Charles Lecture #3

I'd like to begin this third and final lecture with a reading from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians:

And now abide faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

If people come to your first lecture, it is a sign of faith.
If people come to your second lecture, it is a sign of hope.
If people come to your third lecture, it is a sign of charity--or that it's required for a course.

Today we turn to "A Plea for the Poor," an essay by the eighteenth-century Quaker John Woolman. That same summer, after my first year at college, when I read the Words of the Elders, I first encountered the writings of John Woolman, who has since then become a major influence on my own thinking. Those two books, the Words of the Elders and the works of John Woolman, have been carrying on a conversation within me ever since that summer when I was just a bit older than most of you Humanities students.
As you read "A Plea for the Poor," I hope you find connections with the Letter of James as well. The Society of Friends is probably best known for its ethical principles, which Quakers call testimonies. The four classic testimonies are often referred to as the testimonies of simplicity, equality, honesty, and peace. There are roots of all these testimonies in the Letter of James, and earliest Friends quoted James to support these ethical principles. John Woolman is an heir to these earlier Quakers who lived in the seventeenth century.
One theme in these talks has been ways of thinking about reading. In this talk I would like to suggest a third model of reading: reading as entering, with sympathy and respect, the world of another. This way of reading is the most demanding, the most risky, and the most rewarding. It also happens to be the kind of reading to which John Woolman invites his readers. So we move from reading as hospitality to a guest who is a stranger to us, to reading as friendship, to reading as entering the world of another person. It's like off-campus study: you just might come home a changed person.
Today we leap across the centuries to colonial New Jersey, the time of John Woolman, to explore his essay "A Plea for the Poor." I'd like to look at this essay in two ways. The first is as a set of ideas. I'll talk about what I believe are some central points of the essay, the things which John Woolman is trying to persuade his readers are reasonable and true. The second way I'd like to look at this essay is as an invitation to personal transformation, to a change of heart, and here John Woolman invites his readers to use not only their capacity to reason but also their ability to imagine. The more I read this essay, the more convinced I become that it holds out the use of the imagination as a spiritual practice.
First, some words of introduction.
John Woolman was born in 1720 in colonial New Jersey and lived until 1772, when he died of smallpox while on a religious visit to England. His "Plea for the Poor" was written about 1764 but was not published until 1793, over twenty years after his death. John Woolman wrote other essays, including some important and influential anti-slavery tracts, and he left his Journal, a spiritual autobiography. In that Journal he speaks of his struggles regarding the spiritual life when he was eighteen years old. He describes a turning point, a conversion of sorts, in which he comes to understand the nature of religion. As I read this, recall the description of true religion in the Letter of James. You'll find some similarities.

I ... was... convinced in my mind that true religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart doth love and reverence God the Creator and learn to exercise true justice and goodness, not only toward all men but also toward the brute creatures.

