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God As Androgyne: Jane Lead's Rewriting of the Destiny of Nature

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God As Androgyne: Jane Lead's Rewriting of the Destiny of Nature Quidditas Volume 24 2003 Article 2 2003 God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’s Rewriting of the Destiny of Nature Sylvia Bowerbank McMaster University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Renaissance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Bowerbank, Sylvia (2003) "God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’s Rewriting of the Destiny of Nature," Quidditas: Vol. 24 , Article 2. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol24/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quidditas by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’s Rewriting of the Destiny of Nature Sylvia Bowerbank McMaster University ANE LEAD [OR LEADE] (1624–1704) was one of the few seventeenth- century Englishwomen bold and radical enough to engage in “God- J talk”—to use Rosemary Ruether’s term.1 When the power of the English king and church was restored in 1660, radical millenarians were repressed and had to face that the English revolution—“God’s cause”— had failed politically, at least temporarily.2 In her recuperation of God’s cause, Lead argued that the revolution, properly understood, would be “intrinsical.”3 In her prophecies, Lead unites a radical hermeneutics of Scripture with Jacob Boehme’s concept of God as androgyne in order to reconfigure both God and divine history. According to Lead, Wisdom’s disciples and eventually all of creation were to be—to use a Behmenist key- word—“tinctured” by the Virgin Wisdom’s creating power, until a critical mass was made ready for revolutionary change. The license for this strat- egy was found in Scripture, especially Proverbs and the Books of Wisdom, in which a Divine Feminine voice of Wisdom speaks directly: I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.… When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth… (Prov. 8:1, 22, 29– 32). 1Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Bos- ton: Beacon Press, 1983). 2The idea of the failure of “God’s cause” is found in Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 199–212. 3Jane Lead, The Enochian Walks with God, Found out by a Spiritual-Traveller, whose Face Towards Mount-Sion Above was set. [Gen. 5. verse. 22] ; an Experimental Account of what was known, Seen, and met withal there (1694), 6. QUIDDITAS 24 (2003) 5 6 Sylvia Bowerbank Lead’s God is rooted in the desire for a just and compassionate universe, in theological concepts based on the rhythms of woman’s body, and spiri- tual practices devised by Lead and her circle.4 What made the Philadelphian movement unique was the primacy it afforded women’s theological disclosures. As the foremost prophet of the Philadelphians and the writer of its foundational texts, Jane Lead spent the last thirty years of her eighty-year life reinterpreting certain passages from the Bible in order to tease out the voice and presence of a hidden part of God, the Virgin Wisdom.5 In her first Message to the Philadelphian Society (1696), Lead points to the centrality of “woman clothed with the sun” passage in the founding of the Philadelphian community: according to John’s Prophecy, a Virgin Woman is designed of a pure Spirit, and of a bright Sun-like Body, all impregnated with the Holy Ghost, that shall travail to bring forth the First-born, that will multiply and propagate such a Body, as shall be filled with the Spirit, Power, and Temple Glory of the Lamb of God.6 The Philadelphian message was especially germane and empowering for women. According to one scholar, so many ladies joined the society during the late 1690s that it became “derisively known as the Taffeta Soci- ety.”7 The movement also attracted talented and learned men, the most important of whom were Francis Lee (1660–1719) and Richard Roach (1661–1730), both graduates of St. John’s College, Oxford. Lee not only became Jane Lead’s spiritual son, even marrying her widowed daughter to secure the relationship, he also co-founded the Philadelphian Society with Lead, in 1697, in order to propagate her ideas systematically, through organizing public meetings and publishing her writings. Reverend Rich- 4This argument is developed in Sylvia Bowerbank,“Millennial Bodies: The Birth of New Nature in the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 5Important studies of Jane Lead’s work are included in Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Catherine F. Smith, “Jane Lead’s Wisdom: Women and Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature., ed. Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 55–63; eadem, “Jane Lead: The Feminist Mind and Art of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Mystic,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Tradi- tions, ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979): 183–203; Joanne Magnani Sperle, “God’s Healing Angel: A Biography of Jane Lead” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Kent State University, 1985); and Nils Thune, The Beh- menists and the Philadelphians: A Contribution to the Study of English Mysticism in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1948). 6Jane Lead, A Message to the Philadelphian Society, Whithersoever dispersed over the whole Earth (London, 1696), 12. 7Lee C.E. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism from the Restoration to the Revolution, 1660–1688 (1931; repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968), 307. Unfortu- nately, Whiting gives no source for this comment. God As Androgyne 7 ard Roach, rector of St. Augustine’s, Hackney, was an equally steadfast spiritual son of Jane Lead. He acknowledged in his “Divine Communica- tion,” that, although the Virgin Wisdom of God might condescend to dis- play herself to men, she especially manifested herself intrinsically to women: “And hence favours will be indulged to the females of this day, both virgin and others, of like nature with that of the Virgin Mary, but in a more internal and spiritual way.”8 The Philadelphian vision is a legacy of hope, but it is built on the spiritualization of body and earth and on the eschatological motifs of Revelation. What does the Christian mystical tra- dition have to offer to current debates over the destiny of the earth and its inhabitants? It remains important to study the details of the intellectual struggle of the Philadelphians, as well as the strategies they used to bring into effect a distinctive concept of an androgyne God and a corresponding history of nature receptive to women’s desire for a compassionate and just reality. In fact, the very strangeness of their ideas makes visible the range and limits of what has now become acceptable “nature” for us. Many educated men of the Restoration period, whether theologians or philosophers, agreed that God no longer intervened miraculously to change nature. The lesson learned from English revolution was that entrenched hierarchies of power, whether in the church or state, would be challenged and disrupted if God’s love was allowed to range indiscriminately and dangerously among people of all stations. “God” was increasingly restricted to operating only as Providence, according to set and knowable natural laws. Such educated men thus did their part to depreciate enthusiasm as a dangerous conta- gion.9 God’s intervention in history was to be considered a unique occur- rence of the apostolic period. With the repression of prophecy, there were no openings for women’s theological discoveries, even among the Quak- ers.10 Nevertheless, especially during the 1690s, Jane Lead and the Phila- delphians had some short-lived success in publishing their tracts and in promulgating their concept of an androgyne God with revolutionary plans. Chief among Lead’s contributions was her reiteration of radical compassion as the cosmic principle of Divine interaction with nature. By envisioning God as an androgyne, with Virgin Wisdom hidden eternally 8Roach’s “Divine Communication” is reproduced in a patchwork collection of Phila- delphian pieces, published as Mrs. Jane Lead, Divine Revelations and Prophecies (Notting- ham: H. Wild, 1830), 81–88. 9See George Williamson, “The Restoration Revolt Against Enthusiasm,” Studies in Phi- lology 30 (1933): 571–603. Two well known philosophical attacks were Henry More, Enthu- siasmus Triumphatus (1662) and John Locke, “Of Enthusiasm,” in An Essay on Human Understanding, 2 vols. (1690; repr. New York: Dover, 1959), 2:429–31, 434, 436, 438. 10For the use of “God” as a mechanism of social control to encounter radical spiritual- ity in late eighteenth-century England, see Stuart Peterfreund, “Blake, Priestley, and the ‘Gnostic Moment,’” in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990),142–43. 8 Sylvia Bowerbank within him, Lead highlighted compassion as an essential co-existing qual- ity of God the Father (not just the Son). Her aim was to discover a method by which earthly bodies might be made “agreeable” and “answerable” to the rising light of Divine Wisdom who was to remake nature, subject by subject, in Her own compassionate image.11 Christianity has bequeathed to the West a conflicted legacy regarding the nature of God and divine interaction with the earth and its inhabitants.
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