Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) is best known for her work in what can be described as liturgical or pastoral theology.Footnote ² Underhill’s earliest scholarship at the beginning of the twentieth century was mainly in the area of Western mysticism and she became a recognized expert in the field with the 1911 publication of Mysticism. This book went through 12 editions in her life, with significant revisions in 1912 and 1930, and continues to be important today.Footnote ³ Bernard McGinn describes Underhill’s Mysticism as one of the best-known books on the subject in English.Footnote ⁴ Mysticism along with her other publications in this field,Footnote ⁵ formed the basis of her future contributions to the exploration of human spirituality. The most quoted assessment of Underhill’s achievements in this area comes from Michael Ramsey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who wrote in 1975: ‘I think that in the twenties and thirties there were few, if indeed any, in the Church of England who did more to help people grasp the priority of prayer in the Christian life and the place of the contemplative element within it’.Footnote ⁶ Her most recent biographer, Dana Greene, also emphasizes Underhill’s contribution to the spiritual life of the early twentieth century, commenting that her significance rests in her service to ‘the universal human experience of and response to the infinite’.Footnote ⁷ Jeffrey Kripal describes Underhill as evolving from a scholar of mysticism ‘gracefully into a beloved retreat master, a serene and wise spiritual director’.Footnote ⁸

However, these assessments of Underhill under-represent the way in which she worked to build her authority in matters concerning the essential connection between the spiritual life and the improvement of contemporary social conditions. Far from ‘evolving gracefully’ into a purveyor of individual spiritual direction alone, her scholarly and increasingly public activities contributed in important ways to the Christian Social movement,Footnote ⁹ and their objectives, during the interwar years. She used her authority to insert the discourse of spiritual life, and its practical applications, into discussions of prevailing social issues. In print, speeches and radio broadcasts, she insisted on the essential spiritual basis of all successful social action. She worked with leading religious figures to further their collective social aims by providing advice, participating in groups and committees, and leveraging her substantial public reputation to create increased awareness and support for their goals. Margaret Cropper, Underhill’s friend and first biographer, claimed that Underhill was not political,Footnote ¹⁰ and certainly she eschewed the narrow field of party politics. However, much of Underhill’s work from 1913 onward was deeply and pervasively political. The overarching goal that her extensive activities were designed to bring about, as she boldly stated in a BBC radio broadcast in 1936, was the development of ‘a spiritual party’ that would make its ‘influence felt in the State’.Footnote ¹¹ Ramsey noted that from the 1920s Underhill was seen, ‘not as an exponent of mysticism, or as an evolutionary philosopher but as a doctor of the Christian Church’,Footnote ¹² and certainly her authority stemmed mainly from this designation, confirmed by both the fellowship awarded to her by King’s College, London in 1927Footnote ¹³ and the Honorary Doctorate she received from the University of Aberdeen in 1938. These awards recognized the importance of her contributions – in print and radio, as a speaker, retreat leader and member of committees and groups – to the discussion of the spiritual life and the social condition within and beyond the Church of England. In all these forums she insisted that a robust and healthy spiritual life was fundamental to any attempt to improve the social condition.

Scholars have generally placed Evelyn Underhill’s active engagement with the social and spiritual aims of the Church of England in the early 1920s, inaugurated by her Upton Lectures, a series of lectures on religion given at Manchester College, University of Oxford in 1921.Footnote ¹⁴ However, there is much evidence that Underhill was publicly engaging with conversations concerning the relationship between individual spiritual development and social reform as early as 1913. In that year Underhill published ‘The Place of the Will, Intellect and Feeling in Prayer’Footnote ¹⁵ in the Interpreter. This journal was edited by Hewlitt Johnson,Footnote ¹⁶ who founded the journal in 1905 intending it to ‘articulate and preach a Christian faith for modern times’.Footnote ¹⁷ Johnson, though still relatively unknown, was able to attract contributions to the Interpreter from many important theologians and clearly recognized the benefit of including Underhill.Footnote ¹⁸ The underpinning goal of the journal was to bring current theology into discussion with broader social aims.Footnote ¹⁹ In Underhill’s 1913 article, she wrote on what would become her abiding passion, the necessity of prayer as the fundamental basis of any relationship with God and with the world, including with our fellow human beings. Here she insists that prayer allows our consciousness to become aware of that ‘Eternal truth…wherein the world is felt to be enshrined’ and that the whole of a person’s life is lived ‘under two orders’. One ‘is at once a citizen of Eternity and of Time’ that ‘moves perpetually…between God and his neighbour, between this world and that’.Footnote ²⁰ In this essay she insists that in prayer we become more fully and necessarily engaged with the needs of the world through the inspiration of the divine.

