The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To day by Evelyn Underhill

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THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT

AND

THE LIFE OF TO-DAY

BY

EVELYN UNDERHILL

Author of "MYSTICISM," "THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM," etc.

NEW YORK

E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1922.

BY E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All rights reserved_

IN MEMORIAM

E.R.B.

PREFACE

This book owes its origin to the fact that in the autumn of 1921 the
authorities of Manchester College, Oxford invited me to deliver the
inaugural course of a lectureship in religion newly established under
the will of the late Professor Upton. No conditions being attached to
this appointment, it seemed a suitable opportunity to discuss, so far as
possible in the language of the moment, some of the implicits which I
believe to underlie human effort and achievement in the domain of the
spiritual life. The material gathered for this purpose has now been
added to, revised, and to some extent re-written, in order to make it
appropriate to the purposes of the reader rather than the hearer. As the
object of the book is strictly practical, a special attempt has been
made to bring the classic experiences of the spiritual life into line
with the conclusions of modern psychology, and in particular, to suggest
some of the directions in which recent psychological research may cast
light on the standard problems of the religious consciousness. This
subject is still in its infancy; but it is destined, I am sure, in the
near future to exercise a transforming influence on the study of
spiritual experience, and may even prove to be the starting point of a
new apologetic. Those who are inclined either to fear or to resent the
application to this experience of those laws which--as we are now
gradually discovering--govern the rest of our psychic life, or who are
offended by the resulting demonstrations of continuity between our most
homely and most lofty reactions to the universe, might take to
themselves the plain words of Thomas a Kempis: "Thou art a man and not
God, thou art flesh and no angel."

Since my subject is not the splendor of historic sanctity but the normal
life of the Spirit, as it may be and is lived in the here-and-now, I
have done my best to describe the character and meaning of this life in
the ordinary terms of present day thought, and with little or no use of
the technical language of mysticism. For the same reason, no attention
has been given to those abnormal experiences and states of
consciousness, which, too often regarded as specially "mystical," are
now recognized by all competent students as representing the unfortunate
accidents rather than the abiding substance of spirituality. Readers of
these pages will find nothing about trances, Ecstasies and other rare
psychic phenomena; which sometimes indicate holiness, and sometimes only
disease. For information on these matters they must go to larger and
more technical works. My aim here is the more general one, of indicating
first the characteristic experiences--discoverable within all great
religions--which justify or are fundamental to the spiritual life, and
the way in which these experiences may be accommodated to the
world-view of the modern man: and next, the nature of that spiritual
life as it appears in human history. The succeeding sections of the book
treat in some detail the light cast on spiritual problems by mental
analysis--a process which need not necessarily be conducted from the
standpoint of a degraded materialism--and by recent work on the
psychology of autistic thought and of suggestion. These investigations
have a practical interest for every man who desires to be the "captain
of his soul." The relation in which institutional religion does or
should stand to the spiritual life is also in part a matter for
psychology; which is here called upon to deal with the religious aspect
of the social instincts, and the problems surrounding symbols and cults.
These chapters lead up to a discussion of the personal aspect of the
spiritual life, its curve of growth, characters and activities; and a
further section suggests some ways in which educationists might promote
the up springing of this life in the young. Finally, the last chapter
attempts to place the fact of the life of the Spirit in its relation to
the social order, and to indicate some of the results which might follow
upon its healthy corporate development. It is superfluous to point out
that each of these subjects needs, at least, a volume to itself: and to
some of them I shall hope to return in the future. Their treatment in
the present work is necessarily fragmentary and suggestive; and is
intended rather to stimulate thought, than to offer solutions.

Part of Chapter IV has already appeared in "The Fortnightly Review"
under the title "Suggestion and Religious Experience." Chapter VIII
incorporates several passages from an article on "Sources of Power in
Human Life" originally contributed to the "Hubert Journal." These are
reprinted by kind permission of the editors concerned. My numerous debts
to previous writers are obvious, and for the most part are acknowledged
in the footnotes; the greatest, to the works of Baron Von Hugely, will
be clear to all students of his writings. Thanks are also due to my old
friend William Scott Palmer, who read part of the manuscript and gave me
much generous and valuable advice. It is a pleasure to express in this
place my warm gratitude first to the Principal and authorities of
Manchester College, who gave me the opportunity of delivering these
chapters in their original form, and whose unfailing sympathy and
kindness so greatly helped me: and secondly, to the members of the
Oxford Faculty of Theology, to whom I owe the great Honor of being the
first woman lecturer in religion to appear in the University list.

