Frequency of Light, Part 1

Probably no religious concept is more closely associated with Quakerism than that of the “Light” — a manifestation of God within all people, which shows us our true spiritual condition and guides our path into doing what is right.

Friends have used a variety of phrases based on this metaphor of a spiritual Light: the Inward Light, the Inner Light, the Light Within, the Light of Christ, the Light of Christ Within, and others, including simply the Light — this last probably being the most common.

But it should also be noted that a wide variety of phrases have been in common use for this Divine inward presence which do not appeal to the metaphor of Light: the Seed, that of God in everyone, the Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, and simply Christ, among many others.

It is natural to wonder to what extent these terms have waxed and waned in popularity — whether Light metaphors have been more popular at certain times in Quaker history, for example. My guess, based on nothing more than impressions and intuitions from reading Quaker literature from different periods, was that Light metaphors were extremely common in early Quakerism, but became somewhat scarcer in the 18th and early 19th centuries, before being revived again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More recently, it seemed to me, Light  metaphors have again gone into decline, with modern Friends much more likely to use phrases like the Spirit or that of God than the Light or anything similar.

But personal impressions can be wrong, so I thought I would try to take a closer look and see how well my guesses might stand up to scrutiny. To test this, I decided to take some actual counts of how frequently Friends at various times used these terms.

The largest Quaker-focused linguistic corpus available in electronic format seems to be the Digital Quaker Collection at the Earlham School of Religion, so I took my counts from that. The DQC includes approximately 500 works from the period 1650–1940, though rather unevenly distributed over that time span.

Unfortunately, the DQC’s search capabilities are not as powerful as one might hope in doing this kind of work, and it is not possible to obtain individual word frequencies without doing a lot of tedious hand-counting and arithmetic. However, the DQC does make it quite easy to count the number of works published during a given period which contain at least one occurrence of a given search term, so that is what I did.

The blue region in the following graph shows the total number of works in the DQC for each decade in the period covered. The high peaks in the 1720s, 1780s and 1830s correspond to the publication of the collected works of William Penn, Isaac Penington, and George Fox, respectively. Since these were anthologies of previously published material, the original publication dates were obviously earlier than what is shown on the graph. The DQC includes several additional anthologies and republications which do not produce such noticeable peaks in the graph, but which complicate the interpretation of the dates in the same way.

The purple region shows the number of works that contain at least one occurrence of the word light. Obviously, the vast majority of all works at all time periods contain at least one occurrence of this word — which does not support my initial intuition that “Light” -based metaphors declined and then were revived.

Works with "Light"vs. totals (Click to enlarge)

It should be remembered that this graph shows all occurrences of the word light, including occurrences as a noun in its ordinary secular sense, as an adjective meaning “not heavy,” etc. Since light is a pretty common word, it is not very surprising that a large number of texts contain it, no matter how frequently it may have occurred in religious metaphors.

Perhaps we could find better evidence of historical change if we counted specific phrases like Inward Light, Inner Light, Light Within, Light of Christ, etc. Here is a graph comparing how many works contain each of these terms, again decade-by-decade:

Works containing "Light" phrases (Click to enlarge)

And here is one showing the same data, but presented in terms of what percentage of works from each decade contained at least one occurrence of each of the phrases under consideration:

Percentage of works with "Light" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

These graphs show a few surprises, at least for me. Contrary to what I expected, there seems to have been a pretty steady use of Light metaphors all through this period, with no noticeable decline during the middle period.

