Philadelphian Society

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The Philadelphian Society was a small circle of English mystics that formed in London in the 1690s around the visionary Jane Lead and the physician and clergyman John Pordage, taking its inspiration from the German theosophist Jakob Böhme. The name came from the church of Philadelphia in the Book of Revelation — the congregation of brotherly love that Christ neither rebukes nor corrects — and the members understood themselves not as a new sect but as the hidden, gathered remnant of true believers within all churches.

The name and the self-understanding

Of the seven churches addressed in the opening chapters of Revelation, Philadelphia (Revelation 3:7–13) is the one to which the risen Christ speaks no word of correction. To it alone he promises an open door that no one can shut, and that its faithful will be made pillars in the temple of God. Lead and her companions read this passage not as a description of a vanished first-century congregation in Asia Minor but as a type — a figure of the true church of the last age, an interior fellowship of the regenerate scattered through every visible communion. The Philadelphians therefore insisted, in their founding documents, that they were a society and not a church, still less a peculiar sect: members kept their existing allegiances, Anglican or Dissenting, and the society’s irenic purpose was to heal the divisions of Christendom through what they called the effusion of the Spirit. This was the temper of a gathered remnant rather than a separatist body — a posture closer in spirit to the quietist withdrawal of Madame Guyon than to the sectarian rigor of the radical Reformation, and one that aligned the circle with the broader contemplative undercurrent later gathered under the name of quietism. What bound the Philadelphians was not a confession but a shared expectation: that the Spirit was about to be poured out, that the dawn of a new dispensation was at hand, and that those who waited inwardly upon the divine Wisdom would be its first witnesses.

From Pordage’s household to Lead’s leadership

The roots of the society lay a generation earlier, in the Berkshire parish of Bradfield, where John Pordage held the living from the late 1640s. Pordage — baptized in 1607, trained in medicine, and counted by Richard Baxter the chief of the English Behmenists — had gathered around himself a family communion whose members aspired, through contemplation and discipline, to a visible communion with angels. Within the household members took scriptural names, and Pordage’s Böhme-inflected angelology and his cosmology of an archetypal world supplied the matrix from which the later society grew. His unorthodoxy drew the attention of the Interregnum authorities. First charged with heresy and acquitted in 1651, he was summoned again in 1654 before the county commissioners — the so-called ejectors — at Speenhamland; the articles against him multiplied, the charge of intercourse with spirits was pressed, and on 8 December 1654 he was ejected from his living as insufficient for the ministry. He defended himself in print, was reinstated at the Restoration of 1660, and spent his remaining years in a visionary, alchemical, Neoplatonic theosophy whose great monument, the Theologia Mystica, appeared posthumously in 1683 with a preface by Jane Lead.

Lead had come to Pordage by a different road. Widowed in 1670 and thrown into poverty when her husband’s fortune proved lost, she dated the onset of her visions of the divine Wisdom to that same spring, and after diligent searching she sought Pordage out and joined his household around 1673–74. He became, in her own account, a special instrument to encourage and assist her, prizing her extraordinary gift of revelation while she prized his discernment. When he died in 1681 the leadership of the circle passed to her. Her voluminous spiritual diaries — most famously A Fountain of Gardens, published in several volumes between 1696 and 1701 — became the society’s central writings: a dated record of nightly visions, recorded and afterward interpreted, that privileged personal experience, imagination, and the inward senses over what she dismissed as materialistic reason.

Sophia, the divine Wisdom

At the heart of the society stands Sophia, the divine Wisdom. Lead reported encountering her not as an abstraction but as a living figure — a feminine aspect of God who appeared in vision and instructed her, and to whom Lead answered, echoing the Virgin’s fiat, that according to the Word let all this be fulfilled. This Sophia she received from Böhme, who had taken Wisdom for a divine person, the eternal mirror in which the hidden Godhead beholds and brings forth itself; and from Pordage, who had developed his own Sophianic theosophy. But Lead recast rather than merely transmitted the inheritance. In her writings Sophia functions as mediatrix between the human soul and the divine, the object of a betrothal and mystical marriage described in the nuptial imagery of the Song of Songs, and at moments as a feminine principle within the Godhead itself — yielding a vision of a Deity in whom the masculine and feminine are joined, an androgyne fullness from which the soul has fallen and to which it is called to return.

