Evelyn Underhill's remarkable book Mysticism (1911) went through many editions and revisions during her own lifetime, and has rarely been out of print since. This book was the work of a pioneer in the field and is still acknowledged as such. It is also worth noting that terminology has shifted over the years: use of the term ‘spirituality’ has now largely superseded such terms as ascetical/mystical/spiritual theology. Thus most of Underhill's writing as a whole is still much valued as ‘spirituality’ (relation to the transcendent). She is not simply to be written off as if she were of importance only in her own era, before World War II in effect (she died in 1941), though some of the conclusions she drew from her studies would not necessarily be palatable to her present-day readers, as we shall see. Moreover, given that ‘spirituality’ has in the last quarter century or so been developing into a major academic discipline and that it is, so to speak, being reconnected to academic theology, we may hope that there will be renewed attention to the whole range of her work. However, it will no doubt be some time before academic theology fully embraces what is now called ‘liturgical’ or ‘pastoral’ theology of the kind that she herself attempted – also within the broad compass of ‘spirituality’. She was nothing if not ambitious both in the range of topics she tackled and in some of her theological proposals. The reason for choosing my particular focus is precisely the audacity of her convictions. A more comprehensive study of her writing as a whole would require a major book.

Evelyn Underhill and Her Context

Born in December 1875, Evelyn Underhill was a Victorian, but one fortunate enough to benefit from some of the most significant changes in the Victorian and then the Edwardian era, which affected the lives of women and, inevitably, their relationship with men. Put briefly, in England, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, and its development in legislation of 1867 and 1870, had at last done something to rectify the situation of married women, deemed hitherto to have no legal existence and no legal rights of property ownership. In 1885, the Married Women's Property Act secured to married women the property and earnings they had acquired after marriage.

All societies experience stability and change, and this is one of the most puzzling paradoxes in social and political theory. The persistence of social structure in society establishes order without which chaos would result. A desire for change may come about when established institutions fail to meet or to represent the legitimate needs of groups in society. Then again, because societies never achieve permanent integration and continue to develop over time, they may generate the sources of their own conflict and change. The generational cycle is one of the constant sources of social strain in history. Young people always have been impatient with the traditional order, and in recent years youth has emerged as a formidable agent of social and political change (Ortega y Gasset, 1958; Feuer, 1969).

Most members of society in the course of their life cycles experience frustration and the desire for change. However, it is only when a significant number of people become aware of their common circumstances and feel something can be done to alleviate their dissatisfaction that a social movement may appear. The discrepancy between the individual needs or aspirations of young people and the existing social and political conditions lies at the root of youth movements (Heberle, 1951; Killian, 1966; Sherif & Sherif, 1969; Bakke & Bakke, 1971; Demerath, Marwell, & Aiken, 1971; Liebert, 1971).

Youth

Youth is defined as a biosocial age stratum in society, following childhood and adolescence and preceding adulthood. This stage in the life cycle is considered to begin somewhere between the ages of 14 and 18 and to continue until approximately 22 to 25 years of age, or when youth enter the labor market on a full-time basis (Flacks, 1971; Keniston, 1971; Moynihan, 1973). Empirical evidence is mounting that suggests that specific biosocial changes occur during each stage of the life cycle, such that certain needs and developments are considered more important at one stage than at another (Ausubel & Sullivan, 1972). The stage of the life cycle defined as youth is considered crucial for the development of: (1) formal, critical thinking and future orientation (Piaget, 1967); (2) the evaluation of moral principles and values in society (Kohlberg, 1964; Piaget, 1965); and (3) the conscious search for self-identity (Erikson, 1968).

