Is Quaker 'worship' meditation?

 

The Quaker practice called “silent waiting” – the inner core of Quaker spirituality – the ground zero where the boundary between me-here-now and the so-much-more fold one into the other and join as one – the touching place of the divine – is the not unique in taking those whose practice it to the “still centre”, but is unique in how it approaches that place because of the tradition within which it is embedded. 

All  mystical paths lead to the still centre, regardless of the tradition they have grown up in: a place beyond words; a place of deep wordless knowing and communion; a state of union with the ground of being; with being itself.

For some the path of the via positiva is followed to arrive at the still centre. For some it is the via negativa that is followed. The via positiva using the wealth of symbols built up by their tradition; the via negative deconstructing, or doing away with, such symbols, as with the famous Zen saying “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him”.

Within some traditions such practices may be referred to as meditations with object or without object. Both end in the still centre: they differ only in where they start. With object focuses on an image, a story, a memory, a place or time, a koan, and works with that until it dissolves into the still centre. Without object simply rests with the breath, as in zarzen, until the still centre is found.

If there is focus on an object – a prayer, a passage from a book, an icon, an image (something much more common in the theistic faiths) then it is a contemplative pathway. If the focus is on the inward journey itself then it is meditative: mind watching mind until the pure light is found and rested in. Both are mystical paths - paths that go beyond where words can reach. 

Some traditions make finding the still centre the objective. Some identify it as the Buddha mind. Some as the point of deepest communion. Some traditions use finding the still centre as only a spiritual exercise, but not as their core practice. How it is integrated depends on the tradition that is followed, on the spiritual journey undertaken.

Taoists view still centre as the place where the practioneer can sense the movement of the winds of Tao: the place of being in harmony with the energy flowing all around: the eternal creative force of all things.

It was from a Taoist book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by his friend Richard Wilhelm, that C.G.Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of Analytic Psychology, discovered support for finding the still centre that his own investigations had suggested was so crucial to the process of individuation, as he termed the process of lifelong continuing maturation.

In 1934 a group of Geneva Quakers were introduced to Jung’s ideas by one of their number, Elined Kotschnig, who was training under one of Jung’s pupils to become an analyst. Later that year the whole group travelled to Zurich to meet Jung himself and his wife Emma, who was also a notable analyst. Emma later travelled to Geneva to to further introduce the group to Jung’s ideas. 

Jung believed that finding what he termed the Slebst, the wholeness of a person, was the way to personal growth, taking people away from their ego self to where a wider vision was to be found. The core of re-visioning was to be found by discovering the still centre. 

Jung placed the god-archetype there, as a latent potential, to be dressed in whatever guise worked for the individual. What mattered was its discovery and acceptance so it could do its work. It was not passive, but agent of change, of growth, of development, extending beyond the bounds of the ego self in to the collective, accumulated wisdom. The agent that Quakers referred to as “that of God within”, and Buddhists as “your inner Buddha nature”. It was a counterbalance to the ego, viewing the ego’s machinations from a deeper context. In time coming to guide action and word with greater wisdom.

Jung was notable in realising the importance of discovering and connecting with the spiritual dimension of life. He admired the Quaker practice of silent waiting, describing Quakers, in a letter to Irine Pickard, another of the Geneva Quaker-Jungian group, as being “the only tue Christian’s” because of it.

P W Martin, one of the core members of the Geneva-Jungian group, in his book about their discovery of Jung’s ideas and their application to their lives, Experiment in Depth (1955), chose the more nuanced translation of Jung’s Slebst as “the deep centre”. Yet another way of speaking of the still centre.

Quakers have used the still centre as a wellspring from which deeper understanding comes. It seasons and tempers them. Their collective approach is unusual, if not unique. It stems from the practice of the Seekers who George Fox stumbled upon. A practice inspired by the words of the Bible “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20, KJV)

The Quaker practice, amongst those who follow the tradition of unprogrammed meetings, typically has what has been described as a U-shape. An inward phase starting with “centring down” that leads towards the sill centre, followed by a journey outwards that may lead to ministry as a result of what has been encountered. Joycelyn Dawes in her book Discernment and Inner Knowing, making decisions for the best (2017), has elucidated this U-shaped as used among Quakers.

During Meeting for Worship there is openness as what may arise from the still centre. Similar, but more focused, is Worship Sharing. Both are inward journeys.

During Meeting for Business the inward phase carries the question of what needs to be discerned into the stillness and silence with each person alert to what the others are inspired to say. This parallel seeking often leads to one Friend saying of another’s words “My Friend speaks my mind”. 

Meetings for Clearness and Threshing Meetings follow the same U-shaped pattern, and are much valued tools of discernment amongst Quakers.

It is surrendering the ego mind to what the early Quakers called “that of God within”. Those of a more theistic bent still do; but the via positiva was always an easier path, having been built by centuries of tradition and being built into the primary texts of all the “religions of the book”. The ontological objections fired at the theistic edifice on which those traditions and texts were built seem to so many modern minds unanswerable; yet the experience of the still centre remains as tangible to them as to the theistic. It is beyond capture by words: it is a state of being.

The non-theistic traditions of the East are more sympathetic to the via negativa, which accounts for some of the attraction of Zen in particular to the Western mind: a way of a encountering the still centre without the ontological objections. Yet symbolically, as Jung realised, there is so much spiritual wealth to be had in the traditions of the West as they are more accessible to the Western mind: they are integral to the culture. Spiritual maturity came, he thought, with the realisation of the symbolic as a consequence of honestly encountering the still centre. It is there independently of all theologies as an undeniable fact of human life, of the the human mind, of the psyche.

The theistic non-theistic divide is an illusion in the light of the existence of the still centre deep in the mind. It is to be had for all, regardless how it is dressed. The via positive and via negativa just preferred paths depending on personality, inclination and history.. 

The Experiment with Light has carried these U-shaped Quaker practices beyond Quaker circles. It shares much common ground with Eugene T Gendlin’s Focusing (1978) and conforms with what the modern Tibetan Dzogchen pacticioneer, Dusana Dorjee, says in her book Neuroscience and Psychology of Meditation in Everyday Life: Searching for the Essence of Mind (2018), about finding the still centre.

Is Quaker “worship” meditation? In the sense that it involves inwardness and inward attention seeking connection beyond ruminative thought - a letting go of the egoistic stream of consciousness - to find the still centre and what arises there, then, yes it is a form of group or collective meditation.

But then that is only a matter of framing. It could equally be called payer, or contemplation. Terms more at  home in the Western traditions. Which ever, the Quaker collective approach is a unique, at least within Western spirituality.

 

The via positiva & the via negativa

Jung stressed the importance of discovering and exploring our potential for spiritual alignment in order for people to mature throughout life. Of the four main mechanisms of the mind he identified - inflation, projection, suppression/repression, and integration - only one, integration, was entirely healthy, and a great aid to maturation. The two spiritual pathways of the via positiva and the via negativa are classic examples of integration, but they each carry the weight of their histories.

The western mind has been saturated with the result of the "dispute” between Parmenides of  Elea and Heraclitus of Ephesus . Both were born in the 6th century BCE, and died in the 5th century BCE, as far as we know.

Heraclitus described the world as being in constant flux: “you cannot step into the same river twice.”

Parmenides divided the world in two. The apparent world of flux behind which was a more stable world. He did so by distinguishing between substance and essence; on the surface substance seems to flow, but beneath lies a stable word of essence. 

The Greco-Roman philosophers  of classical period, especially the two giants – Plato and Aristotle – followed Parmenides in building their respective philosophies on the distinction between substance and essence.  Substance is subject to change. Essence is unchanging. Between them they established Parmenidian thought as dominant.

