Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XV

SPIRIT

1649: S

T

G

EORGE

’

S

H

ILL

On 26 May, the day that the Lord General with his train of officers came riding to St George’s Hill, there were twelve people working on the heath. They were variously digging, and planting, and spreading manure. The venture was a bold one. The land had been crown property since ancient times. The law of trespass strictly forbade any sowing on it. Times, though, were hard, and there were some locals, faced with destitution, who had come to despise the very notion of private property. Leading them was a smallholder named Gerrard Winstanley, a former cloth-merchant who had moved out of London into the Surrey countryside after going bankrupt in 1643. The entire earth, he declared, was ‘a common Treasury for all, both Rich and Poor’.¹ On 1 April 1649, obedient to a direct command of the Holy Spirit, he had taken his spade and gone to the nearby St George’s Hill, and there broken the ground. Various other men and women had joined him. Now, almost two months on, and despite all the hostility they had provoked among neighbouring landowners, the ‘Diggers’ were still busy among their corn, their carrots and their beans. ‘For in this work of restoration,’ so Winstanley defiantly insisted, ‘there will be no beggar in Israel.’²

The approach of soldiers on horseback would normally have filled any trespassers on crown lands with terror. The times, though, were not normal. Four months earlier, on a bitterly cold winter day, the king of England had been beheaded outside his own palace of Whitehall. The charge had been high treason. Shortly afterwards the monarchy itself had been abolished. To royalists – of whom there remained many in England – the execution of Charles I, God’s anointed, had been not just a crime, but a blasphemy. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Yet that, for supporters of the new English commonwealth, was precisely the point. The causes that had brought the king into armed conflict with his parliament were many, and the road that had led him to the scaffold long and winding; but none of those who had sat in judgement on him ever doubted that God’s finger was manifest in the redrawing of England. Winstanley agreed. Monarchy, he declared, was a usurpation of the power of God. So too was the rule of every lord. Like the followers of Pelagius who, long before, had mocked any notion that wealth might not be tyranny, Winstanley took literally the warnings of scripture, which ‘threaten misery to rich men, bidding them Howl and weep’.³ The return of Christ, which he believed imminent, would not be from the heavens, but in the flesh of men and women. All were to share equally in the treasury of the earth. The evils of Adam’s fall were destined to be reversed. If Winstanley, in preparing for this happy eventuality, was perfectly content to sanction the whipping of those who refused to pull their weight, and even – in extreme cases – their enslavement, then that was due reflection of his utter confidence in his cause. To dig on St George’s Hill was to regain paradise.

Quite what the Lord General might make of all this, however, was open to question. Sir Thomas Fairfax – although he commanded the army which, following its remodelling in 1645 into the most formidable fighting force in Europe, had brought the king to defeat – did not approve of regicide. Already, on 16 April, he had been alerted to the activities of the Diggers. Winstanley, summoned to Whitehall to explain himself, had on that occasion succeeded in persuading Fairfax that he and his project presented no threat to the order of the Commonwealth; but now, one month on, circumstances had changed. Mutiny had broken out. Only swift action by Fairfax and his deputy Oliver Cromwell, a general as formidable as he was devout, had succeeded in breaking it. The mutineers had been taken by surprise at night in Burford, a town west of Oxford. The next morning, three of them had been executed in a churchyard. Order had successfully been restored. Fairfax, however, as he headed back to London, had good reason to view the Diggers with renewed suspicion. Christ, who had foretold the doom of the rich, and whose return would see the poor inherit the earth, was hailed by Winstanley as ‘the greatest, first, and truest Leveller that ever was spoke of in the world’.⁴ The title of ‘Leveller’ was not in fact original to him. It was one that the mutineers had already claimed as their own. Like Winstanley, they believed that rank and wealth were evils; that all were by nature equal; that Christ’s work was to be ‘the Restorer and Repairer of man’s loss and fall’.⁵ Soldiers, though, could not be Diggers. Without rank there would be no discipline; and without discipline there would be no army. Godliness in England did not stand so secure that it could afford that. Cromwell, leaving Burford, had begun to prepare an expedition to Ireland, a notorious sump of popery, where royalists continued to plot the return of monarchy to England, and the overthrow of everything that the army had fought so long and hard to achieve. The responsibility of Fairfax, meanwhile, was to keep his lieutenant-general’s rear secure. The Lord General, as he turned off the highway to London and rode with his attendants to inspect St George’s Hill, had much on his mind.

Arriving before the Diggers, he gave them a short speech of admonition. Winstanley, though, was nothing daunted. Scorning to remove his hat, he scorned as well to moderate his views. Soberly though he spoke, he was not the man to bit or bridle the Spirit. More than a century before, in the first throes of the Reformation, Thomas Müntzer had proclaimed that scripture itself was a less certain witness of truth than God’s direct speaking to the soul; and now, in the hothouse of the English Commonwealth, the Spirit was once again bringing enlightenment to common men and women. ‘I have nothing,’ Winstanley insisted, ‘but what I do receive from a free discovery within.’⁶ The proofs of God’s purpose were more surely to be found in a ploughboy whose heart had been suffused with an awareness of the essential goodness of mankind than they ever were in churches. Just as Müntzer had done, Winstanley despised the book-wrangling of pastors. ‘All places stink with the abomination of Self-seeking Teachers and Rulers.’ True wisdom was the knowledge of God that all mortals could have, if only they were prepared to open themselves to the Spirit: for God, Winstanley proclaimed, was Reason. It was Reason that would lead humanity to forswear the very concept of possessions; to join in building a heaven on earth. His foes might dismiss Winstanley as a dreamer; but he was not the only one. The occupation of St George’s Hill was a declaration of hope: that others some day would join the Diggers, and the world would be as one.

