Memory and time in early Quakerism

Fox’s Journal: a work of memory

Fox’s Journal is at once a history of the early Quaker movement, a spiritual autobiography and a travelogue detailing his life of itinerant ministry through England, Scotland, Ireland, northern Europe and the Atlantic colonies. As such, it is a work of memory: all these modes of writing are reliant on acts of recollection, whether individual, collective or textual. In Fox’s case, this involves recounting the early years of his life, of the movement he was instrumental in founding, and the details of the itineraries of the thousands of miles of his missionary journeys. Moreover, in that his Journal is a retrospective composition and there is no evidence of this being underpinned by notebooks contemporaneous with the events described, memory, with all its vagaries and fluctuations, is the raw material from which the Journal is constructed, supplemented by documents preserved from those earlier years. ³ It is a work shaped by and from memory, not only in its central narrative but also in its genres, composition and construction.

Given the power of memory in the structure and composition of the Journal, its retrospective character, the focus on the author’s life, the narration of countless journeys, events and encounters, and all with a defining commitment to the God-given truthfulness of the resulting account, it might be expected that memory itself, as a key element of compositional process, would engender comment from its author-narrator. Such was certainly the case for other radical religious life-writers contemporary with Fox, who offer reflections on the place and limits of memory in their writing. A striking instance of this is to be found in the work of the Baptist Anna Trapnel. Writing about the exercising of her prophetic calling in the 1650s, she offers a nuanced account of the ways she understood memory to feed into her compositional practice:

though I fail in an orderly penning down these things, yet not in a true relation, of as much as I remember, and what is expedient to be written; I could not have related so much from the shallow memory I have naturally, but through often relating these things, they become as a written book, spread open before me, and after which I write. (Trapnel, 2016: 103)

Like Fox’s, Trapnel’s account depends on its claims to represent a truth that is secured by the godliness of the author and of the experiences she recounts. Yet that truthfulness, she suggests, is not the consequence of an ‘orderly penning down’ of her recollections, governed by chronological sequence and perhaps comprehensiveness. Nor for her does truth preclude the necessity of expediency: Trapnel, like Fox, was a radical, a prophet and a politically contentious figure, and her words here suggest that ‘truth’ would not have been served by ignoring the constraints her reputation brought with it. She acknowledges memory’s limits: hers is ‘shallow’, rather than capacious and infallible, and she can only write ‘as much as I remember’. Moreover, she concludes that memory constitutes only one element in the composition of a truthful first-person account. Of greater significance is the fact that she had frequently recounted her experiences on previous occasions, and it is ‘through often relating these things’ that she is now able to write. These repetitions have in effect written the account even before pen is set to paper, thereby displacing her as author and instating her instead as scribe, a mere copyist working from an account that, ‘spread open before me’, is already in existence.

Trapnel’s reflection on the relation between memory and repetition articulates the complexity of these as mediating processes between event, experience and writing. Her analysis makes visible the workings of memory, rather than assuming their transparency, and demonstrates how the passions and certainties of prophetic discourse in the mid-seventeenth century can, nevertheless, make space for conscious and nuanced analysis. Fox’s account, once again, does not follow this pattern. Trapnel’s analytical aside on the relation of memory, repetition and writing has no counterpart in Fox’s Journal. Despite the text’s retrospective form and despite the extended period covered by the account (more than 30 years), neither memory nor forgetting delays him. There is no consideration of the manner or elements of composition. Since his account remains indifferent to the processes of its own production, these remain an unremarked given, either invisible, irrelevant or without interest.

The absence of such reflexivity, however, in some ways speaks as eloquently as Trapnel’s words, contributing to that sense of Fox’s ‘sacred Self-confidence’ (Cromwell and Carlyle, 1907: 341) in the God-given origin of the message he took to the world and his own importance in its dissemination. Moreover, such confidence was not Fox’s alone, but characteristic of early Quakers more generally, in their lived and written testimonies. In 1659, Dorothy White wrote:

The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Write, and again I say, Write with speed, to the Heads and Rulers of this Nation; oh! earth, earth, earth, hear the Word of the Lord, and be awakened unto righteousness. (White, 1659: 1)

Here, the act of writing seems barely to be mediated by its author: the divine imperative to ‘write’ leads without pause to the vital message in need of communication by the written text: the call to heed God’s word and turn to righteousness. Scrutiny of the writing process has no place. It would slow the pace of transmission and dilute the urgency of the message.

