The Feast Day of Evelyn Underhill
An Essay by Simon+
This week, the Anglican Communion as well our own Episcopal Church celebrates the life and work of Evelyn Underhill. Her feast day is June 15th (the date of her death in 1941). Some of you will have heard of her already, and if you haven’t, then let me introduce you to one of the 20th century’s greatest mystics.
Underhill was born in the English Midlands in 1875 to a well-to-do middle-class family. Her father was a prominent lawyer. Educated at a private school for three years and otherwise at home, she went on to study history and botany at King’s College for Women in London. She launched her writing career by publishing three novels: The Grey World (1904), The Lost World (1907), and The Column of Dust (1909), in which she introduced the world to her thinking. In these early fictional works, Underhill is particularly interested in the idea that the life of faith isn’t simply about trying to find a sense of personal fulfillment. Rather, according to Henry Epps in Christian Mysticism, the spiritual quest is best described as striving towards the “final loss of the private, painful, ego-centered life for the sake of regaining one’s true self.”
Underhill continued to write and teach throughout her life (among other distinctions, she was the first woman to lecture to Anglican clergy), and she was highly sought after as a speaker and spiritual director. Her most famous work, A Study of Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, was published in 1911.
Evelyn Underhill is credited for reintroducing Roman Catholic and medieval thinkers such as St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Jan van Ruusbroec, and Teresa of Avila to Protestants. She was deeply affected by her experiences during World War I and its aftermath, as well as the rise of Fascism in the 1930s and the outbreak of the Second World War, by which time she had become a pacifist.
In her own words:
“We spend most of our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do.”
“Beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love.”
“Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed to live in a world of labels.”
“Wisdom is the fruit of communion.”
“If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”
“The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things.”
“Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking about good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.”