In 1914 she contributed another article to the Interpreter, ‘Mysticism and the Doctrine of Atonement’ where her early ideas concerning the intersection of spiritual and social life become even more pronounced. In this article she explains that each human being is both an individual and part of the ‘body of all life’. She insists that ‘these two – the separate and the corporate – are aspects of one whole’. It is through this ‘corporation actualized in the Christian Church, but potentially co-extensive’ with all of humanity, that allows the grace and spirit of God ‘to bring forth new life, new vision, new goodness’ into the national consciousness.Footnote ²¹ In 1915 she contributed a third article to the Interpreter, ‘The Mystic and the Corporate Life’. Here she takes up the criticism that the mystic was ‘unsocial’, or a ‘religious individualist’, instead arguing for the corporate nature of the mystic. She describes the mystic as having the ability to establish ‘special relations with the spiritual order’, which in turn has implications for more positive actions in the world. Underhill insists that the mystic ‘is a creative personality, consecrated to the great practical business of actualizing the eternal order within the temporal’.Footnote ²² The article reflects conceptualizations that were worked out in Mysticism, especially her concept of the ‘unitive life’ wherein contemplatives live an ‘intense and creative life within the temporal order’, which is tightly bound ‘with complete communion with the Absolute Order’ and is both ‘patient and agent: patient as regards to God, agent as regards to man’.Footnote ²³ Underhill would reprint these articles six years later in Essentials in Mysticism, in a pattern of broad and repeated dissemination of her work that she would employ throughout her life. In 1914 she participated in the Twelfth Vacation Term for Biblical Study, in Oxford. Other speakers at this event were Henry Scott Holland, one of the founders of the Christian Social movement; W.F. Lofthouse, who would later become part of the executive committee for the Conference on Christian Politics, Employment and Citizenship (COPEC); and Neville Figgis CR, who had just published Churches in the Modern State, where he explores ‘the nature of human life in society’, the relationship between Church and State, and the ‘profoundest of all the problems of men’s [human] life together’.Footnote ²⁴

In 1915 Underhill began contributing to an eight-part series on prayer in William Temple’s weekly publication, Challenge. Underhill’s essay, ‘The Prayer of Silence’ again links individual devotion to the promotion of social good: ‘the prayer of silence has an active and social, as well as a religious and personal value. In it the soul feeds upon God; draws new vitality from the source of all life. The citizen who is so strengthened is worth more to the State than the person whose roots do not strike deep into eternity’. She goes so far in this essay, in the middle of World War I, to describe ‘the cultivation of our spiritual faculties … is at the present time a patriotic duty, and each one who deliberately makes a place in his [one’s] life for it is doing a service to the common cause’.Footnote ²⁵ The other contributors to this series included George Henry, Bishop of Edinburgh and Handley Moule, Bishop of Durham.Footnote ²⁶ In 1918 Temple resigned the editorship of Challenge.Footnote ²⁷ Charles Raven was prevailed upon to take it up in 1920, and was tasked with attempting to engage the mainly centre-party Anglicans in the ‘application of Christian principles to current affairs’.Footnote ²⁸ He commissioned an article from Underhill, ‘The Indwelling of Christ’ as part of this objective.Footnote ²⁹ We can see by her engagement with these publications and her participation in the 1914 summer school, that Underhill was already involved with those interested in promoting the Christian Social movement, including Holland, Temple, Raven and Johnson. She contributed her particular expertise in prayer and the spiritual life, grounded in her scholarship on mysticism, to their efforts to bring Christianity into discussions regarding social welfare and the political machinery of the West in the first decades of the twentieth century.

By 1920 Underhill was an invited speaker at the Church of England Congress, held at Southend on Sea.Footnote ³⁰ Her address, on 23 October, was on the general subject of the ‘Indwelling of Christ’. Underhill shared the stage on this day with Ernest William Barnes, Canon of Westminster,Footnote ³¹ Walter Frere, CR,Footnote ³² and Francis James Chavasse, Bishop of Liverpool. Her paper again addressed the intersection of the social with the spiritual, and the necessity of a constant engagement with both. Here she contends that ‘Quietists were content to receive’ while the ‘“social Christianity” of the moment put all its emphasis on giving. Neither, alone, fulfilled the Christian ideal, which was that of an instrument receiving and distributing the gift of abundant life’. Chavasse brought the papers together in his closing address, insisting – in agreement with Underhill’s paper – that the indwelling of Christ was ‘the birth right and inheritance of all true believers’.Footnote ³³

Underhill’s contributions through addresses and articles from 1913–20 make clear that by 1920 Underhill was an established participant in discussions and activities connected to the Social Christian movement. These early essays and addresses show that by 1913 Underhill’s thoughts regarding the relationship between the spiritual and the social were developing along the lines she would pursue in the 1920s and 1930s. It is also clear that Underhill’s relationship with major figures in the Christian Social movement were already established by 1913.

