The Inner Light

MS

We were discussing George Fox, the itinerant Quaker, and a man across the table defended Fox’s 17th century outlook: Fox was unable to go to the source, since he was living in a world that was completely Christian, but we today are able to translate his thoughts into a language that is more understandable and go directly to that source—God—without getting sidetracked by Christ. The friends around the table were sitting in First Day school, and afterwards we would attend meeting. The language was infused with Quaker particularities, although shorn of thou’s and thee’s, but at issue was the continued relevance of the thought of the man George Fox.

Old Roads is a web site dedicated to preserving and making relevant ideas from the past, and this process of translating the 17th century thoughts of George Fox into a modern framework could well be understood as parallel to our own. There are, however, a few points through which the difference in our positions can be made clear.

The idea of a “source” is a place to start. The implication of the statement is that, getting on 400 years later, we now are better able to judge of final truth and to understand the general religious truth sprinkled liberally throughout religious traditions. This idea that we have a clear view of this source distracts us from the fact that we are living in our own historical time period. Our current idea of what this source might be is as true a reflection of our own historical moment as Fox’s was for his.

The use of the word “translating” might lead one to think that the goal is to update an outmoded way of thinking by restating it in accordance with modern ways of thinking. The assumption here is that we can put into the mouth of an historical writer what he would have said if he had had the luck to be born in our own time—“If he had been me, this is how he should have expressed that thought.” But if such is our practice, historical writers will on the instant lose their uniqueness and become ventriloquists for our own views. Translating ought to remain a work for languages, not for thoughts.

The notion that George Fox was bound to see his world only in terms of Christ and the Bible is also questionable. Fox did not step out of a dark age, but out of 17 th century England . When he was born Shakespeare had been dead for 20 odd years, Marlowe for 50, and there was no absence of critical and irreligious viewpoints. Fox had choices which reached beyond Christian doctrine. He lived at a time of religious ferment, it is true.. but then so do we. Fox was no more bound to take the path of an earnest Christian, and to use the language of Christ and faith, than we are today.

Our position is that we live in a time when the possible ways of viewing the world are being pruned. Choose whatever side you will on the political spectrum, this is the case. My Quaker example comes from the left, but the “book of suburban virtues” version of this process is just as evident on the right. We want the past to look like us, and we are hasty to translate their views into our own.

Our primary duty to each thinker from the past should be to preserve and note their singular vantage on our world. The result is not a neat anthology of voices speaking as they might have if they chanced to live in our own time, but rather a contradictory mob of voices speaking against each other and against us, and that is the point. We are not out to make thinkers sound the same, but to make evident how different they all are.

What will be our benefit from this? I like to think about plants in the Amazon rain forest. The oft-stated goal of biologists is to preserve biological diversity. Perhaps this will bear fruit in coming years when some plant produces an unknown chemical that has medical applications, but at the very least it will give us a fuller picture of life on this earth. In a similar fashion, the ideas of the past could someday have startling application, but their preservation also enables us to grasp something of human possibility, something of the breadth and depth of the human imagination.

The Quaker idea of the “inner light” is a case study. The attraction of the idea is obvious: people are able to distinguish and sense truth for themselves without the mediation of external authority. Whether George Fox himself understood the “inner light” in such a convenient sense is another question. His journal—portions of which we have been reading for First Day school—suggests that whatever the inner light might be, it is bounded by scripture. Even when Fox speaks in words that hint at revelation, look closer and there is scripture behind it:

…But the Lord showed me, so that I did see clearly, that he did not dwell in these temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people’s hearts; for both Stephen and Apostle Paul bore testimony that he did not dwell in temples made with hands…

As William Penn states in his preface to the journal: “[Fox] had an extraordinary gift in opening the Scriptures. He would go to the marrow of things..” However we try to understand his sense of direct revelation, it did not function outside scripture.

It seems that as we approach a writer from the past, such as Fox, we turn almost immediately to our own “inner light” of interpretation. The promise is much as George Harrison sings about in his song “The Inner Light”: “Arrive without traveling/ See all without looking.” And that is fine for personal religious experience, but when applied to writers of the past it cuts away the fine challenging edge of their thought and leaves us surrounded by mirrors.

Our work at Old Roads is rather to strive to make these writers stand out with all their strangeness, with all their unorthodoxy, and with all their flaws. That clear, we can come back around and see what might be of relevance to us now, what oddity might challenge the way we live.