by Lucy Violet Hodgkin
First given as the 1919 Swarthmore Lecture
Preface
The Swarthmore Lectureship was established by the Woodbrooke Extension Committee, at a meeting held December 9th, 1907: the minute of the Committee providing for “an annual lecture on some subject relating to the message and work of the Society of Friends.”
The name “Swarthmore” was chosen in memory of the home of Margaret Fox, which was always open to the earnest seeker after Truth, and from which loving words of sympathy and substantial material help were sent to fellow-workers.
The Lectureship has a two-fold purpose: first, to interpret further to the members of the Society of Friends their Message and Mission; and, secondly, to bring before the public the spirit, the aims and the fundamental principles of the Friends.
The Lectures have been delivered on the evening preceding the assembly of the Friends’ Yearly Meeting in each year.
“And as the flowing of the ocean fills
Each creek and branch thereof, and then retires,
Leaving behind a sweet and wholesome savour;
So doth the virtue and the life of God
Flow evermore into the hearts of those
Whom He hath made partakers of His nature;
And, when it but withdraws itself a little,
Leaves a sweet savour after it, that many
Can say they are made clean by every word
That He hath spoken to them in their silence.”
“Truly, we do but grope here in the dark,
Near the partition-wall of Life and Death,
At every moment dreading or desiring
To lay our hands upon the unseen door!
Let us, then, labour for an inward stillness,—
An inward stillness and an inward healing;
That perfect silence, where the lips and heart
Are still, and we no longer entertain
Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions,
But God alone speaks in us, and we wait
In singleness of heart, that we may know
His will, and in the silence of our spirits,
That we may do His will, and do that only.”
—H.W. Longfellow, New England Tragedies
“Look with wonder at that which is before you.”
“Let not him that seeks cease until he find.
When he finds, he shall wonder;
When he wonders, he shall reign;
And when he reigns, he shall rest.”
In this mysterious double “Saying” of our Lord the germ of silent worship lies hidden.
First the Command: not to work, nor to doubt, nor to question, but to watch, to marvel, to adore.
Next, the Experience: seeking, finding, reigning, resting; a pair of attributes active and passive, on either side of this central act and attitude of wonder. Such is the demand that this Logion* makes upon its hearers who, as they surrender themselves to its claim, will discover afresh its divinity.
[*This “Saying” of our Lord occurs in the following passage from the Stromata or Miscellanies of Clement of Alexandria: “The beginning of knowledge is wondering at things, as Plato says in the Theaetetus and Matthias in the Traditions exhorting: ‘Wonder at the things before you’; laying this down as the first step toward the knowledge that lies beyond.” (Clem. Al. Strom. II. ix. 45.); and again “In which connection also in the Gospel according to the Hebrews it is written: ‘He that hath wondered shall reign, and he that hath reigned shall rest. ȯ θαυμάσας βασιλεύσει και ȯ βασιλεύσας ἀναπαύσεται.'” (Clem. Al. Strom. II. ix. 45.).
In Strom. V. xiv. 96, the quotation is given more fully but without its source. “He that seeketh shall not cease until he find, and on finding he shall be amazed, and on being amazed he shall reign, and on reigning he shall rest.”
Among the λόγια Ἰησοῦ discovered at Oxyrhynchus (Oxyrh. Pap. 654. vol. iv. p. 4) this saying is found in a form closely similar to Clement’s version, and as he expressly assigns the saying θάυμασον τά παρόντα to the same source, it follows that it also is a λόγιον Ἰησοῦ.]
There may be innumerable other ways of worship for other pilgrims, but we know that this is the one appointed to us, the intimate communion of spirit in which, unitedly and as a body, we seek in stillness to “look with wonder at that which is before us,” and, thus wondering, to reign and to rest.
Silent worship,—our familiar yet mysterious Way of Wonder,—whence it came to us from the dim hills of the past; how it is leading us over dusty plains and through tangled thickets in the present; and whither, to what mist-shrouded, sun-suffused heights of the future:—this is the subject of our quest.
There is a danger that those of us who were born Friends may overlook the wonder, the mystery, of this silent way of ours, just because we know it too well. We rarely feel that we are treading anything beyond everyday streets and pavements, or country lanes, as we walk to meeting. However far back we probe into our consciousness we can never remember a time when thus to gather together in stillness with other seekers was not, for us, the familiar entrance, the inevitable approach, to the Presence Chamber of GOD.
