Enthusiasm and its critics: Historical and modern perspectives

H,,,o,y Pnnted

ofEuropean ideas, I” Great Britam

Vol. 17, No

4. pp. 461-478.

0191-6599/93 $6 00 + 0.00 4 1993 Pergamon Press Lrd

1993

ENTHUSIASM AND ITS CRITICS: HISTORICAL AND MODERN PERSPECTIVES CATHERINEWILSON* In his sermon of 1680, George Hickes deplored ‘the poison of Enthusiasm, which is the spiritual drunkeness or Lunacy of this Schismatical age, and so distempers the minds of men with extravagant phancies, as to make them more or less affect the extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit, and the conceit, like Poets in Religion, that they have them and are inspired’.’ Like much of the polemical literature of the Restoration, Hickes’s diatribe was a response to pamphlets and broadsheets, and the entire enthusiasm controversy between 1650-1700 resulted in only a handful of bound books and book chapters. Merit Casaubon’s Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm of 1655, Henry More’s Enthusiasmus Triumphatus of 1662, and the chapter ‘On Enthusiasm’ added to the fourth edition of Locke’s Essay which appeared in 1700, are the best known contributions to this controversy: none is a defence of enthusiasm.z The attacks on it, not simply of theologians, but of philosophers are of interest for a number of reasons. One consequence of calling into question the value of precisely those actions and experiences which had formerly been considered as close to the core of Christianity and as marks of sainthood: visions, dreams, mortifications, martyrdoms, was a rationalising of religion. The influential doctrine that the truths of Christianity must be reconcilable with reason became a linkin thechain of interpretations leading away from scriptural fundamentalism towards a minimalistic religion in the sense of the deists and Kant. This paper does not attempt to follow the subject beyond 1700;’ however, the attacks on enthusiasm have more than a purely historical interest. Monsignor Ronald Knox’s celebrated study of 19504 and William James’s earlier treatment of the subject in his Varieties of Religious Experience show how irrationalism in religion proved surprisingly resistant to the values of the Enlightenment and how compelling a topic it remained. Second, the opposition between quasi-anonymous narratives of suffering and persecution and those authoritative texts hallowed by tradition has once again become a focus of interest in educational establishments. Third, the periodic appearance of political charismatics, whatever their degree of success and however they are to be judged morally, poses local and global problems and opportunities of increasingly broad significance. Recent history has provided ample display of the toll wreaked on human life and happiness by prophets and demagogues with their excessive energy, lack of respect for ordinary boundaries, and visions of paradise on earth. And it is difficult for a philosopher not to take sides against fanaticism, superstition and extravagance, in favour of ‘Temperance, Humility and Reason’, as Henry More, iike Locke a sincere and gentle critic, calls the antidotes to enthusiasm. In this *Department

of Philosophy,

University

of Alberta, Edmonton,

Alberta, Canada

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essay however I do not mean to join in the chorus of disapproval of critics but to ask, in the spirit of history written from below, from the point of view of those who did not maintain the floor, what there is to be said in defence of enthusiasm. To what extent was the philosophical polemic against it morally and politically repressive in the context in which it was elaborated? And what is the relation of visionary experiences and cultish practices to political mechanisms and realities? I shall argue here that the sociological or psychological approach typified by More’s essay and many later treatments of the subject is inadequate, and that the meaning of the phenomenon must be grasped from a wider evaluative perspective than that afforded by the notions of normality and pathology.

I. ENTHUSIASM

AS A PSYCHOPATHOLOGY:

MORE’S

ANALYSES

Unlike the slightly earlier treatise of Casaubon, which treats of enthusiasm down through the ages, concentrating on oratory, prophecy and mysticism,5 More’s essay is especially concerned with social activism and emphasises enthusiasm as a social phenomenon of the Interregnum years. The 1640s and 1650s saw the proliferation of multiple distinct sects which rejected both Anglican and Puritan theology. ‘These groups, seething with enthusiasm’, as even a historian generally friendly to religious dissenters puts it, ‘scattered pretty much over England, unorganised or loosely organised, generally gathered about some influential psychopathic leader’.6 This ‘squalid sluttery of frantic conventicles’, as a contemporary critic described it, which included Seekers, Ranters, the Family of Love and the Quakers, together with other localised groups whose names and characteristics have not survived, posed a threat to the established political order not only in their promulgation of radical theory but through their acts of civil disobedience: refusal to cooperate with local magistrates, disruption of church services and general rabble-rousing.’ Their members saw themselves as divinely-appointed, as direct agents of God, and professed to be guided not by authority or tradition but by intuition, divine illumination, or the revelations of an ‘inner light’. They were hostile to ceremonies, catechisms, printed liturgies and prayers, a professionally trained ministry, and, by extension, to universities. When they did (as they in fact did) draw on a literary tradition, it was that of the German mystical writers: Jacob Boehme, Sebastian Frank, Weigel, Schwenkfeld and even Paracelsus. The rebellious life of the last-named and his belief in a light in the spirit of man which was able to apprehend truth immediately without the benefit of interpreters tied together the alchemical notion of artificial perfectibility with the spiritual and social notions of salvation and utopia. The state or condition or enthusiasm which critics like More saw as an empirical given we would regard today as a collection of miscellaneous states and conditions, ranging from actual psychosis with visual and auditory hallucinations and flights of ideas, to temporary hysterical conditions, to a religious hypersensibility permitting two-way conversations with God, to an ordinary intellectual commitment to doctrines such as pantheism or the divinity of all human beings. Somewhere in the middle range of this class of enthusiasts are those who adhere to beliefs and notions which carry with them a good deal of

