Morgan Llwyd
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Morgan Llwyd
Morgan Llwyd was born in 1619 in the farmhouse of Cynfal Fawr, Maentwrog, of an old and prosperous Merionethshire family. The head of the house during his youth was Huw Llwyd, a veteran of Queen Elizabeth’s Netherlands campaigns, who had inherited Cynfal in 1623. Huw was a gifted amateur poet, and a faithful patron of the professional poets who at that time still toured gentlefolks’ houses to sing elegies and eulogies and receive their due fees. Moreover, the parish clergy of Maentwrog were at that time men of letters: Edmwnd Prys, rector 1572–1623, had helped Bishop William Morgan to translate the Bible into Welsh; Huw Lewis, Prys’s successor, had put into Welsh Wermuller’s Kleinot; Dafydd Rowlands, Prys’ curate, made an unpublished Welsh translation of Sutton’s Disce Mori. In this environment, Morgan Llwyd became familiar early with the great literary tradition of Wales, and thus laid the foundations of his own superb prose style.
At about nineteen, Llwyd was sent away to school at Wrexham, then the largest town in Wales, and the home of a vigorous Puritan tradition since the early 1580s, when Christopher Goodman had been active in the adjoining diocese of Chester. The curate of the parish church at that time was the great Walter Cradock, who had already been expelled from the curacy of St. Mary’s, Cardiff, for his Puritan nonconformity. Llwyd was converted through Cradock, and in 1639 followed him to Llanfair Waterdine in Shropshire, where Cradock had found refuge from the authorities under the patronage of Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan. Here he met Vavasor Powell, another convert of Cradock’s, and a lifelong friend thereafter. In November, 1639, Llwyd went with Cradock to help found the first Welsh independent church, at Llanfaches in Monmouthshire. There he met and married his wife Ann. When the Civil War broke out the church fled first to Bristol and then, in July, 1643, to London. Llwyd had already sent his wife and children home to his mother at Cynfal, and now he enlisted as a chaplain in the Parliamentary army. After active service in southern England, he was sent by Parliament in 1644 to North Wales as an itinerant preacher. He settled finally at Wrexham, in Brynyffynnon, a house belonging to his friend, Colonel John Jones, of Maesygarnedd, and remained in Wales almost uninterruptedly thereafter. His status was that of an itinerant minister, paid by Parliament. From 1650, as an Approver under the Act for the Better Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, it was also his duty to find fit ministers to replace the ejected clergy. In 1656 he was settled as minister of Wrexham parish with a salary of £100 per annum. Since 1647, however, he had been acting as pastor to the gathered church at Wrexham, now grown into a famous and influential congregation. He gave himself unsparingly to preaching far and wide, tending his flock and writing for the instruction of his fellow-countrymen till his death on June 3, 1659.
Such was his outward career. His inward development is less easily traced, for he was curiously reticent on the subject. However, there is a little evidence, and Llwyd himself provides a framework by a crucial note which he jotted down on a blank page in a holograph collection of his verse (Cardiff Central Library MS. 1:6, 65b, ca. 1654): 16 Annis (sic) vixi in teneb. varijs, 16 postea in lucibus varijs (“I lived for sixteen years in varying [degrees of] darkness, and for sixteen after that in varying [degrees of] light”). The first sixteen years cover his early life at Cynfal (1619–35). That this should be a time of “varying darkness” is perhaps not surprising, for the Welsh church of those days could offer her children little but elementary instruction in the forms of religion. Llwyd, however, seems to have come early under conviction of sin (in a poem he says he was long dan fellt y gyfraith, under the lightning of the law), and this may have been through reading one of the excellent books of devotion translated into Welsh since the Reformation—Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, perhaps, or Bunny’s Resolution, the book that awakened Baxter. The second sixteen years, 1635–51, begin with Llwyd’s conversion. During this period, his views seem to have been those of a typical radical Puritan, as were Cradock’s own: scepticism as to the importance of outward forms in religion, a strong antipathy to dogmatism about church order and church ordinances, and a marked tendency to evangelical antinomianism. Unlike Cradock, however, Llwyd became a fervent Fifth Monarchist, maintaining on the basis of various passages in Daniel and Revelation that Christ would soon return to earth to establish His kingdom, and that it was the saints’ duty to prepare for this by political as well as spiritual means. Llwyd later renounced the political implications of this creed, but the hope which it enshrined never left him.
In 1651 (so the note quoted above implies) Llwyd received what seemed to him full light. A passage from Lazarus’ testimony to his sisters in Lazarus and his sisters Discoursing of paradise (1655) may reflect his experience.
“I found myself full of thoughts, but very quiet, having no lust, or will, or motion of my own, but my mind breathed in God’s own will all the while; I waited only for his pleasure in the quiet region of holy Angels, hearing (by an inward ear) the heavenly melody, and seeing (with the spirit of my mind) the unutterable wonders of the God-head.”
Llwyd’s discovery of the writings of Jacob Boehme, the German Lutheran visionary, was in some way connected with this experience. All Boehme’s works appeared in English between 1645 and 1662, and Llwyd, who in 1655 was able to introduce his own paraphrase of a passage in Boehme by writing, “I have seen more of the Lord Jesus by reading and considering nine words, then in many Books, Sermons and personal opinions,” himself translated two parts of Boehme’s Der Weg zu Christo into Welsh and published them in 1657. From 1651 onwards, Boehme was undoubtedly the dominant intellectual influence on Llwyd.
