Fountains of ideas: being an Eva Koch Scholar

David Lockyer writes about his experience of six weeks in residence as an Eva Koch Scholar at Woodbrooke

The most unexpected gift of spending six weeks, as an Eva Koch Scholar, at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham was the stimulation of the seemingly free-form conversations with the other Scholars. These, on occasions, ran on late into the night, sparking off ideas left and right, and sometimes drawing in anyone who happened to be nearby: guests, Friends in Residence, Woodbrooke tutors and attenders on other courses. No one was truly safe, not even the gardeners. Woodbrooke seems to be a place that creates fountains of ideas.

We three 2014 Eva Koch Scholars were each immersed in our work in the library during the day, and sometimes into the evenings. We spent hours of diligent digging through books on the open shelves, or in the stacks, chasing references through journals, old tomes, even documents or letters long hidden in the archives, and dredging and trawling to find those gems of ideas or threads to weave into the fabric of the stories being uncovered.

In my case it was the story of a Quaker couple, Bertram and Irene Pickard, who met at the college during the first world war. Traces of them were elusive. The knowledge that they had been there seemed certain, but evidence to support that belief proved very hard to find. Without the great skills of the librarian I doubt the proof would ever have been uncovered; and without my tutor’s instincts about where else to look I suspect that clear confirmation of their presence would have remained undiscovered. It is the human as well as the physical resources at Woodbrooke that are so important.

I am interested in the Pickards because of the fascinating roles they both played in establishing the Quaker presence in Geneva, which still continues today in the form of the Quaker United Nations Office, and because of their contacts with the psychologist Carl Jung and his circle, which, in Irene’s case, led to a lifelong interest in the relationship between his ideas and Quakerism. Over the years she compiled an extensive archive of materials on the subject that is now held by the library of the University of Essex. I was granted the privilege of studying that archive before it was lodged with the university, and am now engaged in writing about the Pickards, and especially about Irene and the archive.

Woodbrooke is a place not just to research but also to absorb a singularly Quaker ambiance. Friends in Residence, in particular, add something special – each in their own way, coming as they do from all over the world to spend a few days or weeks tending to the needs of the establishment. They bring much more than just practical care. The kaleidoscope of personalities presented by these ever-changing guardians of the place deepens the appreciation of just how many ways there are of being a Quaker.

What did I gain from my time as an Eva Koch Scholar? Well, a thick wad of notes to add to my already voluminous resources relating to the Pickards; clarification of some lines of research to do with their lives; the need to completely re-write at least one section of the planned book in the light of what was uncovered; a much deeper understanding of the subject; invaluable insights into the wider significance of my subjects’ endeavours; filling in gaps in the story of their lives; tracing the effects they had on the Religious Society of Friends, right up to the twenty-first century; and the knowledge that it may well be a year or two before I have finished with this process and finally have something coherent to show for my time.

Published in the Friend 9 Jul 2015

Meeting the Messiah: 3 – it's all in the mind

In researching Irene Pickard's archive, ignoring the foundational myth of Christianity was simply not an option. It was far to important to her, to the others whose papers were in her archive, to the Quaker and other circles in which she moved, and to Jung, who became her guide in trying to make sense of the phenomena.

Jung was first-most and foremost a psychologist. He was clear about the boundaries beyond which his speculations should not stray: he was an explorer of the human mind – the psyche – as informed by his clinical practice. This applied just a much to his understanding of religion, as it did to any other aspect of human life. Ultimately for Jung, psychological life is human life as lived, as experienced: all we know, we know via mental phenomena.

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.    C G  Jung: Answer to Job (1954)

I love Jung's referring to 'God' as the 'Unspeakable' – I suspect the connotation in English is not quite the same as the original German! I think he literally meant 'cannot be spoken about'. But he is right, all we can speak about first hand is our experience. That is the psychological experience of 'God' – the 'God' we encounter, if we do. The other is the shrivelled construct of theology – a verbal shuttlecock batted between players in the game of god-talking. 

