Essentials of Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill

Author:Evelyn Underhill
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Body, Spirituality, Devotional, Religion, Inspirational, Prayer, Mind & Spirit, Mysticism
ISBN: 9781602064003
Publisher: Cosimo Classics
Published: 2007-05-01T05:00:00+00:00

THREE MEDI1EVAL MYSTICS

I

"THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS"

I

The Mirror of Simple Souls-a rare work on the spiritual life, of which manuscripts exist in the British Museum, the Bodleian, and one or two other public libraries-has so far received little or no attention from students of religious literature. Yet it may turn out to possess great import- tance, as one of the missing links in the history of English mysticism : for it is a middle-English translation, made at the close of the fourteenth century or beginning of the fifteenth, of the lost work of a French thirteenth-century mystic. It shows, therefore, that the common view of French medixval religion as unmystical needs qualification ; and further indicates a path by which the contemplative tradition of western Europe reached England and affected the development of our native mystical school.

The Mirror of Simple Souls, as we now have it, is a work of nearly 6o,ooo words in length. So far from being simple, it deals almost exclusively with the rarest and most sublime aspects of spiritual experience. Its theme is the theme of all mysticism : the soul's adventures on its way towards union with God. It is not, like the Melum of Richard Rolle, or Revelations of Julian of Norwich, a subjective book; the record of personal experiences and actual " conversations in heaven." Rather it is objective and didactic, a work of geography, not a history of travel ; an advanced text-book of the contemplative life. Only from the ardour and exactitude of its descriptions, its strange air of authority, its defiance of pious convention, can we gather that it is the fruit of first-hand experience, not merely of theological study : though its writer was clearly a trained theologian, familiar with the works of St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite, whom no mystic of the Middle Ages wholly escaped, and apparently with those of St. Bernard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, and other medizeval authorities on the inner life.

I have said that the Mirror, as we have it, purports to be the translation of an unknown French treatise. This translation, so far as we can judge from its language, was probably made in the early years of the fifteenth century, perhaps at the end of the fourteenth. Its author, then, lived at the close of the golden age of English mysticism : he was the contemporary of Julian of Norwich, who was still living in 1413, and of Walter Hilton, who died in 1395. Himself a mystic, he was no servile translator ; rather the eager interpreter of the book which he wished to make accessible to his countrymen. Our manuscripts begin with his prologue : an ingenuous confession of the difficulties of the undertaking, his own temerity in daring to touch these " high divine matters," his fear lest the book should fall into unsuitable hands and its more extreme teachings be misunderstood. It appears from this prologue that our version of the Mirror is a second, or revised edition ; the first having failed to be comprehensible to its readers.

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