The Mystic Way:

A Psychological Study in Christian Origins

Evelyn Underhill

pub J.M. Dent, 1913

Chapter 2, Section 5: The Deified Life

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There is a fifth act in the Christian drama, both as it is put before us by the Synoptic writers, and as it is re-lived in the experience of the mystical saints: nor can we without loss dissociate those two presentations of supreme human attainment. For neither does that idyll of new life and steady growth end in the hidden and paradoxical triumph of the Cross. Here, say the mystics who inherited the "secret of the Kingdom", another and more wondrous life begins. Si trova una rubrica, la quale dice; Incipit vita nova.

The surrendered consciousness of pilgrim man, which has been impelled to abandon its separate existence — willingly merging itself, as it were, in the universal flot qui monte — is carried up by that swift-moving and irresistible tide to fresh high levels of being; and lives again "by some unspeakable transformation" "in another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory." (1) It has in

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mystical language "died to live ": a phrase which the superhuman activities of the great unitive mystics invest with an intense reality. In that everlasting give-and-take, that unearthly osmosis, between the human and the spiritual spheres, which constitutes the true interior life of man, the complete surrender of individual selfhood seems to invoke the inflow of a new vitality; so all-transfusing, so all-possessing, that he who has it is indeed "re-made in God." "All that we have, He takes — all that He is, He gives," says Ruysbroeck, expressing a great "natural" law under the religious forms of a vivid personal experience.

When this happens, the Dark Night is seen to be, not a climax and conclusion, but a fresh start. It represents the pain and confusion attendant on the transition of consciousness to a new order, long known and loved, only now in its totality received: the agonising thrust of spirit as it cuts new channels through the brain. The little wavering candle of the spiritual consciousness has been put out, only in order that the effulgence of the Inaccessible Light may more clearly be seen.

History has proved that the attainment of such a permanent condition of equilibrium — an "unbroken union" as the mystics call it themselves — a new status, "never to be lost or broken," is the end of that process of growth which we have called the "Mystic Way." A splendid maturity crowns the long adolescence of the soul. Though work has been from the beginning the natural expression of its love, now only does it enter on its true creative period, become an agent of the direct transmission of new life. Fire and crucible have transmuted the raw stuff of human nature into the "Philosopher's Stone," which turns all that it touches into gold. Since this law is found to be operative in the normal life of the great

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mystics, since it is thus and only thus that they obtain the perfect union with Reality which is their goal, we look naturally for its presence in the life of that Personality which first brought this experience in its wholeness into the stream of human evolution. What form, then, did this achievement take in the historical life of Jesus ? How was His possession of it communicated to other men?

Now it is true, as we have seen, that the life of Jesus exhibited in a unique degree, and throughout its course, many of the characters of the Unitive Life: that His growth in the Transcendent Order was of an unequalled swiftness, that a personal and impassioned consciousness of unbroken union with Reality was from the first the centre of His secret life. Throughout His career He seems to us as was none other "a live coal burned up by God on the hearth of His Infinite Love." (2) From first to last, then, "the interweaving of divine and human nature" was exhibited in a vital natural sense within the limits of His personality. At almost any moment of the ministry, that personality seems to manifest it in its completeness. So perfect was the manifestation, that it appears at first sight to run counter to the general process of growth: here, we say, there is no more that needs to be done. The pulls and oppositions of the natural man are overpassed; life seems to have completed its course and spirit attained to equilibrium without the crisis and destitution, the swing-back into pain and effort, the heart-searching act of surrender of the Dark Night of the Soul. Yet we know that this act of surrender was made, that the Dark Night was endured in all its terrors: and we are assured that here as elsewhere it was the prelude to a new and higher state. "Another beauty, a higher power, a greater glory " awaited the pioneer of the race.