This chapter is about Austin Farrer as a preacher of the gospel of divine saving judgement; for this purpose the Farrer of the sermons, the Lent books, the paragraphs for use at the Eucharist; even the Farrer who taught the use of the rosary. The thread of the chapter is provided by some of Farrer's remarks in Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (1962; hereafter LA). The title reminds us of P. T. Forsyth's exposition of divine love as that which ‘has absolute power to give itself eternal and righteous effect’. Behind Forsyth lies a long tradition of discussion of theodicy, notably the challenge to Christian theology thrown down by Bayle at the end of the seventeenth century, and Leibniz's attempt to console those who like Bayle expressed inconsolable grief at the way in which ‘evil’ is woven into the entire cosmic texture. Farrer seemed to summarise this tradition when he wrote: ‘The very intensity of the indignation or grief which we feel over the affliction or destruction of God's creatures is a testimony to the esteem in which we hold the happiness and the mere life of the creatures affected’. Farrer's masterly appreciation and criticism of Leibniz sprung both from his own brilliance as a philosopher, and from his thorough grasp of the Christian gospel.

How may we as it were provoke Farrer to speak to us, so that he is not merely the elegant philosopher and theologian of an earlier generation, but a living voice? Perhaps we can deepen our sympathies and refresh our sensitivities to those features of Christ's passion reflected in Farrer's presentation of the gospel by paying attention to two profoundly moving modern ‘passion stories’. One is Rosemary and Victor Zorza's account of the death of Jane, their 25-year-old daughter, a situation of extreme physical evil, in which moral evil is not allowed to proliferate, despite Jane's death. Another is Rolf Hochhuth's account of a German love story, which ends in utter tragedy. Neither of these stories were written to further the interests of any religious apologetic, so it is by accident that they give us a sense of what might be meant by the claim that the passion of Christ is of universal significance.

A walk through the graveyard of the Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead will discover a gravestone for Hubert and Evelyn Stuart Moore, the tablet further identifying her as the daughter of Sir Arthur Underhill. This memorial in effect relegates Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) to the roles of daughter and wife, containing no indication that she had received public recognition in her own right for her remarkable career. A major feature of this was becoming a ‘retreat director’, a vocation which, in the Church of England, was one she pioneered for women. As early as 1913 Underhill was made an Honorary Fellow of King's College for Women (King's having been founded as a Church of England College), and became King's first woman Fellow in 1927. On that occasion, the dean of King's commended her as one might expect, rehearsing her career and qualifications, but rather to her surprise the principal received her not just as an ‘exponent of mysticism’ but as a poet. She had indeed published three volumes of poetry, but she had also published three novels which are the focus of this present chapter: The Grey World (1904), The Lost Word (1907), and The Column of Dust (1909). The principal may have been perfectly well aware that Underhill had long since deliberately abandoned her attempts to establish herself as a novelist in favour of concentrating on her many publications to commend the living of a distinctively Christian life. For these the University of Aberdeen offered her an Honorary DD in 1938, and she is commemorated in the calendar of the Church of England on 15 June, the date of her death in 1941. At the present time, there continues to be much interest in the work which established her as a distinctively Anglican voice, with many of her readers focussing on her extraordinary achievement in researching and writing Mysticism (1911). For those familiar with this major work and her subsequent publications in theology, the novels may well startle readers into a revaluation of Underhill and the development of her own spiritual life.

At the age of 17, Underhill noted down her ideal of a woman: ‘clever, vivacious, accurately but not priggishly informed, gentle, truthful, tactful and tolerant, and should have a due sense of proportion’.

At the beginning of 1888, utopian literature received an abrupt and extraordinary renewal from the publication of the book Looking Backward 2000–1887 by the American writer Edward Bellamy. An edition published in Boston and New York (Riverside Paper Series, September 21, 1889) is called the 220 thousandth. By the beginning of 1890, cheap English reprintings were everywhere: there were four editions at one time. In 1896, a penny edition was produced by Manchester Labour Press; in Germany, the book was published in the most popular and cheap book series at that time, and it has been very widely available ever since then. There have been numerous other translations, and in 1897 there was another book by Bellamy, a sequel, which offers further explanations: Equality. It is a better novel than Looking Backward as far as theory is concerned, but it has neither the verve nor the narrative drive of the earlier work. It did not seize the imagination of the general public as intensely.