So the inward spiritual life and the outward exercise of true justice are inseparable. "A Plea for the Poor" shares this conviction: the inward life and outward life are one. All three of the texts you've been reading address both inward and outward concerns, but in my talk on the Letter of James, I chose to focus on the external life, especially justice and integrity. In my talk on the Words of the Elders, I emphasized the inward life, particularly the practice of interior watchfulness. In considering John Woolman's essay, I hope to show how the inward and outward are connected.
Many of his travels under a religious concern, to use a traditional Quaker phrase, were to come to know the plight of the oppressed and to visit with their oppressors, such as slavekeepers, to attempt to persuade them of the evils of their practices. He journeyed repeatedly to the southern colonies to witness plantation slavery firsthand. He visited a settlement of the Delaware nation (Lenni Lenape) during a time of war to understand better their lives and to serve as an ambassador of peace. When traveling to England at the end of his life, he lodged with the poor sailors in steerage rather than in the comfortable cabins, in order to be present with the oppressed sailors and to enter into their condition. As a result of such experiences, John Woolman reflected deeply on the experience of those who bear the burden of injustice. Some of those reflections are gathered in his essay, "A Plea for the Poor."
Let's begin our consideration of this essay with the title. John Woolman had two titles for the essay: "A Plea for the Poor" and "A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich," and he seems not to have decided so strongly between them. In the manuscript that I used for the edition that you have read, he uses the second title, though I chose to retain the first since that is how the essay has been known for so long. The two complement one another. The essay is a plea on behalf of the poor, an act of advocacy by one who by the witness of his life has shown that he is an ally of the poor, one who stands with them. The essay is also a word of caution to the rich. It is addressed to the rich. Note how this is different from the Letter of James, which I think is addressed to an audience which for the most part is not rich. I find it fascinating that the essay calls itself a word of remembrance. John Woolman anticipates that the information in the essay is not new. It is a reminder of what they are expected to know already. I think it's safe to assume that John Woolman's audience would identify themselves as Christian, since he relies so heavily on the Bible to provide the evidence for his arguments. I find that fascinating as well: the radical ethics in this treatise should be self-evident to anyone acquainted with the Bible. Maybe after studying the Letter of James that shouldn't surprise me.
The principal ideas in this essay are fairly simple: the world belongs to the one who made it; since it was made with a particular purpose in mind, human beings find their own fulfillment when they live in accordance with that purpose.
Let's unravel it a bit.
God owns it. What is John Woolman's understanding of God? One way to get at this question is to look the language he uses to speak of God. Most often he refers to God by God's attributes: universal love, wisdom, and righteousness. It may seem strange that someone who has as profound a sense of intimacy with the divine as John Woolman does refers to God by attributes, but for him I don't think they were mere abstractions. Love, wisdom, and righteousness were how he experienced God.
So what is wisdom?What does Pure Wisdom do? (Note the echo of the Letter of James: the wisdom from above is pure. I'm sure it's no accident.) As in the Letter of James, where wisdom was identified with Torah, wisdom for John Woolman sets boundaries. Recall that in earlier Jewish texts wisdom was God's consultant in creation, when the boundaries of sea and land and of day and night were established. In "A Plea for the Poor," he speaks of wisdom fixing the boundaries of labor, so that people do not work too much or make others work too much on their behalf. In his Journal, he speaks of the experience of setting aside "our own wills" and discovering that wisdom sets boundaries to "all our wants." Unbounded desires engender greed which leads to oppression. But the experience of bounded desires is not one of prohibition or restriction. It's that once people have the experience of their soul's true desire, those other things just aren't so interesting anymore. Maybe it's like being a compulsive collector of third-rate paintings and then discovering the works of a real genius. Who wants that other stuff anymore? Pure wisdom sets boundaries to otherwise disordered desires.

This process of reorienting desires enables people to see the divine nature as love, brings them to love others (particularly those whom they had been dehumanizing through oppression), and therefore brings them to commit themselves to make society just and righteous. This process is for John Woolman the fundamental spiritual transformation.