Though we rnight feel tempted to mistrust the oblique

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and artistic language of our authorities, the mere necessities of history would compel us to admit a substantial truth in this claim. Had the physical death on Calvary, with its crushing manifestation of an ignominious defeat brought to an end the personal relation of Christ with His followers, whence are we to deduce the enthusiasm and certainty which inspired the primitive Church? True, He had infected these followers with His spirit so that whilst under the immediate spell of His regnant personality, they too lived within the precincts of the Kingdom, upon those new high levels of clarity and selfless joy. But the external horror of the Passion plainly annulled for them all that went before it; killed all the dreams of apocalyptic glory, and swept them back from communion with the Transcendent Order into the depths of disillusion and fear. Another and a stronger infusion of vitality was needed, if they were to become the thoroughfares of ascending spirit, carry on the "new movement" of the race.

The essence of life, as we know it, lies in its transmissive power. By their possession of this quality all its outbirths and expressions are tested: by its absence they are condemned. No closed creations — no full stops — have a claim upon the great title of Being. The river of the Flowing Light pours through, not into, its appointed instruments; its union with them, its supreme gift to them, is fundamentally creative, as is the union and selfgiving of love. It is the last perfection of a thing, says Aquinas, that it should become the cause of other things.(3) When the soul is perfected in love, says Richard of St. Victor, it brings forth spiritual children.(4) The lives of the great unitive mystics have demonstrated the truth of this law. Paul, Augustine, Bernard, Francis, Catherine, Ignatius, Teresa — each is the fountain-head of a spiritual

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renaissance, each a thoroughfare whereby the sheaf-like spread of spirit is helped on. Each has left the world other than he found it; has been the parent of a spiritual family, the initiator of a new movement on the part of the spirit of life.

But from Jesus of Nazareth descends that whole spiritual race, that fresh creation, within which the Christian mystics stand as it were as the heads of great houses; the originators of those variations whereby the infinite richness and variety of the parent type has been expressed. Hence the "last perfection" of that parent type is proved by implication to be a condition of divine fecundity, over-passing all that we find in its descendants; and difficult to identify with the lonely triumph of the Cross.

The interior victory there won by His complete surrender was — still is — known to none but Himself. It belongs to that secret and unsharable life of utmost sacrifice and joy which all great spiritual personalities must live towards God in the interests of the race.

True, the experience of lesser personalities — the mystics and the saints, even some little children of the Kingdom who have been initiated into the "Upper School of Self-abandonment'' — at least suggests to us that the close union with Divine Reality, the unique sense of sonship, in which Jesus had always stood, here received its seal and its consummation. It was the wounded hand of a heroic failure which struck down the barriers that had ring-fenced the spirit of man; made plain the path, and reformed the road, upon which that spirit was to move towards its goal. Poverty, says Dante, leapt to the Cross. She was not alone: life was there before her, here making the greatest of her "saltatory ascents" attaining to new levels of being.

Were this, then, the end of our human revelation of Reality, we need not doubt that end celestial. But we should be confronted, on the plane of actual existence, with a series of unintelligible historical events: unintelligible, because the link which connects the whole pageant

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of mystical Christianity with its source has been snatched away, because the final flowering of Divine Humanity — its "deified life" — was never exhibited within the temporal order, never communicated to the race.

What that final flowering is, what it was felt to be for the One who first and completely attained to it, the great confused poem of the Resurrection tries to tell us. Hence the facts which lie behind that poem are crucial facts for the spirit of man. On them the whole structure of the mystic life is built; from them the whole history of the Christian Church descends.

