Love, Liberty and Law
Then war was not nor riches known
no man said this or that is my own
Then first the sacred name of the king began
And things that were as common as the day
Did yield themselves and likewise did obey….
Then some sage man …
Knowing that laws could not dwell
Unless they were observed, did first devise
The name of God, religion, heaven and hell.
—attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh (1603)
"Man's estate before the fall" was "the last daytime of mankind," when "as the spirit was a common treasury of unity and peace within, so the earth was a common treasury of delight for the preservation of their bodies without." Consequently, "there was nothing but peace upon the face of the whole earth."
- Gerrard Winstanley
'What is important is not proof (for who can be said to have proved anything?) but what is most probable to the rational, informed mind.'
- Louise Baron
In an idle moment – I have a few every so often – I entertained myself with one of those Internet quizzes, ‘Which kind of early Christian heretic are you?’
I came out as an antinomian. It used to be Pelagianism or usually Gnosticism.
"Saying you're a new kind of Christian with a new kind of Christianity is basically saying you're an old kind of heretic."
—Burk Parsons
It’s not the first time that “antinomianism” of some descriptionhas cropped up with me … The big theme of my philosophy is ‘rational freedom,’ the idea that the freedom of each individual is conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom of all individuals, and that such freedom can only be realized in a community which recognizes the interdependence of each and all. Historically, 'rational freedom' has been institutionalized as a lawful freedom within the overarching framework of the state and supplied with a written code and constitution. My contention is that, should this freedom come to be embodied in the right relationships of each and all, and of all to the world, we could dissolve the abstracted legal-institutional framework that constrains us to act well into the everyday social lifeworld of solidary exchange, interaction and reciprocity. Instead of an external constraint forcing us to be free (as Rousseau put it), in being responsive to the educative purpose of law we learn, in time, to exercise a self-constraint. If we have love, we will have no need of law ... Such is the idea which may identify me as an antinomian. At which point, I feel the need to emphasize that I do argue for love and justice together, so as to retain a 'rational' unity that is capable of being extended beyond immediate solidarities and loyalties in order to embrace wider relations and ties. The ideas of Gerrard Winstanley influenced the Quakers (and there is evidence that he became a Quaker, and we know that he was buried on Quaker ground). The Quakers are known as 'children of the light' and 'the Society of Friends.' That's a politics of love that trusts to the truths engraved on the human heart, as Rousseau wrote, (and St Paul in Romans long before him). This realizes ethics as ‘the sublime science of simple souls’, as Rousseau put it, being moved by the inner light, what my man from Wigan Gerrard Winstanley calls the ‘Spirit Reason’ that exists in each and every person and which moves all things.
So ... these may help explain why I came out as an antinomian in this impeccably scientific questionnaire (not understanding the questions, and not being concerned to understand, may also have helped).
Here’s the summary of my responses:
‘You are Antinomian! Antinomianism teaches that, since salvation is by faith alone, Christians are under no obligation to obey any moral law. Views of this sort were held by various Gnostic sects in the early centuries of the church, who argued that laws governing human behaviour were of no account since the inward spiritual essence of the human person could never be affected by the actions of the physical body. The term "antinomianism" itself, however, only arose in the aftermath of the continental Reformation, in which some of the more extreme followers of Luther understood the new emphasis on salvation through faith to invalidate the validity of any standard of moral law. Although Luther himself condemned this belief as a heresy, bitter antinomian controversies continued to spring up within Lutheranism and within English Puritanism throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The doctrine is condemned in the Lutheran Book of Concord and in the Decree on Justification of the Council of Trent.’
Is that me?
Not quite. I don't go by faith alone, I will go with reason as far as reason can go. As for being under no obligation to obey any moral law, it sounds like the libertarian conceptions I have spent a lifetime repudiating in their myriad forms, false notions of freedom that always end up enslaving people to necessity in one way or another. And it makes a nonsense of the moral law written on the human heart. That's a big law in my book. I think we can live by it. Philosophers like Don Cupitt argue that there is no pre-given moral law, and that, therefore, we must create a moral law. The statement is self-contradictory. If there is no pre-given moral law, then no ought or must is possible.
I don't draw a sharp distinction between inner and outer, either, although I do indeed criticize and repudiate external mediation insofar as it is the institutional, legal and systemic expression of alienated social power. I don't propose a world of completely unmediated spontaneity and subjectivism, but see freedom as socially mediated and institutionally embodied and articulated. If you want to know what that looks like, think Hegel's Sittlichkeit. (references to my work here below).
If I had to sum up my own approach to antinomianism, then I could do no better than to quote Jesus Christ, who was concerned not with the abolition of the law but with its fulfilment.
The Fulfilment of the Law
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfil them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.…”
Matthew 5:17-18
This is not anti-law at all, but a demand for its realisation. Law embodies truth and right and enjoins us to live up to those things. Rousseau is frequently misunderstood for his statement that the law forces individuals to be free. What he means is that the law exists as a standard of right behaviour and we would come to live well to the extent that we came to live in accordance with that standard. Depart from that standard, and we fall short of our human potentialities. The law, thus, constrains individuals to live in accordance with their healthy potentials, whilst enjoining us to do so voluntarily, for our own good. Should we learn, by good habits, to do the right thing and live well, we could come to dispense with law as an external constraint. In that sense, I take antinomianism to be against not law as such but against legalism or legal fetishism, law as a mere external trapping without moral content and force, an idolatry of words. Jesus came to abolish not law but legalism, a practice that had departed from the content of law.
In like manner, I understand Marx not as anti-philosophical but as seeking to realize philosophy. He openly states this in his early writings, that as philosophy becomes worldly, the world becomes philosophical. The German words Aufhebung and Aufgehoben have no direct translation in English which retains the nuanced meaning of ‘abolition’ in the German – to cancel, nullify but raise up, keep and preserve at the same time, transcendence as a realization. The meaning seems contradictory to English ears, but makes perfect sense. Marx’s abolition of philosophy is also the realization of philosophy. It is a demand for Reason to take rational form:
“Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form. Hence the critic can take his cue from every existing form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from this ideal and final goal implicit in the actual forms of existing reality.”
Marx to Ruge September 1843 in EW 1975:208
Certainly Marx criticised the passive-contemplative approach to knowledge in which philosophy comes to the world after the fact. Marx is looking to overcome the theoretical and the contemplative approach to the world; the philosophical idea is to be located in the world and hence the idea ceases to be philosophical in the abstract sense. Marx is thus removing the gap between philosophy and the world. Philosophy, therefore, loses its abstract character to the extent that the world is made philosophical. This is quite a different proposition to a philosophy that, in abstraction from the world, prescribes for the world according to a priori principles of an abstracted rationality.
“Philosophy cannot realise itself without transcendence of the proletariat and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realisation of philosophy.”
Marx 1975:257
Neither Aufhebung (transcendence) nor Verwirklichung (realization) mean anything like ‘abolition’ in the sense of the ‘extirpation’ of philosophy – they mean fulfilment, the world becoming philosophical by reason taking rational form within the social forms of reality.
Marx came not to abolish philosophy, but to fulfil it … That’s how I read the man in my own work. In my oral examination, Lawrence Wilde expressed a certain incredulity at the extent to which I pushed the libertarian reading of Marx, claiming that at points I made Marx to be ‘almost anarchist.’ Well, not quite. I did emphasize the principle of authority informing Marx’s conception of freedom. If you get time, read Gerrard Winstanley’s introduction to The Law of Freedom, where Winstanley distinguishes his definition of freedom from various other conceptions, including libertarian or anarchist conceptions (then associated with the Ranters). You’ll see why my conception of ‘rational freedom’ is very much in line with Winstanley and Marx, why it retains a principle of authority, and why it affirms the existence of transcendent truths, norms and values as against conventionalism, relativism, sophism, Hobbes, positivism. So, in the end, I don’t come to abolish the law at all, but to fulfil it. And the same goes for reason, philosophy, transcendent norms, truths and values, and God or, in Winstanley's words "Spirit Reason." Now then, in terms of social relations and institutions, what could that fulfilment entail? Socialism, I’d say.
The point of my doctoral work on Marx was precisely to identify the bedrock principle or principles motivating Marx's critical and practical concerns, locating Marx in a tradition I called 'rational freedom.' I highlighted Marx's abolition of philosophy in the German sense of raising up, realization, and transcendence, a negation in one form that is a fulfilment in a deeper, richer, higher sense. That is the fulfilment of the law as against its encasement in sterile forms of legalism, what I criticized as legal fetishism. I therefore presented 'rational freedom' as a lawful freedom, a principle embodied in laws and institutions, to pose the question as to what it would take to realize this ideal standard in the everyday life world. I thus traced the development from a lawful freedom abstracted from social life to a socio-relational freedom in which universality and commonality comes to be embodied in social practices, relations and forms of the common life. When law and the rightness, truth and common good come to be set in the relational and interactive context of everyday life, we end up with Marx's practical philosophy and ethics of freedom. The principle of 'rational freedom' affirms that the freedom and happiness of each individual is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom and happiness of all individuals. The socialist society is one in which this freedom and happiness is attained in and through the self-realization or well-being of others, with socialism being whatever set of social institutions, structures and relations that are required to express and articulate that principle.
I can see why this transition from a lawful freedom to a socio-relational freedom could come to be understood as antinomianism. I do seem to flirt with an environmental antinomianism, seeing ethics as a stream you flow with, and having little or no time for those vast tomes that seek to define environmental ethics. I don’t even care much for the Spinozist work of Freya Mathews. I don’t doubt its brilliance, only its relevance. I have them all on my shelves. Paul Taylor, Singer, you name it, I'll probably have it, great weighty books all seeking to demonstrate why nature is, well, what our hearts tell us what it is – a sacred entity, an animate and enchanted world, the source of life that we should treat with respect and approach with reverence. These books cannot, by conceptual ethics and philosophy, demonstrate the very thing which they evidently believe to be true. The ontological status of Nature, God, rights, the good, freedom, everything ... is uncertain. But as Tennyson wrote in The Ancient Sage:
"And since—from when this earth began—
The Nameless never came
Among us, never spake with man,
And never named the Name’—
Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith."
For we are dealing with a commons, a core, a source, that is beyond naming and framing. Go direct, I say. We have been equipped to jump in the stream and swim. When we look for reasons, we stop swimming and drown.
In An Ethics of Place, Mick Smith writes:
"This nomothetic approach entirely fails to capture the individual phenomenology of the environmentalist's relationship to nature, replacing the heartfelt immediacy of ethical concern with an abstract post hoc rationalization; an unqualified "love of the land" with a set of codified legalistic principles.”
Precisely. This book describes an “anarchic excess” that always escapes reason and rationalisation. I identify this as core, the source of being, life and meaning, and which resists physical and conceptual enclosure. It cannot be demonstrated and does not require demonstration: like love, it has no need of proof.
Chapter 5 is entitled "Environmental Antinomianism: The Moral World Turned Upside Down." The phrase world turned upside down comes from Gerrard Winstanley who, in turn, took it from The Bible.
Heading the chapter are these quotes:
Albion goes to eternal death ...
No individual can keep these Laws, for they are death
To every energy of man and forbid the springs of life.
—William Blake, Jerusalem
True freedom lies in the enjoyment of the Earth.
—Gerrard Winstanley in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down
And there they are, side by side, two of my most favourite writers of all (and I have many favourites), Winstanley and Blake. I am in antinomian company, it seems.
So that socio-relational freedom I argue for beyond lawful or legalistic freedom, beyond the institutional encasement of social power, (but not beyond reason), is it antinomian? And, if so, in what way?
To answer these questions is to make sense of this environmental antinomianism as something more than a libertarianism and hedonism that rejects each, every and any law as a constraint, but a true pleasure gained through an appreciation of nature's plenitude, implicitly recognizing need, limit and moderation as one in a nourishment within as against an inner emptiness that drives an endless acquisition that consumes but can never fulfill. To do this, we need to understand clearly what this ‘anarchic excess’ refers to with respect to Winstanley’s God as the Spirit Reason (and love) in all beings and in all Creation. Winstanley’s "freedom within" is anything but an "excess" in a covetous sense, but denotes an inner fulfilment or strength through connection with love and reason that makes possible the moderate use of objects. "He that is free within is moved to excess or unrational action by no outward objects. He that is not free within, is moved to excess by every object."
In his address to the citizens of London in August 1649 he wrote about the ‘spirit of universal love’ and the ‘universal power of love’, and of the earth becoming ‘a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons.’
‘Well, in the beginning universal love appeared to be the father of all things … he made the earth to be a common treasury of livelihood to what mankind without respect of persons; and for all other creatures likewise that were to proceed from the earth.’
These were the right principles, and Winstanley wrote about them at length. Law and liberty go hand in hand and are grounded in a universal love pervading all things. But affirming this liberation theology was not enough. The words had to be lived in practice. Winstanley thus emphasised the dynamic interrelationship between revelations, words and deeds when he came to reflect upon his life and all that he stood for:
“Not a full year since, being quiet at my work, my heart was filled with sweet thoughts, and many things were revealed to me which I never read in books, nor heard from the mouth of any flesh, and when I began to speak of them, some people could not bear my words, and amongst those revelations this was one, That the earth shall be made a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons; and I had a voice within me bade me declare it all abroad, which I did obey, for I declared it by word of mouth to wheresoever I came, then I was made to write a little book called, ‘The new Law of righteousnesse,’ and therein I declared it yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts run in me, that words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing. Within little time I was made obedient to the word in that particular likewise; for I took my spade and went and broke the ground upon George-hill in Surrey, thereby declaring freedom to the Creation, and that the earth must be set free from entanglements of Lords and Landlords, and that it shall become a common Treasury to all, as it was first made and given to the sons of men.”
That is a clear personal statement affirming the unity of word and deed, damning the sterility of words which are not lived. Winstanley's argument is a clear anticipation of liberation theology. Similarly, the liberation theologians who emphasize the centrality of acts of justice as the means whereby theology is understood hark back to Winstanley’s thoughts and deeds. As Christopher Rowland writes, ‘Winstanley interpreted the story of the Fall in Genesis as the acting out of that inclination in humanity which demands property at the expense of others and also cuts people off from each other. His innovative approach to Christian doctrine may be seen in the way he interpreted the second coming of Christ: as the "rising up in sons and daughters", drawing them back into a spirit of true community.’
Winstanley conceived The New Law of Righteousness from January 1649 in a spirit of visionary, millenarian hope. This is made clear in the preface, which contained a dedication to “the twelve tribes of Israel that are circumcised in the heart, and scattered through all the nations of the Earth.” Whilst these tribes had suffered “inward bondage, and outward persecution,” the seed of Abraham which lay hidden in them, what Winstanley refers to as the “Law and power of righteousnesse” or “Law of righteousnesse and peace,” was ready to break forth from them and infuse the whole of creation. “This is the one spreading power that shall remove the curse, and restore all things from the bondage every thing groans under;” “the blessing shall be everywhere.” The “glory of Jerusalem,” Winstanley argues, was not only to be “seen hereafter, after the body is laid in the dust.” “I know,” Winstanley confidently asserts, “that the glory of the Lord shall be seen and known within the Creation, and the blessing shall be spread in all Nations.” (Sabine Works, pp 149-53).
Winstanley employs the metaphor of first and second Adam reappeared in The New Law of Righteousness, placing it alongside the story of Jacob and Esau. (Sabine, Works, pp 149, 157, 158, 159, 173, 174, 177, 179, 183, 189, 190, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 212, 216, 227, 228). The first Adam or Esau had chosen to live off the objects of creation. Thus driven by self-love and covetousness, man had come to fall out with his maker, with the result that all creatures now lay under the curse. (Sabine, Works, pp 155-56, 174, 186, 221, 226, 235). The second Adam or Jacob heralds the restoration of all things to their former state and the ultimate victory of righteousness and peace through the rising of Christ in his sons and daughters. This Christ rising was the second coming: the new Jerusalem, heaven and hell were all to be seen, and experienced within each individual and all individuals. Winstanley was one of the first to preach the universalist doctrine that all, sooner or later, shall be saved. (Sabine, Works, pp 162, 176-77, 213-19, 224, 226-7, 229). There is no hierarchy and no elect for Winstanley. The first Adam appeared in every man and woman but also more particularly, “he sits down in the chair of Magistracy, in some above others.” This Adam was, Winstanley explained, to be understood in a two-fold sense, as the wisdom and power of the flesh “broke out and sate down in the chair of rule and dominion, in one part of man-kind over another.” (Sabine, Works, 158).
Winstanley made political allusions throughout this work. It is impossible, indeed idle, to try to separate the sacred and the secular in Winstanley, for whom there was no divorce between religion as other-worldly and politics and society as this-worldly. The two are in relation. Winstanley describes kings as enemies to Christ, and denounces “Justices and Officers of State” for frequently multiplying wrongs and for oppressing the poor.” (Sabine, Works, pp 174-75).