This experience is so central to his understanding of the religious life that he does not hesitate to call it redemptive. He speaks, for example, of those "who are so redeemed from the love of the world as to possess nothing in a selfish spirit," and says elsewhere in our essay that "to be redeemed from all the remains of selfishness" is "to have a universal regard to our fellow creatures, and love them as [God] loves them." This is what pure wisdom invites people into. This is what it means to become a friend of God and a prophet.
Living in accordance with the design of creation.
"The Creator of the earth is the owner of it". This creator, John Woolman says, "gave us being thereon, and our nature requires nourishment which is the produce of it." And so, he goes on, because God "is kind and merciful, we as [God's] creatures, while we live answerable to the design of our creation, are so far entitled to a convenient subsistence that no [one] may justly deprive us of it. " Note how he mentions kindness and mercy as qualities of the divine, implying that the design of creation has mercy and kindness woven into its fabric. The universe is designed benevolently, with the intention that life flourish.
John Woolman uses other phrases repeatedly in "A Plea for the Poor" which seem to elaborate on this expression "the design of creation."
A favorite phrase, used in a variety of forms in this essay, is "the right use of things." There is a kind of divine ecology at work. Creation is designed for particular purposes. John Woolman says that if all unnecessary luxuries and what he calls "the desire of outward greatness" (wealth, power, prestige) were laid aside, and if the right use of things were attended to by all, there would be employment for all in things useful, and only moderate labor would be required. This is what John Woolman has in mind when he uses such expressions as "employed in things useful," or "the true use of things," or "that use of things prescribed by our Redeemer, and confirmed by his example," or "the necessity of attending singly to divine wisdom ... thereby to be directed in the right use of things, in opposition to the customs of the times."
As we've just seen, one feature of the right use of things is moderate labor. John Woolman's notion of moderate labor is quite unusual for his day. Other religious leaders in the eighteenth century had slogans such as, "Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can." John Woolman does not conform to what is called the Protestant work ethic. As he says in "A Plea for the Poor," labor is healthful. It contributes to "wellness." His era was agricultural and pre-industrial, and so most labor was physical. For him, labor is not an evil. He does not speak of work as the unfortunate result of original sin. It is part of the design of the creation. For him it is too much labor that is the problem. When desires are out of hand, people want too many things. To get them, they either have to overwork themselves, which does not leave them the energy or the frame of mind to cultivate a life of spirit, or they make others overwork on their behalf. This leads to oppression, to injustice, to slavery.

He writes approvingly of those among the wealthy landowners who "live in the spirit of charity" and inform themselves about the living conditions of their tenants. As a result, these particular wealthy people "regulate their demands" in a way "agreeable to universal love," despite social pressures and permissions to do otherwise. For example, they charge less than what the market would allow for rents or interest on loans, and they pay better wages to their employees. Such persons, says John Woolman, do the right thing as a matter of principle, and so "do good to the poor without placing it as an act of bounty" (that is, they do the right thing because justice requires it, not because they want to be recognized and publicly thanked for it--recall James). This in turn "tends to open the channel to moderate labor in useful affairs," in accordance with true wisdom.
John Woolman says that when we demand too much labor of others in order to serve our own selfish desires for luxury, "we invade their rights as inhabitants of that world of which a good and gracious God is proprietor, under whom we are tenants."
Using imagery drawn from the agriculturally based economy of his day, he describes the risks of immoderate labor:

To labor too hard or cause others to do so, that we may live conformable to customs which Christ our Redeemer contradicted by his example in the days of his flesh [that is, Jesus lived a simple life], and which are contrary to divine order, is to manure a soil for propagating an evil seed in the earth.

Some will say, "Oh, come on, isn't he overdoing it? What's so wrong with wealth?" For one thing, wealth brings power, which can be misapplied (recall that he describes oppression as the "weight of misapplied power"):

... and here oppression, carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes [disguises] itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soil [there's the evil seed]; and ... so the seeds of war swell and sprout and grow and become strong, till much fruits are ripened.

Here we might hear an echo of the Letter of James. Where do wars come from? They come from unbridled desires.

His own decision not to pursue wealth
John Woolman practiced what he preached. When he was in his early twenties, others perceived that he was talented for a career in business, but he chose instead the humbler lot of a tailor. He had apprenticed himself to a shopkeeper to learn business, but he then had come to feel led in another direction. He writes that his mind "through the power of Truth was in a good degree weaned from the desire of outward greatness" and that he that a humble person with divine blessing might live on a little, and that

where the heart was set on greatness, success in business did not satisfy the craving, but that in common with an increase of wealth the desire of wealth increased.

Now why does success in business not satisfy the craving? John Woolman would say that the craving is ultimately misdirected. Human beings have an inherent thirst for the presence of the divine. But trusting something so intangible is scary, so they try to substitute something else to quench that thirst, such as money, success, power, or reputation. But they can't satisfy a thirst for the infinite with something finite. So they end up wanting more money, more success, and no amount is ever enough. Having begun to figure this out, John Woolman finds that his mind is "in a good degree weaned from the desire of outward greatness." And so he took up the life of a tailor, a manageable kind of work, so that he could devote more time to the inward life and be free to travel under religious concerns, particularly to labor on behalf of the oppressed in his day.

