Evelyn Underhill - Mysticism 25

QUOD SUPERIUS SICUT QUOD INFERIUS

"The central doctrine of magic may now be summed up thus: --

(1) That a supersensible and real 'cosmic medium' exists, which interpenetrates, influences, and supports the tangible and apparent world, and is amenable to the categories both of philosophy and of physics.
(2) That there is an established analogy and equilibrium between the real and unseen world, and the illusory manifestations which we call the world of sense.
(3) That this analogy may be discerned, and this equilibrium controlled, by the disciplined will of man, which thus becomes master of itself and of fate."

Contrast the above with the five great stages of the Mystic Way, as set forth in the beginning of Part Two:

(1) Awakening or conversion
(2) Self-Knowledge or Purgation
(3) Illumination
(4) Surrender, or the Dark Night
(5) Union

What is the difference? Attitude toward power. Magic = power over / Union with God = power to. It's still power, but power that recognizes that power comes from God, or it's doomed. Once again, God is God, and I'm not. That is not to say I cannot wield great power, e.g., "do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13)," but it must always be wielded with recognition of its source. No amount of "severe schools" or rigid self-discipline or magical rituals can equal the power of acting with recognition of Whose is the "power, the glory, and the kingdom." Our faith tradition recognizes the focus value of ritual actions, words of power, sacred numbers, but it is not things or actions that matter, but the Who that they point to.

I made a further note about developing the notion that the Magi were, in a sense, returning the gifts that were stolen by Adam and Eve. Wonder what in this section elicited that note?

Evelyn Underhill - Mysticism 24

p. 109: "...'universal agent' connecting soul with soul. // Astral World // ether

We all grope at expressing the sense of God's presence; we all fall short. The distinction between magic and mysticism made in this chapter seems to me to be more the distinction between magic and God acceptance. That is, magic is the will of the human over the spiritual essence, effecting change in the lived world. God acceptance effects the fullness of human being brought forth by the will of God and, in Christianity, exampled in Christ, thus Paul Tillich's "ground of being."

Acts 17:28: For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.”

Evelyn Underhill - Mysticism 23

Magi, magic p. 107

"In magic, whether regarded as a superstition or a science, we have at any rate the survival of a great and ancient tradition, the true meaning of whose title should hardly have been lost in a Christian country; for it claims to be the science of those Magi whose quest of the symbolic Blazing Star brought them once, at least, to the cradle of the Incarnate God."

Thanks be to God, with much nagging the Holy Spirit has succeeded in causing me to open this book again. I'm never sorry I have done so, but I do so kicking and screaming seemingly every time.

And again, I am struck by a quotation concerning Incarnation. If I learn nothing else--unlikely, but if I did--from this book, I have learned that my most cherished touchstone of faith is Incarnation. God is God, and I'm not, but I claim faith in a God Who knows firsthand what it is like to be what I am. The Magi hardly knew what they sought except that what they found was so much more than what they had sought, but exactly what they would have sought, had they known what they knew once they found it. My Lord and my God, thank You for knowing what it's like, but also thank You for being God. You have smitten me wholesale, and I have lived. Somehow.

Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 21

pp. 96-102 “…down the nights and down the days” of Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven.”

“the idea of a love-chase”

The several pages read tonight relate how many mystic writers have described the mystic experience—the pursuit of Reality—with images of the pursuit of alchemy, i.e., that we are spiritual beings, souls, in search of the gold standard, The Goldenness within us, that was put in us by The Hound of Heaven, the One who urges us forward to the fullness of our being in the Eternal One, if we will purge ourselves of the baser metals in our spirits. Much of this book before now has described how the mystic pursues the Ultimate Reality. This section reveals how, in fact, it is Reality that has been pursuing us all along.

With the 2012 Olympics in full swing now, I can’t help thinking about the pursuit of gold, how the athletes work constantly to discover their most golden selves, the ones who allow themselves to be shaped by discipline, constancy, direction, and responsiveness to the best that is within them. They are always the chasers, though. They are not pursued by The One, in order to hand them the gold medal.