I was also surprised to find a couple of very early uses of the phrase Inner Light. A few years ago, on the old Quaker-L email discussion list, some participants claimed repeatedly that early Friends never used this phrase, but only Inward Light — this choice was supposed to have some theological significance, so that the “modern” phrase Inner Light should be considered a distortion of the original idea. At the time, I argued against this view based on historical changes in the meaning of the word inward, but took for granted that they were correct in claiming the phrase Inner Light was modern. In fact, it turns out that this phrase dates back almost to the beginning of the Quaker movement. The earliest attestation I have found is in Samuel Fisher’s Rusticus ad Academicos, first published in 1660. (It shows in the graph as published in the 1670′s because the version in the DQC is from Fisher’s collected works, Testimony of Truth Exalted by the Collected Labours of that Worthy Man, Good Scribe, and Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, Samuel Fisher, published in 1679.) Here is one of several occurrences of Inner Light in Fisher’s book:

And seeing God is the Sole immediate Author of the Light and Spirit within, which is not alterable, flexible, &c. at the wills of Criticks, as thou confessest the Hebrew Text is, and as he is not of the Letter, which is both Copied Canonized and Authorized (as ye have it) by men only as the Rule, if it follow (as secundum Te it doth, not Me ) ab Authore remoto from the remote Author of it God, from whom nothing imperfect can come, that the Letter is the only perfect Rule and Revelation of Gods will, will it not much more forcibly follow from Gods being the only and immediate Author of the Inner Light and Spirit, that they are the only sufficient Rule, and make a perfect Revelation of his will to the ends and purposes aforesaid?

p. 475

Of course it should be recognized that even if this term occurs very early, it did not become commonplace until much later. But — and this was another surprise for me — neither did the term Inward Light. Both these terms occur much less frequently than either Light Within or Light of Christ until well into the 19th century.

What about terms for God’s inward presence which do not appeal to metaphors of light?

The first of these I looked at was Seed, shown in the following two graphs:

Works with "Seed" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Percentage of works with "Seed" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Seed turned out to be quite a  common word in the DQC, with percentages reaching 100% in several decades; but on closer inspection, this included a large number of examples in which this word was used for something other than God’s inward presence in the spirit — mostly other religious usages (e.g. “seed of Abraham,” etc.), but with a few occurrences in the ordinary secular sense as well.

I thought I might better isolate the kinds of examples I was looking for by searching under “seed of Christ,” but as you can see in the graphs, this barely produced a blip — and even some of these turned out to mean something different, as in “I am clothed with a little strength, both to visit the seed of Christ , and to minister to it” (Memoirs of the life and gospel labors of Stephen Grellet, vol. 1, p. 173). It seems pretty clear that simple word searches will not give an accurate picture of the frequency of the “Seed” metaphor for God’s inward presence; perhaps someone with more patience or cleverness than I will come up with a more informative count.

Next, I looked at “Spirit” terms: Spirit of Christ, Holy Spirit, and Holy Ghost. All three of these turned out to be very frequent throughout the whole period, as the following two graphs show:

Works with "Spirit" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Percentage of works with "Spirit" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Finally, I looked at the phrases that of God, that of God in everyone (including examples where everyone was spelled as two words, as was common in the 17th century), and that of God in every man:

Works with "That of God" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Percentage of works with "That of God" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

It is worth paying attention to the difference in these graphs between that of God and that of God in everyone/every man. It is easy to get the impression from the graphs that that of God was in continuous use as a term for God’s inward presence throughout the period shown (albeit less frequently in the middle period). However, a closer inspection showed that many of these examples were spurious for our present purposes, as in “There is no saving power but that of God” (Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, p. 145). If we focus on the longer phrases that of God in everyone/every man, it appears that this kind of terminology was popular in the early years of the Quaker movement, then became extremely rare until the early 20th century (aside from the publication of Fox’s collected works).

I wouldn’t draw very firm conclusions about frequency from any of the data I’ve presented in this post. As I mentioned at the beginning, works in the DQC are very unevenly distributed in time. The small sample size for some decades produces big swings in the percentage graphs that probably do not represent real trends. There are several decades, including the 1730s, 1740s and 1920s, for which the DQC does not contain any works at all.

In a future post, I hope to examine whether clearer patterns emerge from in a larger corpus, such as Google Books.

Advertisement