Margaret Fell and Spinoza

One of the more unlikely surprises I had during my research was a connection between Margaret Fell (1614 – 1702) and Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677): Spinoza translated Margaret's Epistles to the Jews into Hebrew. 

Margaret Fell, who became George Fox's wife later in her life, is very much one of the co-founders of Quakerism, giving it the pastoral structures that enabled it to survive, especially through those early years of persecution and imprisonment. She herself suffered two lengthy spells in prison. Perhaps her most significant writing is Womens Speaking Justified (1666), in which she argued for spiritual equality between men and women, and equal weight being given to their ministry. It is in many ways the foundation of the Testimony of Equality that has stood ever since.

Spinoza I knew from my undergraduate studies in the early 1970s. Margaret Fell I only encountered after I came into Quaker circles some ten or so years ago. That Spinoza, one of the outstanding philosophers of his age, should have encountered Quakers at all seemed unlikely: Quakers were very few and thin on the ground, almost unknown outside England or Wales at that time, and he was a Dutch Jew, who never travelled outside of the Netherlands.

However, following his expulsion from the Amsterdam Jewish community (1656), Spinoza formed relationships with the Dutch Collegiants and via them with the Quakers, some of whom were travelling in Holland, having been drawn to the Collegiants, feeling that they were fellow spirits. He didn't join either, but he did spend time with both, moving to be nearer the headquarters of the Collegiants. It was during that period he offered to translate Margaret's epistle.

In many ways the Collegiants and the Quakers shared much in common, certainly in their attitude of distaste for the established and hierarchical churches, and for a shared attitude towards scriptures as inspired guidance rather than divine writ. They also shared a great tolerance of diverse views, seeing what spoke in people's hearts to be a better guide than the diktats of any church. 

Both had many among them those who embraced Spinoza's vision of God – a view very far removed from the dominant vision of the times. It has been called pantheism – the identity of reality and divinity – or, more crudely, God = Nature, but it is more sophisticated than that. However, it was a vision that placed human beings as the active agents and 'God' as a passive background, enabling and inspiring, but not controlling or interfering. This was humans as moral agents come of age.

It was exactly such attitudes that led George Keith (1638-1716) – an early Quaker and one of Fox's travelling companions both in the Netherlands and in America – to eventually abandon the Quakers, accusing them of being 'deists'. He would have know well what he meant by such a term, having graduated from Aberdeen in Theology before turning Quaker. Deists do not see God as playing an intercessional or active part in human affairs: very much Spinoza's view. He unequivocally denied a personal 'God' as mere superstition.