Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill: The Classic Study Reviewed

Who Was Evelyn Underhill?

Evelyn Underhill was born in Wolverhampton, England, in 1875. She grew up in a comfortable middle-class family, studied history and botany at King's College London, and married Hubert Stuart Moore, a barrister, in 1907. By the standards of Edwardian England, hers was an unremarkable biography. What set her apart was the intensity of her inner life and her determination to write about it with scholarly rigour.

She was drawn to mysticism and the occult from her twenties onward. Early visits to Catholic monasteries in Italy stirred a spiritual restlessness that never settled. She considered converting to Roman Catholicism (the Modernist crisis in the Church delayed her decision), and she ultimately remained within the Church of England, becoming one of the most prominent Anglo-Catholic spiritual writers of her generation.

In 1911, at the age of thirty-six, she published Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. The book made her reputation immediately. She became the first woman invited to lecture on religion at Oxford, a fellow of King's College London, and a sought-after retreat leader and spiritual director. She published prolifically until her death in 1941, but Mysticism remained the work for which she was best known.

The Intellectual Context

Underhill wrote in the wake of William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which had opened serious academic discussion of mystical states in the English-speaking world. But James was a psychologist and pragmatist; he catalogued experiences without constructing a developmental framework. Underhill wanted something more systematic. She wanted to show that mysticism was not a collection of random experiences but a coherent path with recognisable stages.

She also wrote against the grain of the philosophical positivism that dominated British universities. For Underhill, the mystics were not deluded or pathological. They were, in her view, the most fully realised human beings, people who had achieved direct contact with ultimate reality. This conviction gave Mysticism its characteristic warmth and its persuasive power, though it also introduced the bias that later critics would challenge.

What Mysticism Sets Out to Do

The book is divided into two parts. Part One ("The Mystic Fact") lays the philosophical groundwork. Underhill defines her terms, distinguishes mysticism from related phenomena, and defends the mystic's claim to genuine knowledge. Part Two ("The Mystic Way") traces the five stages of the mystical path through close readings of the mystics' own writings.

Underhill's ambition was nothing less than a comprehensive map of mystical consciousness. She wanted to demonstrate that beneath the surface differences of language, culture, and historical period, the mystics of the Western tradition described a single underlying process: the soul's progressive awakening to, and union with, the Absolute.

This is a bold claim, and it is the source of both the book's strength and its vulnerability. Its strength is the coherence and narrative power of her framework. Its vulnerability is the question of whether a single developmental model can truly accommodate the diversity of mystical experience across cultures, periods, and personalities.

The Five Stages of the Mystical Path

Underhill's five-stage model is the heart of the book and the reason it remains cited over a century later. Each stage represents a distinct phase in the transformation of consciousness.

Stage One: Awakening of the Self

The mystical life begins with a sudden or gradual awakening. The individual becomes aware, often with startling clarity, that ordinary reality is not the whole of reality. Something breaks through: a vision, a moment of overwhelming beauty, a crisis of meaning. Underhill compares it to the conversion experience in religious tradition, but insists it is specifically a shift in perception rather than an adoption of new beliefs.

She cites George Fox's experiences in the fields of England, Pascal's "night of fire," and many less famous examples. The common thread is an irruption of the transcendent into ordinary consciousness, leaving the individual permanently changed in orientation if not yet in character.

Stage Two: Purification of the Self (Purgation)

Once awakened, the aspirant confronts the gap between what they have glimpsed and what they are. Purgation is the difficult, often painful process of self-discipline, moral reformation, and detachment from worldly attachments. Underhill draws on the ascetic traditions of Christianity: fasting, vigils, voluntary poverty, obedience.

She is careful to distinguish genuine purgation from mere asceticism for its own sake. The purpose is not suffering but freedom. The mystic strips away attachments not because the world is evil but because attachment to anything less than the Absolute prevents full union with it.

Stage Three: Illumination of the Self

Illumination is the stage most people associate with mystical experience. The purified self begins to perceive reality with new clarity. Underhill describes a state of heightened awareness in which the divine presence is felt in all things. Nature becomes transparent to its source. The mystic experiences joy, certitude, and a sense of being in direct contact with the Real.