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emotional affect-such as the Paracelsian idea that our eyes are made of the same luminous material as the stars-or who endorse social arrangements considered wrong in many societies, such as polygamy or sexual anarchism; or who reject all elites and hierarchies. So difficult is it for us to see all of these unusual people as falling into a single class-Levellers, poets, chemical philosophers, metaphysicians and madmen-that one wonders whether admirers of More’s treatise were not then, as now, responding to it not on account of its logical cogency but for other reasons, especially fear. To be charitable to More, one would have to say that this motley cast does share a common characteristic in addition to the fact of its marginality: its members are deaf to certain arguments concerning the inappropriateness of their proposals and behaviour. True, the inability of the dreamer or madman to ‘listen to reason’ and be talked out of the proposition that he is flying or made of glass is different from the refusal of the Leveller to be swayed by the argument that the universal existence of hierarchies ofwealth and power throughout human history defeats the claim that a classless society is possible. But in both cases, one might say, there is a refusal to acknowledge the rightness of what is, a stubborn persistence and intractability. More regards enthusiasm as a version of melancholy, an illness of physical origin and with typical physical manifestations, and, on his account, enthusiasm does seem to have in common with manic-depressive illness both an agitated aspect, which explains the euphoric states and physical energy of reformers, and an alienated, passive aspect which explains their anger against society, their inability to take pleasure in activity guided by its norms, and the exaggerated inwardness of the outcast-rebel. That enthusiasm is only a pathological condition and not a sign of divine inspiration, or, as others argued, a symptom of demonic possession, is apparent, More thinks, not only from the observation that torpidity of the blood and humours produces dreams and visions, but from the known effects of wine and spirits which render people ‘Rhetorical or Poetical@ and from the danger, which is well-attested to, of dying of apoplexy or epilepsy during an enthusiastic episode.’ More discusses three contemporary cases of enthusiasm to make his point that, except in rare controlled instances of true devotional or Platonic enthusiasm, its relation to knowledge is a negative one. The first concerns a false prophet, David George; the second, alchemists, like his contemporary Thomas Vaughan, who are followers of Paracelsus; and the third, the sect of Quakers. As the bulk of the literature on enthusiasm was directed against Quakers, I will, aftera brief survey of the others, and of More’s reaction to them, turn to a longer discussion of the Quakers’ special characteristics as a fringe group. David George died in Base1 in 1556. This man, ‘of very low parentage’, More concedes nevertheless to have been handsome, well-mannered, and good: ‘He was a religious frequenter of the Church, a liberal reliever of the poor, a comfortable visiter of the sick, obedient to the Magistrate, kind and affable to all persons.. . ‘lo Only what he taught, More thinks, was false and mad; viz., ‘that the Doctrine hitherto delivered by Moses, the Prophets, Christ himself and his Apostles, is maimed and imperfect, published only to keep men in a childish obedience for a time, till the fullness and perfection of David George should be communicated to the world, which is the only Doctrine that can make mankind happy, and replenish them with the knowledge of God’.” David George claimed,

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among other things, to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, to have been invested with the power to remit sin and to judge the world, and to be the true referent of the sayings and testimonies in the Scriptures regarding the Second Corning.” And he claimed to know that there is no real resurrection ofthe dead, that angels and devils are simply good and bad human beings, that ‘Matrimony is free, no obligation’, and that ‘no man thereby is confined to one woman’ so long as the participants ‘are born again or regenerated by the spirit of David George’.‘j More now argues that the aura of supernatural goodness around David George and his eloquence and charisma were only superficial ‘complexional1 Vertues and a Scriptural1 style’.” His cheerfulness, his physical beauty, and his personal magnetism were due to his sanguine temperament which also rendered him libidinous and voluptuous. It was the same cheerful libido which led another fanatic, a Peruvian doctor, to assert that he was appointed to be Redeemer of the world, and that he would make new laws, “‘plain and easy” by which the restraint of Clergymen from Marriage would be taken away, and multitude of Wives allowed, and all necessity of Confession avoided’.” The delusion shared by both false prophets was that they were in a particular union with God. Every extraordinary idea that occurred to them they saw as a pledge of divine favor and an irresistible command, direct from above. Such people are, More says, like the madwoman who believed she was married to a King, who talked to him as though he were there with his retinue; ‘and if she had by chance found a piece of glass in a muck-hill, light upon an oyster shell, piece of tin or any such like thing that would glisten in the sunshine, she would say it was a jewel sent from her Lord and husband, and upon this account fill’d her cabinet full of such trash’.16 To see what is trash as trash is, then, a criterion of right thinking, and More’s second category of enthusiasts involves those who propound as beautiful truths what he regards as a kind of intellectual trash: chemists and theosophists. Their delusions include not only erroneous propositions about the stars-that these produce hail and snow, have some kind of life and sense in them, have affinities to precious stones, and that the astral body of man can confabulate with them”-but religious trash. More mentions as particularly repellent the doctrines ‘That all is Gods self, ‘That a mans self is God, if he live holily’, ‘That Nature is the Body of God, nay God the Father, who is also the World, and whatsoever is in any way sensible or perceptible’, ‘That God the Father is of himself a dale of darknesse, were it not for the light of his Sonne’: ‘That Adam The Paracelsian obsession with the stars, as More was an Hermaphrodite’.‘* shows, goes far beyond a mere doctrinal adherence to the usefulness ofastrology; the stars are for Paracelsus (and Pomponazzi, he suggests) beings of such presence and power that our intimate relationship to them seems to exclude God as an irrelevant being. The third category of enthusiasts is then furnished to More by the Quakers, ‘who undoubtedly are the most Melancholy Sect that ever was yet in the world. They quake and tremble at their meetings, saying that this is fear and love and joy in the presence of God, when it is only the fervour of their spirits and the heat of More’s opposition to them is deep and follows the general their imaginations’.” pattern of his unease with the meretricious radiance of the low-born David George, and his contempt for those who take junk for jewels. He viewed with particular alarm the incursion of Quakerism into the inner chamber of

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philosophy and aristocracy when his friend and pupil the invalid philosopher Anne Conway conceived a great interest in the sect.20 And indeed, as an organised body, with its own mechanisms for communication and persuasion, it posed a much greater problem, both philosophically and practically, than did any individual isolated prophet. To see why, we must look at what that group-still new and unfamiliar at the time of Casaubon’s treatise”-rejected in the way of reason, social conformity, and learned discourse, and its relation to its arguably most charismatic figure, George Fox.