As the classical world declined and morphed into the age of monotheistic religions, splitting the Mediterranean world into two – North and West Christian, South and East Islamic – the substance essence distinction became embedded in their respective theologies. God being the essence. The apparent world of flux – of death and decay, of temporality and suffering –  being willed and held in place by the deity, by whatever name known. 

And so the dominant idea of something permanent behind reality remained in the western mind  - Classical, Christian, Muslim, Judaic - for the next two and a half thousand years.

Growing from an entirely different root stock, the Eastern mind dispensed with the the notion of unchanging essences, instead embracing transience as fundamental, especially in Buddhism and Taoism: we live in a world of illusion. All we can do is watch it flow and sail with its winds, or detach ourselves into equanimity, knowing the circus of illusion to be just that. Learning that to see is to see from different perspectives at the same time, none more real, or less real, than the other.

By contrast the monotheistic religions projected their God on to the shelf provided by the notion of essence; safe, secure and beyond human knowing: omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. The puppet master behind the scenes making things happen, if, as, and when he chooses.

Nineteenth century imperialism dismissed the Eastern mind as nebulous. It had nothing to compare to the fruits of enlightenment rationalism, or of the scientific revolution. Like it or not, post Newton, we seemed to live in an entirely deterministic world, perhaps built by a divine clock maker who had set it going. A world capable in time of being entirely described and known.

Then came the twentieth century. The ultimate triumph of rationalism, of the knowability of everything, given time, effort, precision, and  ingenuity, was expected. The final working of the Newtonian universe. That was what David  Hilbert - the renowned mathematician - and the Positivists envisioned. It was the consensus amongst the educated. 

It was not to be.

The limits of the determinable had been reached. It was proving to be a subset of a wider universe in which chaos and order danced together, the one emerging from the other as stability decays into instability, and new stabilities emerge out of chaos.

Quantum uncertainty puts an end to (pre)determinism. Even a divine intelligence could not know what the outcome will be: God defeated by schrodinger’s cat in a box! 

Events now only becoming determined from the point of interaction between the known and the random, not before. Events are to be described by a probability matrix in advance, anyone of which possibles can emerge at the branching point, as the others collapse. 

Quantum theory was not the only limiting factor restricting what could be determined. It came from within mathematics itself. Godel’s incompleteness theorem marking the end of the remorseless march of rationalism in maths.

Turing‘s halting problem marking another limit to the knowable: even a perfect machine cannot predict it’s own results.

And finally the emergence of chaos theory itself, revealing a universe changing between stable and chaotic states.

It looks as if Heraclitus was right after all. 

Welcome to the world of Schrödinger’s cat and the butterfly effect. A world where the distinction between substance and essence does not exist. Where events are forged by interaction at the time, and each forms an expanding cone of possibilities of how it might develop, and decay.

The two and a  half thousand year reign of essence hidden behind substance, the safe hiding place for Gods, gone in a quantum flash.

The via positiva uses symbols, drawn from rich traditions of western religious iconography, as stepping stones to awaken a sense of the transcendent God; but his hiding place has gone! His, their, her, omnipotents, omnipresence and omniscience terminated. The god loci made possible by Parmenides and so fully developed by all three of the western monotheisms may resonate psychologically, maybe the path needed by some in order to open their spirituality, but it no longer allows for a higher power creating and manipulating behind the scenes.

The via negativa, by contrast, is more amenable to life lived in a post mechanically determined universe. It is more open to the teachings of the East. By deconstructing the symbolism of the monotheistic religions it can become a vehicle for spiritual growth and maturity, incorporating what is good from those traditions with what is discovered anew - the process of continuing revelation - making it a dynamic path not a static path. What those on the path of the via negative are likely to encounter is the immanence of the divine embedded in the hear and now, as in George Fox’s advice to “walk cheerfully over the world answering to that of God in every one.”

An enigma: are these the Pickard's children?

 

In the lounge in Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva hang two paintings by the same artist. They seem to date from the 1930s and may well be part of the furnishings of the original Quaker Centre near the Cathedral. They then would have been moved to its second home in the Palais Wilson, before being stored during the war, and eventually being returned to the Quakers when QUNO was opened. The other painting is of No 5 Place de la Taconnerie, the first home of the Quaker International Centre, which was the ground floor of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute.

The Pickards had three daughters, Jo (b.1924), Alison (b.1926) and Erica (b.1928). The younger two were born in Geneva.  All three went to the International School and were fond of their art teacher. Alison, my informant and the keeper of her mother's archive, said she did not understand how they could have afforded such special education. 

The International School was the first of its kind in the word. It operated on a bilingual basis, teaching equally in English and French. It had a very progressive curriculum being inspired and advised by the  Rousseau Institute (also known as Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute or Academy of Geneva) (French: Académie De Genève or Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau), and then by the Internation Bureau of Education.

In 1912, Édouard Claparède (1873-1940) created an institute to turn educational theory into a science. This new institution was given the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom Claparède attributed the "Copernican reversal" of putting the child, rather than the teacher, at the centre of the educational process.

The founder of the Institute appointed as director Pierre Bovet (1878–1965), whom he considered to be both a philosophical and rigorously scientific person. Between 1921 and 1925, Jean Piaget (1896–1980) took over the reins, soon conferring on Genevan experimental psychology its far-reaching renown. It was to Piaget's dismay, however, that his theoretical work was not as successful. 

In his eulogy at Claparède’s funeral, Bovet highlighted his friend’s profound attachment for Geneva and the broad international influence rapidly attained by the institute he had created; his capacity, in short, to be at the same time of a local land and of the greater world.


Both Claparède and Bovet became Quakers. 

Unfortunately there is no indication on the painting of who the three girls are, but they are the right ages and appearance to be the Pickards. 




 

 

The Stages of Belief

Researching and writing a book is itself a transformative process. The writer cannot help being changed, especially where the material is so much about values, attitudes and belief. Each new document examined, each new source followed up, each part of the history of the subjects that is uncovered, challenges whatever pre-existing frame of belief the writer has. The writer is confronted over and over, especially where the subjects are so heavily engaged with matters of the mind and of fundamental identity. There is a need to reassess so much because of what is being uncovered. Being unaffected by such studies would be difficult.

Irene and Bertram Pickard, Elined Kotschnig, PW & Marjory Martin were all, to borrow the title of one of Carl Jung's books, examples of Modern Man in Search of a Soul. As I encountered more and more to do with their intellectual and spiritual journey I too was taken on that journey. First through the active phase of their lives as they established who they were and what their tasks in life were. Then through the questioning and doubting phase of their lives and on to the stages of struggle, discovery, and transformation.

All five of the subjects were well educated, from comfortable backgrounds, English and had grown up during that period the French so delightfully call La Belle Époque, only to have that idyll smashed by the horrors of the First World War – both hugely formative experiences. It was almost a case of Paradise Lost revisited, with La Belle Epoque playing the part of heaven and the First World War being the Fall into Hell; thus making the post-war tasks they were engaged part of the struggle to regain the lost paradise.

La Belle Époque was full of engendered certainties about the almost heroic advances of science, Empire and reason. It was a golden age of Europe, shattered in the bloodbath of the First World war; a war fought, as far as many could see, for little rhyme or reason. It fell to the lot of all five of my subjects to be tasked with picking up the pieces of that broken world in their own ways. They all became involved with peace and reconstruction work in the aftermath and were all involved in trying to construct a more durable world order, which is why they were in Geneva – a place that was the centre of such efforts because it was where the newly formed League of Nations was.

