These were actions unheard of in the 1920s.įor Underhill the mystics were those who knew for certain the love of God and as such became “live wires” between God’s grace and the world that needed it. She was the first woman to guide a retreat in Canterbury Cathedral and the first to offer retreats for male clergy. Given this, the ordinary person could benefit from learning of the mystic life.Ī lay woman without formal theological training, Underhill began to offer retreats and serve as a spiritual director. Acknowledging the mystics were great pioneering souls, she maintained that every person was on a spectrum with them because each was born with a capacity for God. This was followed by a series of other volumes (she edited or authored thirty-nine books in all) on individual mystics, their writings, and the spiritual life.Īt mid-life Underhill made a dramatic move to begin to offer the insights of the mystics to ordinary people.
In this she laid out the stages of the mystic life and illustrated this development with quotes from the great mystics themselves. Underhill began as scholar of mysticism publishing her ground-breaking book, Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness,in 1911 it has never been out of print for the last hundred and seventeen years.
Eliot who hailed her as a writer attuned to the great spiritual hunger of her contemporaries, and Michael Ramsey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who attested that she did more than anyone else to keep the spiritual life alive in Anglicanism in the interwar period. Her life’s work and achievement were confirmed by her friend T. Evelyn Underhill, the Anglican religious writer, had a leading role in the first half of the twentieth century in reviving interest in mysticism and translating the insights of the great mystics for the ordinary person.
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