Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) is widely recognised as a formative voice in early twentieth-century mysticism. Scholarship has traced her influence on Anglican spirituality, but less attention has been given to the transformation of her thought and its developing theological framework in the 1920s. This article argues that Evelyn Underhill’s turn from an aspirational mysticism to christocentric participation represents a modern Anglican retrieval of Augustinian grace and divine initiative, correcting late-Victorian voluntarism and anticipating contemporary doctrinal conversations. It corrects readings that treat Underhill primarily as a devotional mystic by showing her explicit doctrinal development regarding grace and participation.
Underhill’s reorientation is not only a personal transformation but also parallels wider theological currents in interwar Anglicanism and contemporary thought. The world around her was changing. Her early writings, shaped by late-Victorian idealism and Neoplatonic categories, portrayed the soul’s ascent to the divine with little reference to Christ or the church. After the First World War, however, bereavement, cultural disillusionment, and sustained spiritual direction under Friedrich von Hügel moved her away from what he critiqued as pure mysticism toward a theology grounded in divine initiative and the incarnate life of Christ. While her development parallels broader interwar retrievals of divine initiative, it reflects an internal theological reorientation rather than simply mirroring her context. The movement of her theological framework from a focus on anthropocentric ascent to a christological emphasis on divine initiative not only reshaped her own life but also contributed to a reconfiguration of Christian thinking on the role of divine initiative.Footnote 1 This study employs historical-theological retrieval, based on Underhill’s own writings and her correspondence with von Hügel, in order to recover Underhill not merely as a devotional writer but as a constructive voice in twentieth-century doctrine of grace and participation.
Although Underhill remains a central figure in modern Christian mysticism and theology, scholarship has often focused on her devotional influence over her doctrinal development. Bernard McGinn identifies Underhill as the figure most ‘widely read’ in English on mysticism, reaching a ‘broad public’ with insights on spiritual anthropology and process of growth.Footnote 2 Mark McIntosh highlights Underhill as a guide to prayer and Christian mysteries, while Sarah Coakley sees Underhill as ‘powerful lay’ woman who participated in spiritual direction.Footnote 3 Dana Greene highlights her literary artistry, Robyn Wrigley-Carr emphasises her formation under von Hügel, and Ann Loades situates her within Anglican spirituality. Much less attention has been given to her theological development around grace and divine initiative.Footnote 4 What has been missed is the significant turn in Underhill’s spiritual anthropology, which has not been sufficiently identified or interpreted in explicitly theological terms, particularly regarding grace as prior to desire.
This essay suggests that Underhill belongs not merely to the study of modern mysticism but also to the wider theological retrieval of divine initiative and the transformation of desire in Christ. The argument unfolds in four stages, corresponding to her own development over time: (1) voluntarist ascent; (2) war, disillusionment and fracturing of voluntarist mysticism; (3) von Hügel and the reordering of spiritual agency; (4) christological mediation and Mysticism (1930).
It is crucial to note that Underhill’s writings are not static. What is encountered in her often cited and landmark book from early in her career, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911), differs significantly from the christological framework of her later writing and addresses. To read her fairly, this evolution must be traced. Selective reading of Underhill’s early works risks obscuring the significant doctrinal reconfiguration of her mature theology. This article offers a hermeneutical key to engage with her writings: given the significant influences that shape her thinking over her life and the long period over which she wrote, lectured and led retreats, Underhill’s writings must be read developmentally, not statically. As with Karl Barth, who, like Underhill, wrote predominantly in the first half of the early twentieth century, and whose early writings are now distinguished from his mature dogmatics, students of Underhill must recognise that her early accounts of mysticism are not her most lasting and do not represent her final word. Her turn to a theology of grace, away from an approach to mysticism that prioritises ascent through human consciousness and will, requires that her body of work be read developmentally. This article aims to establish and understand this change and what it means for a theological retrieval of her contribution today.
Voluntarist ascent in early Underhill
The roots of Underhill’s theological transformation lie in her early formation, which combined personal experiences with wider religious currents. These influences, diverse and at times contradictory, generated the tensions that eventually proved central for her reorientation toward Christocentrism.
