Cheyne's magnum opus was reviled by the Newtonians, casting him into depression and overeating. The immense reputation that he enjoyed among the British public in the 1720s and 1730s rested, not on his philosophy, but on his writings about his dietary regime, by which he succeeded in reducing his own gargantuan bulk to manageable size. These works were informed by his theory of spirits, although of course one did not have to be a mystic to appreciate them. What was not generally recognized was the extent to which the famous diet-doctor justified mystical union as a force of nature. Cheyne provided mystics with physiological arguments that few of them had been willing to think through for themselves. He linked religious experience with nervous impulses, unfocused sentiments and unconscious desires—in short, with what would later become the science of psychology.
Rediscovering Boehme: Byrom and Law
Ensconced in fashionable Bath, Dr Cheyne knew everybody who was anybody, or so it seemed. Late in 1741, he wrote a letter to a poet and master of shorthand, John Byrom of Manchester, whose character had been praised by his friend Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. Cheyne wanted to ask Byrom's opinion concerning a recent work by a French follower of Madame Guyon and Jacob Boehme, Charles Hector de St George Marsay. The diet-doctor also attempted, without success, to solicit a further opinion on Marsay from Byrom's close friend the Reverend William Law. Cheyne admitted that Marsay's “discoveries about the states and glory of the invisible world and the future purification of lapsed intelligences, human and angelical,” caused him some intellectual difficulties. Nevertheless, he continued to praise “this wonderful author,” whose works he had recommended to his close friend Dr David Hartley, the bearer of Cheyne's second letter to Byrom.91
In this correspondence we catch a glimpse of the nerve centre of English mysticism in the mid-eighteenth century. All the main players are here: the celebrated Dr Cheyne, promoter of mental health and vegetarian diets; the brilliant David Hartley, whose later writings on mind and sensation would surpass in fame Cheyne's own work; and the two Nonjurors John Byrom and William Law, the first of them a spiritual seeker, the second already known as the caustic opponent of dry religious rationalism. Add to them the energetic countess of Huntingdon, not a mystic herself but friendly towards them, and later to give her name to a denomination of Methodists. All of these men and women appeared to be well connected, prosperous and influential members of the social elite. We have come a long way from the French Prophets.
Yet the marginality of the mystics persisted into the mid-eighteenth century. Cheyne was famous but worried that his spiritual cravings were not quite respectable. The Methodist countess was an outsider in aristocratic circles. Hartley, who had reservations about the Thirty-Nine Articles, took up medicine because he could not become a clergyman.92 Byrom and Law refused to recognize the Hanoverians as lawful monarchs, which made them ineligible for any office in Church or State. Byrom was actually removed from the governing body of the Royal Society in 1727 when he opposed an address to George II.93 Law lost a fellowship at Cambridge in 1713 for making a public speech that was interpreted as rank Jacobitism—at that point, even Byrom thought him “a vain, conceited fellow.”94 These men and women were not among the favoured few of Whig society, which may be why they were less reluctant to delve into the occult philosophies of the past.
The learned mystics were forerunners of a major cultural shift, away from the scientific rationalism of the Newtonians, towards a revaluation of feeling, sentiment and emotion. Among its other precursors was John Hutchinson, a former estate steward, fossil collector and self-educated “natural philosopher,” who began publishing attacks on Newtonianism in the 1720s. In Moses's Principia, Hutchinson used the favourite alchemical trope of the spirit of God moving on the waters to explain the origin of “an invisible, penetrating, powerful, created Agent, which he [God] stiles Spirit.” According to Hutchinson, the natural world was sustained by Spirit, not by gravity. Moreover, the original Hebrew language was informed by Spirit, “and so conveyed perfect Ideas of the Things by the Words.”95 In the 1730s, Hutchinson began to identify the Hebrew letters with angels or cherubim, who actually inhabited the original, unaccented script. Modern Jews, however, were “Apostates” who had polluted their religion with concepts of natural magic, and their language with accent marks (which served as vowels). Hutchinson's own writings are so poorly composed as to be almost indecipherable. Both Stukeley and Warburton, who detested his rambling notions, called them “Cabalistic.”96 Nonetheless, “Hutchinsonianism” eventually came to describe critics of rationalism in the Church of England, who subscribed to Hutchinson's elevation of Spirit, even if they rarely noticed the angels staring out at them from the pages of the Hebrew Bible.
