Jane Lead

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In February 1670 a London merchant’s widow found herself suddenly poor. William Leade had died and the fortune he was thought to hold turned out to have been lost abroad, leaving Jane Leade — born Jane Ward, christened on 9 March 1624 at the parish church of Letheringsett in Norfolk, twelfth and youngest child of Hamond Ward of Letheringsett Hall — without means and near the end of an ordinary life. That spring, in the same season of loss, a figure she would spend the next thirty years describing began to appear to her: a woman of light who named herself Wisdom, who spoke, who promised to lead her. From April 1670 she kept a dated record of these visitations. The record grew into one of the largest bodies of visionary prose in the English language, and it made of an untrained Norfolk widow the foremost voice of the Böhmenist current in England and the guiding presence of the small London circle that became the Philadelphian Society.

The visions were the center of everything. Jane Leade did not argue toward Sophia; she met her. To the encounter she gave an answer she set down in the register of the Virgin Mary’s fiat — that according to the word spoken to her, let all of it be fulfilled in her — and from that consent the rest followed: a relationship she described in the language of betrothal and mystical marriage to the divine Wisdom, sustained across decades of nightly openings. She recorded them, dated them, and returned to interpret them. Late in life she collected the journal under the title A Fountain of Gardens — a sprawling watered garden of dreams, figures seen with the inner eye, and dialogues between the soul and the Wisdom who instructed it — its volumes issued in parts across roughly 1696 to 1701. That a woman without theological schooling claimed such direct instruction, and published it at length and under her own name, was itself part of what made her conspicuous in an age that read female revelation with suspicion. She wrote in the plain register of someone reporting what she had been shown rather than defending a thesis, and those who gathered around her read the diaries as a living scripture of the inner life — a working of prophecy in the present tense rather than the exposition of a closed canon.

Sophia, the Wisdom who appeared

The recurring presence in the diaries is Sophia, Holy Wisdom — and Leade was emphatic that she was no abstraction. Sophia appeared as a person: a feminine aspect of God who came in vision, spoke aloud to the inner ear, betrothed herself to the seer, and led her by stages deeper into the divine life. In Leade’s pages Wisdom is a mediatrix between the human and the divine and, at the boldest reach, a feminine principle within the Godhead itself — so that the Deity she describes leans toward the androgyne, a fullness in which the masculine and the feminine are not divided. The frame for this Sophia came from the German shoemaker-theosophist Jakob Böhme, in whose visionary system the eternal Virgin Wisdom is the mirror in which God beholds himself and the matrix of all creation; it came also through the physician and clergyman John Pordage, the older English Behmenist into whose household Leade entered around 1673 or 1674 after long and deliberate searching. Pordage, she found, possessed a gift of spiritual discernment she prized, and he in turn prized her extraordinary gift of revelation; he became, in her account, a special instrument to encourage and assist her, and she would later supply the preface to his posthumous Theologia Mystica (1683). Pordage’s own theosophy was an elaborate visionary cosmology — a charting of the archetypal world and its hierarchies of angels and spirits — and within that household, in the years of their association, the older man’s discipline of recording inner sight gave the younger seer a method and a vocabulary. But scholarship has come to insist that what Leade did with Böhme’s Sophia was not transcription. She recast the figure — gave the speculative Virgin Wisdom of the Continent a sustained autobiographical voice, a diary of encounters, a betrothal narrative no German Behmenist had written — and so produced something at once derivative in its vocabulary and her own in its substance. The Wisdom of her pages is a person met in the dark of the night, not a term in a cosmological system; the route runs back through Christian theosophy to Böhme, and forward, much later, into the Sophiology of the Russian thinkers who would make the divine Wisdom a doctrine of her own.

Two convictions

Two teachings organized the experience. The first was that true religion is inward — a matter of regeneration and direct illumination of the soul rather than of doctrine, church order, or outward observance. In this Leade stood squarely within the broad family of Protestant inward mysticism — and, more widely, of Christian mysticism as such — the stream that runs from the German theosophists through the radical Pietists and that held the new birth, the unio with the indwelling Christ, to be the one thing needful. She read her own age, too, through the lens of the Apocalypse: the Philadelphian church of Revelation was for her not a figure of the distant past but a present calling, the gathered remnant through whom the promised effusion of the Spirit would come. Her circle understood itself accordingly not as a sect but as the hidden, gathered remnant of true believers scattered through all the churches.

The second conviction was held with more daring, and it cost her. Around 1694 and 1695 Leade embraced the doctrine of universal restoration — the apokatastasis, the final reconciliation of every fallen creature to God. As she came to hold it, post-mortem punishment is purgative rather than endless: the fire purifies and is not eternal, and at the last all are gathered home, including, in the formulation that scandalized her contemporaries, the Devil and his angels. The hope reaches back through the early Church to Origen of Alexandria, who had taught that in the end God would be all in all, and it was a hope the surviving Behmenist consensus had explicitly refused: both Böhme and Pordage had condemned it. By affirming it Leade broke with that consensus and distanced herself from the wider Pietist mainstream, and the breach was sharp — it was above all her universalism that turned the leading German Behmenist Johann Georg Gichtel against her. Set against the settled Protestant teaching on eternal punishment, the doctrine drew the charge that hung over her whole enterprise: enthusiasm, the period’s word for a claimed immediate inspiration that bypassed scripture, reason, and the ministry. To her admirers the charge was the predictable scorn of an unillumined age; to her critics it named exactly what she was.

