The Quakers as Parrhesiasts: Frank Speech and Plain Speaking as the Fruits of Silence

At that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord. From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia my supplicants, my scattered ones, shall bring my offering. On that day you shall not be put to shame because of all the deeds by which you have rebelled against me; for then I will remove from your midst your proudly exultant ones, and you shall no longer be haughty in my holy mountain. For I will leave in the midst of you a people humble and lowly. They shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord—the remnant of Israel; they shall do no wrong and utter no lies, nor shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths. Then they will pasture and lie down, and no one shall make then afraid.

—Zephaniah 3.9-13

The parrhesiastes [truth-teller] does not reveal to his interlocutor what is, the parrhesiastes unmasks who he is.

—Michel Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité

Of immense significance in early Quakerism was the element of "plain" speech. Through their use of plain or pure language Quakers could identify themselves as the remnant of Israel foretold by the prophet Zephaniah in the epigraph that opens this essay. Refined in God's fire, the remnant of Israel was to be a sign of contradiction to the rest of the world; God's people in exile in the midst of the world as it were. Richard Farnsworth, one of the earliest members of the Society of Friends, wrote in 1653 of this experience of being the remnant: "The people in this generation profess themselves to be the people of God, and the scriptures to be their rule … but are as the heathen, all their language is corrupt, and if any speak to them in plainness of speech, they are so scornful, that they cannot bear it… those that speak in plainness of speech, them they hate."¹ As exiles, or "resident aliens" in the world, the early Quakers viewed the use of language as something to be considered very carefully. For them, language was meant to offer something distinctive in comparison with the speaking of others which could so easily deceive. The Quakers' concern with language was especially potent in light of when Quakerism was born in turbulent mid-seventeenth-century England.

Between 1642 and 1651, there took place between King and Parliament, various conflicts generally termed the English Civil War, but sometimes called the English Revolution or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649 there came the period called the English Interregnum which lasted until 1660 when the monarchy was reestablished with the return of Charles II to the throne. The period from 1642 to 1660 was astonishing in terms of radical religion. Searching for the true model of church government and worship, as laid out in the New Testament, groups such as the Seekers and Quakers emerged, questioning the nationally adopted church polity and practice which had emerged from the English Reformation begun by Henry VIII in 1534. For such groups as the Quakers, the search for the true model of church government was a means to separate from the impure and the ignorant, becoming the remnant of Israel. Their search was viewed by the political and religious establishment as a rejection of the divinely ordered social order, and thus the Quakers were regarded as radical sectaries, heretics, the vanguard of Satan's armies. On the part of the Quakers, the search for the true model of Church and Church government meant playing extraordinarily close attention to language and its use since they were very much aware of how easily humans misuse and manipulate language.

The Quakers' intense consideration of language can be seen in such works as that of Francis Howgill (1618–1668), who like Richard Farnsworth, is considered a member of the Valiant Sixty. The Valiant Sixty was a group of...