Wild talk such as this had always provoked alarm. ‘Anabaptist’ remained a dirty word across Europe. If common men and women were to cast themselves as vessels of the Spirit, unmediated by the guidance of their betters, then who knew where it might end? Truth could not compromise with error. Pastors and presbyters – anxious to preserve from damnation the souls of those in their care – believed this no less devoutly than any inquisitor. The horrors of Münster had not been forgotten. Liberty might readily become a menace. Heresy, idolatry, schism: all had to be sternly guarded against. There might even be need – should an offender prove contumacious – to invoke the ultimate sanction. Calvin himself, in 1553, had approved the burning at the stake of a particularly notorious heretic, a propagandist for views on the Trinity so shocking as barely to be trinitarian at all. Within living memory, in 1612, a heretic had been burned in England for questioning in a similar manner the divinity of Christ and the Spirit. The vast majority of Puritans, taking up arms against the king in 1642, had fought him in the conviction that toleration was ‘the whore of Babylon’s back door’.⁷ If the elements of popery in the Church of England were a palpable evil, then so too were the blasphemies of Protestant sectarians. When even scripture might count for nothing before the claims of tinkers and housemaids to direct revelations from God, there was a risk, it seemed to many Puritans, that God himself would end up doubted. ‘A liberty of judgment is pretended, and queries are proposed, until nothing certain be left, nothing unshaken.’⁸

Victory over the king, though, had not led to a tightening of the reins of discipline. Quite the opposite. Despite the passing in 1648 of a blasphemy ordinance that punished anti-trinitarianism with death, and a host of other heresies with imprisonment, it had proved impossible to enforce. The streets of London – which had witnessed an archbishop of Canterbury as well as a king being led to the block – seethed with contempt for the very notion of authority. Practices and beliefs that previously had lurked in the shadows burst into spectacular flower. Baptists who, as the more radical of the first generation of Protestants had done, dismissed infant baptism as an offence against scripture; Quakers, who would shake and foam at the mouth with the intensity of their possession by the Spirit; Ranters, who believed that every human being was equally a part of God: all made a mockery of any notion of a single national church. Their spread, to enthusiasts for Presbyterian discipline, was like that of the plague. Christian order in England seemed at risk of utter disintegration.

Yet one believer’s anarchy might just as well be another’s freedom. Presbyterians who sought to make criminals of other Protestants for laying claim to the gifts of the Spirit had to tread carefully. Aflame as they were with the transformative effect of God’s grace, they might easily be cast as hypocrites. Milton, whose visit to Galileo had steeled him in his loathing for censorship, warned his fellow Puritans that Calvin’s example risked dazzling them. To idolise the reformers of an earlier age was to behave no better than papists. The course of true reform was never done. It was always a work in progress. Every Christian had to be free to seek his own path to God. It was not the business of a state, still less that of a church, to trammel the workings of the Spirit. ‘No man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other men’s consciences but their own.’⁹

But what, in a Protestant country, was ‘religion’? Cut from its Catholic moorings, the word had come to evolve two distinct meanings. It was, so Charles I had declared, ‘the only firm foundation of all power: that cast loose, or depraved, no government can be stable’.¹⁰ Presbyterians agreed. The conception of religion for which both sides in the civil war had been fighting was essentially the same: an understanding of what England’s proper relationship to God should be. If this alone was to be viewed as true, then plainly it could not tolerate a rival. The Reformation needed to be completed; its victory had to be total. Yet that was not the whole story. Religion was also something intimate, personal. A word once used to describe the communal life in an abbey or a convent had come to take on a very different meaning: the private relationship that a Protestant might have with the workings of the Spirit. Fairfax, admonishing the Diggers, spoke both as a Presbyterian and as a man charged by his office with the maintenance of true religion in England; but Winstanley, when he spoke of his duty to God, and refused point blank to abandon St George’s Hill, was equally being obedient to his religion. Fairfax, aware of this, opted not to force the issue. Satisfied a second time that the Diggers presented no threat to public order, he returned to the road, and continued on his way to London. Winstanley and his companions, meanwhile, went back to their digging.

Between the demands of those who believed that there was only the one true religion, and those who believed that God wished all to practise their religion freely, there could be no easy reconciliation. That Fairfax had even attempted to steer a middle course reflected the fact that, as Lord General, he held a more pre-eminent position of authority in the Commonwealth than any civilian. The true victory in the war against the king had gone not to parliament, but to the army. To command it was – inevitably – to be charged with attempting to square a circle. By 1650, Fairfax had had enough. A man much happier in the saddle than in the council chamber, he resigned his commission. His replacement was a man altogether more comfortable in the exercise of power, and who also, unlike Fairfax, was no Presbyterian: Oliver Cromwell. When, in late 1653, he was appointed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, he ruled both as a military autocrat and as England’s first-ever Protestant head of state to support liberty of conscience. A civil war that had been fought between two rival programmes of authoritarian rule was recast by his propagandists as a struggle for freedom. The founding constitution of the Protectorate made this explicit. ‘Such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ,’ it proclaimed, ‘shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and the exercise of their religion.’¹¹

