‘Their prolonged periods of contemplation allowed them time to listen to God, and be open to his guidance.’ | Image: The Mother God Experiment
Mystery tour: Moira Fitt investigates some of the mystical roots of Quakerism
‘I was interested to discover that each had a phrase that identifies their own unique personal relationship with God.’
The early mystics of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries (and later) were all members of cloistered or monastic communities. This meant being committed to holy living twenty-four hours a day in very simple, prayerful circumstances, often largely enclosed, away from the world outside.
When on her death bed, Julian of Norwich (1342-after c1416) experienced sixteen divine revelations of an all-loving God who makes all things well. She was aware that her direct experience of a God of love would be controversial. At this time, the established church was preaching hell and damnation to all for the plague that had visited them. Commanded by God to share her visions, she courageously began her life’s work writing a book recording the revelations, in English – a daring innovation when church services were in Latin and few women could read. ‘Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God, when I saw at the same time both his goodness and his wish that it should be known?’ Julian is known for having envisioned the whole world as the size of a hazelnut in her hand: ‘I was astonished that it managed to survive: it was so small that I thought that it might disintegrate. And in my mind I heard this answer: “It lives on and will live on forever because God loves it”.’
Given safe sanctuary as an anchoress, enclosed in her cell, she had three small windows: the first so she could join the services; another into a walled garden; and, importantly, one into the street, where she offered counsel and healing to those who came seeking her blessing.This ‘mother of English prose’ proved to be a radical theologian, whose writings, by a miracle, survived. The moving story of how a chain of faithful nuns copied her words and protected them with their lives, over many centuries, is at the centre of that miracle. Finally, in 1794, they were smuggled from France back to England by Benedictines disguised as Carmelites fleeing the French Revolution. Eventually given to the British Museum in 1901, among a vast collection of documents from a Scottish estate, they remained safely hidden for many years, their importance unrecognised for nearly 300 years.
Reading about other mystics in medieval Europe, I was interested to discover that each had a phrase that identifies their own unique personal relationship with God. Their prolonged periods of contemplation allowed them time to listen to God, and be open to his guidance through direct experience, not book-knowledge.
Hildegard of Bingen (c1098-1179) was a sister in a Benedictine Abbey. She became respected as a ‘Rhineland mystic’ who wrote treatises on theology, medicine and science, and corresponded with popes and numerous clergy. Alongside scientific work on the healing properties of herbs she also composed music and plainchants for her fellow nuns to sing. In 1151, Hildegard experienced twenty-six spiritual visions, recorded and illustrated as ‘Scivias’, which she described as ‘like a feather on the breath of God’.
Mechthild of Magdeburg (c1210-1294) joined a Beguine religious community of women, where she wrote in her native low German. She recorded that ‘I will not write unless I see with the eyes of my soul.’ This was her witness to the authenticity of her mystical visionary experiences, which she called ‘The Flowing Light of the Godhead’.
At about the same time, Meister Eckhart (1260-c1328), a Dominican in Erfurt, was writing in his native German of his understanding of ‘the spark of the soul’, and the ‘Light which shines out from the soul’, showing his deep concern with ‘the inner life through silent waiting for God’, and of the importance of ‘detachment from external things that hinder the soul’s progress towards union with God and living in the Divine Now’.
Moving forward to the time of political and religious turmoil in England in the seventeenth century, I now include the man who walked the length and breadth of the country telling of his direct experience of the immediacy of the presence of Christ in ‘openings, without the help of any [person]. From reading George Fox’s Journal, I came to the conclusion that his words bear the hallmarks of ‘mystical’ experiences, which were to lead to the emergence of Quakerism, its framework of faith and form of worship ‘to wait on God in gathered, silent worship’.
George Fox (1624-1691) was the son of a Leicestershire weaver, known locally as ‘righteous Christer’. When George was nineteen, he was so shocked by the failure of those who professed themselves to be Christians to live up to Christian standards that he set off in search of those who were on a similar spiritual pilgrimage. Over four years of searching, he found there was none among the priests or dissenters. ‘I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”, and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord did let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give him all the glory; for all are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence who enlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power. Thus, when God doth work who shall hinder it? And this I knew experimentally.’
He saw an ‘infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.’
George Fox wrote: ‘…the Lord God hath opened to me by his invisible power how that every [person] was enlightened by the divine light of Christ… This I saw in the pure openings of the Light without the help of any man.’ In the North West ‘I spied a great high hill called Pendle Hill… but I was moved of the Lord to go atop of it; and when I came atop of it I saw Lancashire sea; and… the Lord let me see atop of the hill in what places he had a great people to be gathered.’ Coming upon Swarthmoor Hall, he was welcomed by Margaret Fell and her husband. At church the next day, he posed the question: ‘Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?’ Margaret Fell said: ‘I saw it was the truth, and I could not deny it; and I did as the apostle saith, I “received the truth in the love of it”.’ She became a staunch supporter of the burgeoning Quaker movement, writing letters and organising the travels of Fox and other ‘convinced’ Quaker preachers throughout the country.
A regular pattern of persecution and imprisonment of Quakers continued. Many refused to pay tithes to the church and had their ‘goods and chattels’ distrained in lieu of payment. When George Fox came to Cornwall in 1656, he was arrested and jailed in the Doomsdale under Launceston Castle for many months, surviving in appalling conditions with the help of Quakers who travelled great distances to visit him with food and hear him preach. Undaunted, he came twice again to Cornwall. Cornwall’s first Meeting house was built in 1688 at Marazion. Then, at last, the Act of Toleration became law and Quakers could worship in peace.
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