The Wisdom of John Pordage

From the Introduction by Arthur Versluis

This little book by John Pordage is the most lucid and comprehensive work on Christian mysticism I have ever read. It is remarkable, given the clarity and profundity of this work, that it has not been available or even noted by scholars since its original publication in 1683, two years after Pordage’s death. But undeserved obscurity has been the fate of all Podage’s works, the English originals of which have all been lost save what you hold in your hands, originally published under the title Mystica Theologica. Pordage’s work is so extraordinary because it offers his direct spiritual experience in a rigorously organized, logical structure. If you think that the word “mysticism” means wooly-minded self-indulgence, prepare to be surprised. Here, Pordage offers nothing less than initiation into the deepest mysteries of Christian spirituality.
Who was John Pordage? The son of a London merchant, Pordage was born in 1607, and entered Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1623. It is possible that he obtained a diploma of a doctor of medicine at Oxford in 1640, but some scholars doubt this (Hutin 82). Certainly it is true in any case that he was not destined to practice medicine, but to be an exemplar of homo religiosus. For whatever his other schooling, Pordage entered into the order of the Anglican Church and was made vicar of the church of St Lawrence’s at Reading in 1644. Soon, under the auspices of Elias Ashmole, he was made rector of the rather wealthy parish at Bradfield, a position he held until 1654.
At Bradfield, Pordage’s wife, Mary Freeman, an especially pious and spiritual woman whom he married for that reason, began to have visionary experiences. Soon Pordage himself was experiencing remarkable phenomena, including angelic apparitions, and these were witnessed too by others in a small group of theosophers who gathered around Pordage and his wife in a prayer group. This group was eventually to include men like Thomas Bromley and Edmund Brice—both of whom were educated at Oxford and themselves wrote theosophic treatises—and women like Anne Bathurst and Mrs Joanna Oxenbridge, both women of high society who left records of their spiritual journeys with the Pordages.
Pordage’s visionary experiences began in August of 1649. This opening of the worlds was the revelation to Pordage and his family of the good and evil invisible realms that inform this visible world of ours. Pordage and his family saw firsthand the Mundi Ideales, or invisible realms, one full of love, the other of wrath. The wrathful realm was evidently quite unpleasant: Pordage and his family, he wrote, witnessed not only the presence of evil hierarchies—in monstrous theriomorphic forms, all “misshapen,” with cat’s ears and cloven feet and fiery eyes—but their physical manifestations in sulphuric foul odors and even the imprint of their images on the windows, ceiling, and chimney of the house. He and his wife, being unable to remove these various images from the chimney using wet cloths, resorted to smashing them off with hammers.
But Pordage wrote that he also passed through the flames and entered into paradise, which he called Mundus Luminosus, or the light world. Here there were “multitudes almost innumerable, of pure Angelical spirits, in figurative bodies, which were clear as the morning-star, and transparent as Christal.” Here they saw the rare beauty of these beings, felt the inexpressible joys and harmonies of heaven, smelled delightful heavenly scents, and heard celestial music. The “tongue can hardly express these Odours of Paradise,” and these glorious visions and sounds, Pordage wrote.
About this time, Pordage was tried before the local Anglican commission as an heretical minister of the faith. Against him were arrayed a whole range of charges, including provocative statements, and immoral conduct. Pordage was able to defend himself well against all these charges: the supposedly provocative or heretical statements imputed to him he proved to have been taken out of context and misinterpreted; the charge that he had kept a mistress in London he demonstrated to be quite false. Thus he was able to exonerate himself from the accusations, and he was allowed to continue as a minister from 1649 to 1654.
In the same period, Pordage’s small group grew to include such people as Thomas Bromley and Edmund Brice. But in 1654, Pordage was tried again on the same charges, and despite his eloquent rebuttal, he was in fact removed from his ministerial position at Bradfield. One of the chief accusations against Pordage was “that he hath very frequent and familiar converse with Angels.” that when he was attacked by a dragon in his home, “his Angel stood by him and upheld him.” Further, “That Mrs Pordage and Mrs Flavel had their Angels standing by them also, Mrs Pordage singing sweetly, keeping time on her breast, and that his children saw the spirits coming into the house, and said, look there, Father. . . And the whole roof of the house was full of Spirits (Innocencie, 14-15).”
Some sense of the atmosphere in which Pordage‘s second trial took place can be gathered from his account of the judge’s rancor. The judge evidently was prejudiced against Pordage from the beginning, growling to Pordage that he was worse than a felon, for all he knew, and that he had no objection to trying Pordage again on the same charges on which he had earlier been acquitted. Pordage did have legitimate reason to be upset, for even the very act under which Pordage was being tried was itself not instituted until a full year after those things with which he was charged had been reputed to take place!