John Woolman lived through the final years and the passing on of William Penn's "Holy Experiment." Many of you already know the old saying, "The Quakers came to Philadelphia to do good, and some of them did very well indeed." John Woolman was a leader in a reform movement within the Society of Friends which called for a renewal of Friends' principles regarding peace, justice, and simplicity at a time when prosperity and war threatened their integrity.

Here are some examples of Quaker prosperity (drawn from Frederick Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House) :
Samuel Powel at his death in 1756 owned over ninety houses in Philadelphia and a large amount of land outside the city (Meeting House and Counting House, 116)

Miers Fisher (1748-1819) was a young Quaker lawyer who provided a feast for some of the Continental Congress attenders when they were in Philadelphia. His guests included John Adams, the New England Congregationalist, who wrote about the meal in his diary but eventually grew weary of listing all the dishes: "ducks, hams, chickens, beef, pig, tarts, creams, custards, jellies, fools, trifles, floating islands, beer, porter, punch, wine, and long &c." (136-137)

Wealthy Friends went in for ostentation: fancy carriages, custom made by special order, imported from England.

Wealthy Friends sent their young sons to Europe to travel, to acquire a bit of culture. "For some Quaker youths the richness of European life and society overcame the inherited concern for plainness, andy they returned from their travels glittering young dandies laden with spoils picked up from Florentine art dealers, London haberdashers, and Parisian perfumers and jewelers." (140) [I've been meaning to talk to IPO about this. This is not exactly what I had in mind earlier when I said that off-campus programs bring you back home a changed person.] Samuel Powel, the grandson, of the one already mentioned, was among such. He got so carried away with his foreign travels--he met with King George II in London, with Pope Clement XIII in Rome--that he joined the fashionable Anglican church of St. Peter's upon his return to Philadelphia. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "no dissenter rides in his coach for three generations, he inevitably falls into the Establishment." (141--quoting Emerson's journals)

This was the kind of wealth that John Woolman encountered in some of his fellow Quakers. To counter such trends, he felt led to challenge the very notion of private property itself. Although his language is, on the whole, gentler than some passages in the Letter of James, it is no less radical in its message.

These, I suggest, are some of the major ideas of "A Plea for the Poor." In essence, John Woolman calls for an inward transformation, to be redeemed from the selfish spirit, but how do people come to such a transformation?
Earlier in this talk I mentioned that I find "A Plea for the Poor" to be an essay profoundly concerned with the imagination as a vehicle for spiritual growth. Repeatedly John Woolman invites his readers to use their capacity for imagination, so much so that at points the essay reads like a series of guided meditations. That, I think, is one reason why the argument in "A Plea for the Poor" does not proceed in a linear fashion. (Once again, I've chosen a text which is not a model Humanities paper. Why do I keep doing this to you poor first-year students?)

I should acknowledge at this point that the word "imagination" is mine, not John Woolman's. The word does not appear in the essay, because it was not a popular word among Quakers at that time. Back then, for Quakers the word carried a sense of self-indulgence, like some uses of the word "fantasize" do for some today. However, over and over "A Plea for the Poor" invites its readers to use their imaginations, and to use them as the first step toward being transformed. So he uses a number of expressions that you may have noticed from your reading: "consider" (used as a synonym for a method of meditation in earlier times, when meditation was a very imagination-using undertaking), "suppose," statements in the subjunctive (if someone were to....).

With these words, John Woolman invites readers to picture themselves present at a scene, where they are not at the moment. It has not only to do with visualization, though. It also is a matter of opening themselves up to the inward responses that are evoked by the scene that they are picturing in their minds. Those inward responses may open the way to a perception of truth that they had not realized before and that realization of truth may inspire a commitment to action.