A ringing declaration – but shadowed by ambivalence. Who precisely were to be defined as those professing faith in God by Jesus Christ? Not Catholics, that was to be sure. In May 1649, on the eve of Cromwell’s expedition to Ireland, leaflets had circulated among the mutineers at Burford, lamenting the slaughter that was to come. ‘We have waded too far in that crimson stream (already) of innocent and Christian blood.’¹² Here was an expression of the same revulsion and despair that on the continent, the previous year, had helped at last to end thirty years of slaughter. By terms of a series of treaties signed in the German territory of Westphalia, a ‘Christian, general and permanent peace’¹³ had been brought to the blood-manured lands of the Empire. The princes who signed it pledged themselves not to force their own religion on their subjects. Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists: all were granted the freedom to worship as they pleased. This formula, far from an attempt to banish religion from the workings of the state, constituted the precise opposite: a project to establish a properly Christian order. Rather than a betrayal of Christ, who had urged his followers to love their enemies, and to turn the other cheek, it expressed a conscious ambition to measure up to his teachings. Toleration of religious difference had been enshrined as a Christian virtue.

Cromwell, victorious in his own wars to a degree that no general on the continent had succeeded in matching, and confident of God’s backing because of it, had felt no call to extend a matching toleration to the Catholic rebels in Ireland. His campaigning there had been obedient to the same rules of war that had brought such ruin to Germany; but Cromwell himself, far from lamenting its horrors, had exulted in his role as an instrument of divine justice. As Lord Protector, he was similarly unbending. Papists, while free to believe what they liked, could not be licensed to practise their ungodly rituals. That there were Protestants in England bold enough to condemn this as hypocrisy did not sway him. Arguments such as that made by a one-time publisher of Milton, that ‘a Protestant sermon is as idolatrous to a Papist, as a Popish Mass is to a Protestant’,¹⁴ only provoked his indignation. Radicals, when they pushed at the limits of what he regarded as acceptable opinion, bewildered and aggravated him. They were, he declared, ‘a despicable and contemptible generation of men’.¹⁵

Revolution had come to England amid the tumult of battles and executions. Nevertheless, throughout Cromwell’s protectorate, it wore as well a more sober aspect: that of a trade-off. Between the yearning of Presbyterians for a purified commonwealth, and the demands of radicals for an absolute liberty of religion, the Lord Protector trod a delicate path. When an anti-trinitarian was sentenced to exile, and a Quaker who had impersonated Christ to mutilation, neither side was satisfied. Yet it was clear, from Cromwell’s personal interventions to ensure that both were spared the death penalty, and his readiness to allow the blasphemy ordinance of 1648 to wither on the vine, where his convictions ultimately lay. It was not – as it had been for the diplomats who had drawn up the treaties of Westphalia – the need to patch up a peace with his enemies that prompted him to accept toleration as a Christian duty. Rather, it was his sense of himself as a vessel of the Spirit, and his attentive reading of scripture. ‘You, then,’ Paul had demanded of the Romans, ‘why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we will all stand before God’s judgement seat.’¹⁶

Cromwell, despite the ambition that had helped to raise him from provincial obscurity to the rule of Britain, was a man far too conscious of God’s prerogatives ever to contemplate usurping them. He had rather see Islam practised in England, he declared, ‘than that one of God’s Children should be persecuted’.¹⁷ Books might be burnt; but not the men who wrote them. Even papists, despite Cromwell’s loathing for their religion, were known to be guests at his table. In 1657, in a particularly startling gesture, he moved to ensure that the son of the founder of Maryland – a colony established in the New World specifically to provide a haven for English Catholics – should not be deprived of his rights to the province. Toleration, then, was a principle that even God’s most faithful servants might opt to uphold in a range of ways. The illumination of the Spirit was not always easy to translate into policy. On occasion, rather than in an ecstasy of certainty, it might need to be answered with compromises. Godliness, it seemed, might sometimes be expressed through ambiguity.

No Other Teacher but the Light

When Cromwell joked about Islam, he could afford to be insouciant. There was not the remotest prospect of Muslims wishing to settle in England, of course. Nevertheless, the issue of whether a godly Commonwealth should tolerate those who did not acknowledge Christ as Lord was a topical one. In 1655, a rabbi resident in Amsterdam arrived in London. Menasseh ben Israel had come with a request. Appealing directly to Cromwell, he begged that Jews be granted a legal right of residency in England. The ban imposed in 1290 had never been rescinded. There were plenty of Protestants who thought it never should be. Christian hostility to Jews, far from being moderated by the Reformation, had in many ways been refined by it. Luther, reading Paul’s letter to the Galatians, had found in it a direct inspiration for his own campaign against the papacy. The Spirit was all. Those who denied the primacy of faith as the way to God – be they papists, be they Jews – were guilty of a baneful legalism. Desiccated and sterile, they blocked the panting sinner from the revivifying waters of the truth. To Luther, the enduring insistence of the Jews that they were God’s Chosen People was a personal affront. ‘We foolish Gentiles, who were not God’s people, are now God’s people. That drives the Jews to distraction and stupidity.’¹⁸ If anyone had been driven to distraction, though, it was Luther. By the end of his life, he had come to nurture fantasies of persecution that went far beyond anything the papacy had ever sanctioned. The Jews, he had demanded, should be rounded up, housed beneath one roof, put to hard labour. Their prayer books, their Talmuds, their synagogues: all should be burned. ‘And whatever will not burn should be buried and covered with dirt, so that no man will ever again see so much as a stone or cinder of them.’¹⁹

