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The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660
This study addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Nicholas McDowell challenges the divide between "elite" and "popular" culture in the seventeenth century and argues that the radical writing of the English Revolution is a more complex literary phenomenon than has hitherto been supposed, lending substance to recent claims for its admission to the traditional literary canon.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published January 15, 2003
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June 14, 2021
RADICALLY IMPRESSIVE
This book is a revealing and thrilling monograph on the English Revolution. It scrutinizes the period (1630-1660) from a completely new point of view and opens a completely regenerated perspective. Before entering the book, it is necessary to express one regret: the numerous books studied in this monograph are listed with their initial publishing dates but not with present references. But this is detail after all, and we can rather easily find this information.
Nicholas McDowell starts with the commonplace stereotype about this period of English history. This stereotype comes from Thomas Edwards who fought at the time against the multiplication of religious approaches during the revolution with one essential argument: the presbyterian church and the religious establishment are supported by literate people, whereas all the heretics are religious heterodox groups of illiterate people expressing their artisan radicalism («illiterate mechanick persons, p.1; “cobblers, tinkers, pedlars, weavers, sow-gelders and chimney-sweepers”, p.38). Then Christopher Hill, after the Second World War in England, endorsed this point of view to support his Marxist approach that these various religious groups were the expression of the working class of the time (craftsmen, artisans, and shopkeepers) if not even the populace, hence the root of a deep democratic desire in England (“the most vigorous instance of plebeian opposition to the puritan ethic”, p.23). Nicholas McDowell picks this stereotype as a challenge and tries to prove it is completely misguided by ideological and social interest on the side of Thomas Edwards and by ideological if not even political interest on the side of Christopher Hill, though Nicholas McDowell does not enter any polemics with the latter.
Nicholas McDowell studies these radicals in great detail, particularly the Levellers, the Ranters, the Quakers, and a few others along with these. His approach is systematic. He looks for those who were the inspirers of these groups, the main spokespeople of them, and shows that they were practically all of them literate, university educated, hence learned scholars. Richard Overton and William Walwyn for the Levellers (Chapter 3), Abiezer Coppe and Daniel Featley for the Ranters (Chapter 4), Samuel Fisher, William Penn, and Robert Rich for the Quakers (Chapter 5), John Rogers for the Fifth Monarchists (Chapter 4 and 5). Milton will be used in various sections of the book, particularly in the Epilogue. Nicholas McDowell studies many more people along the way, particularly Hobbes, Locke, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Spinoza, though in fewer details. These radicals are shown as having a good education, received in grammar schools and universities, and as having held, for some of them, positions in these universities. They are highly literate in Latin, Greek, Hebrew (for some of them), and both classical literature and biblical studies. Thus, the stereotype does not hold. This argument is nevertheless a little bit weak because it does not say anything about the followers of these leaders. We do not know what the members of the Levellers, Ranters, and Quakers were, at least from this book. The book is also clear that the pamphlets and various books studied here were intended to address the learned scholars of the universities, hence they had to be in a language that was that of university deans and professors. What’s more, this book can only study what has survived, hence only printed books or manuscripts. Their language may not be at all the language used by grass and root Levellers, Ranters, and Quakers. But I think these objections are rather easy and superficial because of the other aspects and methodological axioms of the book.
The first great innovation in the field is to look at what was before. He finds out that universities in the 1630s were overpopulated and that they produced a great number of learned scholars that could not find positions in society. Hence there was a high level of discontentment among those who were dropped along the way. One study is missing here: what kind of students came to the grammar schools and the universities in those years? Were they all coming from the upper classes, the nobility, and the richest merchants, or did some come from the lower classes, or at least the middle class of small merchants and artisans? We have one or two mentions of some poor students who were sizars at the universities: a sizar was a student who received an allowance toward college expenses and who originally acted as a servant to other students in return for this allowance. Richard Overton was one in Cambridge for instance. This phenomenon is not studied though it would probably reveal the improvement of social and economic conditions in England after Elizabeth and under the Stuarts. It would also reveal that, despite the absence of any planification, the English society had greater needs in scholars, many of them being priests in the Anglican Church of the time. It would finally reveal that the lower middle class was making an effort to promote their children in society. This led to a problem: “Thomas Nashe warned of the dangers to the stability of Church and State posed by disaffected scholars” (p.10). Nicholas McDowell shows how the 1630s already contained some premises to the coming puritan revolution. In other words, this revolution, and what the author consistently calls the «regicide » did not come from nowhere.
