Thought for the Week: Divine Light and the light of reason
Mark Frankel argues that Quakers today need not worry about religious scepticism
The dichotomy between the divine and the secular, theism and nontheism, science and religion, God and man has occupied Friends for decades. Some Friends ask whether we are willing to be obedient to divine guidance if it goes against secular notions. Others worry that empirical science cannot demonstrate the existence of God. Happily, I believe, these dilemmas need not concern Quakers, who have understood from their founding days that such distinctions are meaningless.
Before the epistemology of Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century, scientists and philosophers saw no difference between religion and science, and believed in both. Science was not invented in the so-called Enlightenment but goes back to ancient times. It saw some of its greatest personalities and achievements a century before the Enlightenment, in the mid-1600s, when Quakerism was founded.
It is no coincidence that George Fox and Margaret Fell were contemporaries of Isaac Newton. In those days, atheism was unknown and everyone thought that God existed. Indeed, the opinion was that God had to exist, but there were strong differences over the nature of God. There was general agreement that God was the ‘substance’ of the universe – a technical term meaning God as the ‘grain of the universe’ or the ‘round of being’, to use modern theologians’ terms – but much debate over how God worked in the world.
For the orthodox, God was not just substance but a loving person who could work miracles and intervene in the world on behalf of mankind, his creation – mostly at the behest of the established churches! Radical thinkers rejected clerical authority and looked to thoughtful men and women to discern God’s truth for themselves. Among these radicals, and figures of interest to today’s Quakers, were Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676) and Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677). Winstanley was a Quaker at least for some of his career, and prolific author as well as communist activist, while Spinoza was a continental philosopher whose works include a translation of one of Margaret Fell’s pamphlets. Winstanley, Fox, Spinoza and Fell were part of the European movement of religious radicals of the mid-seventeenth century.
Winstanley saw Jesus as a hero and rebel calling us to salvation by freeing ourselves from ignorant priests and exercising our own powers of judgement. He equated secular reason with the Divine Light and the Light of Christ as discerned by thoughtful worshippers meeting together without presiding clerics. Spinoza was a Jewish heretic and panentheist.
Panentheism understands God and the world to be interrelated. For Spinoza, God was not a person but both ‘mind’ and ‘extension’. God is the whole of reality as we understand it, not just scientifically but morally. God is the good order of the universe whom we can know, albeit partially, if not worship. To act fully in accordance with reason is to be in tune with the mind of God.
Spinoza combined his panentheism with Biblical scholarship, hostility to clerical authority, a far-sighted commitment to democracy and a belief in the ability of thoughtful people to understand moral and scientific truths for themselves. One such truth is the necessary existence of God, not as the loving father but as nature in its widest sense. Spinoza deprives us of a cosy image of God but asserts our ability to know God’s rules, which are the rules of science and morality, which we can grasp for ourselves if we try hard enough.
Quakers today, like their founding forebears, need not worry about religious scepticism or about the theism/nontheism debate. Let us look to the brilliant heretics who were our founders and discern that the light of God is the light of reason. Such discernment leads us away from strident secularism towards a commitment to each other, our processes and testimonies.
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