[There is an assumption, here implicit, elsewhere spelled out quite explicitly, that eastern mystical experience is of a less exalted kind than Christian mysticism, and that nothing akin to the mystical experience of Christ existed before him, or for that matter, since. Biggles would no doubt approve. We have to acknowledge, however, that the material available to western scholarship, especially in the second half of the twentieth century was not available for EU to peruse. As Carolyn Myss reported, the twin events of Vatican II and the move to the West of the Dalai Lama made available an enormous body of mystical literature and information that had previously been sequestered. Walter Stace, one of the classic writers in the field, was also by no means convinced that the general quality of western mystical experience (including Islam) was comparable with the eastern form. DCW]

What, then, are the facts? Few problems offer greater difficulties. The "rationalist" is confronted by enormous historical consequences, impossible of denial, which appear to spring from an utterly inconceivable event: but, without that event, are themselves inconceivable. The Christian who accepts that event, is driven at last to justify his belief by an appeal to results. His best documents contradict one another; his most violent convictions seem in the end to rest on nothing that he can name; wherever he would tread, the ground breaks beneath his feet. True, the Yea or Nay of the human mind, in the face of a Universe of infinite possibilities, instinct with novelty, charged with wonder, is here of little interest and no authority. We know not yet what life can accomplish, or spirit. We know nothing of the laws which govern that mysterious art by which spirit weaves up a body from recalcitrant matter: nor dare we call such a body "necessary" to the intercourse of soul with soul. It were dogmatism indeed to assert, out of our present darkness, that radiant Life is not greater than its raiment, cannot go on to higher levels of creative freedom, once it has " shaken its wings and feathers, and broken from its cage."

Our ridiculous phrase "supernatural" is but an advertisement of this our ignorance and awe; and nowhere more than in the consideration of the strange beginning of that strange thing the Christian consciousness does

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this ignorance and awe make itself felt. Out of these confused yet poignantly suggestive records of Christophanies — charged even now with a love and wonder hard to match elsewhere — out of the passionate conviction which burns in them, the high poetry in which they are expressed, one fact only emerges clear. A personal and continuous life was veritably recognised and experienced: recognised as belonging to Jesus, though raised to "another beauty, power, glory," experienced as a vivifying force of enormous potency which played upon those still "in the flesh".

" He was all gold when he lay down, but rose
All tincture "

says Donne, with the true poetic instinct for the essence of a situation. This fact of an experienced and entincturing personal life was the initial fact for the "little flock" destined to transmit the secret of the Kingdom; nor can we reasonably account for it — whatever be our view of the way in which it showed itself — upon merely subjective lines. To do so were indeed to introduce the dreaded element of "miracle": for never before or since has hallucination produced such mighty effects.

The presentation of this fact, as we now have it, is admittedly poetic. But the whole life of Jesus, since it was lived in a unique relation with Reality, necessarily took upon itself a poetic form.

[Useful to recall here that we are dealing with a sense of "poetry" most recently informed by the work of Tennyson, Browning, and the Georgians, a sense that T.S. Eliot was shortly to disrupt in a major way. DCW]

Not otherwise could it have effected a link between the "Kingdom" in its wholeness and the distorted, patchy world of normal men. It is the function of the great artist to dignify humanity by his presentation of it; by the high seriousness of his perceptions, by his intense power of perceiving it in the light of the Real. Jesus of Nazareth, the supreme pattern of the artist-type, was in His own person that which His exalted vision perceived. He exhibited Reality by being it. He is Himself the poem, the symphony, which expresses His unique vision of truth.

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It was His peculiar provinoe to exhibit human life at its height and fulness, as the perfect fusion of the "natural" and the "divine." Whether in or out of the body, whether with or without the helps and hindrances of matter, that revelation had to be completed; the soul's implicit "deification" established, the whole of life's new movement expressed. Not the "thing seen" — seen of necessity, as we see all things, under the limiting conditions of the mind — but the action that evoked the vision: here is the essential, and here alone can we lay hands upon the skirts of swiftly moving life. "There are no things," says Bergson, "there are but actions." (5) The image received by consciousness is little: the energising fact is all. In the movement by which that fact is transmitted, we must seek the the meaning of the whole. "The movement of a current is distinct from the banks through which it passes; although it may adapt itself to their curves."(6)

