Kenneth Boulding:

Quakerism and the Arts

Reprinted from Friends Journal, Nov. 1, 1983. Used by permission.

---

The relation of Quakerism to the arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theater, opera, poetry, literature, and dance—is ambiguous and difficult. Historically, one has to see Quakerism in two aspects. It is a unique expression of religious experience and culture, in a certain sense independent of time and place, something that has always been in the potential of human life and experience. Quakerism also has to be looked at in the context of its time and place, as an offshoot of English Puritanism in the 17th century.

One does not have to be a Marxist—which I am certainly not—to see this whole movement as part of a process in class differentiation, in the development of a conscious subculture not willing to be subservient to, and sharply differentiating itself from, the culture of the aristocracy. This was largely made possible by rising technology, improved cultivation and food supplies, and general enrichment. Early Quakers, much like the Puritans, were yeoman farmers, craftsmen, a few shopkeepers at first; then occasionally a member of the upper class, like William Penn; and a few small-propertied people like Isaac Penington and Thomas Ellwood.

This whole movement of what later came to be called "nonconformity," which at the time of George Fox's early ministry consisted of Independents (Congregationalists), Presbyterians and Baptists for the most part, with a few strange marginal sects like the Muggletonians, represented the rise of an independent culture isolating itself from that of propertied people, the aristocracy, and, of course, from the Church of England, which tried to take in everybody as a symbol of an integrated society. Even my grandmother, an English countrywoman who was a Methodist, told me how she used to sing, "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and gave them their estate." In a way the discovery by both the Puritans and the Quakers was that God had given them an "estate" that was by no means "lowly," with a culture of its own and a life of the spirit which was internally rich. I remember again that my Methodist grandparents had a text on the wall, engraved somewhat like a Bank of England note, that read, "My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory." And the "riches in glory" was a very real part of the Puritan, Baptist, and Quaker experience of the 17th century, as it was part of the Methodist experience of the 18th century.

It is not wholly surprising, therefore, that what today we would call the "arts"—painting, sculpture, stained glass, magnificent buildings, theatre, dance, the novel (not really invented before the 18th century)—were rejected as part of "this world" and, what was worse, for being of the flesh and the devil. Puritan and Baptist churches were plain, and Quaker meetinghouses even plainer, coming a long way from the great cathedrals, where the architectural and artistic riches of this world had somehow in the eyes of nonconformity veiled the "riches of glory." The Cromwellian period in England, out of which Quakerism grew, exhibits slight similarities to the "Gang of Four" and the Cultural Revolution in China in its destruction of ancient buildings, statues, stained glass, and so on.

Quakerism, of course, pulled out from this violence into peaceableness, plainness of dress and lifestyle and meetinghouses, the rejection of the worldly arts. This rejection lasted almost until the 20th century. Margaret Fell protested a little against what she called "gaudy drab," and seems to have worn a red gown. Thomas Ellwood was a friend of John Milton and persuaded him, so the story goes, to write Paradise Regained. Quakerism developed a very distinctive form of literature in the Quaker journal, which flowered in John Woolman. Edward Hicks was a painter (although somewhat ashamed of this, as he felt it was not really the most acceptable way to earn a living; he was a failure at farming), and he wrote one of the most charming Quaker journals ever written.

The problem with the Puritan style of life and its simplicity, however, is that it has some tendency to produce riches simply through hard work, innovation, and thrift. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Quakers made enormous contributions to technological change. Abraham Darby of Coalbrookdale, England, discovered how to smelt iron from coal and may well have had more ultimate impact on the world than any other Quaker. Then, of course, probity and trustworthiness got Friends into banking, insurance, and finance, where again they made very large contributions in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 18th century came Joseph John Gurney ("I became as rich as the Gurneys," says Gilbert in Trial by Jury), the Frys, the Cadburys, the Rowntrees of England, the Biddles of Philadelphia.

It is not wholly surprising that with increasing riches a little worldliness, including the arts, crept in. Joseph John Gurney is particularly interesting in this regard. The prosperous Victorian banker, master of Earlham Hall, traveled in almost triumphant procession with his sister, Elizabeth Fry, to the crowned heads of Europe. He was invited to preach before both houses of Congress in Washington, honored and feasted (I have been told that in some rural meetings in the United States leftovers were called "Joseph Johns" for decades after he passed by)—he seems the epitome of Victorian prosperity. Yet his diary reveals a constant tension between his sense of inner spiritual weakness and failure, and the impressive "worldly" outward presence.

Coming into the 20th century, we find a new kind of Quakerism inspired to a remarkable extent by Rufus Jones and his reinterpretation of Quaker history in terms of a sort of practical mysticism, reflected in the American Friends Service Committee, the "new meetings" (largely in the university centers), the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Friends World Committee for Consultation, and so on. The plain dress and plain language disappear. The home of a Quaker professor becomes not very different from the home of any other professor, with art books, reproductions, novels, plays, and recordings of classical music. The new meetinghouses, however, are plain, with some tendency to center around a fireplace, and the silent meeting for the most part excludes even hymn singing; Bach and Handel are listened to at home. It is not surprising that in the noisy and information-overloaded world of academic life, the blessed, silent, gathered meeting has been the central experience of New Quakers, just as it is not surprising that the isolation and quiet of rural America produced the evangelical revivals and the pastoral meetings, some with robed choirs and stained glass. And in the 20th century we see Quaker artists, Quaker novelists, Quaker poets (these go back to the 19th century, at least to Whittier). I suspect Quakers are rather thin on ballet, but folk dancing has become almost universal.

What is perhaps most remarkable is that the mid-20th century produced a distinguished U.S. composer of Quaker origins, Ned Rorem, who in good Quaker tradition has written and published journals. These are moving accounts of his life experience in Paris, Morocco, and New York, within the worldly world of the arts (and to that world, I think, we must add the flesh and the devil). His journals are terrifying accounts of something very close to a descent into hell, of sexual freedom and an endless struggle with alcoholism, and of coming very close to ultimate despair. The worldly culture of the arts, as he describes it, totally liberated from the restraints and inhibitions of Puritanism, is one in which there is little place for the heavenly kingdom, where the price of glory is earthly restraint.

There is a deep unresolved dilemma here. What might be called "classical Quakerism" up to the 20th century represented a kind of Franciscan voluntary poverty in the arts, inspired by a vision of a divine community of love and simplicity. In the 20th century comes liberation from these older taboos and an embracing of a vast, expanded complexity and richness of human experience. As an amateur painter, photographer, poet and composer for the solo recorder, I have participated in this expansion. I have traveled all over the world and received its plaudits and honors, and it is almost another person who goes to meeting for worship and is caught up in the experience of oneness and almost terrifying simplicity. How do we preserve that simplicity and at the same time enjoy our new-found riches? How do we break out from what was perhaps a cultural prison without falling into the hands of the world, the flesh, and the devil, the hell on earth that seems to follow so many liberations—political, economic, sexual, cultural?

There is no simple answer to these questions. We must continue to wrestle with them. The world, the flesh, and hell, at least on earth, are terribly real. How can they be redeemed without a redeemer, or at least a redeeming experience? The world takes a lot of redeeming, and it is not surprising that, when the world seems irredeemable, those who experience the call of redemption retreat from the world into monasticism, Puritanism, or even classical Quakerism. Quakerism seems to have had a peculiar genius for having been able to keep one foot in this world and one in the other. This may lead at times to an uncomfortable straddle—but then, who says we have to be comfortable! And what the redemption of the arts means in the modern world is a question we should not be afraid to ask.