They were also part of the tiny circle of Quakers in that city. Bertram had grown up in a well-to- do Quaker family. Irene had come into Quaker circles through her secretarial work, first as a 'temp' at Woodbrooke, the Quaker College, and then as Rendel Harris' live-in secretary – Rendel Harris was the first Director of Studies at Woodbrooke. How the others came to be Quakers is less clear, although it was normal in those times to follow in the religion of your family. Growing up Quaker still set you apart from much of the world, due to an adherence to a certain plainness and an almost universal abstinence from alcohol, and a somewhat separate framework of belief and practice which all led to making socialising with others from Quaker backgrounds simpler. Then there was the Sunday problem: what to do with a day when attending some form of religious grouping was both normal and expected? Many from Quaker backgrounds found, as they do these days, the more ritualised forms of religion challenging, and Quaker circles then, as now, were attracting those alienated from the mainstreams of Christian observance: its stripped down simplicity speaking of an honesty of belief. Being seekers after the truth rather than knowers is more natural in an age of intellectual curiosity, which the twentieth century was proving to be, and Quakers have always been seekers – its lack of creed encouraging exploration over conformity. The failure of the weltanschauung of the Belle Epoque made having an open and questioning attitude to the fundamental questions of life more intellectually honest than the comfort of conforming to the inherited patterns of belief that had been shown to be so wanting.

In many ways the philosopher who best set the tone of the age was Henri-Louis Bergson, winner of the 1927 Nobel prize for Literature “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.¹” He was perhaps best known for his 1907 book Creative Evolution in which he stressed the inadequacy of human reason. This was something that spoke loudly to the shattering of an apparently rationally organised world in 1914 and the subsequent descent into carnage. For Bergson concepts cannot capture the world since they form only an abstract net thrown over things. Only intuition can really engage, that is visceral experience itself. Neither Rationalism, especially in its iteration as Idealism, perhaps best exemplified by Hegel and his followers, nor Empiricism, iterated as Positivism, exemplified by Auguste Comte and his heirs, adequately describe our lived experience. Both are abstractions taking us away from that experience. The empiricist ultimately resolves reality into no more than a bundle of bits, reducing it to the measurable; the rationalist keeps adding more and more properties to the substance that underlies things until it becomes infinitely saturated and is equivalent to God or the universe. Intuition alone gives you the taste of reality, for it is engagement with the whole being, not simply relating with the more superficial and supposedly rational aspect of our minds.

Relating at an embodied and deep level rather than at the level of intellectual abstraction was also the theme of another thinker of the age, the theologian Rudolf Otto, who coined the term 'numinous' in his 1917 book Das Heilige, translated as The idea of the Holy. Numinosity describes the "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self" as he explained:

The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane,” non-religious mood of everyday experience. [...] It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures. [Rudlolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 1922]

Numinosity is the fundamental experience which is the ground state of relating religiously to the world: it is spiritual experience itself. It is overwhelming experience that transports out of the mundane and illuminates the being. It is capable of inducing transformation. It may come out of the blue, or it may be sought by conscious effort and diligent practice. It may be profound and earth shattering – the burning bush, Paul's being blinded on the road to Damascus, the Buddha's realisation of enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree – or subtle and gentle – a 'knowing beyond words' in a moment. It is intuitive – felt – rather than rational. It is knowing in the bones, in the whole being.

This relates to one of the three aspects of religion identified by Friedrich von Hügel, the mystical/experiential element of his typology which he laid out in The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends (1908). As a modernist he realised that the Catholic Church – and by implication all religions – could no longer sidestep the questions raised by the discoveries of science and scholarship. The other two elements, the historical/institutional and the intellectual/speculative, were, he suggested, derivatives; the mainspring, undisciplined and potentially chaotic as it was, was the mystical/experiential element.

The perception of mysticism as being at the core of spirituality was shared by Evelyn Underhill, who in her 1911 book Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness had traced the aetiology and history of mysticism. She suggested that spiritual journeys are not voluntary, but are triggered either by yearning – unmet feelings of need – or by experiences, and passed through five stages:

• awakening

• purgation of self

• illumination

• the dark night of the soul

• the unitive life

Each stage being a struggle and each bringing an alteration in the way of being; but also each possessing the possibility of being stuck at that stage. She suggested that the final stage of mysticism is as a “most active doer”: doubt has finally subsided and the mystic is empowered by their achieved state of being at one.

These four thinkers seem to have been influential in informing the thinking of my subjects during the 1920s and into the 1930s. They are referred to frequently in the discussion papers left by the study group they formed. The topic they decided to study during the winter of 1933-4 was Mysticism, as Irene Pickard tells us:

A series on Mysticism, in the course of which Elined Kotschnig gave a paper on "Jung as a modern Mystic" laid hold of the group, and for three years in the 1930s some twenty people formed the most intensive and far-reaching study group I have known. At one point three car loads of Friends went to Zurich for a night to meet Dr. Carl Jung . The talk with him in his garden by the lake was a memorable occasion. We felt that Quaker experience was strengthened and enlightened by this exercise in Jungian psychology. The Martins, the Stacks, the Kotschnigs the Gerigs and others were partners in the group, also the Friises and these later made a living contribution to Quaker thought and practice. P.W. Martin's book "Experiment in Depth" published in England after the war crystallises his insights arising from this beginning.²

In 2014, because of my studies of the papers left by Irene, I was awarded an Eva Koch scholarship at Woodbrooke. During my time there I took part in a course called Dreaming Jung which gave me a handle on Jung's way of dream interpretation. One of the presenters was Nancy Krieger, a Jungian analyst, to whom Irene's daughter, Alison Bush, had previously introduced me. It was Alison who had invited me to look at her mother's papers, triggering my research.

One evening during that weekend Nancy and I slipped off into the dining room at Woodbrooke so we could talk about some of the problems I was having understanding Jung. I was truly saturated by my studies at that point, so much so that I was not really seeing the wood for the trees, as the saying goes. We were joined by Professor Zbigniew Kazmierczak, who was also a Eva Koch scholar that year. It was one of the most intense discussions about the psychological path of spiritual discovery I have ever known.

Nancy suggested that the best way to understand Jung's theories about spiritual development was to understand the transformations of the images of 'God' both historically and as stages in each individual's psychological progress. That transformation could be described thus:

1. The pantheistic god: god as everything: god is the tree, etc.


2. The panoptic god: god is spirits in things: god is in the tree, but is not the tree itself.


3. The transcendent god: god is above everything looking down and controlling: god the lawgiver, the all-seeing, etc: the god of judgement.


4. The death of god: there is no god: the bubble of the illusion is burst: an entirely secular world: a godless, god-free world.

5. The projected god: god as the spiritual relationship we feel with the tree, etc: god as our participation mystique with the universe and the realisation of that mystique as a felt/experienced reality.

As I was to discover as I delved deeper into Jung, he felt that the numinous experiences we have emanate from the activation of what he called the God-archetype that lies deep in our minds, specifically in the unconscious . What we shape as our image of God – as unique and personal as that will be – is a projection from the archetype. It will be shaped by our experience and our culture. He says of the relationship:

The religious person enjoys a great advantage when it comes to answering the crucial question that hangs over our time like a threat: he has a clear idea of the way his subjective existence is grounded in relation to “God”. I put the word “God” in quotes in order to indicate that we are dealing with an anthropomorphic idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of such experiences, no matter whether he believes in God or not. … That religious experiences exist no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these experiences. The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of the experience. Anyone who has it is seized by it and therefore is not in a position to indulge in fruitless metaphysical or epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs. [Carl Jung, p.64: The Undiscovered Self: Rutledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1958.]

The realisation that our spirituality is generated from within is to realise that it is a projection, and that its source within – an inward light – leads us to open to the world in a different mode of relationship. George Fox described such an experience thus;

Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. [Quaker Faith & Practice 26.03]

Jung was aware that he was dealing with discovery of the spiritual as experience by the Western mind, which is cultured to attach such experiences to a notion of “God”. He was also aware that the Eastern mind was less inclined to shape images that way. For instance, the experience of Kensho in Zen is a numinous experience, a lightning strike of enlightenment, but is not attributed to discovering “God”. It is, however, the trigger for cultivating the sate of Satori – of being enlightened – which is to allow that inner light to illuminate your life, much like George Fox's experience.