If the operation and fallibility of recall remains an unexamined dimension of the compositional processes of the Journal, traces of memory can nonetheless be found elsewhere. The place where its importance can first be discerned is in the history of the composition and compilation of the Journal itself. To refer to Fox’s Journal in the singular, however, is misleading, for it is in fact a dizzyingly multiple and dispersed text. Fox dictated at least three, and possibly four, accounts of his life. Three are extant, but only two can be consulted; the fourth has been deduced to have existed from a range of references to it in other texts. Fox’s first iteration of his life story, ‘A Short Account of Some of G.F.’s Sufferings and Imprisonments’ (Fox, n.d.), dates from the very early years of the movement in the mid-1650s. It comprises eight folios, remains unpublished and is now too fragile to be consulted. ⁴ Fox’s second account of his life, known as the Short Journal, dates from 1664, and covers his ministry from 1649 through to the Restoration (Fox, 1925). The third and most substantial version, referred to as ‘The Spence Manuscript’ or in its verbatim et literatim published form as the Cambridge Journal, was compiled in the mid-1670s (Fox, 1911). The final account, now missing, is the ‘Great Journal’, and was probably put together in the mid-1680s (Cadbury, 1971: 64–93). From early in his career, therefore, Fox’s recollections of his life and ministry were clearly of significance to him, warranting a re-narration every decade or so between the 1650s and 1680s. The importance of these memories to the wider movement was confirmed by the decision to publish made by the Second Day Morning Meeting, the Quaker licencing committee, in accordance with Fox’s own detailed instructions (Fox, 1911: 2.347–2.350). In 1694, three years after his death, the first edition of Fox’s Journal was published, edited by Thomas Ellwood, drawing on the ‘Short Journal’, the ‘Spence Manuscript’, and probably the ‘Great Journal’, and including substantial edits by Ellwood (Fox, 1694). ⁵ Fox’s memories of his ministry as embodied in his Journal thereby became the first authoritative history of the movement.

Given that these journals relate many of the same events from the vantage points of different moments in Fox’s life and in the movement’s early history, their substantial variations seem to offer the opportunity to consider the ways in which memory might transmute across the years. This possibility can be tested by looking at three accounts of Fox’s first encounter with Richard Robinson in 1652, a meeting which resulted in Robinson’s ‘convincement’ or conversion to Quakerism: the first is from the Short Journal; the second is from the Cambridge Journal; and the final one is from the 1694 edition:

And then I came to one Bousfields [in Gasdaile] who received where there were many convinced, and from thence I was directed to Gervase Bensons where there was a meetting of professing people; and I lay at Richard Robinsons and speaking to him hee was convinced. (Fox, 1925: 17)

And from Major Bosfeilds I came to Rich: Robinsons: [& as I was passinge alonge ye way I askt a man which was Rich: Robinsons: & hee askt mee from whence I came & I tolde him from ye Lorde] & soe when I came in to Rich. Robinsons I declared ye euerlastinge truth to him [& yett a {dark} Jealosye risse uppe in him after I was gonne to bed y^t I might bee some body y^t was come to robbe his house {& hee lockt all his doors fast}]. (Fox, 1911: 41) ⁶

But from Major Bousfield’s I came to Richard Robinson’s, and declared the Everlasting Truth to him. (Fox, 1694: 73)

In critical discussions of the retrospective character of Fox’s Journal, the assumption is often made that the fading of memory will have presented an increasing level of difficulty for Fox as he dictated accounts of events from an ever more distant past. ⁷ If this were the case, the earlier Short Journal would be expected to offer a greater level of recollected detail than the Cambridge Journal. Instead, however, the latter offers the more detailed and emotive account of the two, in particular in its description of Richard Robinson, whose convincement is now said to have been complicated by the arising of his ‘dark jealousy’, his fear that Fox had come to rob him, and his consequent locking of the doors. Ellwood’s edition (Fox, 1694), while not a work of memory since it was sourced from Fox’s manuscripts, in turn gives a significantly pared-down and more anodyne version than both the earlier ones.

Whatever else these examples might suggest, they effectively refute any sense that textual variations will straightforwardly lay bare the processes of memory or demonstrate its diminution over the years. In Fox’s Journal, as elsewhere, recollection necessarily combines with and is moderated by considerations of (for example) politics or diplomacy or expediency, or with the possibility of the use of other unacknowledged sources (written or oral). If this is the case, it becomes impossible to track the coming and going of memory in Fox’s accounts, or to suggest that a declining memory as the years passed accounts for the variations. Rather than thinking of memory as a more or less reliable storage and retrieval system where the passage of time alone might erode the memory materials, therefore, Alison Light suggests that we think instead of ‘the alchemy of memory’, not itself concerned with fixing a version of the past but in its nature premised on ‘changes over time’ (Light, 2021: 218). Such is certainly the evidence of Fox’s multiple journals, whose differing versions indicate the intervention of factors other than recollection in their construction, such that it becomes impossible to separate one from the other. Not only do they call into question the usefulness of the ‘fading memory’ hypothesis, but the very place of recall in the construction and textualisation of such narratives – personal or collective – is also obscured rather than illuminated. If scrutinising these three accounts leaves the processes of memory as opaque as before, the differences between them do nevertheless indicate something of the importance of the mobilisation of memory within early Quaker rhetoric. It moves in and out of focus across them in ways that suggest its importance to the evolving narrative even if the nature of that importance remains unclear.