This is the stage where many mystics produce their greatest writings. Teresa of Avila's earlier visions, Hildegard of Bingen's cosmic revelations, and Richard Rolle's experience of spiritual warmth and song all belong here. Underhill notes that Illumination can last years or even decades, and that many mystics never advance beyond it.

Stage Four: The Dark Night of the Soul

Not all mystics pass through the Dark Night, but those who do describe it as the most harrowing phase of the entire path. After the light and joy of Illumination, the mystic enters a period of profound desolation. God seems absent. Prayer feels empty. The spiritual certainty that sustained the previous stage evaporates completely.

Underhill takes the term from John of the Cross, whose Noche Oscura del Alma is the classic treatment. She interprets the Dark Night not as a failure but as the final purification: the last remnants of self-will, self-love, and spiritual attachment are burned away. The mystic must learn to love God without the consolation of God's felt presence.

Psychologically, Underhill acknowledges, the Dark Night can resemble clinical depression. She argues that the two are distinct because the Dark Night occurs in a specific developmental context and resolves into the Unitive Life, while depression has no such directionality. This distinction has been debated extensively by later scholars and clinicians.

Stage Five: The Unitive Life

The Unitive Life is the goal of the entire process. In it, the mystic achieves stable, permanent union with the Absolute. The oscillations between presence and absence, light and darkness, cease. The self is not annihilated but transformed; it becomes, in Underhill's language, a "living tool" of the divine will.

Critically, Underhill insists that the Unitive Life is not a state of passive absorption. The great mystics in this stage returned to active life: Teresa reformed the Carmelite order, Catherine of Siena intervened in papal politics, Francis of Assisi rebuilt churches and founded a religious order. Union with God, for Underhill, means participating in God's creative activity in the world.

Underhill's Gallery of Mystics

One of the great pleasures of Mysticism is the range of voices Underhill brings to the page. She quotes extensively from primary sources, often in her own translations, and she has a gift for selecting the most vivid and revealing passages.

The Major Figures

Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) appears more frequently than any other mystic. Underhill treats her as the most complete example of the full five-stage path: from dramatic awakening, through severe purgation and brilliant illumination, to a Dark Night that nearly destroyed her, and finally to the Unitive Life expressed through her tireless reform of the Carmelite order.

John of the Cross (1542-1591), Teresa's collaborator, provides Underhill's primary source for the Dark Night. His systematic analysis of spiritual desolation, combined with some of the most extraordinary lyric poetry in any language, makes him central to her argument.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328), the German Dominican, gives Underhill her most philosophical voice. His sermons on detachment (Abgeschiedenheit), the birth of the Word in the soul, and the Godhead beyond God push the mystical tradition to its intellectual limits.

Julian of Norwich (1342-c. 1416), the English anchoress, provides some of the most intimate and psychologically nuanced passages. Her Revelations of Divine Love, with its insistence that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," represents for Underhill the voice of the Unitive Life at its most serene.

Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), the Flemish contemplative, is Underhill's exemplar of mystical balance: a writer who combined the most exalted descriptions of divine union with practical wisdom about the dangers of the contemplative life.

The Supporting Cast

Underhill also draws on Plotinus (the major non-Christian voice), Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of Siena, Heinrich Suso, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Francis of Assisi, Jacopone da Todi, Angela of Foligno, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and many others. The range is impressive, though it remains almost entirely within the Western Christian orbit.

Mysticism vs Magic vs Philosophy

One of Underhill's most influential moves is her sharp distinction between mysticism and its near neighbours. She devotes the opening chapters to drawing these lines, and her definitions shaped academic discourse for decades.

Mysticism and Magic

For Underhill, the mystic and the magician both recognise that the visible world is not the whole of reality. But their responses diverge completely. The mystic surrenders the self to the Absolute; the magician tries to harness unseen forces for personal ends. Mysticism is selfless; magic is self-aggrandising. Mysticism leads to union; magic leads to power.

