While Underhill frequently asserts the lesser status of eastern mysticism, she rarely demonstrates it. It is instructive to read Walter Stace on the subject. DCW]

Yet this refusal of the temporal in the supposed interests of Eternal Life, this satisfaction of the spirit's hunger for its home, He decisively rejected. In the full tide of illumination knowing Himself, and knowing that Transcendent Order in which He stood, He turned His back upon that solitude in which, "alone with the Alone," He might have enjoyed in a unique degree the perpetual and undisturbed fruition of Reality. The whole man raised to heroic levels, "his head in Eternity, his feet in Time," never losing grasp' of the totality of the human, but never ceasing to breathe the atmosphere of the divine; this is the ideal held out to us.

It is this attitude, this handling of the stuff of life, which is new in the spiritual history of the race: this which marks Christian mysticism as a thing totally different in kind from the mysticism of India or of the Neoplatonists. That power which is the human crown, yet seems the super-human gift: that quality of wholeness whereby man participates at once in the worlds of Becoming and of Being — "Eternal Life in the midst of Time" — this it is that Jesus unfolded to the world; and in this the "Gospel of the Kingdom" consists. Under the imagery in which the Temptation in the Wilderness is described by Luke and Matthew, we may see the story of [p.95] a crucial choice in which life turned in a new direction, chose a new path; resisting those impulses towards the development and satisfaction of one aspect of personality alone which must beset every great spirit conscious of its freedom and its power. Nor is there any " irreverence" in this view; since the strength of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation — even when understood in its most orthodox form — lies not in hurnan necessities shirked, but in human necessities fulfilled.

Yet see the pace at which that flaming thing which was the soul of Jesus burned its way to full expression. Compare with the forty days of solitary communion from which He came out "in the power of the Spirit," speaking "as one who had authority," the three years' solitude of St. Paul or St. Catherine of Siena, the sixteen years' struggle of Suso, the thirty years' war of St. Teresa; all destined to that same end of the unification of character about this centre of life. Thus may we gain some measure of the difference in power resulting from their partial yet ever growing participation in the Infinite — that "divine spark" whose possession they claimed — and the fulness of life, the overpowering strength, of the spirit which so quickly subdued to its uses the whole mechanism of thought and sense, and set up in that physical frame which was the agent of its expression the requisite "paths of discharge."

Notes

1. Cf. Loisy, Les Evangiles synoptiques, Vol. I. pp. 405 - 407

2. Luke iii. 2 (Weymouth's Translation)

3. Matt. iii. 2. This is the literal meaning of the Greek, obscured by the A.V. "Repent" and the Vulgate "Poenitentiam agite !" Cf. Weymouth. New Testament in Modern Speech, p. 7.

4. Luke iii. 16, 5, 8. (paraphrase)

5. Luke iii. 17 (R.V.)

6.Luke iii. 21.(Weymouth's Translation)

7. Matt. iii. 16 and Mark i. 10 (Weymouth's Translation) The form "This is my beloved Son" in Matthew suggests that the spiritual experience was already developing into the external miracle. Cf. Carpenter, The First Three Gospels, 2nd ed., p. 165.

8. "This comparison of the Spirit of God to a dove was the property of the scribal erudition of that day: for instance, it compared the Spirit of God brooding over the waters of chaos in Gen. i. 2 to Noah's dove fluttering over the waters of the deluge in Gen. viii. 8 " (O. Holtzmann, Leben Jesu, p. 105).

9. Matter and Memory, xiii

10. Though the expression, "Son of God" is never used by Jesus of Himself, the idea of the fatherhood of God as expressed by Him in a special manner, is notoriously a central fact of the Gospel. He adopted this term for God from the popular usage of the time, whilst giving to it a fresh and personal significance. Cf. Dalnan, The Words of Jesus, pp. 188 - 280.

11. Theologica Germanica, cap. 53.

12. The inconsistency of one in whom there was no sense of sin seeking the baptism of John, which was "for the remission of sins," has been dwelt on by modern critics. See A. Reville, Jesus d' Nazareth, Vol. II. p. 8, and Carpenter, The First Three Gospels, p.118. This paradox was felt as a difficulty in early times; and the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews attempts a feeble explanation of it. But the correct view would seem to be, that freedom from sin was but one rendition of the complete "change of mind" which John preached and Jesus actually brought in. This "change" it was which was offered to the candidates for baptism; and which Jesus experienced in its fullest splendour in the symbolic drama recorded by the Synoptists.

13. Rolle, The Fire of Love, Bk I, cap. 23

14. Coventry Patmore, The Rod, the Root and the Flower, "Magna Moralia", XXII

15. Mark i. 12 (Weymouth's Translation)

16. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 93

17. Jelalu d'Din, Divan, (Nicholson's Translation) p. 64

18. Ennead, VI, 9

19. Rolle, The Fire of Love, Bk II, cap. 7

20. Jacob Boehme, The Threefold Life of man, cap 14, § 72.

21. von Hugel, The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol I, p. 26.

1906 - The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary

1911 - Mysticism

1912 - Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing

1913 - The Mystic Way

1914 - Introduction: Richard Rolle - The Fire of Love

1915 - Practical Mysticism

1915 - Introduction: Songs of Kabir

1916 - Introduction: John of Ruysbroeck

1920 - The Essentials of Mysticism, and other Essays

1922 - The Spiral Way

1922 - The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (Upton Lectures)

1926 - Concerning the Inner Life

1928 - Man and the Supernatural

1929 - The House of the Soul

1933 - The Golden Sequence

1933 - Mixed Pasture: Twelve Essays

1936 - The Spiritual Life

1943 - Introduction to the Letters of Evelyn Underhill
by Charles Williams

COPYRIGHT

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DCW