Hill: The
Sense of 17th Century English Radicals
The
20th century's leading English historian of the 17th century, Christopher
Hill, gives a detailed and complex account of dissenters in his 1972
The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during
the English Revolution. The thing is,
there were so many different kinds of dissenters in that messy century
that things get complicated. Don't worry about the many names here, just
notice how this fits with the comments of Berman, who only follows the
big names in the scientific revolution. Hill sketches many disruptive movements,
most of which were articulated in terms of some particular reading of the
Bible, and often a belief in some secret ancient knowledge (hermeticism).
So cool and level-headed a
sceptic as John Selden was at once a supporter of the new heliocentric
astronomy [Copernicus] and a great admirer of Robert Fludd [alchemist].
Francis Bacon himself had been inspired by the Hermetic [=ancient knowledge
of magic] religio-social ideal of controlling nature. Although he rejected
the superstitious claims of magic and astrology, which attempted to dominate
nature from outside, he thought they contained a core of knowledge about
the physical universe which could be used. He looked to the example of
craftsmen as a model of scientific experiment: nature cannot 'be commanded
except by being obeyed'.
Bacon's influence was spread wide in England after
1640, thanks especially to the exertions of Samuel Hartlib, and to the
invitation to Comenius to come to England. The Comenian fusion of Baconianism
and Hermetic natural philosophy laid great emphasis on the social and democratic
possibilities of the new science. Hartlib for two decades popularized in
England a programme of social, economic, religious and educational reform
which influenced men of the calibre of Boyle and Petty. In the euphoria
of the early 1640s this programme, which appeared to have the blessing
of the Parliamentary leaders, joined with millenarian enthusiasm in creating
visions of a Utopia in England soon. (Cf. Hugh Peter's recommendation
to Parliament in 1646 that the state should further 'the new experimental
philosophy'.). The Comenians appealed especially to craftsmen, who formed
the bulk of the religious sects, by their call for a wide extension of
educational opportunity, for new teaching methods (using the vernacular,
not Latin; emphasizing things, not words; experience, not books); for pooling
and making widely available all existing scientific information (notably
via Hartlib's Office of Addresses) and for directing science to the relief
of man's estate - just as much as by their desire for peace and tolerance
among protestants, and for union against the dark forces of papal reaction.
'We are all fellow-citizens of the world, all of one blood, all of us human
beings,' wrote Comenius in words which Winstanley and Webster echoed. This
was what attracted Boyle in 1646-7. The members of Hartlib's 'Invisible
College' practised 'so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything
called man', taking 'the whole body of mankind for their care'.
Mr [K.V.] Thomas [1971 Religion and the Decline
of Magic] has shown how widespread was interest in alchemy and astrology
in the 1640s and 50s, not least among religious and political radicals....
Mr. Thomas gives evidence to show that Richard Overton sought political
advice from the astrologer Lilly at a crucial stage in April 1648; other
serious rational politicians who consulted professional astrologers include
Cornet Joyce, Mrs. John Lilburne, Hugh Peter, several Agitators, Anabaptists,
Ranters and Quakers. Lawrence Clarkson took up astrology in 1650; John
Pordage practised it. So did the members of Hartlib's Invisible College;
Gerrard Winstanley [of the communist Diggers] and John Webster recommended
that it should be taught. George Fox [of the Quakers] in 1649 was no less
worried by the influence of astrologers than of priests....
Alchemy/chemistry, and especially chemical medicine,
had radical associations. For Familists and Behmenists, so influential
on Ranters and Quakers, alchemy was an outward symbol of internal regeneration.
John Webster, Erbery's heir, had been a pupil of the Transylvanian chemist
Hans Hunneades, who worked at Gresham College. Webster also pressed the
study of alchemy and natural magic on the universities, and was attacked
as a proponent of the 'Familistical-Levelling Magical temper'. One alchemist,
of whom Sir Isaac Newton thought very highly, hoped in 1645 that 'within
a few years', thanks to alchemy, 'money will be like dross', and so 'that
prop of the antichristian Beast will be dashed in pieces ... These things
will accompany our so long expected and so suddenly approaching redemption,'
when 'the new Jerusalem shall abound with gold in the streets'. That was
nearly as subversive as Winstanley [i.e., the Diggers].
