SOURCE: "Sowing in Hope: The Relevance of Theology to Gerrard Winstanley's Political Programme," The Seventeeenth Century, Vol. VI, No. 2, Autumn, 1991, pp. 189-204.

[In the following essay, Bradstock maintains that Winstanley's "radically unorthodox" theology contributed significantly to the development of the Digger communist platform—contrary, Bradstock contends, to what many modern critics allow.]

Since Gerrard Winstanley's writings first became a subject for serious study at the end of the nineteenth century, one question which has regularly exercised his interpreters is how far his political philosophy is shaped by or grounded upon theological premises, and exactly what those premises are. The question is both an interesting and an important one, since it reaches right to the heart of the Diggers' whole project to cultivate the common land and restore a true commonwealth on English soil. We can state the question in the form of two propositions. Did Winstanley's religious beliefs provide the main conceptual framework for his understanding of the world, and underpin his political and economic programme, as a cursory glance at his writings might suggest? Or can the religious language he uses be viewed as incidental or even cosmetic flourishes, sops, maybe, to the milieu in which he lived, such that his political philosophy could be restated, without alteration to its substance, in wholly secular language? This essay seeks to assess the validity of these two positions, and concludes that, radically unorthodox though Winstanley's theology certainly was, it did play a far more significant role in shaping the Digger's praxis than many of his latter-day admirers have been prepared to acknowledge.

One of the stoutest defences of Winstanley as a fundamentally theological thinker, whose religious convictions remained central to his political activity throughout the digging experiment and beyond, has been made by the Australian scholars Mulligan, Graham and Richards.¹ They do not dispute that Winstanley, in stressing the immanence of God, rejected much traditional theology, but caution against leaping from there to the assumption that he gave up theology altogether: it was rather the case that he adopted an 'alternative theology'. Indeed, it is dangerous to try to see Winstanley as a 'secular revolutionary', they argue, since this can only be done by 'making allowances' for his language in a manner advocated, for example, by Christopher Hill. For modem readers to gain a correct understanding of Winstanley it is essential that they accept the Digger's own explanation of his terms, and not impose their own 'secular and rationalistic meanings' on his language.² Further, they argue, Winstanley's theological position remained more or less constant throughout his digging career: even though his last work, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, suggests a 'shift in emphasis' in Winstanley's thinking, the theological beliefs to be found in Truth Lifting up its Head, which was written six months prior to the digging, remained central to his thought throughout the remainder of his literary career.³

Other scholars have reached broadly similar conclusions. George H. Sabine, for example, who edited first complete collection of Winstanley's writings,⁴ considers that, with the publication of The New Law of Righteousnes (three months after Truth Lifting …) his 'train of thought is complete'; and even though The Law of Freedom, published some eighteen months after the digging experiment failed, is 'somewhat different' from the tracts written during the experiment itself, it represents only a 'change of emphasis', not 'of the convictions that lay behind Winstanley's communism'.⁵

Elmen⁶ is another who recognizes a 'transition' in Winstanley, with the author of the more mystical early tracts becoming concerned increasingly with 'practical communism', but, like Mulligan et al and Sabine, he considers this merely a 'change in emphasis' which does not undermine the 'unity of his position'. Indeed, Elmen argues, the motivation behind the digging, and the degree of certainty Winstanley had about its ultimate success, cannot be understood apart from reference to his religious beliefs: 'Because his views were fundamentally theological, Winstanley hopefully undertook a task which economic considerations alone would have told him was impossible: the communization of the English land'.⁷ Woodhouse,⁸ Hudson⁹ and Schenk¹⁰ have also noted the centrality of Winstanley's theology to his programme. The main driving force behind the Diggers, Woodhouse argues, was a 'desire to establish the reign of righteousness', and their 'view of secular life', 'interpretation of the past', and 'vision of the future' are dominated by 'the direct inferences from their religious thought'.¹¹ According to Hudson, Winstanley 'had begun his propagandist career as an exponent of a chiliastic mysticism', and 'he retained this emphasis to the end'. Following Woodhouse he notes that theological concerns were Winstanley's main preoccupation, but draws the rather surprising conclusion that the Digger was not a 'practical reformer' but represented a 'nonpolitical variation' of the 'general eschatological expectation' of his time.¹² For Schenk a preoccupation with mystical theology is also discernable throughout Winstanley's writing career, and even those of his views which may appear to us to be 'modern' are not unconnected with his religious beliefs, which, we may infer from his writings, were 'the mainspring of all his thought'.¹³

On two central assumptions these writers are united: first, that Winstanley's theology played a central role in his thinking throughout his literary career; and secondly, that no fundamental shift in his thinking can be detected between the publication of his early 'mystical' writings in 1648, and that of the blueprint for his communist utopia, The Law of Freedom, four years later. However, the approach more commonly adopted by those who want to give less weight to Winstanley's theology is to delineate stages in his literary career during which his thinking underwent major transition. Thus, whilst they might accept the first assumption above in respect of Winstanley's early tracts, they reach the virtually unanimous conclusion that by the time the digging began, and certainly by the time it was over, the theological impulses which might originally have prompted Winstanley into action could no longer be said to be a major motivating factor.

