‘We are All One in the Eyes of the Lord’: Christopher Hill and the Historical Meanings of Radical Religion

Abstract

but immediate. And Christopher Hill gave me a vigorous imitation of Gregory’s preaching style, leaning forward, as if from the ornate mahogany pulpit in the Centenary Chapel, and speaking with great emphasis to startle the respectable York Methodists with the admonition that, in order to see the divine, they should ‘look into the eyes of every fellow sinner, even the poorest beggar or the most abandoned prostitute or the most vicious wretch in the city streets’. Hill was intellectually stirred by this. The two held many long and earnest debates together. ‘God is in man – in the vilest of men – or else He doesn’t matter’, wrote Gregory provocatively, in one of his published sermons.19 Both men eventually found twentieth-century Methodism insufficient to hold them, although they quit in different directions and no longer remained close. In 1935, Gregory was received into the Catholic Church.20 The agnostic Hill had enough of the fundamentalist Protestant in him to laugh wryly when he later told me this news, which he found faintly distasteful: ‘a waste of a good man’. Nonetheless, the intellectual bond held good. Thirty-five years after their discussions, Hill acknowledged his gratitude to Gregory, aptly enough in a book entitled Intellectual Origins.21 Old truths could be turned into lies over time. For Hill the historian, the answer was to return to the seventeenth century, to the deep source of radical Protestantism. His belief in freedom plus equality attracted him to those who debated these issues in times of turmoil. He could empathize with their struggles; he understood their Biblical language; yet simultaneously he stood far enough apart to provide a historian’s perspective. HILL AND MARXIST EGALITARIANISM There was a gap of some time – exactly how much is not clear – between Hill the doubting Methodist and Hill the convinced Marxist. His intellectual transition occurred during his student days but there was no single moment of conversion before he joined the Communist Party in 1934. Marxism combined an underlying moral belief in equality with a sweeping view of historical destiny that predicted its eventual achievement. That was deeply attractive to Hill, who became a Marxist because he was an egalitarian rather than the other way round. He also applauded the international scope of Marxism, which freed historians mentally from the confines of national chauvinism – even though his own specialist research always remained focused upon England. Christopher Hill and Radical Religion 115 06 dbh032 (ds) 9/9/04 3:47 pm Page 115