Born in Wolverhampton in 1875, Underhill grew up in London in a household shaped by her father Arthur’s Deist outlook, where God was conceived as a supreme Reality more akin to a Platonic Absolute than the Christian Trinity.Footnote 5 Though intellectually formative, this framework was also fragile. She later judged it inadequate before the realities of sin and grace. As a teenager, she recorded in her notebook:
As to religion, I don’t quite know, except that I believe in a God, and think that it is better to love and help the poor people round me than to say that I love an abstract Spirit whom I have never seen … If we are to see God at all it must be through nature and our fellow man.Footnote 6
Underhill’s outlook in her youth mirrored the unsettled theological landscape of late-Victorian Anglicanism.Footnote 7 Broad Church moral theism stressed ethical action and immanence but often left transcendence out; Anglo-Catholic currents restored sacramental depth yet risked overemphasising aestheticism; modernist approaches to the Bible and theology invited suspicion after the papal condemnation of 1907. Her intuition, ‘If we are to see God at all it must be through nature and our fellow man’, reveals her preference at this stage for lived spiritual experience, seeing one’s own ethical action as primary. The absence of a christological centre in this phase of her life becomes clear in retrospect, especially when contrasted with her later theological accounts of union with Christ, which will be discussed below.
Although she wrote about her early years that she was ‘not brought up to religion’, Footnote 8 she was nonetheless drawn toward Christian tradition and was eventually baptised and confirmed in the Church of England. While studying philosophy at King’s College London, she encountered Plotinus and Neoplatonism, which she later described as her first ‘real’ spiritual participation: the discovery of God as Absolute Being mediated through goodness and beauty. Annual travels to France and Italy reinforced this orientation, as she viewed Catholic architecture and art as sacramental signs of transcendence.Footnote 9
By the early 1900s, she also explored the occult, briefly associating with the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, a movement emblematic of late-Victorian quests for spiritual immediacy beyond the church.Footnote 10 Her first novel, The Grey World (1904), portrayed unseen reality refracted through the visible and embodied the Neoplatonic convictions that would shape her seminal study Mysticism (1911).
Her father’s Deism, Protestant liberalism, Neoplatonism, and experimentation with the occult together formed the crucible of Underhill’s early mystical theology. Yet the unresolved tensions they generated between transcendence and immanence, individual and institution, beauty and ethics became the very pressures that later drove her toward a theology of grace and the incarnate Christ.
In February 1907, during a retreat at a French Franciscan convent, Underhill recorded an ‘overpowering vision’ that lacked explicit Christian content yet persuaded her of the truth of Catholicism.Footnote 11 The experience marked a turn from agnosticism toward Christian mysticism, though without firm ecclesial anchoring. Soon after she confessed, ‘I have got half-way from agnosticism to Catholicism and seem unable to get any further … I want to get out, but without sacrificing intellectual honesty’.Footnote 12 This struggle to reconcile religious experience with intellectual integrity reflected the broader modernist debates over authority and experience in the early twentieth century.Footnote 13
She later described this period as a ‘borderland’ – both ecclesiastically, between Anglicanism and Catholicism (exercising theological caution in the wake of Pascendi dominici gregis [1907]), and spiritually, between magic and mysticism.Footnote 14 As Dana Greene notes, her early framework remained ‘inward’, while Robyn Wrigley-Carr emphasises the lack of structural mediation in these years.Footnote 15 Ann Loades she shows how Underhill moved toward sacramental worship within Anglicanism while retaining a somewhat ambiguous position within her tradition.Footnote 16 Thus, her borderland position was not merely personal but symptomatic of wider Anglican struggles to reconcile mystical immediacy with ecclesial mediation.
This tension in Underhill is revealed in Mysticism (1911), where human striving remained central: mystics were ‘pioneers of higher consciousness’, and union with the divine was cast in terms of a voluntarist ascent paradigm.Footnote 17 The very voluntarism of this framework, where the will’s impassioned desire took precedence, would become problematic for her. At the centre of her framework in this early work stood the will: she defined mysticism as the will’s impassioned desire to transcend the sensory world and unite with ‘the one eternal and ultimate Object of love’.Footnote 18 This emphasis would later stand in marked contrast to her conviction towards grace and the fundamentality of God’s initiative.
