by Matthew Gaetano

Even though I went to a school whose mascot is a Quaker and grew up near some early American Quaker meeting houses, I have to admit that I didn’t know much about Quakers. I learned about how they used the informal “thee” and “thou” and refused to tip their hats to social superiors to make manifest their belief in equality and in the fact that there is “no respect of persons with God” (Rom. 2:11). I knew something about Quaker opposition to slavery decades before that position was accepted by most religious groups. And of course there was the great achievement of William Penn’s Pennsylvania and Quaker oats (though, based upon an encyclopedia article, it seems the company that makes this brand of oats was founded by men who simply appreciated Quaker values!). There were some discussions of the notion of the “inner light” in school, but the details of this doctrine were generally not made clear to me.

In the past couple of years, I’ve learned more about some really impressive writers who were associated with the Quaker movement, even if they had theological views that were considered heterodox (or at least outside the mainstream of Western Christianity). Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (at least in the late 1670s), Anne Conway (a Quaker shortly before her death in 1679), Robert Barclay (and here), William Penn himself (and here), and many others engaged in rather subtle controversies about the central mysteries of the Christian faith, ethics and politics, the new science, and so on. The surprises here are not rooted exclusively in my ignorance; a scholar of the early Quakers, Madeleine Pennington (Ward), has said that “[Quaker] aspirations to theological respectability” need more attention and that there is a widespread view of early Quakers “as isolated and anti-intellectual.” The “simple call to faith and action” from the Founder of the Quakers, George Fox (d. 1691), may not resonate with some of the intellectual interests of these figures (182 here), but we need to be careful about letting Fox’s particular vision shape our perception of the whole movement.

An important early and quite learned Quaker, George Keith, was born in 1638 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, to a Presbyterian family. He studied at the University of Aberdeen and, according to Nathan Wölffel, learned a great deal from the works of the Cambridge Platonists, particularly Henry More (even if More later distanced himself from Keith). He became a Quaker in the early 1660s, was beaten, arrested, and imprisoned several times between then and 1680, and helped to defend Quaker theological thought with Robert Barclay (1643-1690) in the late 1670s. Along the way, Keith produced the first English translation of Ibn Tufayl’s twelfth-century Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan, often referred to as The Improvement of Human Reason (on the basis of an already existing Latin translation). Throughout his life, Keith’s literary production was quite extensive.

In 1684, after marrying Elizabeth Johnston and working on missionary journeys with Fox, Penn, and others, Keith traveled to what is now New Jersey. His colleague, Barclay, was the nonresident governor of East Jersey. Keith marked out the border between West and East Jersey. In 1688 he went to Philadelphia to run a Quaker school there, but then went back to New Jersey to build a meeting house in what is now Freehold (rather near my old hometown of Toms River!). He wrote in defense of the Quakers, particularly against Boston Puritans like Increase and Cotton Mather.

Eventually, he broke with the Philadelphia Quakers and formed a group called the “Christian Quakers” because he believed that Penn and others were supposedly straying towards Deism in their way of thinking about the role of Christ in salvation. These controversies animated the 1690s, the period in which Keith and his companions brought to publication An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes (1693), an important antislavery tract. Keith returned to England and was rejected by the London Quakers in 1694. Keith was ordained as an Anglican minister in 1700, joined the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), and made an effort to win over Quakers and inspire Anglicans in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and elsewhere from 1702 to 1704. He went back to England and worked at a parish in Edburton, Sussex. Keith died in 1716.

