Deism

                                                       Deists

Deism, a form of Natural Religion denying the intervention of God in the affairs of men, pervaded the intellectual life of Blake's age. The deists were the true spiritual descendants of  Bacon, Newton, and Locke as Blake understood them. Early in the 18th Century Voltaire, much taken with the English deists, had spread their peculiar faith around the intellectual circles of Europe. Deism  became the fashionable faith of the upper classes in England and on the continent  as well. Many Anglican clergy of that day had strong deistical leanings. Most  historians believe that Washington and his associates were deists as well as  vestrymen, much as recent Mexican presidents have been Masons as well as  Roman Catholics.        Throughout the early and middle 18th Century deism largely belonged to the  gentility. During Blake's lifetime it filtered down to the masses. In America the deist  patricians, our forefathers, used the deist staymaker, Thomas Paine, as an  inflammatory propagandist for their cause. This identification of deists with political  reform explains the ambiguity Blake felt and expressed toward them. He despised  their Natural Religion, but admired their enlightened political views. He counted  Thomas Paine a friend and found his religion relatively non-threatening and his  political views refreshing. It was natural for him to react defensively against the  attack on Paine of Bishop Watson, whom Blake considered a lackey of the State.        Nevertheless Blake refuted the deist doctrine. One of his earliest theological  statements was his Tractate, "There is No Natural Religion" . He dedicated the  third chapter of 'Jerusalem' to the deists, and in the prose introduction addressed  them very straightforwardly: the deist, he said, is "in the State named Rahab , which  State must be put off before he can be the Friend of Man".        Blake went on to make two primary charges. First, the deist "teaches that  Man is Righteous in his Vegetated Spectre: an Opinion of fatal & accursed  consequence to Man". Blake in contrast maintained that "Man is born a Spectre or  Satan, & is altogether an Evil & requires a New Selfhood continually & must  continually be changed into his direct Contrary". Blake's second charge stems from  the first: these "originally righteous" deists promote War and blame it on the spiritually  religious.        Blake deplored the hypocrisy of the philosophes, who did indeed "charge the  poor Monks & religious with being the causes of War, while you acquit and flatter  the Alexanders & Caesars, the Lewises & Fredericks, who alone are its causes and  its actors" (Portion of Jerusalem, Plate 52). Blake himself had blamed war on the religious, not the poor monk, but the bishop  and archbishop. At a deeper level Blake knew that the man righteous in his own eyes is  the man who kills, while "the Glory of Christianity is to Conquer by Forgiveness".        Probably the prevalent opinion of the well to do churchly of deistical inclinations  held that religion is a good thing to keep the masses content; they supported the  Church as a primary bulwark of social stability. This attitude more than anything  else motivated Blake's radical anti-churchly stance. He knew it as a perversion of  everything Jesus stood for. In the great "Wheel of Religion" poem opening the fourth  chapter of 'Jerusalem' he gave his final and considered opinion of the deists' Natural  Religion.