Lives Matter
Whiteside Lecture
September 18, 2002
Dana Greene
Title : Lives Matter
CANDLER SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
EMORY UNIVERSITY
I'm delighted to be here and delighted that you are here with me to share this exploration of someone with whom I've spent many years - Evelyn Underhill. Thanks go to Jack and Aggie Bandy for making this gathering possible. Before I begin with Evelyn Underhill I want to stake out a prior subject - why lives matter - why telling lives and living extraordinary lives is important, especially for those whose work is to impart the Christian message. For Christians, lives matter centrally. The message of Christianity is embedded in a life narrative told by a community of faith haunted by a person and his provocative and inspiring life.
Although telling lives has always been a part of the Western literary tradition, in the last twenty years life telling, biography, has become increasingly important. I want to maintain that biography has implications for explicating Christian life as well.
We see biography's appeal everywhere. One has only to look on the shelves of new books in your local library, or check the book reviews of any major newspaper. The narrative of a life has alluring power. It has a beginning, middle and end. It tells a story. It connects the subject to a context, and hence provides an anchor of meaning, or at least interpretation. Through the small and large choices of a life, vicariously, we see meaning unfold. As Kierkegaard said, the problem with lives is they have to be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards. Biography helps us see backwards, holistically. Hence its contemporary attraction. One of the burdens of being a 21st century person in the West is to live at a time when ideology and liberal religious systems no longer offer the individual the kind of meaning, challenge and solace they did in the past. Unleashed from the framework of meaning, the individual sinks to a kind of subjectivism which becomes increasingly narcissistic. Ironically, the alternative response to the disintegration of structures of meaning is to re-embrace them again, only more forcefully. While ideology seems near dead, religious fundamentalism is resurgent. This new orthodoxy eliminates doubt, asserts truth, and provides a basis for judgment and even vengeance. It is in this context that I see great potential for biography to illuminate the creation of individual meaning.
Biography also has appeal because it sets out a life's inherent contradictions, perhaps never resolving them, but holding them in tension. These contradictions do not collapse. They remain, but by focusing on the living through them, they become intelligible. A life can then be critiqued, but it also can be forgiven, respected, and in short, understood. As such, biography can help the reader grasp another human life and prompt one to greater personal self-reflection.
Biography models how self-identity is created. Life writing shows with exquisite specificity how a subject confronts the human condition with all its joys, sorrows, opportunities and failures, how a particular biological entity in a particular time and place both finds meaning and makes it, and thus creates a life. By laying out the development of the subject's choices, the desires of the subject become evident. The uncovering of these guiding desires - be they security, fame, money, the good, pleasure, whatever, reveals the subject's life intent. It was Yeats who said that there is some one "myth" for every person, and if we knew it it would help us understand all a person did and thought. Although this may be a bit hyperbolic, the truth is that we are defined by what we believe, hope and love - our "myth." Those ends act as both a lure and a shaper of our decisions. By tracking this aspect of self-identity, the biographer models how this process unfolds.
Finally, biography has potential to provide theological insight. William Stringfellow claimed that biography is inherently theological, that by virtue of the Incarnation every life contains the news of the gospel, that each of us is a parable.
The journalist Kenneth Woodword suggests that biography can be a kind of primary theology. As a specific study of a life transformed by faith, biography can be an example of on-going revelation. And hence it can inspire, provoke, inform, challenge and prompt the reader to critical self-examination.
Of course, the use of biography for religious purpose has its perils as any of us knowledgeable about the history of Christian hagiography knows too well. The hagiographic tradition not only idealizes one's subject, but it flattens out a life, minimizing its inherent freedom. Hagiography knows the subject's answer before the question has been asked. Its goal is instrumental: to see the subject in service to some other end - in this case God. The purpose of biography, on the other hand, is to understand the subject and the process of identity creation. Neither hagiography nor its opposite, the expose, is capable of this. Neither adulation nor hatred should motivate the biographer. To idealize, to mock and unmask, or to consider the subject in service to some other end inhibit understanding. In search of this understanding the biographer continuously asks, "Who knows my subject?" The subject herself? Her contemporaries? The biographer? All of the above? None of the above? By so doing the biographer asks what it is to know a subject or a self.