This Wisdom-mysticism is the thread that binds the Philadelphian circle to a long line of Sophianic speculation. It runs upstream to the Christian theosophy of Böhme and his abyss, the Ungrund; it touches the epigrammatic God-mysticism of Angelus Silesius, Lead’s near-contemporary in the Boehmean current; and it descends, by a genuine textual line, into the Russian sophiology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the figure of divine Wisdom is taken up afresh in Russian religious philosophy. The taste for Sophia as a personal, encounterable presence — the conviction that Wisdom can be met, courted, and wedded — is the distinctive Philadelphian note, and the one that travels furthest.

Two convictions: inward religion and universal restoration

Two convictions ran through the society’s teaching. The first was that genuine religion is inward and experiential — a matter of regeneration and direct illumination rather than doctrine or institution. In this the Philadelphians belong to the wider seventeenth-century turn toward the religion of the heart that surfaces in the Pietism of the German lands and in the contemplative quietism of Catholic Europe, and that in England had already found a voice in the Hermetic and mystical preaching of John Everard, the translator who put the Pymander into complete English a generation before. What the Philadelphians sought was not assent to a creed but the new birth — the breaking-forth of the divine light within, the gnosis of God known immediately in the ground of the soul.

The second conviction, more controversial, was the doctrine of universal restoration: the belief, drawn from Böhme and reaching back to Origen, that in the end every fallen creature, even the damned and the devils, would be restored to God. The technical name for this hope is apokatastasis, the restitution of all things named in the Acts of the Apostles and associated since antiquity with Origen and Gregory of Nyssa — a purgative rather than punitive reading of the fire to come, in which torment is the medicine of a wholly merciful God and not his last word. Lead embraced it around 1694–95, rejecting outright the preaching of an endless misery, and in doing so she went beyond her own sources: Böhme had not taught it, and the surviving Behmenist consensus refused it. It was a hope held with some daring, since it cut against the settled Protestant teaching on eternal punishment, and it drew accusations of enthusiasm and heresy. It also cost the society its chief Continental ally, the Amsterdam Behmenist Johann Georg Gichtel, whose break with Lead was precipitated above all by her universalism.

Francis Lee and the public society

The loose circle became an organized body in the 1690s through Francis Lee. A nonjuror deprived of his Oxford fellowship, who had studied medicine at Leiden, Lee returned to England in 1694, married Lead’s daughter, and became at once her amanuensis, editor, and the systematizer of her thought. With Richard Roach, rector of a Hackney parish, he gave the gatherings their shape. Out of private prayer meetings at Lead’s house in Hoxton and at Ann Bathurst’s home in Baldwin’s Gardens, the Philadelphian Society took its formal name — the Philadelphian Society for the Advancement of Piety and Divine Philosophy — and in 1697 emerged into public view with the Theosophical Transactions of the Philadelphian Society, five small numbers published in London between March and November of that year and edited by Lee and Roach. It was the first English-language journal of its kind, its very title a conscious echo of, and counter-statement to, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: a periodical not of natural philosophy but of divine philosophy, of conferences, letters, and inquiries for the advancement of piety. Lee also drafted the society’s Declaration of 1699 and conducted its foreign correspondence, and it was he above all who carried its writings abroad.

The historical moment favored such a venture. The Toleration Act of 1689 and the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 had opened a window for unlicensed religious publishing and assembly, and into it the Philadelphians stepped. Their public meetings drew crowds large enough to force a change of venue; they also drew disturbance from a rude multitude, the suspicion of the archbishop of Canterbury’s agents, who intercepted the society’s letters in 1697, and the remonstrance of the learned nonjuror Henry Dodwell. To the cultured Enlightenment distaste for what it called enthusiasm, the spectacle of a circle of visionaries gathered around an aged, blind prophetess and her diary of dreams was an easy target for ridicule.

