As Winstanley’s writings were published for the most part in separate pamphlet form, I treat their titles (when I mention them) as though they are books, though some are brief. Page numbers in parentheses all refer to The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited by George H. Sabine (1965) and available at archive.org. Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.
Gerrard
Winstanley, the seventeenth century leader of the Diggers of St. George’s Hill
in Surrey, was a pioneer of direct action and civil disobedience whose group,
like the I.W.W., advocated “forming the structure of the new society within the
shell of the old” [1]. Three hundred
years later his example remained fresh enough to animate the Diggers of San
Fracisco’s Haight-Ashbury who greeted me and several thousand others during the
summer of 1967. Those who gathered there
shared with Winstanley not only his brash attitude and uncompromising
anarcho-communism; many were pursuing spiritual paths -- Sufi, Daoist, Zen,
quasi-Native American – which they saw as parallel to their social vision. Winstanley’s religion was the foundation of
his politics; he was a Christian, but a heterodox one, whose vision was at once
more rational and more mystical than that of his fellow Christians who remained
in the pews of the Church of England.
In terms of
politics, he viewed the profit system, whether feudal or capitalist, as
inherently and inevitably vicious. His
communism was absolute in terms of the means of production, primarily
agriculture in his view. (He is careful
to note his disagreement with the contemporaneous Ranters who were reputed to
practice free love [519].) Well before
Proudhon, Winstanley declared unequivocally that “Those that Buy and Sell Land,
and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and
all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thou
shalt not steal, nor kill” (258). He
imagines a utopia in which everyone will work to “cheerfully put their hands to
make these things that are needfull, one helping another” (184), then what is
produced would be available to all in free stores: “every family, when they
want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops, and fetch
without money, even as now they fetch with money” (526) [2]. Though his basic principle is simple,
absolute, and, at its heart, entirely voluntaristic, Winstanley provides
details for its operation in practice, involving numerous “peace-makers,”
overseers, judges, and others [3]
Winstanley
regularly identifies the oppressive feudal system with “the Norman yoak”
imposed by William the Conqueror (as though the Anglo-Saxons had not had their
own equally oppressive kings). To him
putting commons to agricultural use seemed legal under traditional law. More significantly, though, and quite apart
from his more pragmatic suggestions, he viewed the Diggers as spiritual
warriors and the contention as not between classes, but, as he often repeated,
between the apocalyptic figures of the
Dragon and the Lamb. He
explicitly declares that his insights are divine openings, occurring in trance
or otherwise gifts of God’s grace, “shown by Vision, Voyce, and Revelation”
(257). Winstanley clearly regards
himself as a prophetic voice, a herald of divine insights. He states with utter confidence that “the
following declaration of the word of Life was the free gift to me from the
Father himself.” [4] His active interest
in the apocalyptic symbols in the books of Daniel and Revelations,
a curiosity he shares with many of his century, including Isaac Newton, is
reflected in a number of passages [5].
While a pursuit
of esoteric meaning in Scripture is not unusual for his day, Winstanley’s
theology was decidedly unorthodox. His
criticisms of the Established Church and its clergy do not advocate for any
reforming sect. (While he did have
demonstrable ties to Quaker meetings, his actual membership has not been
proven.) Perhaps Winstanley could not
find a doctrinal home in the England of his day, because his theology was, for
all the mystical trappings, shockingly rational, a forerunner in significant
ways of Deism and “natural religion.”
The most striking
sign of his dissent even from Dissenters is in his use of Reason as an
equivalent for God. Though he also refers to God as ”love” (375,
382, etc.), he explicitly says “I use the word reason rather than the word God
in my writings” (104) and commonly speaks of “The Great Creator Reason” (251)
and “the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason” (253). While his attachment to Christian language
and to the sacredness of the scriptures remains intact, he was with his
elevation of reason a prefiguration of the eighteenth-century advocates of a
non-supernatural religion.
Due to the
compassion manifested in his redemptive role, Christ is primarily identified
with love; thus Winstanley speaks of “Christ who is the universall power of
Love.” (446) This emphasis made the idea
of eternal damnation unacceptable to him as it would imply a limitation of
divine love [6]. To him God’s “power of
Universall Love” (375) can do no less than cause “a thorough salvation . . .
and leave none under bondage.” (384) He
is quite explicit that since the deity is “absolutely a God of Love” in the end
every man shall be saved, though some at the last hour” (82) since “Christ gave
himself a ransom for all” (81). For him
in fact the trees of knowledge and of life are beneficial, not forbidden,
though subject to corruption, with the first identified with imagination and
the second with love and knowledge (452).
These concepts of
God and Christ underlie and justify his social campaign. For him the mandate for the truly pious to
open what he repeatedly calls the “treasury” of earth to all people is nothing
less than allowing love and reason rather than tyranny, crime, and
self-interest to govern human affairs.