The second innovation is, in fact, a methodological revolution in itself. Nicholas McDowell applies methods that we generally find in anthropology to analyze the very texts of these revolutionaries. He tries to understand the value of the words, phrases, and ideas in the social, political, and religious context as well as in the general literary, rhetorical, philosophical, and ideological context. This leads him to a complete reassessment of many assertions. Let us take a cluster of such assertions: the radicals were illiterate because they were against education, Latin, and other scholarly elements of that type. The author studies the educational conditions: the imposed study of Latin through Lily’s grammar book that was the only one authorized in schools. This grammar book is built in such a way that it informs the students with a mental architecture that is seen and understood as the foundation of a social, political, and religious order. “Lily’s grammar can be described as the foundation text of the intellectual culture of early modern England.” (p.100) Lily’s grammar is coaching the students into obedience, religious assimilated orthodoxy, and hierarchical respect. Violence and bodily punishments are widely used to correct the mistakes by beating and humiliating the students in front of their fellow students, by the way an all-male environment since education is not for women. This grammar is systematically using examples that center the language on the master as a representation of the teacher, the King, and the Church, eventually God. It is systematically seen and graphically shown as ternary meaning the Trinity. We then understand why some radicals will speak of «grammatical tyranny » (p.108) not against grammar per se, nor even Latin per se, but against the manipulation of grammar and Latin by imposing only one authorized approach (Lily’s), by using violence to impose correct learning and by using this grammar book to manipulate the minds of the students. Then it is associated with the Book of Psalms that has to be memorized. And beyond this Book of Psalms, he studies the ABC book used to teach how to read to plain people. This ABC book only took religious elements, hence teaching how to read and at the same time imposing a catechism of the Christian religion as seen from the religious, political, and social establishment’s point of view. This leads to another remark: about one eighth (half a million copies) of the population (four million people) possessed this ABC Book, hence probably half of the population had access to it, showing that the population was a lot more literate (in the vernacular and religious orthodoxy) than we can think but a literacy that was acquired along with religious orthodox principles.
This education in grammar schools and at universities is thus based on Latin for four or five years, then the Book of Psalms and the Bible (King James I’s version of course) from the very start and all along, then Latin culture, Greek, some Hebrew in later years. This education inculcates obedience, a sense of the social hierarchy (at the top of which some will find themselves sooner or later, and the others will be its privileged servants, particularly in the church), the conception that the Bible is the word of God himself and hence is absolute truth and the conception that the church is the spiritual and ideological warden of the social order of the country. Nicholas McDowell demonstrates how the rejection of education is not the rejection of all education but of this education in all its elements seen as alienating. Most of the radicals studied in this book were for another type of education, with variations among them but one essential common point: religious toleration and freedom. It is then clear why Thomas Edwards, a Presbyterian, was against these sects and radical movements: they attacked the social system in its very architectural heart.