Jung was aware that whatever we say about “God', or gods come to that, is always said about our personal experience, as he explained in Answer to Job:

That is why whenever we speak of religious content we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object. If, for instance, we say “God” we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty — unless it be by faith — whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. After all we can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine him as an eternally unmoved unchangeable essence. Our reason is sure of one thing: that it manipulates images and ideas which are dependent on human imagination and its temporal and local conditions, and which have therefore changed innumerable times in the course of their long history. [Carl Jung, Answer to Job]

The word 'unspeakable' does not carry quite the same connotations in German as it does in English, it is far more literal – that which cannot be spoken about – much akin to the Judaic tradition which avoids directly naming God. It also suggests the Taoist understanding which insists that any attempt at objectifying is to miss the essence:

The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.³

The subjects of my researches underwent a spiritual journey from the shattered belief in the “God” of their childhood to a rediscovery of spirituality through acquaintance with Jung. In 1938 the Geneva Quakers held a winter season on Belief, looking honestly at what each believed. Of the eighteen participants only one had what might be termed a classical belief in an external “God”. All the others had, by one route or another, arrived at something like the last stage of belief outlined by Jung: “God” felt as relationship not as object, and for several of them manifest most clearly in the people they met as love, as life, and as an inward light. They were indeed examples of Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

Although I had entered the Quaker world not long before being invited to study Irene Pickard's remarkable archive – a refugee from a mix of Buddhism and Atheism – I have to confess to not having “belief”. I still don't. However, my unbelief has been transformed, coming to agree with Jung when he explained:

When people say that they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don’t need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.⁴

What you can really know is what you experience, but that experience now includes for me the richness of spiritual openness and encounter.

1Nobel citation

2Pickard, Irene: The Geneva Meeting 1920-40: mss in the private collection of Alison Bush.

3Ch.1: The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu: translated by Stephen Mitchell.

4Jung's reply to Philip's question about whether all we are limited to is knowledge of the God-archetype: p.16: Philp, H L: Jung and the Problem of Evil: Rockliff, London, 1958

The power and role of symbols in Jung's view of the psychological function of religion

Symbols are evocative, that is the point of them. They are not passive. They are not signs. Signs simply stand for something or point at something. They are passive – extremely useful – but passive. In 2+2 the + does its job. The → points in the direction to go and is therefore helpful. The ← turns us around and sends us the other way. Logicians, mathematicians, graphic designers and sign makers, amongst others, deal in signs all day long, and make and invent new ones whenever they feel a need. Twenty-first century people live in a sign rich world, especially since the arrival in our lives of smart phones: the icon is king!

Symbols go deeper, at least in the Jungian sense. On the surface they are signs, but they have the power to evoke deeper responses. In fact, extremely deep responses. For Jung they reached beyond the surface intelligence into the deep mind, into the parts we are not distinctly conscious of: they engage us fully as human beings, passing way beyond the surface shell of intellect.

Jung's work with his patients had led him to realise that much of what drives and shapes us, much of what makes us what we are, is rooted so deeply in us that we are not fully conscious of where it comes from. It is like the wind that fills the sails that push boats along: we feel its force and are driven forward by it, sometimes to destruction on the rocks, sometimes into safe harbour; and, just like the wind, it can be variable, sometimes little more than a breeze, sometimes tearing at us with hurricane force. Think of people who have lost their temper, who are in rage, think how they are hurled along by their passion; and, just like the wind, those psychic forces can veer about, driving us first one way, then another, or even drop so that we wallow in the doldrums of listlessness: but where does the wind start? For sailors it is always from beyond the horizon: just so with the forces that drive us from within.

Symbols operate on the deep parts of the mind where those drives originate. Their meaning is not formal, not reducible, not containable within a matrix of definitions and words. They bypass the purely intellectual. That is why they are encountered over and over again in shapeshifting forms, capable of recurring in altered guises at different times and in different cultures; like a woman who may appear in different outfits each day, but still be recognisably herself.

Jung gave a name to those patterns underlying the swirling changes of outer appearance. He called them archetypes. He held that such archetypal symbols invoke deep responses because the deep mind is predisposed to respond to those patterns. The patterns of the archetypes lie in the deep mind – the unconscious as he termed it – like templates waiting to find configurations of the world that fit their form – they slide naturally over them imbuing them with an aura of meaningfulness.

Art abounds with archetypes because they speak to us. There are galleries full of Virgin and Childs, Crucifixions, Empty Tombs, Buddhas, or many-armed Hindu gods, for that matter. Venuses rise from seas and angry deities belch forth smoke from their noses. Art and religion have walked hand in hand through history. Even Islam has evolved its own highly symbolic abstract and hypnotic pattern to invoke deep responses in its holy spaces, wonderfully woven words into poetry, and created soundscapes from the muezzin's calls to prayer from high minarets, or in its devotional music and song.

For Jung, religions deal in archetypes. They operate on us symbolically. They create a cloud of symbolic meaning that wraps around us, invoking responses at the deepest level. They are the mechanisms by which latent potentials of the archetypes within us engage with our acts of living. They turn spaces from being simply spaces into sacred spaces. They turn actions from being simply actions into acts of worship, or blessing, or sanctification, or contrition, or penance, or devotion – lifting actions out of the mundane into the sacred. Consider the devotion showered on icons in Eastern Orthodox worship. Consider the parading of statues of the Virgin on Catholic feast days and the devotion shown towards them. Consider the ever present statues of Buddha in meditation halls, or the hanging of garlands around statues of Hindu gods.

Those clouds of meaning are shaped by religions into narratives about how the world is. Religious narratives deal mythologically with the world– narratives that do not deal with the mundane world as such, but with the sanctification of the world through weaving mythological meaning through it. They provide structures for making the world comprehensible, manageable, and even tractable. Importantly, they make it meaningful, emotionally, spiritually and evocatively – they speak to the vitality of being, not to the inert fact of being.

Jung regarded mythologies as symbolic encodings of the deep forces at play within the human unconscious, not as passive fantasies. They allow us to symbolically project our inward struggles as we mature through life. Engaging with them helps us to develop: they are midwives of the soul.

Unlike the narratives of fiction, or those spun in film or theatre, the adherents of religions are themselves woven into the plots. They are part of the cosmic drama. They must play their part, fulfil their role. They become part of a living myth. Living out their part imbues their lives with meaning – with mythological meaning. Jung liked quoting the Pueblo indians who felt it was their job to help the sun rise each day – that was their spiritual function – without which the world would die, because what would rise would not be the real sun, and the world would be bathed in a cruel light that made life wither instead of thriving.

Jung noted that many of his clients were floundering in a state of anomie because intellectually they had detached from the mythological meanings inherited from their culture. They had used their intellect to detach from the evocative power of those symbols, but in doing so had anaesthetised many of the archetypes within – hence their malaise.

Jung thought that two of the archetypes, the anima and animus, were not in danger of suffering this fate, because men and women would still meet, and, like it or not, overwhelming attraction would happen. The passion each feeling for the other coming from far deeper than anything intellectual – flowing from those two archetypes. That is why he thought they were entryways into discovering the hidden world of the unconscious: they would be there driving emotions and experiences, one way or another, for almost everyone, in their dreams and fantasies, if not project out into the world over whoever sparked their sexual interest.

However, what he termed the God-archetype, the Self, or deep-centre – that archetype which turns the world sacred and special, and which pours meaning over the 'believer' like a libation – that archetype was all too often anaesthetised by modernity. The title of his first book on the subject, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, arose from his observations of the floundering of so many of his clients who has lost contact with their deep centre, with the God-archetype, with, as Quakers would put it, that of God within.