This line of reasoning has surfaced regularly in Winstanley scholarship ever since the rediscovery of his writings towards the end of the last century. For example, the Marxist writer Eduard Bernstein, who is usually credited with having made that initial rediscovery, observes that in The Law of Freedom the author, 'dropping all mysticism.… propounds a complete social system based on communistic principles'.¹⁴ Strachey, another early commentator, considers that, like everyone of his generation, Winstanley originally came to social and economic questions through theology and the Bible. By the time of The Law of Freedom, however, his 'mystical, Quakerish views' had been abandoned in favour of a 'magnificently expressed materialism'.¹⁵ Zagorin makes a similar point: in The Law of Freedom, he writes, Winstanley's philosophy 'complete[s] the circuit along which its inner logic had impelled it. Inspired still by a deeply felt religion of conduct, he passed, nevertheless, to a substantially rationalist-materialist position'.¹⁶ Davis also observes Winstanley undergoing a major shift in his last pamphlet, exchanging a position of passive hope in God to produce a new social order, for the more robust tactic of advocating an 'exploitation' of the state 'to fashion a better society'. The subtitle of The Law of Freedom—'True Magistracy Restored'—suggests, to Davis, the true nature of this shift: 'Winstanley drops both his millenarianism and his anarchism and concerns himself with the remodelling of the state by men. Cromwell, not Christ, is to be the agent of the change'.¹⁷ David W. Petegorsky, in his extended analysis of Winstanley, asserts that although the Digger never lost his 'profound spirituality', the 'theological framework' which originally underpinned his ideas gradually became redundant. In the end his argument comes to rest upon a foundation 'wholly secular in its nature' even if 'primarily spiritual in its original inspiration'. In The Law of Freedom his position is 'an almost purely materialistic one'. The turning point in Winstanley's life, suggests Petegorsky, was that period which immediately preceded the digging, from autumn 1648 to spring 1649, during which he underwent a rapid transition from 'rational theology' to 'practical communism'. Humanity's struggle, which once Winstanley had seen in spiritual terms as 'the clash of good and evil within man', now became a struggle 'between economic classes',' the wealthy who wanted to retain their privileges, and the poor who demanded that they be shared.¹⁹

A more extreme position with regard to the transition in Winstanley's thought is taken by Juretic.²⁰ For him, any talk of a mere shift in Winstanley's thinking, whether at the point of the digging or during the preparation of The Law of Freedom, is gross understatement. What was actually the case, Juretic argues, was that once the digging experiment got under way on St George's Hill in April 1649, Winstanley's ideas became 'rapidly secularized', so that by the time The True Levellers Standard Advanced, the first Digger tract, was written, the 'millenarian underpinning' of the pre-Digger tracts 'began to disappear'. Then, 'it was only a matter of time for him to discard completely his mystical beliefs.… Mysticism failed to provide him with solutions to the political problems Winstanley encountered while farming the commons'.²¹ The way to a correct understanding of Winstanley does not therefore lie in trying to find a link between the pre-Digger and the Digger, but in recognizing that the real concrete political experience he endured during the digging project transformed him to such an extent, from mystical millenarian to full-blown secularist, that it is possible to speak of 'two Winstanleys'. We must not try to see Winstanley's writings as a 'monolithic whole', nor assume that 'religious impulses' were the foundation for his thinking and praxis: the key to Winstanley's 'socialistic concepts' lies, not in his early mystical writings, but in his 'political experiences while defending his settlement on St George's Hill'.²²

If this general thesis is accepted, that Winstanley at some point lost the religious impulses which originally motivated him, the question still remains of how to account for his continued use of theological terminology and Biblical idiom in his later writings. Strikingly, the conclusion reached by virtually all defenders of this thesis is that the inclusion of religious language in these writings can be explained simply by reference to the times in which he lived: it serves, in other words, either to lend added weight or authority to conclusions he reached on straightforwardly rational grounds; to make his arguments more comprehensible to his readers by using the popular idiom of the day; or, since he was writing under the shadow of the Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648, to provide his subversive and heretical message with a cloak of respectability. Thus Bernstein, for example, writes of the Diggers' pamphlets being 'couched in somewhat mystical phraseology, which manifestly serves as a cloak to conceal the revolutionary designs of the authors',²³ and Petegorsky of the 'theological garb' in which so frequently Winstanley's ideas were clothed.²⁴ For Hill, 'Winstanley drew on Bible stories largely because he thought they would help his contemporaries to understand him: he used them as poetic imagery'.²⁵ The Bible was used to illustrate 'conclusions at which [he] had arrived by rational means'.²⁶ Juretic also considers that Winstanley was merely following convention in seeking 'Biblical justification' for his conclusions, and finds the inclusion of the majority of scripture references irrelevant to his overall argument. Although Winstanley wanted to keep his faith in the Bible, he writes, 'the mass of his exegetical citations were vague, general statements signifying nothing'.²⁷