In such an atmosphere, one is hardly surprised to find Pordage ousted from his pastorate, but his peroration is moving. He writes:

And now ye Ministers of Berks, my persecutors, tell me, what wrong or injury have I done you; have I lusted to preach in any of your Pulpits? Have I privately gone from parish to parish, or from house to house to get followers, or make proselites of your hearers? Have I publicly or privately railed against you or your Doctrines? Have I not lived privately in my own place, onely holding forth that strict, dying, resigning life, as the way to life eternal[?] Why then am I persecuted with so much fury, and violence, as though I were not worthy to live amongst you? The Lord judge betwixt you and me, and give you to consider and repent of what you have done (Innocencie, 79)

But although he was deprived of his livelihood, and although Pordage found himself in extremely difficult circumstances for the remainder of his life, these outward difficulties only served to intensify his, and his group’s, convictions and inward life. Of course, their persecution did mean that for some years they lived spiritually in the “outer darkness” surrounded by wrath, suffering something akin to what St John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul.” But eventually they were restored to angelic communications and to the spiritual light. Yet until his death, Pordage and his small group kept themselves out of public view and therefore censure.
Even when the Restoration took place under Charles II in 1660, and suspended clergymen were allowed to return to their positions, Pordage did not take this step, but remained quietly with his group of fellow theosophers. As a leader of a small, private, non-Anglican religious group, however, Pordage was constrained to meet with them and to live discreetly, for by 1664 such non-conformist meetings were again outlawed, and their leaders potentially at least subjected to fines and imprisonment. Worse, 1665 and 1666 saw the advent of the Great Plague and the great London fire, seen by many as signs of the Apocalypse (fears intensified by the associations of the number 1666 with the number of the Beast in Revelation). Many people fled London, and Pordage and his group had to return to Bradfield to live, only returning to London in 1668, the year Mrs. Pordage died.
This time of outer difficulty also saw the most important affiliation of Pordage’s life, in some respects: that between Pordage and Mrs Jane Leade, who first felt called to join his group in 1663. She remained a member of his group, and in fact assumed leadership, especially after April, 1670, when, after her husband’s death, she experienced a vision of the Holy Virgin Sophia, who called her to a virginal life (Fountain I.17). From this point on, she was to write a large number of extraordinary visionary treatises, and to become a central theosophical figure of her era. In 1674, she moved into Pordage’s own house, at his request, so that together they could form a more powerful spiritual union.
During this time—from the early 1670’s until his death in 1681— Pordage wrote most of his elaborate, lucid, and concisely expressed metaphysical treatises that belong to the tradition of the German theosopher Jacob Böhme (1575-1624). But Pordage only occasionally refers to Böhme directly, for all these treatises were based wholly and directly on his own spiritual experience, exemplary of which is the treatise Sophia, which consists in twenty-two daily journal entries dated from 21 June to 10 July, and which contains biographical data from the year 1675. Pordage’s magnum opus, Göttliche und Wahre Metaphysica, [Holy and True Metaphysics] was also written during this time, probably concluded in the year of his death, 1681.
But none of these works were published during his lifetime and, even more surprisingly, only two were published in English after his death. Although all his works had a wide private circulation, and were extremely influential in both England and the Continent, it remains a strange fact that Pordage’s primary works—albeit written in English—were published only in German, and have been accessible only in that language to the present day.
The Wisdom of John Pordage consists in a modern version of the two works published in English: A Treatise of Eternal Nature with Her Seven Essential Forms (1681) and Theologia Mystica, or the Mystic Divinitie of the Aeternal Invisibles, viz, the Archetypous Globe (1683). The Treatise of Eternal Nature offers a general introduction to the concept of Eternal Nature, the “first original and true ground of all created beings and so of all true knowledge (Eternal Nature, preface).” Outward, physical nature, then, has its origin in an archetypal, pure realm of “Eternal Nature” similar to the Platonic realm of Ideas or Forms. Thus Divine Nature is “hid in Nature, as a Jewel in a Cabinet;” it is manifested in the Seven Essential Forms, and has its origin in the Abyssal Nothing, which is the “ground of all Essences, and yet no Essence to be seen in it,” the “fruitful Mother of all Things.” In Pordage’s treatise, then, we see a visionary hierarchy or ascent from the natural world to the archetypal, to the Seven Essential Forms (the qualities informing existence), to the Abyssal Nothing of God Himself.
