.jpg "Wikipedia Commons Jerusalem Plate 76")
Jerusalem
Plate 76
[1] Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
[2] For by it the elders obtained a good report.
[3] Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
From Larry Clayton's Ram Horn'd with Gold, Chapter 6 - Bible
The Recreation of the Word
Having said all this how can we summarize Blake's relationship to the Bible? First we recall that he didn't read it literally but symbolically, not historically, but poetically. Then we remember that he read it often enough and intensively enough to see it as a whole. That's a rare view nowadays. The Book has been almost universally blackened by simple ignorance (the failure to read it) and by preconceived theological notions that color and predetermine all of its meanings.
Few people have the happy faculty of looking at what's there without preconceptions of one kind or another. Blake's freedom from the conditioning of formal education gave him a most singular ability to do this. His powerful and energetic reading of the Bible therefore offers us the priceless gift of a new beginning, of getting behind our preconceptions and seeing the bedrock of western life in a new way.
This new way is not really a new way, but a very old way; it's a way that was lost when two things happened inaugurating the modern age. First, Bacon, Newton and Locke convinced the intellectual world that spirit doesn't really matter; all that matters is matter. Second, knowledge exploded in such an expansion that it became inconceivable to encompass it.
Blake's new way is a medieval way, but it's a lost way that we desperately need today, for failing an organized unity of spiritual direction, we all sink together into the abyss. The Bible according to Blake provides that direction. If you can make a commitment to the Bible like his, intensive enough to read it thoroughly, if you can put away the black book, if you can learn to read it imaginatively instead of binding it down to literal-historical categories of time and space (which Blake called "single vision"), if you can do all of these things, what emerges is a myth of meaning, a way of understanding life-- the Hebrews' life and your life.
You find this myth of meaning most explicitly stated in the earliest adventures of the children of Israel: they fall into Egypt, at the Exodus are delivered, wander in the wilderness and eventually occupy the Promised Land--but faithlessly. You see this story recreated by every writer of the Bible and applied one by one to a series of local scenes occurring over a period of about a thousand years. You see a man named Jesus who deliberately sets out to live this myth, and to live it in full, to do completely what the successive preceding generations had always failed to do. You see his death and resurrection and promise to come again to achieve for us all what he had achieved as an individual (he in us and we in him).
Finally you see John on Patmos still waiting for the Return and recreating the whole thing one more time in terms of the struggle between the Beast of Rome and the New Jerusalem. But is that the end of the story? For Blake it went on. In the City of God Augustine recreated it for the fourth century. There was Dante's recreation in the 13th, Milton's in the 17th, Blake's in the 18th--and yours and mine today! It's our myth of meaning; it's the way we get from time to eternity. Otherwise we stick with Locke, we decide there is no eternity, and we rot!
Milton, Plate 25 [27], (E 122)
"The Awakener is come. outstretchd over Europe! the Vision of God is fulfilled
The Ancient Man upon the Rock of Albion Awakes,
He listens to the sounds of War astonishd & ashamed;
He sees his Children mock at Faith and deny Providence
Therefore you must bind the Sheaves not by Nations or Families
You shall bind them in Three Classes; according to their Classes
So shall you bind them. Separating What has been Mixed
Since Men began to be Wove into Nations by Rahab & Tirzah
Since Albions Death & Satans Cutting-off from our awful Fields;
When under pretence to benevolence the Elect Subdud All
From the Foundation of the World. The Elect is one Class: You
Shall bind them separate: they cannot Believe in Eternal Life
Except by Miracle & a New Birth. The other two Classes;
The Reprobate who never cease to Believe, and the Redeemd,
Who live in doubts & fears perpetually tormented by the Elect
These you shall bind in a twin-bundle for the Consummation--
But the Elect must be saved [from] fires of Eternal Death,
To be formed into the Churches of Beulah that they destroy not the Earth
For in every Nation & every Family the Three Classes are born"
Milton, Plate 22 [24], (E 118)
"But then I rais'd up Whitefield, Palamabron raisd up Westley,
And these are the cries of the Churches before the two Witnesses
Faith in God the dear Saviour who took on the likeness of men:
Becoming obedient to death, even the death of the Cross
The Witnesses lie dead in the Street of the Great City
No Faith is in all the Earth: the Book of God is trodden under Foot:
He sent his two Servants Whitefield & Westley; were they Prophets
Or were they Idiots or Madmen? shew us Miracles!
PLATE 23 [25]
Can you have greater Miracles than these? Men who devote
Their lifes whole comfort to intire scorn & injury & death
Awake thou sleeper on the Rock of Eternity Albion awake"
Milton, Plate 41 [48], (E 142)
"He smiles with condescension; he talks of Benevolence & Virtue
And those who act with Benevolence & Virtue, they murder time on time
These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers
Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal Life:
Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination;
By imitation of Natures Images drawn from Remembrance
These are the Sexual Garments, the Abomination of Desolation
Hiding the Human lineaments as with an Ark & Curtains
Which Jesus rent: & now shall wholly purge away with Fire
Till Generation is swallowd up in Regeneration."
From The Double Vision, by Northrop Frye,
"What 'the' truth is, is not available to human beings in spiritual matters: the goal of our spiritual life is God, who is spiritual Other, not a spiritual object, much less a conceptual object. That is why the Gospels keep reminding us how many listen and how few hear: the truth of the gospel kind cannot be demonstrated except through personal example. As the seventeenth-century Quaker Isaac Penington said every truth is substantial in its own place, but all truths are shadows except the last. The language which lifts us clear of the merely plausible and the merely credible is the language of the spirit; the language of the spirit is, Paul tells us, the language of love, and the language of love is the only language that we can be sure is spoken and understood by God." (Page 20)
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