In Praise of Holy Women

EVELYN UNDERHILL ON ST PAUL THE MYSTIC
AND THE MONASTIC IDEAL
PHILIP GORSKI
The year of Grace 1654, Monday, 23 November…From about half past ten in the
evening until half past midnight, FIRE. ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob.’
Not of philosophers or scholars. Certainty, Certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace. God of
Jesus Christ. Pascal, Memorial 1
Pascal, caught up in his two-hour ecstatic vision of the Fire, obtains like St Paul
from this abrupt illumination, an overwhelming revelation of personality – ‘not
the God of the philosophers and of scholars’ – and a certitude that demands the
total surrender of his heart, intellect and will. 2
Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) is commemorated in the Anglican calendar
on June 15 th . She was a pioneering female writer on Christian mysticism
and spirituality, a poet, pacifist, a greatly-in-demand leader of prayerretreats,
who was herself a 'mystic.’ 3 Her books sold in enormous numbers,
went into many editions and many of them, remarkably, remain in print.
She was the first woman to have her name accepted for the list of Oxford
University lecturers in 1921 4 , was made a Fellow of King’s College London
in 1928, was a participant in the early days of the Fellowship of St Alban
and St Sergius, and it was said of her, by her contemporary, the Bishop of St
Andrews, that ‘her erudition was almost frightening’. 5 She brought a new
readership to the lives of many female saints, and in particular to the lives
and writings of the English medieval mystics. Yet if one were to study for
a University Degree in Theology today, it is unlikely that her name would
appear upon the recommended reading lists. The reason for this is that she
is not regarded as ‘systematic’ but is viewed as a ‘gentlewoman amateur’, a
product of a vanished age and literary milieu; she is enthusiastic, subjective
(with a hint of the esoteric in some of her writings), a ‘populariser’, is poetic
1
Written on a piece of parchment sewn in Pascal’s clothing, discovered upon his death, and
thought to have been carried with him at all times.
2
Evelyn Underhill, The Mystic Way, A Psychological Study in Christian Origins, JM Dent, 1913.
3
For those who require definitions, Underhill once wrote,’The mystics, to give them their
short and familiar name, are men and women who insist they know for certain the presence
and activity of that which they call the Love of God’.
4
The kind of male academic and ecclesiastical attitudes Underhill had to deal with can be
ascertained from Margaret Cropper’s excellent biography, Evelyn Underhill, Longmans, 1958.
See also Dana Greene, Evelyn Underhill; Artist of The Infinite Life. DLT, 1991.
5
Her friend T.S Eliot wrote of her, ‘Her studies have the inspiration not primarily of the
scholar or the champion of forgotten genius, but of the consciousness of the grievous need of
the contemplative element in the modern world’, Greene, Artist of the Infinite Life, 2
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