The Light and the Enlightenment

Maybe my problem is that I'm not really a Liberal Quaker.  The Paine/Burke thing doesn't sit easy with me.  But it's not because it doesn't apply.  It's because I mourn how Quakerism got to where it does apply.

Both Paine and Burke were (and are) talking about how self governing people should deal with change.   They were products of the Enlightenment--worshipers of reason--riding the early waves of the industrial revolution and coping with what it was doing to society.  They were talking about the "best" way to manage cultural change.  

But the Society of Friends isn't governed by that model of self government.

Is it?

OK, it is.

Should it be?

I think Doug Gwyn depicted the Lamb's War as a losing effort, with Quakers failing to establish a counter-narrative to that of the Anglo-Protestant capitalist class system that eventually emerged from the English Civil War.

That winning narrative was all about the Enlightenment, with its "rational Christianity," the handmaiden of both the capitalist industrial revolution and the modern imperial nation state.

Moral guidance, here, is not a function of spirituality--direct engagement with God.  It is, rather, a function of engagement with ideas about God, from scripture and the authority of the church. The transforming experience with God is replaced by manipulation of second hand, hearsay ideas about God that, far from changing us, tends to validate us in our worldly condition.

Quakerism was subversive to this theo/ideology and the establishment upon which it was based and, as fractured as it might have been from time to time, that establishment was united in persecution and suppression of them.  In time, though, it was not necessary to persecute or suppress Quakers.  They did that to themselves. 

Accommodating themselves to "the world" sufficiently to be allowed to live with whatever peculiarity remained among them, over the centuries Quakerism has pretty much gone over to this theo/ideology, accommodating itself gradually to the "reality" of the world of rational Christianity and, beyond that, rational religion and/or philosophy.  

This began early when "certain writings" of Fox (with his permission) were revised and "toned down."  Friend Barclay stated the first necessary proposition upon which this movement to the mainstream was predicated--the idea that nothing revealed by the Light could contradict scripture (which is a conflation of Fox's statement that everything he learned in the Light was confirmed in scripture--nice rational sleight of hand).

By the 19th Century, in America, there were domains in the Society where the "doctrine" of the Light was deemed an un-Biblical blasphemy.  Short of that extreme, the Light gradually became subordinate to Biblical and other kinds of theological reasoning--whether that was "owned" or not, it was true:   the divided condition of the Society testified to this reality.

With scripture set up as the ultimate authority, the only legitimate "data" upon which one could draw to rationally create and un-create notional theology that suited the institutional needs of the moment (both within the Society and American society at large), the road was paved for Paine and Burke.  Re-interpreted scripture was "continuing revelation," as reasoning religion had created an obsession not with abiding in and with God for guidance but an obsession with enforcing "belief" in propositions about God and insuring a uniformity in that belief, trending ever toward rational Christian orthodoxy.  If one wants to rule by reason one must control what data is legitimately used in the "rational" process of establishing and maintaining power over others.

With some saying that God was revealing "new light" more fit for a new age, and others maintaining that "old light" meant something different in new situations than it meant in situations it originally shined,  Friends  used the doctrine of continuing revelation to move farther and farther into the rational Protestant Christian consensus and the world it created and maintained.  Coming around to living out the capitalist narrative, Quakerism, once the spirituality of people known as Children of the Light, became largely another "choice" among available churches in which could be found Children of the Enlightenment.

Eventually "truth" from the scriptures of other religious (and non religious) traditions became fruit of "continuing revelation" for some Friends,  providing rational Quakerism with new "legitimate" data (at least to some) to be used in "figuring out" (as opposed to "working out") our salvation.

And so Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke walk among us, as Quakers everywhere use whatever data they consider legitimate in this grand reasoning process known to us as Quakerism.  Should we hurry forward as we adapt to the world of reasoning religion, or should we go slowly, carefully, so as to not throw the baby out with the bathwater?  Opinions come and go, depending on what we are aware of and where our human nature (pushing us toward what is most convenient and in our short term interest) guides us at one moment or the other.   It's not to be wondered, then, that the "revelations" of our "reason" should keep us divided.  Moment to moment, after all, any scripture can be used to piece together an argument to support pretty much anything after which one might lust, anything one might covet, anything one might want to do to placate one's anger, anything in which one might want to take pride...

This is a hard realization for me.  It causes me a dissonance in that I have always thought that we were led by the Spirit, not by our own notions and reasoning.  But what, if not notions, abstract reasonings about things we can never know, could have separated Friends one from the other and kept us separated, now?   If we were abiding in that transformational experience, led by the Light, would we be in this condition?  

What is the spirit in which we abide?   Is it Paine?  Is it Burke?  Is it a spirit of self government, instead of being governed by the Light?  Is this not the same struggle of which Friend Penington wrote (see masthead)/

See?   There I go:  "reasoning" and speculating about the nature, character and purpose of God instead of staying low, listening to the guidance about how I am supposed to be living and obeying.

Notwithstanding all of our reasoning, direct encounters with the Spirit, with Christ, go on daily.  The Light is never totally eclipsed, in the world or in our hearts.   All of us continue to be confronted about how we live, everyone hears  the pleadings to change and to endure the difficulties of learning to lie down beside that still water, in those green pastures.   This is the struggle within. 

Who can look around and say that this reason based world of the Enlightenment, and our notional, rational Quakerism as part of it, is filling or creating holes in our hearts?  Isn't it really in so far as we lay down our rationality about morality and go with what we have learned in our hearts that we are matured?


Most of us live with an alloy of spiritual and rational religion, struggling with the confusions that arise where the two compete for our attention, our allegiance.

Confused.

Separated.

Gossiping about the neighbors--gossiping about ourselves.
 

Neither Paine nor Burke is a guide to living in that peaceable kingdom, to being "in world but not of the world." 

Paine and Burke, and the rational notion/delusion of self governance they represent, put us in the position that the world changes us, we do not change the world.

Whether we hold hands with Paine or with Burke, go at one pace or the other, our rationality will take us to the same place:  deeper and deeper into the quicksand of our own imaginings and notions, further and further under the sway of the powers, more and more confused about why it is that each time we hit ourselves in the thumb with the hammer of our thinking it doesn't stop hurting.