Gerrard Winstanley was born in Wigan, the next town to my home town of St Helens. His parents were married in Prescot, St Helens, which is my birthplace. These personal details give me an affinity for the man and his work.
In 2018 I began working on a book on Gerrard Winstanley, coinciding with my involvement with the Wigan Diggers and the Wigan Diggers' Festival, a highlight of every year.
I've done the reading and have already written a lot of text, maybe 80,000 words. I'd say I'm about one-thirds finished, have the basic structure set and just need to start writing again.
Gerrard Winstanley is an important figure. He is usually described as a Christian radical and communist who sought to defend – and extend – the commons against the incipient enclosure movement, but his writings are of more than political and historical importance. If his views on the true commonwealth offer an alternate reformation to the one that happened, his views on 'Spirit Reason,' for instance, offer an alternate enlightenment to the disenchanted mechanical materialism that prevailed. That's very much the approach I take in my proposed book on Winstanley.
Winstanley's prose, not to mention his argument, is remarkable. He is one of the greatest writers in the English radical tradition, in the tradition of Piers Plowman. Many examples of this can be given from his writings:
“Let all men say what they will, so long as such are Rulers as call the Land theirs, upholding this particular propriety of Mine and Thine; the common-people shall never have their liberty, nor the Land ever [be] freed from troubles, oppressions and complainings. O thou proud selfish governing Adam, in this land called England! Know that the cries of the poor, whom thou layeth heavy oppressions upon, is heard. […]
“Therefore you dust of the earth, that are trod under foot, you poor people, that makes both scholars and rich men your oppressors by your labours, take notice of your privilege, the Law of Righteousnesse is now declared. All the men and women in England, are all children of this Land, and the earth is the Lord’s, not particular men’s that claims a proper interest in it above others, which is the devil’s power. This is my Land …
“Therefore if the rich will still hold fast this propriety of Mine and Thine, let them labour their own land with their own hands. And let the common-people … labour together, and eat bread together upon the Commons, Mountains, and Hills. For as the enclosures are called such a man’s Land, and such a man’s Land; so the Commons and Heath, are called the common-people’s, and let the world see who labours the earth in righteousnesse, and . . . let them be the people that shall inherit the earth. …Was the earth made for to preserve a few covetous, proud men, to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the earth from others, that they might beg or starve in a fruitful Land, or was it made to preserve all her children?”
Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law Of Righteousness.
With the radical injunction of the shared life of Acts 4:32 in mind, Winstanley insisted that the “earth should be made a common treasury of livelihood to all mankind, without respect of persons.” His understanding of the communism of apostolic Christianity was enriched by the memory of peasant rebellions past, the theology of the radical Reformation, Renaissance humanism, and a smattering of subterranean mystical ideas to deliver a vision of a true commonweath in which the “Earth [was] to be a Common Treasury” in the here and now and not some distant future. Arguing for the resurrection as the rise of Jesus Christ within each and all, this commonwealth would be brought about not through the intercession of a supernatural agent, but by the labours of flesh and blood men and women.