Probing for the self, the biographer finds that her subject eludes. The best I could do was to attempt to hem in the subject, to circle around her spaciousness. In moments of reverie when I thought I had my subject cornered, locked up, figured out, she'd be gone. This elusiveness forced me to acknowledge the ineffability of the person. However, this realization opened up the possibility that, like a sacrament or symbol, the person points beyond to the self's desired end which is actually active in creating the life. In this sense biography can be a form of primary theology. My point is that biography and telling lives matters, especially in our time. Thus far I have suggested that the work of the biographer is like that of an archeologist drilling down through the debris of a life to its inner space which is always unknown and mysterious. Yet we know that space is important. It is there that personality is transformed and a new way of being in the world is given birth.
It is in this arena that the work of Evelyn Underhill is meaningful. She explored that space, first as she encountered it in the mystics, and secondly as she guided her contemporaries. All of Underhill's writing, the 39 books and several hundred articles, are about that inner space and experience therein. Who then is Evelyn Underhill and what is her contribution? Let me tell you straight away, there is no definition which is fully satisfactory. On today's program Underhill is defined as an ecumenist, a pacifist, a religious writer, and a contemplative. None of these designations is incorrect, but they miss the point. She has also been called a Christian philosopher and a mystic; those terms are even more problematic.
I can remember being asked innocently enough, who is Evelyn Underhill? This was after I had worked on the Underhill biography for seven years. I was speechless. Not merely because I believe that every person is ineffable, but I knew too well the limitation of each of the monikers applied to her. Of course, I could have easily fallen back to the historical designation and locked her in terms of time and place - 1875-1941 - London, Kensington. Since her world was a fairly narrow one, I could have even gotten it down to the actual streets. I could have placed her in a family lineage, barrister father, philanthropist mother. I could have recited her pedigree, referred to her huge corpus, and chronicled her retreats. I could have given the litany of her awards - Honorary Lecturer at Oxford, Fellow of King's College, London, Honorary Doctor of Divinity, University of Aberdeen, first woman to give a retreat in Canterbury Cathedral. While all this would have been an attempt to give specificity, the straightforward query, who is Evelyn Underhill, forced me to face the question of the legitimacy of the biography I had spent seven years writing! In what sense could I say I knew and understood Evelyn Underhill?
It is, of course, easier to talk about her work and contribution, even though the person and her work are inextricably linked. I can remember when it first dawned on me what her contribution was. I was in the venerable Blackwell's bookstore in Oxford, England when across the room I saw the sign for the Used Book Section which was divided into subject areas. My eyes lighted on "second-hand theology." And I knew that that was the correct designation for much theology at least as I had experienced it - abstracted, remote, disconnected from life and hence used up and barren, second hand. The power of Underhill's writing was rather about firsthand theology, the raw experience of the personal encounter with the divine. It is her subject, first-hand theology if you will, that defines the importance of her contribution. Her genius was that she even sought out this subject at all, a subject which had been buried for at least three previous centuries. Certainly in the Protestant world, religious writers after the 17th century had focused on scripture, church history or theology, not on the human's relationship with the divine. Underhill's topic was marginal, as was the person who pursued it - a woman with no systematic university training or ecclesiastical appointment.
In 1907 when she was 32 years old Underhill took up with vocational zeal the writing of her first major book - a 500 page work on mysticism. The book has been in print continuously since 1911 and has served as the principal introduction to the topic in the English-language until about 1970. Writing it was a prodigious labor for which she consulted 1000 sources. The subtitle of this book, "A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness," is revealing because it establishes that her subject is humanity itself, especially humanity in its relationship to the divine. In some limited sense she gives evidence to Feurerbach's claim that all theology is really anthropology. In it she tries to define mysticism, separating it off from what it is not, theology or magic. She then defines the stages of mystic consciousness - awakening, purification, illumination, dark night of the soul, and union, and illustrates these stages through reference to mystic texts. For her the mystic speaks from the first-hand experience of what she calls the Absolute or Reality and seeks union with it. She wrote: "Mysticism is seen to be a highly specialized form of that search for reality, for heightened and completed life, which we have found to be a constant characteristic of human consciousness. . . . [The mystics] constitute one of the most amazing and profound variations of which the human race has yet been witness." The purpose of her big book was in fact to illustrate and preserve this specialized human capacity for a unique kind of consciousness.
One of the most important aspects of her book was the setting out and illustrating four characteristics of mysticism. Here she proceeded to search the mystical texts in order to determine the nature of the phenomenon. Mysticism, she claimed, is "active and practical, not passive and theoretical. It is an organic life-process, something which the whole self does." Second, mysticism is "entirely a spiritual activity." By this she meant that it is not done in order to gain or achieve anything, but only for its own end. Third, the "business and method of mysticism is love." It is an activity, a total dedication of the will toward its source. "It is at once an act of love, an act of surrender, and act of supreme perception." But the One is always a living and personal Object of Love, never an object of exploration. Fourth, mysticism entails a distinct psychological experience. It is "a definite and peculiar development of the whole self, conscious and unconscious, under the spur of such hunger: a remaking of the whole character on high levels in the interest of the transcendent life."