This distinction has been challenged. Scholars of Western esotericism, particularly since Antoine Faivre's work in the 1990s, have argued that Underhill drew the line too sharply. Many historical figures (Giordano Bruno, John Dee, even Eckhart in some readings) combined mystical and magical elements. The neat separation Underhill insists upon may reflect her own theological preferences more than the historical record. Students of the Hermetic Synthesis Course will recognise this tension as central to understanding the Western esoteric tradition.

Mysticism and Philosophy

Underhill also distinguishes mysticism from philosophy. The philosopher reasons about ultimate reality; the mystic experiences it directly. Philosophy is a product of the intellect; mysticism involves the transformation of the whole person. Underhill admires Plotinus precisely because he crosses this line: he is both a philosopher and a mystic, both reasoning about the One and claiming direct contact with it.

The 1930 Revision

Underhill revised Mysticism substantially in 1930, nearly two decades after the first edition. The changes reflect her own spiritual development during the intervening years. By 1930, she had moved from a broadly philosophical and somewhat eclectic spiritual outlook toward a committed Anglo-Catholic Christianity. Her spiritual director from 1922 onward was Friedrich von Hugel, the Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian, and his influence is visible in the revision.

The 1930 edition introduces more explicitly Christian language, moderates some of the more sweeping universalist claims of the first edition, and adds material on the institutional and sacramental context of the mystical life. The Preface to the twelfth edition (1930) is itself a valuable document, in which Underhill reflects honestly on the limitations of her earlier approach.

Underhill and Neoplatonism

Plotinus (204-270 CE) is the only non-Christian figure who receives sustained attention in Mysticism. Underhill treats him as both a precursor and a parallel to the Christian mystics. His description of the soul's ascent to the One, the experience of ecstatic union, and the return to embodied life after that experience all correspond closely to her five-stage model.

Through Plotinus, Underhill connects to the broader Neoplatonic tradition that runs through the entire history of Western mysticism. The Pseudo-Dionysius, who transmitted Neoplatonic categories into Christian theology (the via negativa, the divine darkness, the hierarchy of being), is a key intermediary. Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, and the Cloud of Unknowing author all draw on Dionysian Neoplatonism.

This Neoplatonic thread also links Underhill's subject matter to Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic tradition. The Corpus Hermeticum shares with Plotinus the vision of reality as an emanation from a single transcendent source, and the human soul as capable of returning to that source through knowledge and purification. Underhill does not discuss the Hermetic texts directly, but the philosophical infrastructure she relies upon is deeply Hermetic in its origins.

Influence on Later Scholars

Underhill's framework, for all the criticisms it has attracted, proved enormously generative for later scholarship.

W.T. Stace, in Mysticism and Philosophy (1960), built on Underhill's work while shifting the focus from developmental stages to the phenomenological characteristics of mystical experience. His distinction between introvertive and extrovertive mysticism refined Underhill's categories.

R.C. Zaehner, in Mysticism Sacred and Profane (1957), challenged Underhill's assumption that all mysticism is essentially the same by distinguishing between theistic, monistic, and panenhenic (nature) mysticism. His typology was partly a correction to what he saw as Underhill's overly unified framework.

Bernard McGinn, in his magisterial multi-volume The Presence of God (1991-ongoing), represents the most comprehensive continuation of Underhill's project. McGinn is more historically nuanced, more cautious about grand developmental models, and more attentive to institutional and theological context, but his debt to Underhill is explicit and acknowledged.

The "perennial philosophy" school, represented by Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith, also drew on Underhill's assumption that a single mystical reality underlies all traditions. This school has been vigorously challenged by constructivists like Steven Katz, who argue that mystical experience is always shaped by the mystic's prior beliefs and cultural context.

Criticisms and Limitations

Honest engagement with Mysticism requires acknowledging its significant limitations.

Christian Bias

The most obvious criticism is the book's overwhelming focus on Western Christian mysticism. Underhill mentions Sufism and occasionally references Hindu and Buddhist contemplative traditions, but these are peripheral. Her five-stage model is derived almost entirely from Christian sources. Whether it applies to Zen satori, Sufi fana, Kabbalistic devekut, or Hindu samadhi is a question she barely asks.