The Keithian Controversy among the Quakers during the 1690s is fascinating, and I hope to touch on elements of it along with Keith’s anti-slavery writings in the future. More broadly, the theological controversies in early America are of some interest as scholars today debate the vision of God and the cosmos held by Americans of the Founding generation. But a particular passage that I found quite striking–and which encouraged further reflection on the intellectual efforts of early Quakers–comes from Keith’s Divine Immediate Revelation and Inspiration, Continued in the True Church (1685), a work published before his break with the mainstream Quakers in the early 1690s. The issue being discussed is the relationship of Scripture and immediate revelation or inspiration, a question obviously related to the famous Quaker teaching on the “inner light.” Keith says that he esteems and values “the use of holy Scripture” when joined “with the inward operation and illumination of God” (43). But if Scripture is employed in a way that is “separate” from this divine operation and illumination, as frequently happens “among the most of these called Christians,” it does not profit but “is only a killing Letter” (2 Cor. 3:6). The key passage (with some adjustment to punctuation, spelling, etc.) comes after an articulation of the “due use of the Scripture” as something that requires “the Holy Spirit inwardly enlightening and inspiring us, that we may understand the Doctrines declared in the Scripture, and may savingly apply them, with true and sincere Faith, to the salvation of our souls” (44-45).

Keith’s discussion of the Holy Spirit’s enlightenment and inspiration led to an invocation of Plato and the Platonic tradition. He argues that there is an “experimental and sensible knowledge of God” manifest to “the inward and supreme senses and powers of the soul” when the soul is “awakened” by the Holy Spirit’s “work of regeneration and renewing” (45) This relates to the larger debate about Scripture and the inner light because, according to Keith, the “formal act of such a divine and intuitive knowledge” is not accompanied immediately by the words of Scripture. Keith draws an analogy: just as the name of a human being does not immediately bring about the actual vision of that person, so the words of Scripture do not immediately bring about this direct, intuitive experience of God. When speaking about the Scripture’s testimony about “an experimental and spiritually sensible knowledge of God,” something “perceived in most inward union and communion of the soul with God,” he refers to “a certain intellectual or spiritual contact or touch.” Keith supports this idea in part by referring to the philosophers, particularly Plato and the key figure in the later so-called Neoplatonic tradition, Plotinus (d. 270). He goes on to mention Greek and Latin Fathers (including Augustine), medieval mystics, and even Luther himself.

Again, it is simply fascinating that a key early Quaker like Keith refers to Plato and Plotinus as a way of supporting his conception of “intellectual or spiritual contact,” a notion that he links to the taste or inward feeling of God and divine things “received without all words” discussed by the later mystics (45-46). Joshua Shaw has been showing us the complex interaction with Platonism in a figure like Eusebius. Indeed, there has been a good deal of recent work on Christian Platonism as a significant current in the Christian intellectual tradition, and Keith indicates how Quaker discussions of the inner light may have an important place in this current.

It turns out that Keith was arguing with a Lutheran scholastic theologian, Johann Wilhelm Baier (1647-1695), a professor at the University of Jena and eventually Halle. His whole work On the Foretaste of Eternal Life is worthy of attention for its subtle way of opposing Keith’s so-called “enthusiasm” while also seeking to maintain the Lutheran conception of participation in the divine life (a conception discussed years ago at TRF by Joshua Benjamins here). It is important that we do not assume that the “orthodox” replies to “dissenters” or “enthusiasts” are simply oriented to reinforcing ecclesiastical order, preaching, and the sacraments; the inner working of the Holy Spirit and the experience of God obviously had a place in the theologies of the opponents of Quakers and of other similar traditions.

But what is particularly fascinating is how Baier handled Keith’s invocation of Plato. Baier certainly does not reject the invocation of Plato and Plotinus, though of course he does compare them unfavorably to the true teaching found in the Scriptures. Indeed, Baier uses Plato’s Phaedo and the speech of Diotima in the Symposium to argue that, for Plato, we do not have perfect wisdom in this mortal body, particularly that wisdom “consisting in perfect and immediate knowledge (cognitio) of God” (30). The philosopher can hope to have such wisdom after death. Baier appears to use this reading of the Platonic corpus to oppose Keith’s view that the Christian can have an “intuitive vision of God” in this life before our glorification after the end of our earthly life.

I hope to discuss the debate between Keith and Baier about the intuitive vision of God and mystical experience in a future post. But it is fascinating to see a Quaker and a Lutheran arguing over the extent to which Platonism supports their divergent conception of religious experience.