THE MYSTICS OF THE CHURCH
The Mystics of the Church. By Evelyn Underhill. (James Clarke and Co. 6s. net.)
MISS EVELYN UNDERHILL has had a long and intimate know- ledge of many mystics in many ages. No one has done more than she to explain, so far as It can be explained, the mystic's experience to a generation that haS shown more than a passing 'desire to understand. She has passed through many phases, but she has not yet reached her goal. This last book shows her to be a step nearer ; we still await her final spiritual word.
Miss Underhill brings to her task a rapid clear brain, power of analysis, and something of the novelist's faculty of present- ing characters. She summons before her a wonderful array of mystics—Roman, English, German, French, Spanish—and" makes them speak out in no uncertain fashion.
The _result is striking and serves to dispel the Victorian notion that they were bats flying in the twilight. On the contrary, the Christian mystics were lucid thinkers who approached to an almost scientific precision in their accounts of the mysteries of the Faith. '
St. Augustine, for instance, is visualized for us, and we follow him through his intellectual travail until transcending the intellect he says : " I entered and beheld with the eye of the soul the Light that never changes ; above the eye of the soul, above my intelligence." Hencefcirth he could declare with quiet, joyful conviction " My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee." Each mystic that reaches unity, by whatever path, becomes creative. In the words of Ruysbroeck he is " by the grace of God a life-giving member of Holy Church."
' With many of these mystics Miss Underhill has dealt in her other books, and her long familiarity with them enables her to handle them with extraordinary dexterity. She has also introduced some names which will be unfamiliar to the average reader, like Cassian, whose Dialogues, composed near the time of St. Augustine's death, were a source of inspiration to all later Christians mystics ; like St. Hildegarde, who was so richly endowed with charismatic gifts. Miss Underhill extends her studies of the Protestant mystics, and besides tracing the influence of Jacob Boehme in Quakerism, and thiough William Law to the Evangelieal and Tractarian Movements of the. eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she makes an independent study of Henry Martyn. This last is most welcome. Henry 111(artyn seen in the perspective of the world's religious geniuses appears in a' new light, and many passages in his life, overlooked by the Evangelfeafg, suddenly gain an unexpected significance. This brilliant book succeeds in the attempt, which Miss Underhill made previously on a smaller scale in Practical Mysticism, to make clear to normal people the experiences of those who have done the most to enrich the spiritual life of the Church.
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