Gerrard Winstanley's Experimental Knowledge of God (The Perception of the Spirit and the Acting of Reason)

Extract

This essay is an attempt to find out what Winstanley meant by certain terms, using close textual analysis. Extensive work has already been done in locating Winstanley in political, theological and, as far as possible, intellectual terms. This will receive only cursory treatment here. A scholarly tradition can be traced from Bernstein, through Petergorsky and Margaret James to Christopher Hill, which places Winstanley at the beginning of the development of materialist socialism although, it is suggested, his ideas proved to be a false start and went underground for a century or more. This view derives from his later works, especially The Law of Freedom, with its practical design of tilling the land communally, and sees his mysticism either as a cloak for revolutionary aims or as an undeveloped stage in his thought which he later left behind and which is thus of secondary importance. Work has been done, sometimes by the same scholars, to map out the tenets of his religious beliefs in the context of contemporary radical Puritanism, considering whether he was, for instance, a mortalist, a universalist or a millenarian, and how far he was any of these. For such doctrinal identification one can look to W. S. Hudson, the co-operative study of L. Mulligan, J. K. Graham and J. Richards and to Christopher Hill, for all of these have compared and contrasted his beliefs with those of Seekers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. Hill himself, however, has pointed out the difficulties of placing Winstanley in a particular group because of the fluidity of the borders between one sect and another; sects sharing certain beliefs while differing in others and changing character internally with changing political circumstances.