Yet this is really an astonishing thing to do. And therefore it is well that we, whose sense of wonder at this wordless intercourse of spirits—human and Divine—has been blurred by long familiarity, should have that sense requickened by new companions to whom silent worship, instead of being a habit, is still a rich surprise. The joy these later partakers in it find in our silence has reassured us that our inheritance is no mere curious heirloom, venerable, though useless to all save the members of one small spiritual family; but is, rather, a priceless possession for world-wide present and future needs.
“How did George Fox discover your silence? Where did he find it? When did he first use it? Was this use of silence his own invention? Has it grown and developed since his time? Was it practised by him and by the early Friends in exactly the same way as it is among you to-day? And, if it has altered, in what directions?” These questions, asked by my friend Cyril Hepher in 1916, first showed me how little I knew of the history of our way of worship. Part of the answer to them was supplied by the well-known passages in George Fox’s Journal telling how, as a young man, he kept himself “sometimes retired in his chamber and
often walked solitary in Barnet Chace to wait upon the Lord,” and how, a few years later, at a “great meeting” of priests and professors, he “sat on a haystack and spoke nothing for some hours, … to famish them from words.” [See infra, p. 48.]
From these we went on to Robert Barclay’s sentences in the Apology: “A man may learn more in half an hour and be more certain of it by waiting upon God and His Spirit in the heart than by reading 1,000 volumes… for when I came into the silent assemblies of God’s people, I felt a secret power among them that touched my heart, and as I gave way unto it I found the evil weakening in me and the good reached to, and raised … in that inward quietness, stillness and humility of mind where the Lord appears and His heavenly wisdom is revealed.” [Apology, xi. 21, 23, and xi. 7.]
Nevertheless the more insistent questions as to the growth and development, the origin and history of silent worship remained unanswered and a fruitful subject for enquiry.
In a short hour’s lecture it is impossible to do more than hint at the various stages, but let us glance first at:
The Earlier Use of Silence
- In Other Religions
- In the Christian Church
- In the Mass
- Monastic Communities (Compulsory Silence)
- Individual Mystics (Free Silence)
- Among Philosophers and Heretics
Next let us concentrate on
The History of Quaker Silence
- Its Roots
- On the Continent, in France, Germany, and the Low Countries
- In England, among Familists, Seekers, etc.
- Its Main Stem
- Experiences of Fox and the early Friends
- Theories concerning these—Barclay, Penington, Penn
- Its Degeneration in later times, Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century
- And Revival. Later Nineteenth Century
Lastly, in conclusion, let us look at present developments and future possibilities of silent worship.
- Its Dangers
- Fragility
- Wordiness
- Failure to “Arrive”
- Its Future Hopes
- Central Appeal to the Will
- Hope of Re-union
- The Upper Room
The first division of our subject is too vast and complicated for me to attempt to treat it in detail. I can only offer a few scattered examples in proof of the widespread use of silence in other religions. Some of these I have come across in my own reading. Others have been generously sent to me by more scholarly friends, who are able to go much further afield—and who are also interested in the history of silent worship.
More than three thousand years ago, in the religious life of ancient Egypt, “the attitude of silent communion, waiting upon the gracious goodness of God, was not confined to the select few nor to the educated, priestly communities.”
On the humblest monuments of the common people Amon is called the “god who cometh to the silent, or the lord of the silent, who cometh at the cry of the poor,” [Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt by J. H. Breasted, Ph.D.] and again, “Thou sweet Well for him that thirsteth in the desert, it is closed to him that speaks, but is open to him that is silent. When he who is silent comes, Lo he finds the Well!”
[In Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, by Professor J. H. Breasted, the following paragraphs occur:
“Thou O Amon art the lord of the silent,
Who cometh at the cry of the poor.” (p. 351)
“The surviving influence of the Aton faith and the doctrines of social justice of the Feudal Age now culminated in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries before Christ in the profoundest expression and revelation of the devotional religious spirit ever attained by the men of Egypt…. Prayer becomes a revelation of inner personal experience, an expression of individual communion with God. It is a communion in which the worshipper discerns in his God one nourishing the soul as a shepherd feeds his flock.” (p. 355)
“Amon is a herdman herding him that leans upon him.” “The lord of Truth he lives in Truth.” (Inscriptions in the Hieratic character XXVI.B.Mus. Ostrakon No. 5656 11 6-7. 14. 15.)
“Thou sweet Well for him that thirsteth in the desert; it is closed to him who speaks, but it is open to him who is silent. When he who is silent comes, lo, he finds the Well.” (Papyrus Sallier, 1. 8. 2-3.)