However, the immense success of the book by 1889 shows that a well-constructed utopia knows how to reach the public by the hundreds of thousands in a way that theoretical books and pamphlets do not. There are scarcely two or three socialist books that rise above the level of propaganda: There is August Bebel's Die Frau und der Sozialsmus: Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, und Zukunft [Woman and Socialism: Woman in the Past, Present, and Future] (1891) and Robert Blatchford's Merrie England (1894). I won't undertake to name others, save the contemporary works of Bertrand Russell; but, what has the circulation been of books by Octave Mirbeau, by Anatole France, by Upton Sinclair, by Tolstoy, and so on?! Educational or didactic literature can't do everything; ideas demand to be adorned by art and imagination. The public is not only avid for sensations and rather uninterested in quality, but also curiosity about and desire for a better future have not died out. The public follow those books which have an air of improving the human character. What interest did Camille Flammarion find when, in popularizing astronomy, he cast all of the problems—those concerned with the habitability of the other planets—in a mystical light that excited curiosity?

His book Les mondes imaginaries et les mondes réels. Voyage pittoresque dans le ciel [Imaginary Worlds and Real Worlds.

Theology in the universities of England and Scotland, and to a lesser extent those in Wales and Northern Ireland, has traditionally been dominated by Anglicans or Presbyterians of the established and national churches. Until the mid-twentieth century, theology was predominantly a clerical enterprise allied to a particular kind of confessionalism. One of the most striking developments during the post-war period has been the loosening of this hold on the discipline. Some long-established chairs tied to cathedral canonries were laicized and Roman Catholic and non-conformist academics were appointed to university departments. The first non-Anglicans were appointed at Durham University in the 1940s and, in 1978, Nicholas Lash became the first Roman Catholic since the Reformation to be appointed to a chair of divinity in Oxford or Cambridge. Of course, these developments have broadened the discipline of academic theology in many ways. Unlike faculties in Germany, which are divided into Protestant and Catholic, those in the UK are now more broadly confessional and multi-denominational. The growing predominance of lay theologians has allowed Roman Catholic women, and Anglican women prior to women's ordination to the priesthood, to become leading university theologians.

At the same time, some would argue that the post-war period has seen theology lose its ecclesial identity and its dogmatic and confessional heart. In short, it has become just another academic discipline, often barely distinguishable from philosophy, history, classics or sociology, rather than a distinctively traditioned mode of enquiry that nourishes the confessing life of the churches. This is an important concern, but it is nevertheless significant that public universities in the UK continue to sustain confessional departments of theology which make a significant contribution to the churches. Whilst the number of ordained university theologians has fallen in recent decades, there remains a good number who continue to connect their research and teaching to sacramental and pastoral ministry. Lay theologians in the academy make an outstanding contribution to their churches’ doctrinal committees, teaching ministry and training. There are, of course, gains and losses in the changing landscape of theology in the university.

List of Intentional Communities in Esbozo

From now on when discussing utopias, I have to include authoritarian utopias, for they make up the great majority of texts in the genre. The oldest expressions of libertarian feeling are, one knows, very rare. Rebels at that time primarily acted directly or succumbed to persecution so that even the memory of them has been lost. Their literary works were always quite few and were often lost. In general, one has to be content with the fact that the author of a utopia then almost always had in mind a better state of affairs than existed in his own time, but he could only partly free himself from the thinking of his time, which was most often authoritarian. Utopias in the aggregate, however, present a wide range of viewpoints: from those who accept unrestricted authority, to those who believe it necessary to augment it by regulating everything, to those who try their best to diminish it, to make it disappear, or, at least, to search for what they believe are guarantees against its abuses. Utopias thus present the human spirit grappling with authority, an entity which is considered a panacea by a few and instinctively draped in the cloth of justice by others. How can the people set themselves free, if even the most adventurous spirits who move freely across the terrain created out of their own fantasy almost never know how to bring that freedom about? Now the hour has arrived, but the foremost seekers, after thousands of years, have not arrived there yet.

