Abstract
This chapter explores connections between visionary moments in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse and the experience of “Inner Light” and “Divine Radiance” central to Quaker mysticism. Emily Griesinger looks at mysticism in the writings of Woolf’s Quaker aunt Caroline Stephen, and historically in the Quaker movement in England, and also explores Woolf’s treatment of the lighthouse and light imagery in the novel. While Woolf’s usage may express modernist rejection of Christ as the “Light of the World,” Griesinger argues that it also conveys Woolf’s ambivalence toward secularism and a longing for transcendence, the Divine, or Ultimate Truth.
Have you ever seen a revolving lighthouse at night from across the sea, with its steadfast light alternately hidden and displayed? […] Its appearances and disappearances are a language by which the human care that devised it can speak to the watchers and strugglers at sea. That care does not wax and wane with the light; but in its unchanging vigilance, it provides a means of communication which no unaltering beam could afford. And in like manner, surely, while we endure as seeing Him who is invisible, and rest on His unchangeableness, we may welcome with filial thankfulness and awe, the tender touches by which from time to time, and as we can bear it, He makes His presence felt in our lives; speaking to us in a language understood by the trusting heart alone. (49–50)
—Caroline Emelia Stephen, The Vision of Faith (1911)
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Notes
- 1.
Alison Lewis notes that from her youth, Virginia Woolf seems to have accepted her father’s demeaning view of her aunt, whom the children often derided as “Silly Milly,” “Nun,” or “The Quaker” (2000, 3). Lewis argues that her views shifted later in life as she gained respect for Caroline’s independence as an unmarried woman writer (4–5).
- 2.
Christian iconography pervades Woolf’s writing, says Knight, and although her fiction “includes testimonies of belief and disbelief,” these are “more characterized by a tone of inquiry, of questioning […] Woolf’s readers are expected to take an interest in the questions as questions, the search as a search” (2007, 31). Hence, where Christianity is concerned, her fiction “register[s] itself neither as an affirmation nor a negation, but rather as a vexation” (43).
- 3.
Critics who have recognized the influence of Quaker mysticism and specifically Caroline Stephen include Jane Marcus, Alison Lewis, and most recently Kathleen Heininge, whose work I discuss further on.
- 4.
Jane de Gay traces this history in her article “Challenging the Family Script” and in her book Virginia Woolf and the Clergy. For a helpful “family tree” showing Woolf’s heritage in the Clapham Sect, see Hermione Lee (1997, xx–xxi). See also my discussion of Woolf and Christianity in “Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway” (Griesinger 2015).
- 5.
Woolf uses the term “moments of being” to distinguish incidents of illumination from the “cotton wool” of everyday life. The “shock-receiving capacity” that allows her to penetrate behind the “cotton wool” and put into words what she finds there is what makes her a writer. She explains the process at length in “A Sketch of the Past” (1985a, 70–75).
- 6.
Following the usage of British church historian David W. Bebbington, the term “evangelical” is capitalized when it refers to Anglican Evangelicals. Lower-case “evangelical” is the broader term referring to an international network of professing Christians who share similar theological beliefs dating from the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century (Bebbington 2005, 9–11). For more on these distinctions, see Elizabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century Novel (1979).
- 7.
Jones alludes to the experience of George Fox as recorded in his Journal: “As I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy” (Fox [1694] 1975, 11).
- 8.
Jones is citing Caroline Stephen, Light Arising (1908, 128).
- 9.
According to Jones, “radiance” was Caroline’s favorite word: “It appears in everything she wrote. It was a trait in the character both of her father and her mother [Virginia Woolf’s grandparents on her father’s side], and she calls everyone to an experience of ‘the central glow of Light and Love,’ when the innermost depth is expressed no longer in words but by ‘a living radiance’” (1921, 2: 970). Modern Quakerism has further developed such ideas in ways we cannot go into here, except to note overall disagreement about the authority of mystical experience versus the authority of Scripture, and whether the Inner Light is always the same as the Light of Christ testified to in the Gospels. Nevertheless, the idea that a direct and personal revelation is available to all people, and that this inward experience is transformative in and of itself without priests, sermons, or sacraments is central. Citing the 2002 Book of Discipline for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Pink Dandelion records, “The Light Within is the fundamental and immediate experience for Friends. It is that which guides each of us in our everyday lives and brings us together as a community of faith. It is, most importantly, our direct and unmediated experience of the Divine” (2008, 69).
- 10.