All that we know about this movement is contained in the Synoptic records of the Resurrection; and in the mighty wave of vitality which arose from it, and bore upon its crest the Christian Church. We cannot now disentangle with certitude those artistic elements which belonged to the original revelation from those which are due to the efforts of the Evangelists to bring home its sharp homeliness and high romantic beauty to those selves which had not known Jesus "after the flesh." All is fused into one great work of art, all forms part of one living whole. The instinct of the first Christian communities, the spiritual children of Paul, in whom the flame of the new life still burned clear, naturally seized upon and preserved — perhaps elaborated — those things which fed it best. That which this instinct discerned, as the very heart of the secret it had won and was making actual, was the indestructibility and completeness of the new, transfigured humanity; the finished citizen of the Kingdom of God. That this should

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fade into something merely ghostly and intangible, that it should drop any of its richly vital attributes in the course of its ascent — such a consummation was intuitively felt by it to be a loss. This derogated from the majesty and completeness of that human nature of which the mighty possibilities had been exhibited in Christ. It collided, too, with the convert's direct experience of new life's simplicity and actualness: its acceptance and transmutation of the here-and-now conditions of the world.

The vision, then, which these primitive Christians saw, as at once their companion and their goal, was the vision of a whole man; body, soul and spirit transmuted and glorified — a veritable "New Adam " who came from heaven. Hence we see in all the records of the Resurrection appearances a tendency, perhaps a progressive tendency, to emphasise and describe the most natural, homely aspects under which this enhanced, continuing and inspiring life of Jesus was felt : to clothe the primal experience in an ever more concrete and detailed form. The strong contrast between St. Paul's terse statement, "He was seen of Peter"(7) — more than enough for the mystic, who himself has seen — and the romantic beauty of the narratives in Matthew and Luke has often been noticed. In these a life, a presence and a friendship are presented to us under dramatic forms of unequalled simplicity and loveliness; invested with a glamour which only a "higher critic" could resist.(8) In the dew-drenched garden, at the lake-side, on

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the mountain, in the still assembly, at the evening meal, in all the sweet and natural circumstances of daily life, the eyes of love are suddenly made clear. A new transcendent life floods those who had once tasted but since lost it; catches them again to its high rhythm. They are swept up once more into the mystic Kingdom, made free of its unimaginable possibilities, breathe again its vivifying air. They feel once more the strong assurance of a regnant and creative Personality, inspiring and upholding them: the mysterious joy and clarity proper to "children of the Bridegroom": the release from all confusion and littleness — now doubly mysterious, because doubly joyous, "so divinely above, precisely in being so divinely near."

This experience runs counter to the intellect: refuses to be accommodated within its categories: puzzles and eludes the snapshot apparatus of the brain. It is "here " and yet "not here" for the senses. It feeds and blesses them, yet as it were out of another dimension. They "think it is a spirit" — and even as its deep humanity is made clear to them, it vanishes from their sight. It comes from the very heart of life: an earnest of the new "Way" now made available to the race. By intuition rather than by vision they know it; though all the machinery of the senses may and does combine to provide the medium by which it is actualised and expressed. Nor is this to belittle, but rather to exalt the experience: for intuition, when it moves upon these levels of reality, is but another name for that closest and surest of all intimacies, knowledge bv union — the mystics' "Vision of the Heart." A smouldering spark, deep-buried beneath our crude image-making consciousness, that intuition moves step by step with ascending life, and blazes up into action "whenever a vital interest is at stake." (9) It is, then, the most valid of those instruments by which we receive news

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concerning life — the "gospel" of the kingdom of reality, — and our union with it; the close interweavung of the individual spirit with the All.

Under forms personal and impersonal — first by the clear impact of the Christophanies, then by the great dramatic experience of Pentecost — this knowledge was brought home to those minds which had been prepared for it; was thrust through them into the stream of human life. A growth to be set in hand, a new way to be followed, an Independent Spiritual Life capable of attainment: this fact was revealed to them, or found by them, first in One who had accomplished it; next in that conviction of a new order, a new level of life awaiting them, which they translated into the imminent reordering of all things, the Second Coming of the Messiah; last in a peculiar psychological ferment, an actual new dower of vitality, an immense inebriation of the Infinite felt by them — the "rushing mighty wind, and tongues of flame."