Even Luther’s admirers tended to regard this as a bit extreme. Widespread though resentment of the Jews might be among Protestants, there were also some who felt sympathy for them. In England, where the self-identification of Puritans as the new Israel had fostered a boom in the study of Hebrew, this might on occasion shade almost into admiration. Even before Menasseh’s arrival in London, there were sectarians who claimed it a sin ‘that the Jews were not allowed the open profession and exercise of their religion amongst us’.²⁰ Some warned that God’s anger was bound to fall on England unless repentance was shown for their expulsion. Others demanded their readmission so that they might the more easily be won for Christ, and thereby expedite the end of days. Cromwell, who convened an entire conference in Whitehall to debate Menasseh’s request, was sympathetic to this perspective. Nevertheless, he failed to win formal backing for it. Accordingly – in typical fashion – he opted for compromise. Written permission for the Jews to settle in England was denied; but Cromwell did give Menasseh the private nod, and a pension of a hundred pounds. The practical effect of this was noted by a diarist that same December. ‘Now were the Jews admitted.’²¹

Yet in not nearly large enough numbers to satisfy some in England. Friends, as Quakers called themselves, felt charged with a mission to the Jews. ‘The Lord moved his good spirit in me, and his word came unto me, (which was in me as a fire).’²² It was this burning impulse to proclaim God’s kingdom – which might inspire some Friends to preach naked, and others in sackcloth and ashes – that had frustrated all attempts by the authorities to extinguish it. Unlike the Diggers, all of whom had ended up evicted from their various communes by local landowners, the Quakers had positively flourished in the face of official hostility. Women were particularly active. One, marching into Cromwell’s private quarters in Whitehall, boldly addressed the Protector as a ‘dunghill’, and then spent an hour urging him to repentance; another, a one-time housemaid, travelled to Constantinople, where she somehow succeeded in preaching to the sultan himself. It was the Jews, though, who were a particular object of Quaker hopes. The refusal of Cromwell to grant them a formal right of admission prompted missionaries to head for Amsterdam. The early signs were not promising. The Jews there seemed resolutely uninterested in the Quakers’ message; the authorities were hostile; only one of the missionaries spoke Dutch. Nevertheless, it was not the Quaker way to despair. There was, so one of the missionaries reported, ‘a spark in many of the Jews’ bosoms, which in process of time may kindle to a burning flame’.²³

Here, to any Friend, was encouragement enough. Well read though Quakers might be in scripture, they, like other radicals, did not view it as the most direct source of truth. The most excitable among them – to the embarrassment of their leaders – were known on occasion to burn Bibles in public. Only an unmediated openness to the Spirit could enable the rancorous sectarianism that bedevilled other Christians to be transcended. ‘He that puts the letter for the light, when the letter says Christ is the light, is blind.’²⁴ Quite how this light was to be defined – whether as the conscience natural to all humans mentioned by Paul, or as the Spirit, or as Christ, or as a mingling of all three, or perhaps as something else entirely – was a question to which Quakers could never provide a consistent answer. This, though, did not greatly bother them. To feel the light was to know it. Such was the message that Margaret Fell, one of the founding members of the Friends, addressed directly to Menasseh. A second pamphlet, A Loving Salutation, to the Seed of Abraham Among the Jews, quickly followed. Anxious to get both tracts into Hebrew, the Quaker missionaries in Amsterdam were delighted to report back to Fell that they had successfully procured the services of a translator. This translator was not only a skilled linguist; he had also been a pupil of none other than Menasseh himself.²⁵

Baruch Spinoza was no ordinary Jew. Indeed, he barely considered himself a Jew at all. In July 1656, he had been formally expelled, cursed and damned by the synagogue in Amsterdam. Such a sentence was not unheard of, and was issued in the full expectation that offenders – rather than risk being cut off permanently from their own community – would scrabble to make their peace with the synagogue’s governing board. But Spinoza refused to make peace. He had alternative ports of call. Rather than the Quaker missionaries in Amsterdam approaching him, it was he who had approached the Friends. Writing to Margaret Fell, one of them explained that Spinoza had been ‘Cast out (as he himself and others sayeth) because he owneth no other teacher but the light . . .’ ²⁶ Whether this was an accurate report or not, it was certainly the case that Spinoza, in the wake of his excommunication, did not lack for companionship and support. Rather than with the Quakers, though, it was with their nearest Dutch equivalents that he had sought refuge. Collegiants, as they were called, were recognisably bred of the same soil as their fellow radicals in England. They scorned the claims to authority of the public Church; disdained all ideals of hierarchy and priesthood; despaired of sectarian rivalries and quarrels. Spinoza’s Dutch friends, like his Quaker contacts, believed that true holiness was enlightenment. ‘This it is which leads man in truth, into the way to God, which excuseth him in well-doing, giving him peace in his conscience, yea, brings him to union with God, wherein all happiness and salvation consist.’²⁷