Through the use of vigorous, eloquent, and compelling language, Underhill pulls the reader into the mystic process as it unfolds. While each person has the requisite "germ," "the little buried talent," "the capacity for God," the mystic has a genius for it, a passion for it. This passion is connected to a particular psychological makeup, a natural capability of extraordinary concentration, an intensity of love and will, and the capacity for self-discipline, steadfastness, and courage. Although mystics vary tremendously in their language, symbolic expression and lives, their psychological structure is similar.
Her book, Mysticism, was an exploration of this phenomenon. Once she finished it she began to explore Christian mysticism more fully. She wrote: "Mysticism has been defined as 'the science of the Love of God,' and certainly those words describe its essence. But, looking at it as it appears in the Christian Church in all its degrees and forms, I would prefer to call it 'the life which aims at union with God.'" "By Christian mysticism we mean a conscious growing life of a special kind: that growth in 'love, true Being, and creative spiritual Personality' which has been described as the essence of holiness. This life does not involve an existence withdrawn from common duties into some rapturous religious dreamland, which many people suppose to be mystical. The hard and devoted life of some of the greatest mystics of the Church contradicts this view. . . . . Whatever form the experience of the mystics took ... at bottom all comes down to this. They felt ... an increasing and overwhelming certainty of first-hand contact with God, penetrating, and transfiguring them."
In 1911 mysticism was an iconoclastic and little-explored topic in the Christian community. Nonetheless, Evelyn Underhill became its authority. A torrent of writing spilled out of her for the next decade - a little book called Practical Mysticism for Normal People, editions of mystic texts, and biographies. My question has always been how did she even come to this subject? She was born into a nominally religious family of deists. Although baptized and confirmed in the Church of England, she had no interest in religion until she made the requisite trips of the young Victorian woman to the continent, especially to Italy. It was there that she was literally awakened through aesthetic experience - art, architecture and religious ritual. Those experiences lead her to what she believed was the reality beyond the visible world. She returned to England and joined the Golden Dawn, a Rosicrucian Society, and began to write novels and poetry. Her first novel, The Gray World, is important not so much for its literary but its biographical value. Here she has her character state her own premise, that beauty is the only thing really worth having, that it was after all the visual side of goodness. By 1904 she moved toward Catholicism, but on the eve of "going over to Rome" the Modernist controversy broke and she felt she could not do so. Given her commitment to modern science and historical criticism, she considered herself a Modernist and could no longer walk what she called "the muddy path" to Rome. She chose to live on the borderland outside institutional religion. For the next 15 years she remained without institutional support except from her mystical texts and her own individual devotion. Emotionally her experience became thinner and thinner, and at the end of the Great War she claims to have "gone to pieces."
We know little of this next period - 1919-1921- except these snippets. She reluctantly forced herself into the Anglican Church, the church of her baptism; she opened up a relationship with the Austrian Baron-Frederich von Hugel, the most prominent Roman Catholic theologian in England, and she began new writing and new work. This was the vocational moment for her, the moment on which the whole of the rest of her life hinged. As she wrote several years later "[N]ow the experience of God ....is in the long run always a vocational experience. It always impels to some sort of service: always awakens an energetic love. It never leaves the self where it found it." Underhill the scholar was being forced to some other level of responsiveness.
It is this second half of her life, the time between 1921 until her death is 1941, which is least understood. This is her period of devotional writing, which is generally seen as disconnected from her previous work as a scholar of mysticism. Yet it was her 20 years spent in the company of the mystics that now made it possible for her to translate that knowledge to ordinary people. She could now enter the tangles of the human condition, knowing which ways were dangerous, which safe. Attuned to this environment, she was able to see the faint path, hear the sounds which alert, know the perils of the byways. She would become a guide to the inner terrain, a space accessible to all, but only lived in completely by the mystics.
Initially, Underhill took up work on mysticism because she believed the mystics had something to teach her contemporaries about a certain kind of human experience. The mystics were the great pioneers of a higher human consciousness. Having perceived transcendent reality (what she called the "vision splendid") they allowed it to transfigure their lives. It was the insight, that the mystic capacity for God was shared by all, that pushed Underhill at mid-life to a vocation as a spiritual guide. In this she was immensely successful. The Times Literary Supplement claimed that she "possessed an insight into the meaning both of the culture and individual groping of the soul that was unmatched by any professional teacher of her day." Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, claimed she did more than anyone else to keep the spiritual life alive in the Anglican Church in the period between the wars, and her friend T.S. Eliot said her work carried the "consciousness of the grievous need of the contemplative element in the modern world."
