Warfield on the Mysticism of Evelyn Underhill (Part Four) -- The Inevitable Result: Self-Deification

As mentioned in the previous installments, Warfield’s extensive “Review” of four of Evelyn Underhill’s books was published in the 1914 Princeton Theological Review, (105–123). Underhill’s works were gaining popularity at the time, the reason for Warfield’s detailed and critical response. Many of her books remain in print today, and she still has a following despite her death over eighty years ago (1941). Her “Christianized” form of mysticism (actually pantheism) still finds an audience among those who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” a phenomenon currently being addressed by Michael Horton’s three volume series on the subject.

In Part One, I took up Warfield’s less than favorable review of Evelyn Underhill’s works championing a so-called “Christian” mysticism—a subjective religious impulse grounded in ecstatic experience and not based upon the written word of God. In Part Two, Warfield addresses her notion of God as the “Absolute,” which, as we noted, has much in common with the inscription on the infamous Athenian altar dedicated to an “unknown god,” mentioned by Paul in Acts 17:23. A better term for the “religiosity of the human spirit,” might just be “the flesh,” as identified by Paul in Romans 8:5-8.

In Part Three, The Lion of Princeton presses her on matters of definition—a problem often associated with mystical religious experience, because such experience is difficult to put into explanatory words. But Christianity is essentially a religion of objective truth (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:1-8; 2 Corinthians 5:19) revealed in revelatory speech and acts, not in subjective experience. As noted, the heart should follow the mind, not skip over it into a mystical and subjective abyss divorced from those historical events upon which Christianity is based.

Warfield’s in-depth review of Underhill’s work is important for us to consider because mysticism always seems to resurface in times of religious confusion because its gives people a way to unite through shared mystical experience without any doctrinal commitments—“the heart rules over the head.” Such religious experience exists apart from creeds, objective truth claims, and redemptive history, which provides the foundation for a proper Christian faith, which looks to a very real incarnation, a life lived in perfect obedience to the law of Moses, the shedding of RH-typable blood and an empty tomb. Many of today’s “spiritual but not religious” folk have read or would enjoy the Underhill’s writings.

We pick up where we left off last time. Warfield points out that Underhill mistakes the writings of Plotius and her own pantheizing tendencies with that of “abounding culture,” which, she contends, creates a society which fosters those like her who seek God through direct experience. Warfield corrects her misguided assumption.

Miss Underhill would have us believe that Mysticism appears always in the train of great periods of abounding culture; it is the consummate flower of human culture. We think it truer to say that it appears always in the train of periods of the dominance of a Pantheizing philosophy: it is the effect in the religious mind of prevalent Pantheizing thought. . . . Miss Underhill allows (though this is far from all that she allows) that the Mystics at least speak the language of Plotinus. So true is this, that even she, though set upon cleansing the idea of Mysticism from the smudge of Pantheism, yet herself speaks the language of Plotinus, if indeed she stops with that. Though she may on occasion therefore insist that in his achieved “union with the Absolute,” the Mystic does not lose his identity in God, but “in the Mystic this union is conscious, personal thought”; and even indeed that what the Mystic “calls ‘Union with God’ is only his utter identification with the interests of the spiritual life”—she naturally cannot maintain this point of view, and everywhere lapses into language with quite other implications. . . . [I]t is of the very essence of Mysticism to maintain the immediate presence of the divine in man, needing only to be recognized and felt; and it is therefore that it is by the way of “contemplation” that the Mystic bids us seek and find God. Miss Underhill herself tells us that “the whole claim of the Mystics ultimately depends on man’s possession of pure being in ‘the spark of the soul’” “pure being” being but a synonym for the Absolute.

Notice, for Underhill, there is no mediated encounter with the Holy God. She seeks something quite apart from the intercessory work of Jesus Christ and the indwelling Holy Spirit as described in Romans 8:14-17. According to Underhill, we can encounter the immediate presence of the Absolute, who is “pure being.” Recall that Isaiah had an encounter with the Lord (Isaiah 6:1-13), so did Paul (Acts 9:1-16), as did John (Revelation 4-6). But these were certainly not the sort of experiences sought and endorsed by Miss Underhill. Isaiah, Paul, and John were immediately aware of their own sin and unworthiness and were filled with dread and terror. Union with the God of the Bible requires mediation, lest we be consumed, “for our God is a consuming fire,” (Hebrews 12:29).

Although you would think things could not get worse—they do, and quickly in fact. The mystic consciousness soon leads one to become aware of one’s own deity apart from which, no union is possible.

That in this “ineffable experience” called “the act of union,” something more is achieved than merely the identification of ourselves “with the interests of the spiritual life”—something very much like the identification of ourselves with God—emerges from such statements as the following: “All pleasurable and exalted states of Mystic consciousness in which the sense of I-hood persists, in which there is a loving and joyous relation between the Absolute as object and the self as subject, fall under the head of Illumination.” “The real distinction between the Illuminative and the Unitive life is that in Illumination the individuality of the subject—however profound his spiritual consciousness, however close his communion with the Infinite—remains separate and intact.”