This partial rationalization of Christianity is evident, as well, in his
identification of entities such as Adam, Satan, Eden, Heaven, and Hell as
essentially psychological though he never denies their independent
existence. Thus the significance of Adam
is not as a historical figure, but as he is manifested in every individual
(203). He refers to “the garden of Eden
(mans heart)” (447) and notes that “a half hours silence” is equivalent to
being in Heaven (223). The devil that
matters is the one “within you” (95).
With some
asperity , he insists that, in fact, all history including the events in
scripture are most importantly located within the individual soul. “All that which you call the history, and
have doted upon it, and made it your idol, is all to be seen and felt within
you, before you cast off true peace.” Adam and Christ, Cain and Abel, the
Canaanites, Amalekites, Philistines, he
very land of Canaan, Judas, Heaven and Hell, good and bad angels are “all to be
seen within” (215). Therefore “that
which a man seeks for, whereby he might have peace, is within the heart, not
without” (213) and any people who wish to look for heaven or for hell had best
look into themselves (216).
Winstanley
rejects authority and even scriptural revelation as the basis for religious
belief, privileging only personal experience.
Thinking that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (213) the believer must
find inspiration not from books, but inside the soul (204). For his part he is emphatic in his claim that
his own inspiration is of this kind (204), a “free gift to me from the Father
himself” (445). “While I builded upon
any words or writings of other men, I builded upon sand. Man has a teacher within him” (93). “What I hear another man speak is nothing to
me until I find the same experience in
myself” (96). He claims to
receive these “openings,” as the Quakers would call them, from his meditative
trance experiences (190, 261, etc.).
In a few
passages, Winstanley comes very close to what sounds like pantheism. Not only does he call the earth the “mother”
of humanity (271), he declares that God is to be seen only in the world. The deity cannot be fully known and to
imagine him is simply “to build castles in the air.” Not only is God a mystery, the afterlife is
as well. “To reach God beyond the
Creation, or to know what he will be to a man, after the man is dead, if any
otherwise, than to scatter him into his Essences of fire, water, earth, and
air, of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line, or capacity of
man to attain to, while he lives in his compounded body.” All one can really know is this world. “The creation is all its dimentions be the
fullness of him, that fills all with himself, and if you yourself be part of
this Creation, where can you finde God but in that line or station wherein you stand?” (565)
In the
twenty-first century we remain far short of Winstanley’s recovered Eden in an
egalitarian anarcho-communism, yet he can still indicate the need for change
and the characteristics if a more just social and economic order. Any step toward a more equitable sharing of
the good things of life heads in the right direction. In his use of direct and uncompromising
non-violent action he is exemplary for protestors to the current corrupt
regimes of this earth. And in religion,
he points the way to a more truly catholic Christianity, in which the specific
symbols of the Christian tradition are understood a symbolic and in which any
person may pursue salvation or enlightenment or liberation without sectarian
boundaries. An inspiring example to the
cultural revolutionaries of the ‘sixties who, though not perhaps deprived of
the necessities of life (as the poor were in the seventeenth century)
nonetheless felt alienation and spiritual hunger and who, like him, followed
the dictates of their inner vision to try to practice what in Jewish practice
is called tikkun olam, the mending of the world. Gerrard Winstanley was a mystic as well as a
revolutionary. Over fifty years ago,
when I met some of the San Francisco Diggers, their message seemed to me quite
compatible with that of Che Guevara, honored during “The Year of the Heroic
Guerilla” in 1968, whose slogan that year seemed to be on everyone’s wall.
At the risk of seeming ridiculous,
let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It
is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. [7]
The same love of all humanity that motivated Gerrard
Winstanley in Surrey animated Emmet Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Peter Berg in San
Fransisco’s Haight, and countless others before and since. Perhaps, I flatter myself, even this essay
can spread a little love.
1. Preamble to the
Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World.
2. The vision was
realized by the San Francisco Diggers.
The Haight-Ashbury store had several incarnations including at 1090
Cole. A Black People’s Free Store later
opened at 1099 McAllister, then one in
New York City at 264 East 10th Street, and many other cities
followed..
3. For details see in
particular The Law of Freedom in a
Platform or True Magistracy Restored.
4. Fire in the
Bush p. 445.
5. See, for instance,
pp. 87-90 in The Breaking of the Day of God and 464-472 of Fire in
the Bush.
6. Universalism,
though later condemned, was taught by early church fathers such as Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Diodorus of Tarsus.
7. From “From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution
Today,” later reprinted as “Socialism and man in Cuba 1965” in The Che
Reader (2005).
8. The Ranters seem
to have gone further in the directions
of antinomianism and pantheism. The most
reliable statement of their ideas is likely in Laurence Clarkson’s A Single
Eye (1650) which declares “what act soever I do, is acted by that Majesty
in me God be in all things” and “if God be in all, why are not all things one
in God?” Though Winstanley takes pains
to distinguish himself from this even more radical group, particularly due to
the allegations that they (including Clarkson) practiced promiscuous sexual
relations, in his own day they were viewed as similar.
