David Como. Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. xvi + 513 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-4443-0.
Reviewed by Sears McGee (Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara)
Published on H-Albion (August, 2004)
On the Origins of Seeking, Ranting, Quaking (and Much Else)
In recent years, many scholars have become convinced that religious tensions were more central than constitutional ones to the causation of the civil wars of the 1640s. Thanks largely to the work of Patrick Collinson, we now have a clearer view of the extent to which the puritan movement was driven by people who sought to uphold the traditional social and political order rather than dismantle it. But, as David Como rightly contends, a side-effect of this approach, salutary though it is in many important respects, makes it harder to understand the political, religious, and social radicalism that exploded on the scene in the 1640s and 1650s. In 1972, Lawrence Stone asserted that the most "revolutionary" thing about the "English Revolution" of the mid-seventeenth century was "not its success in permanently changing the face of England--for this was slight--but the intellectual content of the various opposition programs and achievements after 1640."[1] Where did the radical ideas of the Seekers, Ranters, Quakers, Baptists, Levellers, Diggers, and Millenarians come from? For most contemporaries, the obvious source was the machinations of the Devil and his agents (such as the Jesuits). Not satisfied with that explanation, modern historians have noted that the puritan movement began to split into numerous quarrelling factions as soon as the unifying bond of oppression by the bishops was removed in the early months of the Long Parliament. That fracturing certainly occurred, but a critical question remains about why the factions that emerged did so. What were the reasons for the particular fault lines that appeared? Until now, the most influential answer has been Christopher Hill's. He contrasted a pre-war "bourgeois" puritanism intent on discipline and hierarchy with a quite different "plebeian" and revolutionary puritanism whose lusty energies were freed by the war between Roundheads and Royalists. For Hill, this plebeian outburst drew upon an old underground stream "of popular materialist skepticism and anti-clericalism" that had long run among "masterless men," especially in forest, fens, and commons.[2]
Hill's account of radical ideas rested on printed sources that appeared after the collapse of censorship. In this ambitious, subtle, imaginative, deeply researched, and powerfully argued book, Como connects the retrospective remarks and texts that appeared in print after 1640 with manuscript sources from the 1620s and 1630s. He also teases out heterodox implications from sermons published before 1640 by writers who had good reason to express themselves cagily and carefully because they knew the ecclesiastical authorities might come after them. The result is an altogether fresh and vivid account of the roots of "revolutionary" radicalism that has two great virtues. First, it makes possible a reading of the output of antinomians in the context of an earlier history which has been ignored. Everyone who studies the sectarians of the revolutionary period must read this book carefully because its nuanced presentation of the "pre-history" of radicalism requires a complete rethinking of the mid-century decades (and, of course, of developments in New England as well). Second, and no less valuable, it enables us to comprehend much more fully the situation of the "mainstream puritans" in an era in which they found themselves under attack from the Laudian "right" as mere antinomians themselves because of their predestinarianism and from the antinomian "left" which saw them as mere Arminians because they seemed to preach a pharisaical works' righteousness because of their insistence on "marks," "signs," and other "evidences" of election.
With enormous ingenuity, diligence, and archival skill, Como provides a new and compelling explanation of the origins of sectarian radicalism. He describes an "underground" quite different from Hill's and one much more in accord with the complex social, cultural, and intellectual world of early modern England as we now perceive it. Como shows that during the early-seventeenth century a small group of charismatic preachers came to the conclusion that "mainstream puritans" had erred grievously by underestimating the power of God's "free grace" and misunderstanding the role of the Mosaic Law in human salvation. More or less independently of each other at the outset, their ideas and followers gradually mixed together in what Como demonstrates was ultimately a complex kind of hybrid divinity which took shape mostly in London. The "anti-legalism" of these leaders (most of them university educated, such as John Eaton and John Everarde) initially took two distinct forms. Eaton argued that God "imputed" Christ's perfection to the elect, even though elect individuals would continue to sin in this life. In contrast to this imputative version, Everarde (and the Grindletonians) represented the "perfectionist" tendency in English antinomianism. Despite these and other differences, antinomians shared the conviction that "believers would obey the will of God not out of the external compulsion of the Law, but freely and voluntarily by virtue of the internal guidance of the spirit" (p. 260). Despite what their enemies said, they were not libertines. They also insisted on the "absolute passivity of the believer in the process of salvation" and opposed that delicious passivity to "the fretting, activist faith of mainstream puritanism." Everarde characterized the preachers of such anxious and fraught divinity as "stunted dwarves" (p. 265). Como shows how cleverly the antinomians could exploit the very rhetoric of the "godly" against them. The Grindletonian leader, Roger Brearley, was brilliant at "skewering the godly on their own spit" by stating, for example, that their preachers set up human knowledge and righteousness as "the great Idol in the Church" (pp. 290, 287).
According to Jeremiah Burroughes, one of the Dissenting Brethren in the Westminster Assembly, "those that come nearest together, yet differing in some things, are many times at greater variance one with another, then those who differ in more things from them. The Jews and Samaritans were at greater variance then Jews and Heathens."[3] Burroughes's insight encapsulates one of Como's main themes, which is that antinomianism was not "an aberration, but ... the product of a deep structural instability within puritanism itself, the unwanted by-product of normative godly divinity" (p. 131). His antinomian heresiarchs continued to think of themselves as intimately connected with the "puritan mainstream" from which they had in fact come. Its leaders as well as the antinomians competed for the loyalty of members of the same "godly" lay audiences by means of countless private debates and conferences. They struggled to establish a consensus that kept escaping their grasp, and they often criticized each other savagely. Yet the effort continued because both parties believed that they embodied the true reformed religion. They were playing out arguments that went back to the early Church and continued throughout the history of Christianity in one way or another. Precisely because they felt their kinship so deeply and because they saw themselves as protectors of the quintessence of Protestantism, their perplexity as to how to deal with each other heightened. The antinomians constructed a St. Paul and a Luther who fitted their soteriology, while at the same time the mainstream puritans read those giants as men who retained the obligation to obey Mosaic Law. Each side employed selective quotation with results which we now call "spin."
The manifold difficulties inherent in sources created under the shadow of censorship repeatedly require Como to use cautionary words such as "probably," "possibly," perhaps," "very likely," "apparently," and "presumably." Despite this, he manages to penetrate deeply into the workings of a series of social networks of real people interacting with each other. The result is altogether convincing, and Como deserves the high praise for completing a project that some would have thought impossible.
Notes
[1]. Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 146.
[2]. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991; first published 1972), passim, especially chap. 3.
[3]. Jeremiah Burroughes, Irenicum to the Lovers of Truth and Peace (London, 1653), p. 240.
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Citation:
Sears McGee. Review of Como, David, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9698
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