What are profound, and Jung knew this, are numinous experiences. They are capable of utterly altering life. In the theistic framework of the Western mind – being touched by God; in the framework of the Eastern mind, satori – sudden awakening, liberation;  to the post-modern mind – being awestruck, overwhelmed with wonder, dumbfounded; even in the probably fictional teachings of Don Juan as told by Carlos Castañeda – much loved in the New Age circles – it plays the fundamental role of 'stopping the world'. 

I think the rise of the New Age movement, with its syncretic appropriations – a pick and mix approach to spirituality and religion – would have fascinated Jung. It would fit with his suggestions that the age of Christianity was coming to an end, and that people would start searching for spiritual replacements. The term 'New Age' itself owes a lot to borrowings from Jung, who suggested the process in Aion (1951).

I think he would also have found the attraction of so many people to the range of many quite bizarre conspiracy theories that have arisen in recent years, as another symptom, just as he did the emerging belief which he wrote about in Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958): all are examples of the yearning of the human soul for a centre, a point of gravity around which all those otherwise discomforting and confusing feelings that comprise the vitality of spirituality can circulate.

But what of the founding hero figure of Christianity – the messiah? The failed god nailed to a cross. 

A sense of wider meaning to one’s existence is what raises man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable. Had St. Paul been convinced that he was nothing more than a wandering tent-maker he certainly would not have been the man he was. His real and meaningful life lay in the inner certainty that he was the messenger of the Lord. One might accuse him of suffering from megalomania, but this opinion pales before the testimony of history and the judgement of subsequent generations. The myth that took possession of him made him something greater than a mere craftsman. Such myth, however, consist of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.  C G Jung: Man and his Symbols (1964)

Irene had already encountered the idea from Rendel Harris – her employer and mentor – that the man Jesus became infused with God's wisdom at the time of his baptism by John. Jung takes that idea further, suggesting that pre-existing god-man symbol was projected over the man Jesus, perhaps by himself taking on that mantle, but especially by subsequent generations, starting with Paul. 

For Jung the god-man symbol had existed for a long time before Jesus, being embedded in myth and projected over different candidates: but he felt that it had stuck so strongly with Jesus because the myth had evolved with the absorption of Sophia – the wisdom of God manifest as love – making Jesus a new and transformed version of God – God 2.0, if you will – as he tried to explain in Answer to Job: 

Just as the decision to become man apparently makes use of the ancient Egyptian model, so we can expect that the process itself will follow certain prefigurations. The approach of Sophia betokens a new creation. But this time it is not the world that is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own nature. Mankind is not, as before, to be destroyed, but saved. In this decision we can discern the “philanthropic” influence of Sophia: no new human beings are to be created, but only one, the God-man. For this purpose a contrary procedure must be employed. The Second Adam shall not, like the first, proceed from the hand of the Creator, but shall be born of a human woman. … C G Jung: Answer to Job (1954)

Jung goes on the explain how the myth has evolved by the absorption of the female, in the form of Mary, as an aspect of the divine, as part of the celestial. Mary's immaculate conception does not occur in anywhere in the New Testament, but was confirmed by Pope Pius IX in 1858, whose commission stated that neither scriptural proof nor ancient tradition were necessary for this. Her assumption into heaven was then confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. Yet further evidence of a living and evolving myth – of myth making – at a very deep and spiritual level: the church having to concede to the popular process of progressive enthronement of the female as a fourth denizen of heaven. A process that was manifest in the increasing devotion to Mary over the proceeding millennium. The human need to have a female as an integral part of heaven being a projection of developments in the collective unconscious – evolution at work in the deep mind.

… Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure vessel of the coming birth of God. Her independence of the male is emphasised by her virginity as the sin qua non of the process. She is a “daughter of God” who, as a later dogma will establish, is distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of original sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state before the Fall. This posits a new beginning. The divine immaculateness of her status makes it clear that she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, as also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia. Her love of mankind, widely emphasised in the ancient writings, suggests that in this newest of creations of his Yahweh has allowed himself to be largely influenced by Sophia. For Mary, the blessed among women, is a friend and intercessor for sinners, which all men are. Like Sophia, she is a mediatrix who led the way to God and assures man of immortality. Her Assumption is therefore the prototype of man’s bodily resurrection. As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she hold the place of the Old Testament Sophia. (ibid)

 Jung's profoundest suggestion is that myths are externalisations of the structures and processes of the deep mind. As humans have evolved, so have their myths. Their function is is to act as programming algorithms – as we might say these days – affecting the deep mind and helping the individual to adapt and mature. They model what is needed, and act out in symbolic form the maturation processes required within. They are essential ingredients of human growth and individuation (as he called the process of self-actualisation, of becoming an independent and evolving adult). They are only truly affective in so far as they are engaged with and believed.  

Any attempt to deconstruct a myth destroys its magic – our participation with its mystique – and blocks its effect. That is a cause of much of the modern malaise which he detected: our over rational brains had deconstructed the dominant myths of the West so that it can no longer play its part in maturing the soul – in the spiritual maturation of the deep mind. 

However, the deep mind still yearned for meaningful myths to attach itself to, as was evident in the passion with which people bound themselves to the myths of Nationalism or Communism; each resulting in tragic loss of life on an unprecedented scale. Incidences, in Jung's estimation, of mass psychosis: collective delusion that can powered appalling acts of cruelty, violence and destruction.  

Perhaps the only way for modern man to return to realising the efficacy of earlier myths is to suspend disbelief, and engage with their narratives, as would we would with an enthralling book or film? Such re-engagement with the myths should, according to Jung, help shape and encourage maturation at a deep level. 

However, such re-engagement will not be as before, because the myth will be seen with new eyes – eyes that have known the disenchantment. It will need to evolve by being infused with new elements if it is to re-enchant. Jung's own fascination with the Christian mystical tradition of alchemy led to his suggestion that the trinity would need to evolve into a quaternary in order to reflect more accurately the structures of the deep mind. Such an evolution would re-empower the myth's ability to invoke the processes of individuation, of maturation. 

For Jung, religions were not just alternative entertainments, distractions, competing in the attention market place. They encoded pathways of maturation in their symbols, and so were essential to human need; which is why they had evolved in the first place, and why they had been so passionately engaged with, why they have had such an central place in human societies: they encode the vitality of life's growth pathways – they orchestrate and evoke maturation. They are alchemic. 

Christianity, the cultural manifestation of the Western mind, and therefore the one that best suits the Western mind according to Jung, will continue evolving if it is not to wither away. If it does not evolve, then it will simply be replaces by some new symbolic system, just as Christianity itself replaced the Paganism of the Roman world. Its ability to answerer to the needs of  the deep mind will determine its fate. 

So how is Christianity evolving? What are its rivals that it must accommodate or be replaced by? It may be that evolving in a New Age direction, or perhaps by absorbing components from other faith tradition in a universalist direction, or by unearthing the perennial philosophy that is supposed to underlie all faiths, or by adopting a non-theistic, or possibly post theistic, guise. Or it may be retrenching into a more dogmatic, literalist fortress, answering to the needs of a diminishing but trenchant minority.

So, once more, what of the messiah? What have I understood from Jung about the god-man whose life, real or otherwise, has been so fundamental to the Western mind? If nothing else it must be to focus on the potency of the symbol of the god-man set within its cosmic drama – within its narrative – rather than any questions of its historicity. To ask such analytic questions is to step outside the myth and destroy it. There is a need to become re-enchanted.

Meeting the Messiah: 2 – Rendel Harris's christology

Rendel Harris (1852 – 1941) is largely forgotten these days. Some Quakers know of him because of the room named after him at Woodbrooke, the Quaker Study Centre, where his bust proudly surveys the room that bears his name, and because of the interpretation board on the walls in the main corridor which tells of his being its first Director of Studies. To Irene Pickard he was far more.