Chemistry became almost equated with radical theology.
Webster himself hailed Erbery as 'chemist of truth and gospel'. Francis
Osborne in 1656 said that the Socinians were 'looked upon as the most chemical
and rational part of our many divisions'. Samuel Fisher in 1662 praised
'that chemical divinity, that God is declaring forth the mysteries of his
kingdom by', in reply to Bishop Gauden's sneer at 'canting or chemical
divinity, which bubbles forth many specious notions in fine fancies and
short-lived conceptions'. Richard Overton in 1643 had proposed a scientific
experiment to test the immortality of the soul; George Fox and Edward Burrough
in 1658 similarly proposed experiments to test the miracle of the mass.
Henry Pinnell translated Paracelsus in 1657, with an Apology in which the
translator praised the Hermetic philosophy and insisted that, so far from
making 'void the Word of the Lord by his works', he wanted to 'establish
the one by the other'. 'Every part of the creation doth its part to publish
the great mysteries of man's salvation.' One of the Fellows of the short-lived
Durham College was Israel Tonge, an alchemist; another, William Sprigge,
agitated for the teaching of chemistry in the universities.
So astrology, alchemy and natural magic contributed,
together with Biblical prophecy, to the radical outlook. In 1646 Benjamin
Bourne declared that 'the Familists are very confident that by knowledge
of astrology and strength of reason they shall be able to conquer over
the whole world'. As Mr Thomas points out, in the astrologers' 'assumption
that the principles underlying the development of human society were capable
of human explanation we can detect the germ of modern sociology'. 'Astrology,
though beginning as a system of explanation, ... ended as one which held
out the prospect of control.' That is why conservative theologians were
so hostile to it. It also explains its attractions for the radicals: rather
like sociology in mid-twentieth century English universities.
Reliance on dreams and visions - Descartes and Lord
Herbert of Cherbury no less than Fox or Winstanley - was also not entirely
irrational. The sudden insight, summing up mental processes that have been
continuing for some time, is something we are all familiar with. It could
seem like a revelation, especially when it came in the hours of darkness.
But if you believed the insight was divinely inspired, this gave it authority
both for you and for your audience. So new and unconventional insights
could be propounded and accepted. A group which Fox met in 1647, who 'relied
much on dreams', ultimately became Quakers. Many Anabaptists, Ranters and
Quakers practised faith healing, a layman's medicine, or rather the medicine
of lay believers. But the miraculous cures claimed by the early Quakers
were suppressed by their successors: Penn and Ellwood do not refer to them.
The supporters of alchemy, astrology and magic were
unfortunate in backing the right horse at the wrong time. Alchemy was to
develop into the science of chemistry, though it had to wait for the next
great upheaval of the French Revolution for this to be completed. Social
sciences have emerged more slowly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
and they are not conscious of any debt to astrology. But the cosmic hopes
which the Hermetic philosophy seemed to open up were not wholly unreasonable
in the mid-seventeenth century when magic and science were still advancing
side by side. Isaac Newton first turned to the study of mathematics in
order to investigate the scientific claims of judicial astrology. He remained
interested in alchemy throughout the creative period of his life. 'The
last of the magicians,' Lord Keynes called him. From our twentieth-century
vantage point we see the path of science advancing inexorably through the
mechanical philosophy and the gradual elimination of magic from all spheres
- except, unfortunately, the core of Newton's law of gravity, the unexplained
'force' which acts by apparently non-material, non-mechanical means across
vast distances. Ignoring this, we assume that the triumph of mechanism
was inevitable from the start. But Winstanley, for whom God and matter
were one, said 'God is still in motion', and urged us to pursue 'the motional
knowledge of a thing as it is'. For 'truth is hid in every body'. Great
though the achievements of the mechanical philosophy were, a dialectical
element in scientific thinking, a recognition of the 'irrational' (in the
sense of the mechanically inexplicable) was lost when it triumphed, and
is having to be painfully recovered in our own century. We smile when we
read Samuel Hering asking for special university courses on Jacob Boehme;
but at least one modern historian of science has suggested that it was
exactly Boehme's sort of leaven that was missing in English scientific
thinking during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The radicals
were wrong; but they are beginning to look less stupidly wrong than they
did once.