Note well the universalism and egalitarianism. Reformation would not be brought by “the hands of a few, or by unrighteous men, that would pul the tyrannical government out of other mens hands, and keep it in their own heart [hands], as we feel this to be a burden of our age”; “Truly Tyrannie is Tyrannie in one as wel as in another; in a poor man lifted up by his valour, as in a rich man lifted up by his lands.” The deep anticlericalism evident in this as in the earlier writings was directed not only against the beneficed, university-educated clergy, but also against preachers attached to gathered congregations, who saw that “light arises much amongst the people,” and who sought to exploit this for their own ends.” (Sabine, Works, pp 163, 176, 187, 193, 200, 206, 208-09, 212-14, 219, 223-24, 226, 230, 238-43). Wars and “destroying Armies of men” were, for Winstanley, “but the curse, the burden which the Creation groans under”:
“The Kingdoms of the whole world must become the Kingdoms of the Lord Christ; and this the Nations are angry at; Therefore count it no strange thing to see wars and rumours of wars, to see men that are put in trust to act for publiclike good, to prove fals, to see commotions of people every where like flouds of water stirred up, ready to devour and overflow one another; To see Kings storm against the people; To see rich men and gentry most violent against the poor, oppressing them and treading them like mire in the street, Why is all this anger?
But because the man of the flesh is to die, his day of judgment is come, he must give up the Kingdom and Government of the earth (man-kind) into the hand of his neighbour that is more righteous than he, For Jacob must have the blessing, he is blessed, yea and shal be blessed, and Esau shal become his servant; The poor shal inherit the earth.”
(Sabine, Works, pp 208-09, 222, italics in the original).
The New Law of Righteousness makes use of the earth metaphor and attendant alchemical imagery that appears in his earlier writings. The earth and mankind had been made barren as a result of the unrighteousness of the first Adam, who had “lifted up mountaines and hils of oppressing powers”: “look upon the mountaines and little hills of the earth, and see if these prickling thorns and briars, the bitter curse, does not grow there.” (Sabine, Works, pp 157, 198, 202). This was not the Earth as God or Spirit Reason had made it, but the Kingdom of the Beast.
In this work, as in others, such as Truth Lifting Up Its Head Above Scandals, Winstanley didn't merely employ the earth as a metaphor for mankind. The barrenness and the corruption of the earth and of all creatures followed from the Fall of man, but was not a permanent condition. That Fall was both psychological and social, it had a history, and could be turned around. The receptivity of mankind to the new light would thus come to have a direct bearing on the condition of the whole creation. Delivered from the curse, earth and humankind would be restored:
“then other creatures shall be restored likewise, and freed from their burdens: as the Earth, from thorns and briars, and barrennesse; the Air and winds from unseasonable storms and distempers; the Cattle from bitternesse and rage one against another. And the law of righteousnesse and love shall be seated in the whole Creation; from the lowest to the highest creature. And this is the work of restoration.” (Sabine, Works, p 169; cf pp 153, 157, 186, 198-99, 207).
For Winstanley, the Second Coming is not the personal return of Christ but resurrection as the rising of Christ within each and all. This is transformation as a rebirth through the appreciation of the God or Spirit Reason that pervades all of Creation. "To be made experimentally subject to the spirit in creation," he writes, "gives a feeling experience to the heart that can never be forgot. This alone overcomes the self-conceit and evil inclinations of the flesh."
This allows us to speak of a ‘wild ethics,’ a natural state that bears no relation at all to the descriptions of Hobbes and his picture of a life that is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ as a result of the war fought by all against all. Hobbes's state of nature is not nature at all, but the social state of an emerging capitalism founded on private property and buying and selling. It is that mistaken idea that nature is hostile and lacking, something to be subdued and controlled, that promotes the anxiety that feeds an insatiable covetousness. In complete contrast, Winstanley portrays the state of nature as a "very safe condition," where "the soul is under God's protection from the face of the serpent [and] wherein the soul is fed and nourished by God and not by any creature" (quoted in Hayes, p. 31). It is, then, the separation from God/Nature that cuts us off from the nourishment we need, leaving us with the hopeless and endless pursuit of satisfaction through our own self-invention. Enjoying true nourishment "brings mankind back to that plainhearted state of simplicity … and makes him humble, meek, flexible, loving … like the state of a little child." I’m thinking of Rousseau’s description of ethics as ‘the sublime science of simple souls’, a wild ethics indeed, when I read Winstanley saying that God's love and reason is experienced as a "word of power speaking in and to your hearts, causing your hearts to open to His voice." Winstanley teaches that only if the soul "waits upon the Father with a meek and obedient spirit" will God "teach us and feed us with sincere milk." Should we do this, we would cease feeling captive to the hungers, fantasies, and anxieties that turn human desire into "the flesh." The power of love that dwells within each and all and within all creation thus makes the human being "a new creature, in whom the old lusts are passed away and every power is a new power.”
I have trouble identifying Winstanley as antinomian. And myself, too, given the substantial grounding of my philosophy in 'rational freedom', a tradition founded solidly upon Plato and Aristotle, as well as in transcendent truths and eternal law. I have written at length on St Thomas Aquinas, natural law, positive human law, eternal law. Aquinas defines a law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated." I couldn’t agree more. The idea is present in Dante, too. Dante denounced greed for money and possessions as the sin of avarice, the sin which endangers and destroys cities and regions and ruins lives, continually inciting desires for greater and greater wealth, the sin which cannot be satisfied without doing injury to others and inflicting harm on the world. Dante found the safeguard against this most dangerous of evils stated in the texts of canon and civil law:
“[F]or what else were they designed to remedy so much as that cupidity which grows by the amassing of riches? Certainly both branches of the law make this sufficiently plain when we read their origins, that is, the origins of their written record.”
Dante found a structure for the well-being of society in canon and civil law. Avarice could be checked by civil law if a righteous Emperor, with the power to declare and enforce it, came to power... Greed and evil would thus be eliminated from the world. Winstanley wrote of The New Law of Righteousness, promulgated not by a king or an emperor, but pervading the land through the spirit of Christ coming to rise within each and all. If Plato wrote of the philosopher ruler, then Winstanley argued for the rule of (spirit) Reason. I am preparing to publish a book on Dante and The Sweet Symphony of Paradise. No one has written better than Dante on the Love that pervades and moves the universe. And that Love is the Law. Amongst all the discord and disorder, Dante continued to express his belief in ultimate goodness: "there exists a power of discernment between good and evil, which, if rightly exercised, gains control."
"A greater force, a better law there is
which forms your minds and freely you obey;
no power the stars have over you in this.
So if the present world has gone astray,
in you the cause is, seek for it in you;
thy true guide now I'll be in what I say."
That's my view too. Dante rejects determinism, he rejects the idea of evil as something inherent in the world. Whatever problems we face, they are the result of poor choices, either by ourselves or by others. Human beings are social beings, meaning that freedom is a matter of both personal choice and moral autonomy and the social habitus in which we exercise that choice. There is no external God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, says Gerrard Winstanley. I take Dante here to be saying precisely that - look within, says Dante. Whatever the conditions within which we act, since our souls are the direct creations of God, we are responsible for our deeds. Love, for Dante, is both that "greater force" and "better law."
Plato, too, wrote pertinently on law:
"I have now applied the term ‘servants of the laws’ to the men usually said to be rulers, not for the sake of an innovation in names but because I hold that it is this above all that determines whether the city survives or undergoes the opposite. Where the law is itself ruled over and lacks sovereign authority, [transcendent standard] I see destruction at hand for such a place. But where it is despot over the rulers and the rulers are slaves of the law, there I foresee safety and all the good things which the gods have given good cities."
Plato The Laws, 715d
For Plato, it is the rule of law that is sacred, denoting the ability of human beings to manage their own affairs without further interventions by and assistance from the gods. In fine, we cannot have our law, or God, and eat it too. Once we take transcendent standards into our own hands and hearts, they are no longer transcendent – which begs the question as to the criteria by which we shall judge our actions in this society of hearts. Maybe, with that perfect union and harmony, we shall be able to live as one, with no need for external standards. In Plato’s terms, only gods and philosophers can live without laws in this way…
Plato constructed his philosophy of the immaterial and transcendent forms in order to combat the rampant materialism and relativism of his day. Rousseau did likewise, but his Platonism appealed not just to the head but was located in the hearts of each and all:
‘‘eternal truths admitted at all times by all wise men, recognized by all nations, and engraved on the human heart in indelible characters’’ (Reveries, OC, I).
Divine and earthly authority are not in opposition but, on the contrary, support and strengthen one another when conjoined. Thus, in the Book of Wisdom, Solomon says, 'Love righteousness, ye that judge of the earth.'
This statement of ideal justice and its incarnation was spelled out in a pattern of lights in Paradiso, in the Heaven of Jupiter:
Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram.
Love Justice Ye Who Judge the Earth
That implies a transcendent standard or 'everlasting law' that points to a universal government constituting perfect justice.
My point is this, for all of the appeal of an 'environmental antinomianism' that exists outside of 'axiological extensionism,' we should be careful of rushing into the embrace of a superficial libertarianism. Don't think that those accused of moral or theological imposition are unaware of love. But things are not so simple, and the hasty embrace of an apparent libertarianism can lead us into an enslavement to misdirected desire. Love is the seed of every virtue but also of every vice. Which it shall be depends upon what love is attached to and the degree of that attachment. Love needs to be ordered and directed by being connected with its true object. That capacity for love, we know, can be misdirected. The love of money is the root of all evil ... Dante pursued the righteous ordering of earthly life, demanding this reign of righteousness that Winstanley too demanded.
Abolition as realization/preservation/fulfilment, that apparently contradictory Hegelian notion that found its way into Marx makes perfect sense in these terms of an overriding law. The reign of righteousness is not the abolition of the law, but its realization:
'Si si conserva il seme d'ogni giusto.'
'Thus is preserved the seed of all that is just.'
Those words of Dante echo the words uttered by Jesus Christ to John the Baptist at the moment of His baptism:
"Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness."
Dante read them in the Vulgate thus:
'Sic enim decet nos implere omnem iustitiam.'
We can live by those truths, and we ought to live by them. That’s the driving concern of Plato, Dante and Rousseau, of all those who affirm transcendent standards. To do so would much diminish the external constraint required by positive law, but would not replace the transcendent law, what Winstanley called ‘the everlasting law.’ In that sense, antinomianism - at least in any sense that applies to me - is not against the law, but is against the theological-bureaucratic appropriation or enclosure of law, and its reimposition as a rationalisation preserving asymmetrical power relations, becoming an instrument for the manipulation, management and domination of the common people. Gerrard Winstanley challenged enclosure of the commons in all its forms, physical, ethical and political. Any antinomianism that is the rejection of all law merely delivers us to sophism, to Thrasymachus, and the idea that justice is merely the interests of the strongest. Whatever else prospers in such a rule, it won't be justice, righteousness, reason or love.
This theme was strong in my work on Marx, revealing Marx as a critic of ‘legal fetishism,’ (the idea that it is law that preserves social order, which inverts the true relation for Marx ..) With commonality embodied in social relationships, we could dispense with abstract systems of regulation, a social self-mediation replacing alien external mediation through steering media of money and (administrative) power. Philosopher, ethical marxist and all-round fine fellow Lawrence Wilde advised me to be ‘more realistic.’ Somewhere, he had detected my antinomian streak .. although he put it down to anarchism.
OK. But I thought I was being realistic. How real do people want it?
In Exodus and Revolution, Michael Walzer writes that "in the early years of the Puritan Revolution [people] thought that the moment of fulfillment had arrived." They were wrong. Kingship was executed in name only, not in nature; kingly power continued in the form of the victorious propertied republicanism. Winstanley demanded the completion of the Revolution through the realisation of the 'true commonwealth,' but the coalition of forces that had brought the defeat of the king divided along class lines. Walzer describes this as a political coming of age, the rejection of New Testament promises of democracy, unanimity, and perfection in favour of a "toughminded realism." It was a political realism indeed, and a tough imposition of class realities on people who dreamed of a holy nation of men and women living as one. Walzer considers the political acceptance of earthly limitations as the height of political maturity. Winstanley thought it a betrayal. That dream of universal community carries on. Standing in its way are not earthly limitations at all, but the realities of class division. The truth is that Walzer's assertion of earthly limitations over Bible dreams delivers a lesson concerning the social limitations of a class politics. The men of property were never going to use the state to transfer the commons back to the people; for them their revolution was completed. That's the reality of propertied republicanism and the liberal state, and it is based upon the separation of the people from the commons, from the means of their labour and sustenance, and all the formal freedoms and rights in the world will not compensate for that separation. And the state and law reinforce and preserve that fundamental separation. That's a lesson on political reality indeed. We live in an age when politics stands in need of an education by way of earthly realities. In light of climate change, the world of politics is designed to fail on the basis of a social order that is divided to fall. That dream of a 'true commonwealth' of men and women sharing the earth in common reveals the profoundest political truth. How we achieve the unity we need out of the reality of social division and thus solve the problem of collective action is the challenge before us. Winstanley didn't crack that central problem of politics, but the efforts of the rest of us haven't fared much better. But Winstanley does give us the moral reason why we could and should bring the many together as one, and that ethic is something worth stating against the political realists whose 'vision' remains narrowly focused on the class limitations money and power. Winstanley continued express the hope that "the poor and the meek shall inherit the earth" (Works p 388). And that involves not merely a recognition of what Walzer calls 'earthly limitations,' but a reverence for the earth as the realm of enjoyment and abundance.
As he does with his big, generous heart, Winstanley wears the sense of betrayal on his sleeve. Walzer simply sees earthly realities delivering a hard political lesson to dreamers and idealists with heads full of universal justice, freedom and justice for all. And Marx would deliver a lesson on class division to moralists of all persuasions. Marx is plainly aware of the impossibilities of commonality and universality in a revolution with limited social content. Winstanley's moral appeal to rich and poor alike to share the earth in common was bound to flounder in the face of class division. Winstanley was well aware of the existence of a propertied class and how this class institutionalised their power so as to ensure their domination over the non-possessing classes. But he continued to make a moral appeal to unity in the attempt to build a commonwealth that genuinely included all people on equal terms.
So who is being realistic here and who is being unrealistic? And who is right and wrong? And what criteria or standards are we using in asking such questions? It's an old question. As I write this I am reading my October 2017 Newsletter from The Blake Society, and the invitation to a debate on Byron and Worsdworth on Art and Nature: 'Are moral laws a human construct or rooted in nature? Byron v Wordsworth.' Rooted in God/Nature/SpiritReason/the everlasting law/the heart/the soul of the world ... We co-create within the above. It should be clear by now I do not agree with conventionalism, I'm with Plato, Winstanley and Rousseau against Hobbes.
Marx is difficult to place in this divide, somewhere between and beyond the old natural law and the new legal positivism. I do argue that, somewhere beyond the apparent historical relativism, Marx adheres to transcendent standards, seeing these as emergent and incarnated in specific social relations. But his ethic is embedded in history rather than everlasting or universal law. And that makes it difficult to see moral principle apart from ideology. While Marx wraps his argument about ideology in the mantle of a historical science of class struggle, Winstanley wears a sense of betrayal on his sleeve. Winstanley plainly believes that words have a meaning apart from social and class position, a meaning that allows us to check, challenge and criticize those positions. Is he right? What standards or criteria do we have that entitles us to even speak in terms of right and wrong? This, to me, is the key question, because it points to the enduring strength and simple rightness of Winstanley’s moral appeal in politics, despite its manifest unrealism. Forget Walzer’s intervention here, what he asserts as a “toughminded realism” is the plainest sophistry, and his assertion of earthly limitations is an ideological cover for relations of class power; it requires no great insight to assert that might is right and that justice is the interests of the strongest. That’s trite and obvious, the easy line of least political resistance. Much more interesting is the fact that whilst Marx’s critique of capitalism is plainly animated by a sense of justice, he is at pains not to couch his language in the moral terms of injustice. He plainly knows the meaning of the word justice, but cannot express his argument in moral terms on account of a social scientific analysis that reveals such universal truths and values to be impotent and irrelevant in a class society. Marx is realistic in a much more profound sense than Walzer. Where Walzer writes blandly of earthly limitations, Marx writes of the social limitations of universal or transcendent values in a society divided by class interests. In identifying the social content behind words such as justice, Marx is led to deny that such words could possess any moral meaning or content that are socially effective or transformative. Unlike Winstanley, then, Marx does not make a moral appeal to rich as well as poor to come together in community to share the earth for the common good. In Marx’s terms, that appeal is naïve and utopian, presupposing the very social relations that do not exist. Those relations stand in need of creation, which is the central concern of Marx’s politics. Winstanley comes from a different position entirely. He is very well aware of the existence of the propertied class and is actively involved in contesting their power. But he nevertheless makes a cross-class appeal to the common good. Why? Answering that question reveals a difference between Winstanley and Marx that begs us to examine even further the nature of realism.
