Evelyn Underhill in Immanence pp 82

And shall the soul thereby Unto the All draw nigh ? Shall it avail to plumb the mystic deeps Of flowery beauty, scale the icy steps Of perilous thought, thy hidden Face to find, Or tread the starry paths to the utmost verge of the sky ? Nay, groping dull and blind Within the sheltering dimness of thy wings– Shade that their splendour flings Athwart eternity– We, out of age-long wandering, but come Back to our Father's heart, where now we are at home.

Satan in IV or V, talking about hell where I am. Cite Boehme directly

" We are," says Jacob Boehme, who belongs in this line of Spiritual Reformers, " of God's substance : we have heaven and hell in ourselves." 2"

"Most of these men were in revolt against scholasticism and all its works. They speak often very slightingly of " Reasoning," the attempt to find a way to ultimate Realities by logical syllogisms, but they, nevertheless, believed great things of man's rational and moral nature. They are often confused and cloudy in their explicit accounts of this ultimate moral and rational nature.They everywhere indicate the conceptual limitations under which even those who were the most emancipated from tradition were compelled to do their thinking in that age. They could not break the age-long spell and mighty fascination with which the Adam story and the Garden of Eden picture had held the Christian world. They were convinced, however, that the Augustinian interpretation of the fall, with its entail of an indelible taint upon the race forever, was an inadequate, if not an untrue account, though they could not quite arrive at an insight which enabled them to speak with authority on the fundamental nature of man." pp 24

Milton's audience

"By a shift of view, as revolutionary as that from Ptolemaic astronomy to the verifiable insight of Copernicus, they passed over from the dogma of a Christ who came to appease an angry God, and to found a Church as an ark of safety in a doomed world, to the living apprehension of a Christ — verifiable in experience —who revealed to them, in terms of His own nature, an eternally tender, loving, suffering, self-giving God, and who made them see, with the enlightened eyes of their heart, the divine possibilities of human life." pp xl

Milton adopts this eschatology and develops it in the context of epic mythological tradition

"Their revised eschatology was due, at least partly, to this altered account of the character of God, but it was also partly due to their profound tendency to deal with all matters of the soul in terms of life and vital processes. Heaven and Hell were no longer thought of as terminal places, where the saved were everlastingly rewarded and the lost forever punished. Heaven and Hell were for them inward conditions, states of the soul, the normal gravitation of the Spirit toward its chosen centre. Heaven and Hell cease, therefore, to be eschatological in the true sense of the word ; they become present realities, tendencies of life, ways of reacting to\vard the things of deepest import. Heaven, whether here or in any other world, is the condition of complete adjustment to the holy will of God ; it is joy in the prevalence of His goodness ; peace through harmonious correspondence with His purposes ; the formation of a spirit of love, the creation of an inward nature that loves what God loves and enjoys what He enjoys." xlviii

This is what Empson (the faithless agitator) sounds like

""This is the acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful ; that He is j ust who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that ... He seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of love. // by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be no need of faith." There could, in his thought, be no salvation for man, no hope, and no joy, until some way of escape was found from the stern judgments of this angry and wrathful God. " pp 10

Hans Denck and anabaptists

"HANS DENCK has generally been enrolled among the Anabaptists, and it is possible to use that name of scorn with such a latitude and looseness that it includes not only Denck but all the sixteenth-century exponents of a free, inward religion. Anabaptism has often been treated as a sort of broad banyan-tree which flourished exuberantly and shot out far-reaching branches of very varied characters, but which held in one organic unity all the branches that found soil and took root. A name of such looseness and covering capacity is, however, of little worth, and it would promote historical accuracy if we should confine the term to those who opposed infant baptism and who insisted instead upon adult baptism, not as a means of Grace, but as a visible sign of the covenant of man with God. " pp 17

Hans Denck

Solitarie way

He says nearly the same thing again in the little book, Vom Gesetz Gottes : " He who does not know God from God Himself does not ever know Him." This central insight of Denck's religious faith that God and man are not completely sundered, but meet, as he says,2 in the deeps of ourselves, is grounded upon the fact of experience that there is within us a supra-individual Reality which becomes revealed to us sometimes as a Light, sometimes as a Word, sometimes as a Presence or environing Spirit, This testimony is Denck's main contribution, and we must next see how he sets it forth." pp 24