II. EXCESS

AND DENIAL:

THE CASE OF THE QUAKERS

In 1643, to the distress of his relatives, George Fox, who became the established leader of the sect in the 1650s and 1660s began his travels seeking the advice of priests, none of whom could give him any satisfaction about the religious matters which were troubling him. One flew into a rage as they walked in his garden discoursing of temptations and despair and Fox accidentally stepped into a flower bed; another arranged for him to be bled: ‘but they could not get one drop of blood from me, either in arms or head. . . my body being as it were dried up with sorrows, grief and troubles’.22 In 1646, Fox had two insights, or ‘openings’, one as he was approaching a gate going towards Coventry, another as he was walking alone in a field. The first insight was that, contrary to the teaching of the Calvinists, all believers were capable of self-salvation, the other, that ‘being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ’.23 Fox refused after seeing this to go to Church with his relatives and went instead into the fields and orchards with his Bible. Next it was opened up to him that ‘God, who made the world did not dwell in temples made with hands’, but in people’s hearts: the people were the church and not the ‘steeple-house’.2’ He wandered off again, meeting people belonging to strange sects-some who believed that women have no souls, ‘no more than a goose’, others who ‘relied much on dreams’. He experienced the temptation of pantheism, but overcame it. 25 The solitary, inward period continued for some years. ‘I fasted much and walked abroad in solitary places many days, and. . . went and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places til night came on, and frequently, in the night, walked mournfully about by myself .26 He travelled, he tells us, ‘up and down as a stranger in the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself in the town where I came, and tarrying sometimes a month, more or less in a place; for I durst not stay long in any place, being afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either’.27 Fox’s turn from this self-absorption and melancholy to an active public role occurred as a result of another opening in 1647 which revealed to him that his doubts and troubles had been part of his spiritual preparation. God told him, ‘That which people trample upon, must be thy food’. His depression lifted, he was altered ‘in countenance and person’, his sorrows and troubles began to wear off, ‘and tears of joy dropped from me so that I could have wept night and day.. . . I saw into that which was without end, things which cannot be uttered, and of the greatness and infinitude of the love of God which cannot be expressed

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by words. For I had been through the very ocean of darkness and death,. which covered over all the world, and which chained down all and shut up all in death’.28 Accustomed to the psychological concept of depression, which often lifts spontaneously after a period of months, we are likely to read this account, following More, as the story of an episode of melancholy and recovery which the protagonist interpreted in religious terms, an episode which then launched him, with all his new-found energy, on a political mission. Fox found in himself a destructive mandate: his vague inner restlessness and dissatisfactions seized upon, or constituted, as More would have it, an external object to explain and occupy them. His mission, he thought, was ‘to bring people off from the world’s religions which are vain; that they might know the pure religion, might visit the fatherless, the widows, and the strangers, and keep themselves from the spots of the world’. Then, according to his understanding, ‘there would not be so many beggars, the sight of whom often grieved my heart, as it denoted so much hardheartedness amongst them that professed the name of Christ’.?’ Where had these beggars come from? The theological view was that earthly abjection, poverty, toil and hunger were but consequences and proofs of sin. The authority of the ministry and its relationship to the civil power constituted the civilised response to this aspect of the human condition. Pastors exhorted, harangued and threatened their flocks to make them diligent and law-abiding; when this failed, it was proof of the evil in human nature and the curse of Adam, In Fox’s contrary view, sin was a mystifying concept employed by a corrupted church and a degenerate society to wield and sustain power over the populace by the induction of guilt. ‘Now did the priests bestir themselves in their pulpits to breach up sin for term of life; and much of their work was to plead for it; so that people said, never was the like heard. . . . They could not endure to hear of purity, and of victory over sin and the devil; for they said that they could not believe that any could be free from sin on this side the grave’.“’ As Christopher Hill has pointed out, ordinary people found Original Sin a puzzling doctrine, believing that ordinary virtue was sufficient to win them entrance to heaven. That a learned, theological explanation of how Christ had mitigated the effects of sin without exterminating it might be available was not known to them, but it could not have made a difference in any case. Meanwhile, both Presbyterians and Anglicans emphasised the political necessity of orthodoxy and its ambiguous doctrine of sin and salvation. Fox’s denial that sin was an important riddle to which the ministry held the key, and his claim that Christ had taken all sin away so that perfection was possible in this life, was thus depicted, and even seen, as a terrifying anarchic doctrine; its enemies said of the Quakers that ‘they thought they should enjoy that liberty, as to be under no rule, no reverence to be given either to Magistrate or Minister, Parent or Master.. and this it was that made it so easily embraced, and so suddenly spread it about the Kingdom’.j’ The doctrines ascribed to the Quakers, that ‘There is no Command to me which God has given by way of a Command to another’.” and that ‘Laws were not made for the Just’.‘-’ implied that every man was a law unto himself, and Fox’s rejection of a trained, professional priesthood, the sect’s reliance on self-appointed itinerant ministers, including women and people of the lower classes, was a representation of that