Essentialism

Related to the Christian bias is Underhill's essentialist assumption that "mysticism" is a single phenomenon with a single underlying structure. Steven Katz and the constructivist school have argued persuasively that there is no single "mystical experience" common to all traditions. What a Carmelite nun experiences in prayer and what a Zen monk experiences in zazen may share surface similarities but differ profoundly in content, context, and interpretation.

Grace Jantzen's Feminist Critique

Grace Jantzen, in Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (1995), argued that Underhill (and the scholarly tradition she founded) constructed "mysticism" as a category in ways that reinforced existing power structures. Jantzen noted that the selection of who counts as a "mystic" and the definition of what counts as "mystical experience" reflect institutional and gendered assumptions that deserve critical scrutiny.

Romanticisation

Underhill writes about mystics with evident admiration, sometimes bordering on hagiography. She presents the mystical life as the highest form of human development, the mystic as the most fully realised type of person. This is inspiring but not entirely balanced. The psychological costs of the mystical path, the institutional conflicts it generated, and the genuine ambiguity of many mystical claims receive less attention than they deserve.

Reading Mysticism Today

How should a contemporary reader approach a book first published in 1911? With respect for its achievement and clear-eyed awareness of its limitations.

The five-stage model, while not universally applicable, remains a useful heuristic for understanding the Western contemplative tradition. It provides a vocabulary and a framework that make sense of texts that can otherwise seem baffling or disconnected. When Teresa of Avila describes the "interior castle" with its seven mansions, or John of the Cross writes of the dark night, Underhill's framework helps the reader locate these experiences within a larger developmental arc.

The book's prose style also rewards attention. Underhill writes with a clarity and elegance rare in academic treatments of mysticism. She had a genuine literary gift, and her passages of close reading, where she unpacks a mystic's description of their experience, remain models of sympathetic interpretation.

The book is best supplemented with primary sources. Read Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle alongside Underhill's discussion of it. Read John of the Cross's poetry alongside her analysis of the Dark Night. The primary texts are richer and stranger than any secondary account can convey, and Underhill herself would be the first to insist that her commentary is no substitute for the originals.

Comparison with William James

The comparison with James's Varieties of Religious Experience is instructive because it highlights what is distinctive about Underhill's approach.

James was a psychologist and a pragmatist. He approached mystical experience as data: interesting, potentially valuable, but to be assessed by its fruits rather than its metaphysical claims. His four marks of mystical experience (ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity) are descriptive, not developmental. He was genuinely agnostic about whether mystical states reveal anything true about reality.

Underhill, by contrast, is a committed advocate. She believes the mystics are right: they have achieved genuine contact with ultimate reality, and their descriptions of that reality are, within the limits of human language, accurate. This conviction gives her writing its passion and urgency but also its partisanship.

Hermetic Connections

Underhill's work intersects with Hermetic philosophy at several points, even though she does not discuss Hermeticism directly.

The most significant connection is through Neoplatonism. The Hermetic texts, like Plotinus, describe reality as an emanation from a single transcendent source. The Poimandres (the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum) narrates the soul's descent into matter and its potential ascent back to the divine, a pattern closely paralleling Underhill's five-stage model. The Hermetic tradition shares with the Christian mystics the conviction that the human being is capable of direct knowledge of God.

The via negativa, or apophatic theology (describing God by what God is not), connects Underhill's mystics to the Hermetic tradition as well. When Eckhart speaks of the "Godhead beyond God," or when the Cloud of Unknowing author counsels the contemplative to enter the darkness of unknowing, they are drawing on a Neoplatonic-Hermetic inheritance that predates Christianity.

Finally, Underhill's distinction between mysticism and magic has direct Hermetic relevance. The Hermetic tradition, particularly as it developed in the Renaissance through figures like Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno, combined contemplative practice with what Underhill would call "magical" operations (astral magic, talismanic practice, theurgy). Underhill's sharp line between the two does not hold for the Hermetic tradition, which sees contemplation and operation as complementary rather than opposed.

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