Perplexing Lutheran doctrine

"While a student in Heidelberg he first heard Martin Luther speak on the insufficiency of works and on faith as the way of salvation, and though he must have felt the power of this great personality and the freshness of the message, he was not yet ripe for a radical change of front.2 He seems to have felt through these student years that a new age was in process of birth, but though he was following the great events he remained to the end of his University period an adherent of the ancient Church and was ordained a priest about the year 1524 ; but very soon after he went over to the party of Reform, and was settled as a reforming preacher in the little church at Gustenfelden near Nuremberg. " pp 47

Refer to the secularity of Christian history as this

"The discovery of the Word of God creates and constructs an autonomous " kingdom of the con science " (" Reich des Gewissens "), gives us " a thousand fold witness of God," and b"

C.f. plowing

"But the Reformers — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and even Menno Simons — have taken an unwarranted course toward the reform and restoration of the Church. It was within their right and power to improve the unbearable condition of the outward Church, by faithfully following the plain teaching of the New Testament, and without usurping authority. They, however, have not been satisfied to do what lay within the narrow limits of their commission. They have ambitiously undertaken to set up again an authoritative visible Church, even though they lacked the gifts of the Spirit for it, and were without the necessary apostolic commission." pp 121

TL additions

• Quakers
• Ranters
• Spenser
• Donne?
• Dante
• Spinoza
• Descartes (maybe just their works/events rather than birthdates)
• Winthrop
• Rogers (quakers)
• Penn
• Puritans in general??
• Other Reformation thinkers?

"According to the teaching of the Cabala, the original Godhead, called En-Soph, the Infinite, is in essence incomprehensible and immutable, and capable of description only in negations. God, the En-Soph, is above and beyond contact with anything finite, material, or imperfect. It would be blasphemous to suppose that God the in finitely perfect, God the absolutely immutable One, by direct act made a world of matter or created a realm of existence marked with evil as this lower realm of ours is. Instead of supposing a creative act, therefore, the Cabala supposes a series of emanations, or overflows of divine splendour, arranged in three groups of threes, called Sephiroth, which reveal all that is revealable in God, and by means of which invisible and visible worlds come into being" pp 134-35

paracelsus

"A still greater figure in this field of occult knowledge and of nature mysticism was the far-travelled man and medical genius, Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, generally known as Paracelsus. He was born in 1493 in the neighbourhood of Einsiedeln, not far from Zurich, the son of a physician of repute. He studied in the University of Basle, and later was instructed by Trithemius, Abbot of St. Jacobs at Wurtzburg, an adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology. He passed a long period — probably ten years — of his later youth in travel, studying humanity at close range, gathering all sorts of information, forming his theories of diseases and their cure, and learning to know Nature " by treading her Books, through land after land, with his feet," which, he once testified, is the only way of knowing her truly.1" pp 137

Central to Milton's theology

We also know that Milton would have read Boehme from fn on 189 and 234

"His [Boehme] attitude toward outward sacramanets consistently fit in with all his central teachings. The outward, for boehme, is never unimportant. It is always significant and can always be used as a parable of something inner and eternal. But the outward is at best only temporal, only symbolic, and it becomes a hindrance if it is taken for the real substance of which it is only the outward 'signature': "The form shal be destroyed and shall cease with time, but the spirit remains forever'". The Sacramaents, he decalres, do not take away sin, for men go to church all their lives and receive the sacraments and remain as wicked and beastly as ever–while a holy man always has a church within himself and an inward ministry. 1" pp 200-01

"THE ideas developed by spiritual Reformers on the Continent were brought into England by a great variety of carriers and over many routes. Some of the routes were devious and are difficult to trace, but some of them, on the other hand, are obvious and easily found. One of the potent and pervasive intellectual influences for the formation of the " spiritual " type of thought in England was the Platonic influence which came to England through the Humanists. This strand of thought, inherited from the remote past, is woven into the inner structure of all these interpreters of the divine Life. The English revival of Greek philosophy is closely connected with the work of the early Italian Humanists, especially with that of the Florentine scholar, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who was selected and educated by Cosimo de Medici to be the head of the new Academy in Florence. It was a fixed idea iof Ficino that Philosophy and Religion are identical, and therefore that Religion, if it is true Religion, is rooted and grounded in Reason, since god is the source of all Truth and all that is rational. " pp 235

John Everard and this book are mentioned somewhere else in my chapters. Maybe the angelic dinner?

