TRINITY · 15 JUNE & TRINITY · 22 NOVEMBER
Evelyn Underhill & C. S. Lewis
Mystical Theologian & Apologist · The Lay Doctors of the Modern Anglican Church · d. 1941 & 1963
Underhill — UN-der-hil · von Hügel — fon HYOO-gel · Lewis — LOO-is · Screwtape — SCROO-tayp · Mere Christianity — 1952 · Narnia — NAR-nee-ah · Joy Davidman — JOY DAV-id-man
O God, who by thy servants Evelyn and Clive didst make the riches of the mystical tradition and the arguments of the rational faith available to those who had thought themselves beyond the reach of either; Grant that thy Church may always have among its laypeople those who can open the door of prayer and the door of argument to the seeking soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The twentieth century gave the Anglican tradition two lay theologians whose combined output reached a larger audience with the substance of the Christian faith than any ordained minister of their generation: Evelyn Underhill (UN-der-hil), who brought the mystical tradition of the whole Christian centuries to the ordinary lay person seeking a genuine interior life; and C. S. Lewis (LOO-is), who brought the rational case for Christian belief to the educated sceptic who had thought that intelligence and faith were incompatible. Both were Anglican. Both were lay throughout their working lives. Both are in the Church of England’s official calendar of saints. Both wrote in forms accessible to the widest possible audience — Underhill in the retreat address, the devotional manual, and the biography of the mystics; Lewis in the broadcast talk, the paperback argument, and the children’s story — and both reached millions of people who would never have entered a church or read a work of academic theology. They are the fulfilment, in the twentieth century, of the tradition that runs from Bede’s vernacular scholarship through Tyndale’s English Bible through Herbert’s devotional poems: the tradition that the faith must be communicated in the best available language to the widest possible audience, and that the layperson who does this work is doing apostolic work.
Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) began her religious life as an agnostic, moved through a near-conversion to Roman Catholicism, and settled into the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church of England under the spiritual direction of Baron Friedrich von Hügel (fon HYOO-gel), the great Catholic lay theologian who recognised her gifts and directed them toward the mystical tradition. Her major work Mysticism (1911) — written entirely from the tradition of the English and continental mystics, drawing on Rolle and Hilton and the Cloud and Julian and Ruysbroeck and Eckhart — was the first major scholarly treatment of mystical theology in English, and it made the tradition of the medieval mystics available to a twentieth-century readership for the first time. She then spent the rest of her life as a retreat conductor, directing hundreds of clergy and laypeople in the practice of interior prayer, and as a devotional writer whose addresses and letters remain among the wisest guides to the contemplative life in the Anglican tradition. She never sought ordination and never sought academic position; she sought God, and she brought with her everyone who would come.
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) was a convinced atheist who was argued into theism and then into Christianity against his will — he described himself as the most reluctant convert in England — and who spent the rest of his life as an Oxford and Cambridge don arguing for the faith he had resisted with the same rigour he had brought to his resistance. Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters (SCROO-tayp), The Problem of Pain, Miracles, The Four Loves, and the seven volumes of the Narnia (NAR-nee-ah) Chronicles reached a combined readership in the hundreds of millions across the twentieth century. He was not a trained theologian; he was a literary scholar who applied the tools of literary reasoning to theological questions with a clarity and imaginative power that trained theologians rarely achieve. He died on 22 November 1963, the same day as President Kennedy; his death was almost entirely unreported at the time and almost entirely unforgotten since.
Underhill and Lewis together represent the two great modes of lay theological vocation in the modern Anglican Church: the contemplative who leads others into the interior life through the tradition of the mystics, and the apologist who argues others into the faith through the tradition of the rational theologians. Between them they cover the whole range of what Anselm called fides quaerens intellectum — faith seeking understanding — and what Bernard called the soul’s ascent through love to union: Underhill is Bernard’s heir, Lewis is Anselm’s, and together they represent the same complementary wholeness that those two great Benedictines represented in the medieval tradition. Their feasts fall in mid-Trinity, spanning the heart of the Church’s ordinary year as a testimony that the work of lay theology must be done, like all faithful labour, throughout the year, in the ordinary rooms and ordinary conversations and ordinary books that form the Church’s most essential ministry.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant Evelyn didst open the door of the mystical tradition to those who had thought it was closed, and by thy servant Clive didst open the door of the rational faith to those who had thought it was impossible; Grant that thy Church may always have among its laypeople those who can make the interior life accessible and the intellectual case compelling, until every seeking soul finds in both doors the same Lord who said he was the way, the truth, and the life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.