There is always a danger of reading Winstanley anachronistically, looking backwards from the vantage point of the present. That approach runs the risk of seriously downplaying the man's originality and significance, as if he was merely an early forerunner of Enlightenment rationalism and materialism and modern-day socialism. Winstanley's view anticipates both in many respects but also possesses a distinctive quality, and it is that quality which endures beyond the failure and exhaustion of modern traditions. Many people express a “discomfort” with Winstanley's overtly religious language and sources, a discomfort which can be expressed as downright contempt. In such readings, Winstanley's view emerges as a naïve anticipation of a later humanism, rationalism, and materialism, still steeped in the religious and Christian context of his time. This is profoundly unsatisfactory. Christopher Hill reasoned that radicals turned to the Bible for inspiration because they lacked a Rights of Man (Paine), Social Contract (Rousseau), or Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels). That's far too pat, not least because Winstanley himself was a prolific writer who was more than capable his own revolutionary texts. In truth, he did! And he drew extensively on the Bible, and not for merely instrumental reasons. Winstanley weaves texts from the Bible into his arguments as key supports. To remove the religious bases from Winstanley's arguments or marginalse them is to make a nonsense of the man's arguments, reducing him in effect to being an early and minor anticipator of a later Enlightenment humanism and materialism. Not only is this false, it deprives us of a remarkable spiritual radicalism which gives us everything that the Enlightenment diminished, despised, and destroyed, leading us into a wasteland. Even if one may legitimately describe the Diggers as socialists, anarchists, materialists, and humanists, theirs was inherently a religious movement, in motivation, end, and intent. Winstanley made it plain that a true understanding of Christianity implied a democratic and egalitarian society in which the commons would be truly held in common. Any consideration of the possibilities for such a commonwealth is concerned with, as Oscar Wilde put it, 'the soul of socialism under socialism,' calling back the soul as the soul of the world. Hence, I make a point of underlining that Winstanley didn't simply argue for 'Reason' in place of 'God,' but referred to God as 'Spirit Reason' in order to recover God as immanent in a good and purposeful world that supports all its creatures, as distinct from that 'God' that has been traditionally used as a support for hierarchy and inequality. That Spirit Reason is quite distinct from the disenchanting scientific reason that followed in the wake of the aftermath, which means that Winstanley offers us a way out of the flatlands of what Blake called 'Newton's sleep' and single vision.
I take Winstanley's religious views to be sincerely and passionately held. For decades marxist historian Christopher Hill held that Winstanley and such Christian communists made use of Biblical texts merely because they lacked secular revolutionary literature. Towards the end of his life he finally conceded that Winstanley's religious writings were genuine and not merely politically instrumental – the religious ideals fed and oriented his political ideas and commitments. They may do the same for ours.
When does the reforming impulse develop into a full-blown Reformation, and where and how does Reformation stop short of Revolution?
“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
With the following words, written in the last week of August 1649, Gerrard Winstanley described the beginnings of the Digger venture that, in practical terms, lasted only a couple of years, but whose example has endured over centuries.
“Not a full yeere 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 bad me declare it all abroad, which I did obey, for I declared it by word of mouth 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 a little time I was made obedient to the word in that particular likewise; for I tooke my spade and went and broke the ground upon George-hill in Surrey, thereby declaring freedome to the Creation, and that the earth must be set free from intanglements of Lords and Landlords, and that it shall become a common Treasury to all, as it was first made and given to the sonnes of men.”
- Gerrard Winstanley, From the preface to A Watch-Word to the City of London (1649) in Works, 2, p.80
Gerrard Winstanley is a remarkable figure who represents a subterranean radicalism arising from within the Reformation, suggesting possibilities for the Reformation that never came, a truer Reformation that gives us a genuine sociality and interconnection born from its source in a God of nourishment. The Reformation that occurred never knew that God, only a remote and judgemental God, a source of an endless anxiety that spurred neurotic action in dread of the world and others.
Winstanley is something of a neglected figure, languishing in obscurity for centuries until he was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century by the socialists. Even in rediscovery, though, it was Winstanley the proto-socialist and not the religious radical that was valued. That's fine as far as it goes, but is only a partial recovery that makes Winstanley important only insofar as his views anticipate – and fit in with – later developments.
I am interested in recovering the importance of Winstanley's ideas and his example as a whole, and in their own uniqueness. I intend to show how Winstanley anticipates many intellectual and political developments that were to come whilst nevertheless retaining his own distinctive qualities. This is important precisely on account of the seeming exhaustion – and even perversion – of enlightenment rationalism, materialism, and humanism and the politics it inspired. Deeply religious and avowedly communist, Winstanley offers an alternative to the idolatrous humanism that split the modern age into alternatives of capitalism and socialism, both materialistic in the worst, reductionist, senses, eventually spawning an irrationalism and inhumanism through the suppression of sociality and spirituality. Socialism is frequently celebrated and condemned as atheistic. Many socialists, however, drew explicitly on religious roots, the Christian Socialism of R.H. Tawmey to take one notable example. We should ponder at length Keynes' words in describing modern capitalism as 'profoundly irreligious,' and note, too, the conclusion of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where Weber argues that the "light cloak of faith" worn by the early reformers has been turned into an “iron cage” of a bureaucratic capitalist modernity that determines the lives of men and women with “irresistible” economic and institutional force. That world of soulless determinism and purposeless materialism is the product of a Reformation that, predicated on the fear and anxiety incited by a remote and judgemental God, fuelled a neurotic assault upon nature as an enemy to master and control.
