The School of Charity: Meditations on the Christian Creed - Softcover

Underhill, Evelyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819215481 ISBN 13: 9780819215482

Publisher: Morehouse Publishing, 1991

Synopsis

A profound and spiritual reflection on the Nicene Creed, the basis of Catholic belief.

These meditations, based upon the principal articles of the Nicene Creed, were originally presented by Evelyn Underhill (1875 –1941) at a retreat she conducted at her beloved Pleshy, a small village in England that was the site of her conversion to the Christian faith. The renewed interest in mysticism and spirituality today among Christians of all communions draws heavily from her work. The popularity and use of her books by scholar, lay people, and clergy attest to the originality of her writings and the helpfulness of her spiritual direction.

About this title

About the Author

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) was an Anglo-Catholic writer who wrote about spiritual practice and specifically Christian mysticism. She published 39 books and contributed more than 350 articles and reviews. Her best-known works include Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness and Practical Mysticism.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE SCHOOL OF CHARITY

Meditations on the Christian Creed

By EVELYN UNDERHILL

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 1991 Longman Group UK Limited
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8192-1548-2

Contents

FOREWORD
PREFACE
Part I
I. I BELIEVE
II. ONE GOD, CREATOR
III. ONE LORD
Part II
IV. INCARNATE
V. CRUCIFIED
VI. GLORIFIED
Part III
VII. SPIRIT
VIII. CHURCH
IX. THE WORLD TO COME

CHAPTER 1

I BELIEVE

God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God abideth in him... we love because he first loved.—St. John.

We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavouring to know God, forbeholding His greatness, we realize our littleness. His purity shows ourfoulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are frombeing humble.—St. Teresa.

Everyone who is engaged on a great undertaking, depending on many factors forits success, knows how important it is to have a periodical stocktaking. Whetherwe are responsible for a business, an institution, a voyage, or anexploration—even for the well-being of a household—it is sometimesessential to call a halt; examine our stores and our equipment, be sure that allnecessaries are there and in good order, and that we understand the way in whichthey should be used. It is no good to have tins without tin openers, bottles ofwhich the contents have evaporated, labels written in an unknown language, ormysterious packages of which we do not know the use. Now the living-out of thespiritual life, the inner life of the Christian—the secret correspondenceof his soul with God—is from one point of view a great business. It waswell called "the business of all businesses" by St. Bernard; for it is no mereaddition to Christianity, but its very essence, the source of its vitality andpower. From another point of view it is a great journey; a bit-by-bit progress,over roads that are often difficult and in weather that is sometimes pretty bad,from "this world to that which is to come." Whichever way we look at it, anintelligent and respectful attitude to our equipment—seeing that it is allthere, accessible and in good condition, and making sure that we know the realuse of each item—is essential to success. It is only too easy to bedeluded by the modern craving for pace and immediate results, and press onwithout pausing to examine the quality and character of our supplies, or beingsure that we know where we are going and possess the necessary maps. But thismeans all the disabling miseries of the unmarked route and unbalanced diet; andat last, perhaps, complete loss of bearings and consequent starvation of thesoul.

Karl Barth has told us, that on becoming a Calvinist minister, he paused toexamine his own spiritual stock in trade; and found to his horror that it wasuseless to him. He seemed to have nothing to feed on, nothing to depend on,nothing to give. It looked imposing; but much of the food was stale andunnourishing, some of the tins seemed empty, and some were so tightly sealedthat he could not reach their contents. He was the child and servant of thatInfinite God, whose every word nourishes the souls of men. But he was receivingnothing from Him: the real contents of the stores that had been issued to himwere inaccessible. In apparent plenty, he was spiritually starved. In lesserways that dreadful situation can easily become our own, if we merely take ourreligious equipment for granted; do not make sure that it contains food on whichwe can feed, tins we can open, and that we know what the labels really mean. Forthe spiritual life of man cannot be maintained on a diet of suggestive phrasesand ideas. Only when we have found within the familiar externals of ourreligion, those vivid realities which these externals enclose and keep safe, arewe using our equipment properly and getting the food we need. We must open thetins, if we are to discover inside them the mysterious nourishment of the soul.Nor have we any right to ask for fresh enlightenment, or a new issue ofprovisions, until we have fully explored the resources we already possess.

This process is equally necessary for those who are repelled by the externals ofreligion, and those who are attracted by them. Both need to recognize thedifference between the container and the content. Many people spend the whole oftheir devotional lives sitting by the wayside admiring the pictures on the tins;more are alienated from religion by mistaking this procedure for faith. KarlBarth went away into solitude to open some of his least promising packages; andfound with amazement within them the inexhaustible nourishment of eternal life.