E.U.

_Epiphany_, 1922.

[** Transcriber's Note: This text contains just a few instances of a
character with a diacritical mark. The character is a lower-case
'u' with a macron (straight line) above it. In the text, that
character is depicted thusly: [=u] **]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE vii

I. THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 1

II. HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 38

III. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:
(I) THE ANALYSIS OF MIND 74

IV. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT:
(II) CONTEMPLATION AND SUGGESTION 112

V. INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 153

VI. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 191

VII. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 228

VIII. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL ORDER 266

PRINCIPAL WORKS USED AND CITED 300

INDEX 307

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT

AND

THE LIFE OF TO-DAY

Initio tu, Domine, terram fundasti; et opera manuum tuarum sunt caeli.
Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanes; et omnes sicut vestimentum
veterascent.
Et sicut opertorium mutabis eos, et mutabuntur;
Tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficient.
Filii servorum tuorum habitabunt; et semen eorum in seculum dirigetur.

--Psalm cii: 25-28

CHAPTER I

THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE

This book has been called "The Life of the Spirit and the Life of
To-day" in order to emphasize as much as possible the practical,
here-and-now nature of its subject; and specially to combat the idea
that the spiritual life--or the mystic life, as its more intense
manifestations are sometimes called--is to be regarded as primarily a
matter of history. It is not. It is a matter of biology. Though we
cannot disregard history in our study of it, that history will only be
valuable to us in so far as we keep tight hold on its direct connection
with the present, its immediate bearing on our own lives: and this we
shall do only in so far as we realize the unity of all the higher
experiences of the race. In fact, were I called upon to choose a motto
which should express the central notion of these chapters, that motto
would be--"There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." This
declaration I would interpret in the widest possible sense; as
suggesting the underlying harmony and single inspiration of all man's
various and apparently conflicting expressions of his instinct for
fullness of life. For we shall not be able to make order, in any hopeful
sense, of the tangle of material which is before us, until we have
subdued it to this ruling thought: seen one transcendent Object towards
which all our twisting pathways run, and one impulsion pressing us
towards it.

As psychology is now teaching us to find, at all levels of our craving,
dreaming, or thinking, the diverse expressions of one psychic energy; so
that type of philosophy which comes nearest to the religion of the
Spirit, invites us to find at all levels of life the workings and
strivings of one Power: "a Reality which both underlies and crowns all
our other, lesser strivings."[1] Variously manifested in partial
achievements of order and goodness, in diversities of beauty, and in our
graded apprehensions of truth, this Spirit is yet most fully known to us
in the transcendent values of holiness and love. The more deeply it is
loved by man, the nearer he draws to its heart: and the greater his
love, the more fully does he experience its transforming and energizing
power. The words of Plotinus are still true for every one of us, and are
unaffected by the presence or absence of creed:

"Yonder is the true object of our love, which it is possible to grasp
and to live with and truly to possess, since no envelope of flesh
separates us from it. He who has seen it knows what I say, that the soul
then has another life, when it comes to God, and having come possesses
Him, and knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the
dispenser of true life and that it needs nothing further."[2]

So, if we would achieve anything like a real integration of life--and
until we have done so, we are bound to be restless and uncertain in our
touch upon experience--we are compelled to press back towards contact
with this living Reality, however conceived by us. And this not by way
of a retreat from our actual physical and mental life, but by way of a
fulfilment of it.

More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the
searching question of the disciple in Boehme's Dialogue on the
Supersensual Life: "Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature
into the supersensual ground, without destroying nature?"[3] And such a
coming through into the ground, such a finding and feeling of Eternal
Life, is I take it the central business of religion. For religion is
committed to achieving a synthesis of the eternal and the ever-fleeting,
of nature and of spirit; lifting up the whole of life to a greater
reality, because a greater participation in eternity. Such a
participation in eternity, manifested in the time-world, is the very
essence of the spiritual life: but, set as we are in mutability, our
apprehensions of it can only be partial and relative. Absolutes are
known only to absolute mind; our measurements, however careful and
intricate, can never tally with the measurements of God. As Einstein
conceives of space curved round the sun we, borrowing his symbolism for
a moment, may perhaps think of the world of Spirit as curved round the
human soul; shaped to our finite understanding, and therefore presenting
to us innumerable angles of approach. This means that God can and must
be sought only within and through our human experience. "Where," says
Jacob Boehme, "will you seek for God? Seek Him in your soul, which has
proceeded out of the Eternal Nature, the living fountain of forces
wherein the Divine working stands."[4]

But, on the other hand, such limitation as this is no argument for
agnosticism. For this our human experience in its humbling imperfection,
however we interpret it, is as real within its own system of reference
as anything else. It is our inevitably limited way of laying hold on the
stuff of existence: and not less real for that than the monkeys' way on
one hand, or the angels' way on the other. Only we must be sure that we
do it as thoroughly and completely as we can; disdaining the indolence
which so easily relapses to the lower level and the smaller world.

