The Spiral Way
Evelyn Underhill
The Triumphant Mysteries of the Soul's Ascent
Note: Footnotes have been appended in text in a pale blue box.
The Ascension
The life of the regenerate spirit—that Christ-like thing which agonised and died, that it might rise within the soul to greater glory—is like a well of living water perpetually uprising, pouring itself out in diurnal acts of benediction towards men. It cannot fade or tire, it cannot fluctuate; for the deep springs of its being are fed perpetually by the fontal and exuberant Life of God. It moves in a transfigured world, it touches all things to fresh power and loveliness; endows them with its sacramental life.
Yet this, its royal new approach to things created, has at once its counterpart and its origin in a new approach now made possible for it towards the uncreated sphere. Not of its own strength, but because of its eternal attachments made perfect, its mighty outward swing to the Unseen, does it live the risen life within the world; because of the consummation of that union to which the discipline of prayer has slowly led. Hence it is natural that this same growing life of prayer, the heavenly correspondence which alone supports and makes possible the fruitful correspondences of earth, should demand its own expression, a space made clear for its peculiar activities, within the circle of the transfigured life.
Bit by bit, yet very gently, we are led into all the wonders of that new existence. So great is the reverence of our Lover for the littleness and ignorance of the soul, so matchless the humility of God, that He chooses to await the slow discovery of that spirit whom he has made only for Himself. His companionship waits ever at the margin of the mind. But that mind must turn to Him if it would know all the splendours of communion: going up with the sharp dart of longing love from the created to the uncreated sphere. This act, the act of prayer made perfect, has now become for it the highest of all arts, the Science of all Sciences, the Romance in which all longings are fulfilled. So we need not be astonished that the passion for the Real often seizes upon the soul, rapturously and suddenly: abruptly inducts the citizen into the Heavenly Country, catches him from the earth and inundates him with the Uncreated Light. In swift ascents of joy his love will go out toward that Love of God which rushes in to meet it: that so the Loved and Lover may at last be made "one thing."
"In a place beyond uttermost Place, in a track without shadow of trace,
Soul and body transcended, I live in the soul of my Loved One anew!"
Such is the experience of the soul’s true ecstasy; such the Ascension which it makes to the Father, as the pioneer of growing mounting life. Like a bird, says St Gregory, was the ascent of our Forerunner, swiftly and easily borne upward on the feathers of fine love "and the path of that Bird knoweth no man, who believeth not in the ascension into heaven."
This is the third of Love’s mysterious ascents towards Reality; the third journey of that insatiable adventurer up the Mountain of Contemplation. The first time, it went on an errand of courtesy bearing the seed of a life as yet unborn; and its prayer was the prayer of simplicity, a glad confession of joy and faith. The second time it went on an errand of sacrifice, bearing the cruel burden of the Cross; and its prayer was an act of pure surrender to the Will. Now, for the last time, it goes up in triumph, free, unfettered: and its prayer is the ecstatic upward rush of the winged spirit, borne by its simplicity and its purity made perfect to immediate union with the Heart of God.
"A man," says Thomas à Kempis, "is lifted up from earthly things with two wings: they are simplicity and purity. Simplicity ought to be in intention; purity in affection. Simplicity intendeth God, purity taketh Him and tasteth Him."
Simplicity, that is singleness of eye, looks upon God; sees Him in all and above all, the one Transcendent Fact of many facets, outside of Whom is no existence, and in Whom is no darkness at all. Purity, that is singleness of heart, receives and tastes Him; undistracted by any conflict of desires. On these two wings the spirit, remade in Christ, takes flight toward the Eternal, to that superessential Being in which all life has its beginning and its end; there to enjoy as the term of its difficult ascents a veritable fruition of the Absolute.
"He hath set His Beauty above the stars: His loveliness is in the clouds of heaven." Only by a forsaking and overpassing of the earth-life can we truly know it: by a lifting up of the heart towards its home. Not the unresting and immanent Love that works and watches within the framework of the here-and-now, but an utterly transcendent Truth and Beauty, which alone may satisfy our craving, calls us upwards. We are drawn to some unspeakable region, to some imageless experience, where, on the pivot of all time and space, our hunger and thirst for God shall at last be stilled. "This deification and elevation of the spirit in God," says St John of the Cross, "whereby the soul is, as it were rapt and absorbed in love, made one with God, suffers it not to dwell upon any worldly matter. The soul is now detached, not only from all outward things, but even from itself: it is, as it were, undone, assumed by, and dissolved in, Love. The which is to say, that it passes out of itself into the Beloved."
"Into the beloved"—into the Ocean of Godhead, into the Fathomless Abyss. Thither He was caught up from the summits of contemplation; "And a cloud received Him out of their sight." No human eye shall look upon that joyous consummation no human mind shall penetrate the wonder of the mystic’s ecstasy. If we go up with Jesus to the high summit of our spirit, to the mountain of the imageless fact, if we follow Him with the rapt gaze of simplicity, with that intimate and eager comradeship, up the steep slopes of our ascending love; then, led of Him, in Him, through Him, our veritable ascension may be accomplished—that paradoxical ascension of the Christian consciousness, which is really the humblest of descents. "To be immersed in humility is to be immersed in God." This is the triumph of complete self-loss, when at last the soul can say with Catherine, "My Me is God, nor do I know my self-hood out of Him." Then we, not knowing what befalls us, deep hidden in the Cloud of Unknowing, shall indeed for one unspeakable and transient moment "meet the Lord in the air." Then it is that exultant joy shall have its perfect work in us; snatching us from the tame fields of the "reasonable" and enfolding us in that radiant darkness which hides the supremely happy from the sight of other men.
Those other men, so wistful and so eager, long to understand, if they may not experience, these strange and wild adventures of the soul. But the spiritual marriage is not to be accomplished before the astonished eyes of the looker-on. This is the dearest secret of supremest love: and He is a "bashful lover, that His sweetheart before men entreats not." Darkness was on Calvary when first the spirit felt His "terrible initiatory caress." Now in the hour of its ecstatic union a shining cloud receives it, dark with excess of light. It knows not where it may be, for every landmark is transcended: giving and receiving have become for it meaningless and unintelligible words. It has passed from contemplation to fruition: is immersed as for the time of its ecstasy in the silent music and the murmurous solitude of God. In that swift act of spiritual union, that brief immersion in Eternity, He communicates to the soul Life, Knowledge, and Beatitude then all is consummated, all is renewed. Baptized into the embraces of Love, above all reason, above all knowledge, only under the veils of highest poetry can it report to us the faint outline of its wonder and its joy.
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1906 - The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary
1911 - Mysticism
1912 - Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing
1913 - The Mystic Way
1914 - Introduction: Richard Rolle - The Fire of Love
1915 - Practical Mysticism
1915 - Introduction: Songs of Kabir
1916 - Introduction: John of Ruysbroeck
1920 - The Essentials of Mysticism, and other Essays
1922 - The Spiral Way
1922 - The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (Upton Lectures)
1926 - Concerning the Inner Life
1928 - Man and the Supernatural
1929 - The House of the Soul
1933 - The Golden Sequence
1933 - Mixed Pasture: Twelve Essays
1936 - The Spiritual Life
1943 - Introduction to the Letters of Evelyn Underhill
by Charles Williams
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