Quaker Theology #14

Review of  Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality -- Page 2

One of these is

. . .the still relevant question of whether seekers are to keep on seeking for seeking’s sake or to identify an end point to their search. Can a solid religious identity be achieved only through the particularity, integrity and discipline of one tradition? Was the point of pursuing the spiritual life self-expansion, artistic creativity, and endless curiosity or instead self-surrender, obedience, and resignation to God? (P 18)

Another tension is drawn tight over the recurrent question of just how "universal" seeker "universalism" can or should be. Schmidt identifies this as "the larger liberal dilemma of whether to exclude the exclusive." It was posed in 1870, probably without conscious irony, by one Octavius Brooks Frothingham, first President of the Boston-based Free Religious Association (of which Lucretia Mott was a stalwart member and featured speaker): "Into our kingdom of heaven no sectarian may enter," Frothingham declared. . . . "Hold all opinions soluble, and you are one of us." (P. 134)

But of course, a "universal" spirituality which eschews all exclusive beliefs thereby leaves out most of the world’s actual faiths, and is "universal" only at the most abstract level. It’s no wonder that such "universalist" sects occupy quite tiny niches in the spectrum of real religions.

Higginson’s version of "universalism" led him, among other things to celebrate the slave spirituals, a stance that Schmidt thinks, in something of a stretch, tied the black Harvard PhD and activist, W.E.B. Du Bois, to the kind of "soul-hunger" the old abolitionist espoused. Whether or not this was so, Higginson’s was most assuredly an optimistic and, what we would label, "post-Christian" faith.

In the sense of fame, the nineteenth century offered Schmidt a more sterling cast of characters than the 20th century did. Almost all those in the last two chapters of the book are obscure, even unknown, to most folk today. Consider Green Acre (or Green-Acre or Greenacre) Farm in Eliot, Maine, to which Schmidt devotes at least forty pages. Founded in 1894 by one Sarah Farmer (1847-1915), a wealthy seeker, it is barely listed in Wikipedia, and its founder doesn’t even merit an entry. Yet until about the time of the First World War it offered an eclectic collection of courses and speakers to spiritually inclined seekers that apparently attracted thousands of fringe spiritual groupies in America, New Thoughtists, Buddhists, Vedantists, Zoroastrians, Theosophists, Ethical Culturalists, Baha’is – perhaps, given Farmer’s interest in peace, even a stray Quaker or two.

But then Farmer quit seeking and embraced Baha’ism sometime after 1900, a conversion that alienated many of her supporters, who saw this sectarian move as undercutting the ecumenical basis of the farm; they proved themselves unable to be really tolerant and unleashed bitter attacks on her. The farm survives today, according to Wikipedia, as a Baha’i study center.

The twentieth century odyssey of many liberal Quakers, a lot less obscure to readers here than those who trekked to Green Acre, forms the basis of the last chapter of Schmidt’s book. He designates Rufus Jones as "one of the most influential American writers on mysticism and the inner life" in the fifty years after 1900 (p. 230), a fact he asserts made Pendle Hill, founded in 1930, a material expression of this interest among Friends.

Jones declared that he’d found the roots of Quaker mysticism in the middle ages and the early Reformation – and made most of them up as he went, according to Schmidt. Indeed, our author vacillates between open admiration for Jones’s ability to see what he wanted to see, no matter the lack of evidence, and barely-suppressed hoots of scorn at the project’s underlying scholarly vacuousness.

Nevertheless, Jones turned out book after book, and attracted to his banner people as diverse as Friends Douglas Steere, Elton Trueblood, and the frail (and failing) Thomas Kelly, writers Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Gerald Heard, and the black minister Howard Thurman. Schmidt’s discussion of these Jonesians is rich and insightful, even as it is rooted in broad research and telling characterizations, quotations, and anecdotes. For modern Friends, this chapter is well worth the price of the entire book.

Schmidt makes clear that Jones was deeply knowledgeable about Emerson, Whitman, and others described in the book’s earlier pages. Many of these writers Jones interpreted as echoing the words of both George Fox and Elias Hicks, thus connecting them with Quakers of the past, as well as 17th century Seekers, people who proffered a mysticism by use of which 20th century seekers could also reject "the empty show of religion" that existed around them (p. 237).

Schmidt’s major themes of actual vs. imagined "universalism," and the dialectic of inclusivism vs. exclusivism, recur once again here, this time with a bittersweet edge, in the sketch most relevant to Friends, a starkly revealing profile of Jones’s religious thought, with which Schmidt comes to the climax of his tale.

Rufus pursued his own Quaker career in the midst of intense intra-Quaker infighting. The volleys came from both the left (as the Progressive Friends agitated among Hicksites for a Frothingham-ian "universal/inclusive" Unitarianism-lite) and from the right, where the new pastoral movement was sinking into fierce struggles over Fundamentalism, evolution, creeds, sacraments, speaking in tongues, the role of women, and lots more.

Today’s liberal Friends often think of Rufus as the pioneer of a seemingly sublime mystical alternative to all this messy stuff. But seen in the sweep of Schmidt’s saga, it is suddenly revealed as something much less. As Schmidt puts it, with surprising gentleness:

The expansive Transcendentalist rendering of Quakerism’s spiritual significance allowed Jones to reimagine his own religious identity in grandly universal terms. He came to see himself not as part of "a peculiar and provincial sect," . . . but as part of a questing movement that pursued the pure mystical core of religion itself. . . . The self-conscious change of diction proved crucial to Jones. His beloved Quakers–all appearances to the contrary– were not quirky sectarians, mired in doctrinal debates about what distinguished one band of Friends from another, Hicksites from Wilburites from Gurneyites, quietists from evangelicals. Instead, Jones claimed, the Society of Friends stood for an ‘inward, mystical religion’; it was an exemplar of the universal ‘religion of first-hand experience.’ That perspective, deeply indebted to wider currents in religious liberalism, was intended to override all the schismatic factionalism plaguing nineteenth-century Quaker meetings and to lift Jones into the company of a timeless band of spiritual reformers intent on finding "a direct way to God. (P. 235)

So much for good intentions. It’s not clear how well this schema ultimately worked for Jones; I suspect it had a mixed record. As a group agenda, however, it was–there is no kinder term–a dud. It ought to be undeniable for any Quakers who have actually glanced beyond their meeting house gates at "Other Friends" of whichever branch, that Jones’s attempted override was an utter failure.

    More >>>

<< Back

<<< Back to Contents