Philadelphian Society

← Encyclopedia

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.

Pordage, ejected from his living in the 1650s for unorthodox views, had assembled a community devoted to contemplation and the recording of visions; after his death in 1681 the leadership passed to Lead, whose voluminous spiritual diaries — most famously A Fountain of Gardens — became the society’s central writings. At their heart stands Sophia, the divine Wisdom, whom Lead reported encountering as a living figure: a feminine aspect of God who appeared to her in vision and instructed her. The physician and scholar Francis Lee, who married into Lead’s household, gave the loose circle its organization in the 1690s and carried its publications to the Continent, where they found readers among Dutch and German Pietists and Böhme’s other heirs.

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. The second, 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. 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.

As an organized body the society was brief. It never grew large, its public meetings provoked ridicule, and after Lead’s death in 1704 the formal group dissolved. Its afterlife, however, was longer than its institutional one. 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. 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