The other factor complicating the identification of the workings of memory in the Journal is the manner of its composition. Fox dictated his journals. While the manuscript of the Short Journal exists only in a fair copy and so discloses nothing about the processes of its composition, the ‘Spence Manuscript’ is more revealing. Fox dictated this journal mostly (but not only) to his son-in-law. Little of it is in Fox’s own hand. There are multiple in-text amendments and corrections, in different hands, some apparently made in the course of dictation, others in the course of a later read-back. ⁸ The jealousy only becomes ‘dark’, and the detail about Robinson locking all the doors is only introduced, at the read-back stage. Whose memory is intervening here: Fox’s, or that of his amanuensis? Is the addition of the adjective ‘dark’ the outcome of a returning memory, or of a desire for narrative intensification? Was there a new Quaker animus against Richard Robinson in the 1670s that had not been present in the 1660s, when the Short Journal was compiled, prompting this unflattering account of the welcome he had given Fox in 1652? This seems unlikely: at the time Fox dictated the account comprising the ‘Spence Manuscript’, Robinson had recently died, still a ‘faithfull’ witness to the truth (Penney, 1907: 243), so he was not one of the early converts who had fallen away from the movement and whose early contribution therefore needed to be reframed to explain the later return to darkness. Moreover, whatever the source of the detail of Robinson’s jealousy, the resulting text is a group enterprise and a collaboration. The memories constituting the record might not be Fox’s alone, and corrections might not originate with Fox but with one of his interlocutors. Fox’s Journal is revealed as multiple not only in its many different versions but also in what arises in the moments of dictation and read-back. Collaboration further complicates the ways in which the text itself can be said to be a work of memory or, at the very least, it makes it impossible to locate that memory within a single recollecting subject at a given moment.

If consideration of form and composition fails definitively to answer questions about the place of memory in the Journal, what of genre? Quaker historians, theologians and biographers have debated and disagreed about whether the text should be understood primarily as history, spiritual autobiography or journal (see Hinds, 2011: 82–93). Rather than seeking to limit it to one of these genres, however, it has elements of all. It is a history of the first decades of the movement, and as such remains indispensable to researchers of those years. The history is narrated through the life and spiritual experiences (including those that were prophetic and visionary) of the man who saw himself, and came to be seen by others, as the founder and first leader of the movement. And while it is not a journal in the sense of being written serially, in the moment, day by day or at least close to the time in which the events unfolded, it nevertheless conforms to the seventeenth-century understanding of a journal as a record of travel and of commercial transactions or account-keeping: that is, the term ‘journal’ etymologically compacts reference both to journeying and to work (Hinds, 2011: 93–95). ⁹ Fox’s Journal is, at core, a record of his ministering work and his journeys, the one very much an aspect of the other.

To these three generic modes might be added a further category. While not itself another literary genre, it is nevertheless a designation that brings with it a set of interpretative conventions regarding the documents associated with it: namely, the archive. Palmieri (2017, 2018) has established the importance of the archival impulse for the fostering of Quaker collective identity, and this impulse extends to Fox’s Journal itself. As well as comprising a retrospective narrative, the Journal includes scores of interpolated documents contemporary with the events under narration. Their inclusion preserves these documents for posterity, much as an archive does. By virtue simply of their inclusion in the Journal, framed and highlighted by Fox’s story, these documents acquire a patina of value and significance greater than those remaining uncollected or published elsewhere, and their prominence in the history of the early movement is thereby established.

The interpolated documents complicate the temporality of the Journal and its identity as a work of memory. Unlike the retrospective, past-tense historical narration that forms the core of the Journal, these texts speak, often with urgency, in the present tense and in registers very different from the historical narration, whether they are written for the encouragement of Friends or the castigation of adversaries. However, they are also expressly situated by the narrative as belonging to a past moment of both Fox’s life and of the movement. His comments on the documents sometimes draw attention to the gap between the moment of their composition and subsequent events: for example, following a letter he had written to Justice Sawrey, one of the JPs who tried him at his 1652 Lancaster trial, Fox (1694: 95) noted, perhaps with some satisfaction, that ‘This Justice Sawrey, who was the first Persecutor in that Country, was afterward drowned’. ¹⁰ The memory of subsequent events is introduced to reinforce a past intervention and to vindicate the position taken in the still uncertain moment in which the letter was written. The memory transforms Fox’s letter from a possibly groundless and splenetic diatribe into a prescient instance of righteous and justified anger, underwritten by Sawrey’s later providential death. As such, the combination of letter and subsequent commentary fulfils the function that Walsham, Peters and Corens (2018: 3) note that Foucault attributed to the archive itself: ‘by imposing sequential order it created meaning, transforming discrete statements into a record of connected events’. The Journal archives the documents and builds around them an interpretative framework.

The archiving of the documents in the Journal secures them as essential texts from the movement’s past, but in so doing it also gestures towards the future. In Archive Fever, Derrida (1996: 33, 18) suggested that while the archive initially seems ‘to point towards the past’, it is in fact just as powerfully oriented towards the future: ‘the archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [. . .it is] a token of the future’. The publication of the Journal, commissioned and authorised by the Second Day Morning Meeting, is a quite explicit token of the future, of which the interpolated documents are an integral part. The memory of the early years of the movement is to be transmitted through these documents as much as by the retrospective sections, supplementing the ‘history’ of Fox’s past-tense narrative with the intervention of other generic forms, such as the epistle. The result is a textual mechanism for the mobilisation of Fox’s recollections of his life and of his gathering of the Quaker movement in the service of their memorialisation; in Hiscock’s (2018: 70) words, memory has been ‘pressed into service to forge critical narratives of origin and belonging at both a personal and collective level’. The text invests in the movement’s past to seek to secure its survival in the future (Connerton, 1989; Hoskins, 2016).

