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 Assumption

"Allons to that which is endless as it was beginningless" says Whitman. Here is the wayfarer’s motto, the rule of the Spiral Road. The homely human life remade, the transient ecstasy of perfect contemplation, even the fertile and inspired career of charity—these cannot content the soul’s deepest craving for a perfect fruition of and response to the Beloved. Dante found in the freshness and beauty of the Earthly Paradise no continuing city, but sought at once the Ladder to the Stars; and so it is with every pilgrim of the Infinite who has at last attained the summit of the purging mount of prayer. He too goes up in order that he may "lose himself upon the heights." His newly-anointed senses demand some unalloyed objective; the fire of his all-conquering love demands eternal union with a greater flame. "The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," and nothing less than this total self-loss in Him can suffice them. He who is here discerned beneath veils, and because discerned, so passionately desired, the mystic would encounter face to face. "Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is restless." From Him we came: to Him we must return. Only in His presence is fullness of joy—

"Però che il ben, ch’è del volere oblietto
    tutto s’accoglie in lei, e fuor di quella
    è difettivo ciò che lì è perfetto."

"For the Good which is the object of the will      Therein is wholly gathered, and outside it      That is defective, which therein is perfect."           (Paradiso, xxxiii. 103.)

Hence it is that the event which common sense had called the "falling asleep" of Mary, our pattern and our mother, that uncommon sense which is the soul’s true instinct for Reality has called her "raising up." For indeed, it is less a sleep than an awakening. The emphasis is not upon the laying down to rest of the wearied mind and body at the end of our little busy human day, but rather upon the exultant liberation and uprushing of freed spirit to its home. Men speak of the soul’s achievement of this freedom, as of a dreadful rending of that soul from body, the shedding of the essential characters of personality at the bidding of corruption, weakness, death. But it is of the very essence of the story of the Assumption that Mary is here declared to take with her in that last, supremest flight, not some attenuated "spiritual principle"—rather all that we feel most warmly human and most dear."Transit ad æthera, virgo puerpera, virgula Jesse,
Non sine corpore, sed sine tempore, tendit adesse."

"The Virgin that childed mounted into heaven, the little rod of Jesse, not without body but without time, she entendeth to be there." (Caxton’s Golden Legend: The Assumption of our Lady.)

Humanity in its wholeness is here lifted up into life eternal, into the spiritual Kingdom of the Son of God.

True, that Kingdom is here-and-now, immanent in all things; for heaven, as the mystics tell us, is "a temper not a place," and those who dwell in Christ are there already, though still "entangled in the flesh." In no far land need we seek it; "where the body lies, there is heaven and hell." Yet an assumption there must be, a catching up of created to Creator, not of its own strength and volition, but by surrender to His attractive power, if the soul’s cyclic history is to come to its appointed end. Those who have skill to read may find hidden in this mystery the final secret of transcendence; the august declaration of the veritable nature of Man. Maria Virgo assumpta est ad æthereum thalamum, in quo rex regum stellato sedet solio.

“Mary Virgin was caught up to the heavenly habitations, where the King of kings sitteth on His starry throne.” (Roman Breviary First Vespers of the Assumption Antiphon.)

As the nun who kneels before the Tabernacle is caught to communion with a timeless, spaceless Presence, sees the "flaming ramparts" shrink and fade away; so the incarnate genius of humanity entering at last into perfect fruition of the Being of God.