This is not a view held only by Marxist critics, for Maurice Ashley makes a similar point when, during a discussion of the Fifth Monarchy Men, he suggests that if we 'ignore their biblical texts (as we are invited to ignore those of… Winstanley) … there are your seventeenth-century Jacobins or Bolsheviks'.²⁸ Even Sabine, who appears overall to take a conservative position with regard to Winstanley's theology, concludes, a propos of the proofs the latter advances to support his communist position, that his offer to defend his case by invoking the authority of Scripture was only an 'acceptance of what was at the time a conventional form of argument'.²⁹

James³⁰ offers a slightly more nuanced variation of the 'comprehensibility' argument. Winstanley, she argues, began from both rational and theological premises: he 'examined existing institutions in the light of Nature and Reason and found them evil'. He was clear that the inequality and exploitation he saw and experienced had not always existed, and that there had been a Golden Age after Creation when men and women exercised dominion over the beasts of the field but not over one another. However, James concludes, 'it was unlikely that arguments drawn from the rarefied heights of Nature and Reason would prove a popular battlecry', and so, in effect, to give his case a more ready appeal, Winstanley contemporized biblical concepts by making them merely metaphors for the actual episodes in English history, in particular the Norman conquest, which had brought about the present evil state of affairs: 'In the appeal to all Englishmen to unite in destroying the Norman power, the abstract was made concrete, and the theory of a Golden Age and Fall was given decent English clothing'.³¹

What conclusions may be drawn from this discussion? Perhaps the first and most obvious point to make concerns the straightforward impossibility of being able to say with any degree of certainty what the real source of Winstanley's inspiration was at any given time. We may draw certain inferences from both his language and his actions, but to seek to establish a 'real' motivation behind them must of necessity be beyond the bounds of possibility. It must be acknowledged, therefore, that the mere fact that Winstanley's use of religious terminology appears to diminish as he becomes more politically radicalized, and seems to look more and more like a convenient disguise for a materialist philosophy when it is employed, does not necessarily say anything about his 'subjective' assessment of himself as a Christian.³² It may also be true, as Petegorsky has suggested, that Winstanley's decision to republish his five earliest tracts in collected form while the digging was still in progress is a sign that he saw his political position at that time as a 'logical development' of the ideas in those tracts, rather than a contradiction or rebuttal of them.³³ Hill also notes that Winstanley's preface to this collection 'contains a salutary reminder that he did not reject these writings', though, Hill adds, 'his thought had in many respects passed beyond them'.³⁴

A second point to note is the tendency among some interpreters of Winstanley to perceive his rejection of traditional Christianity as a rejection of Christianity altogether. The clearest statement of this position is made by Zagorin who argues, in respect of The Law of Freedom, that, despite the presence of Christian terminology, the religion expressed in that tract is no longer Christian. Winstanley, he writes,

had eliminated a transcendent God, an historic Christ, creed, dogma, and church, and retained naught but the ethical inspiration of the gospel. And even this he did not allow to operate, in the traditional way, as the spirit of charity and love that was to be shown despite the existence of slavery and coercion which man's fall had made inevitable. Instead, the gospel ethic was for him the imperative compelling the remodelling of institutions in the image of reason.³⁵

Hill also appears to adopt this position—though he stops short of actually saying Winstanley's theology was not Christian—when he points to Winstanley's thinking being 'in opposition to traditional Christianity' and to the 'profound difference between the content of his ideas and that of traditional Christianity' such that 'his thinking was struggling towards concepts which were to be more precisely if less poetically formulated by later, non-theological materialisms³⁶