But most of these radicals go a lot further. Since they are scholars and educated people, they use their own knowledge and education to attack the educational institution, the religious orthodoxy of the church (the presbyterian church after the civil war), and society as a whole. Nicholas McDowell shows how the language of these radicals, in its references and its rhetoric, is a constant allusion to and perversion of the pedagogical language of the universities with numerous references to the culture that they have tried to conquer on their own: classical of course, but also continental (Rabelais, Montaigne, Spinoza) and Renaissance. They use an essential weapon: ridicule. They turn upside down the official language, which makes it look at least weird and its arguments irrational. This study is pushed to the finest details and is particularly enlightening, at times funny, for instance, the addition of the “Lunatick mood” (p.104) by Coppe to the other Latin moods. These radical books are thus like knots in a network of affiliations and derivations. They are in that line inspired by Saint Paul and 1Corinthians 1:19 : “I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing all the learning of the learned.” (Jerusalem Bible). Their main principle that the Bible is not to be accepted as the only source of divine light, that the Bible may be tainted by many successive acts of copy, translating, printing, etc., that divine truth has to be understood as the descending of the Spirit in everyone giving them inner Light, leads them to consider the wise and the learned and the powerful (the King, the priests, the scholars) as being wrong and fools, and to consider themselves as inspired by the Spirit, hence being the true wise and true learned people. They just transfer this religious approach into their own rhetoric and produce the style that is often considered as ranting (meaning chaotic), popular and plebeian (in spite of the heavy sprinkling of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, plus all the cultural quotations and allusions), in a word heretic because it questions the established order, even after the revolution and under the Republic.
This method of culturally contextualizing the documents under scrutiny is extremely important because it is in agreement with many other approaches, and it can open tremendous intellectual doors. We think of Umberto Eco, Claude Levi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and many others.
But I would like to insist on two elements.
First a shortcoming. Why did not Nicholas McDowell use the rich corpus of such polemics he would have found in Ben Jonson for instance, but also Shakespeare, Marlowe, and others? The debate on the place and role of puritans, priests, and preachers was commonly present in some plays (Bartholomew Fair for instance). The use of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, or other continental European languages was commonplace and used as a comic tool in many plays before 1630 in the English Renaissance (The Alchemist is a caricature in that line). In the same way, he could have shown the effectiveness of this period in transforming the arts after the Restoration. Purcell and Handel widely use the heritage of the English Renaissance, particularly Shakespeare and Marlowe, but also produce many oratorios or operas based on the Bible with an essential reference to Saul, Belshazzar, David, and Solomon to show what a good king is, to show heavily that a general wins a battle when he has a good strategy, that this strategy comes from inside (the inner Light of the radicals) inspired by the Spirit and God, and that a good general thanks God after the battle because the victory is acknowledged as being the result of God’s inspiration. That would have tremendously reinforced Nicholas McDowell’s conclusion, with Milton, that this period produced a completely new humanism and conception of social, religious, and political life that will be the starting point of the Enlightenment in Europe: “There was little need of Voltairean ‘philosophes’ in the late seventeenth-century England – and perhaps no need of an ‘English Enlightenment’ at all” (p.181) This conclusion uses Milton as a spring box for the future. Milton was able to incorporate the debates, and particularly those carried by the Quakers, into his Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, to open a gate towards a society in which every individual would be free and inspired by God’s grace and their inner Light, guided by virtue into the discipline that would enable them to integrate the polity of society without in any way restraining pure and perfect reason. A man would then be saved by no predestination, or arbitrary decision from God, or an ever promised and never coming Doomsday. This is the «spiritualist materialism » (p.182) of the Quaker Gerrard Winstanley. This is also the promise of Goethe’s Faust II and Faust’s salvation through the use of his scientific and technical knowledge to produce, with the work of the people, the improvement of everyone’s lot. This is Milton’s trinity of Inner-Light/discipline/polity.
Then I would like to point out a tremendous enriching inspiration about history and change in any society that this book and method brings us. If it is the masses who make history, they have to have a dream as an objective, a dream that will give them the inner energy necessary for them to start moving mountains, and this dream will lead them to a future that has to be better than the present with more freedom for everyone, more responsibility for everyone in a more peaceful, tolerant, and open society. This dream is the inner Light of the religious radicals of the English Revolution, an inner Light that can only open men to the use of their human reason. This inner Light is also very close to the concept of Idéal du Moi or Phallus used by Jacques Lacan to explain what drives a person along the road of life. This could male us understand why some societies are changing and why some others look as if they were frozen. If there is no inner dream, there will be no drive towards any goal of any sort. This book could also be a tremendous inspiration to study old periods and arts in those periods. The method used here should be extended and systematized: that would enable us to better analyze and understand Romanesque art for instance, that art that is considered by so many as opaque and beyond reasonable grasping. That could create a real perspective for Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and all other Renaissance and post-Renaissance authors in England, and also to Defoe, Purcell, Handel, Blake, and many others after the Restoration, including the continental influence this English culture, particularly the Elizabethan drama, had in France or Germany.