He suggested that the mythology of Christianity no longer acted symbolically on the deep minds of many European people, which is why he suspected that we were coming to the end of the Christian Era in the West. Its mythology and symbols no longer spoke to people's condition; but this did not mean that people could dispense with a religious framework in which to live. Far from it. The archetype would lurk inside, waiting to be invoked, to be triggered, that sense of need, insatiable and prowling like a hungry wolf, disturbing dreams, disturbing behaviour, expressing itself destructively. That was modern man's search for a soul, as in the title. The zeal of the iconoclastic atheist often being testimony to such pathology, along with a restless experimentation with exotic religions – a searching for a cure – on the part of others.

Sometimes, he noted, substitute mythologies were found – those of nationalism, communism, or fascism – without their adherents realising that those too were just as mythological as any traditional religion. They served much the same function of imbuing with meaning and justifying, or even compelling action. They invoked the God-archetype, they engaged with the deep-centre of a person's being; and, as he had seen all to clearly, they laid waste to the world in consequence. Two World Wars made it only too clear that they brought the dark side of the human potential to the fore.

Jung said that the greatest danger mankind faced was from within; all too apparent in the age of assured mutual annihilation threatened by the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, as it had been in the devastating World Wars. He suggested that by recognising the importance of integrating the God-archetype into our lives such fate could be avoided. That integration should balance the constructive with the destructive, recognising the dark-side of human potentials by symbolically canalising them and directing their energies into more creative expressions than war, human sacrifice or other bloodshed. Likewise he felt that the feminine should be given equal rein with the masculine at the symbolic level. He sensed that the human psyche was seeking a more evolved and balanced expression which would be embedded in whatever mythology came to replace the existing forms of Christianity for Western Man.

Christianity might evolve by transformation of what was there into new forms – a process of continued revelation – such as the Quakers' tradition suggests – an openness to accepting new ways and interpretations; but equally, Christianity might simply be replaced, just as it had itself replaced Paganism in the Roman Empire, or as Islam had replaced its predecessors. The attraction to Buddhism or modern Paganism on the part of many people in the West would seem to support Jung's contention: the archetype will attach itself to whatever symbols invoke the deepest response. That is the nature of spiritual conversion. It may come in a blinding flash – as with St Paul on the Road to Damascus, or it may come by slow degrees of opening to new 'truth', but in either case, the conversion is very real: the old symbols become void and the new become charged because they better fit the archetypes.

For many Quakers influenced by Jung's thinking the perpetual vexed question of the divinity of Christ appeared to have a solution. Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus of the Testaments, was a symbol capable of invoking a response from the deep archetype nearest the centre of their being for some people. The fact of the life and teaching of Jesus were fairly simple, even if the process of sifting and retelling had turned the man into a legendary figure. The projection of the archetype over the legendary figure deified him, and that was then encapsulated in the man-god figure encountered in the Gospels, especially in John. That evangelical narrative of the Saviour spoke deeply to some. For those the image woven in the narrative would trigger that strong response and would lodge in their hearts. This was Christ as powerful symbol, the key that unlocked their soul, but not for all.

For others the divinity lay not in the person but in the message. The message was the symbol that triggered a response. That was the key that unlocked the soul. It was the key to the 'Kingdom of Heaven' on earth as a way of living. It was a kingdom not of the hereafter but of the here and now; not of a paradise, but of a work in progress, built step by step, life by life. It was a living realisation of the word.

Quakers have always been ambivalent about the divinity of Jesus, and about the trinitarian vision of the God-head. Their accusers have placed them, along with the Unitarians, as being in denial of the essential mystery – the core mythology of Christianity – the belief in the dual nature of the central person of the drama, Jesus of Nazareth, as both fully human, and, at the same time, being the fully divine incarnation of the Christ.

There has been an uneasy tension in Quakerism ever since its inception due to that ambivalence. This ambivalence arises because belief is not the core of Quakerism, but the practice of silent waiting is; that state of communion that bypasses belief, focusing on experience instead: in George Fox's words – Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?

That tension in Quakerism, has been sometimes fruitful, but has sometimes produced rifts, especially in North America: a tension between the more evangelical, who take the fact of Jesus as Christ – as God incarnate – as their cornerstone, who engage with the biblical narrative as truth, including the certainty of an afterlife in which they will be judged; and those who view Jesus as a teacher and guide, as the one who opens the door to the divine, as a model and instructor, who provides the code for living rightfully – those who take the teachings as a guide to constructing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, with their sense of the divine message written in each heart as lodestone.

George Keith (1638 – 1716), who worked and travelled with both George Fox and William Penn for many years, was aware of that tension, and of the ambivalence over the 'tenets' of the faith. He eventually left the Quakers because he had come to see them as being Deists, not Christians, who were certain of their sense of “that of God-within” and of the Kingdom of Heaven they were to build in the here and now, but indifferent to the message of salvation in the death, resurrection and ascension of the transfigured being of Jesus of Nazareth revealed as the Christ.

Jung's work on the inner mechanisms of spirituality, central to which was his postulation of the archetype at the deep centre of being – the Selbst (Self) – helped make sense of the ways in which people responded to the symbols and mythology of Christianity or other religions. It accounted for the evocative nature of such symbols and mythologies, and also for how alienation from them can occur. It also provided an account of how religions evolve and mutate, or wither and die, depending on how well they engage the inner complexes – how satisfying they are to the inner psychological needs of people. Essentially, he saw religions as external mythological projections of the sufferings of the soul, but as also containing mechanisms for the relief of that suffering by aiding lifelong maturation.

Reflections on Jung

Jung's followed Freud in dividing the “psyche”, or mind, into a smaller conscious part and a much larger sub-conscious, or unconscious, which acts as a reservoir storing our experiences and our drives. In his eyes, ignoring the part played in our lives by our unconscious was dangerous. We may imagine ourselves the masters of our lives, but that is an illusion – a necessary illusion – but an illusion nonetheless. All goes well until our conscious self is faced with the consequences stemming from that vast hidden reservoir written into our behaviour – consequences that we may not feel comfortable about accepting as having originated from within, but consequences they are.

For Jung the unconscious was far from passive. It was, as neural scanning now reveals, highly, but silently, active. We may not be aware of what is happening in the deeper parts of our mind, but we certainly suffer from the consequences. Jung believed that we get glimpses of what is happening in our dreams, in our daydreams, in our fantasies, in our make-believe, in our play, and in what he called “active imagination”; and if we look carefully we can also get glimpses in the reflections we get back from the world around us; just as when you look through the glass of a shop window you not only see what is on display, but superimposed over it an image of yourself looking at what is on display. Careful examination of how we see the world, how we feel and respond to events, can give us insights into the workings of our unconscious self – into that deep, silent part of our mind.

At the boundary between our deep mind and our consciousness we can be aware of thoughts and feelings forming and emerging. Once they are in play we own them, we live them, they form our stream of consciousness. We are, or so we believe, in control of them. For Jung there were four different ways in which we can process the emerging content of our unconscious: inflation, suppression, projection and integration. Only one, integration, is entirely healthy, the others can all be pathological to a degree.

Inflation and suppression are interesting, and we can observe them at work in our lives, but it is in many ways projection that is the most interesting for it is seen in the way we understand the world around us – in how we believe the world to be. It colours that world for good or ill. It projects content on to it, and merges those projections with what there is. We largely do not realise that how we see the world to be is a mix of what is there, and what we have projected. They merge, and we assume that what we see as being there is what is there; that the reality we experience is totally separate and independent from us, quite free of any contamination by ourselves, unconscious or not. Unless we become deliberately conscious of our projections, just as we can become conscious of our reflection in the shop window superimposed over the images of the models in the window, we can mistakenly assume that we have a pristine and undistorted view of how the world is. For Jung disentangling our projection from our experience of the world was an important step in becoming a mature individual – part of the process he called “individuation” – of attaining the wholeness in which we have successfully integrated the content of our unconscious rather than being its unwitting victim.