To settle among such Protestants – as Spinoza did in 1660, when he moved to Rijnsberg, a village outside Leiden that had become the centre of Collegiant life – was very consciously to take sides in what had become the major division in Dutch society. The purging of dissident preachers in 1619 had provided the Reformed Church with only a temporary victory. For decades, rival promoters of discipline and toleration had been locked in effective stalemate. Meanwhile, in England, fresh upheavals were serving to sharpen the sense of what was at stake. Two years after the death of Cromwell in 1658, the monarchy was restored – and the Church of England with it. An Act of Uniformity served to push Quakers and other religious dissenters to the margins. The warning to Protestants in the Netherlands who rejected the pretensions of institutional churches, who affirmed that personal enlightenment was the surest guide to truth, who read the word of God as something written pre-eminently on their consciences, appeared a grim one. The enemies of toleration were everywhere. Freedom could never be taken for granted – not even in the Dutch Republic. When Spinoza, in 1665, began preparing a book in defence of religious liberty, the praise he offered his homeland was touched by irony as well as gratitude. ‘We are fortunate to enjoy the rare happiness of living in a republic where every person’s liberty to judge for himself is respected, everyone is permitted to worship God according to his own mind, and nothing is thought dearer or sweeter than freedom.’²⁸

It was Calvin himself who had proposed that true obedience to God should be grounded in liberty.²⁹ Spinoza, when he pushed the case for toleration, was participating in a debate that had always been fundamental to Protestantism. This did not mean, however, that he saw himself as bounded by it. Quite the opposite. Spinoza’s ambition was to demonstrate that to quarrel at all over religion, let alone to fight over it, was idiocy. By profession a lens grinder, fine-tuning glasses for both telescopes and microscopes, he knew what it was to hone an instrument that could reveal wonders invisible to the naked eye. Spinoza beheld the cosmos, not as a Christian, still less as a Jew, but as a philosopher. Rather than pick at the Gordian knot of theology, he sought instead to cut directly through it. Already, by 1662, rumours of his shocking opinions had begun to swirl around Amsterdam. Spinoza, it was reported, believed every substance to be infinite, and incapable of producing another. That being so, there could exist only a single substance. God was ‘nothing other than the whole universe’.³⁰ He did not exist beyond the laws that governed the cosmos, and which generations of natural philosophers had committed themselves to identifying: he was those laws. Abelard, declaring that ‘everything that originates without miracles can be adequately accounted for’, had spoken more truly than he had ever imagined. Miracles did not exist. They were an impossibility. There was only nature, and all God’s decrees, all his commandments, all his providence, were in truth only nature’s order. No less than Calvin, Spinoza saw the destiny of every human being as irrevocably preordained. God, though, was no divine judge. He was geometry. ‘For all things follow from God’s eternal decree with the same necessity as from the essence of a triangle it follows that its three angles are equal to two right angles.’³¹

This was not, of course, a God that most pastors would have recognised – which was, for Spinoza, precisely the point. His ambition in questioning the very fundamentals of Christian belief was political as well as philosophical. ‘How pernicious it is,’ he declared, ‘both for religion and the state to allow ministers of things sacred to acquire the right to make decrees or handle the business of government.’³² There were plenty of Protestants who agreed; but increasingly, in the Dutch Republic, the tide seemed to be turning against them. In 1668, a Reformed preacher who had come strongly under Spinoza’s influence was arrested; his brother, convicted on a charge of blasphemy, died in prison a year later. Spinoza, putting the finishing touches to his book, did so in the conviction that the only way to annihilate the authority of the Reformed Church was to attack the deep foundations on which it ultimately depended. Religion itself had to be discredited. Simultaneously, Spinoza knew how dangerously he was treading. The Theological-Political Treatise, when it was published in Amsterdam early in 1670, did not have his name on the cover. It also declared its place of publication to be Hamburg. The guardians of Reformed orthodoxy were not fooled. By the summer of 1674, the Dutch authorities had been persuaded to issue a formal ban on Spinoza’s book. The directive imposing it listed an entire litany of its most monstrous blasphemies: ‘against God and his attributes, and his worshipful trinity, against the divinity of Jesus Christ and his true mission, along with the fundamental dogmas of the true Christian religion, and in effect the authority of Holy Scripture . . .’ ³³ The notoriety of Spinoza as an enemy of the Christian religion was assured.

Yet in truth, the Theological-Political Treatise was a book that only a man utterly saturated in Protestant assumptions could ever have written. What rendered it so unsettling to the Dutch authorities was less that it served as a repudiation of their beliefs than that it pushed them to a remorseless conclusion. Spinoza’s genius was to turn strategies that Luther and Calvin had deployed against popery on Christianity itself. When he lamented just how many people were ‘in thrall to pagan superstition’,³⁴ when he dismissed the rituals of baptism or the celebration of feast-days as mere idle ‘ceremony’,³⁵ and when he lamented that the original teachings of Christ had been corrupted by popes, he was arguing nothing that a stern Reformed pastor might not also have argued. Even the most scandalous of his claims – that a belief in miracles was superstitious nonsense, and that a close reading of scripture would demonstrate it to have been of human rather than divine origin – were merely Protestant arguments pushed to a radical extreme. When Spinoza sought to substantiate them, he described himself – just as he had done to the Quakers – as a pupil of ‘the light’. Naturally, he did not cast his own experience of enlightenment as anything supernatural. Those who claimed to be illumined by the Spirit were, he scoffed, merely fabricating a sanction for their own fantasies. True enlightenment derived from reason. ‘I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy,’ Spinoza wrote to a former pupil who, to his dismay, had converted to Catholicism, ‘but I know that I understand the true one.’³⁶ Here too he was pursuing a familiar strategy. Protestants had been insisting on the correctness of their own readings of scripture, their own understandings of God’s purpose, since the time of Luther’s confrontation with Cajetan. Now, in the person of Spinoza, this tradition had begun to cannibalise itself.

