Radical Prophet

Containing some of the most famous lines of English poetry, ‘Jerusalem’ has become the unofficial national anthem of England. Cherished by progressives and traditionalists alike, it is revered most of all for its lyrical evocation of a holy city constructed on the soil of Albion. Yet for all its iconic status with conservatives, its author – William Blake – was far from being in any way either traditional or conventional. Blake was a visionary: committed to a volatile, eruptive form of prophecy that directly echoed the manifestation of heaven on earth celebrated in the Book of Revelation. And it is precisely that charged prophetic vision which Christopher Rowland explores in his much anticipated new book: whether through the innovative writings of Blake himself, the grassroots suffragism espoused by the Levellers in Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate or bold and insurgent revolutionary ideas in Latin America. Christianity began with the conviction that the old order was finished. The mysterious, charismatic figure of Jesus proclaimed that a new era, the Kingdom of God, was dawning. Yet despite its success, and the conversion of the empire which had executed its founder, the religion he inspired was soon domesticated, its counter-cultural radicalism tamed, as the Church attempted to control both its doctrines and its followers. The author now convincingly shows that this was never the whole story. At the margins, around the edges, sometimes off the religious map, the apocalyptic flame of the New Testament continued to burn. In 1649 the Diggers occupied St George’s Hill to put the egalitarianism of Christ into practice. ‘You must break these men or they will break you’, Cromwell declared of the ‘lunaticks’. This book argues that such subversives had divined the true intent of the enigma who threw over the tables of the money-changers: to summon a new epoch – strange, iconoclastic, uncomfortable and utterly transformed. It gives full weight to a remarkable strain of radical religion that, despite all attempts to eradicate it, simply refuses to die.