QUI AMORE LANGUEO

[Richard of St. Victor] “The Soul, is utterly concentrated on the One.” She is “caught up to the divine light.”

Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 20 (I think of it every month)

I am learning what "fear of the Lord" means in reading this book, in that approaching the book reminds me of Moses' approach to the burning bush. What is this strange sight that I see? There are so many riches within its pages, I am hesitant to read it in any other milieu than complete silence and long stretches of that. If I read it too fast, with too many distractions, I will miss so much. If I read it and savor it slowly, in blessed long silence, I will miss so much, but less, I suppose. There's nothing for it but to slog on and resign myself to reading it more than once, to catch the missed morsels on the second or fourteenth round.

Thank you to the giver of this book for a way to cherish that which is eligible to be cherished.

Chugging along, then, the three principle images by which mystics describe their experiences:

• PILGRIMAGE (Mystic Quest; Grail): "That kingdom which is both near and far..."
  
• SEARCH FOR LOVER/SOUL MATE (Marriage of the Soul): "No lover seeks union with his beloved, But his beloved is also seeking union with him."
  
• ASCETICISM/PURITY ("Great Work")
  

Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 18

pp. 83 – 85

“It was this re-discovery of Nature’s Christliness which Blake desired so passionately when he sang—

‘I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.’”

“Quia per incarnate Verbi mysterium nova mentis nostrae oculis lux tuae claritatis infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.” …for through the Mystery of the Word made flesh, the new light of Thy glory hath shone upon the eyes of our mind so that while we acknowledge God in visible form, we may through Him be drawn to things invisible.

Says Underhill, “The essence of mystical Christianity seems to be summed up in these lovely words.”

They embrace both immanence and transcendence and begin to express their mutuality. This Incarnation is no commercial transaction, but is the Reveal of Reveals, the only Reality worth revealing.

Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 16

Sweet 16. Still puzzling about how to blog this book in a useful way to both my online drogies and me. Definitely think the interlineation approach won't cut it. So, stand by, lecteurs. I am ruminating on yet another method that I will combine with centering prayer.

For today, though, since I'd continued the interlineation effort, here's the rest of the slog:

Text, p. 76	Comment	notes
superiority to the more coldly self-consistent systems of Greece, is the fact that it states the truths of metaphysics in terms of personality: thus offering a third term, a “living mediator” between the Unknowable God, the unconditioned Absolute, and the conditioned self.	Wholeness, in a way no other system provides.
This was the priceless gift which the Wise Men received in return for their gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
This solves the puzzle which all explorers of the supersensible have sooner or later to face: come si convenne l’imago al cerchio, [200] the reconciliation of Infinite and intimate, both known and felt, but neither understood.
Such a third term, such a stepping-stone, was essential if mysticism were ever to attain that active union that fullness of life which is its object, and develop from a blind and egoistic rapture into fruitful and self-forgetting love.
***
Where non-Christian mystics, as a rule, have made a forced choice between the two great dogmatic expressions of their experience, (a) the long pilgrimage towards a transcendent and unconditioned Absolute, (b) the discovery of that Absolute in the “ground” or spiritual principle of the self; it has been possible to Christianity, by means of her central doctrine of the Trinity, to find room for both of them and to exhibit them as that which they are in fact—the complementary parts of a whole. Even Dionysius, the godfather of the emanation doctrine, combines with his scheme of descending hierarchies the dogma of an indwelling God: and no writer is more constantly quoted by Meister Eckhart, who is generally considered to have preached immanence in its most extreme and pantheistic form.
***
Further, the Christian atmosphere is the one in which the individual mystic has most often been able to develop his genius in a sane and fruitful way; and an overwhelming majority of the great European contemplatives have been Christians of a strong impassioned and personal type.	Hmm, is this true now? I grew up Catholic, matured as an Episcopal Christian, always with a contemplative and sometimes mystic thread. I look forward to her further exposition of what distinct advantage a Christian basis for one’s mysticism provides.
This alone would justify us in regarding it as embodying, at any rate in the West, the substance of the true tradition: providing the “path of least resistance” through which that tradition flows.
The very heretics of Christianity have often owed their attraction almost wholly to the mystical element in the teachings.
The Gnostics, the Fraticelli, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Quietists, the Quakers, are instances of this.
In others, it was to an excessive reliance on reason when dealing with the suprarational, and a corresponding absence of trust in mystical intuition that heresy was due. Arius and Pelagius are heretics of this type.
***
The greatest mystics, however, have not been heretics but Catholic saints. In Christianity the “natural mysticism” which like “natural religion,” is latent in humanity, and at a certain point of development breaks out in every race, came to itself; and attributing for the first time true and distinct personality to it Object, brought into focus the confused and unconditioned God which Neoplatonism had constructed from the abstract concepts of philosophy blended with the intuitions of Indian ecstatic, and made the basis of its meditations on the Real.	Sounds like Caucasian-centric thinking. And what constitutes “development?” Hunh?

Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 15

Text, p. 75	Comment	Notes
Departing from the usual convention, they are hard—sometimes impossible—to understand.	Right now, is it enough to trust and hold my figurative hands in front of me and feel my way, with or without a map? After all, running has progressed that way. For the longest time, I was sure I would never get past running only a few minutes, and walking the rest. This morning I ran up a full block of 10% grade hill and, while winded at the top, I kept going to the end of the block. WE HUMANS HATE UNCERTAINTY. WE WANT CLARITY. WE WANT TO KNOW THAT WHAT WE HOLD DEAR WILL NOT CHANGE AND WILL ALWAYS BE THERE. WE GO A BIT CRAZY WHEN THAT DOESN’T HAPPEN. We yell “Heretic!” We yell “Queer!” We yell, “Ick!” We say no. Anything to get out of being in relationship with The Eternal I Am that I Am. Mystics try to express that, despite the scariness, we must be in relationship with this Dicey Deus. Genesis 32.30-32 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ It’s the only way my life is preserved.
As a result, the orthodox have been forced to regard their makers as madmen or heretics: when they were really only practical men struggling to disclose great matters by imperfect means.
***
Without prejudice to individual beliefs, and without offering an opinion as to the exclusive truth of any one religious system or revelation—for here we are concerned neither with controversy nor with apologetics—we are bound to allow as a historical fact that mysticism, so far, has found its best map in Christianity.
Christian philosophy, especially that Neoplatonic theology which, taking up and harmonizing all that was best in the spiritual intuitions of Greece, India, and Egypt, was developed by the great doctors of the early and mediaeval Church, supports and elucidates the revelations of the individual mystic as no other system of thought has been able to do.	And now I will await her persuasive argument as to this. I’ve always intuited this, or taken it on faith, but did not feel equal to offering an argument that would persuade others to this conclusion.	How in Heaven’s name does one absorb the treasures of this book without having to tediously work through sentence by sentence? Yet, if I don’t, I will miss important gems. I think I do work through it sentence by sentence, and resign myself to being at this for a long time.
***
We owe to the great fathers of the first five centuries—to Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine; above all to Dionysius the Areopagite, the great Christian contemporary of Proclus—the preservation of that mighty system of scaffolding which enabled the Catholic mystics to build up the towers and bulwarks of the City of God.	These names are famililar to me, as is some of the substance of their work, but what does it mean in any given moment of Christian response to life’s details? Not everyone is able to or desirous of studying these doctors of the Church. Even those who are interested, do they say to themselves, “Should I do this? What would Irenaeus say?” To me, mysticism is a way to cut through the slog of studying the doctors of the Church, and have that in-Person encounter of the Jacob kind.