Utopias arise from thinking about how to govern and to educate, from being aware of social injustice and the monopolizing of land, from the critique of mores, and so on. The Greeks cultivated this genre to a very high degree in myth without their country experiencing any great social convulsions. The Romans didn't write utopias, but there was fighting between plebians and patricians; there was the agrarian war of the Graci, and a fight to the death by the slaves against their masters in the time of Spartacus. They even saw the idealism and the self-denial of the first Christians, but they also experienced the loss of the social ideals of primitive Christianity when superstitions were created and a Christian hierarchy came into being.

After identifying the origins of the concept “generation” and defining political generations, the historical and contemporary perspectives of political generations are discussed. In the past, much of the theoretical and empirical literature on political generations emphasized the importance of either life-course, cohort, or period effects. Recently, there has been a convergence toward recognizing the interactions of these effects on political behavior. This essay outlines main and interactive effects on political generations, offers an interactive model of political generations, and briefly applies the model over four historical-generational periods. Some of the problems as well as suggestions for testing an interactive approach to political generations are presented.

Introduction

The Concept of Generation

One of the oldest explanations for human behavior is rooted in the concept generation. The earliest meaning of “generation” was in a biological sense, indicating genealogical descent from father to son, and as far back as the days of the ancient Greeks, the social significance of generational membership was recognized (Feuer 1969; Nash 1978). An appreciation of the importance of the concept generation continues today, as reflected in Wohl's (1979, p. 203) statement: “The truest community to which one can belong is that defined by age and experience.” The significance of a generation is not only a shared age-group membership—based on life-cycle characteristics (maturational patterns and changes that occur as a function of age) and cohort position (demographic and social factors associated with time of birth)—but on the sense of social consciousness and participation in the historical process that may develop within any generation. At times, generational consciousness has become so strong that the members of a generation have mobilized and changed the course of history. As the youth generation in England in the 1930s was told, “The enemy is the old gang of our present political system…. The real political division of the present decade is not a division of parties but a division of generations” (Larsen, Hagtvet, and Myklebust 1980, p. 543); and as Octavio Paz wrote about Mexico's revolutionary generation of 1910, “A new generation had risen, a restless generation that desired a change” (Feuer 1969, p. 176).

Young people are marching again throughout Western Europe and the United States with banners and signs reading: EUROSHEIMA NE!, EUROPA ATOM WAFFEN FREI, RAUS NATO!, NON AUX CENTRALES NUCLEAIRES, NOTTINGHAM FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, NO NUKES, and PENNSYLVANIA IS EVERYWHERE. During an October, 1981 peace rally in Bonn, West Germany, more than 250,000 young people gathered to hear American Coretta Scott King (widow of the slain U.S. civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) and singer Harry Belafonte tell the crowd, “Millions of Americans stand by your side,” and the entire crowd sang the civil rights hymn “We Shall Overcome” at the close of the rally (Reid, 1981). While the dominant themes in many of these marches and demonstrations have been the political and social implications of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology, contemporary youth movement activity is not limited to the nuclear power issue, nor is it confined to North America and Western Europe. Issues have included racism and unemployment (in London, Johannesburg, Miami), revolutionary insurrection (in Northern Ireland, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua), crime, rowdyism, and youthful rampages (in the Soviet Union, United States, Switzerland), student strikes (in France, Italy, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, the Philippines), and ideological-religious struggles (in Spain, Turkey, Thailand, Uganda, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt).

