Douglas V. Steere

Douglas Van Steere (1901–1995)

Douglas Van Steere was born on August 31, 1901, in Harbor Beach, Michigan, and grew up in the Midwest in a Baptist household. He took his undergraduate degree at Michigan State College in 1923, then went to Harvard, where he earned a master's degree in 1925 and, a few years later, a doctorate in philosophy. A Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford, where he came under the influence of the philosopher Baron Friedrich von Hügel's circle of thought and, more directly, the Quaker world he would eventually enter. Along the way he met Dorothy Hadley, a Quaker from Pennsylvania, and they married. The marriage, which lasted the rest of his life, became a working partnership in everything that followed.

Steere's path into Quakerism was gradual rather than sudden. He had been drawn to the Society of Friends by the quality of its worship and by the lived seriousness of its members, and he joined the Religious Society of Friends in the late 1920s. In 1928 he began teaching philosophy at Haverford College, near Philadelphia, a Quaker institution where he would remain for his entire academic career, serving as professor and chairing the philosophy department until his retirement in 1964. He was never a minister in the paid, pastoral sense; Quakers have no clergy class, and Steere moved instead as a teacher, a lay leader, and a patient visitor of other people's lives. His tradition was the unprogrammed, silence-based Quakerism of the Philadelphia area, and he was equally at home in the Christian-centered stream of that tradition and in conversation with Friends of other temperaments.

Steere's inner formation owed much to a small circle of older devotional writers. He read and later wrote about Søren Kierkegaard, whom he helped introduce to English-speaking readers, and he drew steadily on the Quaker journalists and mystics: George Fox, John Woolman, Rufus Jones. Jones, his senior colleague at Haverford, was the decisive human influence, shaping his conviction that mystical experience and practical service belong together. Steere also treasured Baron von Hügel and the classical Catholic contemplatives, and he kept up a long habit of reading widely across confessional lines.

What set Steere apart from many scholars of his era was how much of his life was spent in motion, carrying the work of reconciliation across broken borders. During the 1930s he traveled in Europe on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, and in 1936 he and Dorothy visited Germany under the Nazi regime, meeting with Jews and with Christian dissenters and Quaker contacts to learn what was happening and what help could be offered. After the war he returned repeatedly to Scandinavia and the Baltic, Finland in particular, where he worked on relief. In 1964 he was invited as a Quaker observer to the Second Vatican Council in Rome, an assignment that fit his lifelong pull toward the ecumenical. He afterward traveled in Asia, Africa, and the Soviet bloc, often at real personal inconvenience, maintaining correspondence with an enormous network of people.

He also gave himself to the long, unglamorous labor of Quaker institutions. He served on the board of the American Friends Service Committee, was a founding figure of the Friends World Committee for Consultation in its American section, and helped establish the Wider Quaker Fellowship, which kept spiritual contact with people outside formal membership who wanted the Quaker way of silence. He led retreats, sat in committee, and wrote letters at a pace that astonished friends. There was no dramatic conversion story and no condemnation by any authority; his relationship to the church was that of a faithful, reforming member who kept widening the circle.

Dorothy Steere died in 1994, and Douglas followed on March 2, 1995, in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

His Writing and Its Influence

Steere's writing grew out of his teaching and his travels rather than away from them. His earliest scholarly interests were philosophical, and through the 1930s and 1940s his most consequential literary labor was translation and introduction: with Dorothy he worked to make the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard available to English readers, and his own writing on Kierkegaard and on the nature of religious knowledge belongs to that long effort. His first widely read devotional work, Prayer and Worship (1938), came out of the Haverford classroom and the Quaker meeting, and it set the pattern for what followed: short, concrete, and written for ordinary seekers rather than specialists. On Beginning from Within (1943) and Time to Spare (1949) extended that pattern, treating the inner life and the busyness of modern people as a single problem.

The book that most fully gathered his convictions was Dimensions of Prayer, which he wrote in later years and which has remained in use in retreat houses and study groups across denominations. Its governing concern is that prayer is less a technique than an openness, and that openness to God and openness to other people are not two activities but one. Steere never accepted the division, common in his day, between the quiet life and the activist one, and the claim carried weight because his own calendar visibly honored both. He was also an editor and anthologist of considerable range. Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings, which he edited for the Classics of Western Spirituality series, shows how consciously he saw himself as a transmitter of a tradition as well as a contributor to it. Beyond the books, his letters and his oral teaching in retreats probably did as much as any volume to shape those who met him.

His immediate influence was ecumenical in the plainest sense. Quakers rarely had a representative at the center of Catholic and Protestant conversation, and Steere's presence as an observer at the Second Vatican Council, followed by years of friendship with Catholic contemplatives and theologians, helped open a door between the unprogrammed silence of Friends and the long monastic tradition. His quiet advocacy shaped how many Protestants came to regard contemplative prayer as a shared inheritance rather than a Catholic specialty. Within Quakerism, the Wider Quaker Fellowship he helped found gave a spiritual home to people who would never have joined a meeting, and its circle of correspondents, sustained largely by his own letters, stands as a form of ministry that left no institutional monument but changed many lives.

His reception since has been generally warm and steady rather than dramatic. He was never a polemicist, so there was little to reassess. Where criticism has appeared, it has come from Friends who found his Christian-centered mysticism too narrow and from evangelicals who found his catholicity of reading too wide, and he met both with the same patience. His books continue to circulate chiefly among spiritual directors, retreat leaders, and readers of the contemplative tradition, and his account of prayer as attentiveness has fed a good deal of later writing on spiritual formation.

Who should read Steere: Readers who suspect that their prayer life is either too hurried or too private, and who want a guide who held contemplation and costly service together without sentimentality. He is especially useful for those working within denominations that have little vocabulary for silence, and for anyone discouraged by the supposed choice between the inward and the active life. He is not for readers wanting a rigorous systematic theology or a sharp argument against opponents; his gift was gentleness, patience, and a long attention to other people. He is for those willing to listen before they speak.