Fox’s Journal is, therefore, a multi-generic textual archive combining retrospective history, travelogue and spiritual autobiography with present-tense interpolated epistles. Penn (1694) claimed of George Fox that he was sui generis, ‘an Original, being no man’s copy’, but the same might also be said of his Journal. Its generic multiplicity and indeterminacy mean that it escapes final definition, but nevertheless its composite structure remains of relevance to a consideration of memory by highlighting how Fox’s first-person-singular recollections (albeit mediated by recognition of the effects of collaboration, politics and the interpolation of documents from an earlier time) have come profoundly to shape the movement’s own collective memory, the text becoming an instrument for the transmutation of the first-person singular into the first-person plural. A spiritual autobiography quickly acquired the status of the movement’s first history, but it is one articulated through an account that is in its very form – first-person life story – necessarily focalised through one man, putting him at its narrative and historical centre.

Like many autobiographical narratives, Fox’s has been criticised for its sometimes self-serving character and a consequent skewing of the record. It is now widely accepted, for example, that in its presentation of Fox as the sole progenitor of the movement it does a profound disservice to the importance of other early Friends, most egregiously in the downplaying of James Nayler’s leadership in the early years, but also in its positioning of Margaret Fell as ‘nursing mother’ to the movement and helpmeet to Fox rather than as a dynamic and influential leader in her own right (Bruyneel, 2009; Damrosch, 1996; Donawerth and Lush, 2018). While few would now argue that Fox’s Journal is an entirely even-handed, let alone neutral, history of the movement, it is also important to recognise that this might not be entirely the result of a revisionist bid for power by Fox, for it is surely also the case that the form in which that history has been produced and consumed has had its part to play. ¹¹ The generic characteristics and conventions of the seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography necessarily and inevitably shaped, though they did not fully determine, the kind of history that Fox and Ellwood produced. The fact that it takes the form of a first-person narration of his life and work by the revered founder and leader of the movement and had been commissioned and approved by its central administrative committee conferred on the Journal an authorisation which protected its reputation. Its spiritual-autobiographical character, on the one hand, has safeguarded the Journal’s claim to be read as a collective history because of the standing of its author in the movement. On the other hand, it has rendered that claim problematic, because its focalisation through a single (and singular) figure is in tension with other contemporary accounts. Formally, generically, a spiritual–autobiographical form of history, narrated by and through a single figure, spoken in his first-person voice, will always be vulnerable to charges of bias. But those critiques perhaps need to be directed at the form the history takes as much as at what Carlyle termed the ‘sacred Self-confidence’ of its author (Cromwell and Carlyle, 1907: 341).

What, then, can be learnt about the place and operation of memory in early Quakerism by scrutinising the Journal’s structure, composition and genre? Perhaps, in the end, the particularities that seemed to promise to open a window on to this question do not yield the anticipated insights. Variations between accounts produced over 30 years ultimately tell us little about the operation of memory over time and more about the internal politics of the movement, the circumstances of production and the textual conventions of seventeenth-century life-writing than they do about the work and play of memory – not because recollection is not a part of the process, for it surely is, but because there are just too many other variables to be able to attribute any such changes with confidence to memory. They do, however, alert us to the rhetorical importance of memory – both memorialisation and recall – in Quaker discourse, and it is to this that the discussion now turns.

The mobilisation of memory in Quaker discourse

Thus far, memory has proved to be an elusive commodity in Fox’s Journal, decisive but unacknowledged in its importance to composition and genre. When we turn to the Journal’s rhetorical engagement with the concept of memory, however, it begins to acquire definition and substance, yielding insight into the distinct figurations of recollection in early Quaker theology and practice.

Uninterested in his own processes of recall, the act of remembering nevertheless plays a significant part in the rhetoric of Fox’s Journal. It figures there not with reference to himself, his life or his writing, but as something he enjoins others to do as part of his work to convince them to accept the Quaker message and to submit to the inward light. In a series of epistles written in 1652, for example, and included alongside the Journal’s retrospective narrative, Fox addresses his antagonists, exercised by their refusal of his message, and warning them of the consequences. The first letter calls on ‘Burton & Lampert & Ottways brother’ to ‘remember y^u was warned in thy life, now while y^u hast time prise it, when y^u art in ye lake Dives his end then remember me’ (Fox, 1911: 87). Dives was the rich man who, after his death, burnt in a pit of hell fire (here elided with Revelation’s references to a lake of fire), so the warning is a trenchant one. Next, in a warning letter to supporters of his adversary, the minister William Lampitt, he writes, ‘when your condemnation is come remember your warned in your life time, to y^t in your conscience I speake which never changes, which will witnese me eternaly & you condemne’ (87). To Lampitt himself he writes, ‘thoug now y^u swelst in thy vanitie & livest in thy wickedness remember thou wast warned in thy life time when y^e eternal condemnation is reatched over y^ee’ (88). And finally, in another epistle to Lampitt’s followers, he tells them, ‘you y^t hate ye light whose deeds be evill this light is your condemnation when your condemnation is come upon you remember you was warned’ (89). In each case, the present refusal to heed the Quaker message will be recalled when they suffer ‘eternal condemnation’ on their deaths.