Underhill became a practising member of the Church of England around 1919, settling into the Anglo-Catholic wing. The Church of England provided her with a stable place of spiritual communion, and a platform from which to work. In later years, Underhill’s letter to Dom John Chapman (1931) confirms the sense of purpose that accompanied her renewed membership in the Church of England: ‘The Lord has put me here, keeps on giving me more and more jobs to do for souls here, and has never given me orders to move … it seems to me … that God means me to be where I am’.Footnote ³⁴ More playfully, in her speech accepting the Fellowship at Kings College, London, she likens the Church of England to a ship, and thanks the College for admitting her to the ‘fellowship of those experts who are doing most to make & keep the ship sea worthy, & train the crews on which her future usefully must depend’.Footnote ³⁵ Her invitation to give the first Upton Lecture in Oxford in 1921 gave her the opportunity to mark out what would become her most valuable contribution to keeping ‘the ship sea worthy’, her expertise on the spiritual life, and its necessity for any effective social action.

The Upton Lectures (Manchester College, Oxford) were established by the will of Charles Barnes Upton, a philosopher and theologian who died in 1920. Two lecture series, one on Religion and the other on Philosophy were set up in memory of Upton’s two sisters. L.P. Jacks invited Underhill to give the inaugural lecture series on religion in 1921–22.Footnote ³⁶ In the invitation Jacks assured Underhill’s choice of topics was hers to make, but he suggested that she might wish to draw on ideas expressed in her most recent article in the Hibbert Journal, ‘The Sources of Power in the Human Life’.Footnote ³⁷ His suggestion clearly suited the trajectory of Underhill’s religious thought, dealing as it does with the necessary inter-dependency of the social and the spiritual within individuals and society. Underhill writes in this article, ‘the struggle for a personal spiritual life is no selfish undertaking, as busy social reformers sometimes insist. On the contrary, it is the first step in all valid social reform’.Footnote ³⁸ The article goes on to advise a ‘practical mysticism’ (perhaps in reference to her book of the same title);Footnote ³⁹ a spiritual development that allows the ordinary person to experience the flowering of a new creative life.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this article she insists on the centrality of prayer in this spiritual development, a theme that had already emerged in her published work, and was to remain central to her pastoral theology. This article set up the discussions she would explore more fully in the Upton Lecture Series. Underhill published this lecture series in Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today. The last lecture of the series appears in this book as ‘The Life of the Spirit and Social Order’.Footnote ⁴¹

In this essay Underhill attacks the notion that the spiritual life was some kind of self-indulgent luxury and expresses concern with a social gospel that side-lines spiritual life:

Instead she insists that ‘Without the inner life of prayer and meditation, lived for its own sake, and for no utilitarian motive, neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the channel of the Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in the world today’.Footnote ⁴³ In Underhill’s perspective, individual spirituality is essential for any progress in improving the social order, ‘since the place and influence of the spiritual life in the social order will depend entirely on its place in the individual consciousness of which that social order will be built’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The essay also makes quite clear that this is not simply an esoteric debate that one might expect of a scholar of mysticism. She understands the necessity for robust social action on the ground. But she perceives this not as an end in itself – the goal for humanity is not for all to live in a comfortable social situation. The stakes are much higher, eternity – the creation of God’s Kingdom on earth. As she puts it, ‘we have made many plans and elevations; but we have not really tried to build Jerusalem either in our own hearts or in “England’s pleasant land”’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Improvements in the quality of life for individuals is essential not simply for their comfort, but because she believed an authentic and engaged spiritual life could not be nurtured amidst human deprivation, and thus social goals would also be hindered:

Underhill here rejects a spirituality that is directed away from the world, and instead insists on a spiritual pragmatism which brings together what she often terms the ‘time-world’ with eternity. She describes the possibilities inherent in a population of individuals fully engaged in the spiritual life. She saw the potential for a society, thus constituted, to reach and use ‘spiritual power … for the insertion of eternal values in the time-world’.Footnote ⁴⁷ She goes on to insist that ‘full identification with the divine purpose must be social as well as an individual expression of full life … [and] must mean in the end that the real interests of society are identical with the interests of the Creative Spirit’ and that this must be expressed in the prayer and work of Christian Churches.Footnote ⁴⁸ The essay ends with a visionary challenge:

In this essay she challenges her readers not simply to contemplate this vision, but to:

This was not simply a rhetorical flourish to end a successful series of lectures, but her own recognition of a call to embrace this vision of a spiritually rich social activism.Footnote ⁵¹ The importance of the Upton lectures and the subsequent print publication in Underhill’s developing pastoral theology can be seen in a letter to ‘a student’ written in March 1924. In this letter Underhill advises that her earlier book Practical Mysticism should be read ‘in conjunction with the sections on the Institutional and Social Spirituality’ found in Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, making clear Underhill’s understanding that social engagement was an essential component of spiritual life.Footnote ⁵²

Margaret Cropper, Underhill’s friend and biographer, comments that by the summer of 1922 Underhill felt herself a ‘settled Anglican’,Footnote ⁵³ but I would argue she was anything but settled. She was intent on challenging the status quo of Anglican Christianity, and Western Christianity more generally, by ‘drawing together’ with leading voices to enact a Christianity more fully embedded in the social realities of the time, underpinned by a deep spirituality.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the interwar years she would join William Temple, Lucy Gardner, Charles Gore, Charles Raven, George Bell and a number of other men and women who shared a vision for a renewed social reality.

The Upton Lectures were quickly followed by an invitation to Underhill to deliver a lecture at the Inter-Denominational Summer School of Social Services, in Swanwick, Derbyshire, in July 1922.Footnote ⁵⁵ The organization behind this event was the Interdenominational Conference of Social Services, chaired by Charles Gore, CR. Gardner, Temple and Raven were also heavily involved in this organization. Underhill’s lecture, ‘Some Implicits of Christian Social Reform’ covers similar ground as her Upton lectures, and is especially insistent on the importance of the spiritual life for any real progress in an improved society. She maintains that ‘efforts to Christianize our social conduct are foredoomed, unless those who undertake them give themselves to look steadily at Christ’.Footnote ⁵⁶ She explains, further, that the life of doing, without a life of contemplation and communion with God, ‘means a total surrender to the busy click-click of the life of succession’. Underhill asserts that success in all social action is predicated on a commitment to the spiritual grounding of institutions and individuals: ‘The Christian order of society can only come into being as the expression of a corporate Christian Soul … Our need, then, is the re-birth of our vast potential energies into a world of fresh values, in which each particular action would be given the meaning that it has for the Mind of Christ’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Here Underhill draws upon her particular insight into the spiritual life born of her work with Christian mystics,Footnote ⁵⁸ and personal experience.Footnote ⁵⁹

As the 1920s progressed Underhill became embedded in a network of individuals committed to the harmonizing of Christian spirituality with social activism. By 1924 she was a sought-after speaker, giving addresses to a number of organizations and contributing journal articles that discussed this harmonization.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is at this time that we see earlier relationships with Temple, Gardner and Raven, as well as other prominent individuals, flourish. She describes in a letter to Laura Rose the participation of Cosmo Gordon LangFootnote ⁶¹ and Temple in the Christian Citizenship Conference she had organized early in the year:

This conference not only highlights her work with Lang and Temple, but also what would become a key component of her role in the wider Christian community, to speak from within the Anglican Church, while at the same time remaining free from the constraints of organizational authority. She would later describe herself as a ‘scamp’ and a ‘free lance’,Footnote ⁶³ and this allowed her to work ecumenically.

Key to recognizing the importance of Underhill’s status in the Christian Social movement by 1924, was her invitation to participate in the COPEC project. Stephen Spencer describes COPEC as ‘Temple’s first major social reform initiative at Manchester’, where he served as the Bishop of Manchester.Footnote ⁶⁴ Temple’s biographer F.A. Iremonger believed that COPEC ‘gave to international Christian thinking and planning a sense of direction which was to prove of first-rate importance in the subsequent history of that [Christian Social] movement.Footnote ⁶⁵ Charles Raven describes the objective of COPEC ‘to present to the Church a broad vision of the Christian gospel, as it affected the social, economic and political life of [hu]mankind’ and to unite ‘Christians of all denominations’ to apply their faith to the ‘art of corporate living’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, praised the aims and the organization of the conference, noting that ‘The brains and hearts of some of our foremost Christian thinkers and workers are astir with the resolve to look afresh upon our problems – social, industrial, political, international – and to bring them unreservedly to the touchstone of the Christian faith’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The two joint secretaries were Lucy GardnerFootnote ⁶⁸ and Charles Raven. This project grew directly out of the work of the Interdenominational Social Services Union, to which Underhill was already contributing, as discussed above.Footnote ⁶⁹

Underhill records her invitation to COPEC’s first conference (April 1924) rather flippantly in a letter to her friend, Lucy Menzies: ‘Have just been asked to be one of the three speakers on the opening day of COPEC – a truly horrifying responsibility. Dr. Raven for the Anglicans, Mr. Maltby for Free Churches and I (I suppose) for “Any other Colour” as they say at the Cat Shows’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Beyond the lightness of the comment, Underhill reveals the way in which she valued her status as a ‘free lance’, able to move among a variety of denominational positions, and her understanding of the importance and possibilities inherent in the COPEC project.