This question of ‘realism’ needs to be set against the age-old conflict between those who affirm transcendent norms, truths and values, on the one hand, and those who assert conventionalism, the view that any such truths are human inventions and constructions, on the other. It’s the ancient debate that ranged Plato against the Sophists, which takes us right to the question of determining the relation between morality and politics, right and might. There’s no mistaking where I stand on this question, it runs right through my work. I’ll quote Kant: ‘all politics must bend the knee before right.’ That’s more easily said than done, begging not only the incredibly difficult question of how but the much more interesting question of why?
We can simply put these questions away and accept the “toughminded realism” of Walzer. The winners win, and the losers complain, and life isn't fair. We don't need a political philosopher to tell us that. The problem is that simple assertion of might is right has never been found to be satisfactory, and people do insist on pressing the questions. Frankly, the assertion is soft and flabby and is the ideological cover of a profoundly weak politics distanced from true realities. Cromwell prevailed, the propertied republic was instituted, and the common people, those who live closest of all to earthly realities, carried on grumbling away. They are still grumbling, and no amount of lessons and lectures on political realism, earthly limitations and class interests will silence their cries. Which points to the deeper reality of a transcendent dimension to justice. At the heart of this question lies that classic confrontation between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Book I of Plato's Republic. Thrasymachus asserts what to many remains the height of political realism, that justice is the interests of the strongest. Justice is merely what the strong who have prevailed define it to be, and that definition is always a function of their class interests. Like Marx, Thrasymachus exposes the class content that lies behind universal principles. But more than an unmasking here, there is a denial that words such as justice could contain any transcendent meaning that stands outside of time and place to serve as an objective standard by which one could evaluate human actions and interests right or wrong, just or unjust. Socrates is well aware that the word justice can be used to cover the interests of the strongest, just as Winstanley is well aware that the rich will present ideas which claim their propertied interests to be in the interest of society as a whole. That’s the easy bit and says nothing that is in question. The crucial point is that the words themselves retain a principled core that is independent of their particular use. Thus, although the term justice can be equated with the interests of the strongest in an ideological sense, Socrates makes it clear that by justice we do not mean the interests of the strong at all, but something like each person receiving what is due to them, having fair shares, being treated fairly. And words have meaning, they are not mere epiphenomena of social realities, they are integral to those realities.
Any “toughminded realism” which is built upon iniquitous class division and asymmetrical relations of class power will never stifle the human thirst for justice. Plato identified two fundamental needs whose satisfaction was crucial to a truly human life. The first is the desire for recognition, what Plato called thymos, which is that part of the human soul that demands justice. The second need refers to the 'appetitive' element of the human soul, and involves a material satisfaction. A perspective which severs these two needs from each other, and renders the former a mere epiphenomenon of the latter, serving an ideological function masking class interest, will fall far short of the profoundly real and radical needs of human beings. We can analyse justice in sociological terms, but Socrates/Plato is concerned to go much further and press deeper to a reality that lies beyond the politics, institutions and laws of time and place. A term like ‘justice’, therefore, has a meaning that is independent of its ideological function, it possesses a transcendent relevance that serves as a critical standard by which to expose such ideological (mis)use, and demand the transformation of ‘real’ society in order to conform to a deeper reality.
Of course, political realists happy to accept the contingencies of power and its distribution in time and place will still be inclined to compare Socrates’ naive "idealism" unfavourably with Thrasymachus's toughminded "realism." But their 'realism' is, in truth, a complacency founded on a moral and intellectual evasion. It's easy enough to be on the side that is winning. But Socrates puts the awkward question to such 'realists': if Thrasymachus is right, then why is he so angry? Of course, Thrasymachus is discomforted precisely because he knows fine well that what some people - the winners, the rulers, the 'realists' -call justice is often unjust, especially when it is in the service of the interests of the strong. And if he does know that, then he also knows something much more profound: he knows that justice is something much more than the interests of the strong. He knows that justice is more than conventional. He knows, in other words, justice has real meaning and that the rule of the strong violates the meaning of the word; and that is tantamount to a recognition that there are such things as transcendent norms, truths and values, that these things are more than conventional. And that is something profoundly real and radical, it is something that gives us a critical standard by which to judge the world and inspire and orient action on the part of people for its transformation. It is something with real moral and political force that enables us to contest the rule of the strong, not merely in a class struggle, but in a struggle that restores the unity of each and all in a universal community, a fraternity, a 'true commonwealth.'
This is a truth that Thrasymachus knows but refuses to "own." In the end, Thrasymachus’ shallow social and political realism is trumped by a genuine realism which identifies a meaning in words and principles. In like manner, Marx’s class analysis of politics is successful in exposing the ideological function of words and language, but self-destructive in identifying words as such with ideology. Marx’s critique of class society is fired by a sense of justice that Marx cannot give moral expression to. Marx himself is forced to couch his demand for social transformation in terms of social and historical necessity, in accordance with standards immanent to social reality, not standards that lie outside of them. Winstanley, like Marx, can see with Thrasymachus the ideological function of words in concealing or justifying class interest, but Winstanley follows Socrates in a way that Marx cannot in coming to see words as containing real meaning and potential for criticism and transformation. It is for this reason that Winstanley can address the rich and the propertied as brothers of one family in a common home, whereas Marx analyzes the social division of that common earth, addressing only the proletariat on the understanding that any moral appeal to common interest outside of that would lack social relevance. So who is the most realistic? Are the rich amenable to moral persuasion to such an extent that they could come to realize their fraternity with the poor? Marx would suggest that to believe that requires a degree of faith in the power of moral persuasion that is inadvisable in a society divided by class interest. And we do know how that question was answered in history: the rich ignored Winstanley and instituted the propertied republic rather than the ‘true commonwealth.’
But before giving the victory to Marx here, it is worth emphasising why Winstanley could make such a moral appeal and hope for its success. Winstanley is neither naïve or utopian and understands perfectly well the fairly obvious point that that society is divided between class interests, between the possessing and the non-possessing class, the propertied on the one side and the common people on the other. He is in the thick of that fight after all, and received the toughest lessons concerning political realism day after day with the physical and institutional assaults upon his Digger community. His persistence in making a moral appeal to "universal community" indicates not naivety or hopeless idealism, but a commitment to something profound, to transcendent truths as against conventional constructs in the Platonic sense, and to the idea of universal grace in the theological sense, with Christ rising within to lead each and all to know and honour the law of righteousness. Winstanley, in other words, is realistic in the profoundest sense of all, going much further than the contingencies of time and place to affirm standards that are eternal and enduring, and that are capable of satisfying the two fundamental human needs, the thirst for justice and the thirst for material satisfaction. He addresses his politics to those real and radical needs in a way that those who simply follow the vicissitudes of class struggle do not and cannot. Winstanley’s moral appeal to each and all, then, is not a soft-minded idealism that pays no attention to social divisions, but an extremely courageous and toughminded affirmation of transcendent standards and eternal truths, of the power and meaning of words and language, and of human beings as free and rational beings. Winstanley comes at this from a very particular understanding of the human ontology. Whether we care to dress this up as an idealism or a realism, Winstanley goes so far out on a limb politically precisely because he sees all human beings, rich and poor alike, as children of God and of mother earth, not mere functions of classes and production relations.
So how real do people want it? How much political realism can people suffer before demanding the fulfilment of their deepest needs, including the need for justice? If justice really is merely the interests of the strongest, then stifle the cries for fulfilment and accept that power is its own justification. It’s a view that has never proven satisfactory in history, and never will for so long as men and women are on good terms with their essential humanity.
Are there eternal, transcendent norms which inform and inspire the critique and construction of political communities, to which we ought to conform our actions and institutions? Plato says that there are, and thus challenges Thrasymachus’ view that justice is the interests of the strongest; Hobbes says that there are not, and that might is for that reason right. That Plato is with us still should be answer enough to the question.
We are faced with two choices – between transcendentalism (Platonic or divine) and conventionalism (sophist, Hobbesian, relativist, materialist in the disenchanted sense, what Lewis Mumford called 'purposeless materialism', as against Winstanley's world pervaded by Spirit Reason). There is no other choice. It’s one or the other. It's as simple as that. So when I opt for transcendent norms, truths and values, and find the liveliest minds of the age ranged against me, asserting human invention, imposure and construction of truths and values, I do so in order to be on the right side of the dividing line, seeing no value in joining with a crowd for a transitory and ephemeral triumph. And I remember that on the other side is Hobbes. Not good company. As Gustav Radbruch wrote with respect to Hobbesian positivism and conventionalism:
‘‘This view of the nature of a law and its validity . . . has rendered the jurist as well as the people defenseless against laws, however arbitrary, cruel, or criminal they may be’’
Radbruch [1945] 1973: 327
Conventionalism is the idea that truths, values and norms are merely human inventions and constructions relevant in time and place, and subject to no transcendent standard outside of particular laws and institutions. The great danger of this doctrine is its lack of content. In the absence of any constant, non-contingent substance by which to judge, guide and monitor the formation of laws, institutions and policies, anything is possible. Indeed, without transcendent standards, we cannot even differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ governments, any choice can only be based on subjective preferences or vested interests. We pick our sides, or are simply recruited into them involuntarily by accidents of birth or work or class, and support them right or wrong. Conventionalist doctrines, in rejecting transcendent norms, truths and values, leave us morally silent in face of injustices, precisely because there is nothing transcendentally unjust in exploitation, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, ecological destruction. They may even enlist us in committing such crimes and atrocities. Of course, we protest such things and act to stop their occurrence, not out of some realistic assessment of possibilities given prevailing political arrangements, and certainly not out of loyalty to our nation, our state, our party, our class, right or wrong, but out of an awareness of the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. There is an innate moral grammar that is not beholden to the institutions and interests of time and place, and which, when activated, holds power to account. In that sense, we are all innate Platonists and transcendentalists who find conventionalism and positivism deficient before the high charge of moral judgment. The affirmation of transcendent truths, norms and values provide an alternative form of judgment that is viable and stable, enduring across time and place, and one that is in tune with our innate moral sense, reason and intuition. The appeal is to something much more profound and substantial than the standards of an existing government or ruling class, a dominant culture or class interest, something more than subjective preferences and personal likes and dislikes. Instead, the appeal is to ontologically transcendent standards independent of particular institutions in time and place, and which apply to each and all as similarly situated moral and rational beings.
I have presented the case for transcendent standards here in terms of Plato and Platonism. Winstanley draws on no secondary sources other than the Bible in his writings. His appeal is to ‘the everlasting law,’ ‘the ancient law,’ the ‘law of Creation,’ the ‘law of Reason and Equity.’ These are very much transcendent truths, norms and values in the manner outlined above, and the identify Winstanley as one who is against Hobbesian conventionalism and positivism, one who is ranged with Platonism against sophism. You will read commentators and historians repeat the claim that Winstanley did not believe in a transcendent God. I think this view is based on theological misunderstandings. Winstanley’s heavy emphasis falls on God’s immanence as the Spirit Reason in all things. That view, however, does not preclude a belief in a transcendent God. Winstanley’s frequent references to the earth being ‘made’ a common treasury point most certainly to a belief in a Creator God, as I shall argue at length in the coming book. Winstanley argues for immanence and transcendence together, and these things are not mutually exclusive if one affirms, as did Winstanley, an incarnate spirituality. Winstanley plainly affirms the existence of a higher power and supreme judge independent of time and place, holding temporal rulers to account:
‘None shall need to turn over books and writings (for indeed all these shall cease too) to get knowledge. But everyone shall be taken off from seeking knowledge from without, and with an humble quiet heart shall wait upon the Lord, till He manifest Himself: for He is a great king, and worthy to be waited upon. His testimony within fills the heart with joy and singing. He first gives experiences; and then power to set forth these experiences. Hence you shall speak to the rejoicing one of another, and to the praise of Him who declares His power in you. But he that speaks his thoughts, studies, and imagination, and stands up to be a teacher of others, shall be judged for his unrighteousness, because he seeks to honor flesh, and does not honor the Lord.’
‘The time is very near that the people generally shall loathe and be ashamed of your kingly power, in your preaching, in your laws, in your counsels, as now you are ashamed of the Levellers. I tell you Jesus Christ who is that powerful spirit of love is the head Leveller; and as he is lifted up, he will draw all men after him, and leave you naked and bare, and make you ashamed in yourselves. His appearance will be with power; therefore kiss the son, O ye rulers of the earth, lest his anger fall upon you. The wounds of conscience within you from him shall be sharper than the wounds made by your sword, he shook heaven and earth when Moses’s law was cast out, but he will shake heaven and earth now to purpose much more, and nothing shall stand but what is lovely. Be wise, scorn not the counsel of the poor, lest you be whipped with your own rod.’
Well, it didn't happen. As Walzer points out above, that's the kind of heavenly dream that crumbled in the confrontation with earthly limitations. And politics is always lived in the here and now. But political realities within particular circumstances transitory and forever changing. And we are still holding the rich and powerful to account in accordance with standards that are irreducible to time and place. Political change is always the result of the interaction of material interests and moral and metaphysical motivations, there is always a transcendent hope encouraging us to envision a future as something more than the present enlarged. And that something more draws upon the perennial desire for justice, freedom, equality, peace. It is easy to judge realism looking backwards, but history is an optical illusion: much that looks certain when recorded in the history books was anything but when history was being made by men and women living forwards into the future:
Is it any wonder if, filled with the "political drive" as he himself says he was, [Plato] attempted three times to … do for all Greeks what Mohamed later did for his Arabs: to determine customs in things great and small and especially to regulate everyone's day-to-day mode of life. His ideas were as surely practical as those of Mohamed were practical: after all, far more incredible ideas, those of Christianity, have proved practical! A couple of accidents here and a couple of other accidents fewer—and the world would have seen the Platonization of the European South…. But success eluded him: and he was thus left with the reputation of being a fanaticist and utopian—the more opprobrious epithets perished with Athens.
—Nietzsche
With respect to the two fundamental human needs identified above, the need for justice and the need for material satisfaction, Winstanley seeks the fulfilment of both together. He writes that "all men seek the earth, their common mother," who in turn "loves all her children." He thus affirms the legitimacy of the body and its needs: "Better not to have a body, than not to have food and rayment for it." Since Winstanley sees each and all as enjoying God's love within, he is able to conceive the body as worthy of being fed and the earth as a loving source of nourishment. It is therefore not only understandable in a material sense that all people seek material preservation, but also just: "Do not all strive to enjoy the land? The gentry strive for land, the clergy strive for land, the common people strive for land." This conjoining of bodily need and the earth's nourishment in love is expressed in an ethic of sharing in both production and consumption. Sharing in the fruits of the earth requires work as a moral obligation linked to freedom, responsibility and spiritual health. And since no one can feed themselves alone, work is by nature collective: material and spiritual well-being, therefore, depends on people coming to work together. Hence Winstanley’s call: ‘Work together, eat bread together.’ That togetherness is a condition of spiritual regeneration beyond the asceticism and acquisitiveness born of a fear of nature and which drives social conflict. Against that psychology and sociology of scarcity and competition, Winstanley presents the earth as our mother who loves, and seeks to nourish and preserve, all her children, and argues that God is located in Nature and the body, and that moral autonomy and individual responsibility are achieved through labouring in common, in mutual relation to one another and to the earth:
The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows.
And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation. Not Inclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family; not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other, as equals in the Creation; so that our Maker may be glorified in the work of his own hands, and that every one may see, he is no respecter of Persons, but equally loves his whole Creation, and hates nothing but the Serpent, which is Covetousness, branching forth into selvish Imagination, Pride, Envie, Hypocrisie, Uncleanness; all seeking the ease and honor of flesh, and fighting against the Spirit Reason that made the Creation; for that is the Corruption, the Curse, the Devil, the Father of Lies; Death and Bondage that Serpent and Dragon that the Creation is to be delivered from.
I have major objections to Mick Smith’s identification of antinomianism as an anarchism that rejects all law and authority with respect to Winstanley. Such a reading makes Winstanley to be one of the Ranters he explicitly repudiates and whom he vehemently condemns for their false notions of liberty. Or there is a danger of this. Winstanley has plenty in common with the philosophical anarchism of William Godwin, mind. And I have in my own work made out the case for an anarchism that is capable of the democratic constitution of authority through the principle of self-assumed obligation. The point is clear here, however, that Winstanley explicitly repudiates the positions of the Ranters. The editors of The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley make this comment on Winstanley: ‘Antinomian in his radical spiritual impulses and in his profound scepticism about human laws and institutions.’ (vol. 1, p. 55.) Winstanley was certainly critical of human laws in time and place, but that doesn’t make him antinomian as such. Indeed, the critical standard he employs here is the eternal or everlasting law. And the editors later add this note to The Mysterie of God, ‘Winstanley pejoratively characterizes antinomianism, later associated with the Ranters, before dismissing it from serious theological consideration’ (vol. 1, p. 299 n. 122). And that’s the truth of it: Winstanley comes to abolish human positive laws and institutions for their failure to conform to true law, laws whose eternal truths are written on the human heart.