For Jung one of the most powerful, and in many ways most troubling projections, was what he termed “the god image”. He was not interested in the ontological question of whether there was an objective existence over which that image might be projected – that was beyond human knowing. He even said it was “unspeakable” – that is not capable of being spoken about. He was very dismissive of those who sought to substitute “belief” in place of knowing, reminding his patients that – “If you know then you do not need to believe. If you believe then you are not sure you know” – stressing that what they should attend to is not belief but their actual experiences, noting that some of those are especially powerful and profound – “numinous” to use his preferred term.

Jung thought that the god-image would project itself over whatever was culturally available. In some cultures that was a powerful monotheism. In others it took polytheistic forms. Yet others were hybrids, such as trinitarian Christianity, particularly where the cult of Marianism was included, or the worship of bodhisattvas in Mahayana Buddhism.

He felt that the externalisation of spiritual experience by worshipping the projection was a failure of integration and was capable of leading “believers” into some very dark places. Consider the zeal shown by witch hunters, heretic hunters, or those who would murder blasphemers or apostates. Righteous zeal has a terrible force. A force that is driven by inflating that sense of righteousness that is itself the result of attempting to align with the demands of a deity – demands which are collective projections of the unconscious of the community of believers. Pathology for Jung was not purely an individual phenomena, but could be collective and deeply infectious. Like it or not we are all vulnerable to the pull of the “participation mystique” – a mechanism of our deep minds which gives us that powerful sense of belonging which makes us align with other people. So much of who we think we are – our identity – is expressed through belonging; and that sense of belonging – of being bound together by the participation mystique – can lead us into forms of collective madness, as genocides demonstrate only too clearly.

Jung came to see how, in the absence of a religious icon of belief on which to project the god-image, substitutes would more than suffice, be they the Nation, the Great Leader, or the Cause. Jung had witnessed all these in the devotion shown to Hitler and Destiny of the German Nation, or to the Greater Good of the People under Stalin's Communism. He had seen how a peoples' participation mystique could be engaged to terrible effect through their feeling of being bound to the object of their projected god-image; their devotion finding fulfilment in obedience.

Conversely to projection, suppression would detach the individual from an essential part of their personality – their spiritual lives – leading them into the wasteland of anomie. Often he observed patients attempting to cover the suppression by becoming ever more rational – the typical style of the iconoclastic atheist. He found that the more in denial they were, the more iconoclastic they became. Reconnecting his patients with their spiritual lives, he felt, was the key part of his method. He preferred to let his patients discover that dimension, rather than overtly directing them to it. To be of any therapeutic use it had to be an organic process led from within.

Jung was also aware that projection of the god-image gave power to those who orchestrated the public performance of religion, which was an abdication of responsibility by surrender on the part of the “believer”. He insisted that his patients take back control – that spirituality was their personal experience not something to be directed externally, and they must take responsibility for it.

Instead of becoming directed by the supposed commands of the object of their projection, or more often by the commands issued by the custodians of that object – often called the teachings of the church – he encouraged his patients to examine the source of their projection, which he termed the “god-archetype”, and through engagement with it to integrate what it inspired into their lives. This he felt would need to be done by opening up to that “still quiet voice”, and by understanding that the mythologies of religions were projections of the inner process of the human mind. The death and resurrection mythology of Christianity was one such projection – an encoding in narrative form of the mind's deep struggles with death.

That deep interest in the mythologies of religions – in which he found many universal themes – stemmed from the realisation that they were cultural encodings of the processes of the deep mind – of the unconscious. He also came to suspect that religious performances had evolved to evoke responses in the unconscious, aiding it on the path of individuation, helping to engage the participation mystique, and providing the individual with a sense of identity. He even suggested that the performance of rites should be exact, because alternation would invoke different responses in the unconscious.

He was sure of the positive value of religion to peoples' lives, noting that very few people who were deeply engaged by their particular religion ever needed his services; they only came to him at a time of religious crisis, or when their religion conflicted with their deeper needs. However, he was also aware that as soon as a religion no longer served to provide a satisfactory belief structure to contain someones life, it ceased to be of any value, even becoming a hindrance. If it no longer “spoke to their condition” it would be discarded. He had met many whose religion had failed to provide any adequate sense of meaning when confronted with the carnage of the First World War: people for whom religion had simply died.

What was true for individuals, he also felt was true for entire societies. Once a religion ceased to provide for the peoples' psychological needs it would fall away to be replaced by another: one which answered those needs more exactly. He saw in the rise of Communism and Fascism one such transfer of devotion – but he also saw that those too would also fail massively. In his later works he suggested that the era of Christianity was coming to an end, and that in time it would be replaced. However, that fundamental need for an embracing living myth would still remain.

His reading of Eastern religions, and of Buddhism and Taoism in particular – he wrote introductions to a number of translations of classic Eastern religious texts – led him to realise that what he called the god-archetype, which he regarded as the source of the god-image as experienced in the West, could, in different cultural contexts, produce immense senses of profound connection and oneness without generating a god-image. However, he doubted the ability of anyone brought up in the Western “weltanschauung” (world-view) with its millenniums of Christianity built on top of earlier layers of paganism, to fully be able to achieve this. They would be too embedded in their culture to be able to detach sufficiently from its deep collective unconscious in which the archetype found expression by naturally generating a god-image. The iconoclasm of atheists being a clear indicator of their struggles to suppress the latent potential of the archetype to produce such an image in the Western mind. He felt that it would be more successful for Westerners to engage with the mystical traditions within their own cultures, such as the teachings of the Christian mystics, or the esoteric side of alchemy, as he did himself.

In 1934 in a letter written to Irene Pickard, one of the Geneva Quakers, he said “ … I was always interested in the Quaker position, believing that they were the only true Christians.” For, unlike those Christians who faced outward and worshipped the cultural symbols over which the god-image had been projected, the Quakers faced inwards ready to integrate what was generated by the god-archetype – their deep-centre, as P.W.Martin called it, or Selbst, as Jung called it in German – that location in the deep mind where the god-archetype can be found. They faced that internal source of spiritual life, that well-spring of being, and unlike their contemporaries, they did not become entangled with the machinations of theology, of doctrine, of dogma, of ritual, and of creed, but were open to the leadings that came from within as to how to live their lives. The Quaker re-discovery of “that which is of God within” was a radical re-centring requiring re-connecting with the deep-centre itself – the source of projection – making the relationship both natural and normal through a process of integration. This, to Jung's mind, was psychologically valid and healthy. It was a process of integration, one which might use the symbol of the Christ as an agent of the process – hence their being Christians – but one which did not lead to projection of the god-image and all its attendant problems. Essentially, Quakers used Christian symbols to activate the deep-centre of their being but were also alive to “new light, from whatever source it may come”: Christian yes – but not exclusively so; rooted in Christianity, but not confined by it.

Bertram & Irene Pickard: a template for peace-work

When Bertram and Irene Pickard set off for Geneva in 1926 there was no template as to how peace-work should be done. There was ambition, and there was the Quaker concern for peace, especially urgent in the aftermath of the First World War with the all too vivid memory of the carnage, of the destruction, and of the massive suffering and starvation of the civilian populations; there was Carl Heath's vision for Quaker 'Embassies' in every capital through which to carry forward the messages of peace; and there were the hopes vested in the nascent League of Nations.