Temple’s speech opened the conference by affirming his belief that the conference was part of a ‘great movement within the Church, which is, I am convinced, a movement of the Holy Ghost’ and by insisting that the aim of the conference was ‘through the contributions of various speakers and perhaps through the very clash of their opinions, to hear God speak. Those who speak will speak as in God’s presence; those who listen will listen in dependence on God’.Footnote ⁷¹ Temple’s desire to ‘hear God speak’ in relation to social conditions and corporate living, resonated with Underhill’s work from the previous decade.

Underhill was unable to attend the conference because of the death of her mother just prior to the opening. Her paper was read out by W. Moberley. In this forum she makes clear her understanding of social Christianity. She opens with a challenge:

And she contends that, ‘A genuine Christian ought to be alive all over, with a depth and vitality of soul that makes shallow judgments and prejudices impossible: a Christian social order should be permeated in every part with this life; controlled by a supernatural aim’.Footnote ⁷³ It is the inter-permeation of this vitality that she saw as essential to any successful Christian social reality.

Underhill is unstinting in her assessment of the challenges to Christianity as she saw practised all around her:

Here Underhill brings together her conviction that contemplation – adoration – and a robust and integrated social action can and must bring human interaction to the level of the sacramental and through this the complete harmonization of the social and the spiritual. She ends her address by laying before her audience the facts that she sees as both a challenge and a motivation to act: ‘countless human souls as dear to God as our own are passing through this world under conditions of which no Christian, no lover of Christ … can bear to think … I needn’t continue – we know quite well that our country is not a Christian one…. is not corresponding with God’s nature or fulfilling God’s purpose’.Footnote ⁷⁵ She sees the answer to this state of affairs to be the goal of living a ‘vivid, realistic Christianity – the reign of Christ’s love in individual hearts’ that can inspire the kind of charity, compassion and self-sacrifice that will transform society.Footnote ⁷⁶

Underhill’s COPEC address was a call to action, and she disseminated this address far beyond the confines of one conference. It was printed as ‘The Will of the Voice’ in the publication of COPEC proceedings and in Pilgrim, a journal Temple edited, both in 1924.Footnote ⁷⁷ It was reprinted in the Homiletic Review, a US journal of the Roman Catholic Church, under the title of ‘The Nature of God’ in 1933, and was also published in Underhill’s collection of essays, Mixed Pasture (1933).Footnote ⁷⁸ Underhill regularly reprinted articles and addresses as part of a strategy of dissemination which kept her work in front of readers and in dialogue with current religious and social debates. However, this is the only essay she reprinted four times, ensuring a widespread and international audience.

Underhill’s involvement with COPEC was much greater than simply providing an opening address. Her address to the ICSS at Swanwick in 1922 staked out her contribution to the discussions that would dominate COPEC. She was also involved in organizational meetings for COPEC’s first conference.Footnote ⁷⁹ She was part of the sub-committee which produced the first volume of committee reports produced under the auspices of COPEC. This volume, The Nature of God and His Purpose for the World provided the grounding for a further eleven volumes and serves as a preface to the entire series:

The report then quotes Saint Augustine: ‘let the children of Thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon the earth … for the old order is passed and the new arises’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In this report, Underhill’s influence is clear. She worked with Lucy Gardner, Charles Raven, and others, taking a leading role in the production of this first volume.Footnote ⁸¹

At the end of the COPEC project Gardner would reflect, ‘It was a necessary step for the awakening of the Churches and the building up of a united Christian Council’.Footnote ⁸² Underhill became, through this project, one of that united Christian Council. In the Upton Lectures she encouraged joining with like-minded people to further the work of building God’s Kingdom. Through her involvement in COPEC she became a vocal and effective member of a network of individuals determined to further social action through a renewed Christianity. Christopher Armstrong contends that Underhill presented her audiences ‘with an uncompromising summons to return to loving contemplation of God as the true source and guarantee of Christian love … [for Underhill] the mystic is the model even to the “social” Christian in so far as he [/she] alone can really bring a vision to the people and do God’s work’.Footnote ⁸³ Underhill would dedicate the remainder of her life to promote this vital inter-relationship between spirituality (as in a direct and sustained relationship with God) and social action.