And the first point I wish to make is, that the experience which we call
the life of the Spirit is such a genuine fact; which meets us at all
times and places, and at all levels of life. It is an experience which
is independent of, and often precedes, any explanation or
rationalization we may choose to make of it: and no one, as a matter of
fact, takes any real interest in the explanation, unless he has had some
form of the experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordinarily and
also most impressively given to us as such an objective experience,
whole and unanalyzed; and that when it is thus given, and perceived as
effecting a transfiguration of human character, we on our part most
readily understand and respond to it.

Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived more capable of
analysis, can only say: "The soul knows when in that state that it is in
the presence of the dispenser of true life." Yet in saying this, does he
not tell us far more, and rouse in us a greater and more fruitful
longing, than in all his disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of
Soul? And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying "More than all
else do I cherish at heart the love which makes me to live a limitless
life in this world,"[5] assures us in these words that he too has known
that more abundant life. These are the statements of the pure religious
experience, in so far as "pure" experience is possible to us; which is
only of course in a limited and relative sense. The subjective element,
all that the psychologist means by apperception, must enter in, and
control it. Nevertheless, they refer to man's communion with an
independent objective Reality. This experience is more real and
concrete, therefore more important, than any of the systems by which
theology seeks to explain it. We may then take it, without prejudice to
any special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study is _one
life_; based on experience of one Reality, and manifested in the
diversity of gifts and graces which men have been willing to call true,
holy, beautiful and good. For the moment at least we may accept the
definition of it given by Dr. Bosanquet, as "oneness with the Supreme
Good in every facet of the heart and will."[6] And since without
derogation of its transcendent character, its vigour, wonder and worth,
it is in human experience rather than in speculation that we are bound
to seek it, we shall look first at the forms taken by man's intuition of
Eternity, the life to which it seems to call him; and next at the actual
appearance of this life in history. Then at the psychological machinery
by which we may lay hold of it, the contributions which religious
institutions make to its realization; and last, turning our backs on
these partial explorations of the living Whole, seek if we can to seize
something of its inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way in
which education may best prepare its fulfilment, and the part it must
play in the social group.

We begin therefore at the starting point of this life of Spirit: in
man's vague, fluctuating, yet persistent apprehension of an enduring and
transcendent reality--his instinct for God. The characteristic forms
taken by this instinct are simple and fairly well known. Complication
only comes in with the interpretation we put on them.

By three main ways we tend to realize our limited personal relations
with that transcendent Other which we call divine, eternal or real; and
these, appearing perpetually in the vast literature of religion, might
be illustrated from all places and all times.

First, there is the profound sense of security: of being safely held in
a cosmos of which, despite all contrary appearance, peace is the very
heart, and which is not inimical to our true interests. For those whose
religious experience takes this form, God is the Ground of the soul, the
Unmoved, our Very Rest; statements which meet us again and again in
spiritual literature. This certitude of a principle of permanence within
and beyond our world of change--the sense of Eternal Life--lies at the
very centre of the religious consciousness; which will never on this
point capitulate to the attacks of philosophy on the one hand (such as
those of the New Realists) or of psychology on the other hand, assuring
him that what he mistakes for the Eternal World is really his own
unconscious mind. Here man, at least in his great representatives--the
persons of transcendent religious genius--seems to get beyond all
labels. He finds and feels a truth that cannot fail him, and that
satisfies both his heart and mind; a justification of that
transcendental feeling which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art.
If his life has its roots here, it will be a fruitful tree; and whatever
its outward activities, it will be a spiritual life, since it is lived,
as George Fox was so fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All know
the great passage In St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes
how "the mysterious eye of his soul gazed on the Light that never
changes; above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence."[7] There is
nothing archaic in such an experience. Though its description may depend
on the language of Neoplatonism, it is in its essence as possible and as
fruitful for us to-day as it was in the fourth century, and the doctrine
and discipline of Christian prayer have always admitted its validity.

