George Fox and Early Quaker Culture

Hilary Hinds

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719081576
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847797667
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

What was distinctive about the founding principles and practices of Quakerism? In George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, Hilary Hinds explores how the Light Within became the organizing principle of this seventeenth-century movement, inaugurating an influential dissolution of the boundary between the human and the divine. Taking an original perspective on this most enduring of radical religious groups, Hinds combines literary and historical approaches to produce a fresh study of Quaker cultural practice. Close readings of Fox's Journal are put in dialogue with the voices of other early Friends and their critics to argue that the Light Within set the terms for the unique Quaker mode of embodying spirituality and inhabiting the world. In this important study of the cultural consequences of a bedrock belief, Hinds shows how the Quaker spiritual self was premised on a profound continuity between sinful subjects and godly omnipotence. This study will be of interest not only to scholars and students of seventeenth-century literature and history, but also to those concerned with the Quaker movement, spirituality and the changing meanings of religious practice in the early modern period.

1

‘As the Light appeared, all appeared’: the Quaker culture of convincement

So our Practice will Preach out our Performance of what we Promise, and that performance prove our words.

(Samuel Fisher)¹

What was the cultural force of the core belief in the inward light for the rhetoric and practice of early Quakerism? In what ways, and to what ends, can the ramifications of this most insistent of theological tenets be tracked in the writings and practices of early Friends? To what extent were the movement’s characteristic forms, customary behaviours and habits of speech predicated on this founding perception of the divine? In other words, in what ways did Quaker practice, in the words of Samuel Fisher quoted above, ‘Preach out’ the ‘Performance’ of what Friends promised? The theological implications of adherence to the light within have been amply explored by historians, theorists and theologians of Quakerism. Amongst others, Geoffrey Nuttall and Hugh Barbour have traced the continuity between the theologies of the Puritans, Quakers and other sectaries in the seventeenth century, Douglas Gwyn has posited an apocalyptic rather than straightforwardly Protestant analysis of the early Quaker phenomenon, Pink Dandelion has read Quakerism through its eschatology and in relation to the Second Coming, and T. E. Underwood had offered a fascinatingly detailed contrastive analysis of Quaker articulations of their faith with those of their Baptist contemporaries.² My concern here, however, is less with the theological dimensions of the doctrine, and more with its broader cultural and discursive significance: how did Friends’ claims about the presence of the already risen Christ within the believer affect how they thought, spoke and behaved? What did it mean to ‘walk in the light’? What impact did the movement’s insistence on the universality of the light, its presence in and availability to all, and its sufficiency for salvation, have on the work of Quaker ministry and on the perceptions of those to whom they were ministering? Barry Reay has suggested that Quakerism put the accent anew on human effort, and ‘provided an answer to the simple question, “How can I be saved?”’, but this reintroduction of a degree of human agency into the soteriological configuration, together with the temporal and spatial presence of the indwelling Christ, also had profound implications for another question: namely, ‘How should I live in this world?’³

It is the distinctive answers to these questions framed by early Quakers that are examined here. The perspectives afforded by Friends’ vantage point from within the light were shaped by the taxonomies, definitions and ramifications made possible in and by this post-convincement world. The proposition I explore is that turning to the light, and thereafter dwelling in that light, effectively remade the world, broadly conceived, for early Quakers. To Friends, all appeared anew in this illumination, different from before, and different from how their contemporaries perceived, analysed and inhabited the world. With its emphasis on the universality of Christ’s redemptive promise, and with the element of human agency this reintroduced into the soteriological landscape (in turning or failing to turn to the light, or in backsliding), combined with the internalisation and integration of the divine, the light within dissolved or remade the categories that informed other radical theologies. Understandings of election and reprobation, the divine and the human, the spiritual and the carnal, male and female, the perfected and the fallen, the present, past and future, the sacred and the profane continued to shape Quaker discourse and religious practice, but in a transformed (their detractors would say distorted) state. The world seen from an early Quaker perspective, from a position produced and illuminated by the light, looked like a very different place from the one perceived, theorised and inhabited by Baptists, Independents or other early religious radicals.

Quaker formulations of faith, early attacks on Quakerism and Friends’ defences of their beliefs variously invoke, interrogate, extol or condemn the doctrine of the inward light, or the indwelling Christ; they work out from it, back to it, circle it and probe it; they explore its implications, push it to its limits, strip it back to its biblical origins. Even opponents who focused on the more socially contentious aspects of Quaker social and religious practice (the refusal of hat honour and oath-taking, the insistence on the use of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, the interruption of church services, or the performance of prophetic signs) are most troubled, if less piqued, by the implications of the concept of the light within. ‘They hold that Christ is a light within every man, and that every man must mind that light and teacher within’, averred Francis Higginson in his extensive list ‘Of the Erroneous Opinions of the Quakers’.⁴ Thomas Weld tackles James Nayler’s affirmation ‘That every man in the world had a light within them sufficient to guide them to salvation, &c. and this he extended even to Indians, that never heard the Gospel’, begging his readers ‘to consider what sad and lamentable effects will flow from this Doctrine, to the utter undoing of the soule’.⁵ Friends themselves mounted their defences of their faith and practices through reference to this doctrine. Nayler answered Weld with these words: ‘That Iesus Christ is the onely light, and there is none besides him to guide to salvation, and that he is the light of the whole world … is plaine in the whole Scriptures’.⁶ In his Great Mistery of the Great Whore Unfolded of 1659, Fox was still answering the charge that ‘It is a Scripture of the Devills making to apprehend this crucified Christ within’.⁷ Indeed, early Friends first referred to themselves as ‘Children of Light’ – ‘The Children of Light which are in the Light, that comes from Christ, by whom the world was made’ – a phrase which succinctly frames Quakers genealogically in relation to the doctrine of light, naming it as that which formed them, defined them and gave them their being.⁸