War, disillusionment and the fracturing of voluntarist mysticism
The First World War constituted a decisive turning point in Underhill’s early theological framework, with its emphasis on voluntarist ascent. She later wrote of the war’s shattering effect, ‘during the war I went to pieces’. Footnote 19 The conflict birthed a theological reassessment, moving her away from self-willed ascent and toward recognition of divine initiative. On the eve of the war, she published The Mystic Way (1913) and Practical Mysticism (1914), works that presented Christianity as essentially a mystical religion rather than an institutional system. Jesus was depicted as the paradigmatic mystic, and readers were assured that such experiences were ‘well within your reach’. Footnote 20 In retrospect, these texts reveal the limits of her early framework: theocentric but not yet Christocentric, optimistic about human capacity but untested by evil. The catastrophe of war exposed the inadequacy of Neoplatonic voluntarist ascent when confronted with death and human anguish.
Underhill’s crisis of metaphysical confidence and theological adequacy during the war was reflective of a wider theological crisis. Across Europe, liberal optimism gave way to a new insistence on divine initiative Karl Barth’s Römerbrief (1919; 2nd edition, 1922) rejected cultural religion as incapable of addressing sin and judgement, while William Temple urged Anglican spirituality to recover the incarnation as God’s decisive act for a broken world.Footnote 21 As Dana Greene observes, Underhill’s wartime disillusionment marked the end of her romantic confidence in the soul’s capacity for unassisted ascent. Robyn Wrigley-Carr further notes that only in this crucible did she begin to recognise grace as prevenient and decisive, a recognition that would be sealed in her spiritual direction under von Hügel. The war provided the historical and existential frame for her theological correction: not the world’s love of God, but God’s love for the world in Christ.
Her postwar writings reveal this disillusionment. In a 1918 review of Dean Inge’s Philosophy of Plotinus, she contrasted Neoplatonism’s premise, ‘The world so loves God’, with the Johannine affirmation, ‘God so loved the world’, recognising that divine initiative, not human striving, lay at the heart of Christian faith.Footnote 22 By 1920, she was more explicit: in ‘The Essentials of Mysticism’ she dismissed the Neoplatonic phrase ‘alone with the Alone’ as ‘that poisonous phrase of Plotinus’,Footnote 23 a dramatic reversal from her earlier admiration of the same words as ‘superb’.Footnote 24 This reversal underscored her conviction that only the God revealed in Christ could confront the moral void of Neoplatonism and the reality of evil.
The destruction of the Great War exposed the limits of her earlier framework. It also revealed what fuelled her gradual change towards a new direction in her doctrinal development. What was an early, treasured and central claim her writing and spiritual anthropology are now questioned and rejected. A Plotinian spirituality proved insufficient and uncomfortable, lacking the strength of transcendence she would see communicated through the church and the concrete, grace-filled presence of the incarnate Christ.
Yet, despite this developing theological framework, Underhill’s own spiritual life remained unsettled. She joined the Anglican Church in 1920 and continued to publish, lecture and enjoy public success, yet privately she confessed an instability in her earlier framework. Margaret Cropper describes Underhill during this time in the following terms: ‘In 1921 Evelyn Underhill, outwardly was in a great position: just asked to give the Oxford lecture on Religion, was publishing, writing for periodicals, had many good friends and devoted readers, a happy marriage and loyal parents but…[she was asking herself] “What lack I yet?”’ Footnote 25 Cropper’s question names the breakdown of mystical voluntarism and the first stirrings of a doctrinal outlook grounded in grace as divine gift rather than human achievement. At forty-six, Underhill turned decisively to Friedrich von Hügel for sustained spiritual direction, later acknowledging, ‘I owe him my entire spiritual life’. Footnote 26
Von Hügel and the reordering of spiritual agency
Although in 1918 she had cautioned that mysticism ‘divorced from all institutional expression…tends to become sentimental’, until 1921, Underhill’s preferred term for the divine – human relation, as seen in the titles of her major works to date (viz., Mysticism, The Mystic Way, Practical Mysticism), was ‘mysticism’. Footnote 27 Her 1921 Oxford lecture, published as The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, marked a lexical and conceptual shift, as ‘spirituality’ became her operative category. This change was not semantic but substantive. For her, spirituality presupposed God’s prior action and the creature’s responsive participation, increasingly conceived with ecclesial mediation in view.Footnote 28 While ‘mysticism’ in her earlier usage leaned toward a Plotinian framework of voluntarist ascent, her adoption of ‘spirituality’ from 1921 onward marked a personal correction. While neither term can be reduced to such clear polarity in the wider history of Christian thought, Underhill’s usage in the 1920s makes the shift symbolically significant for her own doctrinal reflection.