Here and in many other examples which might be quoted, the spiritual
fact is interpreted in a non-personal and cosmic way; and we must
remember that what is described to us is always, inevitably, the more or
less emotional interpretation, never the pure immediacy of experience.
This interpretation frequently makes use of the symbolisms of space,
stillness, and light: the contemplative soul is "lost in the ocean of
the Godhead," "enters His silence" or exclaims with Dante:

"la mia vista, venendo sincera,
e piu e piu entrava per lo raggio
dell' alta luce, che da se e vera."[8]

But in the second characteristic form of the religious experience, the
relationship is felt rather as the intimate and reciprocal communion of
a person with a Person; a form of apprehension which is common to the
great majority of devout natures. It is true that Divine Reality, while
doubtless including in its span all the values we associate with
personality, must far overpass it: and this conclusion has been reached
again and again by profoundly religious minds, of whom among Christians
we need only mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and Ruysbroeck.
Yet these very minds have always in the end discovered the necessity of
finding place for the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a
prevenient and an answering love. For it is always in a personal and
emotional relationship that man finds himself impelled to surrender to
God; and this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. It is
significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of
rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience. Thus
we have on the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox
Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, confessing--

"I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me,
leading me, grasping me.... Once and again in my life I have seen myself
suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself
at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in
choosing one I should be renouncing all the others--for there is no
turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique
moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious,
sovereign and loving. And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens
out the way of the Lord."[9]

Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: "If," he says, "this Absolute
Presence, which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our
life's experiences, which pours into our fainting the elixir of new
life-mud strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite
infinite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal presence, it is
only because this word personal is too poor and carries with it
associations too human and too limited adequately to express this
profound God-consciousness."[10]

Such a personal God-consciousness is the one impelling cause of those
moral struggles, sacrifices and purifications, those costing and heroic
activities, to which all greatly spiritual souls find themselves drawn.
We note that these souls experience it even when it conflicts with their
philosophy: for a real religious intuition is always accepted by the
self that has it as taking priority of thought, and carrying with it so
to speak its own guarantees. Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an
"intellectual fountain," hears the Divine Voice crying:

"I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me."[11]

Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say:

"O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!"[12]

Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Divine Wisdom as the Father
and ever-present Companion of the soul,[13] and Kabir, for whom God is
the Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim:

"From the beginning until the end of time there is love between me and
thee: and how shall such love be extinguished?"[14]

Christianity, through its concepts of the Divine Fatherhood and of the
Eternal Christ, has given to this sense of personal communion its
fullest and most beautiful expression:

"Amore, chi t'ama non sta ozioso,
tanto li par dolce de te gustare,
ma tutta ora vive desideroso
como te possa stretto piu amare;
che tanto sta per te lo cor gioioso,
chi nol sentisse, nol porria parlare
quanto e dolce a gustare lo tuo sapore."[15]

On the immense question of _what_ it is that lies behind this sense of
direct intercourse, this passionate friendship with the Invisible, I
cannot enter. But it has been one of the strongest and most fruitful
influences in religious history, and gives in particular its special
colour to the most perfect developments of Christian mysticism.

Last--and here is the aspect of religious experience which is specially
to concern us--Spirit is felt as an inflowing power, a veritable
accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group,
impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living-out of its
existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, and lifting it to fresh
levels of life. This sense of enhanced life is a mark of all religions
of the Spirit. "He giveth power to the faint," says the Second Isaiah,
"and to them that hath no might he increaseth strength ... they that
wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk,
and not faint."[16] "I live--yet not I," "I can do all things," says St.
Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this Divine strength invading
and controlling him: and assures his neophytes that they too have
received "the Spirit of power." "My life," says St. Augustine, "shall be
a real life, being wholly full of Thee."[17] "Having found God," says a
modern Indian saint, "the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained
fresh strength."[18] All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the
same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and
endurance.

So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be
resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The
cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite
Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living
and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The
dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us.
These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving
objectives to intellect feeling and will. They must all be taken into
account in any attempt to estimate the full character of the spiritual
life, and this life can hardly achieve perfection unless all three be
present in some measure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Christine
says, that when the voice of God called her it was at one and the same
time a Light, a Drawing, and a Power,[19] and her Indian contemporary
the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that "Seekers after God must realize
Brahma in these three places. They must see Him within, see Him without,
and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself."[20] And
it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of
these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by
us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them,
an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of
which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms
part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from
knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us
how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power,
of beauty which are contained in them.

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