In all four epistles, the action of memory, in the form of the recall of a past event, is invoked as something explicitly punitive, even vengeful. For his addressees, Fox affirms, to remember will be to be condemned if not out of their own mouths, at least out of their own memories. Recollection in such circumstances is threatened as a terrible and inevitable moment of retributive ‘convincement’, the term compacting the meanings both of persuasion (being convinced) and the judicial conviction of guilt (Gwyn, 1986: 67; Hinds, 2011: 36–40). In these instances, an earlier resistance to Fox’s words, a hardening of the heart against the light within, will come to be recognised as an act of ungodly darkness, as the truth (originating with God and mediated by Fox) ultimately and inevitably triumphs. This moment of ‘anticipatory retrospection’ projects a future moment when the past will erupt into the wrongdoers’ present, through the act of remembering, in such a way as to irresistibly rewrite the meanings of both. ¹² It is, in effect, the narrative equivalent of the future perfect tense. At stake in Fox’s injunction to remember is the passage of time, but also the work of time. Time will ensure the recognition of truth, but in the same moment time will cease to have the same structure or the same purchase. Fox foresees a moment when the past will no longer stay tidily in the past, but, through the intervention of a memory, will effect a transformation of the meanings of past, present and future.

In these epistles, the call to remember is a riposte to the hearers’ refusal to accede to the Quaker message that urges a turn to the light of Christ that shone within them. It is an injunction focused on the boundary between a life in the light and one lived in the fallen world of darkness; to remember will be an act that will ultimately and irresistibly ‘convince’ (convict) by opening the heart to the truth of the Quaker message. Like the conscience, which Fox also addresses in these epistles, the capacity to remember is available to those living in darkness, working towards their convincement in combination with the truth of Fox’s message. For Quakers, the conscience was a natural and fully human faculty, enabling discernment between light and darkness. When Fox says to ‘y^t in your conscience I speake’ (Fox, 1911: 1.87), therefore, he is making a fine distinction between the divine character of the inward light and the human character of the conscience in which the inward light is located. In but not of the conscience, the light within works in concert with the moral sensibility of the conscience (Angell, 2013: 159). Memory, likewise, in its capacity to combine with the light within to work towards the convincement of those still dwelling in darkness, shares this ground with conscience: a human moral faculty working towards the accession of divine truth.

Given the inflection in these epistles of recollection as an agent of divine retribution, it is unsurprising that such injunctions do not figure in the Journal in epistles addressing the convinced. In this context, at least, fellow Friends need no reminder to heed God’s word, no warning of divine punishment. Nevertheless, in letters addressed to Friends and included in the first edition of Fox’s epistles, the call to remember is shown to have its place in the lives of the convinced. ‘Teach your Children when they are young, then will they remember it when they are old’, writes Fox to Friends in 1669; ‘to do good, and to communicate, forget not [. . .] we should remember the Poor’, he tells ‘all the Men and Womens Meetings’ in 1676; and in 1673, to ‘Friends in Virginia’ he writes, ‘I cannot but remember the Civility and Moderation’ of the Justices who were ‘Friendly and Curteous to me’ (Fox, 1698: 289, 389, 336). Once again, these instances identify memory as working in concert with the light within but separate from it; its sphere of operation is the social, in dealings with one’s fellow beings, whether teaching children, helping the poor or appreciating past civilities. To remember, in these instances, serves as a support to the life of faith, but is not synonymous with it.

It is precisely because of its status as a human faculty, rather than an aspect of the divine, that the operation of memory proves fragile and of limited use in a godly life. In an epistle to Friends urging them to take their servants, apprentices and children to Meetings for Worship just as they had previously taken them to church, Fox asks them to:

remember the time of your former Professions, wherein you exercised the Reason of Men, as to bring your Servants, &c. to an outward Profession. Now you being come to a Possession of Life, take heed lest you lose the right Reason, Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge. (Fox, 1698: 309) ¹³

Friends are called to remember their ‘former Professions’ of faith, in which they had exercised ‘the Reason of Men’. Their accession to the inward light does not render redundant the human faculty of reason. Rather, life in the light is to be enhanced by the exercise of ‘Reason, Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge’, just as it can by the memory of their former churchgoing practices. These faculties, however, figure in relation to what Fox (1694: 2) called ‘the outward’: as he put it early in the Journal, ‘The Lord taught me to be faithful in all things, and to act faithfully two ways, viz. inwardly to God, and outwardly to man’. Like aiding the poor or teaching children, taking servants, apprentices and children to Meeting is to be faithful ‘outwardly to man’.

Memory also has the capacity usefully to remind Friends of their continuing human frailty and vulnerability. Quakers allowed for the operation of free will in a way contrary to the dominant predestinarian Calvinist theology, recognising the place, albeit limited, of human agency in the turn to the light. ¹⁴ This meant too, however, that human actions could result in a falling away from the light and a return to darkness. Reminding Friends of how some of the godly of former times had not been immune to backsliding, Fox urges them to:

Look back, and see (how) them that had known much of God, how soon they forgot him [. . .] And them that did receive Christ Jesus, and believed in him, in a few Ages after the Apostles, how most of Christendom ran from the Life into Death, and ran from the Light into Darkness; and into Error. (Fox, 1698: 320)

Memory of the backsliding of the godly of former times assists in the continuing negotiation of the precariousness of living in the light, for humanity remains vulnerable to the threat of relapsing into darkness. Like conscience, memory serves as an aid to the life of faith but is not itself claimed as a spiritual faculty.

