Vagabond journey:the ‘psychological abnormalities’ and ‘religious genius’ of George Fox

‘He made trouble his career.’

If you’re thinking of tackling George Fox’s Journal before the quarter centenary commemorations next year, then I recommend William James as a reading companion. Born in 1842, James was a philosopher, and perhaps the first psychologist of the religious sensibility. He is an enthusiast for Quakerism. Take this, for example, from his The Varieties of Religious Experience: A study in human nature (1902): ‘The Quaker religion which [Fox] founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England.’

Fox’s Journal isn’t always reader-friendly. As you’re ploughing through it, consider this startling assertion from James: ‘From the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or détraqué of the deepest dye.’ That’ll keep you reading, however plain Fox’s chronicling may become. Whatever his ‘psychological abnormalities’, James does cite Fox as an example of ‘religious genius’.

On 9 September 1643, aged nineteen, George Fox became a vagabond. Thomas Ellwood’s published version of this event (from 1694) reads: ‘I left my relations, and brake off all familiarity or fellowship with young or old’. William James likes this part of the story: ‘I walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places until night came on’. I like this novelistic self-portraiture, but there isn’t much more of it. This isn’t the description of an exciting year-off, or a pilgrimage to Canterbury, or anything obviously adventurous. Fox instead went to Lutterworth, in Leicestershire. His visit here is not recorded in our latter-day Domesday Book, Wikipedia. But there you can find, strangely enough, that the religious reformer John Wycliffe is believed to have made the first translation of the Bible from Latin into English there. Fox didn’t mention this to his assistant Thomas Lower, to whom he first dictated the story of his vagabondage. Thomas Ellwood, editor of the 1694 publication of the Journal, didn’t see fit to interpolate this wonderful coincidence into his text either. The fifteenth-century wall paintings in Wycliffe’s church also slipped Fox’s memory. So despite all the cultural vandalism and religious iconoclasm going on around him, the malcontent dissenter George Fox doesn’t record a great interest in the cultural highlights that were under threat. This is not the grand tour of a culture-vulture, but a dogged march through the byways of a benighted country.

What was George up to then, what with civil war breaking out just the year before? ‘I had a gravity and staidness of mind and spirit, not usual in children’, the Journal records. So: not pilgrimage, not art appreciation, and not military adventure – it’s civil disobedience that seems to have been Fox’s creative gift. When a priest named Richard Abel recommended tobacco and psalm-singing as a cure for Fox’s melancholy, he declined: ‘Tobacco was a thing I did not love; and psalms I was not in an estate to sing: I could not sing.’ He could proclaim a religious counter-culture, though. He could be uncompromising and freethinking and fearless. It’s hair-raising stuff in that sense, and for courage and stoical endurance it compares to Paul writing to the Corinthians 2,000 years ago: ‘Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck.’

Fox blags and blogs his way round a deeply-traumatised Britain, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, narrowly escaping with his life on multiple occasions. William James directs us to this cussedness: ‘The battle that cost [the Quakers] most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee-ing and thou-ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect.’ As Fox writes in the Journal: ‘The bad language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our lives for this matter’.

Yes, we all know how he got into trouble, don’t we? He made trouble his career in fact, thereby transforming his vagabondage into a prophetic pilgrimage of grace in real time. He went from place to place and ‘showed them out of Hebrews the seventh how not only tithes but the priesthood that took tithes was ended’. This was an attack on the established order, an embarrassing declaration that the ecclesiastical emperors were indeed naked of authority, their smoke-and-mirrors rigmarole devoid of live meaning.

Fox is around fifty years old by the time he dictates his experience of the civil war era. His manuscript is finally published after Thomas Ellwood’s editorialising, and after his own death, some twenty years later. It’s worth remembering, as you read, that other, perhaps more engaging, responses to the civil war years are available. Think of Paradise Lost by John Milton, extemporised (when blind) between 1658 and 1663, and published in 1667 when Milton was nearly sixty (Fox only forty-three). Thomas Ellwood played a part in this too, amazingly, reading in Latin to the blind Milton in 1662. On borrowing the manuscript of Paradise Lost Ellwood asked Milton provocatively (and Quakerly), ‘What hast thou to say of paradise found?’ Then, in 1678, sixteen years before the Journal was published, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan appeared. Bunyan’s first work, Some Gospel Truths Opened, was inspired by a dispute with the Quakers. Neither Bunyan nor Milton, however, founded a religious society of friends.

In all this great labour of reading, trying to comprehend why George Fox should have been sufficiently engaging to attract public attention beyond the ordinary, I have found it helpful to imagine his life and career as a kind of performative doctoral thesis. I think of it as an enactment of self, infused with a transgressive mode of being. Perhaps this is what William James means when he writes about his religious genius, the catalyst of that ‘progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery’.

It may be that, in our reading of the Journal, George Fox does sometimes appear to be that ‘mere lonely madman’ or ‘psychopath’ that William James proposes to psychoanalyse. One couldn’t call him a great writer either, but do remember this: James maintains that ‘No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox’s mind was unsound. Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power.’ Who knows? Perhaps Bunyan and Milton, finally, would also have seen Fox’s openness to a new dawn, and the Society of Friends, as pilgrim’s end, and paradise found.

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Comments

What an excellent and thought provoking article. Thank you so much Jonathon! I have enormous respect for William James’ amazing mind. Made me get the Kindle edition of “Varieties” to compliment my ancient tatty paperback. The value of Kindles is I can search for every use of a word such as “Quaker” . . .
Kindles also great for accessing wiki and looking up unfamiliar words, flipping to and from footnotes and endnotes and cutting and pasting. Of course, one can end up paying for both hard copy and ebook, as I have discovered to my cost.

By NoelS on 29th April 2023 - 12:13

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