“Although William Blake’s incorporation of eighteenth-century developments in the rational and historical treatment of Scripture into an enthusiastic cosmology warns against the acceptance of a Whig narrative of inevitable progress towards enlightenment, the de-Christianizing implication of Fisher’s rational attack on the sanctified status of Scripture are encapsulated by Thomas Paine in the Age of Reason (1794-5): ‘Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities and downright lies’.” (p.182)
This conclusion from Paine is a clear sign of the death of God that is to come with Hegel’s declaration about it. And this conclusion, in the light of Nicholas McDowell’s book, points out that religion is a cultural construction, and that faith is a personal, mental stand in front of the world and life, and thus has to be studied as such, and probably separated from the study of the church or churches that use this religion and this faith for its or their own reasons and objectives.
This book and its methodology could also enable us to understand popular arts in our time, or other times, as having a lot more depth than we often think, even if that depth is unconscious or subconscious or subliminal for the wide audiences of today’s cinema, popular best-selling literature, and popular music, to take only three examples. This book is an introduction to the only balanced and just analysis of cultural facts in any society. They are autonomous, meaning that they work with their own logic. They are rational, meaning this logic is the product of a reasonable and sensible attitude of the authors and artists, and we can only understand them properly if we start from this very inner logic. They may be articulated onto society, some elements coming from it and some elements reacting onto it, but they stand apart on their own feet. If they are articulated onto society, it’s because some in society use them as tools to reach their own objectives. All approaches that decide culture is nothing, but the result of social and political contradictions and some mirror reflection of social and political reality are wrong. Culture is the representation of the relation between man and the universe in the most general definitions of both terms, and this representation, this spiritual vision is absolutely indispensable for each man and all men to cope with their fate and with life.
This book is a revealing and thrilling monograph on the English Revolution. It scrutinizes the period (1630-1660) from a completely new point of view and opens a completely regenerated perspective. Before entering the book, it is necessary to express one regret: the numerous books studied in this monograph are listed with their initial publishing dates but not with present references. But this is detail after all, and we can rather easily find this information.
Nicholas McDowell starts with the commonplace stereotype about this period of English history. This stereotype comes from Thomas Edwards who fought at the time against the multiplication of religious approaches during the revolution with one essential argument: the presbyterian church and the religious establishment are supported by literate people, whereas all the heretics are religious heterodox groups of illiterate people expressing their artisan radicalism («illiterate mechanick persons, p.1; “cobblers, tinkers, pedlars, weavers, sow-gelders and chimney-sweepers”, p.38). Then Christopher Hill, after the Second World War in England, endorsed this point of view to support his Marxist approach that these various religious groups were the expression of the working class of the time (craftsmen, artisans, and shopkeepers) if not even the populace, hence the root of a deep democratic desire in England (“the most vigorous instance of plebeian opposition to the puritan ethic”, p.23). Nicholas McDowell picks this stereotype as a challenge and tries to prove it is completely misguided by ideological and social interest on the side of Thomas Edwards and by ideological if not even political interest on the side of Christopher Hill, though Nicholas McDowell does not enter any polemics with the latter.