What these comments reveal, I believe, are two false assumptions which seriously weaken the argument that Winstanley was (or became) a secular thinker. The first is that the particular interpretation of Christianity generally termed 'traditional' may serve as a yardstick against which to measure, and by implication reject, the claim of other formulations; and the second that Winstanley's tendency towards a more reductionist and pantheistic theological position amounts to a rejection of Christianity itself rather than one interpretation of it, that propounded by the church of his day. Thus Winstanley's rejection of a transcendent God, historic Christ, and creed, dogma and church, is, for Zagorin, a rejection of Christianity itself, whereas in fact Winstanley can be located in that small but vocal tradition which, albeit from its fringes but nevertheless from within the professing Christian church itself, has continually set out to challenge perceived conservative and reactionary interpretations of the faith, positing instead an alternative reading of the gospel stressing themes of protest against injustice and hope for a radically new social order in the shape of the Kingdom or Reign of God. From Lollards to Hussites, through Müntzer and the 'radical Reformation' in Germany, and Quakers, Ranters and Fifth Monarchists in England—and even down to Liberation Theologians of the present day—voices echoing the self-same themes with which Zagorin has difficulty in Winstanley—divine immanence, universalism, iconoclasm, communitarianism and even revolution—have persistently been audible within the Christian church.³⁷ These would hardly comprehend Zagorin's shock that Winstanley should find the 'ethical inspiration of the gospel' an 'imperative compelling the remodelling of institutions in the image of reason', nor for that matter his assumption that there is an apparent incompatibility between the 'blazing chiliastic expectancy of the religious radical who daily looks for Jesus' second coming to inaugurate a reign of righteousness' and the hope for a 'rationalistic communism, abounding in plans and projects', let alone his contention that to move from the former to the latter is to pass beyond orthodoxy to heresy.³⁸ At the root of Zagorin's difficulty with Winstanley is a conception of Christianity as a static rather than developing faith, and a tendency to mistake one culturally-related manifestation of it for its totality.

Another problem with Zagorin's position is that it does not fully appreciate Winstanley as a person of his time. Winstanley lived in an age in which religion permeated every area of life, the Bible shaped the way people thought, and the church was central to the life of the community. In such a climate most people, whether educated or not, accepted unquestioningly fundamental religious doctrines.³⁹ So interwoven was religion into the fabric of society, and so intermixed with political, economic and social questions, that, as Elmen has suggested, 'it would not have occurred to any of [Winstanley's] contemporary critics or friends to wonder whether the ownership of land'—the central issue on the Diggers' agenda—'was a proper concern for the theological mind'.⁴⁰ The Bible's relevance to all areas of life, including the political, economic and social, was accepted far more unproblematically then than is the case today. Thus as Hill rightly suggests,

it is perhaps irrelevant to ask whether Winstanley 'believed' the Christian myths, or whether he used them only as a convenient mode of expression, a metaphor. The question imposes twentieth-century assumptions on him. This was the idiom in which men thought.⁴¹

Yet to see Winstanley against the background of his own time is also to understand why he could not for political reasons accept what might appear to Zagorin and others to be a more conventional or traditional form of Christianity. For this was the Christianity preached by the clergy of the established church, whose motives for so preaching it, Winstanley was clear, were both to promote support for the status quo, and their not uncomfortable position within it. The political task assigned to this theology in his own day gave Winstanley reason enough, quite apart from any misgivings he had on rational grounds, to reject it outright.

For Winstanley the whole theological system of the church was oppressive for the ordinary people to whom it was preached. The clergy encouraged belief in a God 'out there' which, although Winstanley rejected on the grounds that knowledge about such entities was 'beyond the line or capacity of man to attain to while he lives in his compounded body', he did the more so because he saw how the clergy contrived to make God appear punitive and capricious, one who approved the unfair distribution of the earth originally given as a common treasury, and, significantly, one who 'appointed the people to pay Tythes to the Clergy'.⁴² Both God and Christ, Winstanley considered, were held by the priests 'at-a-distance' so that they could then be mediated to the people only through them. The clergy also preached an historic Fall, through which all men and women individually are sinners, and by thus evoking feelings of insufficiency and fear in their hearers, who sought to restore their identity by relating to objects outside themselves, particularly the God- and Christ-at-a-distance, the clergy made the people even more dependent upon them. With the addition of a heaven in the next life as a reward for subservience to them, or hell as punishment, the system by which the clergy reinforced their authority and power over the people was complete. 'By this divined Hell after death', wrote Winstanley, 'they preach to keep both King and people in aw to them'. The clergy persuaded people to think

That true Freedom lay in hearing them preach, and to enjoy that Heaven which they say, every man who beleeves their doctrine, shall enjoy after he is dead: And so tell us of a Heaven and Hell after death, which neither they nor we know what wil be…⁴³

For Winstanley these 'heavenly and spiritual things' served only to destroy the true knowledge of God and spoil the individual's peace. The clergy actually prevented Christ from rising in his people, and instead led them into what he called 'Imagination', a unnecessary feeling of incompleteness, fear and uncertainty which kept them in subjection to the church and the authorities. For Winstanley this was the antithesis of true religion, and he rejected it wholesale.