A few words on Winstanley's critical distancing of himself and his Digging communities from the Ranters and their behaviour are necessary. One person who may have come into contact with the Digger colony was the seeker and self-styled “Captain of the Rant” Laurence Clarkson. Clarkson openly expressed practical antinomian views very different from Winstanley's own understanding of what restoration from bondage entailed (see William Lamont, “Clarkson, Laurence,” ODNB; Barry Reay, “Laurence Clarkson: an Artisan and the English Revolution,” in Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont, The World of the Muggletonians (London 1983) pp 162-86). In A Single Eye, from 1650, Clarkson openly challenged Winstanley's view of the internal combat between love and covetousness and between light and darkness. Winstanley sought the triumph of light and love in individuals through their adoption of an activist religion of conduct. In contrast, Clarkson argued that since all powers derived from God, then both light and darkness were alike to God. Darkness and sinful acts were thus only in the imagination of fallen man: to the pure, all things were pure: “there is no act whatsoever, that is impure in God, sinful with or before God.” For Clarkson: “When as a man in purity in light, acts the same acts, in relation to the act, and not the title: this man (no this man) doth not swear, whore, nor steal: so that for want of this light, of this single pure eye, there appeareth Devil and God, Hell and Heaven, Sin and Holyness, Damnation and Salvation; only, yea only from the esteemation and dark apprehension of the Creature.” (Smith, Ranter Writings pp 165, 167, 169, 170, 173). Whilst the concept of the single eye was familiar in radical mystical circles, Clarkson's 'ranting' reformulation of it enunciated an indifference to conduct which contrasted markedly with Winstanley's view that the mode of behaviour on the part of the individual to others was all-important. In arguing that “for my part, till I acted that, so called sin, I could not predominate over sin,” Clarkson sailed close to equating antinomianism with not merely libertarianism but libertinism of the kind that had provoked – and was intended to provoke - conventional hostility. (Smith, Ranter Writings, 173). It was precisely this extreme expression of antinomian doctrine, in both theory and practice, that encouraged the authorities in 1650 to take action against what they had come to perceive as a growing “Ranter” menace. (Lamont, “Clarkson”; Davis, Fear, Myth and History pp 63, 77; McGregor, “Fear, Myth, and furore,” pp 157-58, 160). Winstanley, too, was concerned to distance himself and his Digger philosophy from practical antinomian doctrine, making clear his disapproval of the deliberately shocking and provocative behaviour of the Ranters. Winstanley and Clarkson were therefore drawn into confrontation. (Smith, Ranter Writings 182). The first signs of this clash between two differing and contrasting perspectives came in the unexpected appearance of a number of condemnatory references to “Ranters” and to “the ranting power” in Winstanley's writings from early 1650. Winstanley clearly associated “the ranting power” with the excess and sexual licence being openly advocated, and maybe even practised, by Clarkson. Winstanley saw such behaviour as a threat to the Digger communities, both through creating internal dissension and through hardening the attitude of the authorities to them. Winstanley was concerned lest the “ranting power” begin to cause dissension among his fellow Diggers, putting off also those whom he sought to attract to the Diggers' cause. Winstanley wanted people who were prepared to work in unison for the community of Diggers, not those indulging in licentious behaviour. Such behaviour would destroy the Digger colonies from within as well as give the authorities the excuse they needed to destroy them from without. In The New Law of Righteousness Winstanley was thus concerned to refute the age-old accusation that common ownership led inevitably to the holding of partners in common. Winstanley's sensitivity towards such accusations is demonstrated throughout the Digger period, making it clear that any 'antinomianism' on Winstanley's part is in complete contrast with Ranting libertarianism and libertinism. (Sabine, Works pp 185, 366-67). There is, very clearly, then, a moral law for Winstanley. Winstanley's statements on the “Ranting” question were not merely defensive. Winstanley's denunciations of “the ranting power” derive from his own positive Digger philosophy of working as one in community in common cause, one that holds ideals of commonality and individuality in integral relation rather than opposing one against the other in a false antithesis. Winstanley saw ranting behaviour as a threat to the spiritual and physical well-being of both the actual and the potential supports of the digging venture. Winstanley's opposition was serious and vehement. A Vindication of Those, Whose Endeavors is Only to Make the Earth a Common Treasury, Called Diggers is devoted exclusively to checking the “ranting” threat to the Diggers. In this pamphlet, Winstanley mounted a vigorous defence of the Diggers who had been “slandered with the Ranting action,” whilst warning of the consequences of following the ranting path. Those most at risk were, he maintained: “All you that are meerly civill, and that are of loving and flexible disposition wanting the strength of reason: and the life of universall love, leading you forth to seeke the peace and preservation of every single body as of one's selfe; You are the People that are like to be tempted, and set upon and torne into peeces by this devouring Beast; the Ranting power.” (Sabine, Works pp 403). Significantly, Winstanley insisted yet again that “these two men, one of Light, and the other of darknesse, now strives with great vehemencie.” (Sabine, Works pp 402). In A New-Yeers Gift, Winstanley sought to counter accusations that “we Diggers hold women to be common, and live in that bestialness,” but acknowledged that “there have been some among the Diggers that have caused scandall, but we dis-own their wayes.” (Sabine, Works pp 364). England's Spirit Unfoulded contained a “watch-word” to women to beware “the ranting crew,” and a warning that “if any of the Diggers fall into the practise of Ranting, they fall off from their principles, as some in all Churches does.” (Aylmer, England's Spirit Unfoulded pp 14-15). In Fire in the Bush, Winstanley again condemned “Lust of the flesh” as “an excessive, or immoderate degree of covetousnesse.” (Sabine, Works pp 482-83). We cannot be sure that Winstanley aimed these passages specifically against Clarkson and his associates. We can be sure that Winstanley was concerned to protect his Digger communities from the disruptive activities of the Ranters. Winstanley would have been keenly aware of former acquaintances of his who were openly identifying as Ranters or to whom the “ranting” label was being applied in 1650, men such as the former Digger William Everard. Winstanley made his opposition plain. Fire in the Bush contained passages in which Winstanley seems to engage directly with Clarkson and his antinomian arguments. “Some of you,” Winstanley suggested, “have got a speech”: “That those that see two powers within themselves, of darkness and Light, Love and Envy, sorrow and comfort striving together, sees with two eyes: but you may say, you see every thing and power with a single-eye, and nothing you see evill, but all things and actions are good, and as they must be. Surely this is well, if you become all of you that speake these words, to eat of that Tree of Life; for my part Ile not condemne you. I can rejoyce to see the Resurrection of Christ in any, but I must watch some of you, to see if your conversations be so universally filled with Love, as shall make the darke world startle; and then I can say of a truth, Christ is risen indeed in you.” Winstanley reaffirms his views that claims to purity are to be judged by an individual's behaviour towards others: “If your own eye be darke, that is, if darknesse rule your whole body; then all the actions of your body towards others are in darknesse, and builders up of selfishnesse, which is the one power you yet live in. But if your eye be truly single, and full of Light, then the Light power wholly rules in you, and the actions of your outward man will be full of Light, and Life, and Love, towards every single branch of the whole Creation.” (Sabine, Works pp 240)
Winstanley's reverence for a God he identifies as the Spirit Reason within himself and within all things does not entitle him to do just anything. That is Hobbes' charge, based on a very different understanding of nature as mean and human nature as selfish and aggressive. Capitalism as a system of economic scarcity goes hand in hand with a psychological scarcity. In contrast, Winstanley writes of enjoyment and an abundance of life based on both needs and limits. Winstanley's reverence for God as a force infusing and enthusing all things nourishes within limits, meaning that human beings must do certain things but cannot do others if they are to become autonomous, authentic beings experiencing 'true freedom.' In contradistinction to those who are ruled by the covetous flesh, those who are "free within" can live as well as proclaim Christ's gospel. In coming to use their reason within, men and women discover the needs and limits that are appropriate to their "nature and necessity" as created beings, thus developing real mutuality to live in a community of "sons and daughters" of God/Nature, a "community of the earth," making the earth as a common treasury for all to share, as God intended. Winstanley thus presents a vision of rational freedom as a moral ecology of interdependent bodies. By using his reason to reflect upon his experiential knowledge of life, Winstanley discovers "experimentally" the truth that Creation is a body composed of interdependent bodies:
"The clouds send down rain, and there is great undeniable reason in it, for otherwise the earth could not bring forth grass and fruit. The earth sends forth grass, or else cattle could not be preserved. The cattle feed on the grass, and there is reason in it, for else man could not be preserved. The sun gives light and heat, or else the creation could not subsist. So that the mighty power Reason bath made these to give life and preservation one to another."
Winstanley thus sees "mind" as operative in Nature, in that there is a reason to all things, in all things, and for all things:
"Reason is that living power of light that is in all things…. It hath a regard to the whole creation, and knits every creature together into a oneness, making every creature to be an upholder of his fellows, so everyone is an assistant to preserve the whole."
Winstanley thus associates the capacity of human beings to reason with the righteousness of God's spirit, a Spirit Reason which "governs" by intentionally giving everything its due "according to its nature and necessity." Human beings can, therefore, know, and enact by choice, the righteousness that infuses Creation.
Winstanley’s God as "Spirit Reason" is a dynamic immanent power that dispels the darkness of the self-oriented powers of the flesh and human imagination, creating the kingdom of God within the hearts of all men and women and infusing the Creation with new life:
‘Reason is the living power of light that is in all things … it is the fire that burns up drosse, and so restores what is corrupted; and preserves what is pure; he is the Lord our righteousnesse.’
THE SEED THAT GROWS IN ALL THINGS
Winstanley’s repeated references to ‘seed’ identifies a strong immanentist strain in his philosophical theology. Winstanley points to an inward light or reason in all, and makes constant reference to the seed that grows from within all things. His emphasis falls firmly upon a creative unfolding from within the hearts of men and women as well as from within Creation. In Fire in the Bush, Winstanley writes of man falling deeper and deeper into hell until ‘the seed or blessing rise up in him to work deliverance and then carry him back again, and lead him into ways of truth.’ He writes further: ‘they that are at liberty within, in whom the Seed is risen to rule, doe conquer all enemies by Love and patience…The Seed or Christ then is to be seen within, to save you from the curse within, to free you from bondage within; he is no Saviour that stands at a distance.’ The seed is a multiple metaphor, argues Boulton: it is the Biblical promise to Abraham, but it is also a saving power within, and yet again it is the people themselves in whom Christ has risen.
"The power of reason” is "the seed of Christ" which issues in freedom. Reason is embodied, and generates freedom from within itself. Freedom is a seed developed by the capacity to reason and by the choice to live according to the light it sheds. But that reason is not extraneous, introduced from the outside, as form is imposed upon chaos, but emerges from within.
The development of the seed of freedom depends on planting real seeds in the earth. Winstanley is a digger and a sower of seed in principle and in practice. "Inner and outer freedom" is a seed that Spirit Reason is bringing to fruition in history —and through the agency of human beings. Winstanley couches the actions of human beings in terms of an inheritance carried as a seed. The practices by which community is preserved, and the principle of justice which that community embodies, are immanent in the situation of human beings, formed as a body of natural beings who require the earth for their sustenance and as a community with a common and shared inheritance as moral beings. Such community does not stand in need of being constructed, nor does the principle of justice appropriate to it stand in need of being created. Human freedom and fulfilment is about reconnection with the sources of life and meaning, in terms of a whole self and a whole world that is already existent, not about creating a self-made world and investing it with any meaning they choose. Good sons and daughters of Spirit Reason/Nature show an appreciation of this world and thus act self-consciously as participants in something they do not make, toward ends they have not chosen, but which they nevertheless choose to honour.
Winstanley thus sees human beings as enfolded within Spirit Reason, whose purposes are immanent and unfolding within the ceaselessly creative universe. Human beings can know, experience and share these purposes and embody them in action. The Spirit Reason is the basis of human identity, inspiring action within the world; the earth is abundant and active and thus nourishes and frees all her children, to the extent that we enter into a common inheritance and resist the forces of enclosure; the poor, the reclaimers of the common earth, put forth blessed seed, and declare the earth’s rich possibilities, bringing about the reconciliation of the self with nature, flesh with spirit, and human beings with God, the earth, and each other, as sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters.
There is, then, a fight for supremacy between the two Adams that exist within each individual. Winstanley identifies this second Adam with ‘the whole bulke of mankind, when they shall be drawne up to live in the unity of the one spirit.’ The triumph of this second Adam would bring about the restoration of things to their prelapsarian state, with Christ bringing all ‘into order again; taking away the bitterness and curse, and making the whole Creation to be of one heart and one Spirit.’ The apostles had declared that the spirit that had ruled in Christ would, in the latter days, ‘be poured out upon sonnes and daughters; and shall spread in the earth like the shining of the Sun from East to West’:
‘And this is that which this mouth and pen of mine doe testifie of to all that heare mee: that the same spirit that hath layne hid under flesh, like a corne of wheat for an appointed time, under the clods of earth, is now sprung out, and begins to grow up a fruitfull vine, which shall never decay, but it shall increase, till he hath filled the earth. This is the Kingdome of God within man. This is the graine of mustard seed, which is little in the beginning, but shall become a mighty tree. This is the fire, that shall dry and burne up all the drosse of man’s worke, and turne all things into his owne nature. This is the spirit which is broke out, that will bringe mankind into one heart, and one minde: For assure your selves, I knowe what I speake. The Thorne bush is burning; but the Vine is flourishing. The Ashes of the Thorne bush is laid at the root of the feet of the Vine, and it growes abundantly.’
In The New Law of Righteousness, Winstanley writes:
‘But when the earth becomes a common treasury as it was in the beginning, and the King of Righteousness comes to rule in every one’s heart, then he kills the first Adam; for covetousness thereby is killed. A man shall have meat, and drink and clothes by his labour in freedom, and what can be desired more in the earth. Pride and envy likewise is killed thereby, for every one shall look upon each other as equal in the creation; every man indeed being a perfect creation of himself. And so this second Adam Christ, the restorer, stops or dams up the running of those stinking waters of self-interest and causes the waters of life and liberty to run plentifully in and through the Creation, making the earth one store-house, and every man and woman to live in the law of Righteousness and peace as members of one household.’
The triumph of this second Adam would bring about the restoration of things to their prelapsarian state, with Christ bringing all ‘into order again; taking away the bitterness and curse, and making the whole Creation to be of one heart and one Spirit.’
"Justice and judgment are the two witnesses or the manifest appearance of the spirit, or the pure light of reason, teaching a man both to know what is righteous and to do righteously. And when these two rule in a man, then is the flesh made subject to the spirit."
The exercise of the capacities for justice and judgment is "prayer", for Winstanley, "the reasonings of the heart," manifesting God's presence. Men and women therefore testify to the Spirit Reason within them and within all things by becoming "assistants to preserve the whole, and the nearer man's reasoning comes to this, the more spiritual they are." The human capacity to reason is also founded on "Reason," since human beings need to know the interdependence of all beings and bodies and uphold that interdependence as a condition of their own well-being as socially and naturally (inter)dependent beings. That (inter)dependency is a constitutive a fact about both human life and nature. As Winstanley declares: "Reason makes a man to live moderately and peaceably with all. He makes a man just and righteous in all his actings…. Wherein is the reason? Because this man stands in need of others, and others stand in need of him; and therefore makes a man do as he would be done unto."
"To know the secrets of nature is to know the works of God; and to know the works of God within creation is to know God himself, for God dwells in every visible work or body. And indeed, if you would know spiritual things, it is to know how the spirit, or power causing motion and growth, dwells within and governs both the several bodies of the stars and planets … and the several bodies of the earth below."
Winstanley returns spirit to Nature and identifies God as dwelling in the body. He restores spirit to the body and finds truth in an experiential knowledge that is affective as well as cognitive, a truth that is felt. Human beings are thus embedded in a nature animated by God as Spirit Reason, and are bodies in which God dwells. Thus "no man or woman can say that the Father doth not dwell in him, for He is everywhere." In identifying God as "dwelling" in Nature and in the body, Winstanley is a lone voice in the western tradition, taking a very different view from those who see the origin of the world in a dangerous, devouring, chaotic nature, often identified as female, which requires the imposition of form and order if it is not to consume men. There is none of that fear of chaos and opposition requiring mastery in Winstanley, and hence none of that neurotic need born of anxiety and insecurity to control Nature, and none of that idolatrous worship of the second nature erected on top of originary nature that characterizes an alienated industrial civilisation. Since there is no need to impose form on chaos, Winstanley offers us an alternative to what he describes as the prideful shaping of self and culture born of a fear of Nature.
"Let every man and woman cleanse himself of the wicked masculine powers that rule him, and there will speedily be a harmony of love in the creation, even among all creatures" (quoted in Hayes, p. 69).
