Florence Nightingale: The Making of a Radical Theologian

At seventy, Florence Nightingale wrote to a close friend, “When very many years ago I planned a future, my one idea was not organizing a hospital but organizing a religion.”

History did not listen to her. Everyone knows the Florence Nightingale who took nurses to the Crimean War and returned to found modern nursing. Few know the Florence who wrote a ‘new religion’ for England’s poor; or the Florence who penned a fifty page tirade about how Victorian families ‘murdered’ their daughters by keeping them in the drawing room; or the Florence who was writing a book on medieval mystics; or the Florence who retired to her home as an invalid at thirty-eight and, from there, orchestrated incredible poor reform around the globe for fifty years after Crimea.

There are many books written about Florence Nightingale, but most biographers have paid little attention to her writings on religion. The few who do usually followed official biographer Sir Edward Cook’s designation of them as a by-work, something to fill her mind while waiting to become a nurse. Eight hundred hand-written pages in dialogue with the scientific and theological debates of her day is hardly a piece of embroidery to fill the time – especially when her topics included the concept of God, universal law, God’s will and human will, sin and evil, family life, women, and life after death. Benjamin Jowett, a theologian and Plato expert from Oxford, read Florence’s manuscript and called it “the imprint of a new mind.” Social reformer John Stuart Mill also read the draft and quoted it in a groundbreaking parliamentary speech on women’s rights.

This book, the first to put Florence squarely on theological shelves, recognizes Florence as a woman with a religious vocation to the poor, including care of the sick poor, rather than a nurse who was also religious. Part of Florence’s vocation to the poor was a “new theology” that enabled them to seek the Spirit within them and work to change their lot, rather than accepting Church of England theology that said God ordained who would be rich and poor, thus negating poor reform.

EXERPTS FROM REVIEWS:

“Val Webb’s carefully crafted study of Florence Nightingale’s religious works, letters, and diaries reveal some surprising and little known aspects of this great nineteenth-century woman pioneer reformer. Her posthumously published writings are evidence of a strong religious vocation and of unexpectedly radical theological thought, resonating more with contemporary feminist theology and process thought than with the Victorian ideas of her own day. This book shows the complex personality, brilliant mind, and deeply religious motivation of this God-intoxicated woman, who is both a mystic and a militant, an original thinker and great innovative doer. Much of this comes as a great surprise and challenge to the reader. Webb’s study is a fine example of the new kind of scholarship on Florence Nightingale. It is a most vivid account and a truly engrossing read.”
Ursula King, Director, Centre for Comparative Studies in Religion & Gender, Bristol University, England

“In this manuscript, so well researched and rigorously documented, Florence Nightingale comes alive as a deeply spiritual searcher for Truth.”
John Donohoe, Professor Emeritus of Urology, Indiana University School of Medicine, USA.

“[This] is a persuasive and well-written text which makes the reader re-examine the common myths and paints a more inclusive portrait of one of the western world’s great icons … But, like the best books, be they biography or fiction, it also takes its readers in new and unexpected directions and raises matters that they may never have thought about. Neither dull pious biography nor abstruse theological treatise, this admirable book is above all a lively narrative of a woman who demands our respect in many more ways than we had ever realised.”
Alison Cotes, Brisbane Courier Mail, Australia

“Val Webb takes the legendary lamp from the sentimental image of Nightingale, to shed new light on the previously undervalued passion of her life. Here we meet Nightingale the mystic and theologian, activist and intellectual, who drank from her own well of experience with impoverished and suffering people. Webb’s historical and narrative expertise recovers Nightingale’s voice from amongst her Victorian contemporaries to introduce us to a truly innovative and constructive theologian in her own right.”
Rev. Dr. Nancy Victorin-Vangerud, Lecturer in Theology, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia

 This is one of those delightful books that shatter one’s preconceived notions … [Florence’s] passionate commitment to God’s call in her life has been trivialized or minimised by previous biographers … this enthralling book by Val Webb will at last ensure that her voice is heard.
Robert Wilson, Anglican News, Australia

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For Australian viewers, if you want a signed copy of this book, please send a cheque or money order made out to Val Webb for $60 Australian ($50 plus $10 postage and handling) to: P.O. Box 1084, Mudgee 2850, NSW.  If it is a gift for a friend, write what you would like written along with the signature.

