The earliest documentary witness to Jesus Christ which we possess is the witness of mysticism; and it tells us, not about His earthly life, but about the intense and transfiguring experience of His continued presence, enjoyed by one who had never known Him in the flesh.
—Evelyn Underhill
Anglican mystic and author Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) is convinced that the apostle Paul’s writings are often misunderstood because we weren’t taught that he is a mystic:
To obtain a true idea of St. Paul’s personality … we must correct the view which sees him mainly as a theologian and organizer by that which recognizes in him a great contemplative. For here we have not only a sense of vivid contact with the Risen Jesus, translated into visionary terms—“I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me” [Acts 22:17]—but an immediate apprehension of the Being of God….
We misunderstand St. Paul’s mysticism if we confuse it with its more sensational expressions. As his spiritual life matured his conviction of union with the Spirit of Christ became deeper and more stable. It disclosed itself … as a source of more than natural power. Its keynote is struck in the great saying of his last authentic letter: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13). This statement has long ago been diluted to the pious level, and we have ceased to realize how startling it was and is. But St. Paul used it in the most practical sense, in a letter written from prison after twelve years of superhuman toil, privation, and ill-usage, accompanied by chronic ill-health; years which had included scourgings, stonings, shipwreck, imprisonments, “on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, … in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked” (2 Corinthians 11:26–27). [1]
These, and not his spiritual activities and successes alone, are among the memories which would be present in St. Paul’s consciousness when he declared his ability “to do all things.”
Underhill emphasizes Paul’s sense of himself as a mystic:
Much of the difficulty of St. Paul’s “doctrine” comes from the fact that he is not trying to invent a theology, but simply to find words which shall represent to others this vivid truth—“I live, yet not I … to live is Christ … Christ in me…” [Galatians 2:20].
[His] letter [to the Romans] is the work of a man who has fully emerged into a new sphere of consciousness, has been “made free by the Spirit of Life,” “a new creature,” and enjoys that sense of boundless possibility which he calls “the glorious liberty of the children of God.” He knows the mysterious truth, which only direct experience can bring home to us, that somehow even in this determined world “all things work together for good to them that love God” [Romans 8:2, 21, 28].
References:
[1] Translation here is the New Revised Standard Version; Underhill used the King James Version.
Evelyn Underhill, The Mystics of the Church (Morehouse-Barlow, 1988), 42, 45–46, 48.
Image credit and inspiration: mohammad hassan taheri, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The fluid, impermanent sand slipped through Paul’s once-certain grasp, as his Divine encounter cracked open his clenched knowing and invited him to see from a transformed perspective.
Story from Our Community:
I have had the privilege to visit some of the greatest cathedrals in the world: Notre Dame, St. Peter’s Basilica, St Patrick’s, and St. Mark’s Basilica. These are wonderful churches, but I felt closer to God deep in the woods in Northern Minnesota on the Paul Bunyan Trail. There, deer, beavers, chipmunks, squirrels, and many colorful birds crossed my path. I admired the rich colors of the red-winged blackbirds and heard the woodpeckers hammering away on the trees above me. I truly felt I was seeing and participating in God’s creation, beyond what we humans can create.
—Brent B.