Spinoza himself, though, saw it as something more than merely Protestant. A Jew learned in the law of his ancestors, who had left his own community to preach a radical and unsettling new message, he did not hesitate to hint at whom he saw as his most obvious forebear. ‘Paul, when he was first converted, saw God as a great light.’³⁷ This light, so Spinoza strongly implied, had been authentically divine. Paul, unlike Moses or the prophets, had adopted the methods of a philosopher: debating with his opponents, and submitting his teachings to the judgement of others. Spinoza’s critique of Judaism, for all that it might be disguised by a tone of scholarly detachment, was recognisably Christian. He admired Paul much as Luther had done: as the apostle who had brought to all of humanity the good news that God’s commandments were written on their hearts. Unlike the Old Testament – a term pointedly used throughout the Theological-Political Treatise – the New bore witness to a law that was for all peoples, not just the one; that constituted ‘true liberty’³⁸ rather than a burdensome legalism; that was best comprehended by means of the light. ‘Anyone therefore who abounds in the fruits of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, against whom (as Paul says in his Epistle to the Galatians 5.22) there is no law, he, whether he has been taught by reason alone or by Scripture alone, has truly been taught by God, and is altogether happy.’³⁹

Spinoza certainly did not approve of all the Christian virtues. Humility and repentance he dismissed as irrational; pity as ‘evil and unprofitable’.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, his equation of Christ’s teachings with the universal laws of nature was a manoeuvre as audacious as it was brilliant. To Christians unenthused by the prospect of worshipping a triangle, it offered what would prove a momentous reassurance: that much of Christianity, even without a belief in the creator God of Israel, might still be retained. Although Spinoza was privately disdainful of any notion that Jesus might have risen from the dead, he unhesitatingly affirmed in the Theological-Political Treatise that Christ – as he always made sure to call him – was a man who had indeed attained a superhuman degree of perfection. ‘Therefore his voice may be called the voice of God.’⁴¹ Even in his unpublished writings, Spinoza maintained this tone of awe. Liberty – the cause which he valued above all others, and to which he had devoted his entire career – he identified directly with ‘the Spirit of Christ’.⁴² Notorious as an enemy of religion though Spinoza rapidly became throughout Europe, there remained in his attitude to Jesus the sense of a profound enigma. When, in the decades that followed his death in 1677, both his enemies and his admirers hailed him as ‘the chief atheist of our age’,⁴³ the ambivalences in his attitude to Christianity, and the way in which his philosophy constituted less a beginning than a mutation, were rapidly occluded. Quakers, when they preached that it was the inner light which enabled the truth to be known, and Collegiants, when they preached that it was Christ, had both been beating a path for Spinoza. All of them, whether they trusted in the Spirit, or reason, or both, had dreamed that sectarian disputes might be resolved for good; and all of them had failed.

Spinoza, far from quieting the babel of competing doctrines, had instead only added to them yet another variant of Christian belief.

The Hunchback’s Progress

To be a Christian was to be a pilgrim. This conviction, widely shared by Protestants, did not imply any nostalgia for the dark days of popery, when monks had gulled the faithful into trekking vast distances to bow and scrape before bogus relics. Rather, it meant to journey through life in the hope that at its end the pilgrim would be met by shining angels, and dressed in raiment that shone like gold, and led into heaven, a city on a hill. Such a commitment was not lightly undertaken. There were bound to be many impediments along the way: sloughs of despond, and fairs full of vanities, and times when despair seemed to loom up like a giant. Many, rather than toil along such a road, shouldering the burden that was the consciousness of their own sin, understandably chose to stay where they were. But that, for those who had come to realise that they were living in the city of Destruction, could never be an option. ‘Down I fell, as a Bird that is shot from the top of a Tree, into great guilt and fearful despair.’⁴⁴ So recalled one itinerant preacher, of the darkness that had preceded the light of the coming of the Spirit. From that time on, all his life had been a tireless journeying towards holiness. Such it was to be a pilgrim. True Christianity was nothing if it were not progress.

