Toward an evaluation of the thought of Evelyn Underhill

Abstract

Evelyn Underhill (Mrs. H. Stuart Moore), 18751941, the prolific twentiethcentury English religious writer, ’ had a considerable following in her own time. Her two major works Mysricism (1911) and Worship (1936), have remained in print continuously since publication2 and recently there has been a rebirth of interest in her writing.3 John Macquarrie in his Twentieth Century Religious Thought claims that Underhill is one of three women in the early part of this century who made a significant contribution to religious scholarship4 and Michael Ramsey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, asserts that she did more than anyone else to keep the spiritual life alive in the Church of England in the early part of this century.5 Underhill has been hailed by T.S. Eliot as a writer attuned to the great spiritual hunger of her times. ‘Her studies’, he wrote, ‘. . . have the inspiration not primarily of the scholar or the champion of forgotten genius, but of the consciousness of the grievous need of the contemplative element in the modern world.‘6 All of this argues for a historical re-evaluation of the thought of this woman who has been called a giant in Anglicanism7 and the spiritual director to her generation.8 Evelyn Underhill’s life was comfortable, secure and outwardly un-dramatic. An only child, she was privately educated until her early teens. She later attended King’s College, travelled on the continent and married at age thirty-two. Sir Arthur Underhill, her father, and H. Stuart Moore, her husband, were both wellrespected barristers. Her social circle was among the educated upper middle classes of London. She had no children and for almost forty years she worked from her home, producing hundreds of book reviews, articles and books. She was religious editor of the Spectator for a number of years and wrote for a variety of publications including Theology, Criterion, Fortnightly and Time and Tide. For the last fifteen years of her life she served as a spiritual director and a leader of retreats. She was the first woman in Anglicanism to work as a retreat conductor and the first woman to lecture at Oxford University. Her achievement was realised without systematic education and without the direct support of any institution, academic or ecclesiastical. Intelligence, emotional intensity and a highly defined sensitivity to the needs of her contemporaries drove her to expend her life in revealing the importance of the contemplative life to her generation. In the almost fifty years since her death, there has been both recognition of her achievement as well as criticism of it. Some philosophers of religion reject her epistemological assumptions’ and historians of spirituality claim her work is the last breath of the Oxford Movement and, as such, is outmoded.‘O It has been argued that she is not an original thinker but a populariser of mysticism” and of