What is that fruition? The mystics try in vain to tell us: for a mighty gulf is fixed between their mind and ours. "Above all knowledge," says Ruysbroeck, of that summit of the soul’s transcendence—even the high language of poetry breaking as it were in his hands—"I feel, I discover, I surprise a bottomless and limitless abyss of darkness, that transcends all qualities, that transcends the names of all created things, that transcends the very names of God. Behold! this is that death, that ecstasy of transcendence, that evanishment of all that is most sublime into the One Eternal Mystery, that hoped-for peace which we discern in the deeps of our being, far superior to all external worlds." This is the "Divine Dark" of the great mystics: dim to the earth-trained intellect, most radiant to the heavenward-tending heart. It is the "peace that passeth understanding" of the saints: the dim silence where all lovers lose themselves. Even in our exile we may sometimes look at it, as Plato’s prisoners peeping from their cave. But the spirit whose education is finished, who has trod the long way in faith and hope and love, shall come out from this cave to that sunlight "dark with excess of bright" to find that it is no mere Vision, but a Home. That burning prayer of Christ—that all may be one as He and the Father are one, humanity sharing in fact as in name the consummation of its Priest and King—this demands the assumption, the induction of the spirit into that state or region; and receives its perfect demonstration in the "beating Godward" of the humble yet exultant Mother of the Divine Grace. In this act she completes the spiral way which links Divine and human: dying, and behold! she lives indeed.

"At last thou hast departed, and gone to the Unseen;
    ‘Tis marvellous by what way thou wentest from the world.
Thou didst strongly shake thy wings and feathers, and, having broken thy cage,
    Didst take to the air and journey towards the world of soul."

She could not help but fly to Him, once the links that bound her to the earth were severed.Exaltavit humiles.

He hath exalted the humble. (Luke i. 52.)

So little and light she was, so meek and humble, that nothing opposed the steadfast attraction of God. "I was caught up to Thee," said the storm-tossed Augustine, "by Thy Beauty, and dragged back again by my own weight." But the downward pull of selfhood is lifted from the utterly self-naughted soul. "Pure and illuminated," says an old mystic, "she sees nor God nor herself: but God sees this of Him, in her, for her, withouten her; that shows her that there is none but He. Nor she knows but Him, nor she loves but Him, nor she praises but Him, for there is but He." Her weight is her love, and bears her without deflection to the only compelling Centre of the Universe.

In the beautiful old legend of the life and death of Mary, it is said that flowering lilies were found within the tomb where her body had been laid to rest; new life and loveliness upspringing even to the last from the contact of that pure meekness with the world. But the body itself, the tangible witness to them of her presence, those who had loved her found not any more. Emigravit! it was hidden with Christ in God. And Thomas, the careful carpenter, who proved all things by rule and square, looked in the sepulchre and could not believe: for there was nothing on which he could lay hold. The careful dialectic of an intellect apt at the affairs of time and space failed here, and left him in the lurch. Then, says the dear and graceful story, a sign was given him: a sign that the promise of God was true, that Mary lived indeed, and in her all other souls surrendered to His Will. The girdle of her virginity, the zone that circled and fenced in her dedicated life, was let down as it were a link from heaven to earth—witness that its office was fulfilled, since all separations were transcended: that her life was at last become one with the life of the All. "If I embrace Him, I shall be virgin indeed." The primal paradox of fruitful purity is established once more, as in the Annunciation; the flaming secret at the heart of things.

Yet not alone as the uniquely chosen Mother of Christ is Mary made a partaker of the Divine Nature. She is the firstfruits and completion of the Incarnation, the key to all cosmic meanings, an earnest of the perfect indwelling of humanity in God. She goes up, then, as type and harbinger of the race which has struggled in her footsteps up the difficult mountain of self-knowledge and prayer—more, of all creation groaning and travailing even until now, awaiting the transmuting of all things in the Divine image, the perfect manifestation of the liberty of the children of God. The poet sees her thus, going up from the ocean of Becoming; set about with the banners of victory, and bearing in her hands the brimming chalice of intensest life.

"Who is She, in candid vesture,
    Rushing up from out the brine?
Treading with resilient gesture
    Air, and with that Cup Divine?
She in us and we in her are
    Beating Godward: all that pine.
Lo! a wonder and a terror!
    The Sun hath blushed the Sea to wine!
He the Anteros and Eros,
    She the Bride and Spirit: for
Now the days of promise near us,
    And the sea shall be no more."

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

COPYRIGHT

As far as I have been able to ascertain, all of these works are now in the public domain. If you own copyright in any of these, please let me know immediately and I shall either negotiate permission to use them or remove them from the site as appropriate.

DCW