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terrifying ‘infinite liberty’, the ‘immense and boundless liberty’ of political chaos which the Civil War had made actual fact. ‘Have not Cobblers, Draymen, Mechanics Governed, as well as preached?’ asked Robert South, ‘Nay have they not by Preaching come to Govern? Was ever that of Solomon more verified, that Servants have Rid, while Princes and Nobles have gone on Foot?‘34 Fox’s anger was directed towards two features of civil society in addition to the existence of a trained (‘idle’) priesthood supported by onerous tithes on working people, which the priesthood extracted forcefully, if need be, in cooperation with the magistrates. (The priests, said George Whitehead in his pamphlet Enthusiasm above Atheism of 1674, ‘trouble and cumber men in Courts for Tythes, and cast them in Prisons and Holes’.3’) These features were its waste and its aggressive handling of vagrants and poor people. The Quakers shared with the Puritans a dislike of excess and frivolity-a dismay at the laxity of ‘merrie England’. Both sects railed against ornamentation: lace, gold, patches, fancy hair-styles for men and women, ribbons, as well as the more ruinous, mindless and brutal forms of entertainment common in plebian society: gambling, cock-fighting, bowlingand drinking. And this censoriousness was directed even at art, learni’ng, and all forms of extraordinary achievement, only excepting the moral. Had Christ and the Apostles read comedies and romances and visited theatrical performances? No more than they had shut themselves away in universities or libraries, dressed up, or gone dancing. But to the increase in penury brought on by the growth of trade, the displacement of farmers, and the removal of the wool trade to Holland in the 1640s and 165Os, the Puritans reacted with punitive measures intended to create a disciplined work force, rounding up beggars, levying harsh fines for thievery and vagrancy, and closing alehouses. The Quaker notion that excessive labour and economic productivity were themselves evils distinguished them from the plain-living but wealth-seeking Puritans, and their reversion to what was perceived as a Catholic tradition of charity, in which beneficent works had a religious value and poverty and saintliness were associated, further divided them from the mainstream of Protestantism. If the illusion of More’s madwoman consisted in taking trash for jewels, the illusion of their society lay, the sectarians thought, in their taking jewels for jewels: ‘It is deadly barbarism and uncouth’, Thomas Traherne says, to put ‘grubs and worms into little children’s minds, to teach them to say, this house is mine, this bauble is a jewel, this gew-gaw is a fine thing, this rattle makes music, when they ought to be made instead to see the spiritual glory of the earth and sky, the beauty of life, the sweetness and nobility of Nature’.36 When the early Quakers took off their clothes and walked naked or half-naked through the streets to show what purity looked like or to represent symbolically the spiritual nakedness of the world, this gesture had something in it of defiant pride as well as humility. The same can be said of their other eccentricities: their refusal of titles, toasts, ceremonial greetings and closures, the formal ‘you’, and the famous ‘hat honour’. In dismissing hallowed and revered practices as ‘marrying with rings’ and ‘sprinkling of infants’ on the grounds that they were superstitious and authoritarian,37 they attacked the surrounding culture at its most sensitive points. The Quakers were however distinguished by their relative sobriety vis-ir-vis the non-conforming groups with which they were often confused, such as the

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Ranters. The Ranters too believed that Christ had taken away all sin, and they professed to be ravished by the sweetness of life without it. ‘All is ours’, they said: this was a religion in which ressentiment had spilled over into antinomianism. They believed that God had taken their souls out of their bodies and occupied the places where their souls had been so that whatever they did or said was done by God.j8 Anna Trapnel wrote in 1642 that ‘earth was now gone, and heaven come.. . every bit of bread I ate, how sweet it was to my taste. Christ sweetened every creature to me’?’ The suggestion here of sensory awakening tends to confirm More’s libidinal interpretation of false prophecy, as a reaction to civilisation and its discontents, and indeed the Ranters did live as luxuriously as possible, believing that, to be free from sin (i.e. from the domination of the idea of sin), it was necessary to commit (what had been) sins as though they were not.l” The abuse of legal power was actively solicited by the early Quakers, who were, consciously or unconsciously, modelling themselves after the Marian martyrs of the previous century, and this legal power was the object of much of their protest. That judges should put men to death for ‘stealing cattle or money and other small matters’, set loose all of FOX’S righteousness. ‘Take heed of oppressing the poor in your courts’, he was moved to write to the court at Derby, ‘or laying burthens upon poor people, which they cannot bear; and of imposing false oaths, or making them to take oaths which they cannot perform’.” He refused to cooperate with the local magistracy, either with regard to its vagrancy laws, or with regard to courtroom decorum once apprehended. In the various accounts of his trials, his refusal to take an oath, swear loyalty, or remove his hat typically prevents the process from getting properly underway, so that he is either finally let go by a frustrated, helpless judge or sent to prison where he endures filth and wretchedness not reserved for religious dissidents. ‘Oh the rage and scorn, the heat and fury that arose!’ he tells us, ‘Oh the blows, punchings, beatings and imprisonments that we underwent for not putting off our hats to men!‘“2 The enthusiasts’ aim in pulling down upon themselves the rage of the world was to force its hidden violence out into the open and to prove that it was possible to live even in such a world as a saint. Yet they had their own madness, ferocity and invective; they seemingly could no more will goodness steadily than the world itself. ‘Patience, innocency, soberness, stillness, steadiness, quietness up to God’ were the virtues Fox recommended to his followers. This did not prevent them addressing their opponents in the harshest of terms. The priests were ‘inwardly ravening wolves, dressed up in sheep’s clothing’.“3 The justice John Sawrey received a lecture from Fox appropriate to his condition: ‘I told him his heart was rotten and he was full of hypocrisy to the brim’. He called Adam Sands a ‘child of the Devil’. The Quakers, as William James remarked, took delight in what they considered judgements on their detractors. When their persecutor, Colonel Robinson, was gored by a bull tearing his thigh to his belly, who then roared and licked up his master’s blood, and could be driven off only by mastiff dogs, Fox noted with satisfaction that ‘the Lord sometimes makes some examples of his just judgement upon the persecutors of his people, that others may fear, and learn to beware’.” There are episodes in Fox’s narrative in which the question does in fact present itself to the reader whether this man was entirely sane. He himself writes of the dangers of the imagination, and numerous Quaker pamphlets deal with the

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problem of self-control. 45Fox hallucinated; he had, as we have seen, his openings and epiphanies: ‘When first I set my horse’s feet upon Scottish ground, I felt the Seed of God to sparkle about me, like innumerable sparks of fire’.“6 He had seemingly telepathic or supersensory institutions: that a now respectable woman had been a harlot, that Cromwell was doomed: ‘I met him riding into HamptonCourt Park, and before I came to him, as he rode at the head of his life-guard, I saw and felt a waft [or apparition] of death go forth against him; and when I came to him, he looked like a dead man’.47 But the most famous of such episodes is Fox’s vision at Litchfield. As he describes it in his Journal, Fox comes to a field of shepherds outside of Lichfield. It is winter, but he is commanded by the Lord, he knows not why, to take off his shoes I stood still for it was Winter, and the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. Then I walked on about a mile, and as soon as I was within the city, the Word of the Lord came to me again, saying, ‘Cry, Woe unto the bloody city of Lichfield’. So I went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice, ‘WOE TO THE BLOODY CITY OF LICHFIELD!’ It being market-day, I went to the maket place, and to and fro in the several parts of it, and made stands, crying as before ‘WOE.. .‘. And no one laid hands on me; but as I went thus crying through the streets, there seemed to me to be a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market place appeared like a pool of blood’.“8

