The essentials of mysticism, and other essaysUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The essentials of mysticism, and other essays
Underhill, Evelyn
Mysticism
lives find their end.” Julian thus represents the first emergence in
English literature of a stream of tradition which is not represented in
the classic school of English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this
school she does not appear to have been greatly influenced; there is
little in her that reminds us of it, or of that group of contemplatives
who produced the _Cloud of Unknowing_ and its companion works. Her true
affinities are with the Christian Platonism which St. Augustine
introduced into theology, and its developments in the works of Erigena
and Eckhart. But when we have given full weight to the effects upon her
work of oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work
only becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her speculative
mind, and helped her to understand and express her own experience; but
this experience in its essence was independent of intellectual
knowledge. It was the fruit of a deeply mystical and poetic nature,
brooding on the conception of God common to mediæval Christianity.
Julian had in a high degree constructive religious genius; and for such
a nature an evocative phrase is enough to waken the “ghostly sight.”
It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account of her
teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent consciousness of
God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing reality; a conception at
once philosophic and practical. For Julian, as for the Platonists, God
is the sum of the highest spiritual values—“He is all-thing that is good
to my seeming, and all-thing that is good, it is He.” Her perception of
the Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and expressed in the
strongest terms. “God is kind (nature) in His being: that is to say,
that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is the ground, He is the
substance, He is the same thing that is kind-head,” and again, “I saw
full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our
sensuality God is ... for it is His good pleasure to reign in our
understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell in
our soul endlessly, us all working into Him.” But this vivid sense of
Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is closely bound up with
her devotion to the person of Christ. Her theological path, like her
mystical experience, lay through the human to the Divine, through
emotional realization of the Passion to intellectual vision of the
Godhead. In the first revelation of all we get these two aspects of
truth sharply contrasted; for there her vision of the bloodstained Crown
of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart, is balanced by her
other interior sight of “the Godhead seen in mine understanding.” The
long version of her book elaborates this simple intuition of the Deity
into a very beautiful description of the Holy Trinity—always one of
Julian’s favourite subjects—but the whole is really implied in the first
brief statement, which strikes at once her characteristic chord of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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