For kind help in tracing the above references I am indebted to Mrs. H. Sefton Jones, F.R.H.S.]
In the changeless East it is said that “The Hindu still looks with pity on our extravagant activities and reckless thought [that] take us ever further from the Absolute, the True, the Unspeakable, the Repose, the Great Silence, upon whose unmoving bosom the tiniest scratchings which make up our earthly silence, transpire, are born, and pass.” [P. N. Waggett—Introduction to The House of Wisdom and Love]
The Buddhist religion, on the other hand, attempts to unite all these distant regions within the breast of a silent worshipper, in the practice of “the art of pervasion, whereby the silent votary contemplates in turn every quarter of the globe with active love.
Silence could never be alien from worship to the devout Hebrew whose Scriptures showed “in the beginning” an earliest æonian silence of the Spirit brooding upon the waters, broken only by the “first tremendous Fiat of GOD.”
Even in the later, ornate days of the Jewish religion more than one trace of silent worship remains. The Talmud states that “companies of angels praise by night but are silent by day because of the glories of the Eternal.” It also mentions that: “The former Chasidim” (i.e. the predecessors of the Pharisees about the Maccabæan period) “used to sit still one hour and then pray one hour and then sit still for one hour.”
The idea formerly held that the word “Selah” in the Psalms preserves the memory of a similar hush or pause for silent prayer, is denied by modern scholarship. The importance of silence in the Jewish conception of worship is shown, however, in several places, notably in the Prophet’s exclamation: “The Lord is in His Holy Temple: let all the earth keep silence before Him.” (Hab. ii. 20).
Memorable also is the record of the utter silence in which the Temple buildings themselves had been scrupulously fashioned.
“And the house when it was in building was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither; so that there was neither hammer nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was in building.” (1 Kings 5:7)
Not only from Judæa, however, also from ancient Greece, come some of the most significant traces of the use of silence in the life and worship of pre-Christian times.
The Pythagoreans are known to have practised silence. “Stop chatter and take to learning” was one of the injunctions of Pythagoras himself, and he “was wont to set every student a task of lengthened silence,” in order that “by the fermentation of his thoughts he might be the better prepared for his master’s teaching.”
In the *Symposium* Socrates is said, on one occasion, to have remained wrapped in thought from early dawn throughout a whole day and night, with a wondering crowd around him. “There he stood till the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way.” [Symposium, 220]
But the most significant example of silence in worship is found in the heart of ancient Greece, in the Mysteries of Eleusis, those shrouded rites of cleansing, of initiation, of death in life, of life out of death, that seem almost like a strange foreshadowing of Christianity.
At sunrise, on a certain day in every year, a throng of chosen worshippers issued forth from the City of the Violet Crown. Leaving Athens, they passed out from under the luminous shadow of its pillared temples and wandered on all through the daylight hours along the Sacred Way, that ancient Way of Wonder, across the plain of Attica and over the dim blue hills to Eleusis. The sun was already setting as the long procession wound round the still waters of the land-locked bay of Salamis; not until nightfall did the pilgrims reach their goal, the Temple of the Two Goddesses at Eleusis.
We know that here in summer’s ardent heats, the chosen came for initiation; but of what the Mysteries themselves consisted, what secrets of essential being they both symbolised and unveiled, can only be guessed now from the scattered hints that have come down to us from illuminated votaries, pledged to secrecy in regard to the essential points of their experience. The Greeks, in their wisdom, knew full well that
“If the chosen soul could never be alone,
In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God,
No greatness ever had been dreamed or done.”
[Columbus, J. R. Lowell]
Therefore they took every precaution that life’s deepest lessons should be learned, and kept, in secret, in darkness, in hiddenness, and in silence.[Even the name mystes given to the Greek initiate, “probably arose from the fact that he was one who was gaining a knowledge of divine things, about which he must keep his mouth shut. (myeo means close lips or eyes). It is from this word that our ‘mystic’ and ‘mysticism’ are derived: thus the connection between mysticism and silence is far from being superficial or arbitrary.”—C. F. E. Spurgeon, Mysticism in English Literature.]
