STUDIES IN SOCIAL HISTORY
HEAVENS BELOW
First published in 1961
This edition published in 2007 by
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
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Transferred to Digital Printing 2010
1961 W. H. G. Armytage
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Heavens Below
ISBN10: 0-415-41290-0 (volume)
ISBN10: 0-415-40266-2 (set)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-41290-2 (volume)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-40266-8 (set)
eISBN: 978-1-134-52950-6
Routledge Library Editions: Studies in Social History
First published 1961
by Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited
Broadway House, 6874 Carter Lane London, E.C.4
Reprinted 1968
Printed in Great Britain
by Billing & Sons Ltd, Guildford and London
W. H. G. Armytage 1961
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism
SBN 7100 4552 2
The hot breath of the charismatic behind ones back is disconcerting. It always has been. For in trying to direct us from behind he uses the language of apocalypse. Desultory reading, many years ago, sharpened my interest, not so much in the language, as the programme of action it presaged. So what began as a diversion, alas, has become a book.
The excuse for the book was provided by one of the characters in it. It would be so useful, he wrote to have records of the failure of sincere and earnest movements, and asked Why are they so scarce? As he saw it, people prefer to tell of days full of hope than days full of dejection. The causes of failure, he went on are obscured by petty, personal conflicts... for the odium theologicum is not confined to the great churches. As the highwayman demands your money or your life, so the religious zealot in every new movement demands your acceptance of his principles or he proceeds to wound your character by imputation of mean motives.
The zealots of the new movements in this book were by no means so uncharitable. Indeed, Father Ronald Knox, who began over thirty years ago to examine what he thought was a rogues gallery to provide an awful warning against illuminism , found to his surprise that the more you got to know the men, the more human did they become, for better or worse; you were more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove they were wrong.
This book does not attempt to prove them right, though the epilogue might make readers think so. Instead, it tells a number of plain tales of those who tried to save the English behind their collective backs. Help in the telling was generously provided by the correspondents and libraries mentioned in the footnotes.
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U TOPIA takes its name from a book of that name published abroad in 1517 by Sir Thomas More. It was not translated into English until 1551 and then as A Fruiteful and pleasunt worke of the beste State of a public weale, and of the new yle, called Utopia. Not till long after were the full implications of its twenty-four garden cities, based on handicrafts, really grasped. For the medieval cast of his thought needed penetrating. It became a primer, subject, like all primers, to gloss and commentary, but important for that very reason.
More had spent some four years in the Charterhouse, and when he wrote Utopia the monastic ideal was before his eyes. There are many signs of thisthe undyed wool dress of the Utopians, the readings and controlled conversations during meals, the apportioning of crafts, the manual trades. The book has been called an imaginative diagram of the contemplative life which all rational men should prefer to an active life which was yearly replacing it as an ideal. Carthusian and Benedictine rules emerge in the details of the ideal state and in the style of presentation.
Yet medieval as More is, he exhibits two new ideals. The first is that the apprehension of Natures secrets would alleviate mens lot on earth. For, speaking of natural science, he described the Utopians as counting :
the knowledge of yt amonge the goodlieste, and mooste profytable partes of Philosophie. For whyles they by the helpe of thys Philosophie search owte the secrete mysteryes of nature, they thynke that they not onlye receaue thereby wonderfull greate pleasur, but also obteyn great thankes and fauour of the auctore and maker thereof.
The second is the overt plea for continuity with the primitive teaching of the early Church, for inwardness as opposed to outward pomp and magnificence. Utopia condemned the social abuses of Christianity in Christendom. Hythlodaye and his companions were told by the Utopians that it was no small healpe and furtherance in the matter that they harde us saye that Christ instytuted amonge hys all thynges commen: and that the same communitee dothe yet remayne amongest the rightest Christian companies.
Mores Utopians were pragmatists: the world of nature and man was a universal laboratory where operations had been going on throughout history to find out what was in harmony or in conflict with Nature. Thus those who could study past and contemporary history could assess the experiments in living which had already been carried out during the 1760 years said to have been required to construct the Utopian commonwealth. For Mores Utopians regarded science as linked to ethics and religion.
At the same time as Utopia was translated there appeared The Vision of Pierce Plowman: Robert Crowleys refurbishing of Langlands vision of a holy commune on high before Lucifer fell. Say the holy writt that in the begynyng of holy church, wrote Henry Parker, a Carmelite friar in