Her most widely recognized contribution to the development of this inter-relationship she believed was so vital, was her work as a retreat leader. Underhill led several retreats between 1924 and 1936, many of these at the Pleshy Retreat house in the Chelmsford Diocese, Essex. Carol Poston claims that Underhill ‘helped invigorate the retreat movement in the Church of England between the two world wars’, while Joy Dixon describes Underhill as a ‘pioneer in the Anglican Retreat movement’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Underhill was involved in the Association for Promoting Retreats and gave addresses to this group.Footnote ⁸⁵ Dana Greene suggests that the growth of the retreat movement in England can be attributed at least in part to Underhill’s involvement.Footnote ⁸⁶ Opening a 1927 retreat that she delivered four times that year, Underhill explains that ‘all our service should be soaked in prayer … to add to the praise offered by the world, to fit into God’s scheme, and to translate some of His spiritual reality into the terms of human life’. Her retreats were designed to assist individuals develop this spiritual capacity within themselves, which would also reflect outward into the world.Footnote ⁸⁷

Underhill’s retreat work complimented an intensive schedule of speaking engagements that again addressed the necessity of a robust inter-relationship of spirituality and social action. In 1925 she spoke at the Central House of the Mother’s Union (May), the Anglo-Catholic summer school (July), and the Student Christian Movement AuxiliariesFootnote ⁸⁸ (October), to list just some of the events to which she contributed that year. In 1926 she was also asked to address the Conference of Clergy, in the Liverpool diocese, at Water Millock, Cumberland by Albert David, Bishop of Liverpool (another COPEC member). In her conference address she told them:

Here Underhill groups the priest with ‘every religious worker’ signalling the importance she placed on lay ministry, in which she herself was involved through her work as a retreat leader and spiritual director.Footnote ⁹⁰ In this address Underhill stressed the importance of the priest’s inner life and its practical working out:

This and two other addresses to the Northern clergy were edited and revised for publication in Concerning the Inner Life (1926).Footnote ⁹² Through this relationship with the Liverpool diocese, Underhill was asked by Albert David, the Bishop of Liverpool, to serve on a commission for developing the spiritual life of the clergy and laity.Footnote ⁹³ At the time her friend Charles Raven was also working for David in revitalizing the northern diocese.

Given Underhill’s belief in the importance of prayer, contemplation and worship in building an authentic and transformative relationship with God, her involvement in the controversy to introduce a new Prayer Book in the Church of England is not surprising. In her support of the new Prayer Book we can see her strategy as an advocate for prayer distilled. She lectured on the topic at Kings College, London and shortly after published this lecture in Maurice Relton’s collection of essays promoting the Prayer Book.Footnote ⁹⁴ This essay was reviewed in the London Times in the summer of 1927. The reviewer notes that Underhill’s essay ‘shows how in the new book we find both the historic attachments and the fresh and living applications of prayer and adoration deepened and emphasized’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Underhill would continue her advocacy for the new Prayer Book in several letters to the London Times well into the autumn of 1927.Footnote ⁹⁶ Underhill was also part of discreet conversations concerning the new Prayer Book held at Lambeth Palace some time in 1927.Footnote ⁹⁷ Her article, ‘Hill of the Lord’ in the Spectator in November 1927 was a final attempt in print to draw together her views on the necessity of the new Prayer Book and by extension the importance of a reinvigorated Christian prayer life necessary to progress any social welfare programme.Footnote ⁹⁸

The Prayer Book controversy developed further relationships between Underhill and important figures in the Church of England, but it also convinced her of the efficacy of popular print journalism to communicate to a wider public audience. She reacted with perhaps somewhat feigned surprise at the public reception of her first letter in the London Times supporting the new Prayer Book:

While Underhill had long published book reviews in mainstream newspapers, especially the Spectator, and articles in the Christian press, this was her first foray into explaining the importance of a spiritual life to a mass audience. It was a lesson she would quickly integrate into her already wide range of activities.