Hutchinson viewed nature through an occult lens that recognized spirits as active in the physical world. The separation between natural and supernatural virtually disappears. This became a distinctive feature of English mystical thought in the mid-eighteenth century. While ordinary people, like the French Prophets, might experience a sudden, inexplicable possession by spirits, the clergymen and doctors who kept mysticism alive in the mid-eighteenth century sought to promote spiritual regeneration by examining the operations of spirit in nature. Like the Newtonians, they appropriated aspects of occult thinking, although they did not openly recommend occult practices. John Byrom and William Law were the most important figures in this learned mysticism. Law was never at ease with the role. He criticized Madame Bourignon as “peevish” and “fretful,” opined that Madame Guyon was “more prudent than Mrs. Bourignon, yet [got] carried away,” and complained “that the Philadelphians, Dr. Lee, &c., were strange people.”97 On the other hand, his friend Byrom, who was not ordained, was seldom able to restrain himself from embracing “the wonderful.” He had a boundless appetite for spiritual experience of all varieties, as well as for occult philosophy.
Byrom's taste for the occult can be judged by the catalogue of books in his library. Even if we do not know exactly how he read them, they present a clear picture of his interests. As might be expected, he had many works by Madame Bourignon, Madame Guyon and Jacob Boehme, as well as Pordage's Theologia Mystica and Roach's Imperial Standard. He was an equally voracious reader of magical works. Chetham's Library in Manchester contains a sixteenth-century Tractatus de Nigromatia or treatise on necromancy that once belonged to him. It includes pentacles, Chaldean scripts and invocations to the “Queen of the Pharies.” Byrom owned works both by and belonging to John Dee, which betokens an extraordinary interest in the Elizabethan magus. On the other hand, he purchased Balthasar Bekker's The World Bewitched as early as 1722, so he would have been aware of the objections to occult thinking, even if he disagreed with them.98 Perhaps the most striking aspect of his collection from an occult point of view is the considerable number of works relating to alchemy, among them the Divine Pimander, Ashmole's Way to Bliss, the works of Roger Bacon and Paracelsus, a tract by Sendivogius and a number of German works on the Hermetic art. Alongside Magia Adamica and the Man-Mouse, the catalogue lists two copies of Thomas Vaughan's edition of the Fama et Confessio of the Rosicrucians. Some of the books are annotated, and Byrom's copy of Artephius's Secret Booke of the Blessed Stone, in the testy words of the catalogue editor, is “crowded with cabalistic figures and observations in the numeric writing of some devotee of the Rosy Cross.”99
Byrom's journals, which he wrote in a shorthand of his own devising, mainly during his regular sojourns in London, give us further clues to his attitudes. They frequently refer to meetings of the “Cabala Club,” a group that Byrom attended from 1723, the year before his election to the Royal Society, until around 1730. It met at the Sun tavern in St Paul's Churchyard, and later at the King's Head in Holborn. The members included Martin Ffolkes, who introduced Byrom to the club, Sir Hans Sloane, George Graham, clockmaker and inventor of the mercury pendulum, and Benjamin Hoadly, physician, playwright and son to a Whig bishop. All were Fellows of the Royal Society, which Sloane and Ffolkes ser
ved as successive presidents. Aside from topics of the day like education or the unlawfulness of the theatre (on which Law had written a pamphlet), the Cabala Club discussed “the art of memory,” “petrified towns in Muscovy,” and “the miracles which Moses wrought in Egypt, and how the magicians could do the like,” suggesting that this illustrious assembly was a forum for subjects not usually discussed in the Royal Society, some of them having occult significance.100 Ffolkes, a close friend of Stukeley, was grand master of a lodge of Freemasons that met upstairs at the Sun tavern. When Sloane offered to take Byrom to it, the latter-replied, “I said I would, and come back if there was anything I did not like, and then he bid me sit down.” By 1730, however, the name of “Mr. John Byram” appears in a list of members of the Swan tavern lodge in Long Acre.101