Ponder these troubling words:
"We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness."
Mary Oliver, Of the Empire
Gerrard Winstanley saw this coming from the first, he is a reforming voice from within the Reformation. He repudiates the external, remote, harsh, judgmental God that drove adherents into prideful self-worship through anxiety, neurosis, insecurity, lack. Such folk, who are now incarcerated in Max Weber's "iron cage" of impersonal, mechanised money and power, never knew the real God in the first place, God as Love and nourishment, the God who is close to us, within us, among us. Winstanley chose to write of "Spirit Reason" instead of God, not because he was an atheist who repudiated God, but precisely because he was a Godly man who sought the rising of Christ in each and all.
Winstanley offered an alternative view of God and Nature that remains vital, in stark contrast to the deadened landscape of the rationalised world. Winstanley, I argue, offers possibilities for an alternative Reformation, the Reformation that never came, but which remains much needed. That Reformation will be a spiritual as well as a material revolution.
Much that Winstanley writes would seem to make him a precursor of the ideas of the Age of Reason that followed, and then the Enlightenment. That Winstanley chose not to refer to God but to “the Spirit Reason” makes his argument appear the precursor of Spinoza's Deus sive Natura, the idea that God and Nature are the one self-subsistent entity accessible by reason and knowable by way of “adequate ideas,” as well as of the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Whilst he does anticipate much of these later intellectual developments, I think that view undervalues the distinctiveness of Winstanley's views. It also ignores the fact that Winstanley is a downright religious radical from first to last. Miss that and you have missed everything. In the book I intend to write I shall certainly flag up Winstanley's anticipation of much of the citizen democracy, republicanism and rationalism that followed. I shall also underscore Winstanley's emphasis on experimental and experiential learning as critical in bridging the gap between science and the social world. But I refuse to reduce Winstanley's ideas to later developments, and instead argue for the originality of his positions, an originality that gives his views a continuing vitality in an era in which the limitations and failures of the Enlightenment and its political platforms are becoming increasingly manifest. Winstanley's reference to “Spirit Reason” marks out a position that quite distinct from the dry and disenchanting scientistic reason that came to prevail. The new science is well past the mechanical conceptions that still dominate, but it perfectly attuned to Winstanley's understanding of an animate and purposive Earth. Indeed, Winstanley's “Reason” is more akin to William Blake's “Imagination” than to any Enlightenment rationalism and is quite distinct from, even hostile to, any Cartesian or Newtonian “single-vision.” William Blake stands in direct line of descent from Winstanley, although there is no evidence he even knew him. For Blake, "one power alone makes a poet - imagination, the divine vision.” Imagination of that kind is a close correlate of Winstanley's “Spirit Reason.” Although Winstanley certainly emphasises scientific learning and reason, his Reason isn't the rationalism of a Spinoza or of a later Enlightenment, still less the arid rationalism of the modern world. It is the divine vision. Gerrard Winstanley, like another of my favourites Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is one of the awkward squad. My people. They are the people who go where they must, even if it takes them out on a limb; they avoid the main grooves, whether conservative or revolutionary, to aim for something beyond the confines of existing narratives. To them, I would attach William Blake's self-justification: "That in time of trouble, I kept the divine vision.”