This shift crystallised under the direction of Friedrich von Hügel from late 1921. Wrigley-Carr has shown that their correspondence eventually leads to a realisation that ‘union with Christ recreates the entire person.’Footnote 29 This level of transformation makes it difficult to overestimate the influence of von Hügel on Underhill’s theological development. Underhill’s understanding of the primary initiative for spiritual ascent is transformed. Their annual reports and his replies preserve a rare record of theology in the mode of theological and spiritual guidance.Footnote 30 Von Hügel critiqued her tendency toward what he called ‘pure mysticism’, by which he meant an over-intellectual, voluntarist spirituality detached from sacramental life – more Plotinian abstraction than Pauline participation. He urged her to ‘de-intellectualize’ and above all to reverse causality: ‘Humble recognition of the reaching out of the divine to the human does more for the soul’s best interests than any arrogant reaching-out of the human to the divine’. Footnote 31
Underhill’s Rule of December 1921 echoed this correction: ‘Entirely mystical and purely non-successive religion is a dangerous abstraction from reality. Further, religiously, the soul requires God’s own descent into it – the whole way – in human and homely forms and ways, rather than its ascent to Him’. Footnote 32 The schema here is reversed from her earlier position: not self-ascent but divine descent, grace as God’s initiative.Footnote 33
Grace not only redirected her theology from anthropocentrism to theocentrism, but also from theocentric abstraction to Christology. Direction with von Hügel exposed her difficulty in making Christ the object of attention: in December 1921, she admitted, ‘I can’t do it … God seems the only inevitable Object’.Footnote 34 Von Hügel warned that she risked drifting toward abstraction by neglecting the incarnation, the ‘historical happenings’ of God’s self-abasement in Jesus, and urged her ‘to pray to God Unincarnate with thoughts and affections as to Nazareth’.Footnote 35 The baron pinpoints the weakness Underhill experienced as her theological outlook remained on the level of ‘pure spirit…to Pure Spirit’.Footnote 36 Gradually her language became explicitly christological: ‘We are in Christ and He in us … the Spirit of Christ transfusing every part’. Footnote 37 By late 1923, she affirmed, ‘A happy life is not “alone with the Alone,” but union with the Spirit of Jesus at work in the world.’ Footnote 38 Her early focus on a Neoplatonic divine was replaced by a pointed emphasis on a Christ present in the world, who by virtue of the incarnation is the object of her theology. Her christological vocabulary became explicit: ‘We are in Christ and He in us’.
She later identified three criteria for discerning the reality of grace in the incarnate Christ: (a) given-ness rather than achievement, (b) certitude and obligation, and (c) absence of striving to obtain or retain. These became for her theological marks of grace and signals of divine initiative rather than psychological manufacture. In her own words, the first criterion is ‘what you call given-ness; unexpectedness, entire non-earnedness’, language captured as ‘grace’ in her own words by 1930.Footnote 39 These expressions stand in contrast to her early agnosticism, giving insight into a theological framework relying heavily on transcendence.
Her ‘shellfish’ image captured the new causality: God as the sea that supports and permeates, so that any ‘decent thing we do’ is not ours but the ‘direct activity of the one Love, passing right through and vivifying one like the sea waters … through a shell fish’.Footnote 40 Human agency is derivative; divine initiative primary. In these images, the logic is consistent with divine causality preceding human action, mediation grounding immediacy, and incarnation replacing abstraction. Von Hügel’s theology gave Underhill the categories by which her spirituality could be re-centred in grace and Christ.
