The Neo-Platonist of New Jersey: Daniel Leeds, Mystic, Schismatic

Daniel Leeds—cooper, farmer, surveyor, almanac maker, local official—followed a migratory spiritual path.  As a young man troubled by his sins amidst the tumult of the English interregnum, he was comforted by Christ appearing to him in visions. He then became a Quaker and emigrated to New Jersey in the 1670s.  There he meditated on the works of the Neo-Platonist Jacob Boehme, authoring a synopsis of Boehme’s work that he published in 1688.  For Leeds, the material and the spiritual were interpenetrated and he sought spiritual truth behind the veil of the everyday. Yet in 1692, when the Keithian schism developed, Leeds supported the side of doctrinal purification and organizational hierarchy; he contributed ardently to the pamphlet war that ensued. Why was his mysticism apparently unsustainable on the Delaware, and why, in such a relatively small and face-to-face society, did Leeds feel such a need to express himself in print?  

The story of Daniel Leeds offers an opportunity to explore larger questions about the relationships between mysticism and social circumstance, and between private belief and print.  While the Great Migration of the Quakers to the Delaware in the 1670s and 1680s created a region that offered freedom for expressing the “Light Within,” Leeds found little companionship for his studies for the arcana of Boehme and astrology.  While Leeds was now freer to speak, ironically he seems to have felt that he was not heard.  Print was his voice. Like many with mystical experiences, Leeds felt the urgency of one who has been offered access to Truth, and experienced the manifold difficulties of communicating this Truth to those without such experiences.  In print he tried first to bridge the chasm between mystical understanding and common apprehensions, and then to buttress more familiar forms of theological authority.