Only after three days of purification, of prayer, and of solitary ordeals, did the central and most representative event of the Mysteries take place. This was enacted not in the inmost chambers of hidden secret things but with a sudden blaze of light in full sight of the assembled multitude. [At Eleusis “there was probably no dogmatic teaching, there were possibly no words spoken, it was all an acted parable. But it was all kept in silence. There was an awful individuality about it. They [the initiates] saw the sight in common, but they saw it [alone]. It was his personal communion with the Divine life. The effect of it was conceived to be a change both of character and of relation to the Gods. The initiated were, by virtue of their initiation, made partakers of a world to come. ‘Thrice happy they who go to the world below having seen these mysteries; to them alone is life there, to others all is misery.'” (Sophocles, Fragm. 348) E. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 1888. The initiates “were bound to make their life on earth correspond to their initiation. In later times it was supposed even to make them better.” (Ibid.)] Every soul present was drawn into rapt communion and participation, every eye was focussed to witness and to partake in the symbol of one divine act, every heart bowed to adore “the great, the wonderful, the most perfect object of mystical contemplation,—an ear of wheat reaped in silence.”[“The Greeks of old knew that silence is not a negative but a positive thing. There is never a complete vacuum of stillness but only a hushing of the more dominant sounds. The silence of a northern night and of a southern noon; the silence of a forest, a moor, a sea: what resemblance is there between them, and how are they related to this silence of a worshipping multitude who came to Eleusis to learn—so an inscription tells us—’the fair and joyful truth that death is not an evil but a blessing to mortals.'”—E. S. Bosanquet, Days in Attica]
In spite of the difference of outward ceremonial there is a true inward connection [There are several interesting points of contact between the Mysteries (at Eleusis and elsewhere), and the ritual of Christian worship. It was the later Mystery Religions with their indoor rites of communion, that prepared the way for the Christian ritual observances rather than the open air sacrifices that went on outside the normal classical temple, accompanied as the latter were with hymn and dance and a hubbub of conversation among the worshippers. In contrast with these open air noisy rites of the state religion of Greece and Rome, silence as an attribute of highest worship is characteristic of the Mysteries, which were as has been said generally nocturnal, indoor or even subterranean. Later on, during the persecutions, Christianity was also forced into hiding, and often driven underground as a condition of survival, or even of continued existence, (as for instance in the Catacombs of Rome), and this reinforced its natural sympathy with the Mystery Religions. Another interesting point of similarity is that both in the Mysteries and in the Christian Church the altar is placed at the inner end of the meeting house, whereas the Greek or Roman temple invariably had its altar in front, outside the building. In the later history of Græco-Egyptian mysticism an extremely interesting example of Ritual Silence occurs in the so-called Mithras-Liturgie, although this is not strictly a liturgy, and can hardly represent the official Mithraic teaching. It is, rather, a Revelation, put by the writer in the mouth of Mithras, of the rites by which a worshipper may attain to the presence of the supreme God. In one “instruction” the novice is told what to do when as the result of his first prayer the Gods become visible to him and he to them. When they fix their eyes upon him and bear down upon him, he is to lay his forefinger on his mouth and say, “Silence! Silence! Silence! Password of the living imperishable God! Guard me, O Silence!”…Then shalt thou see the Gods looking kindly upon thee, and no longer rushing upon thee, but going about their business. So at later stages of the journey a prayer admits to each, and the same password, “Silence,” keeps the intruder safe. [A. Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, p. 6] I am indebted to my brother-in-law, Prof. R. C. Bosanquet, for this information.] between this mystical spell of silence cast over the worshipping multitude in the dark Hall of Initiation, and the hush of utter stillness that unites the congregation in a dim, candle-lit Christian Church, at the culminating moment of the Sacrament of the Mass, when the tinkle of a silver bell calls the worshippers to adore in silence [It is true that in the Roman Liturgy there is no outward pause in the swift succession of words and of dramatic actions accompanying them, beyond the direction to the priest genuflexus adorat and this “adoration” is now usually interpreted as a rapid genuflection rather than a pause. But so far as the people are concerned the Roman Mass is generally said in silence, that is inaudibly, almost in toto. Therefore, as it is commonly said, it is in effect largely a service of silent fellowship directed by symbolic acts, which in silence convey a well understood succession of thought and devotion. In the liturgy of St. James there is a call to silence: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence…for the King of Kings cometh…” In the Roman and Sarum Missals a relic of ancient silence is preserved. There follows “Let us kneel,—Let us arise,” and a collect which gathers up the prayer of the silent interval. I owe this interesting information to Cyril Hepher.], not one gathered ear of wheat, as in Eleusis of old, but the broken Bread itself: “My body, given for you.”