Byrom first encountered William Law in March 1729, when the two men met at an inn in Putney. The learned clergyman had just published A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, a classic of moral rigourism. While Byrom admired it, his relationship with Law was not initially close. He was at this time seeking out all sorts of religious teachers, including Edward Elwall, an eccentric ironmonger of Wolverhampton who lived according to his own interpretation of Jewish law. Byrom was gradually settling on a mystic path, however, and was pleased when Law, in a rare moment of humility, said of Madame Bourignon that “he wished he could think like her.”102 Byrom did not introduce Law to Jacob Boehme, but his transition towards “mystic divinity” definitely preceded that of the man often seen as his mentor. The journal's first reference to the Teutonic Theosopher comes in January 1731, when Byrom bought “two pieces of Jacob Behmen” at a book auction in London. He mentioned Boehme to Law in April 1737, at which point his friend responded “that it was by force that he had writ, that he had desired that all his books had been in one [set of volumes].” Clearly, Law had read at least some of Boehme's works by this time. By Law's own account, given to Byrom in 1743, “Dr. Cheyne was the providential occasion of his meeting or knowing of Jacob Behmen, by a book which the Dr. mentioned to him in a letter, which book mentioned Behmen.” This book, as is known through later testimony, was Faith and Reason Compared by a German Philadelphian named Baron Metternich.103
Faith and Reason Compared actually owed more to John Pordage and Jane Lead than to Boehme. Metternich refers to God as the “Magic Eye,” which was one of Pordage's favourite images.104 He argues in favour of a religion based on direct revelation by God, working either through the imagination or the intellect. Metternich aimed to confute “Modern Rationalists,” who judge revelation, scriptural or personal, according to “Right Reason.” Far from providing a basis for judgment, in Metternich's view, “Reason darkens our pure Understanding, and hinders it from perceiving the subtile Influences of divine Light.”105 Law's research into Boehme, therefore, began with a Philadelphian, and it continued to be deeply affected by that movement. The remaining Philadelphians gave him open access to their archives, and Law became a busy copyist. He cited a manuscript work by Andreas Dionysius Freher to Byrom in April 1737, shortly before his first recorded remark concerning Boehme. He painstakingly copied Freher's “Serial Elucidations,” that is, his thoughts on Jacob Boehme, along with three versions of the “Three Tables.” Byrom participated in this rediscovery of the Philadelphians; he kept his own manuscript version of Freher's “Three Tables” and owned a large collection of mystical diagrams that resemble the illustrations of Boehme made by Freher's disciple J.D. Leuchter.106
The Philadelphians held to unconventional beliefs concerning alchemy, astrology, “Magia” and angelic visions. Law never endorsed these things in print. When he took up the struggle against “Modern Rationalists,” he fashioned it as a defence of Christian orthodoxy rather than of immediate revelation. Law was not actively seeking personal union with God, and he remained deeply suspicious of spirit possession. Yet he threw himself into the study of Boehme, on whom he lavished extraordinary praise—“as a chosen Servant of God, he may be placed among those who had received the highest Measures of Light, Wisdom and Knowledge from Above.”107 What Boehme added to the fight against rationalism, in Law's view, was a mystical synthesis of theology and the material world. According to Law, Boehme “has made all that is found in the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of nature, to be one continual demonstration, that dying to self to be born again of Christ is the one only possible salvation of the sons of fallen Adam.” In Law's estimation, Boehme spoke not just to religious matters: he also provided insight into the structure of nature.
