"The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, and intellect and feeling are only important insofar as they contribute to that"
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Underhill’s line is a quiet rebuke to the modern habit of treating insight and emotion as achievements in themselves. She’s writing out of a Christian mystical tradition where the self isn’t “expressed” so much as trained, and where spiritual maturity is measured less by flashes of understanding than by sustained orientation: what you choose, repeatedly, when nobody is applauding.
“The direction and constancy of the will” is doing the heavy lifting. Direction implies a telos, a chosen end; constancy implies boredom, relapse, dry seasons, and the slow re-choosing that actually forms a life. Underhill demotes “intellect and feeling” not because she’s anti-thinking or anti-emotion, but because she’s suspicious of their volatility and their ego-friendly glamour. Intellect can become a substitute for obedience: you can analyze your way around transformation. Feeling can become a proxy for holiness: you can mistake intensity for truth. Her hierarchy is diagnostic as much as devotional.
The subtext is almost psychological: you are what you keep consenting to. Everything else is weather. In the early 20th century, when Underhill was publishing on mysticism amid war trauma and a culture newly infatuated with psychology and subjective experience, this insistence on will reads like a corrective to spiritual tourism and mood-based faith. It’s also a subtle defense against despair: if the will is the anchor, then absence of consolation doesn’t equal failure. The work is to keep turning the self, deliberately, toward the good.
“The direction and constancy of the will” is doing the heavy lifting. Direction implies a telos, a chosen end; constancy implies boredom, relapse, dry seasons, and the slow re-choosing that actually forms a life. Underhill demotes “intellect and feeling” not because she’s anti-thinking or anti-emotion, but because she’s suspicious of their volatility and their ego-friendly glamour. Intellect can become a substitute for obedience: you can analyze your way around transformation. Feeling can become a proxy for holiness: you can mistake intensity for truth. Her hierarchy is diagnostic as much as devotional.
The subtext is almost psychological: you are what you keep consenting to. Everything else is weather. In the early 20th century, when Underhill was publishing on mysticism amid war trauma and a culture newly infatuated with psychology and subjective experience, this insistence on will reads like a corrective to spiritual tourism and mood-based faith. It’s also a subtle defense against despair: if the will is the anchor, then absence of consolation doesn’t equal failure. The work is to keep turning the self, deliberately, toward the good.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
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