Rufus M. Jones

← Encyclopedia

The household at South China, Maine, in which Rufus Matthew Jones was born on 25 January 1863, kept the older shape of American Quaker life: plain speech, plain dress, silent worship, and a discipline of inward waiting that distrusted the busy will and treated outward activity as a kind of noise the soul had to quiet before it could hear. His parents, Edwin and Mary Hoxie Jones, raised him spare and devout, and an aunt — named Peace — taught the boy that the silence of the meeting was not empty but full, a place where God could speak directly to a single attentive life. Jones spent the rest of that life arguing the tradition he was handed back out of its quietist seclusion and toward the world. The inner light, he came to insist, was not a retreat from action but the spring of it; the seed of God the first Friends had named was meant to flower in work, in service, in reform. More than any other single figure he refitted the Religious Society of Friends around that conviction, and in the doing he gave the wider history of mysticism a scholarly footing it had not had before.

Rufus Matthew Jones (1863–1948), Quaker philosopher and historian of mysticism. — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The making of a scholar-Friend

Jones was schooled at the Friends’ boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island, and took his degree at Haverford College in 1885. A year teaching at a Quaker school in upstate New York was followed by study abroad, in Germany, where he read the Rhineland and Reformation mystics in their own language and first felt the pull of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme — figures who would later anchor the long pedigree he drew for his own people. In 1893 he returned to Haverford as a professor of philosophy and held the chair for more than four decades, until 1934; in the same year he took up the editorship of the Quaker journal Friends’ Review, which the following year merged into The American Friend, the platform from which he addressed the transatlantic Society of Friends for a generation.

His private life carried heavy loss. His first wife, Sarah Coutant, whom he married in 1888, died of tuberculosis in 1899; their son Lowell died of diphtheria in 1903; a woman to whom he had become engaged in the interval died of typhoid. In 1902 he married Elizabeth Cadbury, and their daughter Mary Hoxie Jones, born in 1904, became in time his editor and the keeper of his memory. The grief is not incidental to the work. The mysticism Jones defended was never an escape from the weight of ordinary days; it was a way of finding the divine inside them, and his most-read book, the childhood memoir Finding the Trail of Life (1926), reaches back to the Maine farm precisely to locate the first openings of that presence in a boy’s everyday seeing.

Mysticism brought down from the height

Jones wrote constantly and for a general readership — close to sixty books over his career, alongside lectures on two continents — and the through-line of nearly all of it is a single, deliberately undramatic definition of his subject. Mysticism, he held, is the kind of religion that puts its weight on the immediate, first-hand awareness of relation with God: a direct and intimate consciousness of the divine presence in the depths of the soul. It is, for Jones, rarely the high ecstatic rapture of the textbooks; far more often it is the quiet and unmistakable testimony of inward peace that an ordinary believer knows. By pitching the definition this low and this wide he made mysticism describable, arguable, and — crucially for a teacher of philosophy — defensible to people who mistrusted enthusiasm. What he offered the Friends was a way of holding their faith that was at once experiential and reasonable: conviction without creed, intimacy with God without credulity.

The most consequential intellectual debt behind that program was to the psychologist and philosopher William James, whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) reached Jones at the moment he was forming his own account and gave him both a method — religion studied through its reported inner experience rather than through dogma — and a vocabulary of the genuine. The two men became personal friends, and Jones kept a portrait of James on the wall of his Haverford study. James’s empirical, individual-centered reading of religious states is everywhere in Jones’s pages, refitted to a Quaker end: where James cataloged the varieties, Jones sorted them by their fruits.

That sorting produced his signature distinction, and it is best held as his own interpretation rather than a neutral description of the historical record. Negation mysticism, as he named it, seeks union by emptying — the via negativa of the apophatic tradition, the soul climbing toward an impersonal Absolute by stripping away image, thought, and finally the self, until it is absorbed into a featureless divine dark. Jones treated this strand with respect and read it deeply, but he judged it finally less fruitful: inward-turned, prone to self-cultivation, apt to make the vision its own end. Against it he set what he called affirmation mysticism — the immediate sense of a personal God taken not as a terminus but as a beginning, a height descended from in order to feed work, service, and the reform of the world. The motto he attached to it is exact: more important than the vision is obedience to the vision. The contemplative and the humanitarian were, for Jones, not two callings but one motion with two beats.

The genealogy of the inward church

As a historian Jones set out to give Quakerism a long ancestry. The project had its roots in the Liberal-Quaker awakening dated to the 1895 Manchester Conference and in his collaboration with the young English Friend John Wilhelm Rowntree; when Rowntree died in 1905 with the work scarcely begun, Jones, joined by William Charles Braithwaite, carried forward the multi-volume history of the Society of Friends that bears the Rowntree name and that appeared across 1909 to 1921. Its governing wager was that early Quakerism should be located not within the customary story of left-wing English Puritanism but within a far older and wider current of inward, undogmatic religion.