In place of this alienating form of religion Winstanley stressed the immanence of God, who could be known by all without the 'aid' of the professional beneficed clergy. Humankind, he taught, need not be bowed down by Imagination: 'Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself, and has the creator dwelling in him 'to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself'.⁴⁴ The individual was therefore able to judge all things by experience, which was more important than the whole edifice of doctrine and church government built up on biblical texts. Such line of thinking eliminated, too, any need for a learned clergy. Winstanley often preferred to use the word 'Reason' instead of 'God', because it emphasized his immanence and stood in contrast to the Imagination from which he would redeem his sons and daughters as he rose in them and brought them together into community. The term may have signified for Winstanley something more akin to a 'spirit' or 'force' than a 'personal' God, but it removed the 'othemess' which the clergy had invested in the term.⁴⁵ In fact, however, as Hill has said, the question of an antithesis between immanence and transcendence appears never to have concerned Winstanley, and he could unproblematically hold in tension the notion that '"the same spirit that made the globe" is "the indweller in the five senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling and feeling"'.⁴⁶ Creation was for Winstanley ex deo, not ex nihilo.⁴⁷

Christ, too, was no longer remote but within the individual, and Winstanley saw Christ in every person, and every person in Christ. As he says in The Law of Freedom, all who have shown themselves to be 'Promoters of Common Freedom, whether they be members in Church fellowship or not … all are one in Christ'.⁴⁸ Heaven and hell are present states: heaven is humankind and hell describes the conditions men and women have created for themselves on earth. Winstanley left open the question whether there may be a physical heaven or hell, but did hold the highly unorthodox belief that all humankind would be saved. Sin, in Winstanley, is the whole system of buying and selling with its resultant inequality and domination by landowners and priests. Antichrist, traditionally interpreted as the Pope or the Church, and the Fall, are also to be understood in terms of property relations, the former being property itself, and the latter having occurred once selfish desires began to manifest themselves, and not, as usually held, the other way around. 'When Mankinde began to buy and sell, then did he fall from this Innocency'.⁴⁹ Finally, Christ's second coming will be the establishment of a communitarian society on earth, and the entering into all men and women of Christ's spirit as they awaken to the rule of Reason within them and embrace the principle of community life lost since the Fall. In summary Winstanley rejects quite explicitly the whole theological system of the church, but not, pace Zagorin, Christianity itself; his own theological formulations are rather, I suggest, an attempt to keep the essentials of the faith and recast them in a non-alienating form, to recover what he believed to be the original message of Christianity which the church, through time, had distorted and submerged.

There is yet another problem with attempts to see Winstanley as an essentially secular thinker, namely his continued adherence to some form of millennial hope, even, it would appear, up until the time of writing The Law of Freedom. Clearly there is little question that such a hope was influential in originally inspiring the digging venture.⁵⁰ In The True Levellers Standard Advanced Winstanley suggests than an apocalyptic vision in the Book of Daniel is to be realized in his own day,⁵¹ and two pages later that 'all the Prophecies, Visions, and Revelations of Scriptures, of Prophets, and Apostles…,. doth all seat themselves in this Work of making the Earth a Common Treasury',⁵² a work, as he was told in a trance, assigned to him and the diggers on St George's Hill. Thus 'all the Prophesies of Scriptures and Reason are Circled here in this Community'.⁵³ These, he was clear, were the last days:

the righteous Father suffered himself … to be suppressed for a time, times and dividing of time, or for 42 months, or for three dayes and half, which are all but one and the same term of time: And the world is now come to the half day.⁵⁴

As we have noted, Winstanley's millennium did not involve a literal physical return of Jesus Christ as King, as many believed the Bible taught, but rather the restoration of community as Christ began to rise in his sons and daughters. Nevertheless, it is not sufficient to say that his reformulation of the Second Coming in this way is an example of the use of Biblical imagery to conceal an essentially political hope, for a belief that the millennium was now to begin appears, in fact, to have been the one single hope which sustained the digging project in the face of all opposition and hardship. 'We have another encouragement that this work shall prosper', Winstanley wrote at the outset,

Because we see it to be the fulness of Time: For whereas the Son of Man, the Lamb, came in the Fulness of Time … Even so now in this Age of the World, that the Spirit is upon his Resurrection, it is likewise the Fulness of Time in a higher measure.⁵⁵

We noted earlier Elmen's assertion that it was Winstanley's theological perspective which motivated him to undertake a task which purely economic considerations would have suggested was an impossibility. Sabine notes a reference in The True Levellers Standard Advanced where Winstanley appears to expect that, with the restoration of community life, barren commons and waste ground would once more became fertile, and comments that 'without such a belief, his communism was hardly workable, since it implied that a large part of the English population would be fed from the produce of land that had not previously been arable'.⁵⁶ Clearly Winstanley saw the outbreak of digging in 1649, at St George's Hill and subsequently at a number of other locations, as a sign that the millennium was imminent, that Christ was beginning to rise in men and women, and this would have encouraged him to think that the venture must of necessity meet with success and be taken up by more and more people until the transformation of the earth was complete. In practical terms this would most likely mean that, infilled with a renewed sense of community, the common people would revolt against property, refuse to sell their labour, and generate a situation in which no one would own more land than they could themselves cultivate, thus making most privately-enclosed land the common possession of all.