Nicholas McDowell studies these radicals in great detail, particularly the Levellers, the Ranters, the Quakers, and a few others along with these. His approach is systematic. He looks for those who were the inspirers of these groups, the main spokespeople of them, and shows that they were practically all of them literate, university educated, hence learned scholars. Richard Overton and William Walwyn for the Levellers (Chapter 3), Abiezer Coppe and Daniel Featley for the Ranters (Chapter 4), Samuel Fisher, William Penn, and Robert Rich for the Quakers (Chapter 5), John Rogers for the Fifth Monarchists (Chapter 4 and 5). Milton will be used in various sections of the book, particularly in the Epilogue. Nicholas McDowell studies many more people along the way, particularly Hobbes, Locke, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Spinoza, though in fewer details. These radicals are shown as having a good education, received in grammar schools and universities, and as having held, for some of them, positions in these universities. They are highly literate in Latin, Greek, Hebrew (for some of them), and both classical literature and biblical studies. Thus, the stereotype does not hold. This argument is nevertheless a little bit weak because it does not say anything about the followers of these leaders. We do not know what the members of the Levellers, Ranters, and Quakers were, at least from this book. The book is also clear that the pamphlets and various books studied here were intended to address the learned scholars of the universities, hence they had to be in a language that was that of university deans and professors. What’s more, this book can only study what has survived, hence only printed books or manuscripts. Their language may not be at all the language used by grass and root Levellers, Ranters, and Quakers. But I think these objections are rather easy and superficial because of the other aspects and methodological axioms of the book.
The first great innovation in the field is to look at what was before. He finds out that universities in the 1630s were overpopulated and that they produced a great number of learned scholars that could not find positions in society. Hence there was a high level of discontentment among those who were dropped along the way. One study is missing here: what kind of students came to the grammar schools and the universities in those years? Were they all coming from the upper classes, the nobility, and the richest merchants, or did some come from the lower classes, or at least the middle class of small merchants and artisans? We have one or two mentions of some poor students who were sizars at the universities: a sizar was a student who received an allowance toward college expenses and who originally acted as a servant to other students in return for this allowance. Richard Overton was one in Cambridge for instance. This phenomenon is not studied though it would probably reveal the improvement of social and economic conditions in England after Elizabeth and under the Stuarts. It would also reveal that, despite the absence of any planification, the English society had greater needs in scholars, many of them being priests in the Anglican Church of the time. It would finally reveal that the lower middle class was making an effort to promote their children in society. This led to a problem: “Thomas Nashe warned of the dangers to the stability of Church and State posed by disaffected scholars” (p.10). Nicholas McDowell shows how the 1630s already contained some premises to the coming puritan revolution. In other words, this revolution, and what the author consistently calls the «regicide » did not come from nowhere.
The second innovation is, in fact, a methodological revolution in itself. Nicholas McDowell applies methods that we generally find in anthropology to analyze the very texts of these revolutionaries. He tries to understand the value of the words, phrases, and ideas in the social, political, and religious context as well as in the general literary, rhetorical, philosophical, and ideological context. This leads him to a complete reassessment of many assertions. Let us take a cluster of such assertions: the radicals were illiterate because they were against education, Latin, and other scholarly elements of that type. The author studies the educational conditions: the imposed study of Latin through Lily’s grammar book that was the only one authorized in schools. This grammar book is built in such a way that it informs the students with a mental architecture that is seen and understood as the foundation of a social, political, and religious order. “Lily’s grammar can be described as the foundation text of the intellectual culture of early modern England.” (p.100) Lily’s grammar is coaching the students into obedience, religious assimilated orthodoxy, and hierarchical respect. Violence and bodily punishments are widely used to correct the mistakes by beating and humiliating the students in front of their fellow students, by the way an all-male environment since education is not for women. This grammar is systematically using examples that center the language on the master as a representation of the teacher, the King, and the Church, eventually God. It is systematically seen and graphically shown as ternary meaning the Trinity. We then understand why some radicals will speak of «grammatical tyranny » (p.108) not against grammar per se, nor even Latin per se, but against the manipulation of grammar and Latin by imposing only one authorized approach (Lily’s), by using violence to impose correct learning and by using this grammar book to manipulate the minds of the students. Then it is associated with the Book of Psalms that has to be memorized. And beyond this Book of Psalms, he studies the ABC book used to teach how to read to plain people. This ABC book only took religious elements, hence teaching how to read and at the same time imposing a catechism of the Christian religion as seen from the religious, political, and social establishment’s point of view. This leads to another remark: about one eighth (half a million copies) of the population (four million people) possessed this ABC Book, hence probably half of the population had access to it, showing that the population was a lot more literate (in the vernacular and religious orthodoxy) than we can think but a literacy that was acquired along with religious orthodox principles.