While memory works alongside other human faculties (such as conscience, reason and knowledge) in a godly ‘outward’ life, its place in the spiritual work of ministry and convincement, or the ‘inward’ life, is limited. The preface to the first edition of George Fox’s Journal (Fox, 1694), written by William Penn, one of the principal Quaker apologists of the movement’s ‘Second Generation’, explains why this is the case:

nothing can quicken or make People alive to God, but the life of God: And it must be a Ministry in and from Life, that enlivens any People to God. [. . .] It is not our Parts, or Memory, the repetition of former Openings in our own will and time, that will do God’s Work. A dry Doctrinal Ministry, however sound in Words, can reach but the Ear, and is but a Dream at the Best. (Penn, 1694: n.p.)

Quaker ministry emanates from the ‘life of God’; this enlivens the minister, confers a spiritual vitality which is ‘in and from’ God, inhering within the inward light (what Fox frequently also termed ‘that of God within’), and is experienced only in the present moment. An enlivened ministry is set against the operation merely of ‘our Parts, or Memory’: that is, the recollection and repetition – akin to the recitation of prayers or liturgy in programmed worship – ‘in our own will and time’ of former ‘Openings’ (the direct and immediate experiences of God’s grace). ¹⁵ While the memory of a prior opening might be recounted later, it would be ‘but a Dream at the Best’, offering an etiolated, because mediated, experience of truth. ¹⁶ Penn’s argument rests not on the ambiguity and unreliability of memory (which is the usual case against dreams: is this the prompting of God or of Satan?), but rather on its weakness as an instrument of convincement. His argument is reminiscent of the comparison made by Puritan ministers between the diminished power of a published sermon compared with one delivered in person: ‘The Press is a dead thing to the Pulpit’, wrote Greenhill (1656: A4v); ‘when it is in Ink and Paper, it’s only cold Meat and Milk, it hath lost its lively taste’. However accurately the live sermon has been transcribed, print strips out its liveliness, the performative power and pulse of the living voice and body. Penn takes the argument further by suggesting not just that the persuasive power of the embodied delivery of the sermon is lost, but that the mobilisation of a memory of a former opening lacks the divine presence that originally prompted and animated it. The speaking of a memory can therefore only reach the ear, the outward part of the hearer, rather than the light dwelling within.

Crucially, for Penn memory resembles a dream in that it is an intermediary, standing between the human subject and the experience of the divine, and obscuring the power and clarity of the unmediated truth. Penn (1694: n.p.) reiterates his point: ‘no Memory, no Repetitions of former Openings [. . .] will bring a Soul to God [. . .] unless Life go, with what we say, and that must be waited for’. Consequently, Quaker ministry necessarily unfolds in the present, animated by the divine in that moment. It arises in ‘God’s life’, and life lives only in the present, not in its recollection or repetition. Life must ‘go, with what we say’: only words kindled by and infused with the divine light within can be agents of convincement, and such an opening cannot be solicited or revived by will or memory. It can only be ‘waited for’ with patience and in silence.

Penn’s words, therefore, identify the present as the only place of living testimony, which arises from within the power of the inward light; memories of past openings can, like dreams, at best offer only shadowy mediations. Divine openings are beyond the reach of the human will and cannot be summoned or solicited; and to serve as an agent of convincement, an opening must be expressed unmediated, in the moment. This insistence on the living power of the present moment as the only point of access by which to experience and communicate the enlivening power of the divine points to the way that the Quaker tenets of faith – in particular, the doctrine of the light within – transformed the experience of time, and the sense of what it meant for early Friends to live simultaneously in the light and in the still fallen world.

Early Quaker theology: time and the end of time

The significance of the light within to Fox’s inflection of Christianity was established early in his life. From this flowed the relationship to time particular to the first Quakers, which in turn formed the Quaker relationship to memory. In his Journal, Fox records how, after many years of gloomy and feverish seeking after truth, he experienced a series of visions which revealed to him the universality of the inward light of Christ. It shone in all, whether Friend or adversary, whether open or unreceptive to the Quaker message, whether Christian or of another faith. It is this belief that led to such apparently hopeless missionary journeys as that of Mary Fisher to the Sultan in Adrianople in 1658 (Brown, 2007). To turn to that universally present light was understood as the route to salvation, but Fox acknowledged that, while the light was omnipresent and omnipotent, it would not result in all making that turn; some would resist and remain in darkness. This notwithstanding, the light was available to all and sufficient for the salvation of all: ‘all might come to know their Salvation nigh. For I saw, that Christ had died for all Men, and was a Propitiation for all; and had enlightened all Men and Women with his divine and saving Light’ (Fox, 1694: 22). Humanity was unified by the universality of this inward light, and divided only by the fault-line between those who submitted to its power and those who hardened their hearts against it.