That Winstanley's millenarianism sustained his political hopes, not only through but even beyond the digging venture, is suggested by the recurrence of themes from Daniel and Revelation in his last work, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, written in the wake of the Diggers' enforced removal from Cobham Heath (whither they had resorted following expulsion from St George's Hill). This writing, which takes the form of a detailed outline of a radically new socio-economic order which Winstanley hopes can be constructed on the ashes of the old 'kingly power', stands apart from his earlier tracts in many respects, not least in so far as it recognizes that Christ's work of transforming people and drawing them together into community may be a somewhat more gradual process than anticipated in, say, The New Law of Righteousnes. In The Law of Freedom Winstanley also goes to greater lengths to demonstrate how his new society may be implemented: Cromwell, to whom it is dedicated, not Christ, this time appears to hold the key. Yet millenarian hopes are not discarded: God, 'the Spirit of the whole Creation … is about the Reformation of the World', he writes in his foreword;⁵⁷ or, we might say, is still about this reformation. 'This Kingly Power is the old Heaven, and the old Earth, that must pass away', he asserts in Chapter 2, whereas the new 'Commonwealth's Government' will be 'Sion', 'Jerusalem', and the 'holy Mountain of the Lord God our Righteousness and Peace'.⁵⁸ These images Winstanley borrows from the unambiguously apocalyptic writer Micah, and they are joined by others from the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel. Kingly power and government is 'the great Man of Sin', 'the great Antichrist, and Mystery of Iniquity', 'the Devil', and 'the Power and Government of the Beast', soon to be cast down;⁵⁹ covetousness is 'the great red Dragon, the god of this world', from whom the groaning creation waits to be delivered;⁶⁰ and the deceitful and oppressing 'Divinity' taught by the clergy is 'the language of the Mystery of Iniquity and Antichrist', and 'that great City Babylon … which hath filled the whole Earth with her sorcery, and deceived all people, so that the whole world wondered after this Beast'. 'How is it faln', Winstanley concludes, 'and how is her Judgment come upon her in one hour?⁶¹ But perhaps more significantly Winstanley still appears to believe that Christ is rising in his sons and daughters, if at a rather slower pace than he anticipated earlier: 'But surely Light is so broke out, that it will cover the Earth, so that the Divinity Charmers shall say, The people will not hear the voyce of our charming, charm we never so wisely,' he writes as he concludes his discourse on these false preachers.⁶² Indeed, the fact that a commonwealth has been declared in England, though the even greater work of establishing it on right principles is still to be done, is a sign that 'the spirit of universal Righteousness' is rising up in men and women. 'We may hope' that 'these be the days of his resurrection to power', Winstanley writes, 'because the name of Commonwealth is risen and established in England by a Law'.⁶³ The work of consolidating the Commonwealth's Government is also vital, Winstanley argues, not only because a failure in this regard will deny people the peace, plenty and freedom which they desire, but because it would 'shew our Government to be gone no further but to the half day of the Beast, or the dividing of Time, of which there must be an over-turn'.⁶⁴

It may be plausible also to suggest that, had Winstanley's millenarianism not been genuine—had he, in other words, truly been a secular thinker—he could arguably have produced a more revolutionary programme than he did, since by placing a religious interpretation on the political struggle in which he was engaged he failed to see it in a true historical perspective. His millenarianism, in other words, made it 'unnecessary' for him to demonstrate how it was possible for his programme to be realized, and therefore it was destined to remain only as what it was, namely an idea superimposed on to his particular situation but not historically related to it. He anticipated, as Turner has said, 'in the form of a communist myth, a stage of social development—communism—which would become possible only on the basis of the achievements of the bourgeois revolution to which [he was] in fact opposed'.⁶⁵ The significance of this should not be underrated, for although it is Winstanley's eschatology that forces us to classify his programme as in practice reactionary and not revolutionary, the line between the two definitions is thin. Winstanley's analysis was undoubtedly revolutionary in that it was rooted in the 'material activity and the material intercourse of men' in a way in which Marx would have recognized; yet his hopes for the fulfilment of his political programme were grounded, not in the real world, but in a belief that its time had come. Thus his ideas, not having came historically to term, 'fell stillborn from the womb'.⁶⁶

