A Seventeenth-Century Theology of Liberation: Some

1 Edward Terrar, “A Seventeenth-Century Theology of Liberation: Some Antinomian and Labor Theory of Value Aspects of the English Catholic Laboring People's Beliefs During the Period of the English Civil War, 1639-1640.” This article originally appeared in The Journal of Religious History (Sydney, Australia), (June 1993), vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 297-321. (DM06.01.02a; 18c-ar7.doc; box 3.19, pt. 5). This article is about the social theology of the the English Catholic laboring people in the mid- seventeenth century, a large but, until recently, not well studied sector of the English Catholic community. 1 The article draws upon and supplements the new county studies by isolating and analyzing several significant aspects of the Catholics' beliefs that emerge from a review of the county studies. Just as the county studies have resulted in a interpretive revision about the composition of the post-reformation English Catholic community, so this article highlights the need for revising the understanding of the community's social theology. The picture of the Catholics that is reflected in the new county studies is a community of mainly laboring people living in the north and west of England and in the five major towns and cities of London, Norwich, Bristol, Newcastle, and York.2 Anti-Catholic persecution was not significant in their lives. Most were not convicted recusants. They were too poor to prosecute for recusancy and probably the great majority were church Catholics, meaning they partially or occasionally conformed to the established church.3 In their thinking, the persecution in their lives was not so much religious as economic and it came from Protestant and Catholic landlords. During the Civil War, the Catholic community took the side of the Independents, not that of the Royalists or of the Presbyterian sector of the parliamentary party. This picture of mainly laboring people turns on its head the view that prevailed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century about the community being predominantly gentry, Royalist, and dominated by anti-Catholic persecution. The two aspects of the community's theological history that will be of interest in this article are their antinomianism, meaning literally those "against the law," and their labor theory of value. The seventeenth-century antinomians in large measure rejected both the spiritual and material basis of the established order. Antinomian levelers and their Catholic counterparts tended to view religious, economic, and political value in terms of labor. As will be seen in their pamphlets and activities, one 2 finds the idea that it was God's plan that since laboring people produced wealth, they should enjoy it, not landlords and monopolists. The levelers did not wish to abolish property rights. Some even complained that they were "levelers, falsely so called."4 One pamphlet stated, "We profess we never had it in our thoughts to level men's estates, it being the utmost of our aim that the commonwealth be reduced to such a pass that every man may with as much security as may be enjoy his property."5 A. L. Morton points out that at the time laboring people saw the small property of the small man menaced "not by the poor but by the rich--by monopolists, greedy entrepreneurs, and enclosing landlords."6 It was against these that security was needed. The levelers represented and appealed in the main to the small and medium producers. The levelers' social theology contrasted with that of the gentry, who taught that God wanted obedience to the established order with any redistribution of wealth toward its producers to come in the next life. In the gentry's doctrine God had a special love for their class, not for laboring people.7 Antinomianism. The antinomian aspect of the community's social theology will be taken up first. Four preliminary points need observation. First, antinomianism did not mean anarchism, despite the contentions of those who opposed the antinomians. The antinomians did not intend to remove the essence of the Mosaic law, that is, its political and moral content, but rather to clear the way for its realization. Second, the antinomians of the period did not generally use the term "antinomian" to describe their doctrines. It was a term of abuse used by their enemies. But scholars now use it to designate them. Third, not all historians would agree that antinomianism was a material, that is, a political and economic, as well as a spiritual doctrine. But there is no lack of authority for the materialist interpretation and it seems to best describe the developments within the Catholic community. 8 Illustrative of those who give antinomianism a materialist interpretation is Christopher Hill. He points out that the term meant the repudiation of "all human laws, not just Mosaic law."9 The Presbyterian-dominated Parliament in 1646 called treasonous the teaching of antinomianism and enacted capital punishment against it.10 The Presbyterian gentry did not fear antinomianism because of 3 otherworldly considerations, but because, as occurred in Pride's purge in 1648, the antinomian Independents were seeking political power at the expense of the Presbyterians. Just a few years earlier the Presbyterian gentry in Parliament had themselves professed the antinomian doctrine in their battle with the crown. But once they achieved victory in 1646, they sought to exclude its further use to, among others, the laboring people who opposed not only the crown but the landlord order as well. A fourth and last preliminary point is that the term antinomian is most frequently used to describe Protestants, but scholars do use it for Catholics. For example, Jodi Bilinkoff in her study of religious reform in sixteenth-century Spain calls "antinomian" the teachings of Maria Vela y Cueto.11 James Gaffney labels the program of the English Benedictine priest Augustine Baker (d. 1641) "a virtual antinomianism predicated on the belief that nothing is finally normative for human behavior but the personal experience of what is taken to be a divine inspiration."12 This article suggests that the concept of antinomianism can also be fruitfully used in connection with Catholic laboring people. Some of the political, economic, and religious programs promoted by the community at the local and national level did not differ from those of the levelers. There were not as many Catholic antinomian pamphlets as there were Protestant, but they nevertheless had a presence in the community. At the top of the list of perhaps 5 or 10 Catholics who wrote such pamphlets was the secular priest, Thomas White. 13 White did well in terms of being published and reprinted. This was evidently because he articulated what many people believed and patronized. According to John Bossy, White was the intellectual leader of the 450 secular clergy in England during the period.14 That he was representative of the thinking of laboring people was testified to at the time by the Royalist Robert Pugh. Pugh complained that White took the side of the "meanest of the commons, against the just rights of the king, the nobility, and a great part of the gentry."15 Similarly Roger Coke was upset because White spoke for those with "plough-holding" hands.16 One of the recurrent themes in White's pamphlets was that obedience to the established order in church and state was not God's will. The Protestant antinomian Thomas Collier wrote in 1646 that "believers are a law unto themselves."17 White taught in like manner, "It is a fallacious principle, though maintained by many, that obedience is one of the most eminent virtues and that it is the 4 greatest sacrifice we can offer to God, to renounce our own wills, because our will is the chiefest good we have."18 Besides questioning the connection between God and obedience, other antinomian themes prominent in White's pamphlets included universal grace, an emphasis on the Holy Spirit, and eschatology.19 Each theme had political-economic ramifications that were detrimental to the landlord order. For example, the gentry denied the universal grace doctrine because the doctrine meant they and their institutions were not God's conduit of grace; they were not "all things to all men."20 White's pamphlets and the antinomianism of the community had a material as well as a spiritual dimension. Two significant examples of where the community gave concrete form to their material antinomianism need mention. One example is revealed in the county studies that picture the relative unimportance within the community of anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism and the continuing existence of church Catholicism. When the king was in power, church Catholics lied in taking the oath of supremacy, which acknowledged the king as head of the church. Then the Catholics lied in taking Parliament's oath of abjuration when that oath was imposed after 1642.21 Church Catholicism was a continuing aspect of the community in England and its existence was illegal in the eyes of both the established church and Rome. Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters of 1656 blamed Rome and the Jesuits for teaching the doctrine of equivocation, that is, that it was licit to lie under oath. But Rome and the Jesuits were teaching just the opposite. Pope Innocent X in 1649 denounced equivocation because it was "ecclesiastically subversive."22 If the pope had had his way, Catholics would not have taken the oaths or attended Anglican services. They would have shed their blood for Roman clericalism. The tendency of the English Catholics to be a law unto themselves extended to their clergy. The 450 secular clergy in England governed themselves through their dean and chapter, which was a body of elected representatives.

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