Lent is a good moment for such spiritual stocktaking; a pause, a retreat fromlife's busy surface to its solemn deeps. There we can consider our possessions;and discriminate between the necessary stores which have been issued to us, andmust be treasured and kept in good order, and the odds and ends which we haveaccumulated for ourselves. Most of us are inclined to pay considerable attentionto the spiritual odds and ends: the air-cushions, tabloids, and vacuum flasks,and various labour-saving devices which we call by such attractive names as ourown peace, our own approach, our own experience, and so forth. But we leave thesuperb and massive standard equipment which is issued to each baptized Christianto look after itself. There are few who cannot benefit by a bit by bitexamination of that equipment, a humble return to first principles; for there wefind the map and road-book of that spiritual world which is our trueenvironment, all the needed information about the laws which control it, and allessentials for feeding that inner life of which we talk so much and understandso very little.

The Christian creed is a hand-list of the soul's essential requirements: theiron ration of truths, the knowledge of mighty realities, which rightly used issufficient to feed and safeguard our supernatural life throughout its course.When Christians say the Creed, they say in effect, "This is what we believe tobe the truth about existence; about God and the things of God, and so byimplication about our own mysterious lives." For the whole of life, visible andinvisible, is governed by these statements; which come to us from beyond ournormal radius, entering the human scene in their penetrating truth and majesticbeauty, to show us how to live.

The longer we go on with life, the more mysterious, the more baffling it seemsto most of us: and the more deeply we feel the need of being taught how to live.We go muddling on, secretly conscious that we are making a mess of it. Guidescome forward to tell us this or that, yet always with an avoidance of the fullmystery of our situation, seldom with any real sense of the richness of thematerial of life: and they all fail to be of much use to us when we come to thebad bits. The surface-indications often mislead us. The tangle of new roads,bordered by important-looking factories and unhappy little trees, the arterialhighways leading nowhere, the conflicting demands and directions which reach usfrom every side, only make our confusions worse. And at last we realize thatonly the Author of human life can teach us how to live human life, because Healone sees it in its eternal significance: and He does this by a disclosure thatat first may seem strange and puzzling, but grows in beauty and meaning as wegaze at it, and which feeds, enlightens and supports us when we dare to take upthe life that it reveals.

"Lord," said St. Thomas Aquinas, "set my life in order; making me to know what Iought to do and do it in the way that I should." The civilized world seems nowto have reached the point at which only this prayer can save it; and the answeris already given us in the Christian creed. We talk much of reconstruction; butno one has yet dared to take the Christian's profound beliefs about Reality asthe basis of a reconditioned world. We treat them as dwellers in the plain treatthe mountains. We lift up our eyes to their solemn beauty with respect; butrefuse to acknowledge that plain and mountain are part of the same world. Yetthe Creed is no mere academic document, no mere list of "dogmas." It is anaccount of that which is; and every word it contains has a meaning at onceuniversal, practical, and spiritual within the particular experience of eachsoul. It irradiates and harmonizes every level of our life, not one alone. Allgreat spiritual literature does this to some extent; but the Creed, thecondensed hand-list of those deep truths from which spiritual literature isbuilt up, does it supremely.

Dante warned the readers of the Divine Comedy that everything in it had afourfold meaning, and would never be understood by those who were satisfied bythe surface-sense alone. This, which is indeed true of the Comedy, is far moretrue of the great statements of the Christian religion. They are true at everylevel; but only disclose their full splendour and attraction when we dare toreach out, beyond their surface beauty and their moral teaching, to God, theirmeaning and their end, and let their fourfold wisdom and tremendous demandspenetrate and light up the deepest level of our souls.

The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from thedifficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficultexistence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost. Till we acceptthis truth, religion is full of puzzles for us, and its practices oftenunmeaning: for we do not know what it is all about. So there are few things morebracing and enlightening than a deliberate resort to these superb statementsabout God, the world and the soul; testing by them our attitude to thoserealities, and the quality and vigour of our interior life with God. For everyone of them has a direct bearing on that interior life. Lex credendi, lexorandi. Our prayer and belief should fit like hand and glove; they are theinside and outside of one single correspondence with God. Since the life ofprayer consists in an ever-deepening communion with a Reality beyond ourselves,which is truly there, and touches, calls, attracts us, what we believe aboutthat Reality will rule our relation to it. We do not approach a friend and amachine in the same way. We make the first and greatest of our mistakes inreligion when we begin with ourselves, our petty feelings and needs, ideas andcapacities. The Creed sweeps us up past all this to God, the objective Fact, andHis mysterious self-giving to us. It sets first Eternity and then History beforeus, as the things that truly matter in religion; and shows us a humble andadoring delight in God as the first duty of the believing soul. So there canhardly be a better inward discipline than the deliberate testing of our vague,dilute, self-occupied spirituality by this superb vision of Reality.