Studies in Mystical Religion (1909) traced that current from Philo of Alexandria and the Greek fathers through the medieval mystics. Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1914) is the load-bearing volume for the Quaker claim: it gathered the Reformation-era spiritualists — Sebastian Franck, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Valentin Weigel, Sebastian Castellio, and above all Boehme, whose works flooded mid-seventeenth-century English dissent in translation — and read early Quakerism as that movement’s English flowering, the point at which the inward, anti-credal, Spirit-led religion of the Continent broke into a gathered people. The two-volume Later Periods of Quakerism (1921) carried the story to the present, and Faith and Practice of the Quakers (1927) distilled it for a popular readership. The effect of the whole was to place the Society of Friends inside the great house of Christian mysticism and the broader story of Protestant mysticism, giving a small, persecuted, plain-living body a pedigree that ran back through the Rhineland to the desert.

The genealogy was also a theology in historical dress, and this is the second register in which it must be read. Jones’s lineage reflected the liberal Christian sympathies of his own day — its preference for experience over doctrine, for the universal inward light over the particular gospel event, for continuity over rupture. Mid-century critics pressed exactly there. Geoffrey Nuttall, in The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (1946), and Hugh Barbour, in The Quakers in Puritan England (1964), relocated the first Friends squarely within radical Puritanism and found the direct influence of Boehme and the Cambridge Platonists on George Fox far thinner than Jones had supposed. Later scholars — among them Rosemary Moore, Carole Spencer, and Ben Pink Dandelion — have variously stressed the apocalyptic-prophetic urgency, the distinctive plain speech, or the holiness intensity of the early movement, and have treated Jones’s mysticism as a twentieth-century overlay rather than a recovery of how the first Friends understood themselves. The point has teeth: Fox and Robert Barclay associated the very word mystic with Catholic monastic spirituality and would almost certainly have refused it, preferring their own vocabulary of the Light, the Seed, the Truth, the Power. What Jones recovered, on this reading, was less the seventeenth century than a usable past for the twentieth — though his framing proved so powerful that it shaped Liberal-Quaker self-understanding for decades and fed back into the mainstream history of mysticism through writers such as Evelyn Underhill.

The vision obeyed

The test of affirmation mysticism, by its own logic, lay outside the meeting house. When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Jones helped gather Friends into the American Friends Service Committee, founded that April, and served as its first chairman. Its initial charge was practical and Quaker to the bone: to give conscientious objectors a way to serve that did not require them to kill, and to carry relief into the wreckage of France. After the armistice the work turned to the defeated enemy. Herbert Hoover, himself a Friend, appealed to Jones to lead the feeding of starving German and Austrian children, and the AFSC, with its British counterpart the Friends Service Council, mounted the great relief operation Germans came to call the Quäkerspeisung — at its height feeding something near a million children a day across more than a thousand centers, an act of organized compassion toward a recent foe that embodied, in soup kitchens, the theology Jones had argued on the page. In 1947 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the AFSC and the Friends Service Council; Jones traveled to receive the honor for the American body, and died the following year, on 16 June 1948.

The shape of the life is its own argument. The boy taught in a Maine silence that God speaks directly to the waiting soul grew into the scholar who gave that silence a history reaching back to Eckhart, and into the founder of a relief agency that turned the inner light into bread. For Jones these were never separable enterprises. The descent from the height was the whole point of the ascent; the consciousness of the divine presence was authenticated not by the sweetness of the moment but by the obedience it compelled afterward, in the ordinary and exhausting labor of feeding the hungry and refusing the sword. The inward life and the humanitarian life were, in his understanding, a single continuous demand — and the demand, by his own logic, is never discharged, only answered again each morning that another child needs to be fed.

Texts and scholarship

Jones died in 1948, and his major works — written in the great burst between 1904 and 1930 — have long passed into the public domain in the United States and, since 2019, in the United Kingdom and Europe. His Studies in Mystical Religion (1909) and Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1914) are the indispensable statements of his historical thesis, with Later Periods of Quakerism (1921) completing the Rowntree History; his small devotional book Spiritual Energies in Daily Life (1922) is the most accessible window onto the affirmation mysticism in plain form. The landmark biographies remain Elizabeth Gray Vining’s Friend of Life: The Biography of Rufus M. Jones (1958) and the later study by Thomas C. Kennedy (2001). The critical reassessment of Jones’s mysticism reading runs through Nuttall (1946) and Barbour (1964) and into the present Quaker-studies literature; Daniel Bassuk’s Rufus Jones and Mysticism (1978) remains a useful entry into the affirmation/negation distinction and its sources in William James. For the institutional and doctrinal background — the inner light, waiting worship, the testimonies — see Quakers and the Religious Society of Friends, whose substance Jones spent his life interpreting rather than inventing.

→ In the library: Woolman — The Journal of John Woolman (1774) · Penn — No Cross, No Crown (1682)

→ Related: Protestant Mysticism · Gnosis · Christianity · Mysticism · Quakers · Quakerism Religious Society Of Friends · William James · Meister Eckhart · Jacob Boehme · Apophatic Theology · Evelyn Underhill · Christian Mysticism · Comparative Mysticism · Traditionalism Perennialism