The nature of the "Inner Light"

Looking over the writings of early Quakers, I'm struck by the sense in which they associated the Inner Light with the boring old personal conscience. It's not a link which seems to be made explicitly much these days.

We have inherited a number of strands from early Quaker thinking. One was definitely mystical or ecstatic and associated with heightened religious experience. Another was rational and reflective and associated with the ordinary everyday consciousness and the sense of right and wrong. This blend created the enduring quality of Quaker action, which seems motivated at once by plain common sense, and at the same time by some wild and primitive irrational impulse which not even the Quakers fully understood.

The blend is clear in Quaker thinking on conscience. It's reasonable that Quakers might have objected in conscience to tithes and hat honour and so forth, but the punishing lengths to which they went in bearing their testimony suggests something beyond the strictly rational, as they themselves were aware (hence William Penn in "No Cross, No Crown"). The early Quakers assumed that the one drive could never contradict the other, because they had the same source and drew people towards the same objective. What united the rational and irrational conscience (so to speak) was the sense that the individual was acting in response to the sacred, that is, in response to an external drive, which may have manifested deep within the individual consciousness but did not originate there.

This puts classical Quaker thinking somewhat at odds with the modern liberal consensus which most British Quakers probably otherwise inhabit. In secular, liberal terms, "conscience" seems to involve a personal decision or preference (with the secular, liberal freedom to follow it as of right). Hence, those acting under conscience, on things like peace tax, are often accused of acting self-indulgently, irresponsibly, etc. - as if, in fact, they were causing trouble by doing whatever they liked in the secular, liberal sense. Rightly or wrongly, this is not the Quaker understanding of conscience, according to which, those bearing their testimonies are doing what reality compels them directly to do.

But one internal problem for present-day Quakers may be that we have lost some sense of the identity of the boring old conscience with the ecstatic Inner Light. I speak from experience. I often find it hard to achieve any sense of what the Light requires, and when I do, I'm starting to wonder if it's because I'm relying too much on the mystical, ecstatic, heightened understanding of what the Light is. I'm waiting for the blinding headrush of compulsion to go off and do something extravagant. I'd probably die of fright if I actually felt any such compulsion, but half the time I wonder if the problem isn't more prosaic - I'm neglecting the more commonsense thread in Quaker understanding, which suggests that what the Light requires is simple, practical recognition of the ingrained sense of right and wrong which is so much part of my everyday consciousness that I can effectively take it for granted, but which I often fail to respond in my actual conduct. The Quaker understanding seems to be that the blinding, ecstatic sense of the sacred, and the humdrum demands of an everyday life conscientiously lived, are the same thing. The thing they both are is the Inner Light, and if you plug fully into the one, it brings the other along with it. And if not, not. Living in the Light may sometimes mean charging up a mountain to do a lot of shouting, but it also means being in the habit of confronting everyday situations with the question, "Well, what's REALLY the right thing to do?" and then doing it.

Phew. Tough call!!