Index librorum prohibitorum

"the shifts we have outlined affected even individual Quakers over the course of a single lifetime. On this point, it is notable that of the 131 publications written by George Fox and considered by the [Second Day] Morning Meeting before 1704, 50 per cent written between 1652 and 1660 were retrospectively deemed unacceptable, compared to 40 per cent written between 1661 and 1670. Of course it is remarkable that the Meeting should reject so many of Fox’s works in either period, but the shifting pattern also illustrates a subtle shift in Fox’s thinking—towards a later, more acceptable ‘brand’ of Quakerism over time. This pattern cannot have been caused by Fox’s direct response to the concerns of the Morning Meeting, as the publications in question were all written before its foundation. Rather, it suggests a steady and deliberate trajectory which affected even those who were Quakers from the start: Tickell, Travers, and Burrough . . . were all convinced Friends of the 1650s, and their Quakerism was therefore the result of direct conversion rather than upbringing. That they also bore the hallmarks of change implies that developments were being driven by a cultural or theological shift within Quakerism, beyond a merely sociological adjustment in the profile of the movement or the character of its members."

     Madeleine Pennington, Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 48, underscoring mine.

Quaker discernment. Or Is my Measure my Rule?

Egbert van Heemskerck II

      "The Papists say, Believe as the Church believes:  So likewise G. Fox; but I say, Nay, I am not to believe a thing barely because the Church believes it, but because it’s manifested in me, else I am to wait till God reveals it."

     [William Mucklow], The spirit of the hat: or, the government of the Quakers among themselves, as it hath been exercised of late years by George Fox, and other leading men, in their Monday, or Second-dayes Meeting at Devonshire-house, brought to light (London:  F. Smith, 1673), 12.
     The objection is to the departure from the radical individualism of early Quakerism, i.e. the reversion to a principle other than that of "the true Light, which lighteth every man [(i.e. individual)] that comes into the World" (20).  And so it is to a kind of hypocrisy:  "How do they build up that which they once pulled down; and do that themselves which they have condemned in others?"  "some of you [Quakers] were Judged, Condemned, and Executed, for no other Cause than the Hat [(i.e. the insistence upon the right to leave it on before men of rank)], and now they [(i.e. Fox and others)] Judge, Condemn, and Excommunicate [us] for the same [(i.e. the insistence upon the right to leave it on before God in prayer)], . . . Not that I am against this practice when required of the Lord, but against the [merely] customary use thereof" (32), as imposed, "against . . . my Conscience" (16), by "the Body the Touchstone" (18) rather than solely the Light within.  "as others before them set up the Scriptures above the Spirit, in having that to be the Tryal, Touch-stone, Standard of Doctrine Worship, and of all Spirits; so do they greatly err in setting up the Body above the Spirit, in having the Spirit tried by the Body; the one saieth, The Scripture is the Rule; but in truth, their Meanings they make the Rule:  The other saieth, The Spirit (and not the Scripture) is the Rule; but the Dictates of the Body they make the Rule.  For if I walk according to my Measure, and my Measure is my Rule, and it differs from the judgment of the Body; by their Rule I am to deny my Motion, because it answers not the mind of the Body; for they lay down this as an infallible Rule, That the Body will have a true sense, feeling, and understanding of Motions, Visions, Revelations Doctrines, &c. and therefore safest to make Her my Touch-stone in all things relating to God" (21).  And so "The same Arguments which the Pope, &c. makes use of to support himself, the Body useth; and severe judgment is denounced against him that shall speak a word against the Authority of the Body, as it is against him that shall speak against the Power and Authority of Rome" (22).  "My Friend observe; What difference is there in these things between George Fox and the Papists?  The one faith, No Liberty out of the Church; the other, No Liberty out of the Power.  Saith the Papist, What Liberty to the Sectary?  No, What Liberty to the Heretick?  No:  And George Fox saith, What Liberty to the Presbyter?  No; What Liberty to the Independent?  No; What Liberty to the Baptist?  No:  Liberty (saith he) is in the Truth" (12).  "Many of the most eminent have had potent Impulses, to give forth solid, and sound Arguments for Liberty of Conscience [in this matter], and have pleaded strongly for the same, yet George Fox was heard to say in a selected great Assembly thus, Though many Friends have writ for Liberty of Conscience, I never lik’d the word, it is not a good word.  No Liberty to the Presbyterians, no Liberty to the Papists, no Liberty to the Independents, no Liberty to the Baptists, &c.  Liberty is to be only in the Truth, and, saith he, no Liberty out of the Power" (41).
     No, "the Unity that the Lord approves of, is for every one to act according to his measure and growth in the Truth" (11).