A lone voice, a lost voice, who gives us the alternative to disenchanted rationalization and ecological despoliation, and shows us that that alternative lies within our natural reach. Winstanley shows how this prideful war with Nature brings not freedom but human bondage through enslavement to self-invention, self-made man under the sway of his idolatrous worship of his own creations. Winstanley can do this because he rejects the idea of an angry, hateful and distant God and instead sees God within each and all and within all things. In internalizing this power of a loving God, Winstanley can argue that all may enjoy the earth and its abundance in this life. The redemption that religious orthodoxy reserves only for the elect in the afterlife, Winstanley makes available to all men and women in the here and now:
"O you hearsay preachers, do not deceive the people any longer by telling them that this glory shall not be known and seen til the body be laid in the dust. I tell you, this great mystery is begun to appear, and it must be seen by the material eyes of the flesh; and those five senses that is in man, shall partake of this glory."
Winstanley, in fine, gives us an integral moral ecology based upon a close relationship between spirit, reason, body, nature, each and all, and other beings and bodies, an earthly commonwealth characterized by mutual assistance and care, restoration and "reverence" — a natural piety with respect to the interconnections of life which are not human inventions but upon which human life depends, and through which human freedom and happiness is achieved.
"Every man is an equal to every man, not a lord over any, for all men looked at in the bulk are but the Creation, the living earth."
Common membership in the "living earth of mankind" means that "every part of creation should lend a mutual help of love in action to preserve the whole." In becoming aware of this membership in the one body that unites each and all in their mutual need, "the King of Righteousness shall be governor in every man, none shall work for hire, neither shall [any] give hire; but every one shall work in love, with and for another, and eat bread together as members of one household." In this earth as a common home, each honours "the Spirit Reason" within all others, and all honour the earth itself as the "common mother" that enfolds, nourishes and preserves all her children.
Arthur E. Barker, in Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641-1660, writes critically of Winstanley's theology. Barker’s precise charge is that there is a confusion between the perfect law of God and of prime nature and the imperfect law of degenerate nature, to the effect that the perfect law, written in men’s hearts at the Creation, was confused with the natural law imperfectly perceived by men after the Fall so as to demand the establishment of a commonwealth founded on the law of the Spirit as the original law of nature. To which I reply, ‘guilty as charged’, and ask ‘guilty of what?’ In affirming a natural equality and in demanding a commonwealth which corresponded to that equality, Winstanley affirmed that all shall be saved, and saved on earth by common efforts, rather than waiting for heaven. And that, in Barker’s eyes, ‘ignored the superior claims of the regenerate’ and ‘minimized the intractableness of the unregenerate.’ Who, I would ask, are the regenerate and the unregenerate? Winstanley gives answers here which plainly discomfort the rich and the powerful. So, for that matter, does Jesus. Winstanley believed in universal salvation, the doctrine that everyone will eventually be reconciled to God: "in the end every man shall be saved, though some at the last hour." His book The Mysterie of God is claimed to be the first theological work in the English language to state this doctrine of universalism. At the same time, Winstanley doesn't say much at all about traditional religious concerns such as sin, justification and redemption. Instead, he looks at what it would take to lead a good life on earth, each and all enjoying the world in common. If that makes the man suspect in the eyes of orthodox religion, then so much the worse for religious orthodoxy, and bring on good old William Blake and his denunciations of the Beast of Church and State.
Behind Barker’s objections lie a clear concern that Winstanley’s unorthodox theology implies ‘the substitution of humanitarian naturalism for an ethical and spiritual discipline.’ Winstanley's egalitarian politics and communism are grounds enough to justify the hostility of many, but his theology generates an even greater vehemence in some quarters. I have had that warning off myself. I don't take kindly to such encroachment. I quote Rabelais below with respect to those unsmiling people who think the truth is one obvious thing. I hear the laughter of God when some humans busy themselves hectoring and lecturing others on God's truth. People should be left alone to work out spiritual questions for themselves. I'll trust Winstanley's experimental and experiential knowledge of the world from within that world.
If you ever see the book shelves in my front room, and gaze upwards to the very top shelf, there you will see the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri side by side with that indomitable spirit William Blake. They are my two favourites, and they are not easy to reconcile at all. I refuse to choose between them. They sit up there, challenging each other, and challenging me to keep thinking on. Dante and Blake are at odds theologically. And Blake’s views were expressed by Gerrard Winstanley very clearly indeed a century and a half before Blake. There is no Heaven and Hell in any external sense, said Winstanley, and we should stop looking for God and Heaven in some place of glory beyond the skies; there is no distance between Jesus and ordinary human beings, and we should look to the Christ within. The Second Coming is no personal return of Jesus, but the rising of the spirit of Christ in all men and women. And we should look to take care of the good earth that has been given us, and live life well in the here and now, instead of being diverted by disputations relating to events thousands of years ago, and places somewhere else. Dante conceives of God as existing in a separate realm above, transcending the fallen world below. I love Dante for that transcendent standard, that eternal truth. But both Winstanley and Blake reject the idea of a God that is apart from humankind. For the pair of them, it is that false understanding of separateness from God that lies at the source of our troubles. Dante, of course, is all about reconciliation with God, overcoming that separateness. And he is concerned with the misuse of our gifts and the way that this leads us to Hell. Both Winstanley and Blake reject the idea that any good or loving God could condemn anyone to Hell for an eternity, whatever they have done. My view is that Dante is in agreement, and that any Hell we end up in is of our own making and our own choosing - 'act well and rejoice', wrote Spinoza in the Ethics. By acting well, we work with the grain of God/Nature and come to flourish well. I see no opposition here between these thinkers, despite very different metaphysics at work. Winstanley is the first person in the English language to proclaim the doctrine of universal salvation. The God of Winstanley and Blake is a God of forgiveness. “Dante saw devils where I see none. I see only good,” said Blake, even as he worked on Dante, his last ever works. Well, devils there are in the world, but again, Dante was a Thomist, and for St. Thomas Aquinas, evil is not a property of the world at all: the world is good and evil is the privation of good.
I think I can reconcile these issues. But when Blake condemns Dante as an atheist and a naturalist! ... it all becomes very complicated – I’ll leave them debating away on my top shelf for now.
Back to the theological controversy, and the way that Winstanley worries the orthodox. God, Winstanley argues, should not be seen to be “in some particular place of glory, beyond the skies”; God is in every creature, and is “the spirit within you, invisible in every body to the eye of flesh, yet discernible to the eye of the spirit.”
“This spirit which is called God, or Father, or Lord, is Reason: for though men esteem this word Reason to be too mean a name to set forth the Father by, yet it is the highest name that can be given him. For it is Reason that made all things, and it is Reason that governs the whole Creation, and if flesh were but subject thereunto, that is, to the spirit of Reason within himself, it would never act unrighteousnesse.”
It’s Blake! Except that Blake used the term Imagination and rejected Reason. Winstanley used Reason to reject Imagination … That is not so confusing once we consider that Winstanley’s Spirit Reason is not the Enlightenment Reason that Blake condemned as one-dimensional, and that Blake’s Imagination is not the mystified consciousness that Winstanley condemned.
Winstanley seems to point the way ahead to the modern secularism and humanism to come. He seems to point forwards to Spinoza, the Enlightenment, to sensualism and materialism, to socialism and to a religious humanism without God. For those without Barker's religious concerns, Winstanley’s immanence and rationalism are cause for praise and celebration. In truth, however, splitting to extremes in this way does not do justice to the man’s thought at all. His immanence is attached to transcendent truths, norms and values, and any ‘confusion’ here lies in his concern with an incarnate spirituality, bridging the gap between ideal and real. And that, surely, is what Christians are enjoined to do in building the New Jerusalem. That doesn’t entail the abolition of the eternal law in favour of temporal law. Winstanley plainly sets human positive law within the 'everlasting law' (as he puts it in The Law of Freedom.) His position does not reduce to a humanism or a naturalism, his immanence is attached plainly to transcendence. And his rationalism is of a different character to that of the Enlightenment, and cannot be identified with naturalism and natural science. Winstanley's Spirit Reason is certainly very different from a Weberian rationalization that is implicated in the 'disenchantment of the world.' Winstanley’s reason comes with an ethical and religious component firmly in place, one that retains value, meaning and purpose at the heart of the world. Although Christopher Hill emphasizes Winstanley's immanence - and that 'here and now', this-worldy, sense of living in an animate, meaningful, common earth is very strong in Winstanley - Winstanley does plainly affirm transcendent norms, values and truths in arguing that the spirit of eternal justice, the ancient and everlasting law, divine and natural, ought to be the rule of civil law in the temporal sphere. He opposes that eternal law to positive human law in time and place:
"The life of this dark kingly power, which you have made an act of Parliament and oath to cast out, if you search it to the bottom, you shall see it lies within the iron chest of cursed covetousness, who gives the earth to some part of mankind and denies it to another part of mankind: and that part that hath the earth, hath no right from the law of creation to take it to himself and shut out others; but he took it away violently by theft and murder in conquest."
A New-year's Gift for the Parliament and Army
"For what you call the Law is but a club of the rich over the lowest of men, sanctifying the conquest of the earth by a few and making their theft the way of things. But over and above these pitiful statutes of yours that enclose the common land and reduce us to poverty to make you fat stands the Law of Creation, which renders judgment on rich and poor alike, making them one. For freedom is the man who will thus turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he has enemies."
The True Levellers’ Standard,
Winstanley still has enemies. But note well Winstanley’s affirmation of a transcendent law ‘over and above’ human positive law in time and place, a transcendent law that is integral to our physical, political and ethical commons, and which resists enclosure of those commons by the laws and institutions of time and place. And note how often Winstanley refers to law. Lose this grounding, and his claims to share the earth in common lose their grounding and their meaning, we end up in a mere power struggle in which the decision is decided by might.
In The New Law of Righteousness, Winstanley gives full expression to what was to become the characteristic Quaker doctrine concerning silence as the necessary precursor of prayer. No one should pray ‘until the Power within thee gives words to thy mouth to utter, then speak, and thou canst not but speak’:
‘All these declare the half-hour’s silence that is to be in Heaven (Rev. viii. 1). For all mouths are to be stopped by the power of Reason’s law shining within the heart. And this abundance of talk that is amongst people by arguments, by disputes, by declaring expositions upon others’ word and writing, by long discourse, called preaching, shall all cease (Jer. xxxi. 34).
Some shall not be able to speak, they shall be struck silent with shame by seeing themselves in a loss and in confusion. Neither shall they care to speak till they know by experience within themselves what to speak; but wait with a quiet silence upon the Lord, till He break forth within their hearts, and give them words and power to speak.... Men must leave off teaching one another, and the eyes of all shall look upward to the Father, to be taught of Him. And at this time silence shall be a man’s rest and liberty; it is the gathering time, the soul’s receiving time: it is the forerunner of pure language.... He that speaks from the original light within can truly say, I know what I say, and I know whom I worship.’
Winstanley presents such silence as ‘the forerunner of pure language,’ counting as ‘pure’ in being based solely upon experience:
‘None shall need to turn over books and writings (for indeed all these shall cease too) to get knowledge. But everyone shall be taken off from seeking knowledge from without, and with an humble quiet heart shall wait upon the Lord, till He manifest Himself: for He is a great king, and worthy to be waited upon. His testimony within fills the heart with joy and singing. He first gives experiences; and then power to set forth these experiences. Hence you shall speak to the rejoicing one of another, and to the praise of Him who declares His power in you. But he that speaks his thoughts, studies, and imagination, and stands up to be a teacher of others, shall be judged for his unrighteousness, because he seeks to honor flesh, and does not honor the Lord.’
Winstanley continues in mystical vein, to affirm a vision of the Church, the great Congregation, as the mystical body of Christ, beyond all external forms of institutional mediation:
‘Behold the Annointing, that is to reach all things, is coming to create a new Heaven and a new Earth wherein Righteousness shall dwell, and there shall not be a vessel of humane earth but it shall be filled with Christ. If it were possible to have so many buckets as to contain the whole ocean, every one could be filled with the ocean, and being put all together it would make up the perfect ocean which filled them all. Even so Christ, which is the spreading power, is now beginning to fill every man and woman with Himself. He will dwell and rule in everyone; and the Law of Reason and Equity shall be Christ in them. Every single body is a star shining forth of Him, or rather a body in and out of whom He shines; and He is the ocean of power that fills all. And so the words are true, the Creation, mankind, shall be the fulness of Him that fills all in all. This is the Church, the great Congregation, that, when the mystery is completed, shall be the mystical body of Christ, all set at liberty from inward and outward straits and bondage. And this is called the holy breathing that made all new by Himself and for Himself.’
As Berens notes, these doctrines, almost entirely, came to be adopted by the Quakers, the Society of Friends. As men came to learn to worship by ‘walking righteously in the Creation,’ mere ‘verbal worship,’ the idolatry of words, would cease. In addition to the mediation of language, Winstanley rejected the forms of organized worship, referring to the ordinances as having been ‘new moulded’ by the preachers. Although Winstanley described himself as having been ‘dipped’ at an earlier age, he had now come to believe that the only baptism that mattered was in the ‘water of life,’ by which he meant the Spirit. That’s what I mean by ethics as an ethical stream, the flowing rivers of life. Winstanley has that immanence, that sense of Spirit Reason as animating all of Creation.
And there is laughter in those hearts.
Rabelais created the word ageliste to describe those people who do not laugh:
"Never having heard God's laughter, the agelistes are convinced that truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are."
Winstanley did seem to assume that there is the one truth and that, free from external mediation and deceptive language and added meanings of the theologians and the educated, people would hear the inner voice, and that voice would say the same thing, and the world would live as one, a union of hearts. We found that the God within spoke with as many different voices as there are men and women .. I think God would laugh with those who thought they have access to the whole truth, and at those who took their reverence to po-faced self-righteous extremes. I think we need to temper our reverence with a little irreverence and join with Montaigne in lighting a candle for both St Michael and his dragon. Never trust an ideal that can't laugh at itself, Alexander Herzen said.
It takes silence to hear the laughter of God. Another of my favourite writers, John O’Donohue, writes of this ‘anarchic excess’ that escapes reason, this core, this space that is beyond all naming and framing, this silence as the condition of hearing truly:
“For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.
As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.
As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god.”
― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
Winstanley is not against law at all. He takes his stand on the everlasting law, the Law of Reason, the Law of Creation, the Law of Freedom. He is against the appropriation and misuse of those laws in the service of domination and exploitation, he is against those positive laws written to confirm the enclosure and private use of the commons.
Winstanley's alleged antinomianism is grounded in ‘the everlasting law’ – love and liberty with the law, in conformity with the eternal truths written on the human heart – and running through all things. And what goes for Winstanley goes for me too. That’s an antinomianism that is for the law as a living thing, and against its appropriation, enclosure, misuse and manipulation, a legalism or legal fetishism in which true law becomes a dead and false thing through abstraction and codification.
Marx looked to transform social relations that generated such evil in the first place, so we would not have need to resort to law for an ideal regulative standard and an external constraint. We are back to Rousseau’s old notion of the law as possessing a morally educative purpose in forcing individuals to be free .. And once free, we follow the laws written clearly on the our hearts .. I can even find some such notion in Kant, the world as a union of hearts. Kant also warned against ‘the lawless use of reason’. I heeded the warning, only to ask, if the law embodies the right way of living, the common good, the standard by which we should live … then shouldn’t we live it inside our social relationships, instead of trying to regulate competitive, egoistic, self-seeking asocial relations by law as an external ideal lacking in social relevance? But, hey, I’m just an old antinomian who should be more realistic.
But that ‘antonomian’ theme is present, certainly, in Kant, the philosopher of the universal law, the moral law and of the law we give ourselves through self-legislating reason. It is interesting in this respect to compare Winstanley’s republicanism, his concern to uproot ‘kingly power’ in all its forms to realize the ‘true commonwealth,’ with Kant’s ‘perfect constitution’ taking form as the republican commonwealth. In Kant’s conception (following Rousseau), the rule of law realizes the social as against the unsocial character of human beings. In assuring each individual that all individuals will follow the concept of law, republican government serves to cultivate the moral disposition within each and all to a direct respect for the law. The law thus ceases to be the external constraint ‘forcing’ individuals to be free and instead is voluntarily accepted in our own good. As Rousseau understood, the truth cannot just be given, it needs to be willed. For Kant, this represents a 'great step' 'towards morality .. towards a state where the concept of duty is recognized for its own sake, irrespective of any possible gain in return' (Kant, Political Peace Reiss ed 1991:121n). The rule of law thus creates a habitus which is favourable to the development of moral autonomy and is thus preparatory for the final end of creation, the moral community in which the command of law is internalised as the product of moral motives rather than of self-interest and coercion. With internal discipline replacing external discipline, political peace is spontaneously affirmed by human agents as morally autonomous beings.
I would compare what Kant writes here to what Winstanley writes on the Law of Reason and the Law of Creation. There is an evident similarity. Kant proposes a political peace beyond coercion in the republican constitution. He certainly retains all the external institutional forms associated with the conventional political sphere but, alongside this political realism, he also argues that the visible church prepares the ground for the invisible church. (Again, the argument savours a great deal of the inherent anarchism of Rousseau, so long as we appreciate the extent to which Rousseau put autonomy, authority and authenticity together – with law as supreme and, indeed, sacred in the Platonic manner). Ultimately, religion will gradually be freed from all empirical determining grounds and from 'all statutes which provisionally unite men for the requirements of the good'. In the end, 'pure religion of reason will rule over all'. Statutes become a fetter and 'become bit by bit dispensable'. With 'true freedom' 'each obeys the (non-statutory) law which he prescribes to himself, obeying a rational will, 'a will which by invisible means unites all under one common government into one state' (R 1960:112). This future 'state' is the moral community resting upon an 'inner' unification of good wills through the moral law.