As Warfield explains, the “I-hood” may remain,”separate and intact.” But in the following, it becomes clear that this expected “close communion with the Absolute,” leads to the following result—a transmutation, a veritable “deification” of the self. This may be the high point for the mystic, but is the low point of biblical expectation. In fact, seeking such requires repentance.

That the achievement of this union with the Absolute should be represented by some Mystics at least as “deification” can occasion no surprise. These Mystics certainly do not bate their breath when they speak of it: Miss Underhill herself calls their language with respect to it “blunt and positive.” “If we are to allow,” she writes, however, “that the Mystics have ever attained the object of their quest, I think we must also allow that such attainment involves the transmutation of the self to that state which they call, for want of exact language, ‘deified.’ The necessity of such transmutation is an implicit of their first position: the law that ‘we behold that which we are, and are that which we behold.’ Eckhart, in whom the language of deification assumes its most extreme form, justifies it upon this necessity. ‘If,’ he says, ‘I am to know God directly, I must become completely He and He I: so that this He and this I become and are one I.’”

John Lenon’s famous line from the Walrus comes to mind—“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,” summing up Underhill’s theology quite well. Had Warfield lived into the age of the Beatles, my guess is that he would have cited this line in response. Experience of the Absolute, leads to union with the Absolute. This is nothing less than self-deification. The mystic thinks this a goal—the orthodox Christian sees it as blasphemy. There is a load echo here from Genesis 3:5, the challenge to Eve offered by the serpent. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Eve embraced it, so has Underhill.

As Warfield explains, this is where a pantheistic mysticism ultimately takes us.

“The achievement of reality, and deification,” says Miss Underhill, “are then one and the same thing: necessarily so, since we know that only the divine is the real.” Accordingly “the Mystic Way” begins “by the awakening within the self of a new and embryonic consciousness; a consciousness of divine reality, as opposed to the illusory sense-world in which she was immersed.” There is nothing more fundamental to the whole Mystical consciousness than the conviction that what we shall see when we retreat into the “cell of self-knowledge” is just that Reality which stands to it for God.

A retreat into the “cell of self-knowledge” is in reality a sort of prison from the real world in which we live. Paul describes this as a darkened understanding (Ephesians 4:18-19). God can become whatever we think or want him to be—which make us his equal if not his superior.

Warfield is quick to point out that the mystic beats a quick retreat from the deifying logic of their position, but the mystic cannot truly escape the trap of their own making.

It is easy to point out that these same Mystics nevertheless protest that by this transmutation the creature does not really become God; and that others prefer the figure of marriage with God to that of deification to express the “mystic union” which they seek in common. But this is only to say that they are Christians as well as Mystics, and that their Christianity modifies their Mysticism: it does not throw doubt upon but rather establishes the fact that the truly—unmodified—Mystical doctrine involves the identification of the creature with the deity. And that for a much deeper reason than the merely epistemological one pointed out by Miss Underhill in the passage just quoted from her).

Nevertheless, the mystic sees themselves as a chip off the divine block.

“What constitutes the main distinction between mysticism and other piety is that the ordinary pious man has above everything an eye for that which distinguishes him from God: for his insignificance in contrast with God’s greatness, for his finiteness in contrast with God’s infinity and eternity, for his sinfulness in contrast with God’s holiness. In their feeling of this distinction men remain clearly conscious of their humanity and look upon their God as something peculiar, different from themselves. Of this distinguishableness of God, however, the Mystic will know nothing. God is to him indistinguishable as He is incomprehensible, invisible and infinite and therefore all-embracing. No one is in a position to draw a sharp line between humanity and deity; and therefore this line is capable of being crossed and man accordingly can attain this union.” Behind this somewhat negative attitude there lies the positive conviction of the Mystic that there exists in himself a native spark of “pure Being” which is in and of itself divine, and that it is his part to blow this spark into a flame that he may become truly himself in the consciousness that he is really God.

The mystic path leads to an “awakening and embryonic consciousness,” away from a “reality” completely independent of the sensuous world into which God has placed us. The mystic prefers darkness to light where they can find a deity of their own imagining—a deity which looks back at them in the mirror.

“The achievement of reality, and deification,” says Miss Underhill, “are then one and the same thing: necessarily so, since we know that only the divine is the real.” Accordingly “the Mystic Way” begins “by the awakening within the self of a new and embryonic consciousness; a consciousness of divine reality, as opposed to the illusory sense-world in which she was immersed”. There is nothing more fundamental to the whole Mystical consciousness than the conviction that what we shall see when we retreat into the “cell of self-knowledge” is just that Reality which stands to it for God.

To be continued . . .