That makes Winstanley's vision of the 'Earthly' commonwealth of an entirely different character to the flatlands of atheistic and determinist materialism. This is an important point to establish given that the limitations of Enlightenment rationalism, and its implications with respect to political institutions and economic systems, are becoming increasingly apparent. It is here that the notion of an alternative Reformation becomes compelling. Winstanley was not remotely 'orthodox' in his words and deeds. He fought the enclosure of the commons in his life and in death his ideas resist enclosure by a totalising reason and politics. Winstanley's views on universal salvation were unorthodox, heretical even, and would have landed him in serious trouble had he lived at a slightly earlier period.
Blake, evoking Jesus, said: “If the world hates you, know that it hated me first.” Blake was considered a madman, died in poverty and obscurity, and was ignored for many years after his death. He is now considered a genius, and rightly so. Winstanley himself was ignored for centuries. I shall endeavour to do my best to make him better known the world over. And although Rousseau is very well known, the problem is that he is much misunderstood and abused as a 'totalitarian' thinker. These three figures of close interest to me sought to develop an alternative to the modernity that came to prevail, a Reformation that could never come to have lost touch with the “divine vision” and trapped us within an “iron cage” of our own making, serving not God but Moloch and Mammon. That may seen an odd claim, given the extent to which Winstanley is sometimes celebrated for having anticipated Marx and atheistic materialism, but such celebrations are made more out of wider political commitments than awareness of Winstanley's own views. It's a point of some significance that the Bible was the only text that Winstanley ever cited in his works, also that he cited it constantly. We should also note the dedication to “the everlasting gospel” contained in his very last book The Law of Freedom on a Platform. We should also note the violence with which Rousseau split with the Philosophes, citing their materialism and the way in which its mechanicism and determinism denied free-will, God and the immortal soul. Rousseau was no reactionary, seeking to preserve the old order. As he criticised the Ancien Regime, he also saw the clear danger that the hierarchies of the old order of Church and State would come to be replaced by new hierarchies and new aristocracies of letters, trade, and commerce. ('Progressives' who can be found regularly denouncing church, religion, and monarchy in the present age seem to have little issue with these new hierarchies and aristocracies of knowledge and power, not least because they are members or would-be members of them, would-be universal reformers and managers of the new order. They may sometimes claim that their motives are democratic, taking their stand on 'the people,' but when the feudal targets are out of sight and they are concerned to advance their platforms, they speak the language of science, expertise, and truth as credentialed and hence legitimised elites). Rousseau, as one who was in and against the Enlightenment, would not be remotely surprised by contemporary “populist” revolts against the “elites”: he would say “I told you so.” From a position 'in and against' the Enlightenment, Rousseau warned of the new aristocracies preparing to supplant the old feudal aristocracies. He openly denounced the atheism of the Philosophes as “the philosophy of the comfortable.” William Blake too. There is much that is obscure in Blake, odd even, historian EP Thompson wrote in his very last book Witness Against the Beast, but on no page of Blake is there the slightest complicity with the Kingdom of the Beast. The same can be said of Gerrard Winstanley. Some of the most moving lines I have ever read were penned by Winstanley in the aftermath of the suppression of his Digger colonies by force. With their houses burned down and their crops destroyed, the Diggers were finally beaten. But a moral victory could be claimed against those who pursue victory by means which serve to keep the Kingdom of the Beast riding roughshod over the good people of the good Earth:
The enemies of the Diggers had “trod our weak flesh down,” said Winstanley. (Sabine, Works, 437). But there is such a thing as moral force, much more enduring than physical force.
“And now they cry out the Diggers are routed, and they rang bells for joy; but stay Gentlemen, your selves are routed, and you have lost your Crown, and the poor Diggers have won the Crown of glory.” (Sabine, Works, 436).
The Diggers' enemies had won, but had gained their victory through a resort to a violence that is destructive of all true ends; their victory was also their defeat in face of “the power of the Beast.” In contrast, the Diggers held and still hold, in memory and in inspiration of example, “the field of patience, quietness, joy and sweet rest in their hearts.” Winstanley knew that, however emphatic the defeat of the Diggers' in particular time and place, the divine vision is “everlasting” and that the final choice between “freedom and bondage” had yet to be made. (Sabine, Works, 436, 437).