I argued this thesis through Rousseau, Kant and Marx. Hegel, too. Hegel assimilated the full import of Rousseau's general will. The modern state no longer rested upon traditional authority but upon the recognition of individual freedom as the self-conscious aim of political institutions: 'So far as the authority of any existing state has anything to do with reasons, these reasons are culled from the forms of law authoritative within it' (Philosophy of Right para 258). The authoritative derives not from force but from 'insight and argument' (PR para 258). This 'rational', non-authoritarian, definition of authority has implications which Hegel explores beyond where Kant and Rousseau had left it.
I even traced it to the present day in the ideal communication community of Jurgen Habermas, a society beyond asymmetrical relations of power, in which the only force is the force of the better argument.
I examined the ontological, moral and social foundations of this investment of political and ethical bonds in the interaction between individuals in the everyday life world, exploring possibilities of replacing the liberal discourse of rights and justice with a conception of the good which envisages the dissolution of an authoritative institutional framework. This would represent the social and material embodiment of 'rational' principles – the law of reason, transcendent truths etc - of reciprocity, interaction, communication and exchange and their articulation through social relationships. Any obligations we recognize are those we owe to each other and not to some extraneous power or authority. Individuals would no longer be institutionally constrained to the good from above via the 'rational' state but will realize rationality in their everyday relationships.
Marx adhered to Hegel’s principle of the state as an ethical agency concerned with the universal interest, transcending particular interests and canalising them to the common good. But his early career as an economics journalist taught him that the state had become a surrogate of private interest and power. He thus the principle of the state as a rational and critical yardstick with which to evaluate the adequacy or otherwise of particular states. Marx thus wrote: ‘A state which is not the realization of rational freedom is a bad state’ (Marx and Engels Historische Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt, Berlin and Moscow 1927, vol. I, i (i), p. 247). Marx understood that the automatic connection between reason and freedom under temporal or positive law could no longer be assumed in class society. This did not lead him to abandon the 'rational' conception of the ethical state embodying universality and commonality but to seek its material foundation in a classless society, a society which has put an end to the exploitative and alienative relations which perverted law, thus dissolving the abstracted legal-institutional form of reason into a self-organising democratic society. Marx thus radicalised the 'rational' principle of collective and reciprocal freedom embodied in the state beyond its legal-institutional expression to realize a new associational public. In transcending the legalistic and moralistic framework of the 'rational' tradition, Marx realised rational unity within the social world of everyday exchange, reciprocity and solidarity.
Two hundred years before Marx, Gerrard Winstanley called it the ‘true commonwealth.’
He also called it ‘true religion’. And here’s the big difference between Marx and Winstanley – both exposed an external religiosity as a mystification and repression inimical to freedom and demanded its abolition. Winstanley did so in the name of a true religion, the inner light, the Spirit Reason within, an internal religiosity as a healthy spirituality on the part of men and women. Marx sought to abolish that internal religiosity too as an internal constraint. The question is, then, do we come to abolish the law, or to fulfil it? I was once with Marx on this. I am now with Winstanley. But that is thinking and writing to come.
I have been doing masses of reading and writing for a substantial book on Gerrard Winstanley - with themes drawn from Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, you name it, on how to deconstruct lawful/rational freedom and reconstruct it as a socially embodied relational freedom. The old theme of my writing in Manchester turns out to have been Winstanley's all along. And it all points to an environmental antinomianism - ethics as a stream that cannot be enclosed, codified, and rationalised without becoming dead, false and repressive.
Winstanley was against the constraint of life and persons by way of external forms. Although he described himself as having been ‘dipped’ at an earlier age, he had now come to believe that the only baptism that mattered was in the ‘water of life,’ by which he meant the Spirit:
‘I have gone through the ordinance of dipping, which the letter of the Scripture doth warrant, yet I do not press anyone thereunto, but bid everyone to wait upon the Father, till He teach and persuade, and then their submitting will be sound. For I see now that it is not the material water, but the water of life; that is, the Spirit in which souls are to be dipped, and so drawn forth into the one Spirit; and all these outward customs and forms are to cease and pass away.’
For Winstanely, to worship ‘in spirit and in truth’ implies a worship that is no longer confined and mediated by external forms or by the doctrine and practice of particular churches or sects:
‘All of your particular Churches are like the inclosures of land which hedges in some to be heires of life, and hedges out others.’
And here, Mick Smith is right:
“This returns us full circle to the question of antinomianism, which, if my characterization is at all accurate, rejects political-administrative authority, refuses to accept the external imposition of moral norms, questions reason's impartiality and instead emphasizes the inspiration of the free individual, liberty and love."
“But ethics always resists, it always subverts, because it is that anarchic excess, that love that refuses to be contained.”
“Antinomianism sought to replace the doctrine of election, of God's choosing some in preference to others, with the simple and egalitarian need for belief. Indeed many held ... that Christ's sacrifice atoned for all sins, even those of unbelievers. Nor, as E. P. Thompson points out, was the removal of the moral law seen to leave a vacuum. Rather it was to be replaced with love, a love that knew no bounds, a love from the heart, an enduring sympathy with one's fellows.”
Those passages make a lot of sense of my favourite thinkers, Winstanley, Blake and Rousseau, except to point out that it is possible to envisage the democratic constitution of authority through the principle of self-assumed obligation, and that political-administrative power need not always be alien to us, but may actually be an expression of our sovereign power; bearing in mind, too, that Winstanley’s last book was The Law of Freedom, a law he grounded in ‘the everlasting law,’ law as setting the framework for the commonwealth of true hearts; and bearing in mind that Rousseau did something very similar indeed in making the law supreme and, indeed, sacred. Mediation must take place ...
We need to take full account of politics as a legitimate sphere of human concern, a public space in which human beings come to manage their common affairs and determine together the terms of which they come to live. Politics is not an alien sphere to be extirpated, a sphere external to love and friendship, but is integral to the truly human life of human beings as social beings. That point needs to be made clearly give en the very definite anti-political strain in an ethics of Christian love. Time and again in history we find to our cost that love is not remotely enough to form the one out of the many. It is worth making this point in relation to Martin Luther, relating to wider issues of alternate possibilities in the Reformation, possibilities that could have steered us in directions other than capitalism and the industrial revolution (and biospheric destruction, planetary unraveling, climate catastrophe ...).
Here’s a letter that was published in The Times (October 31 2017) in celebration of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Note well the connection of the Reformation with the work ethic and the ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit of capitalism, free trade and free markets, and the colonisation of the world by commercial imperatives:
‘On this day exactly 500 years ago Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in protest against the Church of Rome selling certificates of pardon. This has since come to mark the start of the Protestant Reformation that led to a movement for which the whole of Europe should indeed be profoundly thankful. It took the churches back to the very heart of the Christian faith which, as Luther rightly contended, is trusting to Christ alone. It led to the publication of vernacular Bibles and liturgies, among them our own Book of Common Prayer. This in turn generated a simple piety that prompted biblically based literature from the pens of Bunyan, Milton and Donne. The work ethic of the early Protestants clearly stimulated investment in entrepreneurial activity, growth in the arts and sciences and European and worldwide trade, exploration and discovery. Early Protestants were the first to demand complete religious toleration. Today is therefore a historic landmark in the history of modern Europe and indeed the world. May we in this country never underestimate the value of our Protestant heritage.’
The Rev Dr Nigel Scotland, Hon research fellow in religious studies, University of Gloucestershire.
One can scarce forbear to cheer. We are where we are today because of Martin Luther. In retrospect, it would be easy to invert the claims made here to portray a picture of global conquest, colonization by money and power, destruction of cultures, wars and mutual self-annihilation in the service of new idols and systemic imperatives. As Erich Fromm detailed at length in his work, there is a direct connection between the fear of a remote God, the fear of freedom, the worship of authoritarian power and subservience to external force, whether in the shape of the centralized state or the capitalist economy. As we stand on the brink of climate catastrophe, so engrossed in the wealth of material means at our disposal that we are incapable of seeing ends in any collective sense, so used to obeying external imperatives of ‘the system’ that we have lost the capacity to determine ends morally and socially. Find purpose, and the means will follow, said Gandhi. The problem with the association of Luther and the Reformation with the 'entrepreneurial' spirit of capitalism is that this delivers us into a Weberian rationalization and disenchantment that has driven purpose from the world. Far from taking us back to Christian roots, the path from reformation to industrial revolution has taken us even further away from the God at the core. Winstanley's Spirit Reason involves a very different rationalization and enlightenment.
I'm not sure we should be so thankful of toleration, either. It says something that toleration is the only virtue that modern liberal society can come to tolerate ... (and didn't actually practice, either, see the position of Catholics in modern British society and politics - let's not mistake smug self-identity and celebration for the truth). Such a principle seems to show the limitations of claims of Christian brotherhood, and the need for toleration seems to point up the lack of warm, affective solidarities and bonds around a genuine common ethic in the first place. Love of neighbour as self, even love of enemies, I can understand. But Christians tolerating one another ... Christians are taught not only to love their neighbours as themselves, but to love their enemies too. And here, we are being given Christians tolerating one another as the highest virtue of all. That this is the only virtue left in the liberal world should tell us that something essential has gone missing.
Winstanley saw the limits of such toleration. Other-worldly Christians such as Parson Platt were horrified by Winstanley’s communist and cooperative ethic, and took direct, physical action to defend private property. Protestant Reformation went off half-cock as it was delivered into the hands of a propertied minority free-riding on the commons, accumulating worldly wealth at the expense of others. Winstanley also contested the idea that the Protestant Reformation, in the hands of the propertied radicals, brought the church back to the heart of the Christian faith. Winstanley identified Jesus Christ explicitly as the head leveller. The world could have done without the two hundred years of war, with Christian torturing and slaughtering Christian, splitting the universal church and removing the world about as far away from Jesus as the Prince of Peace as was possible. The simple piety that the Rev writes about spoke with many voices, the disagreements over texts and words showing little by way of genuine spirituality. Winstanley had a different work ethic too, one based on working together, eating together and sharing the land in common. From the start, from within the heart of the Protestant revolution, Winstanley had identified the fatal flaw that would channel the revolutionary spirit into sterile worldly forms. The propertied radicals had misidentified God as angry, wrathful and distant, and so, cut off from the source of nourishment, had to turn upon the world and conquer it to prove their worthiness. That remoteness from God, that denial of a loving God, fed a neurotic need to master nature as an enemy to be conquered, bringing about the paradox of an other-worldly religious ethic driving the pursuit of worldly gain through a neurotic need to compensate for lack of nourishment, worth and fulfilment, delivering one and all to subservience to the new idols of money, power, state and capital. We can give thanks to the new religion of capitalism and endless economic growth if we like. It is nihilistic, the endless accumulation of means for the sake of further means, going nowhere, and consuming the world in the process. This endless accumulation of material quantities can never fill up the gaping hole where the soul once was. In the self-image, as presented by this letter, this appears as a plainly idolatrous worship of the powers of world mastery. The reality is a pathetic enslavement to a social necessity. The problem with this bogus religion is not that it is materialist but that it isn’t materialist enough, or spiritual; it is neither fish nor fowl. This was a work ethic bred in scarcity, a psychic scarcity born from separation from the loving God immanent in all things, and that was led as a result to conceive nature in the same mean and narrow spirit. Winstanley saw the earth in terms of abundance, a common inheritance to be enjoyed. He saw from the very first how this Protestant work ethic was misguided, and would misfire, removed from the loving God and abundant nature, to create a world as desolate as its own mean psychology.
'The Renaissance ended with Machiavelli’s The Prince and the Counter-Reformation. The Reformation loosed upon the world a new dominant Europe, supremely capitalist; in Germany it produced a crew of petty princelings – not a happy result. And did Luther not betray the rebel cause in the Peasant war of 1525?’
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. III p. 626
Gerrard Winstanley gives us an alternative Protestant Ethic, one from within the Reformation, one which puts us back in touch with a loving God as a spiritual and material commons that enfolds, nurtures and sustains all things. With a close connection to this source of life and meaning, there is no need to project an inner emptiness and scarcity upon the world, and no need for a work ethic that pits us against an ‘external’ world, succeeding only in exchanging the true God for worldly gain, and leading us into an idolatrous self-worship that is also a debilitating self-enslavement to our own powers in alien form.
We know too much, and we are too close to unraveling the moral, social and ecological boundaries of civilised life, to accept any triumphalism about the ‘spirit’ of capitalism. The pathos of means being extended to displace ends, leaving men as Gods as masters of a wasteland of their own making, was identified long ago. Here is R.H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism from 1926:
‘Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical interpretation of moral principles must alter with them. Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social history will be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful, organized for purposes of economic gain, buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies, which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian Faith, lies deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal follies against which criticism is most commonly directed. It consists in the assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly less naivete than by the defenders of the established order, that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavour and the final criterion of human success. Such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution, may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.
'Modern capitalism', writes Mr Keynes, 'is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.' It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression, as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley - who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.’
R.H. Tawney ‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’ 1926 ch 5
The words with which Max Weber ended The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism continue to haunt a world incapable of mustering the moral, political and institutional wit and will to avert the climate catastrophe closing in on the horizon:
‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage….
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."’
Max Weber, ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, 1905
There is not one word on Winstanley in either Tawney's book or Weber's, which is quite an omission since he offers a reformation that takes us in a very different direction than capitalism. That reformation is based on a very different theology, what could be described as a natural theology, so long as we understand Winstanley's God as a close and loving God, the Spirit Reason that is located in nature and in the body. There is no neurotic obsession with proving oneself with a work ethic, no identification of nature as niggardly and mean, an external enemy to be suppressed by organisation and technique, no identification of human beings as competitors for scarce resources, no need to hoard to snatch and snatch to hoard. Protestantism and capitalism conquered the world! It would have been some achievement to have appreciated that the world was ours to begin with, to share with all, and with other beings and bodies, not to be expropriated, possessed and parcelled out by the few. I'm thinking of Karl Marx's praise for Adam Smith as 'the Luther of political economy,' relating external religiosity to internal religiosity, getting rid of external mediation to return us to the truth about God and religion, and in like manner tracing private property to its source in labour. There is a world to win, wrote Marx at the end of the Communist Manifesto. But such a claim is hardly revolutionary if it remains within the world-conquering hubris of humans against nature.
I’m not inclined to join in celebrations of Martin Luther which associate his ‘reformation’ with a world-conquering, world-hating hubris that reveals nothing other than the ill-balanced psychological poverty and meanness that split society into individuals, and split individuals within into separate personalities and which, though the neurotic need to fill an inner emptiness, led them to act against the world in ways that split the world between a life-denying asceticism on the one hand and a gross and engrossing worldly gain on the other. That may well be the ‘spirit of capitalism’, but it has naught to do with what Gerrard Winstanley called ‘true religion.’ And it has naught to do with nature and human nature either, it is false to all things. None of this is true or natural, but has a peculiar character which is attributable to the capital system and the way it moulds our behaviours within and nature without. Here is Weber:
In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and entirely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.
Weber 1974:53
Marx also identified the 'ascetic' spirit of capitalism as a denial of natural qualities, pointing to the mean, life denying morality of capitalism.
'Its true ideal is the ascetic but usurious miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings bank... Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc. the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt - your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the capitalist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.'
Marx EW EPM 1975:361/2.
Gerrard Winstanley gave us an alternative Reformation to the above, a true reformation that took us back to the true God, to the Spirit Reason pervading all things; he restored us to the earth as our common inheritance, and gave us a true abundance of life. He gave us an alternative radicalism right from the heart of those revolutionary transformations in thought, in society and in politics.
As for Luther, he was as politically naïve in his devotion to Christian love as was Winstanley (to begin with). Love may be all we need, but, so long as we continue to fall short of the moral law, we will require that external legal and institutional framework. Winstanley died still waiting for Christ to rise within each and all. He saw how action could incite that spirit, cooperate with it, how we could become partners within the Spirit Reason, and he came to appreciate the need for a framework of law and government in The Law of Freedom. He had learned the necessity, as well as the worth and dignity of politics, the hard way.
