Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 19a (19 shall remain unpublished)

p. 87: [Nativity - Eternal Birth of the Divine Word]: ECKHART: "When the soul brings forth the Son, it is happier than Mary." Love this image. As I read Mysticism, I am realizing how primary the Incarnation is in my faith life.

p. 88: "If you would truly know how these things come to pass," says St. Bonaventura,..."ask it of grace, not of doctrine; of desire, not of intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not the teachings of the schools; of the Bridegroom, not of the Master; of God, not of man; of the darkness, not of the day; not of illumination, but of that Fire which enflames all and wraps us in God with great sweetness and most ardent love. The which Fire most truly is God, and the hearth thereof is in Jerusalem." It is, after all, about a relationship, and one doesn't get to know the beloved by reading books or sets of instruction.

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?

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 29

The Sacrifice of Obedience

Gehorsamopfer—to offer obedience.

To offer oneself to God as a sacrifice of obedience in faith. This is the crucial point. Too much emphasis on one’s own truth, one’s own authentic freedom, and one forgets the limitations and restrictions of this “my own.” Tendency to take “my own” truth and freedom as unlimited, ultimate, “in my own case.” This is a total loss. The paradox that only God’s truth is ultimately my truth (there is no one truth for me, another for my neighbor, another for God) and only God’s will is my freedom. When they appear to be opposed, am I acting freely?

“Blessed are the pure in heart who leave everything to God now as they did before they ever existed” (Meister Eckhart). This is what I have to get back to. It is coming to the surface again. As Eckhart was my life raft in the hospital, so now also he seems the best link to restore continuity: my obedience to God begetting His love in me (which has never stopped!).

June 30, 1966, VI.91-92