Evelyn Underhill
Evelyn Underhill was born on 6 December 1875 in Wolverhampton and spent her life as a citizen of the United Kingdom. She was educated at King's College London, and her career as a writer developed within the English language across several literary forms. In addition to working as a novelist and a poet, she produced numerous works concerned with religion and spiritual practice, and she became closely associated with Christian mysticism as a field of sustained inquiry.
Underhill's Anglo-Catholic faith informed her engagement with mystical and devotional subjects, and her writing moved between imaginative and religious registers. She was known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, and her notable work Practical Mysticism stands as one of the most recognisable titles to emerge from that body of writing. Her occupation is recorded as encompassing mysticism alongside her roles as writer, poet, and novelist, reflecting the degree to which religious and spiritual concerns ran through her work in each of those forms.
Beyond her literary and religious output, Underhill was a committed pacifist, a conviction that defined her relationship to the broader world throughout her adult life. She died on 15 June 1941 in London, the city where her career had taken much of its shape and where her long engagement with questions of faith, spiritual practice, and mystical experience reached its end.
Quotes by Evelyn Underhill
Evelyn Underhill's insights on:
Here we part from the “nature mystics,” the mystic poets, and all who shared in and were contented with the illuminated vision of reality. Those who go on are the great and strong spirits, who do not seek to know, but are driven to be.
In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram – impersonal and unattainable – the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.
Do not suppose from this that your new career is to be perpetually supported by agreeable spiritual contacts, or occupy itself in the mild contemplation of the great world through which you move. True, it is said of the Shepherd that he carries the lambs in his bosom: but the sheep are expected to walk, and put up with the inequalities of the road, the bunts and blunders of the flock. It.
Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.
Being, not Doing, is the first aim of the mystic; and hence should be the first interest of the student of mysticism.
In my relations with my father, which are difficult and where I’m often met by coolness and indifference, I am constantly tempted to be cold and indifferent. Yet I know that this is a test if I could take it rightly.
Wisdom is the fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of those who “keep themselves to themselves,” and stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have never truly known.
It is important to increase our sense of God’s richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him.