Religious Materialism in Early Enlightenment Britain, 1640-1715
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Flesh Redeemed: Religious Materialism in Early Enlightenment Britain, 1640-1715 By Samuel Robinson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ethan Shagan, Chair Professor Jonathan Sheehan Professor James Grantham Turner Summer 2017 © Samuel Robinson 2017 All Rights Reserved 1 Abstract Flesh Redeemed: Religious Materialism in Early Enlightenment Britain, 1640-1715 by Samuel Robinson Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Ethan Shagan, Chair This dissertation examines how early modern Britons came to deem the material world as worthy of attention, care, and redemption. It traces a broad current of philosophical and theological speculation regarding material bodies that began in the 1640s. In a series of case studies, I chart how a range of formulations regarding the nature of corporeal bodies and matter increasingly served as a resource for theological discourse, philosophical debate, and popular belief in the late seventeenth century. I argue that heterodox religious ideas in the mid-seventeenth century served as an engine of change, driving early modern Britons to rethink how divinity, the soul, and the material world interacted. By focusing on the relationship between divinity and earthbound corporeality, this dissertation reframes heterodox religious ideas, often relegated to the historical margins, as in fact generative of modern conceptions of the human body and the material world. In the following study, I trace the material linkages that connected religious belief and early modern philosophies of embodied substance. The project follows changing early modern interest in the material world as a range of thinkers reconfigured the perceived interaction and interpellation of spiritual, corporeal, and divine substances. Redeeming the flesh—discovering the nature of the body and the means to God’s sanctifying grace—continually motivated a variety of investigations into the nature of body, soul, and spirit. But the Christian project of corporeal redemption drove early modern interests beyond the specific human body to engage with questions of cosmology, vitalism, and the nature of knowledge. This was part of a new willingness of early moderns to probe into scriptural mysteries to better understand the human body, but also to extend these questions to wider material processes and entities. i Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii List of Abbreviations iii Introduction: A Quest of a Substance 1 Part I: Theories of Body, Soul, and Spirit 1. The English Revolution and the End of Transcendence 15 2. Flesh, God, and Spiritual Realism in the Age of the Ranters 39 3. Dark Materials: Theosophy and the Origins of Matter 69 Part II: Experiencing Religious Embodiment 4. The Problem of Flesh: Vegetarianism and Edible Matters 95 5. The Rise and Fall of Quaker Spiritualism 124 6. Personal Gods: Muggletonians, Hobbes, and Corporeal Metaphysics 148 Conclusion 185 ii Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to acknowledge the encouragement and support that I received while writing this study. I’m especially fortunate to have benefited from the guidance of Ethan Shagan, who has provided incisive criticism and advice throughout the entire process. His sharp insights and helpful candor moved the project past numerous obstacles that might have otherwise capsized the entire effort. Jonathan Sheehan deserves special mention and thanks for continually providing friendly advice, helpful suggestions, and incisive criticism. James Turner gave sage counsel and deserves my sincere thanks for holding my prose to a high standard. My punctuation has benefited enormously from his sharp pen. I have sincere gratitude to the numerous scholars who offered encouragement, advice, and guidance over the years. I am particularly thankful to Stephanie Bahr, Purushottoma Bilmoria, Thomas Brady, David Como, Jan de Vries, Robert Harkins, Tim Harris, Ariel Hessyaon, Victoria Kahn, Christopher Ocker, John Paulas, Priya Satia, Julia Shatz, Nigel Smith, Alan Tansman, James Vernon, and Timothy Wright. I’m especially grateful to Timothy Fehler, Stephen O’Neill, David Spear, and James Edwards for first encouraging me to pursue historical research. I’ve had the great privilege of presenting portions of this study to scholarly groups in England and the United States. I would especially like to thank audiences at the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, the Revisiting Early Modern Prophecies conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, the Berkeley conference on Early Modern Peripheries, the Muilenburg-Koenig workshop at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, the University of Oslo REDO project, and the Futures of Intellectual History Graduate Conference. I am also immensely grateful to the institutions that provided generous financial support. A grant from the UC Berkeley Student Mentoring and Research Teams (SMART) program enabled early work on the project. My sincere thanks to Edward Everett, who worked on the team to collect digital sources and brainstorm case studies. The Center for British Studies at Berkeley funded research in the UK in the fall of 2013, as well as early efforts to write up the dissertation in 2014. Additionally, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion generously funded a summer of research in Oxford and London in 2014. This project would have been far weaker had it not benefited from the conversation, criticism, and interdisciplinary exposure enabled by a fellowship at the Townsend Center for the Humanities during 2015-2016 academic year. Additionally, I must note that dissertation research would have been impossible without the assistance of archivists and staff members at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, Dr. Williams’s Library, the Lambeth Palace Library, the London Metropolitan Archives, the National Archives in Kew, and the London Library of the Society of Friends. I’m thankful to the Berkeley colleagues who joined innumerable Traffic Circle Lunches outside Dwinelle Hall, which functioned as low-key therapy for neurotic would-be academics. Particular thanks must be given to Chris Casey, Katherine Harper, Jason Rozumalski, and Tehila Sasson, the original Brit-Clique, for offering words of encouragement, critical feedback, and continual friendship at the all stages of the dissertation. Additionally, I’m indebted to the support of the global running community, including the Breakfast Club, Highgate Harriers, Inside Trail Racing, Transports, Salomon Running, and the ever-sassy That’s Fine Track Club. Finally, I must express my deepest gratitude to my family for their incredible support over the last decade. The Robinsons, the Whites, and the Smiths have provided unconditional love iii and kindness over the years. Above all, I owe the most to Caitlin Smith. I am staggered by her compassion and love, and I am forever grateful for her support and patience. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Lavius Arad Robinson, Jr. who steadfastly believed that study of the past was a source of both personal and social strength. iv Abbreviations BL British Library Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford CUL Cambridge University Library FHL Friends House Library ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, September 2013 1 Introduction A Quest of a Substance In 1650 Thomas Vaughan tried to understand both God and man through his vegetable harvest. Having trained in Oxford and “rambled over all those inventions which the folly of men called sciences,” the Welsh philosopher despaired over his inability to understand God. He initially reasoned that man’s created connection to God might allow, through introspection, some understanding of divinity itself. But he realized that man was fallen and had lost innate knowledge about the wider world. This led Vaughan to his garden where he “noticed a great many vegetables [growing] fresh and beauteous in their time.” The vegetables gave him pause. They led him to think about the origins of the plants: “When I looked back on their original, they were no such thing as vegetables.” Vaughan remembered that the plants had of course grown from a different form—seeds containing “præxistent matter” that had been vitalized into vegetables. Vaughan stumbled onto a new set of questions: What enabled this growth? Could one understand “being” through the changes and transmutations of life in the material world? Since God was “the only proper immediate agent which actuates this matter,” Vaughan extrapolated that it was necessary to understand God’s seminal relationship to creation more generally. Thus spurred, Vaughan declared he was “now in a quest of a substance”—a search for the vibrant connections between man, matter, and the divine. If the substance of the world could be determined, man might find a path toward divine redemption.1 Vaughan’s quest epitomized a wider religious problem of embodied substance—a complex of questions, intellectual curiosities, and cultural anxieties regarding corporeal bodies and their relationship to God. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, a surge of intense religious and philosophical speculation into the nature of matter, spirit, soul, and God arose in early modern Britain. Scholars, ministers, and other writers became newly curious about the qualities, attributes,