"Before turning to Everard's message, as it finds expres sion in the rare volume of his sermons — The Gospel Treasures Opened — we must consider the Translations which he left unpublished. They are preserved in clearly written manuscripts in Cambridge University Library, under the title " Three Bookes Translated out of their Original!." x The first " Book " bears the following title-page : " The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, And the Tree of Life in the Midst of the Paradise of God : Taken out of a Book called The Letter and the Life, or The Flesh and the Spirit. Translated by Dr. Everard." An interesting article on Dr. Everard in Notes and Queries* concludes that this first " Book " of Everard's is a free translation of the Second Part of Tentzel's Medicina diastica. This guess, however, proves to be incorrect, though there is a slight likeness between Tentzel's book and the English MS. Everard's book is, in reality, a translation of Sebastian Franck's Von dem Baum des Wissens Gutes undBtises (" Of the Tree of Know ledge of Good and Evil "). The translation is made from a Latin edition of Franck's little book, which was published in 1561. "pp 241-42

Everard & "grosser stuff"

" In a very striking passage, Everard points out how the beings nearest in order to God are most free of matter and imperfection, while those lower in hierarchical scale are increasingly more material : " God is a pure Spirit, only Form without any manner of matter ; and all the Creatures, the further off from Him, the more matter [they have] and the nearer the less. For example, Angels are pictured with complete bodies ; yet to show they are further off from matter than men, therefore they have always wings. And Arch-angels, they being nearer the Nature of God than Angels, are pictured with bodies cut off by the middle with wings. But Cherubims, having less matter and nearer God Himself than either, are pictured only with heads and wings, without bodies. But Seraphims, being farthest off from man and nearest of all to God, have no bodies nor heads nor wings at all but [are] only represented by a certain yellowish or fiery Colour." 2

We ourselves, wre men, are both finite and infinite. We have come from an infinite source, and even in our apparent finiteness and independence we still remain inwardly joined to that central Reality. " pp 249

history of the commonwealth w.r.t. reformatiion

"THE spiritual struggles which culminated in the great upheaval of the English Commonwealth were the normal fruit of the Reformation spirit, when once it had pene trated the life of the English people and kindled the fire of personal conviction in their hearts. Beginning as it did with the simple substitution of royal for papal authority in the government of the Church, the English Reformation lacked at its inception the inward depth, the prophetic vision, the creative power, the vigorous articulation of newly awakened personal conscience, which formed such a commanding feature of the Reformation movement on the Continent. It took another hundred years in England to cultivate individual conscience, to ripen religious experience, to produce the body of dynamic ideas, and to create the necessary prophetic vision before an intense and popular spirit of Reform could find its voice and marching power. The contact of English exiles and chance visitors with the stream of thought in Germany, in Switzerland, and in Holland, and the filtering in of literature from the Continent, together with the occasional coming of living exponents, sowed the seeds that slowly ripened into that strange and interesting variety of religious thought and practice which forms the inner life of the Commonwealth. The policy of the throne had always opposed this steadily increasing tide of thought which refused to run in the well-worn channels, but, as usual, the opposition and hindrances only served to deepen personal conviction, to sharpen the edge of con science, to nourish great and daring spirits, to formulate the battle-ideas and to win popular support. The inner life and the varied tendencies of the Commonwealth are too rich and complicated to be adequately treated here.1 The purpose of this chapter is to show how the type of inward and spiritual religion, which the Reformation in its kindling power everywhere produced, finds expression in the writings of three men who came to large public prominence in the period of the Commonwealth, Francis Rous, Sir Harry Vane, and Peter Sterry. " pp 266-7