Llwyd expounded the complex and obscure metaphysical system which he worked out under Boehme’s influence in nine works, six Welsh and three English: Llythur ir Cyrnru cariadus (A Letter to the loving Welshmen), London, 1653 [?]; Gwaedd ynghymru yn wyneb pob Cydwybod (A cry in Wales to every conscience), Dublin, 1653; Dirgelwch I rai iw ddeall Ac i eraill iw watwar . . . Neu ARWYDD i annerch y Cymru (A mystery for some to understand and for others to mock at . . . or a sign to confront the Welsh), London [1653] (these three summon Welshmen to prepare themselves for Christ’s early return, an event presaged, Llwyd thought, by the summoning of the Saints’ Parliament in 1653); An Honest discourse between Three NEIGHBOURS, London, 1655 (this reflects Llwyd’s disillusionment after Cromwell dissolved the Saints’ Parliament, and in effect urges Fifth Monarchists to prepare for their King’s coming by spiritual rather than political means); Lazarus and his sisters Discoursing of paradise, London, 1655; Where is Christ?, London, 1655 (an anti-Quaker tract); Gait o’r Gair (A Word from the Word), London, 1656; Cyfarwyddid ir Cymru (Instruction for the Welsh), London, 1657; Gwyddor vehod (Heavenly science), London, 1657 (these last three are more in the nature of systematic expositions of Llwyd’s metaphysics: the last is in verse, and uses current astrological ideas to give point to its message). In the five Welsh prose works, Llwyd shows himself one of the great masters of the language.
A fairly consistent doctrinal scheme appears in all his books, which may be summarized thus: The root and ground of all being is the immortal, unmeasurable, unsearchable, self-subsisting God. At first, He was as nothing (Dim) in a condition of timeless, motionless existence. With Him was the Word (His Wisdom), the agent of His creative acts. Discerning in Himself His eternal thoughts, possibilities, and intentions, God expresses Himself in an act of creation, and His nature is revealed as a trinity of will, love, and power, which pervade all things. Endowed with will, His creatures depart from their root and become a dark, formless mass (Diddim, matter) from which the Four Elements emerge; God’s mind, acting upon the Four Elements, then brings into existence all visible created things. Man is a unique case: his body is a compound of the Four Elements and is therefore dominated by a self-seeking principle or dark trinity alien to God; but he is also endowed with a spirit which derives directly from God through the word and in which the Holy Trinity itself dwells “substantially”; also, he possesses a soul, the intermediary between the body and the spirit, partaking of the nature of each and subject to the attractions of both. In the Incarnation, God expressed Himself a second time: the word became man in Jesus Christ, and by His perfect obedience and self-denial defeated and subjugated the dark trinity of this world; now He is become a Spirit who (in Llwyd’s words) enlightens, searches, comprises, rules, quickens, and upholds all things. Finally, in the Last Day, God will express Himself a third and final time: the earth and all things earthly will be destroyed, time will be swallowed up by eternity, and a new heaven and earth come into being. The fate of the soul on that day will depend on whether she has chosen union with the spirit or enslavement by the body; if the first, her communion in the spirit with the Godhead will be made perfect and she will live for ever in joy and light; but if the second, she will not be destroyed with the body but will live for ever in darkness and deprivation. The soul can attach herself to the spirit by rejecting the claims of body and self-will, and obeying instead the dictates of conscience, through which the word in the spirit speaks.
This summary is undoubtedly over-simplified; but if we may tentatively accept it as substantially fair, two comments suggest themselves. First, much of this is pure uncontrolled speculation; second, certain features in it seem positively erroneous. This was pointed out in Llwyd’s own day, most sharply by his old friend Vavasor Powell, who wrote in 1657, “It will be small joy to me and other saints to hear that beloved and blessed M(organ) L(lwyd) does degenerate so much in his doctrine as to hold many of the old Arminian and popish principles, as free will, perfection, or the Socinian d(octrine), as to enervate the power of Christ’s death or intercession. I do not say you do, but look you to it.” Powell’s warning was justified. Llwyd did believe in free will and, it seems, in the possibility of Christian perfection (cf. C.C.L. MS. 1:6, p. 60: “Sinai & churches now bethinke/how all may strive for sin”). More seriously, his Behmenist doctrine of the word indwelling every man does in fact “enervate the power of Christ’s death or intercession,” undermining the centrality of the Incarnagion and atonement and gift of the Spirit to the church. If Christ already indwells all men, why need He have died at Jerusalem? And if He already teaches all men in their consciences, what need was there of an external revelation and a Bible? Though Llwyd directs a solemn admonition to the Quakers, who scoffed at the “Jerusalem Christ” and the “outward book,” “be warned not to divide the Christ without, and the Christ within; it is the gulph of condemnation, a pit for self-conceited hearts; He that writeth hath seen the deceit . . . speak not reproachfully of the outward Bible” (Where is Christ?), it is clear that the whole tendency of his own teaching was towards the Quaker position, and many of his own flock became Quakers after his death.
We can guess what happened to Llwyd. In the light of his 1651 experience, he saw that much current Puritan religion was intellectual only, an outward assent without any complementary inward experience of grace, exclusively and intolerantly concerned with a bare doctrinal correctness. Against this he reacted too far: not only did he tend to stress the inward aspects of Christian faith and life to the virtual exclusion of the outward, but he adopted as the basis of his teaching Boehme’s “inward” mystical metaphysics. Not that his writings are therefore wholly unedifying, for he was surely a man of genuine, if fitful, spiritual insight; but we should perhaps do well to apply to his case Peter Sterry’s caveat about Boehme himself.
“They that read him had need come to him well instructed in the mystery of Christ, with a heavenly newness of mind, by which they may be able to try what the good and acceptable word of God is.”
I wish to record my great debt to the writings of Dr. E. Lewis Evans, our foremost authority on the thought of Morgan Llwyd. I should add, however, that Dr. Evans would certainly disagree forcibly with many of the views expressed above.