Episode 50. Evelyn Underhill: Pioneer of Modern Spirituality

SYNOPSIS

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), Christian mystic, retreat conductor and spiritual director is the first of four 20th century Anglicans who receive pen portraits in Professor Shaw’s Pioneers of Modern Spirituality. With the others, the liturgist Percy Dearmer, the writer Rose Macaulay, and spiritual director Reginald Somerset Ward, Evelyn Underhill faced head-on increasing disillusion with the institutional church, declining attendance through unbelief, and the increased tendency of people to regard themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’.

Born into a comfortable English middle-class family (her father was a barrister), Evelyn escaped from the nominal Anglicanism of her background through mysticism. Private study over many years led to her publishing the ground breaking book, Mysticism in 1911; it introduced the possibility that mysticism might be practiced by ordinary people and is still in print today. Through the offices of a modernist Catholic layman, Baron von Hugel, her first spiritual director, her mysticism took on a markedly Christ centred, incarnational character. Formally entering the Church of England only in her forties, Underhill was soon in demand as the leader of quiet days and retreats for women working in the caring professions and priests, quietly subverting to some extent the limitations placed upon the ministry of women decades before the ordination of women. She particularly liked the retreat centre at Pleshey, Essex (please see Episode 43). Possessed of deep discernment, common sense and a wry sense of humour Evelyn spent many years replying by letter to spiritual enquirers.

The episode provides an insight into how imaginative Anglican writers and pastors responded to the modernist challenges and insights of Darwinism, Biblical criticism and depth psychology, whilst finding liturgically rich and intellectual satisfying resources within the traditions of the Church.

GUESTS

Professor Jane Shaw is a British historian of religion, Anglican priest and academic with a focus upon ‘lived religion’. She published Miracles in Enlightenment England in 2006. This was followed in 2011 by Octavia, Daughter of God, a sympathetic study of the Panacea Society, a utopian community founded in Bedford, England, under the firm leadership of a vicar’s widow named Mabel Barltrop. Pioneers of Modern Spirituality was published in 2018. Jane Shaw is the former Professor of Religious Studies and Dean for Religious Life at Stanford University and was previously Dean of Divinity and Fellow of New College, Oxford. Since 2018 she has been Principal of Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

Simon’s interview with Jane Shaw was recorded online on 14 July 2023.