A generation ago even so sensitive a commentator
as Sabine was a little embarrassed by Winstanley's suggestion that nature
itself had been corrupted by the Fall of Man. He dismissed as 'naive' and
'simple-minded' the idea that natural disasters like 'the risings up of
waters and the breakings forth of fire to waste and destroy are but that
curse, or the works of man's own hands that rise up and run together to
destroy their maker, and torment him that brought the curse forth'. Winstanley,
however, as so often, is putting startlingly new content into traditional
forms of language. If we bear in mind that for him the Fall was caused
by covetousness and set up kingly power, we may rather think today that
this is one of the profoundest of Winstanley's insights. As we contemplate
our landscape made hideous by neon signs, advertisements, pylons, wreckage
of automobiles; our seas poisoned by atomic waste, their shores littered
with plastic and oil; our atmosphere polluted with carbon dioxide and nuclear
fall-out, our peace shattered by supersonic planes; as we think of nuclear
bombs which can 'waste and destroy' to an extent that Winstanley never
dreamed of -we can recognize that man's greed, competition between men
and between states, are really in danger of upsetting the balance of nature,
of poisoning and destroying the fabric of the globe. We are better placed
to appreciate Winstanley's insight, that in a competitive society the state
is just a part of the competitive system. Perhaps it was over-simplified
to believe that harmony and beauty will be restored to nature, as well
as society, as soon as community of property is established. But what are
the chances of priority being given to 'the beauty of the commonwealth'
before there has been a change in social relations? For Winstanley social
revolution is the same thing as men learning to 'live in community with
the globe and ... the spirit of the globe', in accordance with the laws
of nature: letting Reason rule in man as it does in the cosmos.
Rejection of non-mechanistic explanations was in
part - and only in part - ideologically motivated. Stable laws of nature
went with a stable society. Now that God was located within every human
heart, it was inconvenient to have him intervening in the day-to-day running
of the universe. Both popular magic and catholic magic upset the ordered
cosmos. After 1660 everything connected with the political radicals had
to be rejected, including 'enthusiasm', prophecy, astrology as a rival
system of explanation to Christianity, alchemy and chemical medicine. Proponents
of the latter were dismissed as 'fanatics in physic', 'a sort of men not
of academical but mechanic education', supporters of 'the late rebellion',
who wanted to open medicine to 'batters, cobblers and tinkers'. Naturally
enough, as the iatrochemists and alchemists failed to win acceptance, as
they found themselves spurned by official scientific bodies, so they became
increasingly wild and irrational. Thus society's verdicts are self-confirming.
It was 'plebeians and mechanics' whom Bishop Parker
denounced in 1681 for having 'philosophized themselves into principles
of impiety'. They 'read their lectures of atheism in the streets and highways'.
I was guilty of undue foreshortening when in my Intellectual Origins
of the English Revolution I described the mechanical philosophy as
the philosophy of rude mechanicals. I should have differentiated more sharply
between 'mechanic atheism' and the mechanical philosophy proper. One part
of the reason for the acceptance of the latter was that it seemed to offer
an academic alternative to the mechanic atheism to which some of the radical
congregations under mechanic preachers were tending.
The triumph of the mechanical philosophy ultimately
created further problems for Christianity, as some parsons had foreseen
it would. Witches, malignant spirits and the devil had been useful explanations
for the existence of evil and suffering, useful scapegoats. Who was to
blame if they were not? 'Deny spirits and you are an atheist,' divines
said.