Mysticism in Modern France

Mysticism in Modern France by Evelyn Underhill

Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism in Modern France argues that the Catholic contemplative tradition is still alive, using three modern French cases to show the classic saintly and mystical types reappearing in the present age. The first section treats the Carmelite Sœur Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus. Underhill describes the cloistered discipline as a demanding school of virtue, not a refuge of idle piety. She names Thérèse Martin, Elizabeth Catez (Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité) and Mère Marie-Ange de l'Enfant-Jésus as young women who died before thirty and renewed traditional mysticism. Thérèse was born at Alençon in 1873 and died in 1897, after nine years in the Carmelite convent of Lisieux. Her parents had wished for religious lives themselves, and all five surviving daughters became nuns. The household lived in a world of angels, relics and miracles taken literally. Thérèse was precocious, ardent and psychically sensitive. A childhood illness was cured by a vision of the Virgin's statue smiling at her. A second nervous illness came at thirteen, and she then pressed her vocation with the Superior, the Bishop and the Pope himself until she entered at fifteen. In the convent she endured long spells of aridity and a severe training from her Prioress, and she fell ill with tuberculosis. She came to see love as her vocation and followed a "little pathway" of small, ordinary acts done with love. Her zeal was social and reached out to the world. After her death a cult grew up at once, with pilgrimages, relics, reported miracles and wartime stories of her help. Underhill sees it as a living parallel to medieval saints' cults. Her remark that she wished to spend her heaven doing good on earth is taken as the root of that devotion. The second section studies Lucie-Christine, a pseudonym. She was a married woman of the leisured class, born in 1844 and married in 1865. She had five children, was widowed at forty-three, was blind for nineteen years, and died in 1908. Her journal, published in 1912, was written for her confessor and covers 1870 to 1908. She knew no mystical literature, so Underhill rules out imitation. Her love of beauty led her toward the Absolute until she heard the inner words "Dieu seul!", which gave her light, attraction and strength. Her contemplation brought visions, ecstasies, desolation, and a loss of the sense of duration in the state of union. Underhill thinks some of her anthropomorphic visions and temptations came from her instinctive nature. She values most the "metaphysical visions" of the Divine Abyss and of God as the one reality, where evil is a mere nothing. She stayed a devoted mother, loyal to the Church and its sacraments, and her house was known as "the house of peace". Her mysticism was both transcendental and sacramental. The third section presents Charles Péguy, poet and founder of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, killed in action on September 5, 1914, aged forty-one. Born at Orleans in 1873 of peasant stock, he moved from Catholic upbringing to humanitarian socialism and then to a medieval, somewhat anti-clerical Catholicism. His question was "Comment faut-il sauver?". He was combative and unreconciled within himself. Through a marriage to a freethinker he left his children unbaptized, and he was himself kept from the sacraments. His poems, the three Mystères on Joan of Arc and the Tapisseries including Eve, hold that the natural and supernatural are one and that the human and divine cannot be separated. He praised childlike faith and above all hope, and held that God hopes in man. He joined patriotism to religion, with Joan of Arc and St. Geneviève as his types of holiness. Underhill admits his mannerisms, arrogance and polemical excess, but ranks him as a great Christian poet.

By Evelyn Underhill · First published 1920 · Genre: Religious Nonfiction, Christian Mysticism, Spiritual Biography · 17,326 words

First lines

I. SŒUR THÉRÈSE DE L'ENFANT-JÉSUS

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

Evelyn Underhill · Mysticism in Modern France · Catholic mysticism · Christian mysticism · Carmelite spirituality · Thérèse of Lisieux · Lucie-Christine · Charles Péguy · contemplative life · cloistered convent · saintly type · religious vocation

What this Textopian page supports

Mysticism in Modern France is listed on Textopian as an essay by Evelyn Underhill, dated 1920 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

More by Evelyn Underhill