     "Thus, whilst the earliest Quakers characterized disobedience to the Light as the archetypal sin (and obedience as the sole path to salvation) their successors envisaged a similar obligation to the community itself. Again, this reinforced the notion that Quakers viewed the movement as a Church not only in a mystical sense (that is, as Christ’s body) but an institutional sense, and, therefore, that the emerging organizational machinery of the movement had the authority to demand compliance" (Madeleine Pennington, Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 34, italics mine).

"It is not just any civilization that" hands the riches of others on down intact

"It is unheard of in the history of religions that the holy book of a religion contain, at its side, that of an earlier religion.  Moreover, the second book, the New Testament, constitutes something like a commentary on the first.  More exactly, using the technical term of Jewish exegesis, the New Testament is like a pesher of the Old, which is to say an interpretation that applies the text to the present situation and interprets it in function of a key event, here the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus."

     Rémi Brague, "Inclusion and digestion:  two models of cultural appropriation in response to a question of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Tübingen, September 3, 1996)," in Rémi Brague, The legend of the Middle Ages:  philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago and London:  The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 155 (145-158).
     According to Brague, digestion (to the point of destruction) is the approach characteristic of Islam, and inclusion, that of Christianity.  If I understand him correctly, the latter is viewed as a strength at the beginning of the essay ("It is not just any civilization that encourages a style of appropriation that permits the transmission of an object of that appropriation to future generations so that they can newly appropriate it themselves" (145)), but a weakness at the end ("European culture suffers from dispepsia", which is to say indigestion; for the European "stomach—precisely because of all the undissolved inclusions within it—has become more like a gizzard. . . . thanks to the model of appropriation that Europe developed with its sources, it can appropriate other cultures without feeling obliged to digest them" (158)).

An old story

Nineteenth-century "U.S. expansion into the Southwest was built on a Comanche antecedent.  Comanches are at the center of the story and the westward-pushing Americans remain in the sidelines, stepping in, often unknowingly, to seize territories that had already been subjugated and weakened by Comanches.  The narrative does not ignore the vast imperial ambitions and resources of the United States, but it shows that the stunning success of American imperialism in the Southwest can be understood only if placed in the context of the indigenous imperialism that preceded it."

     Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche empire (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2008), 142.  This on top of the impact that the Comanches had already made upon Anglo-Americans and other immigrants, the French, Mexicans, and especially the New Spanish (i.e. the Spanish Empire) throughout much of the previous century.

"no early Quaker tract, treatise or journal has much merit as consecutive discourse."

      Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, Yale publications in religion 7 (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1964), xi.  Barbour is speaking, presumably (?), mainly of those composed "During 1652-65, the years with which this book is most concerned," and therefore not, for example, of Fox's Journal, since "Fox's well-known writings have been less used here than works by other Quaker authors."  Madeleine Pennington:  "The Journal is not strictly a contemporary source; even the earliest manuscript was only written during Fox’s imprisonment in Worcester Jail between 1673 and 1674, as he dictated it to his stepson-in-law Thomas Lower, and the first published edition was not issued until 1694. Furthermore, since the original manuscript is missing its earliest pages, the passages dealing with Fox’s early religious formation only appear in the 1694 edition onwards" (Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 6).

