On Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World

“Jonathan Healey’s insightful new overview, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603–1689, wherein he astutely argues that “[b]y the end of the century, a new world had arisen.””

“The 18th century is so often seen as the main event, as “The Enlightenment,” but its precursor is the moment of real action that made everything that followed possible, a gloaming period between Renaissance and modernity.”

“In England, the century began with Queen Elizabeth on the throne, intimations of that quasi-medieval “Merry Old England” everywhere still in evidence, a realm of maypoles and morris dancers, green men and gargoyles, while by 1700 you could grab a cup at a coffeehouse, buy a newspaper, and read about squabbling political parties.”

“Somewhere in there, the modern world was birthed.”

“Modernity may have been born during this century, but it also saw the elucidation of those literalist idolatries of soul-denying scientific positivism and religious puritanism, the propagation of colonialism, the firm establishment of the transatlantic slave trade, and the beginnings of the market worldview that may indeed still condemn us all and usher in the apocalypse that pamphleteers long warned of.”

“From the statue of 17th-century English slave trader Edward Colston being torn from its pedestal and thrown into the harbor at Bristol during those convulsive summer months of 2020 to those ancient Antarctic ice cores demonstrating to climatologists how the beginnings of industrial production during the 17th century ended the so-called “Little Ice Age” and ushered in the Anthropocene, this is a period that has stretched far beyond the years 1601–1700.”

“Michael Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008)”

“Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain (2006)”

“No more pertinent and insightful book has yet to be written on the subject, including Healey’s, than Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972).”

“An advocate for history from below, Hill’s own prejudices against the numinous still made it impossible for him to fully take those whom he wrote about at their word concerning religion.”

“According to him, all of that God- and Bible-talk was something that men like Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard used to bring the proletariat along with them, when in reality they were men of a profound and genuine faith, as strange as it might seem to us.”

“Ironically, nobody less than “God’s Own Englishman,” Oliver Cromwell, agreed more with the atheist Hill when he claimed that “[r]eligion was not the thing […] contested for,” while that steadfast materialist Thomas Hobbes, rather, wrote that the war was “nothing other than the quarrelling about theological issues.””

“Healey, benefiting from two generations of a humanistic critical “turn to religion,” admits in The Blazing World that religion was always “intertwined with [the] wider project of social order.””

Commentator’s Note: This is something Hilary Mantel does so well in Wolf Hall.

“Liberalism, a particular species of Protestant heresy, was the fruitful result.”

“Reading Hill’s classic, it’s easy to get the sense that he viewed a certain critical vanguard in the 17th century as being crypto-liberals disguised as religion sectarians, so that they were basically us. He was correct in the conclusion, but the argument is backward. The reality is that we’re really crypto-religious sectarians disguised as liberals.”

Commentator’s Note: The Pietism to Liberalism pipeline, witnessed most eminently in Kant.

“Liberalism is an ideology that is both broad and inchoate.”

“More a humanistic attitude than a sect, liberalism presumes certain things about the role of the state, the sovereignty of the individual, and the necessity of the market, all of which have increasingly been challenged from both right and left as the biome undergoes a collapse started 400 years ago.”

“All those concepts emerge from the post-Reformation theological disputations, which animated the English civil wars and made the 17th century among the most intellectually fruitful in Western history, and every single one of them, from the role of the individual to the freedom of the market, is challenged by the technological success and disaster of our current moment.”

“Just as the English Civil War marked the final eclipse of the medieval mind and the convulsive emergence of modernity as if from the head of Zeus, so today we sense the guns of Edgehill again on the horizon.”