This education in grammar schools and at universities is thus based on Latin for four or five years, then the Book of Psalms and the Bible (King James I’s version of course) from the very start and all along, then Latin culture, Greek, some Hebrew in later years. This education inculcates obedience, a sense of the social hierarchy (at the top of which some will find themselves sooner or later, and the others will be its privileged servants, particularly in the church), the conception that the Bible is the word of God himself and hence is absolute truth and the conception that the church is the spiritual and ideological warden of the social order of the country. Nicholas McDowell demonstrates how the rejection of education is not the rejection of all education but of this education in all its elements seen as alienating. Most of the radicals studied in this book were for another type of education, with variations among them but one essential common point: religious toleration and freedom. It is then clear why Thomas Edwards, a Presbyterian, was against these sects and radical movements: they attacked the social system in its very architectural heart.
But most of these radicals go a lot further. Since they are scholars and educated people, they use their own knowledge and education to attack the educational institution, the religious orthodoxy of the church (the presbyterian church after the civil war), and society as a whole. Nicholas McDowell shows how the language of these radicals, in its references and its rhetoric, is a constant allusion to and perversion of the pedagogical language of the universities with numerous references to the culture that they have tried to conquer on their own: classical of course, but also continental (Rabelais, Montaigne, Spinoza) and Renaissance. They use an essential weapon: ridicule. They turn upside down the official language, which makes it look at least weird and its arguments irrational. This study is pushed to the finest details and is particularly enlightening, at times funny, for instance, the addition of the “Lunatick mood” (p.104) by Coppe to the other Latin moods. These radical books are thus like knots in a network of affiliations and derivations. They are in that line inspired by Saint Paul and 1Corinthians 1:19 : “I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing all the learning of the learned.” (Jerusalem Bible). Their main principle that the Bible is not to be accepted as the only source of divine light, that the Bible may be tainted by many successive acts of copy, translating, printing, etc., that divine truth has to be understood as the descending of the Spirit in everyone giving them inner Light, leads them to consider the wise and the learned and the powerful (the King, the priests, the scholars) as being wrong and fools, and to consider themselves as inspired by the Spirit, hence being the true wise and true learned people. They just transfer this religious approach into their own rhetoric and produce the style that is often considered as ranting (meaning chaotic), popular and plebeian (in spite of the heavy sprinkling of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, plus all the cultural quotations and allusions), in a word heretic because it questions the established order, even after the revolution and under the Republic.
This method of culturally contextualizing the documents under scrutiny is extremely important because it is in agreement with many other approaches, and it can open tremendous intellectual doors. We think of Umberto Eco, Claude Levi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and many others.
But I would like to insist on two elements.
