A good man is hard to find: Joseph Jones on the many faces of George Fox

‘There are a lot of people who have tried to get to know George Fox.’

He believed he should ‘be as a stranger unto all’, but there are a lot of people who have tried to get to know George Fox. Given the wide range of conclusions they’ve reached about him, however, it seems that he was probably successful. Was his messaging, as Henry Cadbury had it, ‘often dull and repetitious’; or was Rufus Jones right to call it ‘powerful’? Was he the ‘graceful’ and ‘courteous’ man described by Thomas Ellwood – ‘civil beyond all forms of breeding’ according to William Penn? Those on the receiving end of one of his many ‘denunciations’ may not have thought so. Was he a practical man of action, after earthly change, or more concerned with the heavenly realm and the Inner Light? All these things can be true, of course, looked at from a particular angle. Context always matters. We might recoil from a man shouting down his opponents in an argument, until we learn he was doing it in defence of the view that a woman had a soul of her own. 

But the context of the observer matters as much as the observed. By the time of Fox’s death, and the publication of his Journal, Friends were already describing him in ways that suited their current purpose. Forgotten was the ‘Fifty nine Particulars laid down for the Regulating of things,’ the document which Fox had sent to parliament in the wake of Cromwell’s death. It was perhaps his most radical political writing – and too radical, it seems, for the Friends who, by now, sought to establish for themselves a respectable movement. Instead, the Journal, much amended by editors, concentrates on Fox’s religious radicalism (though arguably in an amended form, some distance from what Friends had once experienced as the second coming among them). 

A century ago, at the tercentenary of Fox’s birth, Rufus Jones said that ‘contemporary judgments’ about Fox could ‘carry no finality. Only the stern sifting of the centuries can decide upon the measure of a man’s real greatness, only the votes of many generations can give a sure verdict’. But I’m not so certain. To me, it feels rather that the further we get from the magnetic live presence of the man himself, the more we overlay our own current concerns.

Take, for example, Fox’s mysticism, understood in his time as a visionary enlightenment. This seems to have matched itself with a mind that also suffered deep depressions. In Jones’s day ‘The border line between disintegrating hysteria and the vital energy of the prophet and genius has not yet been mapped’, but soon the new language of psychology was to make an attempt. In 1931, in The Denunciations of George Fox Viewed Psychologically, Warren C Middleton would proclaim, ‘In George Fox we undoubtedly have a pronounced case of a superiority complex.’ For William James (he of The Varieties of Religious Experience), ‘From the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or detraqué of the deepest dye.’ By the time of our own century, we come full circle: the Quaker Universalist Fellowship, in a new spirit of politically-engaged Quakerism, publishes the ‘Fifty nine Particulars’ for the first time since 1659, and in its introduction calls Fox another new term: manic depressive.

Other causes – perhaps all Quaker causes – eventually hitch themselves to the Fox wagon. For example, where he was once understood as the man who rejected the mainstream churches’ assertion that enslaved people were too primitive to comprehend Christian precepts, Fox is now, according to this month’s excellent issue of Friends Journal, ‘a racist’. My aim here is not to question the validity of any of these perspectives, but to point out that who George Fox was depends entirely on where one stands when one looks at him.

‘Each of us makes only a personal engagement with our founder.’

Even our visual cues are not useful (should we in any case be minded to ascribe a personality to a picture). No image we have of Fox was painted during his lifetime, nor any of them by anyone who ever met him. It was for this reason that I felt emboldened to publish an AI-generated picture of him in the Friend last year – with all our images being guesses, I was interested to see what a computer might do.

 Each of us, then, makes only a personal engagement with our founder. As I read through the Journal I find myself stopping at the points that complicate the cleanest picture – the eternal vice of the editor. Why, George, when a woman offers to cut your rats’-tail hair, do you tell her instead to ‘cut down the corruptions in her with the sword of the spirit of God’? It’s a bit much. Even if she was ‘too light to receive the weighty things of God’, wasn’t she planning on doing you a favour? No wonder she went off telling silly stories.

Then, having battled for the right to keep your hat rather than doff it to whoever thought they deserved it, why do you get so offended when James Nayler refuses to doff his to you? When he would not kiss your hand, you tell him to kiss your foot. I think I might have been tempted to tell you to kiss something else. Yes, I think you would have found me too ‘light’ and ‘airy’, too. In fact, when you want to ban fiddlers from pubs, I wonder how we ended up on the same team at all. Did you never dance, George? I think it might have done you some good.

My predecessors, a century ago, said that you convinced men because you were yourself convinced (see page 14). But you find me now in the middle of an election campaign, when the convinced men are the ones I don’t like the look of. The Friend of 1924 believed society weak in its lack of conviction; in 2024 I fear the strength of it.

And yet. There’s a thing that happens inside me when you stride into those steeplehouses to do your shouting. Reading about the things you insisted upon – that no ritual is needed for me to encounter the divine; that no priest is needed for me to access the divine; that no building is needed for me to access the divine – puts me in mind of what it might have felt like to have those things denied. This feeling comes with a weight that even you might have found suitably heavy. Certainly it comes with a voice that says ‘I am grateful.’  

In the end, though, I think you should remain a stranger. Your aim – your pattern, your example – was not that you become a lens through which every topic of our day must be refracted. It was that no person should come between us and God. Perhaps here we find another thing on which we might agree: shall we move you out of the way? 

Joe is editor of the Friend.

Photos: (Left) George Fox, artist unknown, c1835, probably based on an earlier painting by Samuel Chinn (Middle) George Fox, AI generated by Open Art, 2023 (Right) George Fox artist unknown, early 1800s.

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