God IV

The conventional understanding of God is that he will get you and put you in a dark hot

place forever if you don't do exactly as you are told, by his priest of course. In 1741, 

sixteen years before Blake's birth, a New England divine named Jonathan Edwards

wrote and delivered a sermon which he named, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 

God"; historians tell us that it scared literally thousands of people into the Christian 

church. A similiar vision of God has haunted multitudes before and after Blake even 

own to the present day. Besides the superstitious fear it has aroused, this understanding 

of God has contributed to oceans of blood shed by well meaning Christians through the 

ages.

Relating this conventional understanding to one of Blake's earliest experiences, his 

brief career in school yields a distinctive image of God as a Transcendental 

Schoolmaster. As soon as Blake reached the age of reason, he rejected such a God as

radically and uniquivocally as he had rejected the flesh and blood schoolmaster. He saw

such an image of God standing at the apex of a pyramid of human unhappiness, of 

exploitation, oppression, misery and hatred. He saw the divine right of kings and all 

those who derive their authority from the Crown. He saw their lackey priests extorting 

tithes from the people, collected by the 18th century equivalent of the IRS, and often 

giving little in return.

He saw the emerging divine right of industrialists to work seven year old children 

fourteen hours a day at hard labor and reward them with a pittance. This image of God 

was most horrendously embodied in the judges and executioners who disposed of the 

child criminals. He saw the press gangs with royal authority to capture and drug anyone 

lacking upper class credentials; their poor victims woke up aboard ship in a state of 

virtual slavery, and following the brave Roman tradition they learned to fear their 

officers more than the enemy. Blake felt an intense mystic union with the suffering 

masses and even the suffering masters: he knew that a prison officer has to be just as 

sick as the men he guards.

All these social programs were devised to teach poor devils to do what they were told, 

and behind them all stood the grim Transcendental Schoolmaster with the god sized 

birch rod. How could a self respecting person with any human sensitivity be other than 

an atheist! But Blake was never an atheist. Somehow he had to come to terms with God. 

If the above were a true representation of God, then he would rebel against God with 

his last breath. The young Blake identified with Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost: such a 

God is a sneaking serpent, and Blake would spend his life as "the just man raging in the 

wilds". Schizophrenia might be the normal reaction to certain social conditions.

The August Schoolmaster exists to enforce good and to prohibit or punish evil. The 

trouble with good and evil is that in this fallen world they are always defined by the 

man with the biggest stick. He of course sees himself as the likeness of God, God's 

earthly representative. So the most oppressive tyrant, the most colossal mass murderer, 

the most authentic Caesar becomes the Son of Heaven. The list is long and gruesome, 

and Blake knew his history.

Although he wouldn't dream of worshipping such a deity, Blake had no hesitancy about 

calling him God; he simply refused to call him a good God. Wide reading in Oriental, 

Greek, and Norse mythology had led him to an acquaintance with any number of 

malevolent gods. In his poetry he used these pagan images to flesh out the God of 

Wrath whom he found in the Old Testament. For perhaps fifteen years Blake's creative 

energies were largely expended in a conscious and deliberate overt rebellion against the 

conventional image of the Old Testament God. During those years he subjected that 

image to a searching and unique psychological analysis; it fills the pages of the Blake 

reader.