Imagination opens the way to perceiving how those who bear the burden of injustice feel. It is an invitation to identify with them and to be in solidarity with them. This practice of imagination reaches what John Woolman calls the pure witness within people. This interior witness is of divine origin. It verifies the truth of those feelings and perceptions. It says, "Yes, this is true." As a result people are moved to love those that their wider culture prefers to regard as unlovable. It convinces people of the need for justice.
We should also note that the kind of imaginative skills John Woolman advocates requires the capacity to pay attention. It is essential to sit attentively with that other reality which we are trying to embrace with compassion by the use of our imagination. That takes time. It takes practice. We might contrast this with media advertisements in our day. They may look imaginative at one level, but they do not invite us to exercise a sustained attention. The average image in a television commercial, it is said, lasts less than a second. Some suggest that this creates a desire for incessant stimulation. This does not promote the discipline of attention that is essential to the kind of imagination John Woolman is interested in. Such attentiveness in imagination is needed in a situation in which injustice parades as justice, when oppression is acceptable, proper, civil-- when it's considered bad manners to think or act otherwise. (Like the Letter of James, John Woolman is more interested in morals than in manners.)
Let's recall some of the things that John Woolman asks readers to imagine:

1. Imagine being in the situation of the poor laborers, people who are forced by circumstances to do the work of two or three people. Who, John Woolman asks, would not simplify their lives so as to make fewer demands, once they truly understood the reality of the poor?

2. Imagine the thinking of the oppressed poor:
When the poor laborer considers that the oppressive actions of the wealthy are socially acceptable, and "sees no means of redress in this world,"

how would the inward sighing of an innocent person ascend to the throne of that great, good Being, who created us all and hath a constant care over his creatures.

Recall the Letter of James: Look, the wages of the laborers who harvested your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.

By candidly considering these things, we may have some sense of the condition of innocent people overloaded by the wealthy. But he who toils one year after another to furnish others with wealth and superfluities, who labours and thinks, and thinks and labours, till by overmuch labor he is wearied and oppressed, such an one understands the meaning of that language: "Ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Note what he's doing with the Biblical passage here. He is identifying the poor of his day with the ancient Hebrews toiling as slaves under their Egyptian overlords. What does this imply about the rich of John Woolman's day? They are identified with the oppressive slavekeepers of ancient Egypt--the villains. Now usually when religious people read the Scriptures, they like to identify themselves with the winning team, the chosen people. Here John Woolman is inviting the wealthy to see themselves as the bad guys. That takes imagination because it is not the standard way of seeing yourself if you're privileged. "I'm doing well in life, so God obviously likes me better" is the temptation. Sometimes you need to use your imagination to see the truth.

3. Imagine yourself in heaven. He challenges the excuse, "I'm only making so much money so that I can give it to my children," noting that to give our children great wealth is to put them in the position to oppress others, which is dangerous for their own well being. If we think it will make us happy to leave our children in such danger, consider how we'll feel after death. If we're in heaven, then only goodness will make us happy, and so fostering conditions for injustice will not add to our celestial bliss. He describes heaven as "that state of being where there is no possibility of our taking delight in any thing contrary to the pure principle of universal love. " If we're not in heaven, then nothing much is going to make us happy except maybe an air conditioner. (Those are not his words. I wrote them on a hot humid day in the 90's in July in my unairconditioned office.)

4. Imagine a camel going through the eye of a needle, referring to the Biblical passage, "It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God." He writes,

As a camel considered under that character [that is, recognizable as a camel] cannot pass through a needle's eye, so a man who trusteth in riches and holds them for the sake of the power and distinction attending them cannot in that spirit enter the kingdom [of God].

He goes on to say that you can get a camel through a hole as small as a needle's eye, but you have to run it through a blender first. (That's a slight paraphrase.) It'll go through, but it won't look like much of a camel anymore. Likewise So man must cease from that spirit which craves riches, and be reduced into another disposition, before he inherits the kingdom, as effectually as a camel must cease from the form of a camel in passing through the eye of a needle." By asking his readers to imagine what must happen to a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he invites his readers to understand how profound a change is necessary in the thinking of the rich.