As well as the light within being universally present in human beings, it was also a source of unification between humanity and the divine. Submission to the light reunited believers with the God from whom their fallen condition had separated them. The unity conferred by the light within reconciled God with his creation, estranged from him by the Fall: ‘hee that sanctifyeth and hee that is sanctifyed are {all of} one’, wrote Fox (1911: 64–65); ‘they are one in ye ffather & ye Sonne, & of his flesh, & of his bone, this ye scripture doth witnesse’. The light within was capable of reframing not only the spiritual life of the believer, but also their whole embodied being: ‘I was very much altered in Countenance and Person as if my Body had been New-moulded or changed’, wrote Fox (1694: 13). Unity with the divine was taken literally rather than metaphorically by early Friends, and thus had radically transformative and restitutive implications, with the power to return believers to the sinless perfection of Adam in Paradise: ‘All things were New; and all the Creation gave another Smell unto me than before [. . .] being renewed up into the Image of God by Christ Jesus; so that I say, I was come up to the State of Adam, which he was in, before he fell’ (Fox 1694: 17–18). Accessing this state remade the material world for the transformed believer, such that creation now ‘gave another Smell’ than previously.

In the unified world that followed the turn to the light, the divisions that characteristically structure the postlapsarian world were dissolved, including its usual temporalities. The recognition of Christ as already returned, indwelling in all, collapses the customary Protestant chronology, particularly starkly articulated in the prevailing Calvinism of the seventeenth century and characterising the environment in which Fox’s youthful seeking had taken place. In the Calvinist-Protestant interpretation, believers looked beyond the specificities of their sharply demarcated present moment, where they dwelt in a helplessly fallen world of sin and temptation, back to a past state of lost prelapsarian perfection and forward to the promised future return of Christ. Paradise was lost to the past, while the present was a place of imperfection and spiritual deficit. For the elect, chosen by the grace of God for salvation, their future redemption was assured, but the present was a painful and demanding stage on their journey back to the Father. Chronological time – the sequential, progressive and unidirectional flow between the distinct categories of past, present and future – was fundamental to this Calvinist soteriological narrative.

Quaker theology, however, as exemplified by Fox’s words and practices, dissolved the terms of that chronology. The emphasis on the indwelling Christ rather than the historical Jesus retrieved the promised redemption from the future and returned it, fulfilled, to the present, into what Carolyn Dinshaw (2007: 109) has called ‘the everlasting now of the mystic’. Salvation was no longer restricted to the Calvinists’ always receding and uncertain future – for the elect could never have absolute assurance of their status in this life – but could be experienced, through the light within, in the present. Consequently, life was no longer lived in the meantime, a time of preparation, dearth and waiting, but in a time of plenitude and fulfilment. Not only did submission to the doctrine of the indwelling Christ merge the future with the present, but it also collapsed the distinction between past and present. The light within returned Fox (1694: 21) to a sense of living in Apostolic time, the time of the primitive church: the enlightened, he wrote, ‘shall come, while upon Earth, into the same Power and Spirit that the Prophets and Apostles were in’. Just as that had been a time of direct revelation, of the fulfilment of prophecies, of an experientially based testimony of a living Christ, so too was this.

The turn to the light within in effect brought an end to the sequential chronology of human time and inaugurated the advent of the ahistorical atemporality of divine eternity. As Pink Dandelion put it, ‘Fox claims to work from a sense of truth outside of time or from before time (prelapsarian) [. . .] All life was now potentially “out of time”, and soon all time would end. Time had ended and was ending’ (2005: 13, 14; see too Bruyneel, 2009). The simultaneity of these different temporalities – the suggestion that time ‘had ended and was ending’ – echoes a phraseology characteristic of Fox (1694: 206; 1698: 501) and other early Friends, where the present perfect and the present continuous are juxtaposed to indicate the fulfilment but also the ongoing work of salvation in the world: ‘Christ is come, and coming’, writes Fox; the Gospel-Day ‘is come and coming out of the Apostacy’ (1694: 206; 1698: 501; see Gwyn, 1986: 117, 205–207; Hinds, 2011: 82–99). The ‘coming’, in each case, is both achieved and continuing, both in time and out of it, precisely because each statement depends on an underlying relation between the saved and the unregenerate. Dandelion concludes that ‘The Quaker experience is thus temporal, in that they engage with the world, and meta-temporal in their relationship with Christ the Word’ (19). To live both in the ‘world’ and in the ‘Word’ required a reckoning with different temporalities, with both human, historical time (Chronos) and with the timeless eternity of godly time (Kairos). ¹⁷

The complexity of these apprehensions of time results from the focus on the presence, temporal as well as spatial, of the indwelling light. The simultaneity of the two temporalities (human and godly) results from the understanding that, if the turn to the light inaugurated the end of human time, it did so in a human subject still living in the fallen world and engaging with people still enmeshed in the snares of human history and for whom time still proceeded. A life in the light was lived in relationship with those still in darkness. Not only do the two temporalities co-exist, but they are permeable each to the other. Chronological time, from a Quaker perspective, was not only the meantime, a waiting time, but also a potential time, providing the means to live otherwise by turning to the light always and already within.

