Desiderata in Quaker History-An Editorial

BULLETINOF Friends Historical Association Vol. 36Spring Number, 1947No. 1 DESIDERATA IN QUAKER HISTORY— AN EDITORIAL By Frederick B. Toixes TAKING advantage of his temporary occupancy of the editorial chair, the Acting Editor begs leave to take a few pages to point out what seem to him some of the outstanding needs in the field of Quaker history at the present time. The origins of Quakerism have always held a peculiar fascination for historians and will no doubt continue to do so. Without question, more pages have been devoted to the decade or so before 1660 than to any other period in Quaker history. Yet, as shown by the recent lively exchange between Henry J. Cadbury and Winthrop S. Hudson in the Journal of Religion, there is still room for controversy over the relationship between primitive Quakerism and other cognate movements in the Commonwealth period. I should like to submit that in our zeal to find traces of the influence of Boehme and other esoteric mystics we have overlooked something which should have been obvious ; namely, the rootage of Quakerism in the distinctive religious ethos of seventeenth-century England—that great outcropping of prophetic piety which we call Puritanism. Students of Quaker history need to bring themselves abreast of the work of recent scholars who have been reinterpreting the Puritan movement in terms which reveal a closer affinity with Quakerism than previous generations appreciated. Thus we find 4 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Perry Miller of Harvard, the most profound interpreter of the New England Puritan mind, writing that there was in Puritanism "a piety, a religious passion, the sense of an inward communication " which, he feels, was not unlike that of the Quakers. "At the core of the [Puritan] theology," he observes, "there was an indestructible element which was mystical." This is assuredly a startling view to those of us who think of the Puritans only as exponents of a grim and unlovely Calvinism who hanged four Quakers on Boston Common and harried others out of their colonies with unexampled ferocity. This interpretation is buttressed , however, not only by Professor Miller's inexpugnable learning but by the findings of other scholars like Geoffrey F. Nuttall, in whose important recent book The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience we find the striking thesis that "the Puritan movement was a movement towards immediacy, towards direct communion with God through His Holy Spirit, in independence of all outward and creaturely aids." Recalling that the "Children of the Light" grew up in an intellectual and spiritual climate pervaded by Puritanism, do we need to infer influences from abroad to explain the vein of mysticism which cropped out so notably in the early Friends? Is it not more reasonable to assume (since in the absence of positive evidence we are obliged to fall back largely upon assumptions) that the primitive Friends simply brought out into the open the latent mystical element in Puritanism and made it the core of their religious faith? I would venture to predict that the next generation of scholars in this field will direct their attention mainly to elaborating the proposition that primitive Quakerism was "a heresy within Calvinism," a development within the broad framework of the Puritan ethos, rather than emphasizing, as earlier generations have done, the parallels with the mysticism of the Neoplatonic tradition. If this prediction is valid, it is nevertheless not the whole story. Quaker historians need to take more seriously than they have so far done Theodor Sippell's pregnant suggestion that the distinctive thing about primitive Quakerism was its unique combination of the mystical with the prophetic spirit and temper. (Incidentally, an English translation of Sippell's Werdendes Vol. 36, Spring 1947 DESIDERATA IN QUAKER HISTORY5 Quäkertum is one of the crying needs of Quaker scholarship.) Anglo-American students of Quaker history have not yet sufficiently grasped the significance of the crucial distinction between mystical and prophetic religion which has been worked out so fully and persuasively by European scholars like Söderblom and Heiler, although Rufus M. Jones devoted a few valuable pages to the subject thirty years ago in his Introduction to Braithwaite's Beginnings of Quakerism, and Rachel Hadley King...