5. Imagine an island.
Suppose twenty families discover an uninhabited island and divide it equitably. Suppose nineteen of these first possessors provide for the future equitable distribution of their property "as best suited the convenience of the whole and tend[ing] to preserve love and harmony," and their descendants do likewise. But suppose also that twentieth of these first settlers gives most of his lands to his favorite son making all the other sons his tenants and dependents, and that this favored son's heirs do the same. Other family members are reduced to tenants.

Suppose this son ... demands such a portion of the fruits of the earth as may supply him and his family and some others [that is, his servants and other employees]; and [suppose] that these others ... are employed in adorning his buildings with curious engravings and paintings, preparing carriages to ride in, vessels for his house, delicious meats, fine-wrought apparel, and furniture, all suiting that distinction lately arisen between him and the other inhabitants

--a good description of Philadelphia! Eventually there will be one great landlord over a twentieth of this island and the rest poor, oppressed people. John Woolman invites his readers to imagine this family-in-ruins to persuade them of this conclusion: if we were to trace the claim of the tenth of these great landlords down to the first and find the claim supported through these ten generations by legal documents, still "we could not admit a belief into our hearts that he had a right to so great a portion of land." When God gave life to these other people, now reduced to poverty, God gave them a right to the fruits of the earth, which cannot be denied or overridden by the legal claims of their landlord. They, "as creatures of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth, had a right to part of what this great claimer held, though they had no instruments [that is, legal documentation] to confirm their right."

It doesn't require a lot of imagination on our part to see the implications of this for people today living in this society which consumes so much of the world's resources.

Imagine a war: (Here I paraphrase so that we do not get tangled in his colonial syntax and miss the power of his words.)

Consider the great oppressions and tragedies brought on by nation making war on nation throughout history.

Consider the chaos in our own time brought on by the tremendous rush of so many people to become rich.

Consider how they pervert the true use of things, how they violate the purpose of creation, making war and shedding blood.

Consider how many people are employed in work to prepare for war, to support war.

Consider the great expense and effort required for maintaining armies.

Consider the miseries brought on by war, by combat.

Consider how much other people engaged in useful work (the right use of things) have to overwork, to support not only themselves but also those in the armies and the demands of the consumptive lifestyle of their landlords (today: creditors).

Consider the hardships brought on by their having to work too hard, to support these others who are not productively engaged--

while in the meantime others are making lifelong prisoners of people from distant lands, to force them to spend the rest of their lives in the terrible condition of slaves.

Here again we see John Woolman the heir to the Letter of James: where do wars come from?

In light of all this, John Woolman invites his readers to reimagine what business is. Note how the passage I'm about to read uses terms we've looked at: oppression, labor, redemption, family.

Thus oppression in the extreme appears terrible, but oppression in more refined appearances remains to be oppression, and where the smallest degree of it is cherished it grows stronger and more extensive: that to labor for a perfect redemption from this spirit of oppression is the great business of the whole family of Christ Jesus in this world [or, given our diverse community, we might say, the whole human family].

This is what can happen when we open ourselves to the spiritual practice of a compassionate and attentive imagination.
Our time together is coming to an end. Together we have looked at three ways of reading: reading as hospitality (being a good host), as friendship (a deeper exchange), and as imaginatively entering into the world of the writer (we become the guest and open ourselves to being changed by our experiences). Whether as hosts, friends, or guests, I wish you a lifetime of the joy of reading.
I have suggested three spiritual practices: integrity of speech and action, interior watchfulness, and a compassionate use of the human capacity to imagine. I believe these practices complement one another. As in John Woolman's description of the spiritual life that we looked at earlier in this talk, these practices unite the internal and external qualities of our lives as human beings. Imagination can strengthen the commitment to integrity, particularly in integrity's dimension as social justice. Interior watchfulness can safeguard the spiritual practice of the imagination, to prevent that practice from falling into self-deception. mere entertainment, or even exploitation, if misused. The commitment to integrity protects interior watchfulness from degenerating into indulgent self-absorption. I commend these practices to you as gifts from friends of God and prophets, persons who had the courage to pursue wisdom.