When the poor peasants and Anabaptists read ‘God’s word’ in the vernacular, and understood its clear meaning, by clear light of conscience, Luther suddenly appreciated dangers of the ‘Christian liberty’ he proclaimed. The problem was that God’s word meant different things to different people. In the city of man the word of God proved inscrutable. That doesn’t lead us back to true Christian faith so much as forwards to scepticism, relativism, liberalism, to a tolerance that values an ethics that dispenses with the need of any religious sanction. The Anabaptists scared Luther. He attempted negotiation and mediation but the appeal to reason failed, as it tends to do when passions are inflamed. And so, the unworldly, unpolitical Luther saw no option but to support the most extreme assertion of the exercise of temporal power. He supported the princes in their brutal crushing of the rebellion. Some 100,000 peasants are thought to have died as a result. For Luther, the Christian has only one right against established Power, the right meekly to suffer unjust punishment, bearing witness to the truth as Christ did not on the cross. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that Christians arguing against politics as a secondary, temporal sphere are highly political in choosing to ally with established power. Either politics matters or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it is no business of the Christian to take one side or the other. If it matters, then the basis for support rests with where the balance of Christian principle lies.
There is real, bitter irony in Luther’s condemnation of the peasants’ and his support for their violent quashing. For Luther’s deepest conviction told him that force and violence could never be a real solution to anything. He said precisely this in arguing that faith should be gentle and uncoerced and he repeated the view consistently. Deeply conservative, Luther condemns rebellion not only for being in defiance of God’s express commandment but for being foolish, futile and self-destructive.
That Luther lacked a political theory becomes apparent when one considers that for him, human law and government were only needed since human beings, however they perceived themselves, were not Christians. As he wrote: ‘The greater number of men are and always will be unchristian, whether they be baptised or not’ (Von Weltlicher Uberkeyt). If people were true Christians living a truly Christian life, then there would be no need of temporal power to rule them.
Luther admitted that law-making power existed in a secondary sense. Law consists in the Scriptures and in the conscience of man. However, the precepts and the principles alike of natural and of scriptural law need to be continuously adjusted to a complex of circumstance. For this reason there arises the need of a lex positiva. Whilst Luther was in agreement with Aquinas here, his recognition was nevertheless grudging. Luther was sceptical of all man-made law, and this applies as much to the Corpus Juris Civilis as to the Canon Law. Luther admits the necessity of law but he was of the view that there was too much of it. For Luther, the mass of man-made law, with its definitions, its subtleties and technicalities, was useless at best. Luther argued that good judges are much better than laws, however good. ‘Love needs no law’ (Babylonish Captivity). All that was need for the right judging of disputes among men was love, reason and a good conscience. If a judge has nothing but the letter of the law to rely on he ‘will further nothing but evil’ (Von Weltlicher Uberkeyt). If a Christian Prince has to depend upon lawyers and law books, it will likely go ill with his people. The prince should pray for an understanding heart.
“Without love and natural justice (Naturrecht) you can never be in accord with the will of God, though you have devoured the Jurists and all their works. The more you ponder them, the more will you err. A good judgment must not, and never can come out of books, but can only come from a free mind, as though no books were. Such a free judgment is given by love and natural law, that is full of all reason” (Von Weltlicher Uberkeyt).
Luther, it is evident, didn’t have a political theory and, for his purposes, didn’t require one. Not only did Luther lack a theory of the state, it is only in a very secondary and limited sense that he recognized the institution of the state at all. There is no conception at all of the legitimate power and right of the state or of the sovereign law-making power.
To make my point clear - the identification of antinomianism with freedom should not be taken at face value to be true. Historical experience shows the issue to be far more complicated. Human beings are complicated creatures. Miss the complexity, and your freedom can very quickly turn into its opposite. To point to the love in the human heart that escapes reason is no great discovery. The discovery that love is not always directed to its proper object, and therefore may go awry, is. The love of money is the root of all evil ... So we instruct, educate, direct, channel, guide - it's called ethics and politics, and it involves laws, institutions and codes.
The less man-made law we have the better, as far as Luther is concerned. Human beings know right from wrong and where conscience fails, the Scriptures will guide. “Love needs no law” and, if everyone were true Christians, there would be need for neither law nor Prince. That's the antinomian strain again. My point is that it is easy enough to affirm an environmental antinomianism, and to portray oneself as anarchist and libertarian, a true friend of freedom, as against authoritarians who talk so much about ethics, moral codes, laws, government and politics. It's just that it is not so easy to live in accordance with 'anarchic excess.' And to that extent, we certainly do need to be more realistic.
Luther points in two directions at once, both for and against the civil authority. Luther, it is true, justified submission and obedience to worldly authority as a condition of free worship. But his words about true Christianity not requiring the state and law must have led many in a completely opposite direction. And there is plenty in Luther which justified the Anabaptist claim to be merely following where Luther led – the insistence on the duty of resistance in obedience to God, on the natural priesthood of believers, on Christian liberty, and in his consistent belief that a truly Christian community would require neither law nor magistrate. Strictly speaking, to the exact letter of what he said, Luther is correct when he denied responsibility for the violent revolution which claimed his inspiration. Luther is clear that political affairs, the distribution of worldly goods and powers, are secondary to spiritual matters.
Luther expresses in inchoate and incoherently form the many divergent tendencies in early Protestantism, all of which were to find theoretical and practical expression in the coming years. Luther was a precursor of Zwingli and Bucer, of Calvin and Knox, of Castellion and the Arminians and, yes, the Anabaptists and the Mennonites, of liberty of conscience theories and right of resistance theories. Calvin’s ideal city state itself represented the theocratic ideal which Luther held in the vaguest terms. Knox embodied that revolt at the godlessness of rulers which Luther expressed, much to Mary Stuart’s chagrin. The Anabaptists acted on Luther’s persistent yearning for a perfectly Christian community of true Christians. Such a community would not require the state and law, as Luther had stated many times. Tolstoy argued precisely the same thing. Far from being the theorist of the absolute state, in his ethic, Luther resembles most of all a Tolstoyan Christian anarchist. But it takes more than declarations of love to live a life of Tolstoyan Christian anarchism. I'm all in favour. You may be all in favour. But there are always some who are not. And read Andrew Schmookler on The Parable of the Tribes to find an answer to this question: "Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace?"
The distinctions here can be very fine indeed. So fine that even Luther seems not to have realized how close he was to the Anabaptists. Luther’s words from 1520 expressed the Anabaptist view perfectly: “I believe that there is on earth, wide as the world, but one holy, common Christian Church, which is no other than the community of the saints.. I believe that in this community or Christendom all things are in common and each man’s goods are the other’s and nothing is simply a man’s own” (Works, ed Erlanger, 22, p20).
These points suggest a distinction between Luther and Lutheranism. The only connection that Luther’s teaching has with the systems of government that the Princes’ established in Germany is his name. The State-ridden churches went under the sign of Lutheranism but had little of Luther’s spirit. Luther’s spirit, though, could be found in some very radical places, places that would have horrified Luther himself.
Winstanley very much believed that his communist commonwealth was a Christian commonwealth, a community in which ‘all things are in common’ and that, indeed, love requires no law. But believing in a loving God in all things, he felt that we could join together to act to realize this community in the here and now. Against him was the direction of the reforming energies into a propertied republicanism that preserved kingly power in its very earthly forms. Luther stated that he did “not wish the Gospel defended by force and bloodshed. The world was conquered by the Word, the Church is maintained by the Word, and the Word will also put the Church back into its own, and Antichrist, who gained his own without violence, will fall without violence”. Winstanley and the Diggers also preached and practised peace. They were met with physical violence and state repression, and yet still did not meet physical force with physical force. Winstanley trusted to the Word and to the spirit of Christ rising within. It didn’t happen, and the Diggers’ community was suppressed.
And Luther? Luther understood that any violent upheaval would alienate the princes, nobility and certain towns, and would be put down by Catholic or Imperial opposition. He wrote a pamphlet Against the Rioting Peasants, which contained three charges: the peasants had violated oaths of loyalty, which makes them subject to secular punishment; they had committed crimes against the faith; and they had committed blasphemy in using Christ’s name in their crimes.
‘The peasants have taken upon themselves the burden of three terrible sins against God and man; by this they have merited death in body and soul... they have sworn to be true and faithful, submissive and obedient, to their rulers... now deliberately and violently breaking this oath... they are starting a rebellion, and are violently robbing and plundering monasteries and castles which are not theirs... they have doubly deserved death in body and soul as highwaymen and murderers... they cloak this terrible and horrible sin with the gospel... thus they become the worst blasphemers of God and slanderers of his holy name.’
All you need is love and natural justice? A political and legal theory helps too, as does an institutional and legal framework for public community. Winstanley set out these principles in The Law of Freedom. He had learned by experience that truth, like love, is never simple and can’t be relied upon to unite a community. He thus set up law and institutions as a transitional framework that would bring about the true commonwealth in the hearts of men and women, so that in the end any external constraint would be displaced by an internal direction. It was essentially the argument that Rousseau was to make over a century later, the law forcing human beings to do involuntarily what they ought to do voluntary and which they would choose to do as moral beings. We end up with a legal-institutional framework attempting to regulate the self-seeking, self-interested behaviour of individuals within capitalist relations, instead of changing those patterns of behaviour through the transformation of social relations. We end up not in the communist commonwealth but in the propertied republic, powered by a global heat machine that is busy consuming the world in its unquenchable thirst for economic growth. ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the Prophets,’ wrote Marx. That’s capitalism as the new religion. To that, Winstanley offered an alternate Protestant ethic.
Winstanley affirmed a transcendent standard which enabled him to cleave to a truth outside of the institutions and laws of time and place, demanding that our actions and practices be brought into conformity with that ideal. As he wrote:
"True religion and undefiled is this, To make restitution of the earth which hath been taken and held from the common people by the power of Conquests formerly and so set the oppressed free."
"Buying and Selling is an Art, whereby people endeavour to cheat one another of the Land.......and true Religion is, To let every one enjoy it."
Gerrard Winstanley A New Yeers Gift for the Parliament and the Army, 1650
That’s my kind of pleasure. And my kind of ethics. Morality is all about the enjoyment of earth and the appreciation of the abundance of a life shared in common with others. That's a view that invites God to laugh, with us, in a nice way, all hearts as one in the Creation. We can be reverent with respect to Creation, and irreverent with respect to those with pretensions to enclose it, whether by law, by physical force, or by conceptualization and rationalization. Winstanley's "Spirit Reason" is an anarchic excess that evades all such attempts. And that Spirit Reason is in each and all of us, and runs through all things, forever flowing as a river flows, never ending, endlessly surprising. The greatest joy and the deepest happiness are to be found in this instinctive immersion in the 'water of life.'
‘When we try to define happiness in contrast to depression, we approach Spinoza's definition of joy and happiness as that state of intensified vitality that fuses into one whole our effort both to understand our fellow men and be one with them. Happiness results from the experience of productive living, and the use of the powers of love and reason which unite us with the world. Happiness consists in our touching the rock bottom of reality, in the discovery of our self and our oneness with others as well as our difference from them. Happiness is a state of intense inner activity and the experience of the increasing vital energy which occurs in productive relatedness to the world and to ourselves.
Fromm, The Sane Society 1990 ch 5
We are all part of an ocean of energies, spiritual and material as one. We come equipped with an innate instruction manual. Just swim!
‘Once the earth becomes a common treasury again, as it must…and mankind must have the law of righteousness once more writ in his heart, and all must be made of one heart and one mind: Then this enmity in all lands will cease, for none shall dare to seek a dominion over others, neither shall any dare to kill another, nor desire more of the earth than another.’
Gerrard Winstanley, 1973, p 80
And that, to me, sounds like living up to the standards of the one and true law, ‘true religion’ as he called it, not a libertarian or libertine rejection of those standards, which characterised the Ranters of the seventeenth century (and the hedonists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, those people consumed by desire and hooked by their noses to the capitalist treadmill, miscalling this necessity 'individual freedom.') The great Marxist historian Christopher Hill wrote a fine book called Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies. Those controversies continue, and beg the question: 'which law?' for their resolution. Winstanley doesn’t get much coverage, and when he does, he is too often read as one of the Ranters that he vehemently opposed for their false freedom, for their mistaking of licence for liberty, showing how it leads us to enslavement to empirical necessity. That’s also the view I developed at length in my work on ‘rational freedom’. But it does entail a shift from a legalistic definition of freedom to freedom as a love and liberty embodied in right relationships. And that’s a kind of antinomianism of which I am without doubt guilty. But it is a very different notion from libertarianism, whether the economic libertarianism of 'free' markets and 'free' trade, or the libertarianism of its cultural wing, the decadent liberalism and pluralism of 'difference' and 'otherness' that strikes radical enough 'alternative' poses against the system, but is incapable of uprooting its power at source, let alone constituting a viable alternative of its own. I note how many times Mick Smith justifies his environmental antinomianism in terms of 'opposition'. I will affirm opposition in the dialectical sense, and in the sense of 'abolition' as a negation that is also a transcendence bringing out the full quality of a thing. ‘No thing can become manifest to itself without opposition’ (Boehme.) William Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
'Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.'
This dialectical understanding affirms both negation and progression, it has a point and a purpose that is for something. The antinomianism I write of is undertaken in the name of a true law, and wishes to see that law socially and institutionally embodied and articulated. Not colonized, captured, intellectualized, rationalised and institutionalised, but expressed, experienced and lived. It is easy enough to be against 'the system', you don't have to be an anarchist for that. But try being for a social order, try building institutions and systems, and try making them work without some kind of normative commitment. The idea of an unmediated social practice that proceeds by spontaneity is a Romantic delusion, and a dangerous one. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and any gaps in social thought and practice will quickly fill up with bureaucracy or some other extraneous force. Mediation must take place, Marx insisted, and he was right. Try, in other words, to embody your freedom, place it in a socially viable and meaningful sense. That's the freedom I'm interested in, not a politics of permanent protest against the status quo, an endless rehearsal of the defeats that are sure to come - that kind of politics changes nothing and is but a superficial radicalism, complicit in the ills and iniquitous of the status quo it purports to criticize, but eschews the practical and constructive engagement required for substantial transformation.
To self-proclaimed antinomians, who proceed directly to the libertarian, unconstrained, unrestrained definition of freedom as a love that escapes reason, I say simply this, I am sympathetic, but be careful lest your haste and passion to be free come to deliver you to the most repressive constraints within and without. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the greatest minds of ethics and politics have missed the truth of the moral law written on the human heart. You will find recognition of that truth in St Paul (Romans 2:14ff). It’s there in Rousseau, too, who wrote of the truths engraved on the human heart. As I make clear in this piece, it’s the view of Gerrard Winstanley too. Those who think the matter is as simple as stating the simple truths ingrained in the hearts of simple souls will, no doubt, be perplexed and frustrated by those who proceed to argue for written laws, codes and institutions to declare and enforce the law and, with it. prescribe morality and good behaviour. From an antinomian perspective, this can only be understood as a repressive constraint, hence we get the libertarian idea that the repudiation of all law is freedom. We ought to be ‘free to choose’ asserts that great antinomian of free-market economics Milton Friedman… You see my point? Antinomianism as a libertarianism can serve to devalue and undermine the very laws and institutions that human beings, as social beings, require to ensure a public freedom in a supra-individual, inter-relational context. Remove that framework, and we are in the realm of ‘free’ individuals, whose free interplay is merely a free competition in which mutual self-cancellation degenerates into a mutual self-annihilation. To repudiate all law is not freedom but its very antithesis, denying human beings the social-relational framework and infrastructure they require to individuate themselves. Instead of freedom, individuals come to be slaves to the external collective constraints unleashed by their incremental and uncoordinated activities, to their own immediate desires, to their egos, to empirical necessity. It is a false freedom and, although the likes of Mick Smith cite Winstanley in support of what he calls an ‘environmental antinomianism,’ Winstanley himself explicitly identified libertarianism as a false freedom in the opening to his Law of Freedom.
I am currently completing a book on the great poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri. Dante knew all about love. He wrote about being turned by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. He knew about law too. He argues that the purpose of law is to restrain cupidity (selfishness, covetousness, self-interest) and to demonstrate equity (Convivio IV, vi, 17). A libertarian freedom unleashes cupidity and delivers us into an inegalitarian order. He argues that whilst it is enough for young men to accept and obey this law willingly, old men, of whom Cato is the prime example, should have equity in their hearts (Convivio IV, xxvi, 14). Dante quotes St. Augustine, who argues that there would be no need of written law if men had such equity in their hearts (Convivio IV, ix, 18). But neither St Augustine nor Dante, knowing love, knowing equity, knowing justice as written into the hearts of men and women, into the very fabric of the universe, make the mistake of repudiating law within and without. It's a romantic fantasy, decadence and delusion that delivers precisely the opposite of love and freedom. There is, Dante argues, a need of such law in post-lapsarian society, and, therefore, there is need of someone and some body — the emperor and the empire — to enforce it. Dante thus describes the emperor as the rider of the human will (Convivio IV, ix, 10). That's not the way I would put it. I see the legal-institutional framework as educational and transitional. I prefer the way that Rousseau states the point with respect to the moral and educative purpose of the law, inducing people to see and to will the good; the law constraining people to the good they ought to choose voluntarily and which, in time, they well come to will. When that day comes … the law will be embodied in the social, relational and psychic framework of everyday living and an internal self-direction and social self-mediation will replace the external constraints, to achieve justice and equity in a union of hearts. Miss out the crucial steps, abandon law as an external constraint, and we lose the all-important transitions, and, in the name of a (libertarian) freedom, proceed to a collective unfreedom. Antinomianism in this sense devalues law, ethics and politics, and encourages us to fall for the oldest errors that human beings commit in the book of life.