What was it about the doctrine of Christ as an inward light that troubled Quakers’ predominantly Calvinist opponents and disputants? It was, after all, an idea readily traced to the Scriptures; most significant for Quakers was John 1: ‘In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not…. That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world’ (John 1.4–5, 9).⁹ The image had been adopted and deployed by many Christian theologians thereafter, not least St Augustine, who, having been reading from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, wrote that ‘No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away’.¹⁰ In its marking of the limits of the force of the written word, and its emphasis on the primacy and power of its individual and immediate inward apprehension, as well as in its apprehension of truth as a light, the scene is strongly reminiscent of Fox’s own pronouncements, and underscores the familiarity, the longevity and the orthodoxy of many of the concepts which caused such consternation when reanimated by Fox and the early Friends.

It was not, therefore, the Quaker recourse to the figure of Christ as light itself that offended but its interpretation, and in particular the stress on its inwardness. Quakers insisted on both the universality and the immanence of Christ’s light. It shone within everyone, and its salvific potential was available to all, though would not be attained by all. This divine immanence became the alpha and omega of belief: ‘none could be a true believer, but who believed in it’.¹¹ Furthermore, the implications of this notion were pressed to their conclusions. Friends agreed that, if Christ indwelt each individual, then the authority of that inward light must supersede even the authority of the Bible. If Christ indwelt, then what were the implications for the human subject’s fallen and sinful postlapsarian condition, or for his or her relation to that divinity, or for Christ’s promised second coming? Critics have traced the ways in which seventeenth-century Friends inflected their answers to these questions slightly differently – Fox from Nayler, and both of them from Penn and Barclay, for example – but their critics took little account of these fine discriminations, and unequivocally condemned the blasphemous potential of the questions themselves.¹²

In his Journal, Fox establishes the sense of Christ as light at the heart of his account of his year of convincement, revelation and personal calling in 1646–47, when it was revealed to him that his mission was ‘to turn people from darkness to the light, that they might receive Christ Jesus’. He makes his understanding of the revelation of Christ as light foundational to this vocation:

for to as many as should receive him in his light, I saw, that he would give power to become the sons of God: which I had obtained by receiving Christ…. For I saw, that Christ had died for all men, and was a propitiation for all; and had enlightened all men and women with his divine and saving light: and that none could be a true believer, but who believed in it…. These things I did not see by the help of man, nor by the letter (though they are written in the letter;) but I saw them in the light of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by his immediate Spirit and power, as did the holy men of God, by whom the Holy Scriptures were written.¹³

Fox’s revelation concerns the universal reach of Christ’s sacrifice: he died ‘for all men … and had enlightened all men and women’. Here was the contentious statement of the universality of Christ’s light, its availability in, and saving power for, everyone, not only for an elect predestined to salvation, as in the Calvinist interpretation. Moreover, Fox indicates that he arrived at this understanding by means of Christ’s ‘immediate Spirit and power’: that is, Christ’s spirit came to him by direct revelation – something most Protestants understood to have come to an end with the apostles – unmediated by any human or scriptural means. In a far-reaching extension of reformed religion’s general rejection of the mediation of the divine by religious structures and sacraments, as glossed in the Lutheran notion of the priesthood of all believers, Fox here adumbrates the Quaker insistence on the primacy of direct revelation of the truth, via a Christ ‘immediate’, unmediated, because within. The doctrine of the light within, or the indwelling Christ, constituted a radical internalisation of the agent of salvation for fallen humanity: Christ, said Fox, ‘revealed himself in me’.¹⁴ The risen and already returned saviour was to be found not in the promise of a future moment, in a distanced and externalised form, ‘above the stars’, but here and now, within the believer himself or herself; the light of Christ was, Fox wrote, ‘the unchangeable truth in the inward parts’.¹⁵ This perception of Christ’s presence, immediacy and inwardness was uncompromising and explicit, made manifest in direct revelation by the light itself, the authority of which was greater than that of the scriptures but also confirmed by reference to them: ‘the saints are the temples of God’, wrote Fox, ‘and God doth dwell in them, that I witness and the Scripture doth witness, and if God doth dwell in them the divinity dwelleth in them’.¹⁶ Accession to this apprehension – turning to the light within – was, effectively, what defined the saved and separated them from the damned: ‘If Christ that’s crucified be not within, and Christ that’s risen be not within, I say that you all are Reprobates’.¹⁷