Later, feeling himself ‘clear’, he returns to the shepherds, gives them some money and retrieves his shoes, though he does not know whether, without a further sign from the Lord, he should put them on again or not; at length he washes his feet and does so, and, ‘After this a deep consideration came upon me, why, or for what reason, I should be sent to cry against that city, and call it THE BLOODY CITY’.49 Later he connects this inspiration with the memory that, in the time of the ancient emperor Diocletian, thousands of Christians were martyred there. Fox’s occasional manias could issue in a kind of parataxis, as in his journal entries against the Ranters: ‘. . . Oh hypocrisy it makes me sicke to thincke of them. I have given them a vissitation and as faithful1 a warneing as ever was: there is an ugly a slubering hound and ugely hound an ugely slobering hound but the Lord forgive them-destruction-destruction’.50 Here his fury reaches a kind of apotheosis-not, let it be noted, against the world, but against a rival sect with whom his own has not a little in common. Fox’s belief that the inner voice which showed him the falsity of outward forms and the illegitimacy of priestly mediators and which commanded him to disrupt the exercises of officialdom and provoke and exhaust the punitive response of the powerful was at once God and his own conscience led, not to the pantheism which had tempted him in his youth and had been put aside, but to an even more curious theology. God became, one might say, identical, not with the world or nature in its outward appearances and powers, but with the truths which were opened up to him within his own mind and with his own felt power to transform the world. Though he did not present himself, like David George, as a messiah, he claimed, in the view of his enemies, equality to God, and he had in fact to cut away portions of letters in which he was addressed as God by enthusiastic followers.51 And this re-writing of early Quaker documents by the Quakers

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themselves in the cooling off period following the Restoration, which extended to Thomas Elwood’s excision of many of the ecstatic and visionary passages of Fox’s own journals after his death, is a significant phenomenon in the history of the sect. It had already begun a process of transformation from a radical social movement to a quiet religious culture, which now repudiated the world not simply in respect of its excesses and divertisements, but in point of the adherence to revolutionary ideals which had involved, as we have seen, considerable use of literary and declamatory aggression and violence.52

III.

ENTHUSIASM

AND

DEMYSTIFICATION

William James remarks in the Varietie.s qf Religious Experience, that ‘all effective initiators of change must needs live to some degree upon the psychopathic level of sudden perception or conviction of new truth, or of impulse to action so obsessive it must be worked off.. .r.53This startling generalisation, which contradicts every notion of measured, Burkean societal evolution, and raises the specter of demonic leaders, hypnotised followers. and orgies of destruction needed to clear the ground to rebuild paradise on earth, naturally forces the reader to stop and ask, ‘Is it really so?’ James faced, in conceiving his own extraordinary book, in which the subjectivity of religion and its truth-claims and objective power present the central problem, the question how to admit to this ‘psychopathic’ and, equally important, historically recurrent, element while acknowledging the validity of the ‘truth’ in whose perception it resulted. But is it not romanticism-and dangerous romanticism-to invoke some extraordinary pre-established harmony, the existence of some realm of truth, to which only the mad or near-mad have access? More indicates in his treatise that not only true factual beliefs, but true moral. political and religious beliefs have particular formal qualities which aid us in their recognition. ‘Whatever of Intellectual light is communicated to us, is derived from hence, and is in us Particular Reason or Reason in Succession or by piecemeal. Nor is there anything the Holy Spirit did ever suggest to any man but it was agreeable to, if not demonstrable from, what we call Reason’.54 He admits that the scriptural revelations involved direct transmission, but remains convinced that these items of religious teaching are consistent with reason as that of the sectarians is not. Locke, it needs to be said, was more aware of the difficulty in admitting distant, indirect reports of Old Testament revelation and the authority of its prophets while denying the direct claims of latter-day prophets. God can, he admits, ‘enlighten the Understanding, by a Ray darted into the Mind immediately from the Fountain of Light’.55 And he understands the strength of the enthusiasts’ convictions: ‘They feel the Hand of GOD moving them within, and the impulses of the Spirit, and cannot be mistaken in what they feel’. But they are guilty of reasoning in a circle if they argue that what they have experienced is a revelation of truth because they are so firmly convinced of it, and if they are so firmly convinced of it because they believe it is a revelation. To save the authority of the Old Testament prophets, Locke, like the anti-enthusiastic pamphlet writers, has recourse to external signs. The holy men of old ‘had something else besides that internal Light of assurance in their own

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Minds.. .They were not left to their own Perswasions alone, that those Perswasions were from God.’ Moses had his burning bush, and his rod which turned into a serpent. 56 But this attempt to establish the old prophets as the last prophets, and Scripture as the last authoritative text proves less than cogent, for it leaves the self-described defenders of reason appealing in the end to miracles.57 For all their talk of reason, Locke and More are in fact defending the succession of priests as conceived by the orthodox, for whom enthusiasm is the blemish or ‘mark’ of the innovator or schismatic5* ‘Reasonable religion’. in the sense understood by these opponents of enthusiasm, is, as subsequent history shows, an unstable idea: the direction taken by their critique can only end in the denial of the possibility of supernatural illumination across the board. ‘As the Apostles and Apostolic preachers died’, George Hickes tells us, ‘God supplied their mortality, by calling Philosophers and other Learned men to the rational defence of the Gospel against Jews, Heathens and Heretics’.59 The proliferation of ‘monstrous sects’, he said, was correspondingly linked to the decline of the two universities and the devaluation of humane learning. It would be wrong to say that the social standing, academic connections, and aspirations of philosophers like More and Locke made it inconceivable that they should have identified with or even have been able to see in a sympathetic light the actions and claims of the sectarians. The Quakers did have friends in high places, such as Judge Fell and Lady Conway, who had been ‘persuaded’, and even a surprising degree of access to leaders like Cromwell before, as they saw it, he hardened against them. But their own thought-as Latitudinarian or anti-Trinitarian as it might have been in strict theological terms-laid no great weight on the question of religion and social justice. We should not forget that Locke’s eloquent analysis and defence of private property was meant for a culture which only recently had tortured and hanged a woman for stealing a tablecloth and some sheets.60 The philosophers used their logic and their learning to speak out against a social movement which, in its turn, rejected logic and learning as oppressive instruments of an entrenched elite.61 By contrast, William James, whose belief in biological rhythms of quiescence and excitement was a credo of its own, and who saw irrationalism as a necessary complement of discipline, obedience and caution, transcended his own categories of the healthy and the unhealthy in describing Fox’s ideas as true. Though he saw the best example of a recurring form of the psychopathology of religion in the leader’s exalted sensibility, his melancholy, his liability to trances and hallucinations, and his fixed ideas, James paid him and his religion homage: ‘In a day of shams it was a religion of veracity’. ‘No one can pretend’, James says, ‘that in point of spiritual sagacity or capacity, Fox’s mind was unsound’.62 But he drops back to the level of pragmatism in observing, as many have observed since, how impossible it is to sustain the momentum of reform when this is rooted in a state of inwardness; for such states by their very nature cannot persist, either in the individual or in the group. A heresy such as the Quaker heresy survives persecution to become orthodoxy; as orthodoxy it must engage in forms of repression similar to those it began by protesting against. The fact of inevitable self-limitation, it might be said, constitutes a practical refutation of enthusiasm: regression to the mean is the law of the world, and durable change implies Burkean gradualism.63