In 1929 Underhill became religious editor of the Spectator,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ a position she would hold until 1932. She used this as an opportunity to invite theologians and religious writers (men and women) to speak on theological issues she believed should be brought before the wider Spectator audience. She commissioned four series: ‘Problems of the Christian Conscience’; ‘The Challenge to Religious Orthodoxy: Ideas of God’; ‘Studies in Sanctity’; and ‘A Christian’s Faith’. The many writers who contributed, and the large circulation of the newspaper, allowed Underhill to engage the public in matters of religion in important ways. Underhill wrote to Lucy Menzies of her hopes for this editorial position, ‘it is rather an opportunity to get the things one wishes said before the public’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

As religious editor of the Spectator Underhill also reviewed the Lambeth conference of 1930 where she expressed concern about the lack of spiritual engagement she found in the proceedings there, with the emphasis on, as she puts it, the horizontal rather than the vertical:

In the report, Underhill objects to the bishops’ emphasis on ‘humanizing’ religion and their avoidance of ‘other-worldliness’ which she describes as anthropocentric. This anthropocentricity ran counter to all her published works and lectures, her contributions to the Social Christian movement, her advocacy of the retreat movement, and certainly her early work on mysticism. At the time Underhill was using the public forum of the Spectator to lobby for a more God focused, Christocentric spirituality to permeate the church and society. Over and over again she insisted this was the only way in which real and profound change could occur in the world. Underhill had tried before this 1930 Lambeth Conference to exert some influence on the proceedings, which her later Spectator article shows was not as successful as she had hoped. A letter to the relatively new Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, with whom she had worked for over a decade, shows how she attempted to influence the direction of this Lambeth Conference. In this letter, opening with the heading, ‘A Way of Renewal’,Footnote ¹⁰³ Underhill proposed a serious programme of spiritual renewal for clergy: ‘to call the clergy as a whole, solemnly and insistently to a greater interiority and cultivation of the personal life of prayer’. She explains in the letter, ‘We were convinced the real failures, difficulties and weaknesses of the Church are spiritual and can only be remedied by spiritual effort and sacrifice, and that her deepest need is a renewal, first in the clergy and through them in the laity; of the great Christian tradition of the inner life’. The ‘we’ referred to here is the Jerusalem Chamber Fellowship of Prayer, described by St Clair Donaldson in 1927 as a group of individuals ‘joining together in prayer … in the acknowledgement that there is a widespread feeling of impotence in the church which cannot respond to the emergencies of the age’, a recognition that ‘something is wanted from outside’. The central belief of the group was that ‘nothing will avail us but a revival of the spiritual life’. The meetings were held in Westminster Abbey through the hospitality of the Dean, William Foxley Norris. The overarching goal of the fellowship was ‘A Church awakened out of its prayerlessness to a spirit of eager supplication’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Underhill was involved with the group from its inception, as it had emerged out of a 1926 conference Underhill organized at Westminster Abbey. Underhill describes in a letter to Lucy Menzies the conference attendees that included ‘progressive ecclesiastics of all parties, four bishops, and quite a bunch of canons, with boys and girls from the universities …[and] representatives from missionary societies’. Many of these became part of this loosely constituted fellowship.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In her letter to Lang, Underhill makes clear that she is writing not as an individual, but as a part of this fellowship, noting that this call to the clergy for a greater life of personal prayer, ‘was the original aim of the founders of the Jerusalem Chamber Fellowship, of whom I am one’. The letter is a distillation of the careful considerations of at least the London branch of the Jerusalem Chamber Fellowship, for which Underhill was the mouthpiece. And clearly her decades long insistence on the necessity of a robust spiritual life, if there was to be any hope of real social change, is written large in the letter. She laments that present Christianity in the Church of England was ‘humanitarian rather than theocentric’ and this had a stifling effect on the spiritual life of many: ‘Hence the dreary character of many church services and the result in the increasing alienation of the laity from institutional forms’. She closes by acknowledging that recovering ‘the ordered interior life of prayer and meditation, as a first charge on their time, will be very difficult for clergy … They will not do it unless they are made to feel its crucial importance’. She advises that only ‘The solemn voice of the united episcopate, recalling the Church to that personal, realistic contact with the Supernatural which has been since Pentecost the one source of her power, will give authoritative support’ but cautions that ‘the renewal of a spiritual society must depend on giving absolute priority to the spiritual life’. She asks that a proposal be put before the conference to provide ordinands with a ‘far more thorough, varied, interesting and expert devotional training’. She requests that the clergy adopt a rule of life and attend an annual retreat. Attached to this letter is a typewritten ‘Study Scheme on The Holy Spirit and the Church’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While the conference as a whole disappointed her, there is evidence that some attention was paid to this letter in regards to clergy formation. In Underhill’s Lambeth Report, published in the Spectator, she notes ‘the need of improved and enlightened theological education for both clergy and laity, if they are to maintain religious freshness, and bring their faith into a living harmony with modern thought, is rightly stressed’ in the proceedings of the conference.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This involvement in the 1930 Lambeth Conference makes clear that Underhill spoke within the Church with authority, and that she felt able to criticize Church leadership publicly in the Spectator. Her activities during the first part of the 1930s emphasize the necessity for a robust spiritual life among the clergy and laity as essential to greater social goals.