The circle and its carriage abroad

The community Leade led had a seed older than herself. John Pordage, ejected from his Berkshire living in 1654 by the parliamentary commissioners on charges that ran from heterodoxy to commerce with spirits — and reinstated at the Restoration in 1660 — had gathered around himself in earlier decades a household devoted to contemplation and the recording of visions, its members taking scriptural names. After his death in December 1681 the leadership of the circle passed to Leade. In the 1690s it took organized shape: from weekday prayer meetings in Hoxton and Holborn it emerged into public view, drew up its declarations and confession, and styled itself the Philadelphian Society after the church of brotherly love in the Book of Revelation that Christ neither rebukes nor corrects. It never grew large — perhaps no more than a hundred English adherents at its height — and its public meetings drew a rude crowd and the disapproving notice of the authorities. The work of giving it institutional form, and of carrying Leade’s books beyond England, fell chiefly to the scholar and physician Francis Lee, the Oxford Nonjuror who married her daughter and became her amanuensis, editor, and son-in-law; the priest Richard Roach was its other leading voice, and would deliver Leade’s funeral address. (The institution itself, its journal, and its rapid dissolution after her death belong to the Philadelphian Society; here the person stands in the foreground.)

Her fame, in the event, was larger abroad than at home. From the early 1690s Loth Fischer of Utrecht translated her writings into Dutch and German, and across the German-speaking world the aged, impoverished, and by 1695 blind seer found the readers England had largely denied her. Her books fed the radical and spiritualist wings of Pietism; they drew the interested attention of Johann Wilhelm Petersen and his learned wife Johanna; they earned the running hostility of Gichtel; and they reached, as a curious reader rather than a disciple, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who took note of the English prophetess and her universal restoration. The afterlife ran on longer than the society did. The Sophianic and restorationist current she had kept alive surfaced again in the visionary Protestantism of the next century: Emmanuel Swedenborg and the world of his angelic correspondences, the engraved prophecies of William Blake, and the French theosopher Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who came to London in 1785 to study her writings at the source and carried something of them into the Martinist reading of Böhme. Among the women contemplatives of her own generation she keeps unusual company — the French Quietist Madame Guyon, whose doctrine of pure, disinterested love and abandonment to God ran a parallel course to Leade’s inwardness and drew the same suspicion of Quietism and enthusiasm; and the philosopher Anne Conway, whose own late turn against eternal damnation, and toward a created order in which every substance might be restored through endless gradations of being, sounds a philosophical chord beside Leade’s prophetic one.

The diaries, their editions, and the scholarship

The textual situation is unusually clean at its base and difficult above it. The seventeenth-century originals are long out of copyright, and the keyboarded, fully searchable transcriptions of Jane Leade’s works produced by the Text Creation Partnership are released into the public domain under a CC0 dedication — the transcription, that is, though not the underlying page images, which remain under their own restrictions. Her central work can be read in that form at the University of Michigan’s collection: the first volume of A Fountain of Gardens and its continuation, the watered garden of the soul in its progress toward the New Jerusalem. The German parallel, Ein Garten-Brunn, appeared from 1697 and carried her name across the Continent in the very years of her English obscurity. The earliest synoptic life remains the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography of the 1880s–1890s, which records — with the surname spelled, as it often is, “Leade,” and the birth year given in the older catalog style as 1623 — that she died in the eighty-first year of her age and in the sixty-fifth of what it calls her vocation to the inward life; the archival baptism of March 1624 governs the date the catalogs misstate.

The modern study of Leade falls into two layers. The mid-twentieth-century foundation was laid by Nils Thune’s institutional history of the Behmenists and the Philadelphians (Uppsala, 1948) and Serge Hutin’s French account of Böhme’s English disciples (Paris, 1960); the present generation is dominated by archival reconstruction. Arthur Versluis gave Leade and Pordage dedicated treatment in Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (1999), reading them as a sustained Western Sophianic current; Brian Gibbons set the Behmenist gender ideas in their wider frame; Julie Hirst produced the standard stand-alone biography, Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic (2005). The current center of gravity is Ariel Hessayon’s edited volume Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy (Palgrave, 2016), whose archival chapters strip away the later hagiography — the serene matriarch who unified her followers is shown to be in part a construction of her closest disciples, the historical Leade a more radical and more divisive figure than the legend allowed — and whose contributors trace her reach into German Pietism, North America, and the nineteenth century. Sarah Apetrei’s work on women, prophecy, and the Reformation of the heart anchors the gender-and- theology axis; the earliest modern biographical study, Joanne Magnani Sperle’s God’s Healing Angel (1985), opened the field. Whether she is best read as a proto-feminist or whether that frame sits uneasily with her dependence on male patrons; whether her Philadelphians cohered or fragmented — these are live debates among her readers, and the seventeenth-century opponents who called her a credulous woman mistaking reverie for revelation have their nineteenth- and twentieth-century echoes in the verdicts of Rufus Jones and Evelyn Underhill. What none of them disputes is the bulk and the strangeness of the achievement: the most prolific English voice of the Böhmenist current, a woman who gave the speculative theosophy of the Continent an English literature of its own.

Blindness closed over her in her last years, and the diaries went on being copied and translated by hands other than hers; she died in Hoxton on 19 August 1704 and was buried in Bunhill Fields, Richard Roach speaking over the grave. But the ending she herself looked toward was not the small one of a dissolved society. It was the great restoration she had set down again and again in the garden of her diaries — the purifying fire that does not last forever, the gathering home of every fallen creature without exception, the Wisdom who had appeared to a poor widow in a Norfolk spring and promised to lead her, and through her, all things back to the God in whom they began.

→ In the library: Eckartshausen — The Cloud upon the Sanctuary (1896)

→ Related: Philadelphian Society · Christian Theosophy Boehmean · Russian Sophiology · Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon · Quietism · Protestant Mysticism · Christian Mysticism · Origen · Anne Conway · Pietism · Emmanuel Swedenborg · William Blake · Prophecy · Martinism