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The objections of philosophers to enthuasiasm which we have so far considered are (I) it delivers unreliable messages; (2) its programme is heretical or scandalous; (3)it fails to sustain momentum. These objections are to some extent in conflict with one another: if the messages of the prophet are unreliable, what does it matter that they are heretical; if they are heretical, what does it matter that momentum cannot be sustained? Critics of enthusiasm must then concede that one or another of their claims is false. It might be that all three are false; if so, then conscience and intuition do have epistemological authority, the content of prophetic messages corresponds to knowledge rather than error, and, finally, enthusiasm is effective. One might, without inconsistency believe that each of these claims is true. We have already noticed that Locke’s defence of revealed religion reduces to the authority of tradition despite his efforts to establish reason as the antipode of enthusiasm. A second, relatively internal, but still important point to make is that the enthusiasts’ openings and illuminations were not idiosyncratic. Spiritual journals of the period follow one another so closely in describing early doubt, conflicts and searches and their eventual resolution that it is obvious that they served each other as models and drew on common traditions. The idea of direct instruction by God is one which finds expression in the specific literary forms of the journal, the letter and the pamphlet. The content of this instruction is drawn from literary sources representing well-established, though heterodox, as More noticed, rival theologies. 61 Thus a conflict between what were actually rival traditions and ideals was deceptively portrayed by the critics of enthusiasm as a conflict between the consensus of the community and aberrant individualism. Yet these points, which minimise the basis of the dispute, do not take us to the marrow of the question posed by James’s extraordinary claim quoted earlier, to the effect that all profound changes are the result of irrationalist behaviour and discourse. In Fox’s own mental organisation we find, I believe, three independent traits which help to explain what enthusiasm can accomplish which sober reason cannot. The first was his overdeveloped subjectivity, his excessive permeability to sights and sounds: bells, spires, stranger’s faces, and the manifestations of poverty and oppression. The second was his indifference to normal comforts and rewards, which enabled him to achieve the detached view of an outsider with respect to his own society, a disinterested objectivity with respect to its presuppositions and mechanisms. The third characteristic was a desire for public exposure with all the dangers and humiliations of public life. It is easy to imagine certain combinations of sensitivity, detachment, and love of exposure which would manifest themselves in tyranny and evtl. Thus it is correct in one regard to say that enthusiasm in its prosecution is not a guarantee of the truth of any teaching or the goodness or rightness of any cause. Because of the dangerous mobilising capacities of enthusiasts, it might seem that, in order to be on the safe side, one is best off following the recommendation of the philosophers to condemn and avoid. Or it might simply be argued that, if the content of the message must be considered separately from its form and source, enthusiastic presentation drops out as irrelevant. To these arguments there are several replies.

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First, the differentiation of destructive forms of enthusiasm from others is not difficult in every case, though it is assuredly difficult in some. The intrasectarian violence and bloodshed of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War had horrified Hobbes, Leibniz and Spinoza. The great philosophers’ tendency to emphasise the peace-keeping role of a strong central authority is, in this light. fully understandable. Yet the exact targets of the denunciation of enthusiasm in the Restoration, as the pamphlet literature shows, were not fanatics massacring their doctrinal opponents, but social reformers. In the case we are discussing, although ressentiment is the primary motive, the aim is not domination of others and retribution. That the poor wanted to usurp the place of the princes and the libertines to overturn the institution of marriage was the misconstruction which many of their contemporaries placed on their ideals. But personal, ethnic, national, or even sectarian advantage was not being sought, as it is in other examples of political irrationalism or cult-sadism. While believing that a ‘heaven on earth’ was possible, that perfection was not deferred but attainable in this life, the Quaker enthusiasts narrowly avoided the appropriation-theology of the Ranters, who believed that they had become Gods and the world was theirs, by restricting the permissible scope of human achievements to the moral. Second, as I will argue shortly, sobriety in its defence is no measure of the rightness of a cause, despite what More and Locke would have us think. Third, we need not concede that style and source are wholly unrelated to the value of the content. Fox’s critics, who did not possess extreme permeability, objectivity or exposure-readiness (Locke took evasive action by fleeing to Holland when his political theory and practice and his reasonable religion looked dangerous), were hampered and bound by their successful adaptation: they were not in a position to see how the defence of reason might itself have substantive political import. And even if it is no longer the case that an identity can be assumed between political theorists and definers of truth, it needs to be remembered that the ubiquity, orderliness and unobtrusiveness of injustice may persuade reason, humility and toleration-More’s virtues-to cooperate in it. The traditions of humane learning, which might appear to lie entirely outside the fray of sociopolitical controversy, and to involve the application of neutral modes of reasoning, may be correctly understood, as we have seen, by their defenders as well as their detractors, as supportive of or antagonistic to certain substantive social goals. This point gains in sharpness when we return to the enthusiasts’ agenda. Fox mentions repeatedly the trio who have been the traditional focus of religious concern and the embarrassment of the modern state as well: the widow,65 the and the stranger. 67 These people pose a problem for every society: the orphatP problem of intervention on behalf of those who stand neither fully inside nor fully outside natural and artificial spheres of obligation. The natural sympathy they can command is limited; and, as they present themselves as dependents, artificial justice, which depends on the notion of quid pro quo, is not easily extended to them. In smaller traditional societies, there may be more or less success in weaving people into the social fabric in ways other than through their economic productivity. In modern population centres, this has proved almost impossible, and indeed it is modernity, and the economic super-systems which have evolved

