Selected Writings of Isaac Penington in their Historical and Theological Context (289.6 PEN)
Selected and introduced by R. Melvin Keiser & Rosemary Moore
Most of us are familiar with such 17th century Quaker luminaries as George Fox, Margaret Fell, James Nayler, William Penn, and Robert Barclay, but included in this group of founding Quakers is also Isaac Penington. As stated on the back cover of this book, “His years in prison, his political awareness, and his search for religious freedom and truth during the Puritan revolution and Restoration made him a prophetic witness to spiritual poverty, deceit, and oppression. He grounded this in a philosophy of the nature of the self, its doing and knowing, and in an evocative metaphorical style he expresses the mystery of the spiritual life and how we may experience it.”
The book is divided into two parts: Part I, The Life of Isaac Penington, from his Letters and Other Writings, is set out by Rosemary Moor; Part II, The Spirituality and Thought of Isaac Penington, is presented by R. Melvin Keiser. It is in Part II that we get the substance of Penington’s thought under several headings, such as “The Process of the Spiritual Life,” “Knowing, Sensing, Feeling, and Believing,” “Freedom, Virtue, and Wisdom,” and “Religion, Language, and the Self.” Each of these sections — there are twelve, in all — is prefaced by Keiser and followed by several quotations from Penington’s writings. Given that Penington was, “beyond question, a wordy writer. Even his contemporaries sometimes found him too much,” Keiser’s prefaces are extremely useful, and, as he says, “It is best to read Isaac Penington slowly, at the pace of the quill pen he used for writing.”
Often, when dealing with deeply spiritual matters, metaphors are the most useful way to approach them. And so, Penington depended heavily on metaphors, such as life, light, seed, truth, presence, spring, fountain, breath, spirit. At the same time, however, Penington encourages us to get to know, to feel, “the thing itself,” before language gets hold of it. For example, he writes, “Therefore rest not in the opening of prophecies, or true meanings of these things (though this kind of knowledge is very excellent, and hath been very rare), but wait to feel the thing itself which the words speak of, and to be united by the living Spirit to that, and then thou hast a knowledge from the nature of the thing itself; and this is more deep and inward than all the knowledge that can be had from words concerning the thing.”
In the section “The Process of the Spiritual Life,” Penington uses the metaphors of divine breath and the seed. Of the former, he writes, “O! how doth the soul that is begotten of the divine breath, that is born of the living power and virtue, depend upon God for his continual breathings!” In that same passage, taken from his piece “Where is the Wise? Where is the Scribe?” he says of the seed, “but I waited for such an appearance [of God’s mercy and goodness] as could not be questioned by the fleshly wisdom. And he that waits for that […] cannot but refuse the little seed; and so, not being received into his earth, it can never grow up in him into a great tree.”
Keiser prefaces the section “Knowing, Sensing, Feeling, and Believing,” by pointing out that “the conception of the self as knowing through sensing and feeling rather than through believing is central to Quakerism not only in the seventeenth century but throughout its history.” He then sets up a quotation by Penington on mystery, by explaining that “where modernity has divided reality into two kinds — objects (things, including our bodies) and subjects (the rational mind) —Penington presents a third, and more important kind of reality: mystery.” Here are Penington’s own words: “The knowledge of [the life of Jesus and its narratives], without the knowledge of the mystery, is not sufficient to bring them unto God. […] My meaning is, they have a notion of Christ to be the rock, a notion of him to be the foundation-stone; but never come livingly to feel him the rock, to feel him the foundation-stone, inwardly laid in their hearts, and themselves made living stones in him, and build upon him, the main fundamental stone. Where is this to be felt but within?”
In the section “Freedom, Virtue, and Wisdom,” Penington argues that wisdom is not something that can be gained through mere observation: “the wisest Scribes and Pharisees could not know it by all the observations which they could gather out of Moses’ and prophets’ writings; nor can any now know it by any observations which they can gather out of the apostles’ writings; but by being born of that Spirit whereof they were born, and by being formed in that womb wherein they were formed, by this means alone is the thing come to be known which they knew.”
In the section “Religion, Language, and the Self,” Keiser writes of religion, “In its ordinary meaning people are religious if someone espouses certain beliefs, belongs to a group, participates in rituals, endorses certain morals — all things that can be explicitly identified. For Penington religion is situated in a level of consciousness deeper than what can so easily be named.” In his own words, Penington says, “the main thing in religion is to keep the conscience pure to the Lord, to know the guide, to follow the guide, to receive from him the light whereby I am to walk,” and “Religion, true religion, is not a matter of opinion […] but a new creation and work of God in the heart of the creature, sowing the light and life of his Spirit there, and by it working man out of the darkness and death of sin […] into his life and blessedness.”
These are but a few samples of the thought of Isaac Penington. There is so much more in this book that deserves our full attention and that sparks our curiosity and desire to learn more about early and present Quaker thought.