These great objective truths are not very fashionable among modern Christians;yet how greatly we need them, if we are to escape pettiness, individualism andemotional bias. For that mysterious inner life which glows at the heart ofChristianity, which we recognize with delight whenever we meet it, and which isthe source of Christian power in the world, is fed through two channels. Alongone channel a certain limited knowledge of God and the things of God enters themind; and asks of us that honest and humble thought about the mysteries of faithwhich is the raw material of meditation. Along the other channel God Himselfcomes secretly to the heart, and wakes up that desire and that sense of needwhich are the cause of prayer. The awestruck vision of faith and the confidentmovement of love are both needed, if the life of devotion is to be rich, braveand humble; equally removed from mere feeling and mere thought. Christian prayerto God must harmonize with Christian belief about God: and quickly loseshumility and sanity if it gets away from that great law. We pray first becausewe believe something; perhaps at that stage a very crude or vague something. Andwith the deepening of prayer, its patient cultivation, there comes—perhapsslowly, perhaps suddenly—the enrichment and enlargement of belief, as weenter into a first-hand communion with the Reality who is the object of ourfaith.

For God, not man, is the first term of religion: and our first step in religionis the acknowledgment that HE IS. All else is the unfolding of those truthsabout His life and our life, which this fact of facts involves. I believe in OneGod. We begin there; not with our own needs, desires, feelings, or obligations.Were all these abolished, His independent splendour would remain, as the Truthwhich gives its meaning to the world. So we begin by stating with humble delightour belief and trust in the most concrete, most rich of all realities—God.Yet even the power to do this reflects back again to Him, and witnesses to Hisself-giving to the soul. For Christianity is not a pious reverie, a moral systemor a fantasy life; it is a revelation, adapted to our capacity, of the Realitieswhich control life. Those Realities must largely remain unknown to us; limitedlittle creatures that we are. God, as Brother Giles said, is a great mountain ofcorn from which man, like a sparrow, takes a grain of wheat: yet even that grainof wheat, which is as much as we can carry away, contains all the essentials ofour life. We are to carry it carefully and eat it gratefully: remembering withawe the majesty of the mountain from which it comes.

The first thing this vast sense of God does for us, is to deliver us from theimbecilities of religious self-love and self-assurance; and sink our littlesouls in the great life of the race, in and upon which this One God in Hismysterious independence is always working, whether we notice it or not. Whenthat sense of His unique reality gets dim and stodgy, we must go back and beginthere once more; saying with the Psalmist, "All my fresh springs are in thee."Man, said Christ, is nourished by every word that proceeds out of the mouth ofGod. Not the words we expect, or persuade ourselves that we have heard; butthose unexpected words He really utters, sometimes by the mouths of the mostunsuitable people, sometimes through apparently unspiritual events, sometimessecretly within the soul. Therefore seeking God, and listening to God, is animportant part of the business of human life: and this is the essence of prayer.We do something immense, almost unbelievable, when we enter that world ofprayer, for then we deliberately move out towards that transcendent Being whomChristianity declares to be the one Reality: a Reality revealed to us in threeways as a Creative Love, a Rescuing Love, and an Indwelling, all-pervading Love,and in each of those three ways claiming and responding to our absolute trust.Prayer is the give-and take between the little souls of men and that three-foldReality.

So we begin the overhaul of our spiritual equipment not by thinking about ourown needs and shortcomings, but by looking up and out at this One Reality, thisUnchanging God, and so gaining a standard of comparison, a "control." Thatremarkable naturalist and philosopher, Dr. Beebe, whose patient study of livingthings seems to have brought him so near to the sources of life, says in hislatest book Nonsuch, "As a panacea for a host of human ills, worries and fears,I should like to advocate a law that every toothbrush should have a smalltelescope in its handle, and the two used equally." As far as the life ofreligion is concerned, if we always used the telescope before we used thetoothbrush—looked first at the sky of stars, the great ranges of thebeauty and majesty of God, and only then at our own small souls and theircondition, needs, and sins—the essential work of the toothbrush would bemuch better done; and without that self-conscious conviction of its overwhelmingimportance, and the special peculiarities and requirements of our own set ofteeth, which the angels must surely find amusing. "Where I left myself I foundGod; where I found myself, I lost God," says Meister Eckhart. Our eyes are notin focus for His Reality, until they are out of focus for our own pettyconcerns.

What then is the nature of that Eternal God, the Substance of all that is, sofar as we are able to apprehend Him? What is the quality of that mysteriousstarlight the telescope helps us to discern? We are Christians; and so weaccept, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the Christian account ofHis character. God is Love, or rather Charity; generous, out-flowing, self-giving love, Agape. When all the qualities which human thought attributes toReality are set aside, this remains. Charity is the colour of the Divinepersonality, the spectrum of Holiness. We believe that the tendency to give, toshare, to cherish, is the mainspring of the universe, ultimate cause of all thatis, and reveals the Nature of God: and therefore that when we are most generouswe are most living and most real. "Who dwelleth in Charity dwelleth in God, andGod in him"; our true life develops within a spiritual world which lives andglows in virtue of His Eternal Charity. To enter the Divine order then, achievethe full life for which we are made, means entering an existence which only hasmeaning as the channel and expression of an infinite, self-spending love. Thisis not piety. It is not altruism. It is the clue to our human situation.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE SCHOOL OF CHARITY by EVELYN UNDERHILL. Copyright © 1991 Longman Group UK Limited. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819215481
• ISBN 13: 9780819215482
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 111