In standard historical past, there are few tougher topics than the supernatural and spiritual beliefs of the previous. Even essentially the most open-minded trendy historian or reader of historical past can battle as we attempt to have interaction with unfamiliar thought-worlds, or cultures the place supernatural realities had been felt to permeate each day life in methods now unfamiliar to us.
This 12 months marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of a author who sought to interpret for her personal time a type of spirituality which might be particularly tough for a contemporary Western viewers to understand. Evelyn Underhill, born on 6 December 1875, performed an influential position in introducing readers to key works of medieval and early trendy mystical and visionary expertise.
Underhill was the writer of quite a few standard books on the religious life, her most well-known work being Mysticism (1911). She got here to those topics by way of an early attraction to spiritualism, ritual magic, and the occult – not unusual in mental circles within the years across the First World Battle – although later she turned a dedicated Christian. Nonetheless, her work mirrored a broad-minded outlook. Her vary of pursuits embraced a large European perspective – German, Italian, and Spanish mystics as a lot as English-speaking ones – and in addition appeared additional afield, to Islamic and Hindu writers. Clear and accessible, with a full of life flip of phrase, her books provided a brand new perspective on spirituality to a Britain profoundly shaken by the horror of the struggle.
Although not an expert educational, Underhill’s method was thorough and scholarly. Her editions of two necessary Center English works, The Cloud of Unknowing and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, had been commonplace texts for a few years. She lectured and led retreats in an space the place it was nonetheless very uncommon for ladies to take action: in 1922 she turned the primary girl – within the 700-year historical past of the college – to be invited to lecture on theology at Oxford.
Her books helped to popularise the work of writers reminiscent of Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich – now among the many best-known and most revered figures of the Center Ages, however within the early twentieth century removed from the canonical authors they’ve since change into; scholarship was in its early levels, with new manuscripts nonetheless being found. (The ‘Brief Textual content’ of Julian’s Revelations solely got here to mild in 1910.)
It was commonplace for such texts – particularly these by feminine authors – to be dismissed as fanatical or sentimental, merchandise of a spiritual tradition which to a British viewers appeared too Catholic, too overseas. In comparison with a few of her contemporaries, Underhill’s method is a breath of contemporary air. She treats them with nice sympathy and creativeness: it was necessary, she wrote, to have interaction with historic folks as residing people, not ‘stuffed specimens exhibited towards a flat tapestried background, roughly picturesque, however all the time considered in opposition to the concrete thickness of the fashionable world’.
She tried to strike a steadiness between understanding these writers inside their context and exploring religious experiences which she thought of to be cross-cultural. Although the later explosion of scholarship on these texts should qualify a few of her interpretations, there may be nonetheless a lot of worth in her refreshingly frank type. She labored to translate into the idiom of her day expressions of a longing she believed to be timeless. Right here’s a attribute passage from her 1914 e book Sensible Mysticism, supposed not for spiritual specialists however, as its endearing subtitle explains, ‘For Regular Folks’:
Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, however we’re too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to reply … The method includes a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our psychological furnishings, a large opening of closed home windows, that the notes of the wild birds past our backyard could come to us totally charged with surprise and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramophone inside.
‘The noise of the gramophone’ is the language of 1914; medieval writers would have talked as a substitute about resisting the ‘scattering’ of the thoughts by way of what Walter Hilton calls the ‘strobillynge [disturbance] of worldly busyness’. At present we might converse of the distractions of social media and the lure of doomscrolling. However the music of the wild birds is perhaps heard in anyplace or time.
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Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose Faculty, Oxford.
