#christopher hill

[sharpened--edges]

[Gerrard] Winstanley used Scripture language, but gave his own sense to the biblical stories. The Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension may or may not have been historical events (‘it matters not much’): they are more important as metaphors for psychological transformations within men and women. The Christ who lived at Jerusalem is less significant for us than the Christ within. The establishment of private property had been the Fall of Man: its abolition, together with that of wage labour, would allow a return to the innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Winstanley’s God is not to be found above the skies after we are dead, but within each of us, here on earth. There is no heaven or hell after death, no personal immortality. Heaven, hell, Satan, are all within us. The universe—as Milton thought too—had been created out of the substance of God. The Second Coming of Jesus Christ is the rising of Reason within sons and daughters, and Reason means awareness of the need for co-operation. Winstanley uses the word Reason in preference to God. As Christ rises, so all men and women will come to see the necessity of co-operation. There is no other Second Coming. Ultimately all mankind, without exception, will be saved—i.e. brought into the haven of peace and rest on earth—not by the descent of a Saviour from the clouds but by the rising of communal consciousness within them. All men shall become Sons of God united by the Christ within. Universalism was of course highly unorthodox when Winstanley began to preach it in 1648: in his final version it was hardly Christian at all. Winstanley saw the clergy as his main adversaries because they made a handsome living out of persuading the poor to accept their poverty on earth and look for their reward in heaven after death. The Diggers expected their heaven on earth. In Winstanley’s ideal commonwealth there would be no state church; preaching for hire (i.e. an endowed ministry) would be as illegal as buying and selling, or lawyers taking fees. Winstanley rejected all church ordinances—prayer, preaching, baptism, holy communion, Sabbath observance. What mattered was ‘the anointing’ by the spirit of God. Winstanley believed that ‘all the inward bondages of the mind’ are ‘occasioned by the outward bondage that one sort of people lay upon another’, and will disappear in an equal society.

Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (Verso, 2017 [1984]), pp. 38–9.

[thecollectibles]

Art by Christopher Hill

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it relives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors."

~ Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

[chalet2000]

We recall the oatmeal-maker who, on trial before the High Commission in April 1630, said that he would never take off his hat to bishops. 'But you will to Privy Councillors,' he was urged. 'Then as you are Privy Councillors,' quoth he, 'I put off my hat; but as you are the rags of the beast, lo! I put it on again.'

Christopher Hill - The World Turned Upside Down (1972)

[lovelyballetandmore]

Christopher Hill | Alessio Scognamiglio | West Australian Ballet | Photo by Sergey Pevnev

[galina-ulanova]

Brooke Widdison-Jacobs, Christopher Hill, Alessio Scognamiglio and Andrew Radak in Ambiguous Content (West Australian Ballet, 2016)

[considermycat]

It is perhaps as misleading to speak of ‘the Quakers’ before 1661 as it is to speak of ‘the Levellers’—more so indeed, since ‘Quakers’ were far more widely scattered across England and even less homogeneous. In the euphoric early 1650s George Fox found congregations everywhere in the North, apparently waiting for his message. But these congregations had their own traditions—Familist, Grindletonian, Seeker. There must have been many early ‘Quakerisms’. […] A balanced picture of early Quakerism would pay far more attention to their internal divisions, to their opposition to tithes and to their millenarianism (though suppressions by later Quakers make this difficult to recapture). It would also give greater prominence to more traditionally acknowledged aspects of Quaker thinking like the inner light, the pacifism which developed after 1660 and the sense of the meeting. What most of us regard as characteristic features of ‘Quakerism’—refusal of ‘hat honour’, insistence on ‘thou’ rather than ‘you’, opposition to oaths (and tithes too, for that matter) are in fact traditional features of English radical movements, going back to the Lollards, through sixteenth-century Familists and Anabaptists.

Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat, pp.130f.

[chuckbbirdsjunk]