The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays

Evelyn Underhill was an English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism. She was one of the most widely read writers on such matters in the first half of the twentieth century. She then uses that sacramental framework very effectively to illustrate the unfolding of a human drama. The collection of essays deals with various aspects of the subject of mysticism: the first half-dozen with its general theory and practice, and special points arising within it; the rest with its application as seen in the lives and works of the mystics, from the pagan Plotinus to the Christian con- templatives of our own day.