This growing shift appears in her own counsel to those who sought her spiritual direction: ‘By sacramentalism I mean the humble acceptance of grace through the medium of things – God coming into our souls…’Footnote 41 and ‘Remember all life comes to you from God…’Footnote 42 The pattern was consistent for Underhill in that God acts, the human responds. Underhill’s reorientation is not merely experiential or devotional; it represents a theological reconfiguration in which divine initiative precedes and grounds human response.
To situate this development, it is necessary to identify the doctrinal space into which her mature theology of grace fits. The anchor of grace as the cause of ascent resonates with the classical Augustinian conviction that divine initiative precedes and generates the soul’s desire for God in the first place. Augustine confesses, ‘You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness…You touched me, and I am set on fire…’,Footnote 43 and in so doing insists that human longing for God arises only because God acts first.Footnote 44 In the interwar period of the Anglican world, this focus remains in von Hügel, whose theology emphasised receptivity and mediated grace above a disembodied religious impulse; this was a ‘foundational concept’ for the baron as Underhill’s spiritual director.Footnote 45
This thinking occurred at a time when there was a wider emphasis on divine descent and participation, and though this wider context did not exercise direct causal influence on Underhill, it remains an important piece of context for her development. As already noted, Barth and Temple’s work shows parallels with the ways in which Underhill’s later theology reflects a re-anchoring of mysticism in Christ’s initiative, aligning contemplative practice with doctrinal accounts of prevenient grace.Footnote 46 This is not a claim of direct intellectual dependence, but of thematic convergence within a wider interwar Christian recovery of divine initiative.
Christological mediation and the 1930 Mysticism
In her 1924 address to The Conference on Politics, Economics, and Citizenship (C.O.P.E.C.), Underhill extended the logic of grace from the soul to history, describing the conference as arising from ‘the pressure of God upon history’, an instance of God’s ‘unceasing action on human thought and life’. Footnote 47 Here, grace was not only personal but historical, opposed to human ‘self-centeredness’.
By the end of the 1920s, Underhill’s earlier oscillations had yielded to a stable christocentric synthesis. She admitted, ‘I take back … every word I said against [christocentric focus] … I am still mainly theocentric’, seeking latitude regarding Nicene and Logos language.Footnote 48 By June 1923, she reported that her doctrinal ‘oscillations’ had resolved into a ‘steady line’: Christology now predominated, though vestiges of theocentrism remained.Footnote 49 Thereafter, fluctuations persisted, but within a decidedly christocentric frame. This was not simply a matter of private devotion but a theological reconfiguration with parallels across interwar Anglican thought.
In the preface to the twelfth edition of Mysticism (1930), Underhill publicly acknowledged her correction. She emphasised concrete Reality as first cause and incentive, the God–soul relation that makes growth possible, and the prevenient action of the supernatural – ‘grace’ – over against evolutionary or emergent explanations. Genuine mystical knowing, she insisted, requires the ‘element of given-ness’. She explains,
Were I, then, now planning this book for the first time…more emphasis would be given (a) to the concrete…Reality over against the mystic…(b)…the relation between…God and soul, which makes possible this development; (c) to the predominant part played in that development by the free and prevenient action of the Supernatural – in theological language, by ‘grace’ – as against all merely evolutionary or emergent theories of spiritual transcendence.Footnote 50
This preface offers the clearest programmatic statement of her 1920s reorientation. For Underhill, mystical knowing was no longer a human achievement but the reception of God’s initiative in Christ. This marks the culmination of her theological correction where grace descends, Christ mediates, the church conveys and the soul responds.