First a shortcoming. Why did not Nicholas McDowell use the rich corpus of such polemics he would have found in Ben Jonson for instance, but also Shakespeare, Marlowe, and others? The debate on the place and role of puritans, priests, and preachers was commonly present in some plays (Bartholomew Fair for instance). The use of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, or other continental European languages was commonplace and used as a comic tool in many plays before 1630 in the English Renaissance (The Alchemist is a caricature in that line). In the same way, he could have shown the effectiveness of this period in transforming the arts after the Restoration. Purcell and Handel widely use the heritage of the English Renaissance, particularly Shakespeare and Marlowe, but also produce many oratorios or operas based on the Bible with an essential reference to Saul, Belshazzar, David, and Solomon to show what a good king is, to show heavily that a general wins a battle when he has a good strategy, that this strategy comes from inside (the inner Light of the radicals) inspired by the Spirit and God, and that a good general thanks God after the battle because the victory is acknowledged as being the result of God’s inspiration. That would have tremendously reinforced Nicholas McDowell’s conclusion, with Milton, that this period produced a completely new humanism and conception of social, religious, and political life that will be the starting point of the Enlightenment in Europe: “There was little need of Voltairean ‘philosophes’ in the late seventeenth-century England – and perhaps no need of an ‘English Enlightenment’ at all” (p.181) This conclusion uses Milton as a spring box for the future. Milton was able to incorporate the debates, and particularly those carried by the Quakers, into his Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, to open a gate towards a society in which every individual would be free and inspired by God’s grace and their inner Light, guided by virtue into the discipline that would enable them to integrate the polity of society without in any way restraining pure and perfect reason. A man would then be saved by no predestination, or arbitrary decision from God, or an ever promised and never coming Doomsday. This is the «spiritualist materialism » (p.182) of the Quaker Gerrard Winstanley. This is also the promise of Goethe’s Faust II and Faust’s salvation through the use of his scientific and technical knowledge to produce, with the work of the people, the improvement of everyone’s lot. This is Milton’s trinity of Inner-Light/discipline/polity.
Then I would like to point out a tremendous enriching inspiration about history and change in any society that this book and method brings us. If it is the masses who make history, they have to have a dream as an objective, a dream that will give them the inner energy necessary for them to start moving mountains, and this dream will lead them to a future that has to be better than the present with more freedom for everyone, more responsibility for everyone in a more peaceful, tolerant, and open society. This dream is the inner Light of the religious radicals of the English Revolution, an inner Light that can only open men to the use of their human reason. This inner Light is also very close to the concept of Idéal du Moi or Phallus used by Jacques Lacan to explain what drives a person along the road of life. This could male us understand why some societies are changing and why some others look as if they were frozen. If there is no inner dream, there will be no drive towards any goal of any sort. This book could also be a tremendous inspiration to study old periods and arts in those periods. The method used here should be extended and systematized: that would enable us to better analyze and understand Romanesque art for instance, that art that is considered by so many as opaque and beyond reasonable grasping. That could create a real perspective for Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and all other Renaissance and post-Renaissance authors in England, and also to Defoe, Purcell, Handel, Blake, and many others after the Restoration, including the continental influence this English culture, particularly the Elizabethan drama, had in France or Germany.
“Although William Blake’s incorporation of eighteenth-century developments in the rational and historical treatment of Scripture into an enthusiastic cosmology warns against the acceptance of a Whig narrative of inevitable progress towards enlightenment, the de-Christianizing implication of Fisher’s rational attack on the sanctified status of Scripture are encapsulated by Thomas Paine in the Age of Reason (1794-5): ‘Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities and downright lies’.” (p.182)
This conclusion from Paine is a clear sign of the death of God that is to come with Hegel’s declaration about it. And this conclusion, in the light of Nicholas McDowell’s book, points out that religion is a cultural construction, and that faith is a personal, mental stand in front of the world and life, and thus has to be studied as such, and probably separated from the study of the church or churches that use this religion and this faith for its or their own reasons and objectives.
This book and its methodology could also enable us to understand popular arts in our time, or other times, as having a lot more depth than we often think, even if that depth is unconscious or subconscious or subliminal for the wide audiences of today’s cinema, popular best-selling literature, and popular music, to take only three examples. This book is an introduction to the only balanced and just analysis of cultural facts in any society. They are autonomous, meaning that they work with their own logic. They are rational, meaning this logic is the product of a reasonable and sensible attitude of the authors and artists, and we can only understand them properly if we start from this very inner logic. They may be articulated onto society, some elements coming from it and some elements reacting onto it, but they stand apart on their own feet. If they are articulated onto society, it’s because some in society use them as tools to reach their own objectives. All approaches that decide culture is nothing, but the result of social and political contradictions and some mirror reflection of social and political reality are wrong. Culture is the representation of the relation between man and the universe in the most general definitions of both terms, and this representation, this spiritual vision is absolutely indispensable for each man and all men to cope with their fate and with life.
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