It was this concern to bring together a revitalized spirituality that would fully underpin the social action that also informed her key publication on Western Christianity, Worship. In late 1933, Walter Matthews, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, approached Underhill to write a book on worship. Underhill wrote to Margaret Cropper in early 1934 indicating her interest in the project, ‘It looks as if I should do that Christian Worship book – rather exciting’ and later ‘I’ve definitely accepted the Christian Worship Book and now feel frightened and incompetent’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Worship was published in the Library of Constructive Theology series and became the Religious Book of the Month in the United States.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Soon after its publication, J.R. Pridie wrote in Theology that ‘Its thought moves on the highest plane’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ T.E. Johnson suggests that even today Underhill’s approach in Worship makes ‘her work surprisingly relevant to contemporary liturgical studies’.Footnote ¹¹¹ While Ann Loades believes that ‘Worship reveals her continuing preoccupation with the question of how Christology integrates with liturgy, and therefore with the living of a distinctively Christian life’.Footnote ¹¹² Dana Greene notes that in Worship Underhill ‘defines Anglicanism not merely as a variant of continental Protestantism but as a special development of traditional Christian worship’.Footnote ¹¹³ In Worship Underhill’s activities as a lecturer, spiritual advisor, retreat leader, commission member, scholar, and mystic all came together to inform her conception of the Christian Church and prayer. And yet, what has often been missed in discussions of this work, is its consonance with her understanding of the inter-relationship between the spiritual and the social. Worship does not signal a retreat for Underhill into the sanctuary of the liturgical. Instead she insists in the conclusion of this work that the greater ‘significance attached to the Church’s sacramental life’ that she saw emerging in the church from the late nineteenth century, signalled an ‘active path’ of cooperation ‘with the creative purpose within the temporal world, a striving for perfection’ – that is a social reality underpinned by total dependence on God’s divine presence. This she had long maintained was the only effective way to eradicate social ills, including the threatening international violence that was soon to erupt into the Second World War.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Underhill insists that within this relationship with God, enabled through sacramental worship, the material order could be transformed, ‘and especially the human scene – cleansing, healing, saving, reconciling, and making of it a fit vehicle of the divine indwelling Life – giving, in fact, concrete and social expression to the Eucharistic ideal’ on the ground.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In Worship Underhill insists on a spiritual life firmly engaged with, and imbedded in, social relationships – transforming and perfecting these through a continual and developing engagement with the Charity of God. As she makes clear in her Lent book for 1934, The School of Charity, ‘we are children of the Eternal Perfect, whose essential nature is generous Love; and we are destined to manifest the splendour of God in and through the homely scenes’ of our daily lives and relationships. In this way, Underhill asserts, ‘a new quality of life’ is possible and awaits us ‘not somewhere else but where we are now’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

These key ideas, continually expressed in Underhill’s essays and books were to be given a much wider audience in her BBC radio broadcasts. In her first broadcast, ‘The Inside of Life’ aired on 13 December 1931, she told her listeners ‘we are compound creatures, of sense and spirit, of mind and of soul, dwellers in time, yet capable of eternity’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In 1936 Underhill took to the airwaves again to press this message home. She gave four broadcast talks, which she published the following year as The Spiritual Life. Footnote ¹¹⁸ It is in the final lecture of this series that she speaks plainly of the imperatives that had motivated much of her work for over two decades:

Here Underhill calls for a spiritual revolution – a revolution wherein individuals and corporate bodies recognize and participate fully in the Spirit of God in order to transform earthly society. Her long career as a scholar of mysticism and the church, her extensive engagement with individuals and institutions, and her own intense life of prayer, convinced her there was no other way.

Underhill may have been, as Kripal describes her, a graceful retreat master and a serene spiritual director. However, the evidence of her engagement with the Christian Social movement, and her determination to make the life of the spirit central to this movement, highlights another important dimension to her work. Underhill made use of every forum available to her, exerting pressure on institutions and individuals, to ensure that the spiritual life – intense and shared, vertical not horizontal – was part of the Christian conversation of her time. And this enables us to put into a more dynamic context Michael Ramsey’s comment that ‘there were few, if indeed any, in the Church of England who did more to help people to grasp the priority of prayer in the Christian life and the place of the contemplative element within it’ during the interwar years. Underhill, and many of her most well-known contemporaries, believed that without the priority of prayer, through which a robust spiritual life could develop, all human endeavour to improve the social condition would be fruitless. By considering Underhill’s work in the light of the social transformation she so vehemently desired, her work today can provide important insights and inspiration as we work to deal with our own social issues both within and beyond the Church.