One of the problems in un-packaging her archive was to come to an understanding of her relationship with Dr J Rendel Harris, both at a personal level and as an influence on her spiritual and intellectual development. 

She worked as his secretary for over a twelve years, moving into his home after the death of his wife, becoming his general factotum as well as his private secretary. Even though he explicitly instructed that no biography about him should be written, she did just that in her retirement, privately publishing her Memories of J. Rendel Harris (1979).

She says of him, quoting and echoing W E Wilson's words:

The Doctor's academic many-sidedness is not half of the tale. A wonderful personality, full of humour, delighting in the society of all sorts of persons, a saint and mystic, utterly approachable. A man of immovable principles and strong prejudices. Delighting in fighting for great moral causes, yet charitable to opponents, and a personal friend of some whose principles he detested. Filled, even in old age, with the joy of living, radiating the love of Christ. To talk with him was stimulating, to enjoy his friendship was an education, to be his pupil for years was a privilege for which one can never be thankful enough.

For Irene, Rendel Harris functioned as a latter day John the Baptist, preparing the way for her immersion into Jung's vision of what the function of religion was and how it worked on the deep mind. She may not have been receptive to Jung's radical and challenging ideas without the preparation she received by being intimately exposed to Rendel Harris's thoughts and reflections on how Christianity evolved, and how its teachings might be understood – he was, according to Irene, particularly inspiring and adept at hermeneutics, the craft of understanding the relationship between a text and its reader. 

Rendel Harris also laid the foundation to her evolving understanding of Quakerism and Christianity, moving her on from her somewhat evangelical and literalist beginnings, as much by example as by any direct teaching. She was not his pupil, but, as his personal secretary she was very much looking over his shoulder and witnessing his mind at work. She would have typed up all of his later works and correspondence.

Coming to an understanding of Rendel Harris's beliefs about Christianity was very much an essential stepping stone in exploring Irene's archive. It was also a another step in my somewhat reluctant confrontation with some of the fundamentals of Christianity: the veracity of its foundational stories. Like it or not, researching materials like those in Irene's archive has consequences for one's own beliefs because it confronts your own prejudices and limitations by expanding the range and depth of information that underlie your opinions; it exposes you to different ways of thinking; it opens new vistas to the mind. You are necessarily affected by what you research.

Rendel Harris was a radical thinker for his age. As a scholar, he came to realise that Christianity had evolved, initially in a Jewish context, but with the addition of something new:

So long then, as nascent Christianity is making its way in a Jewish environment, it does so as a sect of Judaism, accepting the whole of the inspired Jewish documents, and re-interpreting them in the light of what it holds to be a larger revelation. The Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity: Rendel Harris, 1919

He appears to have thought that it then evolved on through the convolutions of the early Church, until it reached a much more defined and stable state in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, when the creeds were created, and the early Christian texts were codified to form the New Testament, and then added to agreed versions of those Jewish books which formed the Old Testament, with, in the eyes of the Church, the teachings of the New superseding those of the Old.

He strongly suspected that the writers of the four Gospels used note books full of proof texts, traces of which survived in some of the ancient documents recently discovered in his time: his two volumes on Testimonies published in 1917 and 1920 suggested such traces. He thought that the proof texts were drawn from oral and written traditions about the life and teaching of Jesus, as well as from the Jewish scriptures. Their disappearance being much like the disappearance of an artist's cartoon or an architect's drawings when the finished work is complete.

He also accepted the scholastic arguments that Mark's Gospel was the primary Gospel, that is it was written before the others. This took him to a realisation of the importance of a discovery with which he was intimately involved – that of the Sinaitic palimpsest. The version of St Mark's Gospel in the palimpsest was both older and shorter than the canonical version, ending with the discovery of the empty tomb, and lacking the verses about the resurrection and ascension.