Pilgrimage to the celestial city did not, of course, require Christians to kick up literal dust. They also served who only stood and waited. Nevertheless, something of the restlessness that had led in 1620 to the founding of Plymouth continued to inspire in numerous Protestants a yearning to leave behind the miseries and temptations of the old world and begin afresh. Some were willing to go halfway round the world to achieve this. In 1688, taking ship, 150 of the Calvinists who had recently been expelled by royal command from France – ‘Huguenots’ – made for Cape Colony, a settlement founded by Dutch traders on the southernmost tip of Africa. Most Protestants, though, continued to head for America. In Massachusetts, where a law passed in 1661 had prescribed that Quakers be tied to a cart and flogged, Puritans continued to uphold a uniformity of worship that, back in the mother country, Cromwell’s protectorate had served to doom for good. The New World, though, was not New England. South of Boston and Plymouth, there was no lack of places where dissenters might settle without fear of harassment. The most visionary of all was a colony named Philadelphia: ‘Brotherly Love’. William Penn, its founder, was a man of paradox. The son of one of Cromwell’s admirals, he was simultaneously a dandy with close links to the royal court, and a Quaker who had repeatedly suffered imprisonment for his beliefs. Philadelphia, the capital of a huge tranche of territory granted Penn by royal charter, was designed to serve as ‘a holy experiment’:⁴⁵ a city without stockades, at peace with the local Indians, in which all ‘such as profess faith in Jesus Christ’⁴⁶ might be permitted to hold office. Just as the godly colonies of New England had been founded to serve the whole world as models, so too was Philadelphia – but as a haven of tolerance. By the early eighteenth century, its streets were filled with Anabaptists as well as Quakers, and with Germans as well as English. There were Jews. There were even Catholics. Increasingly, it was New England – once the vanguard of Protestant expansion overseas – that seemed out of step with the times.

To cross the Atlantic, then, was to lay claim to the liberty that Paul had proclaimed to be every Christian’s. ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.’⁴⁷ In the autumn of 1718, when a Quaker named Benjamin Lay sailed for the Caribbean with his wife, Sarah, he could do so confident that they would literally be among Friends. Barbados, an English colony for almost a century, now belonged – following the union of England with Scotland in 1707 – to a British empire. It was, in the words of one settler, ‘a Babel of all Nations and Conditions of men’.⁴⁸ Yet even amid the colour and clamour of Bridgetown, the island’s principal port, the Lays stood out. Both were hunchbacks; both were barely four feet tall. Lay, despite having legs ‘so slender, as to appear almost unequal to the purpose of supporting him’,⁴⁹ had already, by the age of forty-one, led an astonishingly active life. Of humble background, he had worked variously as a glover, a shepherd and a sailor; he had visited a well in Syria beside which Jesus was supposed to have sat; he had personally lobbied the British king. His small stature had made him only the more determined to be true to ‘the counsel and direction of the Holy Spirit’,⁵⁰ and oppose anything that he viewed as contrary to Christ. In an age when many Quakers were coming to set a premium on respectability, Lay was a throwback to their wilder, more confrontational beginnings. In England, this had made him plenty of enemies. Now, arriving in Barbados, he was about to make many more.

Not everyone who came to the New World did so by choice. One day, visiting a Quaker who lived some miles outside Bridgetown, Sarah Lay was shocked to find a naked African suspended outside his house. The man had just been savagely whipped. Blood, dripping from his twitching body, had formed a puddle in the dust. Flies were swarming over his wounds. Like the more than seventy thousand other Africans on Barbados, the man was a slave. The Quaker, explaining to Sarah that he was a runaway, felt no need to apologise. As in the time of Gregory of Nyssa, so in the time of the Lays: slavery was regarded by the overwhelming majority of Christians as being – much like poverty, or war, or sickness – a brutal fact of life. That there was no slave nor free in Christ Jesus did not mean that the distinction itself was abolished. Europeans, who lived on a continent where the institution had largely vanished, rarely thought for that reason to condemn it out of hand. Even Bartolomé de las Casas, whose campaign to redeem the Indians from slavery had become the focus of his entire life, never doubted that servitude might be merited as punishment for certain crimes. In the Caribbean as in Spanish America, the need for workers who could be relied upon to toil in hot and sticky climates without dying of the tropical diseases to which European labourers were prone made the purchase of Africans seem an obvious recourse. No Christian should feel guilt. Abraham had owned slaves. Laws in the Pentateuch regulated their treatment. A letter written by Paul’s followers, but attributed to Paul himself, urged them to obey their owners. ‘Do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favour, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.’⁵¹ The punishment of a runaway, then, might well be viewed as God’s work. Even Lay, despite not owning slaves himself, had been known to reach for a whip when other people’s slaves stole from him. ‘Sometimes I could catch them, and then I would give them Stripes.’⁵²

Lay, when he remembered bringing down the lash on a starving slave’s back, did not reach for scriptural justifications. On the contrary, he felt only a crushing sense of self-abhorrence. His guilt was that of a man who had suddenly discovered himself to be in the city of Destruction. ‘Oh my Heart has been pained within me many times, to see and hear; and now, now, now, it is so.’⁵³ Las Casas, brought to a similar consciousness of his sin, had turned for guidance to the great inheritance of Catholic scholarship: to Cajetan, and Aquinas, and the compilers of canon law. Lay turned for guidance to the Spirit. When he and his wife, fearlessly confronting the slave-owners of Barbados, beseeched them to ‘examine your own Hearts’,⁵⁴ it was with an inner certitude as to the ultimate meaning of Scripture. The God that Lay could feel as enlightenment had brought his Chosen People out of slavery in Egypt; his son had washed feet, and suffered a death of humiliating agony, and redeemed all of humanity from servitude. To trade in slaves, to separate them from their children, to whip and rack and roast them, to starve them, to work them to death, to care nothing for the mixing into raw sugar of their ‘Limbs, Bowels and Excrements’,⁵⁵ was not to be a Christian, but to be worse than the Devil himself. The more that the Lays, opening their home and their table to starving slaves, learned about slavery, the more furiously they denounced it – and the more unpopular they became. Forced to beat a retreat from Barbados in 1720, they were never to escape the shadow of its horrors. For the rest of their lives, their campaign to abolish slavery – quixotic though it seemed – was to be their pilgrims’ progress.