Of Carl Heath's 'Embassies' five had taken root, although wisdom had prevailed over their names and they were now referred to as 'Quaker Centres': Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Geneva. In addition a few other Quaker Centres were established elsewhere in the world, with varying degrees of success. Of the five that had taken root in Europe, Moscow, Berlin and Vienna had grown out of the administrative centres for feeding programmes that had engaged so much Quaker energy in the aftermath of the War. Paris was a joint venture with the French Quaker community – a community with a long history of its own – and Geneva was an act of faith that somehow a Quaker presence could be established in the city that now hosted the League of Nations.

Since 1917 there had been a tiny Quaker foothold in Geneva. Madeleine Savary, a native of the city, had work for a time for the Cadbury's at Bourneville, Birmingham, and had learned Quaker ways. She gathered a few of her friends together and began holding Quaker Meetings for Worship around her kitchen table. A simpler and more honest beginning can hardly be imagined. Among that circle of friends was Amy Bovet, the wife of Pierre Bovet of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute – an institute dedicated to the understanding and development of the education of children. Pierre was certainly sympathetic to his wife's new found practice, as was Adolf Ferrière, another of the institute's luminaries. In time both of them were to become Quakers. The institute had premises at 5 rue de la Taconnerie, close to the cathedral where Calvin preached during the reformation. The premises were larger than their needs. With the establishment of the League of Nations in the city, and learning of the Quaker wish to have a centre, they offered some space. So it was that the Quaker Centre found its first home.

In 1920 Herbert and Ethel Jones came as the first representatives of Britain Yearly Meeting. Their time was not the most successful. According to some accounts they were somewhat evangelical and refused to accept materials in French, being very suspicious of their provenance. This must have been a disappointment to Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese Quaker and Under-Secretary at the League of Nations, and a consummate diplomat. He was glad that there was the beginnings of a Quaker community in Geneva for he and his American Quaker wife to relate to, and that the Quaker Centre was being established, but his concern over how it was being run led to his asking Carl Heath to come to Geneva to rescue the situation. The Jones left at the end of their three year term, and their place was taken by a number of short term appointees. Nitobe realised that so much more could be achieved with the right people running the centre. He had plans for bringing diplomats and others together at informal events, perhaps dinners, where issues could be discussed off the record. What really gave impetus to his plans was when the American Friends Service Committee agreed to share the costs of running the centre with Britain Yearly Meeting. Now there were sufficient funds to employ a full time secretary to begin to develop the centre's potential.

Bertram Pickard was working in London at the time, as Secretary to the Friends' Peace Committee at Friends' House. He was in his early thirties, married, with one daughter and another child on the way. His wife, Irene, had been secretary to Rendel Harris, the first Director of Studies at Woodbrooke, the Quaker College. Carl Heath and Nibobe persuaded them to move to Geneva, Bertram to be Secretary to the Quaker Centre, and Irene to apply her talents to supporting the nascent Quaker Meeting, and act as Warden to the planned Student Hostel.

In addition to being Secretary to the Quaker Centre, Bertram was to use his talents as a journalist to report on the League of Nations, and to set its proceedings in a wider context to international affairs. He was to write for The Friend and other Quaker periodicals, but also for the Starmer Group of thirty provincial and weekly newspapers, which would provide him with additional income. From the mid 1930s he also wrote for the Washington Post. As a journalist accredited to the League and could observe the deliberations and have access to League staff and the delegates of the various nations.

Natobie's idea of having monthly dinners at which delegates to the League, representatives of various international organisations, diplomats, and experts, could come together for their mutual benefit, and at which, as a stimulus, talks on matters of common interest could be presented, had already been trialled under the auspices of the International Club. Bertram took on the responsibility of organising them. Typically about a hundred people attended each month, and many eminent speakers were engaged. This helped cultivate a deeper, international understanding of events and problems. What was clear was that technology had changed the world, with steam ships and railways, the electric telegraph, telephone and radio communications bringing the world into contact like never before; but technology also contained terribly destructive dangers, as had all too tragically been demonstrated. The First World War had been the first truly global war affecting every part of the world, and the costs were felt everywhere. Accommodating to the new reality was going to need a considerable effort on the part of nations to realise and accept the limits of their own freedom of action, and to understand the emerging interconnectivity: a process that is still continuing.

Studying and understanding the emerging international order, and training a new species of diplomats and administrators to cope with it, was very much the concern of William Rappard, Director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University of Geneva – the first of its kind in the world – created specially to cater for the need. There was the realisation that training an entirely new order of civil servants was required, whose loyalty would be to the international organisations they served not to the countries from which they came. Such civil servants would need the training to give them the a international perspective. Likewise, the civil servants and diplomats of each nation would need training to have a wider, more international understanding of the world in which they now operated.

The new Quaker run student hostel, of which Irene was warden, was planned to allow students to attend courses in International Studies at the University, or to attend the summer schools run by Alfred Zimmern, an expert on the League.

Because the League was in Geneva, more and more organisations were setting up offices in the city. They felt the need to be in dialogue with the League and with each other. Each found itself competing for the attention of the League's secretariat. Bertram realised that they would all be much more effective if they could co-ordinate their efforts, and, where possible, present a common front to the League. His efforts led to the foundation of the Fèdèration Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies, Genëve (FIIG), or the Federation of the Private and Semi-Official International Organisations, as it was known in English. In effect, it brought together the fifty or more Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that had a presence in the city. The numbers of NGOs in Geneva continued to grow between the wars, ultimately nearing a hundred. All were embraced by the FIIG and all benefited from Bertram's work as its secretary.

Bertram also became secretary to the International Consultative Group for Disarmament (ICG), which coordinated the disarmament work of some thirty NGOs, and he became Chairman of the Disarmament Committee of the Christian International Organizations. There was no doubt considerable overlap between the two, although the ICG consisted of women's, student's and ex-servicemen's organisations as well as Christian organisations.

At a much more informal level, Bertram and Irene began hosting small, intimate gatherings of diplomats, civil servants, experts, representatives of the NGOs and academics. These small gatherings of up to a dozen or more were intended to be very informal, but also to provide real opportunities for developing mutual understanding and respect. Irene trained herself up to cook up to Cordon Bleu standard so that it became something of a treat to be invited. Many of her recipes she later handed on to Brenda Bailey when she and her husband, Sydney, became part of the team at the Quaker United Nations Office and house in New York.

The Quaker Centre in Geneva became known as a place where diplomats could meet for off-the-record talks. A great deal of formative and explorative discussion took place at the Centre with the absolutely certain knowledge that what was said there stayed there. Quaker impartiality came to be respected and relied on, as did Quaker integrity. Bertram had only one incident when he learned the hard way how important it was for peace-work to remain almost invisible to the public.

In a statement made in the name of the Geneva Group of Friends a reference was made to the self-evident absurdity of cutting off the supply of arms equally to Japan (the alleged aggressor and fully equipped to manufacture arms itself) and to China (the obvious victim of the aggression and palpably unable to arm its people with modern weapons).¹

The partiality of this statement caused very considerable difficulties with both the Quaker organisation that funded the Geneva Centre, in part because it jeopardised the potential peace efforts they were trying to making elsewhere. It also alienated the Japanese, whose trust in Quaker impartiality was destroyed.

Bertram Pickard in the Quaker International Centre at Geneva, personal memories of its origins and early development, 1920-1940 outlined what he saw as the main tasks of the Quaker Centre in Geneva:

1. Information about contemporary world affairs and international relations, with special reference to the role of international organizations.

2. Education towards an informed and enlightened world outlook and citizenship.

3. Promotion of the administrative cooperation of the NGOs at Geneva.

4. Action by corporate statement, or personal contact via the organs, or personnel, of international organizations (intergovernmental or non-governmental) designed to further the causes whether of peace or of social and cultural betterment, which Friends have at heart.