One final weakness in the argument propounded by some, particularly Marxist, interpreters of Winstanley, that he was essentially a secular thinker, arises from their a priori understanding of religion as either, in Maguire's words, 'a set of abstract platitudes, at best useless … [or] … in so far as it says anything about the social and political reality of its time', not religion at all.⁶⁷ For such thinkers—for whom perhaps the locus classicus is Engels' analysis of Thomas Miuntzer in The Peasant War in Germany—even when one encounters a culture which is deeply religious (as in the case of Muntzer and Winstanley), and which gives rise to revolutionary programmes couched in language which reflects that culture, such language may be seen as at best superfluous and metaphorical, or, at worst, a means of misrepresenting political struggles in the guise of theological ones. Thus according to Engels, the class struggles in which Muntzer and Luther were engaged could be understood quite adequately without reference to the theological differences between them:

Although the class struggles of that day were clothed in religious shibboleths, and though the interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealed behind a religious screen, this changed nothing and is easily explained by the conditions of the time.⁶⁸

Thus the presence of religious language in the revolutionary programme of a Muintzer or a Winstanley is politically insignificant: tautologous, abstract, metaphorical and non-cognitive; and this being the case, where such programmes do say something about reality, nothing is added by the use of theological terminology in the presentation.

Reasoning of this sort, I believe, lies behind some of the attempts to sift out the 'theological' from the 'political' in Winstanley, in order the more easily to play down the former. Petegorsky, as we have noted, refers to the 'theological garb' in which Winstanley's ideas were frequently clothed;⁶⁹ George to 'the almost ornamental, certainly at best tangential, relation of the Bible' to his thought;⁷⁰ and Aylmer to the way in which Winstanley 'uses millenarian images and scriptural texts to convey his sense of immediacy and crisis'.⁷¹ But it is Hill who perhaps pursues the point farther than most. In his introduction to the volume of Winstanley's writings he edited in 1973,⁷² he begins by suggesting that, since Winstanley wrote before the Industrial Revolution, 'some of his insights may be of interest to those in the Third World today who face the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society'.⁷³ Winstanley, in other words, may be read as a modern. If one were to raise the obvious objection that the situation in some parts of the developing world differs from the one Winstanley addressed in terms of religious culture, Hill would suggest that this may be got around by going behind the language Winstanley adopts to the essence of the message: 'We must make allowances for the biblical idiom which Winstanley shared with almost all his contemporaries and try to penetrate through to the thought beneath', he writes. 'It is worth taking a little trouble to break down the barriers of Winstanley's biblical language … Winstanley drew on Bible stories largely because he thought they would help his contemporaries to understand him'.⁷⁴ All of which leads Hill to conclude, in an essay written five years later, that 'Winstanley's system of ideas could be rewritten in the language of rational deism; had he lived fifty years later he might have so expressed them'.⁷⁵

The thesis that there has to be, as it were, a single unified discourse for revolutionary theory has to be seen as unhistorical. It is, on the one hand, another example of the failure of some modem-day interpreters to read Winstanley against the background of his own time, but, more profoundly, it attempts to suggest that the language in which he framed his ideas is somehow incidental to the ideas themselves: in other words, take up the 'religious screen', whose presence is required merely by 'the conditions of the time', and then, and only then, the real message of the writer can be properly understood. Yet the essence of Winstanley's politics cannot, as it were, be sifted out from the theological language in which it is presented, nor can it be argued that he used such language merely to help his contemporaries to understand him, or because it was the most accessible way of expressing truths about humanity. There was, I believe, a profound dialectical relationship between his theology and his political views. He saw the alienation of the poor oppressed people of England as at the same time political, economic and religious, and he sought, in working to overcome this alienation, not to abolish religion altogether but to recast it in an immanent and non-alienating form: to show, in fact, that the meek might inherit the earth now.

Notes

¹ Lotte Mulligan, John K. Graham, and Judith Richards, 'Winstanley: A Case for the Man as He Said He Was', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 28 (1977).

² Ibid., pp. 63, 64, 65. The reference to Hill refers to his introductory essay in Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Harmondsworth, 1973).

³ Mulligan et al, loc.cit., p. 65.

⁴The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited by George H. Sabine (New York, 1941 & 1965). Hereafter referred to as 'Works'. 'Complete' is not a strictly accurate description of this collection since, disappointingly, Winstanley's first three tracts appear only in heavily abbreviated form. Editions of these works are housed in the British Library (though The Saints Paradice may be read only on microfilm).

⁵ Works, p. 36.

⁶ Paul Elmen, 'The Theological Basis of Digger Communism', Church History, 23 (1954).

