The Place of Will, Intellect and Feeling in Prayer

The Place of Will, Intellect and Feeling in Pray

Evelyn Underhill's "The Place of Will, Intellect and Feeling in Prayer" argues that prayer should engage the whole person, with thinking, feeling and willing each given a proper place and order. She frames the question as a problem of religious psychology: how the powers of the self are best used when they turn from the natural world to spiritual reality, and to God as its source. Underhill defines prayer as the part of conscious life deliberately directed toward transcendent reality. She draws on Walter Hilton, Ruysbroeck and William Law, who describe it as an ascent of desire out of earthly thoughts. Human life, she says, swings like a pendulum between God and neighbour, between adoration and charity, and the essay concerns the outward swing of adoration. Christianity differs from the old mysteries, she argues, because it calls the whole man to God and not one supposedly spiritual part. Prayer should therefore be the highest exercise of mind, heart and will. It includes adoration, petition, meditation, contemplation and spiritual rest. She notes that any conscious act normally runs from thought, to feeling, to will. Exaggerating one faculty distorts the spiritual life. Excess of intellect produces mere theology or philosophy. Unchecked emotion produces sentimentality and self-indulgence. Unchecked will produces arrogant striving, a "super-sensual ambition." Prayer begins with an intellectual act: recollecting the mind and forming a purpose, as Hilton, the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Teresa all advise. Underhill rejects the notion that one should leave one's brains behind when turning to God, or cultivate "pious imbecility." She also denies that she is advocating intellectualism. Humble love matters more than cleverness, and she contrasts a simple, loving woman saying her rosary with a bishop who preferred "Oh, Great First Cause" to "Our Father." Still, thought alone stays exterior to its object, because the intellect is static and cannot carry us to heaven. What carries us is the "synthesis of love and will." Ruysbroeck says reason must stay without where these may enter. Underhill calls will and desire the explorers of the Infinite and the part of us that is most our own. Intellect and feeling are not wholly ours to command, since they fluctuate with mood and temperament. The will remains available even when heart and mind are dull, as a "blind intent stretching to God." The Kingdom is taken by effort and courage, not by cleverness or ecstatic feeling. The strength of the will measures the success of prayer, because grace and will rise and fall together. Grace is the inflow of spiritual life answering human effort, and Hilton holds that prayer is a means by which grace enters the soul. Feeling, in turn, inflames the will with gladness and vividness, turning dull determination into eager desire. Underhill holds that all action springs from some emotion, and that a person is led to God by "a leash of longing" and not by dialectic. She divides healthy prayer emotions into two groups. The subjective group is the sense of one's own imperfection, which yields penitence and humility. The objective group centres on God's goodness and beauty and yields adoration and love. Prayer should begin in humble contrition and flower in loving adoration. In its higher degrees will is transmuted into love, like the phoenix rising from ashes. Love gives prayer two things, ardour and beauty. Ardour is the intimate, personal love found in Richard of St. Victor, St. Bernard, Thomas à Kempis, Rolle, Hilton, Julian of Norwich and the author of The Golden Fountain. It is self-giving, creative and closer to suffering than to mere pleasure. Beauty is a disinterested, aesthetic love tied to the sense of the Beautiful. Citing Hegel and Augustine, Underhill holds that prayer should be as beautiful as one can make it, with dignity as well as intimacy. She wants it living and lyrical, not dead ceremony, and says it needs a special training. Prayers of petition that come before worship drag the soul back. She cites St. Francis, Suso and Angela of Foligno as examples of this beauty. She concludes that intellect may conceive of absolute beauty and will may be set on attaining it, but only intuitive feeling can know it and only love can make it one's own. True prayer and deep poetry, she says, rise very near together in the heart.

By Evelyn Underhill · First published 1920 · Genre: Christian spirituality, Prayer and devotional literature, Christian mysticism · 6,855 words

First lines

The psychology of religious experience, as yet so little understood, has few more important problems proposed to it than that which concerns the true place and right use of will, intellect, and feeling in prayer. This question, which to some may appear merely academic, really involves the whole problem of the method and proportion in which the various powers and activities of our being may best be used, when they turn from the natural world of concrete things to attend to the so-called "supernatural" world of Spirit -- in fact, to God, Who is the source and sum of the reality of that world. That problem must be of practical interest to every Christian -- more, to every one who believes in the spiritual possibilities of man -- for it concerns itself with all those responses which are made by human personality to the impact of Infinite Life. It deals, in Maeterlinck's words, with "the harshest and most uninhabitable headlands of the Divine ‘know thyself," and includes in its span the whole region "where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God."

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Christian prayer · religious psychology · will and desire · intellect and thought · feeling and emotion · spiritual faculties · adoration · contemplation · meditation · humility · divine love · beauty in prayer

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