It is this dual temporality – the sense that Friends needed to live with due regard to both the chronological successiveness of the meantime and the atemporal ‘now’ of godly time – that can begin to account for the movement’s commitment to, on the one hand, the chronological-historical practices of record-keeping and archiving and, on the other hand, the theological and rhetorical insistence on the collapse of historical time in the spiritual power of the present moment. These temporalities were not only understood to exist in opposition to each other, with the unregenerate condemned to dwell in the uncertainty and opacity of the successive meantime while Quakers were reunited with God in Kairos, but they also intersected in the lives of Friends themselves. Having turned to the light within, Quakers’ lives unfolded in perpetual witness to the immanence of godly time within chronological or successive time – that is, to the potential for Chronos to give way to Kairos in the lives of the newly convinced.

Beyond this, however, there was a recognition of the continuing vulnerability of Friends to the insinuations and temptations of the carnal world. Just as all might turn to the inward light and experience godly time in this life, as Fox had described it in his own case, so too all might again turn away from it and fall back into darkness, the temporality of successive historical time. For Friends to sustain themselves in the light required them to live their lives faithfully, above all in their watching and waiting attentively in the stillness and silence of Meeting for Worship. But Friends could also guard against backsliding by turning to the support afforded by fully human moral faculties such as memory, which found material form in the records and journals of the early movement. Like the exercise of reason or the operation of conscience, memorials such as these were valued as supports to the life of faith. These textual traces of ministry, while not themselves ‘of God’, were invaluable aids to living faithfully and continuing to walk in the light.

The Quaker practice of record-keeping – the making of accounts, copying of letters, writing and rewriting of journals – provided a means for the preservation of the memory of the movement’s beginnings. These histories of the movement, their narratives of persecution, of stalwart resolution and of the ecstatic joy of life in the light, could encourage the oppressed and warn waverers against backsliding. But they operated not as a means of convincement, but ‘outwardly’, as guards against human frailty. Consequently, they did not share the kairotic atemporality of inward communion with the divine, where the successiveness of a chronological past, present and future dissolved into a timeless now of divine plenitude, and memory lost its epistemological purchase. Rather, they served as bulwarks against the blandishments of carnality as Friends continued to dwell in a generally hostile and attritional world. Friends inhabited these different temporalities simultaneously: they lived in the human time of the fallen world, even though they were no longer fully of that world, witnessing to the life within, and seeking the convincement of others. But they also, even as dwellers in the divine light, were in continuing need of the encouragement and strength afforded by the ‘outward’ supports of conscience and memory.

Fox’s warning injunctions to Priest Lampitt and his supporters to ‘remember me’ and Penn’s proposition that the work of conviction can unfold only in the present moment therefore suggest ways in which the early Quaker understanding of time offers insight into the movement’s distinctive perspective on the status and discursive power of memory. The very concept of memory is premised on a sense of different temporalities – that the past is distinct from the present, that it can be forgotten but also that it can be retrieved for, made available to, the present. As such, it is dependent on and reproduces precisely the model of temporality that was dissolved by the doctrine of the light within. It relies on, first, the distinctiveness of, and separation between, past and present, then and now, and second, their successiveness: this first, that second. The doctrine of the inward light refused or rewrote both propositions. It proposed a continuity between apostolic time and present time, and it dissolved the promised future return of the saviour into the eternal present of the indwelling Christ.

When Friends are enjoined to remember, as they are in Fox’s Epistles, they are addressed in their ‘outward’ or social lives, their relations with each other and with their fellows in the persisting, still fallen, still potential, world. Here they should live faithfully, according to the light, but should also bring to bear the wisdom of their human faculties: their consciences, knowledge, reason, understanding – and their memories – to guide the social encounters of their daily lives. But as Penn wrote in his preface to Fox’s Journal, when it comes to the work of ministry and witness, of being ‘moved of the spirit’ to testify without intermediary to the truth of God manifested in the inward light, those human faculties have no part to play, belonging as they do to the realm of the human and social. In the immediacy of the ‘now’ of a divine opening from God, the past and future dissolve, and it is only in this condition that such an opening can effect the convincement of the hearer. In the eternal present of the ‘inward’ indwelling Christ, where human time has ended, memory has no place and nothing to offer.

In the Journal, it is in Fox’s warning epistles that memory is most insistently at stake. Here, the injunction to ‘remember’ resonates because it is only those persisting in darkness who dwell fully on a temporal plane, and in whom the sufficiency of the indwelling Christ will be anything other than a truth that pulses in the endlessly circulating present of the blood and breath. Only in the unredeemed will the pastness of the past threaten the soul’s eternal life, as this is the locus of the wilful rejection of the word of Fox and of God.

For those dwelling in darkness, therefore, to remember, as eventually at judgement day they must and will, relies in the first instance on the distinction between past and present: the words of Fox and their past rejection of them will be recalled in the presence of the divine arbiter. Yet that very act of remembering will itself inaugurate the final collapse of this temporal distinction in two ways: first, structurally, for the act of remembering will bring the past into the present; and second, this particular act of remembering will integrate past, present and future through its contribution to the subject’s ultimate submission to the truth-status of that memory and so to his or her soteriological destiny. The doctrinal necessity of finally witnessing to the indwelling Christ and the end of time inaugurated by remembering is effected here by means of memory’s structural and simultaneous confirmation and undoing of ‘distinctness’ and of sequence. To remember, therefore, is both unQuakerly, because of its reliance on a distinction between past and present, and profoundly Quakerly, as the presence of the past exists in a timeless and endless now.