In investigating this aspect of the Theosopher's writings, Law finally crossed the line separating mystic divinity and occult philosophy, proposing that the Newtonian cosmos should be turned on its head. The bold idea, no doubt derived from the Philadelphians, was germinating in Law's mind by 1742, when he published his first extended defence of Boehme. There he suggested: “The illustrious Sir Isaac Newton when he wrote his Principia … could have told the world, that the true and infallible Ground of what he there advanced, was to be found in the teutonick Philosopher, in his three first Properties of Eternal Nature.”108 The Newtonian theory of gravity, in other words, had been plagiarized from Boehme. Soon after, in a letter to Dr Cheyne, Law explained the evidence for this outrageous claim. “Dr. Newton,” an unidentified relative of the great man, had informed Law that he and Sir Isaac had set up furnaces to find the Philosopher's Stone after reading the works of Boehme. They failed, but Law opined that Newton had learned from the experience. He noted that attraction was a universal property in Boehme as well as “the grand foundation of the Newtonian Philosophy.” This could not be a coincidence. No one could try to learn the secret of the tincture from Boehme “without knowing and believing as B— does, the ground of Universal attraction, and therefore Sir Isaac's silence, and ignorance of this ground must have been affected & for certain reasons which can now only be guess'd at.” Law repeated this astonishing story to Byrom in May 1743.109
Its veracity is highly dubious. No extensive transcripts by Newton from Boehme's works have survived, and the two men had very different understandings of alchemy as well as of gravity. Furthermore, the notion of extracting an alchemical recipe from Boehme's writings is absurd—unless one follows Freher's handwritten treatise on redemption as a spagyric process, which Law must have read. In fact, the story of the Behmenist origins of gravity tells us more about Law than it does about Newton. Law wanted to give it credit because he believed in Boehme as well as in alchemy. He confessed to Byrom that he had confidence in certain claims of the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone, and the two men “agreed that it could not possibly be forgery.” Law had evidently heard about Newton's spagyric experiments, and was eager to count the great scientist in the Behmenist camp.110
Law convinced himself that Newton had been misled—in fact, the man of science had reversed the true order of nature. In a 1752 tract entitled The Spirit of Love, Law maintained that “all the Matter of this World is from spiritual Properties, since all its Workings and Effects are according to them.” Regarding the laws of matter and motion, “the illustrious Sir Isaac ploughed with Behmen’s Heifer”: that is, he concocted worldly theories out of principles that pertained to spirits.111 Did Law weigh the philosophical implications of this argument? If matter consisted of spirit, and all spirit was part of God, then the deity was present in everything—an arrangement not far removed from that set forth in Kabbala Denudata, or the pantheist philosophy that was usually called “Spinozism.” Boehme's heifer, in other words, was ploughing a spiritual version of Spinoza's “Substance.” No wonder Bishop Warburton, who detested Law, accused Boehme of “rank Spinozism.” Byrom, whose piety and benevolence Warburton actually admired, denied the charge, which he considered tantamount to an accusation of atheism, in a polite exchange of letters with the bishop in 1752.112 It remains unclear, however, whether Law would have justified a Neoplatonic universe of differentiated spirits, or a Kabbalistic one in which all spirits were essentially versions
of the same divine being.
In any case, we should not assume, as their critics did, that Law and Byrom were simply credulous men who were willing to stomach things that defied rational judgment. Byrom, for example, took a non-committal position regarding Mary Toft, who supposedly gave birth to rabbits: “I neither believe nor disbelieve, because I do not suppose the matter has as yet been thoroughly examined on both sides.” As to witches, he had “no notion of those things,” although he was inclined to believe Madame Bourignon's story of the “witches’ school.”113 For his part, Law mocked rationalists for their obsession with wanting to know the unknowable, like “the inward Structure of Solomon's Temple, and all of its Services,” an unsubtle jab at the preoccupations of Newton, Stukeley and the Freemasons.114 We should also be wary of linking mystical religious attitudes too closely with a Jacobite mindset, as there were considerable differences among the adherents of the exiled Stuart claimant to the throne. Jacobitism did not induce heightened spirituality or acceptance of the supernatural, even if many Jacobites believed that the exiled Pretender had the ability to cure scrofula by the laying-on of hands.115 Jacobites did not often write in favour of the royal healing power, and it is difficult to say what Law or Byrom thought of it.
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