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over time, which have produced such large numbers of displaced or unplaced persons: urban anonymity does not permit the maintenance of the village values of labour, chastity and responsibility. The magistrates of Fox’s time were overwhelmed by the poor and the problem of the poor; only they could not think what to do with them except to institute ever harsher measures of repression with the aim of forcing them into productivity or removing them from sight.6X In our time, the apparently reasonable, because non-disruptive solution, is similar: vigorous prosecution of crime, which is the remote end-product of the conflict between the stranger and the wealthy society, and withholding of sustenance with the aim of forcing the technically able-bodied into productivity. But might one not speak out against this form of social evolution and still do so reasonably, without excessive display and the fringe phenomena of illuminationism? Is it not the case that these social policies are themselves irrational, that they constitute a banked form of emotion-driven practice-one based in fear and unease-rather than being grounded in fact and analysis, and that they cannot accomplish what they are supposed to? In response it can only be said that to question persuasively-not merely, as it were, academically-the reasonableness of deeply entrenched social realities and directions with a strong momentum of their own is precisely what counts as ‘enthusiasm’, when it is defined by its opponents. The traits of permeability, detachment and readiness to be humiliated are not those possessed by entirely reasonable people. It is tempting, of course, to say that enthusiasm is simply another source of suggestions which need then to be evaluated by reasonable methods. But two points need to be made in response here. First, embracing such a position does not help anyone to decide how to be or to respond, what level of dissidence to attend to or discourage. Second, it is easy to come to the belief that whatever is the case-concentrated wealth, or racial and sexual inequalities-having stood the test of time, has a certain rightness to it, that it must be the result of some cumulative set of small improvements undertaken over time, and, as their sum total, must bear an even greater measure of rightness. Where roots are deep and tangled, extirpation is difficult, chaotic and painful, and a reasonable person rightly shies from such tasks as long as they do not seem, subjectively, necessary. The virtue of sober reason-which is cultivated precisely through training in the humane letters-is that it is capable of revealing the premises which support the .rtatu.r quo as arbitrary and of elaborating hypothetical alternatives. But it is questionable whether, in light of the undeniable history ofsocial inequalities and their repeated codification in political philosophy-the many philosophical attempts to ‘explain’, or show the logic of, these inequalities-sober reason has consistently dedicated itself to that task, rather than leaving it to visionaries and utopians to examine premises and propose alternatives. It might seem paradoxical to defend enthusiasm by disclosing its latent rationality; it is no more so, however, than the more familiar attempt to undermine reasonableness by showing its latent dependence on interest. Perhaps the moral is that we are not after all concerned with two exclusive modes of perception and thinking, but with the old game of insiders and outsiders as it maps onto the divided loyalties of human nature. The hallmark of enthusiasm, as I have also tried to show, is its invocation of ideas older than any of the particular institutions and systems it is directed against. Beneath the more outlandish

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doctrines of the seventeenth century enthusiasts-star-worship, androgyny, the community of saints-there lie aspirations-the mythic marriage of nature and perfection-stronger than any particular set of contingent social arrangements. Their opponents say that their strength derives from their never having been tested in practice: they are incoherent heresies which can survive only as long as they exist in the subterranean realm; they would wither on exposure. Alternatively we might say that they are always dying off under pressure from what exists and that the enthusiasts are those indispensable guardians who fan them now and then into life. What Henry More and his fellow critics did not see is that there are two kinds of truth: the truth that is and the truth that isn’t. Catherine University

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of Alberta

Acknovi~ledgements-Much

helpful commentary and criticism was received by the author in Alvin Plantinga’s Philosophy of Religion Reading Group at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 1990; thanks are also due to Philip Quinn, to Michael Losonsky, and to Charles L. Reid for their suggestions.

NOTES 1. George Hickes, The Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcised, 3rd edn (1683). 2. Other reactions from well-known philosophers include Leibniz’s comments on William Penn’s Travails in Holland and Germany, and Robert Barclay’s Apology; see Nicholas Rescher, ‘Leibniz and the Quakers’, Bulletin of the Friends’ Historical Association, 44 (1955) pp. 100-107. 3. Shaftesbury’s defence of ‘good’ enthusiasm in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times of 1711 is beyond its scope as are German Pietism, Swedenborg, and the problem of Schwaermerei in the eighteenth century. Other historical aspects of the subject include the relation between enthusiasm and the ‘New Science’ [cf. Michael Heyd, ‘The New Experimental Philosophy: a Manifestation of “Enthusiasm” or an Antidote to it?’ Minerva, 25 (1987) pp. 423-4401; and between enthusiasm and continental rationalism [cf. Thomas M. Lennon’s study of the fortunes of Cartesianism in The Battle of the God,s and Giant.s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 276ffl. 4. Enthusiasm: a Chapter in the History of Religion with SpecialReference to the XVIIand XVIII Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). 5. Casaubon is well-known as a skeptic about witch-craft, which, a progressive, he regarded in psychopathological rather than in theological terms. The emotionality of women is a recurrent motive in the enthusiasm literature. 6. Rufus Jones, Spiritual Reformers of the 16th and 17th Century, (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 320. 7. The Lollards of the fourteenth century, the Diggers and Levellers of the first half of the seventeenth were among the most active of these groups. 8. Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, (repr. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clarke Memorial Library, 1966). The title refers to the triumph of good (cheerful, restrained) enthusiasm over its bad counterpart, p. 18. 9. Ibid., p. 19. 10. Ibid., p. 23. 11. Ibid., p. 24.