There are two copies of Quaker Strongholds in the Leonard and Virginia Woolf Library housed at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, Washington. One is the third edition, published in 1891, and cited throughout this chapter, inscribed to Virginia from Caroline Stephen; the other, published in 1890, belonged to her father, Sir Leslie Stephen. According to Heininge, both copies were “uncut” from about midway to the end, suggesting that father and daughter read them together, stopping at the same place in the text (2011, 20–21). If this theory is correct, then we can assume Virginia received Quaker Strongholds in 1899, when she was seventeen years old, as indicated in the inscription. Her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, the model for Mrs. Ramsay in the novel, died in 1895, followed by a decade in which her father grieved, as does Mr. Ramsay in the novel. As Leslie Stephen died in 1904, their reading together of Quaker Strongholds must have occurred between 1899 and 1904. In a visit to the Woolf Library housed at WSU, I examined both copies of Quaker Strongholds, as well as other books in this 9000+ collection, including several by Caroline Stephen as well as other works by or about Quaker authors or concerning Quaker history such as The Journal of George Fox, Robert Barclay’s Apology, The Journal of John Woolman, and Ray Strachey’s biography of her “Quaker Grandmother” Hannah Whitall Smith. For a complete list of titles in the collection, see The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-Title Catalog (King and Miletic-Vejzovic 2003).
- 11.
“Using the word in a very wide sense we may find a ‘religious’ element in her novels,” writes Bell, “she tended to be, as she herself put it, ‘mystical’; but she entertained no comfortable beliefs. That the Universe is a very mysterious place she would certainly have allowed, but not that this mysteriousness allows us to suppose the existence of a moral deity or of a future life” (1972, 136).
- 12.
See Marcus, “The Niece of a Nun” (1983, 24).
- 13.
The idea of the lighthouse as salvific is not original to Christianity but goes back to the ancient world. The first lighthouse is believed to have been the Pharos of Alexandria, built on the Island of Pharos around 280 BC, later deemed one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This 350-foot tower had a bonfire on top to warn sailors away from dangerous sandbars as they entered the harbor of Alexandria (“Pharos of Alexandria”). In the Old Testament the image of the lamp represents divine light, for example, in II Samuel 22:29: “for thou art my lamp, O Lord; and the Lord will lighten my darkness.” In the New Testament Jesus calls himself the “light of the world” in John 9:5, which became the inspiration for William Holman Hunt’s famous painting of Christ “The Light of the World” (“Lamps, Lanterns, and Lights” 2005). Woolf saw a replica of this painting at Hunt’s home in 1905 (Woolf 1985b, 176–77). For more on lighthouse imagery and Christianity, see Philip Kosloski, “Lighthouses, An Ancient Symbol of Christianity” (2017).
- 14.
See Leslie Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology published in 1893. A good biography that discusses Stephen’s position at length is Noel Annan’s Leslie Stephen: His Thoughts and Character in Relation to His Time (1952).
- 15.
“Domesticity essentially replaced religion for [Leslie] Stephen,” Gaipa contends, “and he made this exchange explicit when he wrote to Julia Duckworth in anticipation of their marriage: ‘I have not got any Saints and you must not be angry if I put you in the place where my Saints ought to be’” (2003, 18). The letter is included in Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book ([1893] 2010, 53).
- 16.
For further discussion of this aspect of Christian mysticism, see Evelyn Underhill’s chapters “Mysticism and Symbolism” (1911, 136–140) and “Ecstasy and Rapture” (1911, 358–379). Connections between human marriage and mystic union are the focus of St. Bernard’s mystical sermons on the Old Testament “Song of Songs.” In these sermons “the Divine Word is the Bridegroom and the human soul is the Bride” (Underhill 1911, 137). See also “Spiritual Marriage” in The Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (Scorgie 2011, 601).
- 17.
Science and evolutionary theory eroded orthodox religion during the nineteenth century. Yet, for many Victorians “the triumph of the new materialism (represented by worldviews like utilitarianism, positivism, and naturalism) failed to provide the emotional security that religion had offered, leaving them desirous of some other source of spiritual comfort” (Gaipa 2003, 6). Such sources might include theosophy and other forms of the occult. Lily summons the dead Mrs. Ramsay in what Gaipa describes as a “séance” during which she “avails herself of spiritualist tools: she falls into a trance, and even facilitates spiritual communion by engaging in a sort of telepathy—as demonstrated in her silent communications with Mr. Carmichael” (2003, 32). For a similar reading of Woolf’s mysticism through a spiritualist lens, see Julie Kane, “Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf” (1995).
- 18.
“A Sketch of the Past” (Woolf 1985a, 70–75).
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Griesinger, E. (2019). Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In: Groover, K. (eds) Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8_8
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