Given the extent of youthful political activity in the last two centuries and the modern explosion of such activity that reached its zenith in the 1960s and continued, albeit to a lesser extent in the 1970s and 1980s, there are surprisingly few theories that explain the historical patterns and generational cycles of youth movement activity. In particular, what remains unclear is the relationship between historical and generational forces that give rise to youth movements, and especially why certain epochs experience dramatic generational rebellions while others do not. In order to address this issue, the present study will explore how and why historical and generational forces interact to produce youth movements. The attempt is made to construct a theoretical model of historical generations and youth movements that is broad, global, and historically applicable. To accomplish these rather ambitious tasks, the following procedures are outlined. First two theoretical approaches, the historical and the generational, to the study of youth movements are presented and discussed in detail. These theoretical approaches are among the most popular macrosociological theories explaining youth movements.

My interest in Simone Weil (1909–1943) in this chapter is not primarily in her very many merits, but in what helped to bring her to her death. I would not deny that she was one of the great minds of this century, and that whatever she wrote, whether for publication or for her own needs, is marked by her own inimitable authority. We can rely on argument for her merits from writers as different as Professor D. Allen, with his critique of that egocentrism which infects our culture, and is at odds with Christianity's doctrines of co-inherence in their many forms; and Professor D. Z. Phillips, not least with regard to her hunger for the transcendent.

We may recall that terrible prayer she wrote towards the end of her life1 though she did insist to herself that one could not voluntarily demand what the petitions were for, that such prayer was despite oneself, though with consent, entire and without reservation, a movement of the whole being. The prayer included a petition to the Father to grant her in the name of Christ, ‘That I may be unable to will any bodily movement, or even any attempt at movement, like a total paralytic. That I may be incapable of receiving any sensation, like someone who is completely blind, deaf, and deprived of all the senses. That I may be unable to make the slightest connection between two thoughts […]’ She asked for will, sensibility, intelligence, love to be stripped away, ‘devoured by God, transformed into Christ's substance, and given for food to afflicted men whose body and soul lack every kind of nourishment. And let me be a paralytic – blind, deaf, witless, and utterly decrepit’.

At the very least, she is one of those who skip certain levels of contemplative religious development and start with ‘Passionist’ manifestations. Someone operating at this level presents themselves as a total physical sacrifice to the destructive elements of the world, rather than ‘hitting back’: and it is worth noticing that the next level is what Margaret Masterman identified as the ‘Hostic’ level, ‘only sacramentals portrayed’ at which the saint desires not only to be killed but eaten. And indeed we find Simone Weil noting: ‘To live the death of a being is to eat him.

Utopia. How easily one scorns the genre. It is considered useless, illusory, contrary both to reality and to science. Let us guard against following such dry, utilitarian voices! The world is poor enough as it is right now, and utopia is altogether one of its rarest flowers. Truly poor is the man who doesn't cherish utopia, who can't sustain in his mind an eternal utopia built according to some ideal, as much universal as individual, that he conceives of in his earliest youth. Such a utopia will be very flexible in construction. It will be something he adds to or alters at each step of his intellectual and moral development, something that grows, gets old, and dies with him. What an empty mind it is that doesn't know utopia, that thinks—from pride, resignation, or triviality pure and simple—there is nothing more than the present moment! Not that one has to make an abstraction of the present; on the contrary, carpe diem matters. However, those who are absolutely absorbed in what is are as incomplete as those who live in nothing more than a dream, in nothing more than a utopia.

Utopia is a social phenomenon that occurs in every epoch, and is one of the primary and oldest forms in which progress and rebellion are expressed. The desire to lift oneself above a present that seems acceptable only to the power broker or the pleasure seeker; the hope that one day one will triumph when the chance occurs and one becomes transformed into reflecting on the future, into envisioning what one can become. This process alternates in the healthy organism with the impulse to focus on the here and now, on whatever action, work, investigation, or experiment lies to hand. Indeed, because of this impulse, because men would have been truly free and happy by attending to their own affairs, the worst authoritarian clergymen have always tried to prevent them from becoming complete men. In some men, they have cultivated only a liking for the present, for vulgar pastimes, while in others, the dispossessed and the conquered, they have cultivated a belief that the only hope lies in a future under some form of heavenly justice—either the happiness of paradise or the punishment of hell that is found in all religions.