When we look at Pordage’s and Bromley’s works, as indeed at the whole of English theosophic literature, it becomes quite clear that these authors are referring to a single theosophic initiatic process that entails the opening of inner vision and access to what Pordage calls in Sophia a “magical earth,” what Bromley describes as when “our internal Eye is more unlocked, to behold the paradisical World, with those luminous Objects and Inhabitants that are in it.” The “magical earth” seen in spiritual vision is precisely what Henry Corbin called a mundus imaginalis, or imaginal realm: it represents an intermediate state between the duality of earthly life and the inexpressible unitive realization of total transcendence.
This visionary realm belongs neither to the realm of the subjective (fantasy) nor to the objective (scientific observer), but rather represents a realm in which subject and object reflect one another and ultimately are indivisible from one another. In Pordage’s account, for instance, the initiate (the subject) perceives the divine object (if we may so put it) as joyous presence—as delight-filled taste, touch, smell, and so forth. Boundaries between self and other are dissolving, not only here, in the visionary realm, but also in the theosophic initiatic circle as well. Each individual is able to perceive the joys and sorrows of the others even at a distance because habitual divisions into self and other are being transcended.
Thus it would be totally mistaken to attempt to place a great divide between Pordage’s visionary gnosis and the via negativa. I have elsewhere argued that via positiva gnosis both leads into and manifests via negativa gnosis; that spiritual symbolism both reveals and reflects sheer transcendence. Here we have a case in point. Pordage in particular explicitly recognized the crucial importance of the Böhmean ungrund, or not-ground, the sheer transcendence that is the godhead, prior to all being. This is the “Abyss” of the “Abyssal Globe” that Pordage’s inner Eye perceives at the opening of its visionary experience; it is the essential nature of paradise itself. Pordage’s spiritual vision here is very much akin to what we find in Vajrayana Buddhism, particularly in the Nyingma tradition, where it is not at all uncommon for someone who is spiritually realized to have visionary experiences as part of their initiatic path. These visionary experiences are not seen in the tradition as somehow opposed to or fundamentally different from the fundamental nature of existence as sunyata, or emptiness, but rather as visionary revelations of that fundamental nature expressing itself in revelatory form.
It is important to observe that the word “initiation” has the meaning of “to begin,” and this is very much implied throughout these accounts of theosophic initiation. Initiation in a theosophic context is most definitely a continuing process, and even what we see here as an end—catachresis—is only the beginning of another stage, the living out of the Christic life. For Pordage, this life was lived largely in reclusion, rather in the manner of a Sufi shaikh and disciples. Indeed, much of the theosophic initiatic tradition reminds us of Sufism, not least the visionary recitals of Pordage’s major works, Göttliche und Wahre Metaphysica, Vier Tractätlein, and Sophia. Pordage left behind a vast corpus of works that, taken as a whole, very much suggest he was like an explorer who had entered into a new terrain and had set out to map it for all who would follow after him into it.
Taken as a whole and in the context of such works as Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth, the writings of Pordage, and his fellow theosophers do indeed suggest that there is a terra lucida to which we may have access through spiritual vision. While scientists sought to explore and manipulate the outer world during the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, Western society was entirely neglecting the inner realms; it abdicated our spiritual calling in favor of tekhné, our increasing ability to control the physical realm. All the while, there remains an entire inner terrain that calls out for exploration, and whose exploration is synonymous with inner fulfillment. Yet we must keep in mind that this inner exploration can only take place at a price—that of our own ignorance, oftentimes the most painful of prices. This journey is not merely that of a “neutral” and manipulative observer, but rather the transmutation of the observer into that which is observed. To enter the terra lucida, we must give up our ordinary habitual selves and be willing to undertake the most fundamental adventure of all, that of our own transfiguration.
For it is self-evident that the initiatic journey Pordage outlines is nothing less than a radical, total transformation of the individual. It is not that the visionary realms which the soul traverses are its own creation—that would be mere solipsism—but rather that the soul must leave behind everything it holds dear, indeed, everything, including its concepts of itself, in order to enter into a realm where it gradually realizes its own joyous unity with all that transcends it. Held onto as a visionary event by a discrete self, even visionary experience can become an impediment. In its very nature, then, this is a path that is closed to all who refuse the radical openness it requires as a sine qua non. No wonder that it has remained so little known in the Christian world! Indeed, what you are now reading is the only specific discussion of this Christian initiatic path in print.