This excerpt is from our free booklet, Mysticism and the Inner Life: Evelyn Underhill and Christian Spirituality.
Thus by Christian mysticism we mean a conscious growing life of a special kind: that growth in “Love, true Being, and creative spiritual Personality” which has been described as the essence of holiness. This life does not involve an existence withdrawn from common duties into some rapturous religious dreamland, which many people suppose to be mystical. The hard and devoted life of some of the greatest mystics of the Church at once contradicts this view. It is a life inspired by a vivid and definite aim; the life of a dedicated will moving steadily in one direction, towards a perfect and unbroken union with God. Whatever form the experience of the mystics took—whether expressed in the deep peace of contemplative prayer or in ecstasy and other “abnormal ways”—at bottom all comes down to this. They felt, or rather feel—for there are plenty of them in the world to-day—an increasing and overwhelming certainty of first-hand contact with God, penetrating and transfiguring them. By it they were at once deeply humbled yet intensely stimulated: it became, once for all, the supreme factor in their lives, calling forth a total response from mind, feeling and will.
Such an experience, though not peculiar to Christianity, has taken within the Christian Church a special form which is not found elsewhere. There are, of course, two distinct but complementary currents in Christian feeling and worship. One is directed towards God, the Eternal and Infinite Spirit; the other towards His incarnate revelation in Jesus Christ. These two strains are reflected in Christian mystical experience. On the one hand, we have a group of mystics of whom St. Augustine and St. Catherine of Genoa are supreme types, whose dominant spiritual apprehension is of the absolute Being of God, and of the soul’s union with Him. In technical language, they are “theocentric.” God is realized by them under more or less impersonal symbols, and especially as Light and Love. “What,” says St. Augustine, “do I love when I love Thee? It is a certain light that I love, and melody, and fragrance and embrace, that I love when I love my God.” Mystics of this temperament often show close correspondences with the experience of other great lovers of God, outside the Christian fold. This should not surprise us; for since God is one, and “is not far from any one of us,” there must be a common element in our limited human apprehension of Him.
On the other hand, the inner life of many of the most ardent Christian mystics is controlled by their sense of a direct personal communion with our Lord: they are “Christocentric,” and can say with Walter Hilton that for them “God, grace and Jesus are all one.” Within that consciousness of God as the eternal and abiding Reality, which is perhaps the mystic sense, this type of religious experience apprehends the intimate presence here and now of a personal Love, identified by them with the Risen and Exalted Christ, and accepted as the Master, Companion, and Helper of the soul.
Image: Evelyn Underhill, Blue plaque, 50 Campden Hill Square, London (Source).