In The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Alec Nove condemned Marxists for failing to recognize the reality of complexity and the reality of scarcity, inhabiting 'a quasi-religious dream world, from which they can sally forth to damn every realistically conceivable form of socialism for making compromises with reality' (Nove 1983:60). It is in that respect that I would question the libertarianism that celebrates an anarchic excess beyond reason, not for its being radical, but for it not being radical enough, in the sense of being incapable of institutionalizing, embodying and articulating its principles, power and interests in a viable social order. Where there is power there is resistance, argues Foucault, and people quote Foucault as some kind of great anarchic authority on this, oblivious to the fact that this celebration of resistance, and 'otherness' and 'difference' and constant struggle etc, concedes the practical world to the forces that are to be not merely contested, but defeated, uprooted and supplanted. Bad social systems, like bad theories, continue until they are replaced with something that does the job better. A radicalism of 'opposition' and 'resistance' refuses the task of constituting an alternative. An antinomianism that is merely about resisting power, but is incapable of embodying power in a viable social and institutional order, and unwilling to make the effort, is a mere indulgence and decadence. It sounds libertarian enough, but is ineffectual and, as a result of its uncompromising nature, is complicit in the continuation of the iniquitous, exploitative and repressive status quo it claims to reject.
In a criticism of the 'moralizing' dimension of my work last year, I was advised to read Foucault ... It wasn't appreciated that I have, of course, read Foucault in depth and at length over the years, appropriated his insights (Weber is much better, and much more profound), noted his attempts in later life to find his way back to Kantian enlightenment, (and his seeming admission, here, of the limitations of his approach), and criticized his impotence for want of an appropriate philosophical anthropology. He doesn't like essentialism, and neither do his acolytes. That is his and his followers' fatal flaw, gutting any liberatory potential in their work. Foucault takes us back into the Hobbesian world of an endless circulation and contest of power, power without an essential point or purpose, the world as merely conventional. Whereas Marx's distinction between 'descending' exploiting classes and 'ascending' exploited classes based on an understanding of the human ontology is capable of embodying progressive goals, Foucault's concepts of "war", "resistance", "power" and "the social" merely conflates all all struggles into one universal, endless, pointless struggle, a constant social warfare with no prospect of peace, merely a new version in fancy words of the Hobbesian thesis that the pursuit of naked self-interest is the motivating force in human affairs. This is a step back from the 'rational' tradition in that it fails to explain or resolve the problem of perpetual war within the social order. Not wishing to be funny, but Foucault should have read me. And so should those who keep prattling on about essentializing and totalizing discourses that suppress difference and otherness ... I read text after text making sweeping statements when it comes to rejecting universalizing, essentializing and totalizing discourses, containing claims and accusations much more universalizing, essentializing and totalizing than anything in the discourses being criticized and rejected. I'm not interested in shallow oppositional stances, and am not interested in dreary repetitions that betray a philosophical amateurism and ignorance. But, yes, 'difference' and 'otherness' are wonderful, essentialism is oppressive, fixes identities and denies choice, universalism is false and suppresses particularism, morality is repressive, notions of the common good too, and Reason – always capitalised – is totalizing. Someone will have to point a gun at my head or at other sensitive parts before I’ll read another work from this crowd. I read their acolytes in their denunciations of the common good as oppressive of otherness and difference, and I read their sweeping denunciations of essentialism, and that is more than enough to tell me that they still repeating a hoary old discourse and have yet to actually engage philosophically with the issues they raise. They are good at generalisation, reduction and caricature, and they are good at reinforcing their own prejudices, and ... at suppressing 'other' discourses. As an essentialist, as someone who holds that there is such a thing as human nature, and as someone who affirms normative humanist concerns with respect to a philosophical anthropology grounded in what it is to be human, I feel very 'different' and 'other' indeed within contemporary social and cultural theory. And I don't feel that my difference and otherness is being appreciated, let alone embraced, by those who have most to say on these things. Apologies for the slight impatience and ill-temper here, but I am leery of being bracketed with an ex-marxism/post-rationalism/post-humanism without substance: if I may speak bluntly, this stuff is a moral and intellectual blight, and is not the kind of antinomianism I have any time for. Terry Eagleton has argued cogently on this, as did Norman Geras, the man who should have been my first supervisor, and who exposed the inflated rhetoric involved in the repudiation of 'essentialism' at length, concluding:
Argument by caricature and simplification; by easy reduction and intellectual short-cut; by light-minded use of such hackneyed vulgarizations as have already been answered many times over (and as will be seen today for vulgarizations not only by Marxists but by a substantial number of fair-minded, non-Marxist students of Marxism) - this is a dual dereliction. It obstructs fruitful socialist debate. And it reinforces the currently difficult external environment of that debate. It is no fit style for the kind of socialist pluralism we need. In any case, enough is now more than enough.
Norman Geras, Discourses of Extremity 1986: 165
Norman takes the anti-essentialism of the likes of Laclau and Mouffe apart, line by line. His last line is his best line: 'enough is now more than enough.' Thirty years on, it is a tragedy. It was a waste of time then, and it is a waste of time now: mere verbiage concealing paucity of thought, subjectless and structureless, pointless and purposeless. It sounds radical enough but is anything but - get back to Marx! But read Eagleton, or Geras' Discourses of Extremity if you have the time, will and inclination. I've done with it. Better to read people like Alasdair MacIntyre, who takes us back to human nature, (these characters debate endlessly whether human nature, or anything, exists, I leave them be), ethics as practice, forms of the common life, and offers us far more. The lack of a normative humanism will continue sending people up a creek without a paddle, as my good old DOS Jules Townshend told me back in the 1990s. Just to add, responding in general to general repudiations of essentialism runs the risk of the kind of generalisation that is certain to get essentialist modes of thought into trouble. There is nothing fixed about essences. There may be necessary lines of development in potentials becoming actual, but that realization is indeterminate. Thus Marx wrote less and less on species-being in general and referred more precisely to social forms and relations. That is, the content of any essence is not spelled out in concrete detail in the abstract universal. To take by way of analogy the game of chess. Whilst according to the rulebook, the goal of the game is to checkmate the opponent’s king, how this is achieved is contingent upon the many different circumstances that arise in the context of playing the game. Sometimes it will be appropriate to sacrifice certain pieces, at other times it will be suicidal to do so - context matters. Marx did not merely refer generally to human nature but to its creative unfolding within specific social relations. But count how many times Marx condemned the capital system as a dehumanization. You cannot describe a social order as a dehumanization unless you have some idea of what a truly human life in a truly human society may look like. And that necessarily involves normative commitments with respect to human nature, which makes ethics and questions of value central to the political.
So ... I am cautious of this antinomian designation ... It all depends on what is being rejected and on what is being embraced. I don't reject law or reason, I don't reject essences. I do think there is such a thing as nature and human nature, and that reason and emotional intelligence can say something meaningful about both. I don't see Reason as necessarily totalizing. And I don't see morality as necessarily repressive. It all depends on social relations and institutional forms. Deep down, life is joy and abundance. That's the universal and everlasting law I recognize. And I don't see talk of essences as naturalizing as such, fixing identities, it depends on how it is done. I do see the emphasis on resistance and rejection, ruling out anything more as repressive of freedom, as a libertarian delusion and snare that risks plunging us into and confirming us within the harshest of necessity. Istvan Meszaros hits the nail smack on the head here:
To do away with all mediation is the most naive of all anarchist dreams... it is not mediation itself which is at fault but the capitalistic form of reified second order mediations. According to Marx non-alienated human relations are characterised by self-mediation and not by some fictitious direct identity with, or dissolution in, some generic Collective Subject. The problem for socialist theory and practice is the concrete practical elaboration of adequate intermediaries which enable the social individual to mediate himself with himself, instead of being mediated by reified institutions. In other words, according to Marx, the task is to bring the instruments of human interchange in line with the objective sociality of human beings. What is really implied by the concept of an adequate ‘self-mediation of the social individual’ is not the disappearance of all instrumentality but the establishment of consciously controlled socialist forms of mediation in place of the capitalistically reified social relations of production.
Meszaros, Marx's Theory of Alienation 1970:285/6
Which is why Winstanley interests me greatly. He was oppositional and critical enough, but wasn't satisfied with a mere resistance to and protest against something: he was for something, made explicitly normative judgments and undertook normative commitments, and acted on them in order to create an alternative social order. And he addresses social and institutional realities in his words and actions. He sought to reclaim and reconstitute the commons, working the common land with others, and seeking the 'true commonwealth' in politics. His last book is entitled The Law of Freedom. I can locate him easily within the tradition of 'rational freedom' as I have set it out. It is interesting how many of those who praise his oppositional stance regret this final book of his, his attempt to set out the principles and policies of a viable social order. Here, he sets out laws, policies and institutions which embed freedom, grounding them in the 'everlasting law.' That legal and institutional framework creates a socio-relational infrastructure in which the true commonwealth emerges and grows from below, from within the hearts - and actions - of men and women. I take that to be a genuine radicalism, something that goes much further than an endless opposition and resistance that presumes that the world of power/knowledge will always be in a fallen condition. Winstanley identifies the Fall of Man in a social Fall brought about by the institution of private property and the reduction of human relationships to the buying and selling of persons, land, labour and the earth. We can resist that, we can oppose that - but we need to uproot and supplant the entire social metabolism that expropriates, encloses, commodifies, commercializes, exploits, abuses, degrades and destroys our common treasury. Winstanley shows what it takes to bring us back to our common senses. And that involves more than a subversive rejection of things, it involves social construction, institutional reformation, ecological restoration and spiritual regeneration. Winstanley denied that his ideas came from books nor had he ‘heard [them] from the mouth of any flesh’ but that a voice had told him to ‘declare…to all abroad’ that ‘the earth should be made a common treasury.’ (Winstanley, 1973, p24). Winstanley makes cleae the fine distinctions with respect to law that are apt to be missed. Winstanley rejects certain kinds of law - legalism, legal fetishism abstracted from the sources of life - out of his respect for true law. Winstanley writes of 'the power of unreasonable covetousness and pride' that 'hath sometimes rise up and corrupted that traditional law.’
‘For since the power of the sword rise up in nations to conquer, the written law hath not been to advance common freedom and to beat down the unreasonable self-will in mankind, but it hath been framed to uphold that self-will of the conqueror, right or wrong; not respecting the freedom of the commonwealth, but the freedom of the conqueror and his friends only. By reason whereof much slavery hath been laid upon the backs of the plain-dealing man; and men of public spirits, as Moses was, have been crushed, and their spirits damped thereby; which hath bred, first discontents, and then more wars in the nations.'
Against this, Winstanley affirms the ancient law, the ‘true ancient law of God’ which is ‘a covenant of peace to whole mankind.’ The ancient law:
‘sets the earth free to all; this unites both Jew and Gentile into one brotherhood, and rejects none: this makes Christ's garment whole again, and makes the kingdoms of the world to become commonwealths again. It is the inward power of right understanding, which is the true law that teaches people, in action as well as in words, to do as they would be done unto.’
That's the law I embrace rather than reject, the law I am for rather than against. Humankind must return to this ancient law so that the ‘commonwealth may be governed in peace and all burdens removed.’ This is ‘a breaking forth of that law of liberty which will be the joy of all nations when he arises up and is established in his brightness.’ (Winstanley, 1973, pp 374-377). And that's the fulfilment of the law, not its denial:
"For everyone shall know the Law, and everyone shall obey the Law, for it shall be writ in everyone's heart; and everyone that is subject to Reasons law shall enjoy the benefit of sonship. And that is, in respect to outward community, to work together, and eat bread together, and by so doing to lift up the creation from the bondage of self-interest or particular propriety of mine and thine."
That's love, law and liberty all as one, in the whole world of whole beings. A world that is made whole and wholesome.
And so, finally, we return to Gerrard Winstanley, and his emphasis on experiential and experimental knowledge, his restoration not only of dignity but also agency to the ‘common people,’ his emphasis on digging where we stand, working the land, his emphasis on collaboration, on working and eating together, company as breaking bread, his emphasis on action over idle words, his rejection of the idolatry of lofty words and pious wishes that do not get acted upon, and his ‘true commonwealth’ which is constituted by nothing less than what Marx would later call ‘freely associated labour.’
When these clay bodies are in the grave,
And children stand in place.
This shows we stood for truth and peace and freedom in our days
And true-born sons we shall appear of England that's our Mother.
—epigraph to Winstanley's New Year's Gift
These words are a moving testimony to Winstanley’s conviction that his was an act of costly witness to the engrossing of the commons in ethical, political, psychic and physical forms, and an incitement to a different way of human beings coming to relate to each other, to the earth and to God. That alternative was the path not taken, but which could yet still be taken. To say such a thing is to invite derisory comments on the inevitability of dreamers coming to grief in the hard world of politics. To which I would simply state that the political realism which triumphed in the form of the industrial megamachine and heat engine is so detached from social, ethical and planetary realities as to be potentially fatal for civilization. Winstanley's alternate way of human-planetary relating shows humanity what it needs to do to bring politics back to its common senses. The "earthly limitations" which “toughminded realists” like Michael Walzer point to in giving lessons to utopian dreamers in politics contain so much more than a politics consumed by rivalries and enmities with respect to haggling over the terms on which the earth is possessed. The problem with such a politics is not its realism, but that it isn't realistic enough, neither morally, psychologically nor ecologically. Winstanley knew this three hundred and fifty years ago, and affirmed a law more ancient and more wise than the calculations of short-term sectional advantage. Christopher Rowland argues that ‘in a globalized economy we must learn from the overambition of the radicals and not mistakenly hope for a humane, more equal society and world, and then make it impossible by precipitate actions.’ (Christopher Rowland in Zoë Bennett and David B. Gowler ed., Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland, p 273). I agree. But at the same time, I don’t think Winstanley’s actions were precipitate at all, and Rowland too accepts that Winstanley’s project of digging the common land was not ‘fantastic’ at all. If we read the evidence that historian John Gurney has gathered on Winstanley and The Diggers, we can see that digging was a realistic and logical response to hardship and hunger, and attracted eminently practical men and women prepared to work the land in common. This was no an idle dream at all, but was a realistic attempt to reclaim the commons as well, at the same time, reclaiming the ground of our being – by digging in, Winstanley was calling back the soul.
To address Rowland’s point further, whilst we should be cautious of overreaching social and political possibilities, we should also take care not to under-reach ourselves. We are far more powerful, and have far greater potential, than we think. We can only find out the extent of our abilities by extending ourselves, by seeing through and breaking through false intellectual, political and institutional fixities, reaching out to others in the project of changing the world. I heard Terry Eagleton complaining a decade ago that, as capitalism has gone big, the left has started to think and act small. There is nothing wrong with small. ‘Small is beautiful,’ wrote E.F. Schumacher, in a book calling for appropriately scaled development. I argue that large-scale ambitious projects of social and political change need to be rooted in a love of home and place, in small-scale practical reasoning and in communities of practices. I cannot help but think of Gerrard Winstanley’s call to action when I read Gary Snyder’s words: ‘Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.’ But we expand our being in extending our connections to others, seeing ourselves in something greater than we are, connecting that Spirit Reason Winstanley saw within each and all with the community of others. The globalized economy that Rowland refers to tells us not to lower our ambitions and expectations, but to raise them. That globalization indicates how extensive our interconnections are on the planet now. Further, the globalization of capitalist relations of exploitation and alienation allied with a global heat machine which is destructive of the biosphere makes it imperative to think and act big as well as small – we need to scale our ambitions appropriately. Faced with crisis, a slow driver is at least as great a menace as a speeding driver. We dig in where we are and we act from there. Our actions start local, but do not end there. In this respect we need to bear in mind that Gerrard Winstanley argued for his digger communities not only in terms of bringing people together in local place, but in terms of a reaching out to other communities in the nation, and then the world. He envisaged the ‘true commonwealth’ as a federated network of communities working together and eating bread together.In his words and deeds, Gerrard Winstanley pointed us in the direction of the peaceable kingdom of the Lamb, and did the best he could to bring it about. Who could have done more? It is for us to go the rest of the way. If we sincerely desire that peaceable kingdom, if we wish to do more than pay idolatrous service to our fine words, then we have to act on principle, regardless of the narrow calculations of political success and failure.
“And here I end, having put my Arm as far as my strength will go to advance Righteousness: I have Writ, I have Acted, I have Peace: and now I must wait to see the Spirit do his own work in the hearts of others, and whether England shall be the first Land, or some other, wherein Truth shall sit down in triumph.”
Gerrard Winstanley, A New Yeers Gift
More by me on Winstanley
WORKS ON RATIONAL FREEDOM
Here are the principal texts where I set out my views on Rational Freedom:
[The painting is The Gleaning Field by Samuel Palmer, a favourite artist of mine, Samuel Palmer: Mysterious Moonlit Dreams