ABSTRACT
The obvious question that arises regarding this strong doctrine of the inner Light is the question of its validity. Is it indeed the ‘promptings of love and truth’, or might there be a strong element of deception involved? How could we know? How can we be sure that the light is accurately recognized and discerned, either in our own case or in the claims that others make? The question was bound to exercise early Friends, partly out of their own concern and partly because of the accusations of enemies. It was of course not a new anxiety, though in the seventeenth century its
form changed in an interesting way. In medieval spirituality the worry would have been demonic intervention: the devil could appear as the proverbial ‘angel of light’ and deceive even those who most wanted to discern the voice of God. Seventeenth-century religious sensibilities, including those of Friends, did not dismiss this concern, but with the rise of Protestant emphasis on the Bible and with the rise of science, the mood was shifting to a more secular notion of deception: what evidence was there – and where should evidence be sought – to bear out any claim to inner Light? Could individual assertion be sufficient? Rather than (or along with) anxieties about demons, there grew anxieties about truth and beliefs, and how they might be justified. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, we might be preoccupied with issues of selfdeception and lies. In the seventeenth century the term of opprobrium was ‘enthusiasm’. It was all part of the epistemological shift of early modernity. That story has often been told. My concern is not to repeat it, but to point
out the extent to which this same shift is a part of the displacement of beauty, and its close involvement in what could count as spirituality. From a medieval sense of the immediacy of beauty, grounded in the beauty of nature created by God, there grew the suspicion of ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’: the worry that beauty is, after all, no more than subjective, and that the subjective is somehow not to be trusted. Recognition and discernment, indispensable for a spirituality of beauty, is thrown into question. Indeed, I would suggest that contrary to what is often thought, we could see the epistemological shift of early modernity, not as the work of overbearing confidence and rationality, but rather as a crisis of confidence, a deep self-doubt which cannot anymore
rely on its own capabilities of discernment and recognition but must have external validation. The implications for a spirituality of beauty are part of what I shall be exploring in the rest of this section. My aim, however, is not primarily critical. Rather, I wish to show how early Friends tried to deal with the anxieties to which concerns about deception opened them. In so doing, I shall reconsider what is involved in recognition. Ultimately, it is all we have. The question, I shall argue, is not whether it is fundamental, but rather how it can be trained and strengthened, how we can overcome our fear and learn to trust in the inner Light, for a deepening spirituality of beauty that can confront and heal the violence and brokenness of the world. Again, it is useful to start small, with a historical case study. There were
many instances, in the lives of early Friends, where they were challenged regarding their claims to the inner Light. I have chosen the story of William Law and Fanny Henshaw: a spiritual writer of influence and power in the land, and a young woman whom he tried and failed to persuade against following her own discernment. Although Law (and Henshaw too) appealed to reason and objectivity, the story is stuffed with technologies of gendered power: but in the end they did not prevail. In the year 1734, Fanny Henshaw was 20 years of age, living in a privileged
household in Cheshire in the north of England. With her younger sister, she was under the guardianship of her uncle and aunt, their parents having died when she was a small child. It was a deeply religious, Protestant household, reasonably affluent; and the two young women had returned to it after a boarding-school education which had given them not only the singing and dancing abilities of genteel women, but also good training in reading, writing, literature and more, and a grounding in the Bible and the practice of the Church of England: Fanny could never be dismissed as a pretty but illiterate young thing! Yet that, in effect, was the way in which William Law attempted to deal
with her claims to the inner Light. In a memoir which Fanny wrote later in her life, she describes her experience. When she was about 20, her sister became seriously ill; and the thoughts of both young women, devout as they were, turned to the question of death and what they must do to prepare for it. To Fanny, who had previously observed Quakers with respect and admiration, an inner answer came to her question.
