The essentials of mysticism, and other essaysUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The essentials of mysticism, and other essays
Underhill, Evelyn
Mysticism
precession from and return to God. “The soul,” said Eckhart, “is created
that it may flow back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain whence
it came forth.” “Thus I understood,” says Julian, “that all His blessed
children which be come out of Him by nature shall be brought again into
Him by grace”; and again, “all kinds that He hath made to flow out of
Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him.”
Here, again, the naked Eckhartian monism seems to be transmitted through
a more human and more spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the
German mystics in her doctrine of God as the “ground of the soul.” “Our
soul is so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we may
not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God....
God is nearer to us than our own soul, for He is the ground in whom our
soul standeth, and He is the mean that keepeth the substance and the
sensuality together so that they shall never depart.” So Tauler says, “A
man who verily desires to enter in will surely find God here, for God
never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him
and he will find and enjoy eternity here.”
Julian’s revelation was received in 1373, and the long text as we have
it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart had died in 1329, Tauler
in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck, whose mysticism owes much on its
speculative side to Eckhart’s philosophy, in 1381. The influence of
their teaching spread rapidly, and few preaching friars of an inward
disposition can have escaped it. To these preaching friars was committed
in the fourteenth century the special duty of giving solid theological
teaching to nuns. This was commonly done by way of vernacular sermons
and instructions, of which Tauler’s surviving sermons are types: and it
was possibly through such instructions given in the Carrow convent that
Julian obtained that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism, those
contacts with Augustinian and Victorine thought, on which the more
philosophic side of her revelation seems to depend. The parallels with
her great contemporary St. Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund
Gardner has noted, are probably due to the fact that both women drew
their ideas from some earlier source. Her likenesses to Ruysbroeck can
also be accounted for. His _Seven Cloisters_, _Kingdom of God’s Lovers_,
and _Ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage_ were all completed before
1350, and knowledge of them would reach East Anglia quickly, through the
Flemish colony established at Norwich. Several close correspondences
with him can be traced in Julian’s work; especially her conception of
God’s eternal thirst and love-longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck’s
“hungry yet generous love of God,” and the opening phrase of her Third
Revelation, “After this I saw God in a Point,” which reminds us of the
great definition in the _Seven Cloisters_, “That Point in which all our
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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