⁷ Ibid., pp. 216, 217.

⁸Puritanism and Liberty, edited by A. S. P. Woodhouse (London, 1938).

⁹ Winthrop S. Hudson, 'Economic and Social Thought of Gerrard Winstanley: was he a Seventeenth-Century Marxist?', The Journal of Modern History, 18 (1946).

¹⁰ W. Schenk, The Concern for Social Justice in the Puritan Revolution (London, 1948).

¹¹ Woodhouse, p. [99].

¹² Hudson, p. 5.

¹³ Schenk, pp. 98, 110-11.

¹⁴ Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism (Nottingham, 1980), p. 115; (first English ed., 1930).

¹⁵ Cited in Elmen, p. 208.

¹⁶ Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954), pp. 52-53.

¹⁷ J. C. Davis, 'Utopia and History', Historical Studies, 13 (1968), p. 172.

¹⁸ David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War (London, 1940).

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 178, 138, 149.

²⁰ George Juretic, 'Digger No Millenarian: the Revolutionizing of Gerrard Winstanley', Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975).

²¹ Ibid., pp. 269, 276, 279.

²² Ibid., pp. 270, 266, 264, 274-75.

²³ Bernstein, p. 107.

²⁴ Petegorsky, p. 206.

²⁵ Hill, op. cit., p. 55.

²⁶ Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 94; cf. pp. 144, 264, 388.

²⁷ Juretic, pp. 278-79.

²⁸ Maurice Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century (Harmondsworth, 3rd ed. 1961), p. 115.

²⁹Works, p. 51; cf. p. 37.

³⁰ Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution 1640-1660 (London, 1930).

³¹ Ibid., p. 103.

³² This is a point made by Zagorin: p. 57.

³³ Petegorsky, p. 149. Winstanley's first five tracts were published in collected form, with a preface by the author, under the title Several Pieces Gathered into One volume, on 20 December 1649.

³⁴ Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, p. 139.

³⁵ Zagorin, p. 57.

³⁶ Christopher Hill, The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley, Past and Present Supplement 5 (Oxford, 1978), p. 57.

³⁷ For a recent examination of some of 'those faint voices of protest on the very margins of the tradition'—including Winstanley—see Christopher Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Cambridge, 1988). (Quote from p. 2.)

³⁸ Zagorin, p. 57.

³⁹ Cf. Christopher Hill's comment: 'even theological materialists like Milton [and] philosophical materialists like Hobbes took for granted the existence of a creator-God' (The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley, p. 57).

⁴⁰ Elmen, p. 217.

⁴¹ Hill, The Religion …, p. 57.

⁴² Works, pp. 565, 532.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 523.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 251.

⁴⁵ For two very recent discussions of the use of this term see Nicola Baxter, 'Gerrard Winstanley's Experimental Knowledge of God (The Perception of the Spirit and the Acting of Reason)', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 39 (1988), and Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 258f.

⁴⁶ Christopher Hill, 'Debate: The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley; A Rejoinder', Past and Present, no. 89, (November 1980), 147.

⁴⁷ Ibid; cf. Hill, The Religion …, p. 47.

⁴⁸Works, p. 543.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 511.

⁵⁰ I discuss this point more fully, and the general question of the significance of millenarianism in Winstanley's writings, in Chapter 4 of 'A Christian Contribution to Revolutionary Praxis? An examination of the significance of religious belief for the political philosophies of Gerrard Winstanley and Camilo Torres' (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1989), pp. 105-51. This present article is based on chapter 2 of that thesis.

⁵¹Works, p. 259.

⁵² Ibid., p. 260. 'Two pages' of course refers to the original (1649) edition.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 253.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 261.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 263.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 42.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 502.

⁵⁸ Ibid., pp. 532, 534, 535; cf. p. 533.

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 530, 532.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 530.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 570.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 534.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 535.

⁶⁵ Denys Turner, Marxism and Christianity (Oxford, 1983), p. 167.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 182.

⁶⁷ John Maguire, 'Gospel or Religious Language?: Engels on the Peasant War', New Blackfriars, 54 (1973), 350.

⁶⁸ Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (Moscow, 1956), p. 42 (first German edition 1850).

⁶⁹ Petegorsky, p. 206.

⁷⁰ C. H. George, 'Gerrard Winstanley: A Critical Retrospect', in The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson, edited by C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody (Athens, Ohio, 1975), p. 214.

⁷¹ G. E. Aylmer, 'The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley', in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, edited by J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford, 1984), p. 95.

⁷² Hill, Winstanley: The Law of Freedom …

⁷³ Ibid., p. 10.

⁷⁴ Ibid., pp. 19, 55.

⁷⁵ Hill, The Religion. … p. 57