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QUOTATIONS FROM FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE:

 
“Life your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things grow by God’s law out of the smallest.”

“To be nailed to this continuation and exaggeration of my present life, without the hope of another, would be intolerable to me. Voluntarily to put it out of my power never to be able to seize the chance of forming myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide … I think that God has clearly marked out some to be single women as He has others to be wives, and has organized them accordingly for their vocation.”

“Today I am 30 – the age at which Christ began his mission. Now no more childish things. No more love, no more marriage. Now Lord let me think only of They Will, what Thou willist me to do. Oh Lord, Thy Will, Thy Will.”

“[Reading aloud in the drawing room is] the most miserable exercise of the human intellect … It is like lying on one’s back, with one’s hands tied and having liquid poured down one’s throat. Worse than that, because suffocation would immediately ensue and put a stop to this operation. But no suffocation would stop the other.”

“Unless you make a life which shall be a manifestation of your religion, it does not much signify what you believe.”

“God surrounds us. His Law is ever at work, bringing about the right, so all will be well. Without this conviction, the present world would be fearful.”

“Still feel that it is such a blessing to have been called, however unworthy, to be the “handmaid of the Lord” … I see women, so far better and cleverer than I, wasting their whole lives, not in improving but in deteriorating their own families … I have always felt, I could live 1,000 lives to prove to Him how inestimable the blessing I think it is to be “called.”

FULL REVIEWS

Review by Alison Cotes, Journalist, Brisbane, Australia. 

The world knows her as the Lady with the Lamp, but there was much more to Florence Nightingale than this iconic image.

 In fact, she spent less than two years of her life in the Crimea, and a year after she returned to England at the age of 36, she declared herself an invalid and took to her bed until she died, aged ninety, in 1910.

 This bed was probably more of a retreat from the world than a genuine bed of pain, for from it she produced influential works on Army reform, sanitation in India and Poor Law reform, and assisted in organising Army hospitals for the American Civil War.

Some of this we know, as we already know of her family’s refusal to accept her deeply-felt vocation, and her close friendship with some of England’s leading intellectuals like John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Jowett.

But how many of us know that she was a radical theologian and a devoted Christian, who felt she had a call from God, and who toyed with joining a Roman Catholic order of nuns? Or that she cried aloud against the restraints that were put upon her as a woman in Victorian England, on women who had “passion, intellect, moral activity – and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?’’

She demanded a moratorium on the word “God’’, claiming that it carried too much theological baggage; made personal vows of obedience and chastity on her thirtieth birthday; and, believing that Jesus was not the only incarnation of God, longed for a woman Christ to save people from social and moral error. 

As her first biographer, Sir Edward Cook, said of her, “she was not `the lady with the lamp’. She was the lady with the brain – one of those rare personalities who reshape the contours of life.’’

Later biographers portrayed her as a merciless possessed woman – in his “Eminent Victorians’’, published in 1918, Lytton Strachey caricatured her thus: “One has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if he is not careful, she will kill him with overwork.’’

In her exciting new book about Florence Nightingale, Val Webb doesn’t set out either to prove or disprove the conflicting images of the Ministering Angel or the Woman Possessed, but to provide an even deeper insight into the mind and work of this extraordinary woman, who edited Benjamin Jowett’s translations of Plato, wrote a book on the medieval mystics, and attacked traditional Christian theology.

“Florence Nightingale: the making of a radical theologian’’, is a persuasive and well-written text which makes the reader re-examine the common myths and paints a more inclusive portrait of one of the western world’s great icons.  But, like the best books, be they biography or fiction, it also takes its readers in new and unexpected directions and raises matters that they may never have thought about. It got me quite excited about Pre-Adamite theory, for example, an obscure 19^th century theological doctrine that explains the early white explorers’ idea of Australia as Terra Nullius.

Neither dull pious biography nor abstruse theological treatise, this admirable book is above all a lively narrative of a woman who demands our respect in many more ways than we had ever realised.

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