They were not the first abolitionists in the New World. Back in the 1670s, an Irish Quaker named William Edmundson had toured both Barbados and New England, campaigning to have Christianity taught to African slaves. Then, on 19 September 1676, writing to his fellow Friends in the Rhode Island settlement of Newport, he had been struck by a sudden thought. ‘And many of you count it unlawful to make slaves of the Indians, and if so, then why the Negroes?’⁵⁶ This again was to echo las Casas. The great Spanish campaigner for human rights, in his anxiety to spare Indians enslavement, had for many decades backed the importation of Africans to do forced labour. This he had done under the impression that they were convicts, sold as punishment for their crimes. Then, late in life, he had discovered the terrible truth: that the Africans were unjustly enslaved, and no less the victims of Christian oppression than the Indians. The guilt felt by las Casas, the revulsion and dread of damnation, had been sharpened by the sustenance that he knew he had provided to the argument of Aristotle: that certain races were suited to be slaves. ‘God has made of one blood all nations.’⁵⁷ When William Penn, writing in prison, cited this line of scripture, he had been making precisely the same case as las Casas: that all of humanity had been created equally in God’s image; that to argue for a hierarchy of races was an offence against the very fundamentals of Christ’s teaching; that no peoples were fitted by the colour of their skins to serve as either masters or slaves. Naturally – since this was an argument that so self-evidently went with the grain of Christian tradition – it was capable of provoking some anxiety among the owners of African slaves. Just as opponents of the Dominicans had cited Aristotle, so opponents of Quaker abolitionists might grope after obscure verses in the Old Testament. Particularly popular was a passage that related a curse laid by Noah on his grandson, whose descendants – by means of various tortuous deductions – had come to be identified with Africans. So unconvincing was this argument, however, that no one ever took it very seriously. Slave-owners with delicate consciences, and who wished to salve them, preferred instead an altogether more solidly founded justification: that the enslavement of pagans, and their transportation to Christian lands, was done for the good of their souls. This, as Benjamin Lay had discovered in Barbados, was a licence for slavery widely accepted by Quakers. Even William Penn had been convinced. It was why the founder of Philadelphia, that great and undoubted enthusiast for ‘the Right of Liberty’,⁵⁸ had himself been an owner of slaves.

To Lay, all this was the rankest hypocrisy. In 1731, when he and his wife arrived in Philadelphia, he was appalled to discover whips, and chains, and slave-markets in the City of Brotherly Love. Rather than stay in such a Babylon, they settled instead in the nearby town of Abington. There, much as Elizabeth of Hungary had once done, they sought to boycott anything that might have been procured at the cost of another creature’s suffering. The couple made their own clothes; drank nothing but water and milk; lived entirely on vegetables. Unlike Elizabeth, though, they did not attempt to keep their commitment to ethical living between themselves and God. Their ambition instead was to draw attention to their lifestyle: to make a public spectacle of it. In 1735, when Sarah Lay died, her husband mourned her by pushing his activism to a new level. By 1737, the Quaker slave-holders in Abington had grown so fed up with his endless protests that they banned him from their meeting hall. The following year, attending the annual assembly of Philadelphia Friends, Lay pulled off his most spectacular publicity stunt yet. Called to address his fellow Quakers, he rose to his feet, smoothed back his coat, and drew out a sword that he had been concealing within its folds. The enslavement of Africans, he declared in a resounding voice, was ‘as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard, as if you should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book’.⁵⁹ Then, holding up a hollowed-out Bible in which he had concealed a bladder full of blood-red pokeberry juice, he ran it through. The juice spattered everywhere. The meeting hall erupted in indignation. Lay, turning on his heel, hobbled out. He had made his point.

Summons to repentance were, of course, nothing new. The Bible was full of them. Yet Lay’s campaign, for all that it drew on the example of the prophets, and for all that his admonitions against slavery were garlanded with biblical references, did indeed constitute something different. To target it for abolition was to endow society itself with the character of a pilgrim, bound upon a continuous journey, away from sinfulness towards the light. It was to cast slavery as a burden, long borne by fallen humanity, but which, by the grace of God, might one day loose from its shoulders, and fall from off its back, and begin to tumble. It was at once a startling repudiation of an institution that most Christians had always taken utterly for granted, and yet bred of Christianity’s marrow. It bore witness, no less than did the spirit of toleration in neighbouring Philadelphia, no less than did those who in distant Amsterdam pondered the writings of Spinoza, to the workings of the Spirit. It was founded upon the conviction that had for centuries, in the lands of the Christian West, served as the great incubator of revolution: that society might be born again. ‘Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.’⁶⁰

Never once did Lay despair of these words of Jesus. Twenty years after he had gatecrashed the annual assembly of Philadelphia Friends, as he lay mortally sick in bed, he was brought news that a new assembly had voted to discipline any Quaker who traded in slaves. ‘I can now die in peace,’⁶¹ he sighed in relief. His own progress through life, for all its discouragements, for all the dismal stories that had beset him round, for all the hobgoblins and foul fiends that had sought to daunt his spirit, had never turned aside from its object. Benjamin Lay had succeeded, by the time of his death in 1759, in making the community in which he had lived just that little bit more like him – in making it just that little bit more progressive.