Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill (classic reads .txt) 📕

out towards some new and higher range of sensation, rather than towards new and more accurate ideas. They are ever eager to assure us that man’s most sublime thoughts of the Transcendent are but a little better than his worst: that loving intuition is the only certain guide. “By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thought never.”

Yet here you are not to fall into the clumsy error of supposing that the things which are beyond the grasp of reason are necessarily unreasonable things. Immediate feeling, so far as it is true, does not oppose but transcends and completes the highest results of thought. It contains within itself the sum of all the processes through which thought would pass in the act of attaining the same goal: supposing thought to have reached⁠—as it has not⁠—the high pitch at which it was capable of thinking its way all along this road.

In the preliminary act of gathering yourself together, and in those unremitting explorations through which you came to “a knowing and a feeling of yourself as you are,” thought assuredly had its place. There the powers of analysis, criticism, and deduction found work that they could do. But now it is the love and will⁠—the feeling, the intent, the passionate desire⁠—of the self, which shall govern your activities and make possible your success. Few would care to brave the horrors of a courtship conducted upon strictly intellectual lines: and contemplation is an act of love, the wooing, not the critical study, of Divine Reality. It is an eager outpouring of ourselves towards a Somewhat Other for which we feel a passion of desire; a seeking, touching, and tasting, not a considering and analysing, of the beautiful and true wherever found. It is, as it were, a responsive act of the organism to those Supernal Powers without, which touch and stir it. Deep humility as towards those Powers, a willing surrender to their control, is the first condition of success. The mystics speak much of these elusive contacts; felt more and more in the soul, as it becomes increasingly sensitive to the subtle movements of its spiritual environment.

“Sense, feeling, taste, complacency, and sight,
These are the true and real joys,
The living, flowing, inward, melting, bright,
And heavenly pleasures; all the rest are toys;
All which are founded in Desire,
As light in flame and heat in fire.”

But this new method of correspondence with the universe is not to be identified with “mere feeling” in its lowest and least orderly forms. Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every “mystical” impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual silliness. All the powers of the self, raised to their intensest form, shall be used in it; though used perhaps in a new way. These, the three great faculties of love, thought, and will⁠—with which you have been accustomed to make great show on the periphery of consciousness⁠—you have, as it were, drawn inwards during the course of your inward retreat: and by your education in detachment have cured them of their tendency to fritter their powers amongst a multiplicity of objects. Now, at the very heart of personality, you are alone with them; you hold with you in that “Interior Castle,” and undistracted for the moment by the demands of practical existence, the three great tools wherewith the soul deals with life.

As regards the life you have hitherto looked upon as “normal,” love⁠—understood in its widest sense, as desire, emotional inclination⁠—has throughout directed your activities. You did things, sought things, learned things, even suffered things, because at bottom you wanted to. Will has done the work to which love spurred it: thought has assimilated the results of their activities and made for them pictures, analyses, “explanations” of the world with which they had to deal. But now your purified love discerns and desires, your will is set towards, something which thought cannot really assimilate⁠—still less explain. “Contemplation,” says Ruysbroeck, “is a knowing that is in no wise⁠ ⁠… therein all the workings of the reason fail.” That reason has been trained to deal with the stuff of temporal existence. It will only make mincemeat of your experience of Eternity if you give it a chance; trimming, transforming, rationalising that ineffable vision, trying to force it into a symbolic system with which the intellect can cope. This is why the great contemplatives utter again and again their solemn warning against the deceptiveness of thought when it ventures to deal with the spiritual intuitions of man; crying with the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, “Look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching”⁠—the voluntary tension of your ever-growing, ever-moving personality pushing out towards the Real. “Love, and do what you like,” said the wise Augustine: so little does mere surface activity count, against the deep motive that begets it.

The dynamic power of love and will, the fact that the heart’s desire⁠—if it be intense and industrious⁠—is a better earnest of possible fulfilment than the most elegant theories of the spiritual world; this is the perpetual theme of all the Christian mystics. By such love, they think, the worlds themselves were made. By an eager outstretching towards Reality, they tell us, we tend to move towards Reality, to enter into its rhythm: by a humble and unquestioning surrender to it we permit its entrance into our souls. This twofold act, in which we find the double character of all true love⁠—which both gives and takes, yields and demands⁠—is assured, if we be patient and single-hearted, of ultimate success. At last our ignorance shall be done away; and we shall “apprehend” the real and the eternal, as we apprehend the sunshine when the sky is free from cloud. Therefore “Smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love”⁠—and suddenly it