In The Spiritual Life (developed in the late 1920s, but only published in 1933), she described the in-breaking ‘something’ that penetrates and reorders existence, pointing beyond time to transcendent Reality, which she explicitly named God. God is present to and pressing upon creation; authentic religious instinct is given rather than manufactured. Hence her frequent appeal to Anglican prayers: ‘Pour down on us the continual dew of thy blessing…. Pour into our hearts such love toward thee’. Footnote 51 Dependence on God was balanced by courageous human initiative, yet primacy remained with divine self-giving. Mere self-determination, she concluded, became ‘ridiculous’ once one lived ‘sustained and fed by a present God’.Footnote 52 A recurring feature of her retreats was the closing prayer attributed to Thomas à Kempis: ‘Defend and keep the soul of thy little servant…and thy grace going with him, direct him by the way of peace to the country of everlasting clearness.’Footnote 53 The prayer epitomised her mature conviction that grace, not self-striving, initiates and sustains the spiritual life.
Conclusion
The trajectory of Underhill’s theological framework in the 1920s, from voluntarist ascent to theocentric grace and finally to an explicitly christocentric account of contemplation, illustrates with unusual clarity the theological currents of her age. Her approach to grace rooted in divine initiative and incarnation offers a case study in modern doctrinal development. This trajectory reveals a theological re-ordering in which divine agency grounds human participation, locating transformation in grace rather than aspiration. Her trajectory also illustrates more than a cultural or ecclesial correction; it reflects a substantial doctrinal reorientation that converged with wider currents in interwar theology.
Read developmentally, Underhill’s writings reveal how war, bereavement and conflict over the object of devotion became decisive for her reorientation toward grace and Christocentric thought. The significance lies not in biographical detail but in her resisting moralistic optimism that saw growth related firstly to willpower and technique. Underhill’s correction from a model of Plotinian ascent to one of divine descent reflects the emergence of a christological vision grounded in transformative incarnation.
Underhill reached stability amid cultural disillusionment by emphasising given-ness – that is, grace as gift, not achievement. Her theology situates the Christian life beyond psychological uplift toward objectivity and transcendence so that God’s self-giving precedes human response and informs assurance. Her language of gift and the pressure of God upon history countered voluntarist mysticism, situating grace as the ground of stability in a fractured age. Her mature synthesis coheres with doctrinal accounts of prevenient grace, resisting voluntarism and devotional self-construction by identifying assurance in the objective given-ness of God’s action in Christ.
Underhill refused to treat Christian life as a plateau to be attained. Her correspondence and practice of confession, retreats and regular attendance in institutional religion give shape to a lifelong growth. Her mature theology reflects a sense of ongoing movement, imperfect but mediated by word, prayer, sacraments and the life of the Church of England. These practices embodied her theological correction from ‘pure mysticism’ detached from history to a sacramental, christocentric framework grounded in ecclesial locality. Here, her theological conviction converged with her devotional practice in that God gives Christ through the church by the Spirit.
Also striking is the alignment of her later account of grace and participation with others in the history of Christian theology and spirituality. Underhill does not stand alone. Her shift parallels classic accounts in which grace precedes and enables desire. She is also part of a much older conversation with those facing the limitations of human creatureliness. It is a strand she shares that runs through Augustine’s emphasis on prior action of grace, through Bernard Clairvaux, who sees Christ as ‘kissing’ the seeker and mediating divine transcendence,Footnote 54 and through St. Theresa of Ávila’s advice to devotees to be ready ‘for God to lead’.Footnote 55
In conclusion, Underhill’s decade of re-centring may be captured in two movements where the cause of contemplation shifted from self to God, and the object shifted from abstract deity to the incarnate Christ. The result is a theological account of contemplation in which giver and gift precede the seeker. As Augustine prayed, ‘I should not exist were You not already with me’.Footnote 56 And as Underhill confessed, ‘we are in Christ and He in us’.Footnote 57 Underhill’s trajectory illustrates how theological reflection functioned in her own context, as a site where questions of grace and transformation were negotiated. Her trajectory exemplifies the emergence of a conviction that became increasingly widespread among Christian writers of the early twentieth century: that renewal was rightly framed less in terms of human ascent and more in terms of divine initiative in Christ. In recovering grace as prior to desire, Underhill stands as a modern witness to the primacy of divine action and the christological mediation of participation in God.
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