As in every human act of knowing the Something external to the mind, and the something within it, here melted and merged to form a concept with which it could deal. The "interior intimacy and exterior activity" which are the soul's two ways of laying hold upon reality,(10) were inextricably entwined. The sudden triumphant uprush of a contagious vitality from the deeps, the sudden joyful conviction of indestructible Life, received their countersign from without: in communion with a transcendent Personality, and in the "coming of the Spirit," the inflow of immanent "grace." "In some unspeakable way," says St. Leo, "He began to be more present as touching His Godhead, when He removed Himself farther from us as touching His manhood." (11)

But only that which has a foothold within the spiritual order can have contact with the spiritual personality, or

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intuitive knowledge of the spiritual fact. Man's implicit realness is once again the basis on which all is built; his latent goldness is the reason why the Tincture can take effect. "This," says Ruysbroeck — and his words seem to reflect back to that first vivid and mysterious reception of the image of Divine Humanity, that enormous enhancement ot life — "this is why the soul receives, in the highest, most secret part of its being, the impress of its Eternal Image, and the uninterrupted effulgence of the divine light, and is the eternal dwelling-place of God: wherein He abides as in a perpetual habitation, and yet which He perpetually visits with the new coming and new radiance and new splendour of His eternal birth. For where He comes, He is: and where He is, He comes." (12)
The which is but to say, in other and more elusive language, that the mystical doctrine of Incarnation, rightly understood, is the corner-stone of the mystic life in man.

Notes

1. St Bernard, Di Diligendo Deo, cap. 10. Suso, glossing this passage, says, "The true renunciation and veritable abandonment of a man to the Divine Will in the temporal world is an imitation and reduction of that self-abandonment of the blessed of which Scripture speaks: and this imitation approaches its model more or less, according as men are more or less united with God. Remark well that which is said of the blessed. they are stripped of their personal initiative and changed into another form. another glory, another power. What then is this other form, if it be not the Divine Nature and the Divine Being whereinto they pour themselves, and which pours itself into them and becomes one thing with them? And what is that other glory, if it be not to be illuminated and made shining in the Inaccessible Light? What is that other power if it be not that by means of his union with the Divine Personality, there is given to man a divine strength and a divine power that he may accomplish all that pertains to his blessedness, and omit all which is contrary thereto?" (Buchlein von der Wahrheit, cap. 5).

2. Ruysbroeck, De Septem gradibus amoris, cap. 14.

3. Summa contra Gentiles, Bk. III. cap. 21.

4. De Quatuor gradibus violentae Charitatis (Migne, Pat. Lat., T. CXCVI. col 1216

5. L'Evolution creatrice, p. 270.

6. Ibid., p. 292

7. 1. Cor. xv. 5

8. This resistance sometimes takes peculiar forms. Weizacker, apparently inspired by the unevangelical conviction that only the strictly useful has a place in the Kingdom of Heaven, discredits the story of the appearances at the Sepulchre because these would have been "empty and meaningless ... a mere piece of display" (The Apostolic Age, Vol. I, p. 6). Yet taking into account the character of Jesus, are we justified in assuming that an experience which comforted and reaffirmed even one desolate heart would have seemed to Him "empty and meaningless"? And is it not at least a psychological probability that the loyal and passionate heart of Mary should outstrip the disconcerted affection of the Twelve, and leap to the heights at which spirit's encounter with spirit becomes a possibility?

9. Bergson, L'Evolution creatrice, p. 290.

10. Ruysbroeck, L'Ornement des noces spirituelles, Lib. II. cap 57.

11. Second Sermon on the Ascension (Roman Breviary, Saturday after the Feast of the Ascension, fourth lesson).

12. L'Ornement des noces spirituelles, loc. cit.

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

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DCW