Dissolution and the longer afterlife

As an organized body the society was brief. It never grew large — at its height perhaps no more than a hundred English adherents — its public meetings provoked ridicule, and the strains of leadership and doctrine pulled at it from within. It drew up a formal confession in 1703 and, after Lead’s death in 1704, the formal group dissolved. Lee abandoned his Philadelphian principles; Roach alone kept the flame, and around 1707–09 merged the remnant with the Camisard French Prophets.

Its afterlife, however, was longer than its institutional one. Even in Lead’s lifetime her Continental fame outran her English following. The Utrecht translator Loth Fischer rendered her works into Dutch and German from the mid-1690s, and through Pietist, Spiritualist, and Behmenist networks her writings reached readers from Pennsylvania to Saxony — among them Johann Wilhelm Petersen and his wife Johanna, the Berleburg circle, and, as a curious reader, Leibniz. The writings circulated in German translation and fed the streams of radical Pietism and Christian theosophy; the figure of Sophia, and the longing for a final restoration of all things, surface again in later visionary Protestantism — in the angelology and spirit-world of Emanuel Swedenborg and the church that grew from his writings, Swedenborgianism, and, far downstream, in the Sophiology of the Russian Orthodox tradition. The Philadelphian project of a universal divine philosophy also belongs to the seventeenth century’s larger dream of total wisdom, the pansophism that sought to gather all knowledge into a single illuminated whole.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The Philadelphians left a substantial body of print. The primary corpus — Pordage’s Theologia Mystica (London, 1683) and his Sophia (surviving chiefly in the Amsterdam German edition of 1699), together with Lead’s diaries, above all A Fountain of Gardens — is public domain on age and, for the English texts, freely available in the keyboarded transcriptions of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, released under a public-domain dedication that covers the transcribed text (though not the page images). A peculiarity of the corpus is that much of Pordage’s English writing was suppressed or lost after his death and survives principally through the Dutch and German translations of the Fischer and Gichtel circle, which makes the Continental editions the primary witnesses to his thought — a transmission anomaly that mirrors the society’s own Continental afterlife.

The modern scholarship is largely of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The foundational institutional study is Nils Thune’s The Behmenists and the Philadelphians (Uppsala, 1948), which first treated the circle as a coherent movement; Serge Hutin’s Les disciples anglais de Jacob Boehme (Paris, 1960) extended the inquiry in French. Arthur Versluis gave Pordage and Lead dedicated chapters in Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (SUNY Press, 1999), reading them as part of a Christian esoteric line descending from Böhme, and reprinted substantial extracts in his anthology Wisdom’s Book (2000). B. J. Gibbons’s Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought (Cambridge, 1996) is the key study of the Behmenist treatment of the masculine and feminine in God, and Julie Hirst’s Jane Leade (Ashgate, 2005) is the standard stand-alone biography. The current archival baseline is set by Ariel Hessayon, editor of Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy (Palgrave, 2016) and author of much of the recent reconstruction of the circle’s networks, alongside the work of Sarah Apetrei on early Enlightenment women, prophecy, and the religion of the heart. The historiographic movement has been from the mid-century institutional-and-psychological framing of Thune and Hutin toward a transnational, gendered, archival reading that takes the Philadelphians seriously as a node in the wider European world of radical Pietism and Behmenist theosophy.

Scholars treat the society as one of the clearest English expressions of the Böhmenist current — a case in which the speculative theosophy of the Continent took root, briefly, in English soil and produced a literature of its own.

→ Related: Christian Theosophy Boehmean · Russian Sophiology · Quietism · Pietism · Gnosis · Jane Lead · Origen · Pansophism · Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon · Angelus Silesius · Emmanuel Swedenborg · Swedenborgianism · John Everard · Russian Religious Philosophy Sophiology