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Writings
About Evelyn Underhill
Evelyn Underhill: Middle-Way Within
The Via Media?
Todd E. Johnson
""Souls who live an heroic spiritual
life within great religious traditions and institutions, attain a
rare volume and vividness of religious insight, conviction and reality"---far
more seldom achieved by the religious individualist." Evelyn
Underhill applied this quote of Baron von Hugel to the Oxford Tractarians
and their spiritual revitalization of the Church of England. As Underhill
describes the work of the Tractarians---those heroic souls whose vision
of a church filled with mystery and awe created a renaissance with
Anglicanism---one is struck by the similarity to her own life almost
a century later. Underhill describes the Tractarians as restoring
a sense of the Catholic tradition to the church, of reviving liturgical
and sacramental worship, advocating a disciplined life, and emphasizing
Christian sanctity. The examples of Underhill's writings which square
nicely with each of these four areas are numerous. However the context
in which they were written was very different.
The Anglican communion is often described as a via media---a middle-way
between the Roman Catholic tradition and the Protestant reformation.
Yet within the church of England in Underhill's day there were various
theological schools, a variety of liturgical fashions, and sharp disagreement
over the essentials of faith. It becomes clear when examining these
issues that Underhill steers an irenic middle way through the turbulent
waters of her day.
The most obvious division within the Anglican communion was over worship.
At the turn of the century Anglican worship styles ranged from simple
"Evangelical" worship with an emphasis on preaching and
hymnody to elaborate "Anglo-Catholic" worship reflecting
the Catholic tradition both past and present. The result of this variety
of worship styles and their supporting theologies led to the attempted
revision of the Book of Common Prayer in both 1927 and again in 1928.
No revision was found to be "common" or acceptable to all
of the camps within the church, failing to create the unity sought.
Controversial issues were over the reservation of the Eucharistic
elements, whether the principal Sunday service should be Morning prayer
or Eucharist, and the form of consecration used in the Eucharistic
prayer, either the Words of Institution or the epiclesis, a prayer
invoking the Holy Spirit upon the elements as in the Eastern liturgies.
Although Underhill's preferences were squarely within the Anglo-Catholic
camp, she showed a breadth of appreciation seldom seen in her day.
Her work Worship is a strong defense for the validity of all
forms of worship, which still emphasizing the primacy of the traditional
and the sacramental. Likewise, she was a public advocate of Prayer
Book reform, yet she hoped to keep both Morning Prayer and Eucharist
as complementary services, striking a healthy balance between Word
and Sacrament.
Underhill's most unique contribution to these issues was her understanding
of the Eucharist. Like the "sacramental socialist," she
saw the Eucharist as being an offering of one's self for the service
of God. Yet she is clear that the best way to fulfill the Second Commandment
is to fulfill the First. She clearly saw Anglican worship as "Catholic",
but her understanding of this term covered the Catholic church ancient,
medieval, and modern, Eastern and Western. In fact it is through her
understanding of the liturgies of the Eastern church that she recovers
the presence of the Spirit in the liturgy, avoiding controversial
pitfalls involving the presence of Christ. Underhill's most astute
political and theological middle-ground is found in the issue of consecration.
While an advocate of the recovery of an epiclesis in the liturgy,
she maintains that it is neither the epiclesis nor the words of Institution
which consecrate, and quotes St. John Chrysostom in arguing that it
is the entire act of offering which makes both the gift and the givers
sacred.
In a time when the Church of England was distinguished by its polictical
and theological controversies, Evelyn Underhill charts a steady path
through these conflicts in such a way that she both distilled the
vast riches of the Christian tradition into manageable categories,
as well as synthesized disparate views and defined a middle-ground
on which both mutual understanding and dialogue could be founded.
Underhill in her day, like the Tractarians before her, attained that
rare perspective of religious insight that came from constructing
her theology within the Anglican communion in a most tempestuous period.
Todd E. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Studies at Loyola
University, Chicago.
(This article appeared in the November
1993 Evelyn Underhill Newsletter.)
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