As a Quaker, Rendel Harris was at ease with the notion of the inward light, 'that of God in everyone' from which revelation sprang: a charismatic living presence within each and every person, if only they had the steadfast patience to wait upon it. As George Fox is reported to have said:

'The Scriptures were the prophets’ words and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what as they spoke they enjoyed and possessed and had it from the Lord’. And said, ‘Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. …'   Margaret Fell, 1694

According to Fox, even Christ's words came from that inward wellspring: a radical thought that did not sit well with the orthodox belief in the Trinity, which asserted that Jesus was one with God from the beginning of time (that is identical with God). Fox's claim led to accusation that the Quakers denied the Trinity and were thus heretics, justifying much of the persecution they suffered.

Rendel Harris thought he understood what had happened. If St Mark's is the most authentic account, then the man Jesus had become infused with the wisdom of God at the moment of his baptism, which is where St Mark starts, so we should not wonder that there is no trace of Jesus after he was laid in the 'sepulchre hewn out of rock' with no resurrection and ascension, as is the case in the version of St Mark found on the palimpsest. Christ was that wisdom, accessible to all and universal, not the person Jesus. Testimony to its pre-existence and universality was to be found in other ancient wisdom writings. The emergent Christian churches of the late Roman Empire had welded it onto the man Jesus, rather than understanding its universality. The man Jesus simply exemplified its wonderful depth and brilliance more fully. He was the paradigm, the vehicle through which it was best exhibited. 

… Indeed we may say boldly, that Christianity as a dogmatic system is founded on two things: firstly, the identification of Jesus with the wisdom of God, and second, the description of Christ as identified with wisdom in terms borrowed from the Sapiential literature. The Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity

Or, as he is reported in Irene's Memories to have said:

‘There is no suggestion nor fragment of evidence that we might, by excavating a thousand years, unearth an ecclesiastical Christ. He, at all events, is the dream and creation of a later age.’

It is interesting that Rendel Harris's Testimonies have been republished in 2011. Those works are still considered relevant to biblical studies as demonstrated by Alessandro Falcetta's paper on The Testimony Research of James Rendel Harris.

Rendel Harris's view of the Jewish nature of the first stages of the evolution of Christianity would be very much in accord with the views of such modern biblical scholars as Bart D Ehrman, Reza Aslan and Gésa Vermes, as would his view that the 'ecclesiastical Christ' being an artifice of later ages; although they have gone much further in developing both the understanding of Jesus as a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews, and of the evolution of Trinitarian Christianity.

The debates about the Sinaitic palimpsest and the problem posed for Christianity by the missing verses still continues.

Meeting the Messiah: 1

In researching Irene Pickard's archive it is inevitable that confronting the fundamental issue of the authenticity of Christianity was unavoidable. Hide as I might, investigating and challenging my own relationship to that vast two thousand year old tradition was not something I could duck out of. Inevitably, the very nature of the contents of the archive meant confronting my own understanding of what spirituality might be, what religions are, what role they have, and perhaps must have, in our lives, at a psychological level, if not also at a cultural and social level. 

I have for much of my life been a secular atheist, detached from involvement in any religious practice, believing myself immune to whatever appeal religions might have, protected by my intellectual training in the cannon of analytic philosophy. Religions were, ultimately, absurd, and their claims easily dismantled by the progressive application of ruthless logic. They had no useful part to play in life. They were at best delusions, at worst positively harmful. They were full of pre-scientific understandings of life, that necessarily melted away as the range and depth of our collective scientific understanding expanded. It was inevitable that they would be discarded into the dustbin of history, to borrow phrase much loved by Marxists. A lovely, clinically clean, brave new world was emerging due to intellectual advances, in which, no doubt, everything would be reducible in the end to a series of elegant mathematical formula or algorithms: intellectually satisfying in a mechanical sense, and sterile.