Winstanley wrote his epitaph:
“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.”
(Sabine, Works, 395).
To the end, Winstanley repeated his confident belief that the destruction of the Kingdom of the Beast would one day be achieved:
“But though the Devill be let loose to swell against us, in these Gentry that rule over us, by Kingly Power, or Law of Norman Conquest, notwithstanding, they have taken the Engagement, to cast out Kingly Power: yet his time to be chained up drawes nigh: and then we are assured this righteous work of earthly community, shall have a most glorious resurrection out of his ashes.”
(Sabine, Works, 435).
The hope of radical restoration remains, based as it is in the “everlasting gospel.” The importance of Winstanley's marriage of word and deed is becoming more appreciated as time goes by. Winstanley was forgotten for centuries. But I think the future, should we ever come to have a future worthy of the divine vision, will recover the significance this obscure man from Wigan and his handful of Diggers once had.
When in the 1650s John Coulton published a series of almanacs he followed the standard practice of including a list of the most significant events in world history. The Norman Conquest was in there, Luther's challenge to the Roman Church, the Gunpowder plot, the execution of Charles I in 1649. We remember these and other such events to this day. Among these significant world events, however, Coulton included the moment in 1649 when “the common people began to plant upon George Hill in Surrey, April 1.” (Coulton, Theoria Contigentium … 1653; Prognostes Astralis … 1654; Prognostae Astralis .. 1655).
Winstanley's example came to be forgotten, but Winstanley is still with us. His true commonwealth sought to extirpate all kingly power and all thrones to make the divine vision active and ongoing in all human relations. This is the Reformation that never came. Is this the Reformation that could never come? Hopelessly utopian and dangerously Millenarian? As the world implodes socially, morally, economically, and ecologically I would suggest that we revisit and reassess conventional notions of realism and pragmatism.
Winstanley's view is that the Reformation went awry in being premised on the remote, external, judgmental God, this abstract force that made human beings fearful of life, nature, and one another, rendering them neurotic and having to prove their worth through work. Such reformers never knew the real God in the first place, the God of Love and of endless nourishment, and so were driven, through neurosis, to an activity that could not but end in a prideful self-worship, the proof of worth being sought through the products of human hands. The first Adam lives upon the objects of Creation, argued Winstanley, in search of the second, spiritual Adam. In a condition of self-worship, we remain the first Adam, pursuing self-realisation through the objects of human self-creation. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber refers to the process in which the Puritan Baxter's 'light cloak of faith' came to be transformed into the 'iron cage' of a capitalist economy that determines the lives of all with 'irresistible force.' Weber is deeply pessimistic, seeing the socialist alternative as no alternative at all, merely bureaucratising and thereby extending the 'steel-hard' force of instrumental, abstract rationality over the whole of society, an extension of means divorced from ends, thereby ensuring the diminution of meaning. That's the world we are in, and study the Marxes, the Nietzsches, the Webers, the Heideggers etc as hard as you like, there seems no way out. I say 'seems' because I may be wrong. It has been known. For now, I am most interested in those who did indeed keep the divine vision alive in times of trouble, because that is the task we are charged with undertaking in a world that seems to be going in entirely the wrong direction.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
- William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
And when I say keeping the divine vision 'alive,' I mean alive. I don't mean stated or imposed as sterile dead dogma. I have no doubt that my favourite thinkers – Winstanley, Blake, Rousseau – are unorthodox, heretical to the point at which they could be, and have been, accused of being atheist. But I don't see them as atheist at all. On the contrary, I see them as trying to hold onto the divine vision in an age of mechanist, purposeless, determinist materialism, whilst appreciating that many of the old statements of that vision were no longer tenable.
Is that possible? Maybe Winstanley was defeated through the impossibilities of his dream of the Earth as a commonwealth for each and all. It all depends on this issue of natural goodness, the idea of God as a nourishing God, a God of Love, close to all. Winstanley affirms that goodness of the Earth, he doesn't emphasise a fallen nature that makes the institutions of private property, authoritarian governance, and coercive law necessary on account of an irredeemably greedy, aggressive, selfish human nature. Those economic motives and imperatives which seek to spur self-interest to a greater good arise from a fallen view of human nature. The vision of communism in the Book of Acts seems to contradict that 'realistic' acceptance of the second best short of Heaven, affirming communism as a practical possibility within right proximal relations. Winstanley's Digger communities were small-scale and based on face-to-face interaction, trust relations, cooperation between those joined in the one endeavour. He saw these colonies as expanding outwards, linking together across the nation, across all nations. He sees the possibility of redemption in institutions and relations that, rather than conforming to a fallen, selfish, competitive nature, transforms that nature – thus effecting the transition from the first Adam, living on and through objects, to the second Adam, living through the Spirit Reason infusing the entire earthly community. Winstanley doesn't see Earth as a formless chaos, but sees a purpose uniting all creatures as running throughout the whole. It is on that question of innate goodness that the viability or otherwise of Winstanley's Christian communism rests. Socialists have done the greatest work in recovering the ideas and example of Gerrard Winstanley, but err badly when they either deny that Winstanley was a religious radical or dismiss the importance of Winstanley's view of God and religion. You simply cannot divorce the religious and social aspects of Winstanley's argument without making a nonsense of the man and the views he presented; these aspects are joined together, the one infusing and orienting the other.
That's one of the reasons why I take an interest in Winstanley, William Blake and Rousseau after him. However unorthodox, and even plainly heretical, their religious views often are, they are distinct from the atheistic, purposeless materialism that came to dominate in the modern age (and which is in process of imploding), and did affirm a belief in God, thus offering much more than the wilful projection of truth and meaning upon what the disenchanted moderns conceived to be an objectively valueless and meaningless universe. As such, they stand clear of the godless political, social, and scientific experiments that are in the process of imploding. The modern age is the tale of self-made man and his undoing, making the point that a self-legislating reason ultimately undercuts itself. Reason needs to be set within a transcendent divine economy, giving it an endpoint beyond self-assertion and wilful imposition. Such is Gerrard Winstanley's 'Spirit Reason.'
To conclude, my book will emphasise the contemporary relevance of the ideas, example, and vision of the seventeenth century Digger Gerrard Winstanley. Winstanley may not be as well-known as King Charles I or Oliver Cromwell, and his ideas may not be as well-known as those of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. But his arguments and his example offer an alternative to the purposeless expansionary materialism the 'victors' in history brought about and which is now in the process of implosion. In Fire in the Bush, Winstanley answered Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ argument before Hobbes had even made it.
Many may be “uncomfortable” with Winstanley’s religious views. I am not. Winstanley's political, ethical, and religious unorthodoxy is his strength, giving him an extra dimension that a later left republicanism/materialism perhaps lost in an age of disenchanting science. Winstanley is far more important than merely a precursor of Spinoza, Enlightenment rationalism and materialism, and Marx. He has an extra dimension, he supplies what went missing, resulting in a deficiency in the motivational economy.
Winstanley’s proclamation from The New Law of Righteousness that “No man shall have any more land, then he can labour himself, or have others to labour with him in love, working together, and eating bread together, as one” remains a potent reminder of what socialism is and why it is something quite distinct from liberalism and progressivism.
Winstanley gets a good mention in the book The Politics of the Common Good: Dispossession in Australia by Jane Goodall. In place of the neoliberalism she decries, Goodall finds inspiration in Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, a Protestant sect that arose in the 17th century during the English Revolution Winstanley, Goodall explains, ‘‘saw the state of the earth and the state of humanity as bound together, in service to each other.” In the age of climate change, she says, the Earth must – as Gerrard Winstanley put it – become ‘‘a Common Treasury again.”
Links to outlines on my work on Winstanley:
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