One of the few nice things we have of him saying about anyone

"would involve the entire history of the great epoch of the Commonwealth. Next to Cromwell, he was the most influential shaper of events from the time of the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640 until his " retirement " on the occasion of the expulsion of the members of Parliament in 1653. In his views of constitutional government ancj of human liberty he was one of the most original and one of the most modern men of the seventeenth century. Richard Baxter, who had no love for Vane, is only stating an actual fact when he says : "To most of our changes he was that within the House that Cromwell was without." 2 Clarendon, who loved him still less, said of him : " He was indeed a man of extraordinary parts, a pleasant wit, a great understanding which pierced into and discerned the purposes of men with wonderfulsagacity." 3

What Milton thought of him he has told in one of the noblest sonnets that a poet ever wrote on a great statesman : Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old, Than whom a better senator ne'er held The helm of Rome, when gowns not arms repelled The fierce Epirot and the African bold : Whether to settle peace, or to unfold The drift of hollow states hard to be spelled, Then to advise how war may best upheld Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold, In all her equipage ; besides to know Both spiritual power and civil, what each means, What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done : The bounds of either sword to thee we owe ; Therefore on thy firm hand religion leans In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son.4 " pp 271-2

Cambridge platonists

"THE type of Christianity which I have been calling" spiritual religion," that is, religion grounded in the nature of Reason, finds, at least in England, its noblest expression in the group of men, sometimes called " Cam bridge Platonists," and sometimes " Latitude-Men," or simply " Latitudinarians." These labels were all given them by their critics and opponents, and were used to give the impression that the members of this group or school were introducing and advancing a type of Chris tianity too broad and humanistic to be safe, and one grounded on Greek philosophy rather than on Scripture and historical Revelation.2 They were, however, undertaking to do in their genera tion precisely what the long line of spiritual interpreters had for more than a century been endeavouring, through pain and suffering, misunderstanding and fierce persecu tion, to work out for humanity — a religion of life and reality, a religion rooted in the eternal nature of the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, a religion as authorita tive and unescapable " as mathematical demonstration." 3 It is not possible to establish direct connection between the leaders of this school and the writings of the successive " pp 288

A consistent theme across all the notable spiritual reformers of the 16th and especially 17th centuries is a rejection of the institutional form af church and –to varying degrees– the sacramanets in favor of an internalized logos, word, light, spirit, salcation, communion. Hence the Anglican church was not popualr amongst this brand of reformers since it was still all these things which the Romish/Popish church was which embodied the things they were seeking to reform

"THE powerful religious upheaval in England which reached its culmination during the two middle decades of the seventeenth century, profoundly stirred both the upper and lower intellectual strata of society. It fused and organized men on the one hand, and carried them beyond themselves ; and on the other hand it broke up settled habits of thought, swept away many customs and prac tices which had become almost irresistible subconscious influences, and left those who were in any way morally and intellectually defective at the mercy of chance currents and eddies. As a result there appeared a strange medley of tiny sects. These groups, seething with enthusiasm, scattered pretty much over England, unorganized or loosely organized, generally gathered about some influential psychopathic leader, were lumped together in the public mind and named " Ranters." l They are by no means a negligible phenomenon of the period. They reveal the back-wash of the spiritual movement, which in the main went steadily onward. They exhibit, in their loose and unmoralized freedom, the inherent dangers which attach to the proclamation of spiritual liberty, and they furnish a clear historical illustration of the truth that progress toward a religion grounded upon the inner life of man can only be slowly and painfully achieved. " pp 320

Monism shared not only by the (neo)platonists, in Cambridge, but also in these reformers

"Traherne shares with Boehme and with the Cambridge Platonists the view that Eternity is as much here as anywhere. Those Christians, he thinks, who put off felicity and defer their enjoyment with long delays " are to be much suspected." 4 ' 'Tis not," so he states his law, " change of place, but glorious principles well prac tised that establish Heaven in the life and soul. An angel will be happy anywhere and a devil miserable, because the principles of the one are always good, of the other, bad. From the centre to the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills all is Heaven before God, and full of treasure ; and he that walks like God in the midst of them is blessed." l " pp 334-5

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