The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. - book reviews

Leo Damrosch, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. 320pp. $39.95 (cloth).

In late October 1656, a group of men and women approached the gates of Bristol, singing hosannas before a man on a horse. He was imitating Christ's entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The man was John Nayler (16177-60), a leader of the upstart Quaker movement and onetime member of Cromwell's New Model Army. The Puritan authorities were outraged. Nayler was seized and charged with blasphemy.

Sent to London where he was the subject of a full Parliamentary debate for ten days, and found guilty of "horrid blasphemy," he received over three-hundred lashes, a brand of the letter B on the forehead, and finally a red-hot iron through his tongue. He was placed in solitary confinement for three years in Bridewell until the general amnesty of 1659. In a year he was dead, the victim of highway men as he walked toward his home in Yorkshire. The incident was a grim footnote to the terror of the English Civil War.

Now Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, has "unpacked" the meaning or meanings of that event so many years ago. The result is a book that is emotionally moving and intellectually challenging. Both contemporaries and historians of various religious persuasions have argued and puzzled over the Nayler's story. Apparently, he could never explain fully his behavior that rainy day in Bristol.

With masterful literary criticism and critical historical reconstruction, Damrosch analyzes the incident in all of its complexity. With chapters on the Quaker menace, theology, Nayler's sin and its meanings, the trial and an aftermath, the book contains paradox and irony on every page. Created out of the theological and social upheavals of the English Civil War, the Society of Friends was just one group among many that proclaimed the antinomian ideal that an internal spiritual law had replaced the external moral law of the established order, whether Anglican or Puritan. The Quakers believed that the full presence of Christ was in each of them; therefore, they were free of state and church.

The Puritan authorities were not pleased. They moved against the Quakers. The Nayler incident was one among several that worried both Puritans and Quakers, then and now. Among its many virtues, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus is a fine historiographic study of the affair and how the event's meaning has changed over time, For contemporary Quaker scholars, the event had an embarrassing quality to it. On the other hand, as Damrosch observes, Nayler's acts was an exercise in typology, a favorite rhetorical device of the Puritan divines. Order was the key concern. Puritans wanted their vision enforced by the state, to stamp out the varied heresies and blasphemies that threatened their saintly realm. The Puritans were not advocates of religious liberty. For the welfare of the state and personal salvation, an event such as the Bristol affair must not happen again.

George Fox, one of the major forces in the development of Quakerism, receives an interesting evaluation from Damrosch. "Far from inculcating a new faith or system of belief, as his followers increasingly claimed, it was his organizational skills that mattered most in a movement that had originally rejected the very idea of organization" (245). As the Society attracted more people and became more acceptable as a religious body, the presence of a radical such as Nayler had to be reevaluated, placed in perspective, ignored if possible.

Damrosch has revealed an interesting and important affair in the history of the Quakers. After all these centuries Nayler has a sensitive interpreter of that event in Bristol.

DONALD K. PICKENS

COPYRIGHT 1998 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group