Only, that's not quite the truth about what happened to me. At about the age of thirty I collided with Zen Buddhism in the form of koans – intricate, logic destroying verbal Rubic cubes. Turn and turn them as you might, logical solutions are simply not possible. They twist the mind until eventually you are forced out of the comfort zone of your everyday frames of reference. Whoops! Bang! There goes the security of logical reduction used in defence of the frames of reference that you did not even know you had, but which had held your life in place until then. 

It was a bit like being plugged into Douglas Adam's Ultimate Perspective Vortex. You, naked and raw, are plugged in at one end and the vast complexity of the universe at the other. It is pretty clear which is going to win. Exposure to Zen induces a certain intellectual humility thereafter, and an openness to exploring what seemed intellectually off limits before. 

Having passed through the bowels of Zen, and on via Tai Chi and Qigong, where I encountered other meditative traditions, I have for the last decade been under the guidance of a Dzogchen practitioner from the Tibetan tradition: but I have also become a Quaker. I learned a little about them from my time teaching History, and I wanted to take a risk and try out going to a Meeting. What I did not expect was to fall through the silence into a place of honesty and welcome where I felt at home. It was whilst dipping my toes into the Quaker pond that I encountered Irene's archive.

As a researcher you are supposed to try to maintain some sort of objectivity in order to report on what you have found, however you are inevitably affected by exposure to your subjects' milieu of spiritual influence – you have to walk the same paths as the people you are studying – if in no more than you have to read what they read, read their comments as they digested what they were exposed to, read what they themselves wrote, and try to understand their understanding: you have to get inside their heads. It is a bit like wearing somebody-else's clothes and vicariously living aspects of their life whilst vainly trying not to be affected. You are inevitably changed by the experience.  

Historically, whether we like the fact or not, Christianity has done more to shape European culture than any other tradition, and via Europe, due to the technological and imperial explosion of the last three hundred years, the world. As a result an otherwise obscure Palestinian Jew of the first century CE has become the most influential spiritual teacher in history. Some influencer! Some obscurity! 2.382 billion followers (according to Wikipedia) beats anything on social media. It was clearly time to come to terms with the leviathan.

In the ten years since encountering Irene's archive, I have absorbed a very great deal that has deepened and widened my understanding. It has taken me places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, including having to come to some sort of terms with Christianity. Not my natural inclination. My early exposure to Christian piety had, I thought, inoculated me against having anything to do with 'faiths' – I do include them all – and led me to what I thought was a non-faith way: Buddhism. At least, that how Buddhism is often presented to the West, as being principally composed of meditative practices focussed on liberating the mind from the shackles of attachment. I now know that it is much more than that, and at bottom is just as much a faith-way.

Whatever my own views of Christianity, as a researcher I had to try to understand the Christianity of my subjects. Firstly there was Quakerism, at least that of the time of my subjects, which in itself meant delving into Quaker history. Then I had to try to understand Rendel Harris's Christianity – Irene's one time employer and mentor – and, the biggest ask of all, that of Carl Gustav Jung – the greatest intellectual influence on four of my subjects – Irene Pickard, Elined Kotschnig, P.W. and Marjory Martin – and significant in the life of the fifth, Bertram Pickard.

My subjects also met and were influenced by a number of the more prominent theologians of their time: Carl Barth, Adolf Keller, Visser 't Hooft, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, among others. I had to develop at least a nodding acquaintance with their thoughts and even those of theological thinkers such as Kierkegaard.

It has been an interesting journey. It has made me realise that my early rejection of Christianity was based on a very simplistic understanding – but that vision is, after all, what I had been fed by the compulsory religious education and attendance as required in UK schools when I was young. I now know it to be a vastly more complex spiritual path. One that has left its footprint all over European thought, even those supposedly post-Christian traditions such as Humanism or Marxism, both hugely influenced by the Christian ethic, and in some ways being simply Christianity with God sucked out.

Ah, God – that's another problem, and one I still haven't come to terms with yet: the universe seems to get along perfectly well without. According to Jung I may be stuck at the 'death of God' stage. He may be right.