For 20 years Underhill spoke and wrote about this human capacity to respond to the love of God. The most important of her lectures came in 1921 when she gave a series at Oxford, later published as Life of the Spirit and The Life of Today. In this she subjected the classical experiences of the spiritual life to the insights of psychology. In these lectures she marks out the characteristics of the fully developed life - integration of personality, complimentary tendencies toward contemplation and action, and a new sense of power and vitality expressed in vocation, a giving without stint.
A more widely received lecture was her four-part BBC series called "The Spiritual Life" delivered in 1936. In accessible language she defined the spiritual life as that "life in which all that we do comes from a center where we are anchored in God." The spiritual life was not some narrow, disembodied life, but the apex of a full humanity which expressed itself in adoration, communion, and cooperation with God. Its marks were tranquility, gentleness, courage and service. It was a life which responded -"Here I am, send me."
Her spiritual guidance was also extended in retreats. Beginning in 1924, she gave about eight retreats a year at various houses throughout England. As such she became a pioneer in the incipient retreat movement within Anglicanism. She did not come to this new work with ease. In her diary she records her apprehensions:
"In my lucid moments, I see only too clearly that the possible end of this road is complete, unconditional self-consecration, and for this I have not the nerve, the character or the depth. There has been some sort of mistake. My soul is too small for it and yet it is at bottom, the only thing that I really want. It feels sometimes as if, whilst still a jumble of conflicting impulses and violent faults, I were being pushed from behind towards an edge I dare not jump over." And yet it was here, as spiritual companion of her contemporaries, that she experienced her vocation, that place, Fredrick Beuchner says, "where our deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
This mid-life period was productive. The wisdom of the mystics had become so integrated into her that she could live out of it and impart its insights to the many who sought her counsel. In this sense she became a public explicator of the Christian life as it could be lived out by ordinary people.
In her retreat work and spiritual guidance she focused on the interlocking themes of prayer and vocation, purification and holiness. In all of this she worked from the basic premise that there is a personal holy presence and energy in which all things live and have their being. It prompts in those who recognize it not only acknowledgment but an awe-filled response. It is important to note here that Underhill sees the life of the spirit beginning not with a sense of one's sinfulness, but rather with an acknowledgement of this presence. Early on she captured this understanding in a line of poetry - "There is," she wrote, "a splendor burning in the heart of things." This personal holy presence, which for her had its first manifestation in the aesthetic, has its most profound revelation in Jesus, is witnessed to by the lives of the saints, and is available to each person. Participation in the holy presence is the spiritual life. This participation can suffuse and take over all of life, radically transforming it as it gains power.
It is prayer which does this work of transformation. Prayer is not so much an action or a duty, or even an experience, but a vital relationship between the whole individual and the being of God. Initiated by God, prayer is nonetheless a mutual act, dependent both on grace and the will of the individual. More than a specific act, prayer is a state, a condition of soul at the heart of which is not intercession but adoration, the "awe-struck" love which brings with it a sense of humility and gratitude, a communion with God, and a self-offering. In short, prayer is that life which has adoration at its root, communion as its flower, and loving action as its fruit.
The goal of prayer is to ignite that which is already present in each person, this "latent capacity for God." Once ignited, the individual becomes a "live wire," a "link between God's Grace and the world that needs healing," a "distributing center" for God's creative power. A person of prayer is one who has "a more wide-spreading, energetic, self-giving and redeeming type of love," one who senses oneself as a child of God, who is and knows an attachment to God. This attachment to God, the result of prayer, is the clearest mark of the spiritual life, a "life in which God has more and more sway." Conceived in another way, the spiritual life is principally the life of holiness. And this, frankly, sounds pretty Methodist to me.
Underhill stopped her retreat work for a year or so in the mid 1930s in order to take up the writing of her last major book, Worship, published in 1936. This book was borne out of a largeness of heart and ecumenical inclusivity. Both in its subject and its treatment it was well ahead of its time. At first, the study of worship might seem outside Underhill's competence or interest, but it followed from her long-standing exploration of the relationship between the human and the divine. As mysticism was the intense personal relationship between the individual and the Absolute, and the spiritual life the integration of all life through prayer and cooperation with God, worship was another human response to the divine, the outpouring of human awe and adoration. In her book she analyzes the elements of worship and then its forms. Casting her net broadly she brings in the entire spectrum of western religious liturgical expression, including Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and the variety of Protestant denominations, the Baptists, Anglicans, the Free Church and Methodism, eleven in all. Worship was a remarkably insightful exploration of the validity of each of these traditions. She saw each as a different expression of the impulse of adoration. Each was analogous to a "chapel in the Cathedral of the Spirit." For example, in her treatment of Methodism she locates it within the reform of Anglicanism and shows deep appreciation for the drive toward holiness which permeates the commitments of the Wesleys and is best expressed in their early hymns.