476 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 3 I, 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., pp. 31-33. Ibid. Ibid., p. 18. Through the philosopher F.M. van Helmont: see M. Nicholson (ed.), The Con,vu~ Letter.7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 404-419. The reception of More and other Cambridge Platonists of the concept of the ‘inner light’ was not wholly negative: a detailed study ofMore and enthusiasm would have to take this into account. Merit Casaubon, A Treati.Ye Concerning Enthusia.stne, 2nd edn, ed. P.J. Korshin (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970). p, 173f. George Fox, Journal, 7th edn, ed. W. Armistead, 2 vols (London: W. Cash, 1852), 152. On early Quakerism see, in addition to works cited below, W.C. Braithewaite, The Beginnings qf QuakerBm, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955); W. Stark, The Sociology, qf Religion, Vol. 2, Sectarian Religion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); A. Cole, ‘The Quakers and the English Revolution’, Past and Present X (1955), pp. 39-54. George Fox, Journal. I:53. Ibid., 24. ‘One morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me, and a temptation beset me; but I sat still. And it was said, “All things come by nature”; and the elements and stars came over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it. But as I sat still. and silent, the people of the house perceived nothing’. Ibid., 1:71. Ibid., 1:54. Ibid., 1155. Ibid., 1:61f. A negative version of the ‘oceanic’ feeling which Freud famously claimed never to have experienced in Civilization and its Discontent.P. Ibid., 1:71. Ibid., 1:84; 81. Quoted in B. Reay, The Quaker.5 and the English Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 59. Thomas Hicks, The Quaker Condemned (1674), p. 2. George Whitehead, Enthusiatm above Atheism (1674), p. 14. Robert South, quoted in Reay, Quakers and the English Revolution, p. 100. See, on religion and radicalism, George M. Shulman, Radicalism andReverence: the Politics of Gerrard Winstanley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Whitehead, Enthusiasm above Athei.cm, p. 62. Quoted in R. Jones, Spiritual Reformers, p. 332. These attacks coincide with the rise of a historical and comparative approach to the question of religious rites. The anonymous History qfAncient Ceremonies( 1668) tries to show, for example, that Christian rituals are historical remnants of ancient pagan religions. On rhe Ranters see Jones, Spiritual R in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974). p. 90.

Enthusiasm and its Critics 40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

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Fox was not of this temperament and consistently repelled female admirers such as the lady, ‘with her frothy mind’ who wanted to cut his hair, mentioned in the Journal. In the case of Nayler however, who was thought to have disgraced the sect, sexual libertinism as well as blasphemy were the issue: see W.G. Bittle, James Nayler: the Quaker Indicted by Parliament (York: William Sessions, 1986). On the libidinal issue see Shulman, Radicalism and Reverence, pp. 184ff. George Fox, Journa/, 1:84. On oath-swearing and the poor, see C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Shocken, 1964), p. 382ff. Journal, 1:72. In Doomsdale prison, an institution mainly housing condemned murders, ‘It seems the smoke went up into the jailer’s room; which put him into such a rage, that he took pots of excrements.. . and poured them through a hole upon our heads in Doomsdale; whereby we were so bespattered, that we could not touch ourselves or one another’. Ibid., 1:236. Ibid., 1:68. Though not pacifists at this stage of their history, the Quakers did not engage in armed insurgency. Ibid., 11:6ff. ‘When thou art in the transgression of the life of God in thy own particular, the mind flies up in the air, the creature is led into the night, nature goes out of its course, an old garment goes on, and an uppermost clothing; and thy nature being led out of its course, it comes to be all on fire.. .‘. Then, Fox says, it is necessary to ‘be still a while from thy own thoughts, searching, seeking, desires and imaginations’. Ibid., 1:339.

46.

Ibid., 1:325.

47.

Ibid., 1:345.

48.

1:lOO. The episode is discussed by William James, Varieties of Religious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 7f. Cf. Locke on the inexplicable actions of enthusiasts: ‘[I]t is no wonder, that some have been very apt to pretend to Revelation, and to perswade themselves, that they are under the peculiar guidance of Heaven in their Actions and Opinions, especially in those of them, which they cannot account for by the ordinary Methods of Knowledge, and Principles of Reason’, Essay, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), IV:XIX:5. George Fox, Cambridge Journal 11:172, quoted in Barbour, Quakers in Puritan England, p. 170. See Reay, Quakers and the English Revolution, p. 1 l2ff. See Braithewaite, The Second Period of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). James, Varieties, p. 380. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, p. 39. Locke, Essay, IV:XIX:5.

Ibid.,

Experience

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. Ibid. Arguably, Locke does so in order better to make the case for toleration; he wants to exclude the civil power from the role of sustaining religion. So one might read his Third Letter on Toleration [published in The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. LT. Ramsey (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1958)] 58. See e.g. Bossuet, Politics Drawn from the Very Words of the Holy Scripture (1709) trans. and ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 200ff. 59. Hickes, The Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcized, pp. 45-46. 60. It should be pointed out that (a) household linens were costly and treasured items; and (b) dishonesty by servants was judged very harshly, as a form of treason, in seventeenth century law. Still! Charles Webster is right to contrast Locke’s utilitymotivated proposals for work-houses for the poor with the Quaker proposals: ‘John 57.

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61.

62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

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Beller was indeed actuated by a desire to relieve the poor, but Locke and his friends moved in a world ofLeviathan political economy’. The Great Znstauration (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976). p. 244. Whitehead refers to ‘Meer mans Teaching, and to that dark and unlearned State, wherein People have been kept ever learning under Humane Traditions and Un-sent Teachers’, Enthusia.rm above Athei.rm, p. 3. James, Varieties, p. 7. The Quakers after the Restoration were concerned with narrowing the spectrum of opinion and subduing the expressive behaviour which had established their place and made them their converts. (George Keith declared that it had been an error to say that Christ mends souls immediately.)The imposition ofa strict Quaker discipline and regularity of conduct led them in due course to become successful tradespeople and even wealthy according to the best Puritan formula. Fox’s original ‘openings’ were clearly the result of reading a book, Jakob Boehme’s, as Jones demonstrates, Spiritual Rcformerr, p. 200. The distinction between the external or visible church and the mvisible church of believers was standard in reformed and mystical theologies, and the Paracelsian distinction, which furnished an organising metaphor for alchemy, between inner essences and outer husks and shells has obvious affinities to it. Read ‘unwed mother’. Read ‘deprived child’. Read ‘welfare recipient’. In 1990, the District of Columbia also hit on the idea of arresting beggars and putting homeless people in jail (Nell, York Timey. 7 November, 1990).