"they despayrd not of ye gift of tongues," or An incommunicated "Omnisciency and Omnipotency"

Juan de Flandes, 1500/04

"The orthodox Puritan, following Augustinian doctrine, expected the mind of a Saint to be straightened by conversion for practical use in God's service, but Quakers expected men to set reason aside and let the Spirit lead:  'Neither are Omnisciency and Omnipotency themselves[,] as to all those things that are to be known and done [by such,] so altogether incommunicable to spiritual men as our Academical Animals imagine [they are].'  Fortunately, only a few Quakers relied on this completely in practice.  A witty diplomat in 1657 described two Quaker missionaries who, knowing no French, 'past lately by Paris; they were found in the streetes soe starved wth cold & hunger, that one would have thought the Spirit had beene dead in them; the charity of some English gentlemen relieved them, not knowing [yet their] religion; but the fire & a supper revived itt; & would you know their buisenes, they were Ambassadors from the Ld to the Duke of Savoy; wt thr message was is unknowne, but they despayrd not of the gift of tongues [& the Lord had told them they should have successe].'"

     Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, Yale publications in religion 7 (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1964), 151 (original italics re-introduced), citing first p. 575 of the 1679 Testimony of truth exalted of Samuel Fisher, and second "Charles Perrott to Joseph Wilkinson, Paris, January 17, 1656/57" (Extracts from state papers relating to Friends, ed. Penney (1913), 24, which is even more abbreviated than Barbour indicates).

"No such item as a virtuous people."

"When that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland he said he would leave nothing alive.  Said the Irish were vermin and devils.  Clean out the country for good people to step into.  Make a paradise.  Now we make this American paradise I guess.  Guess it be strange so many Irish boys doing this work.  Ain’t that the way of the world.  No such item as a virtuous people.  Winona the only soul not thrown on the bonfire."

     Thomas McNulty in Sebastian Barry's Days without end:  a novel (New York:  Viking, 2016), 226.

"the long muscle of the river"

     Thomas McNulty in Sebastian Barry's Days without end:  a novel (New York:  Viking, 2016), 181.

Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato

      "The commemorative practices that have accumulated about the figure of Columbus can doubtless be criticized for reproducing [(reproduzieren)] over and over again the dubious dichotomies of Middle Ages and Modernity, dogmatism and enlightenment, knowledge rooted in authority and knowledge rooted in empirical investigation, flat world and round earth; and so not just [for] reproducing [(nachformen)] the flat earth error, but [for] positively contributing to its establishment.  But that with the exception of [professional historians committed to] the historical sciences understood in the broadest sense, no one thinks to question critically the comprehensive darkening and flattening of the Middle Ages; indeed, that even the mass-medial corrections issued at regular intervals in books, films, and magazines [produced] for popular consumption appear to achieve at best a short-term Aha! effect before once more giving way to the picture of a disk-shaped Middle Ages—[all of this] shows that this type of discourse [(Diskursfigur)] is granted in the public consciousness afterwards just as before the status of an historical fact, and that the fiction [(Erzälung)] of a period of cosmo-, geo-, and ethnographical ignorance ended by Columbus meets obviously a need for [the] construction of historical meaning [(historischer Sinnstiftung)] that the 'true history [(Realhistorie)]' cannot—or can only with difficulty—satisfy.
     "One is almost tempted to speak of the scene [(Auftritt)] of the discoverer of America before the Talavera Commission [reproduced, for example, on the Columbus doors of the U.S. Capitol] as a mythologue [(Mythologem)].  Like most myths [(Mythen)], the [one] compressed into this scene [(Szene)] of the demonstration of the spherical shape of the earth does [but] one [thing]:  it explains the present—and as it became, so it is.  Enabled thereby is a positioning of modern man in time (important at none other than a time of global spatial expansion [(Entgrenzung)]), and the dissociation [of him] from [(Abgrenzung gegenüber)] an Other experienced as foreign, primitive, threatening, etc.  In 'reality' the world of the Middle Ages may [?!] have been less flat than many moderns believe.  But [summoning up] the will to correct the error [(Den Irrtum korrigieren zu wollen)] has turned out to be [a] rather hopeless undertaking:  Se non è vero, è ben trovato.  If not true, it is nevertheless well invented.  As one puts it with felicity today, it makes simply too much sense."

     Thomas Reinhardt, "Die Erfindung der flachen Erde:  der Mythos Kolumbus und die Konstruktion der Epochenschwelle zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit," Paideuma:  Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 53 (2007):  175-176 (161-180).