Furtherance of these required a special style of soft, or quiet, diplomacy at which he seemed especially adept.

Brenda Bailey, in an informal interview with me in 2013, stressed the importance of the methods developed by the Pickards and others Quakers engaged in international work. Brenda suggested that three principles underlie the Quaker approach:

1. Accuracy: Which involved being very well informed about the subject even at its deepest and most complex levels, and being able to summarise the points made with clarity. This in itself requires being a good and intelligent audience, to listen deeply to what is being said.

2. Non-alignment: complete impartiality, avoiding aligning with either side in a dispute, so that your independence, trustworthiness, and honesty are not compromised.

3. Genuine caring: the parties need to feel your commitment to promoting peace, to deep humanitarian concern, and to the specific interests of all the parties.

Brenda paid special tribute to the tradition established by the Pickards in Geneva of hosting 'conferences' as a method of bringing together those who influence the processes of decision making, as well as to the more informal gatherings, such as over dinners that Bertram and Irene held.

It is interesting to note that the style of “quiet diplomacy” developed by Bertram and Irene in Geneva between the wars has found favour once again:

Over the last two years we have overhauled how we work and are now using ‘quiet diplomacy’ as a major tool in our advocacy. Bringing together people in the relaxed and confidential surroundings of Quaker House in Brussels, we provide a space where diplomats, officials and civil society can speak freely and openly. We have been astonished at how successful this has been – we had thought that it may take years to establish our reputation in this area, but in fact over twenty such meetings have taken place in the past year and others are now asking us to host meetings on their behalf. This is clearly something that there was a need for in the European institutions and only Quakers are providing it.²

A new influence came into Bertram's way of practising diplomacy in the 1930s, when the Geneva Quakers first encountered the work of Carl Jung. In 1934 they travelled to Zurich to meet him, and Emma Jung came to Geneva to give the group a talk about analytical psychology. In 1936 Bertram wrote A Brief Note on Quaker Doctrine and Practice of Psychological Significance which was read to Jung by Emma Jung at the Psychology Club in Zurich. Her husband, Carl Jung, was particularly impressed by the Quaker business method which Bertram had described in the paper, noting how it avoided the inevitable polarisation that usually ensues when conflicting views are made to compete. As Bertram explained in the paper:

This method is neither democratic, where majorities rule, and generally push their views upon a more or less reluctant minority, still less autocratic, since no one person directs, still less dictates. It is really a theocracy, not like Calvin's idea of a theocracy where a single person acts as intermediary between God and man, but where the whole community, severally and collectively, seeks the right solution by sensitive interplay of many minds and spirits. Assuming willingness to be taught and guided together, it is extraordinary how often apparent sharp divergences of view are resolved to the satisfaction of all. But when this is not so, there is a willingness to recognise differences of view without undue alarm, believing, as a contemporary Quaker has said, that, in a creative society “a real solution becomes possible when the stubborn fact of a real divergence is honestly accepted and honestly faced by all”.³

Jung's theories of personality made a lasting impression on Bertram. He realised how often conflicts are due not to differences of fact, but of personality, especially the differences between introverts and extroverts. He began to realise that what he was to come to term “integral pacifists” were most highly motivated by what was internal to them – their deep felt sense of rejection of violence – and that those with a more external, pragmatic understanding of peace were more persuaded by external factors such as the collective mechanism by which peace might be preserved. It was a distinction which would lead him into conflict with many Quakers when he tried to persuade them of the need to support actions by the League, such as sanctions:

In principle they (sanctions) differ from war in that they constitute police action by the community for social order, as against anarchical action by the individual state for selfish aggression. They constitute public war for the defence of the community against private war for advantage of one state at another's expense. Even if, at the very worst, this involved some form of military or naval action, that would be preferable, in a world where armed force rules, to allowing the aggressor to work his will freely, for this would mean repeated warfare of the old anarchic type, and total disruption of the League …⁴

That conflict brought more clearly to his mind the differing styles of pacifism:

(1) Absolute pacifism – i.e., personal and often political, opposition not only to war, but to all forms of armed coercion (e.g., military sanctions);

(2) International pacifism – i.e., evolutionary political organisation of peace through a “collective system” of which the League is the nucleus;

(3) Revolutionary Socialist pacifism – i.e., belief in the incompatibility of Capitalism and peace, and the necessity for the overthrow of Capitalism, by force if need be, as a necessary prelude to the organisation of peace.⁵

He felt the full force of that distinction in 1942 when he began to reluctantly accept that the only hope for restoring peace was through supporting the war effort whilst preparing to build the peace that would follow on the defeat of Germany and Japan. The distress of coming to this decision took him to the edge of a breakdown. He wrote about the the agonising problem in The Peace Makers Dilemma. He contrasted the demands of the integral pacifist, who, being introvert heeds their internal drivers more, with that pragmatism of the instrumental pacifist, who being extrovert heeds the importance of the collective mechanisms that can be evolved. He asks:

At the same time one is convinced that such an attitude to the war on the part of Integral Pacifists would , generally speaking, be wrong, in part because it seems to imply a moral superiority which is not justified by the facts, in part because it offers no sort of suggestion as to how the war at present can be brought to an end in a way that would be regarded as morally tolerable.⁶

In Pacifist Diplomacy in Conflict Situations, written in 1943, he return to his theme of the importance of impartiality in diplomacy:

The positive and more important aspect is not in a refusal to take sides, but in the concentration that this permits upon the task of throwing bridges across the torrent of conflict. These bridges have necessarily to be built from both sides of the controversy, so that by refraining from complete identification with one or the other of the parties, the pacifist diplomat keeps open access to both banks.⁷

In late 1943 he began working for UNRRA preparing for the immense work of providing relief and rehabilitation in a devastated Europe, and in 1945 he was invited to assist with the preparatory work for the San Fransisco Conference that established the United Nations. Drawing on his experience before the war in Geneva he saw the need for clear channels of communication between the proposed UN and the inevitable cloud of NGO which would be drawn into its orbit. He had twice written about the issue. In the 1930 in The Greater League of Nations, and more recently in The Greater United Nations. When the United Nations Charter was drawn up, provision was made for NGOs to be given Consultative Status, and in 1947 Bertram was appointed to supervise its implementation and operation, returning to Geneva to take up a post which mirrored the one he had created with FIIG between the wars. Brenda Bailey considers the creation of the system of Consultative Status for NGOs to be Bertram's greatest and most lasting achievement.

1 Pickard, Bertram: The Quaker International Centre at Geneva, personal memories of its origins and early development, 1920-1940 (in the private papers of Alison Bush, Bertam Pickard's daughter).

2Oliver Robertson, Clerk to the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA): Newsletter, 21/05/18

3Bertram Pickard: A Brief Note on Quaker Doctrine and Practice of Psychological Significance: Irene Pickard's archive item # 76

4Notes on the Basis and Nature of Sanctions: Special Surveys and Reports of the International Consultative Group No.5. Geneva: 15 January 1936. Box 7/1. League of Nations Archive, Geneva. – Waugh, Maureen in “Quakers, Peace and the League of Nations: The Role of Bertram Pickard: Quaker Studies 6/1 (2001) [59-79]

5Pickard, Bertram: Friends and Psychology. The Significance and Value of Our Differences: The Friend, November 6^th 1936

6Pickard, Bertram: Peacemakers' Dilemma. Plea for a Modus Vivendi in the Peace Movement: Pendle Hill Pamphlet Number Sixteen, 1942

7p.25: Pickard, Bertram: Pacifist Diplomacy in Conflict Situations: illustrate by the Quaker International Centers: Pacifist Research Bureau, Pennsylvania, 1943: Distributed by The Peace Section, American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia.