Heavens Below
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Heavens Below

Utopian Experiments in England, 1560-1960

W.H.G. Armytage

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eBook - ePub

Heavens Below

Utopian Experiments in England, 1560-1960

W.H.G. Armytage

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About This Book

First published in 2006. This book tells a number of plain tales of those who tried to save the English behind their collective backs under the term of Utopian Experiments in England between 1560 and 1960. It looks at the influences of the church to community experiments and groups, the ideas of Robert Owen, William Allen, George Mudie, Abraham Combe and more.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134529506
Topic
History
Edition
1

1

Filaments of Light
(1)
UTOPIA takes its name from a book of that name published abroad in 1517 by Sir Thomas More. It was not translated into English until 1551 and then as A Fruiteful and pleasunt worke of the beste State of a public weale, and of the new yle, called Utopia. Not till long after were the full implications of its twenty-four garden cities, based on handicrafts, really grasped. For the medieval cast of his thought needed penetrating. It became a primer, subject, like all primers, to gloss and commentary, but important for that very reason.
More had spent some four years in the Charterhouse, and when he wrote Utopia the monastic ideal was before his eyes. There are many signs of this—the undyed wool dress of the Utopians, the readings and controlled conversations during meals, the apportioning of crafts, the manual trades. The book has been called ‘an imaginative diagram of the contemplative life which all rational men should prefer to an active life which was yearly replacing it as an ideal’. Carthusian and Benedictine rules emerge in the details of the ideal state and in the style of presentation.
Yet medieval as More is, he exhibits two new ideals. The first is that the apprehension of Nature’s secrets would alleviate men’s lot on earth. For, speaking of natural science, he described the Utopians as counting :–
the knowledge of yt amonge the goodlieste, and mooste profytable partes of Philosophie. For whyles they by the helpe of thys Philosophie search owte the secrete mysteryes of nature, they thynke that they not onlye receaue thereby wonderfull greate pleasur, but also obteyn great thankes and fauour of the auctore and maker thereof.
The second is the overt plea for continuity with the primitive teaching of the early Church, for inwardness as opposed to outward pomp and magnificence. Utopia condemned the social abuses of Christianity in Christendom. Hythlodaye and his companions were told by the Utopians that ‘it was no small healpe and furtherance in the matter that they harde us saye that Christ instytuted amonge hys all thynges commen: and that the same communitee dothe yet remayne amongest the rightest Christian companies’.
More’s Utopians were pragmatists: the world of nature and man was a universal laboratory where operations had been going on throughout history to find out what was in harmony or in conflict with Nature. Thus those who could study past and contemporary history could assess the ‘experiments’ in living which had already been carried out during the 1760 years said to have been required to construct the Utopian commonwealth. For More’s Utopians regarded science as linked to ethics and religion.3
At the same time as Utopia was translated there appeared The Vision of Pierce Plowman: Robert Crowley’s refurbishing of Langland’s vision of a holy commune on high before Lucifer fell. ‘Say the holy writt that in the begynyng of holy church’, wrote Henry Parker, a Carmelite friar in Dives and Pauper, a book much printed between 1493 and 1536, ‘al thinges were comon to the multitude of al cristen people nat only to the apostylys; but to all cristen people . . . And therefore sayth the law: that common lyf is nedeful to al men, and namely to them that wyl folowe the lif of cristes desiples’.
To More’s generation and the two that followed, however, the 6,000 years of the world’s span were considered as coming to an end. George Gascoigne in the Drum of Doomsday (1576) lamented the corruption and decay of mankind. Others contrasted the golden age with the corruption of the present and Francis Shakelton in A Blazing Starre (1580) envisaged ‘the final dissolution of the Engine of this worlde’. Phillip Stubbes in The Anatomie of Abuses (1587) declared ‘The day of the Lord cannot be farre off’. Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, in Virgi demiarium (1597) compared life in its golden age with the present ‘thriving in ill as it in age decays’. Samuel Purchas, writing of the explorations of his age in Purchas, His Pilgrimage (1613), remarked ‘All Arts are but the supply of Nature’s defects, to patch up her ragged and worne rents, to cover rather than cure or recover man’s Fall’. God had cursed the earth and Donne in his Anatomie of the World shows that ‘The New Philosophy’ by calling ‘all in doubt’ had been partly responsible :–
Freely men confesse that this world’s spent,
When in the Planets and the Firmament
They seek so many new, they see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation.4
Such pessimism reached its climax in Godfrey Goodman’s The Fall of Man (1616), recently described as: ‘the classical expression in England of the prevailing doctrine, which was derived from the fusion between the Christian belief that man was fallen, and the pagan notion of decline from a golden age’.5
Goodman’s thesis was attacked by Archdeacon George Hakewill in An Apologie or the Power and Providence of God (1627). Goodman’s reply, and Hakewill’s answers were published as an appendix to the third edition in 1635. Pepys, who read Hakewill’s book thirty-two years later found that it ‘did satisfy myself mighty fair in the truth of the saying that the world do not grow old at all’.6 Hakewill asserted his belief in man’s progress in social morality. His significance lay in this demolition of ‘current theories of degeneration, which stood in the way of all possible theories of progress’.7
Another rebel against man’s acceptance of his human limitations was Francis Bacon who wrote that :–
by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein, is found in this—that men dispair and think things impossible. For wise and serious men are wont in these matters to be altogether distrustful; considering with themselves the obscurity of nature, the shortness of life, the deceitfulness of the senses, the weakness of the judgement, the difficulty of experiment and the like.8
His optimism was based on a theory of continuous fulfilment: ‘There are still,’ he wrote, ‘laid up in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use, having no affinity or parallelism with anything that is now known, but lying entirely out of the beat of the imagination which have not yet been found.’9 And again: ‘For man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.’10
Describing another island Utopia—Bensalem—in his New Atlantis, Bacon envisages science as leading men to God. The miraculous ark bearing the Christian Scriptures could not be approached except by a pious scientist. Science, in Bensalem, has for its end the ‘enlarging of the Bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. Bacon had no doubts that science would provide the key to an earthly paradise; for, as he said in the Novum Organum, ‘only let man regain his right over Nature, which belongs to him by the gift of God; let there be given to him the power; right reason and sound religion will teach him how to apply it’.11
(2)
Science and right religion were the especial interest of continental thinkers who sketched the dimensions of the ideal city of good men. In 1551 (the same year as More’s Utopia was translated into English), La Citta Felice was published by Franciscus Patrique. The dimensions became clearer with J. V. Andreae’s Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio (1619) and Campanella’s Civitas Solis (1623): both testaments to the value of communities or groups. Campanella was a member of the Accademia Delia in Padua, Andreae the ‘founder’ of the Rosicrucians.
Andreae, in fact, had said in his Fama Fraternitatis (circulated in manuscript) that the only way in which a truly Christian society could be produced was by the co-operative activity of a group. This advice was in a mock-serious vein; Christian Rosenkreuz, the ‘hero’ of his parable, was a mythical character who was supposed to have founded an order. The rules for this order were elaborated by Andreae four years later in his Confessio Fraternitatis R.C. ad eruditos Europae, together with its plan for reform. These plans envisaged the redemption of man by two means: science and the philosopher’s stone (to produce wealth) and religious freedom (to kindle his spiritual life). Andreae’s genuine interest in science was elaborated in Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz (a satire on the get-rich-quick attitudes of alchemists) and his concern for the kindling of religious life in his Invitatio Fraternitatis Christi ad amoris candidates (1617) (an appeal to Christians to form a society to effect this purpose). This society Andreae outlined in Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio (1619); it was, incidentally, a powerful exposition of what the ‘inner light’ can effect in this direction.
Andreae exercised a considerable influence in England. One group gathered round Robert Fludd, a builder of ingenious machines like a wooden bull that bellowed, an automatic dragon and a performing harp. This group used language of natural philosophy to explain supernature (or the mystic), revelling in hidden meanings and ambiguities. They actually believed Christian Rosenkreuz had brought much wisdom from the East in 1422. As a rustic rhymer from Scotland put in his Muses’ Threnode in 1638, just after Fludd’s death :–
For what we do presage is riot in grosse,
For we are brethren of the Rosie Crosse;
We have the Mason word and second sight,
Things for to come we can fortell aright.
Fludd held that all things were ‘ideally in God’ before they were made. This he developed to show how God was immanent in all things. He taught that those filled with the spirit of Christ might rise before his ‘second coming’, and his voluminous writings—at least fifteen of them are listed in the catalogue of the British Museum—made considerable impact abroad, a ‘key’ to them being published at Frankfort in 1633.12 The Rosicrucians probably stemmed from the Militia Crucifera Evangelica, a secret society in Nuremburg, founded by the Lutheran alchemist Simon Studion.
A second group did not take easily to the mysteries and alchemy of Christian Rosenkreuz but responded to Andreae’s call for a rescue team of devoted men to ‘fan the holy flame of faith, of love and of knowledge and in their endeavour to be ever strengthened by the consciousness of a great and united striving towards these nobel ends’. This rescue team, a civitas solis, a societas Christiana or a unio Christiana was taken up by, amongst others, Samuel Hartlib,13 who in the 1620’s was anxious to form a society called Antilia.
To Hartlib, Antilia was a practical proposition. After he came to London, he corresponded with RĂ´hmer about the possibility of founding it in Virginia. Another of his correspondents, Fridwald, suggested an experiment on an island near Liffland. But one after another of the members of the group seem to have died, and a suitable patron was not forthcoming. Antilia changed its name. It became Collegium Charitatis (1628), Illustre Collegium (1632) and Societas Reformatorum et Correspondency (1634). Ultimately it became Macaria, a Utopian kingdom which Hartlib outlined in a pamphlet, A description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641).14
One of Hartlib’s friends was Robert Boyle, the chemist, who had ‘great longings to peruse’ his Imago Societatis and Dextra Amoris in March 1647. A month later, having done so, he presented it ‘to a person of quality to whom if it takes suitably . . . may thence have no obscure influence on the public good . . . Campanella’s Civitatis Solis and that same Republica Christianopolitana . . . will both of them deserve to be taught in our language’. By May of that year, Boyle was writing: ‘you interest yourself so much in the invisible college, and that whole society is so highly concerned in all the accidents of your life, that you can send me no intelligence of your affairs that does not assume the nature of Utopian’.15
Utopia, Macaria, Antilia: Hartlib worked hard to establish it. One of his continental correspondents, Joachim Poleman, who loved Hartlib ‘as his own soul’, was interested in founding a similar society in Germany. Asking Hartlib’s opinion of his society he wrote ‘what do you think of the delineation . . . under the title Dextra amoris Christiano porrecta or Imago Societatis’.16 ‘The chief end of Commonwealth’, Hartlib wrote in 1648 in A Further Discovery of the Office of Public Address for Accommodation, ‘is Society, the End of Society is mutual Help, and the End and Use of Help is to enjoy from one another Comfort; that is, every Thing lawfully desirable or wanting to our Contentation.’17 This society was Hartlib’s main concern during the period of the Commonwealth. By 1661 he was forced to confess ‘of the Antilian Society the smoke is over, but the fire is not...

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