Like her big book on mysticism, Worship was a taxing undertaking. And now she was old and increasingly afflicted with asthma. Although her energy was clearly abating, she continued to give retreats until 1937 when she left active work. In that year with almost prophetic insight she claimed that in the days to come Christianity would have to become a complete philosophy of existence rather than some mere devotional expression. In 1939 she took up a new angle on the human relationship to the divine, the subject she had written on for 40 years. She became a pacifist, and wrote a number of short pieces on this topic and joined the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship. This was a particularly painful period of her life. There were few pacifists in Britain during the war. The Angican Church denounced this position, and friends pulled away from her. For Underhill pacifism was a position rooted in the faith that love is the ultimate reality and it must prevail. This faith followed from the Christian understanding of the love of God for all creatures. To be a pacifist was a vocation given by God for God's ends. Although the church should be the rallying point for all those who believed in the creative and redeeming power of love, it was incapable, she thought, of seizing this opportunity because its supernatural life was so weak and ineffective. Thus the work of pacifism fell to those who had known "the vision splendid" and who as persons of prayer were able to proclaim peace in the midst of violence and hopelessness.
As the Blitz dragged on and London experienced great devastation the future seemed very dark and uncertain. Homelessness and misery surrounded Underhill like an Apocalypse. Until the end when she died in June 1941, she tried to steady believers.
Many have applauded Underhill's contribution. She was lauded by Henri Bergson, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Merton, Alan Watts and Charles Williams. Scholars of religion credit her with describing mysticism as a way of life, linking it to social concern. Her work served as an early bridge between believers and unbelievers, and between religion and the behavioral sciences. After her death, however, there were critics who convicted her of a sentimentalized and cozy spirituality, calling her "the Agatha Christie of spirituality," claiming she appealed only to the well-heeled Kensington set. Others suspected she had only a second-hand knowledge of the spiritual life or that she was intellectually unsound, having drawn faulty conclusions from her research. Some said she represented the last gasp of the dying Oxford Movement or that she was merely a follower of deSales and the French school of spirituality, or a disciple of Von Hugel. In short, she was not an "original" thinker.
Although much of her work has been superseded, its uniqueness rests both in the kinds of questions she asked and the eloquence, power and authenticity with which she answered them. She was a pioneer, a foremother, if you will, of much of contemporary religious writing.
Her broadest contribution was in redefining religion and what it means to be a religious person. Although dogma, doctrine, and moral code are central to religion, she believed its essential element was the mystical, that is, the personal experience of the love of God that gives authenticity and authority. This love was a gift from God to which the human responded with awe and adoration. This mystical element of religion is paradigmatic; it provided the standard by which one relates to others. Having been loved by God, one is free to love others as one has been loved, even the unlovable and the enemy. It is as well the basis for the transformation of all of life; it causes what she called "divine fecundity," the birthing of new life in the world. While this is the work of the great mystics, it is also participated in by ordinary persons.
By reasserting the importance of mysticism as the personal encounter with the God of Love, Evelyn Underhill reclaimed the Christian tradition and found new ways to interpret it for her contemporaries and for us. Such was her so-called "unoriginal" contribution.
What is particularly unique in Underhill's restatement of the Christian message is the priority she gives to the potency of the transformed life. As she was fond of saying, the life of the spirit was not "taught" but "caught." "We most easily recognize spiritual reality when it is perceived transfiguring human character and most easily attain it by sympathetic contagion." Much like Wesley, Underhill called believers to lives of holiness, guiding them one by one and holding up models for inspiration.
In the Anglican Communion Evelyn Underhill is remembered in the liturgy of June 15th, her death day. The reading for that day is from the Book of Wisdom; it is particularly apt. It first praises Wisdom as lucid, steadfast, subtle, a reflection of the eternal light, mirror of God's active power, image of God's goodness. The text goes on to promise "In each generation wisdom passes into holy souls making them friends of God and prophets." Evelyn Underhill was one of these friends of God who illuminated the Christian message. Such was her uncommon contribution, made from the margins.