For Fox, this indwelling Christ was not to be understood metaphorically. His conception was of a divinity of which the godly partook corporeally and spiritually, in their regenerate flesh as well as in their immortal souls: ‘The Father and Son are one, and we are of his flesh and of his bone’, he wrote.¹⁸ ‘[Those] who are of the flesh and bone of Christ are with him, and sits with him in Heavenly places’, but ‘if the Scripture be not within, which was spoken forth from within, you all want the spirit that gave it forth, and Christ the substance of it; and you have not eaten his flesh, neither are you of his bone’.¹⁹ In a language of integrated immanence – which Richard Bailey, who has argued most extensively and forcibly for the importance of this dimension of Fox’s Christology, has called ‘Fox’s not distinct language’ – Christ is substantially as well as spiritually present to the believer: ‘Gods Christ is not distinct from his Saints, nor his bodies, for he is within them; nor distinct from their spirits, for their spirits witnesse him; … and he is in the Saints, and they eate his flesh, and sit with him in heavenly places’.²⁰ This linguistic formulation stops short of claiming equality with God (though this is something of which Fox and others were frequently accused), but none the less there was for Fox quite literally – in one of his best-known formulations – ‘that of God in every one’.²¹ True faith and lived testimony consisted in recognising and answering this inward manifestation of divinity.²²

In his repeated references to Christ in the flesh and bone of the believer, Fox vividly articulated the sense of the regenerate body substantively inhabited and transformed by the light within. Other Friends also referred to the corporeal dimension of the changes wrought by accession to the light. Nigel Smith has noted that ‘early Quakers often assumed the body underwent a change when it was inhabited by the inner light, that is, by the substance of Christ’, citing the Quaker Martin Mason’s The Proud Pharisee Reproved (1655) in evidence: ‘Is not he that denyes Jesus to be come in the flesh an Antichrist? … Is not Christ Jesus of the Substance of the Deity? Is it not said, Christ in you the Hope of Glory? [Colossians 1.27]’.²³ Nayler wrote that ‘Christ is not divided; for if he be, he is no more Christ: but I witness that Christ in me who is God and man in measure’; more succinctly, he said that Christ ‘dwelleth in the bodies of his saints’, an interpretation that found notorious concrete public form in his later messianic entry into Bristol on horseback, in the manner of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.²⁴ Later Quaker spokesmen such as William Penn and Robert Barclay drew back from and redefined the corporeally articulated Christ within so frequently invoked in the 1650s, yet the earlier perception was certainly not reformulated out of existence, as the earlier perception continued to be cited into the 1670s and beyond. Particularly telling in this regard is the first edition of Fox’s Journal (1694), published three years after Fox’s death and heavily edited, re-ordered and rewritten by Thomas Ellwood. This volume was commissioned and approved by the Second Day Morning Meeting, the committee which, since 1672, had been charged with responsibility for approving Quaker publications. None the less, despite that committee’s frequent decisions that publication of certain texts was ‘not convenient’, and despite the excision of some of the more theologically contentious episodes from the Journal, such as those concerning prophecies and miracles, the Journal leaves intact many of Fox’s formulations with regard to carnal regeneration and transformation in the light.²⁵ Members of the church of Christ, Ellwood’s edition avers, are ‘of the Seed and Flesh of Christ; as the Apostle saith, Flesh of his Flesh, and Bone of his Bone’; ‘they, that are of his Seed, are of the Generation of Christ; and so are Flesh of his Flesh, and Bone of his Bone’.²⁶ However much the first of these statements might be hedged in by the mediating, authorising and palliating reference to ‘the apostle’, Fox’s formulation claiming ‘the flesh of Christ’ for the members of the true church is none the less permitted to stand. Also allowed to remain in Ellwood’s edition is Fox’s comment that, living in the light, he was ‘very much altered in Countenance and Person, as if my Body had been New-moulded or changed’.²⁷ Even in the more conservative and cautious climate of the 1690s, Fox’s Journal was still permitted by the chief editorial body of the movement to suggest that renewal through accession to the indwelling Christ remade the subject not only spiritually but also corporeally.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on references to Fox’s Journal
• Introduction: seamless subjects
• 1 ‘As the Light appeared, all appeared’: the Quaker culture of convincement
• 2 ‘Let your lives preach’: the embodied rhetoric of the early Quakers
• 3 ‘And the Lord’s power was over all’: anxiety, confidence and masculinity in Fox’s Journal
• 4 A technology of presence: genre and temporality in Fox’s Journal
• 5 ‘Moved of the Lord’: the contingent itinerancy of early Friends
• 6 The limits of the light: silence and slavery in Quaker narratives of journeys to America and Barbados
• Conclusion: singularity and doubleness
• Notes
• References
• Index