FORGIVENESS OF SINS

William's book Forgiveness of Sins can be download along with He Came Down from Heaven from the site Faded Page. 

Charles Williams, a friend of C.S.Lewis, wrote a short book named The Forgiveness of Sins. In his chapter Forgiveness and Reconciliation he quoted passages from Blake to demonstrate the distinction between "the state of union to which forgiveness is a means and the opposite state." Although Williams agreed with Blake on many points, he seemed to disagree where Blake deviated from some orthodox church teachings, particularly in regard to complete absolution for the sinner.

I have added the locations where Blake's statements can be found in Erdman's The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.

Charles Williams Wrote:

Jerusalem, Plate 34 [38], (E 179)

"the Eternal Vision, the Divine Similitude,
In loves and tears of brothers, sisters, sons, fathers, and friends,
Which if Man ceases to behold, he ceases to exist.
. . . Our wars are wars of life and wounds of love,
With intellectual spears and long winged arrows of thought."

We may or may not suffer from exterior things; from this
interior thing we must all suffer—or almost all. It is certainly
possible that a few holy souls may have been born already so
disposed to sanctity that their effort is natural and their growth
instinctive; they move happily into goodness, and their
regeneration seems to have been one with their generation;
but even they may have suffered more than they chose
or indeed were able to communicate. Their wounds were
hidden; their sensitiveness bled privately; they appeased
the rage of their companions in their own quietude, and no one
has done more than envy a celsitude more painful than anyone
knew. But for the rest of us, the ‘wounds of love’ mean a
sudden or a lingering death. The second death itself is indeed
but a choice in time; if we prefer it before our natural death, we
are taught that it may be salvation; if after, that it may be
eternal loss. The death of our Lord introduced that choice. He
who died in his natural life brought into our natural life the
possibility of the choice of a supernatural death and therefore
of a supernatural life; this is the life of faith.

Jerusalem, Plate 96, (E 256)

"Wouldst thou love one who never died
For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee?
And if God dieth not for Man, and giveth not himself
Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love
As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death
In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood."

‘Man is Love.’ I do not remember the divine epigram
elsewhere. It is this which is the original part of all our life; to
divide it into natural and supernatural is a schism inevitable to
us, but an inevitability only as a means to unite or disunite the
common, the public thing. It is in our most private hearts that
the Republic is established, but our private hearts can force
themselves out of the Republic. We can refuse the maternity of
Love, the protectorate of Grace: intolerable and too certain
concession! and then? 

Jerusalem, Plate 47, (E 196)

"Hark! and Record the terrible wonder, that the Punisher
Mingles with his Victim’s Spectre, enslaved and tormented
To him whom he has murder’d, bound in vengeance and enmity.
Shudder not, but Write, and the hand of God will assist you."

The Sinner is for ever justified? no; perhaps Blake was indeed
heretical. Certainly the Republic is ambiguous, but the
humanitarian terror of punishment will not be more than a
Precursor, a Saint John Baptist there. It is the fashion
nowadays among many Christians to sneer at
humanitarianism and liberalism (in the political sense),
and this is natural because of the undue trust that has been
reposed in them. But ‘the lights of nature and faith’, wrote
John Donne, ‘are subordinate John Baptists to Christ’;
humanitarianism is a formula of prophecy. Pity is still half a
pagan virtue; compassion a Christian. To forgive is indeed
compassion, the suffering with another. To refuse to forgive is
to refuse that other as himself or herself; it is to prefer the
spectre of him, and to prefer a spectre is to be for ever lost. 

Jerusalem, Plate 45 [31], ( E 194)

"All things are so constructed
And builded by the Divine hand that the sinner shall always escape;
And he who takes vengeance alone is the criminal of Providence.
O Albion! If thou takest vengeance, if thou revengest thy wrongs,
Thou art for ever lost! What can I do to hinder the Sons
Of Albion from taking vengeance or how shall I them
persuade?"

To say that the sinner shall always escape is a rash definition.
Our Lord did not say so. But he did say that even the collection
of our just human debts was a very dangerous business; he did
say that we were to pray to be forgiven as—precisely as—we
forgive; he did say that the debts forgiven us reduced to
nonsense the debts owed to us. It is not therefore to read the
New Testament too rashly to see in it rather more than a
suggestion that, as far as we humanly are concerned, the sinner
will always escape. The Church may blame; it does not
condemn—at most it does but relegate the sinner to the Mercy
of God. The Republic may condemn; it must not blame
—the judge has no business to do more than pronounce
a sentence. We are not yet—perhaps in this world we shall
never be—in that ‘state’ when the judges themselves may
descend to be substitutes for the condemned and to endure in
their own persons the sentences they impose. But something
like this is already the habit of the Church, for the Church
mystically shares the vicarious sufferings of Christ. ‘The state
of the punisher is eternal death.’ In the Church this is so, for in
the Church he who takes vengeance is indeed already lost; he
is outside the Church, ‘outside which is no salvation’; he is
outside the City, where as Saint John saw, are dogs and
sorcerers and whoremongers, ‘and whoever loveth and maketh
a lie’. In the Church there is no punishment except when it is
invoked and as long as it is invoked; there is no punishment
except through and because of pardon. There indeed the holy
soul, aware at once of pardon and celestial vengeance, may
sigh: ‘Both! both!’—too far beyond our vision to be more than
momently comprehensible, and only at moments desirable. But
it has been declared that the scars of Christ, the wounds of
Love, are glorious in heaven; and the justice of God glorifies
the scars of Man who is also Love. The alternative?

Jerusalem, Plate 38 [43], (E 185)

"Instead of the Mutual Forgiveness, the Minute Particulars, I see
Pits of bitumen ever burning, artificial riches of the Canaanite
Like Lakes of liquid lead; instead of heavenly Chapels, built
By our dear Lord, I see Worlds crusted with snows and ice.
I see a Wicker Idol woven round Jerusalem’s children. I see
The Canaanite, the Amalekite, the Moabite, the Egyptian . . .
Driven on the Void in incoherent despair into Non Entity."

Blake put the same vision more positively and more simply in
one of the shorter poems:

Songs and Ballads, My Spectre, (E 476)

"Thus through all eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me:
As our dear Redeemer said:
This the Wine and this the Bread."

The orthodox Christian need not reject that quatrain. If our
Lord was indeed the very Person of forgiveness, then
certainly it is the very passion of forgiveness which is
communicated in the Eucharist; it is a mutuality between God
and man which is also expressed between man and man. To
feed on that with a grudge or a resentment present in the brain,
or still lingering in the blood below the brain, is to reject the
divine Food that is swallowed; it is not only to set schism
between the body and the soul but literally in the body itself.
All things are finally worked out in the body; all mysteries are
there manifested, even if still as mysteries. It is the only
crucible of the great experiment; its innocent, even if debased,
purity endures the most difficult transmutations of the soul. 
...
The whole state of forgiveness must be whole; it is a state of
being into which we grow and not a series of acts which we
exercise, though (to repeat) we must exercise those acts in
faith. Say, 'Do not do;' and add, 'And then do.' The
supernatural is the birth of action in the death of action.

"O point of mutual forgiveness between enemies,
Birthplace of the Lamb of God incomprehensible!" 

End for passages from Charles Williams. 

_____________________

Yale Center for British Art

Jerusalem

Plate 87

Jerusalem, Plate 7, (E 150)

"O that I could abstain from wrath! O that the Lamb
Of God would look upon me and pity me in my fury.                
In anguish of regeneration! in terrors of self annihilation:
Pity must join together those whom wrath has torn in sunder,
And the Religion of Generation which was meant for the destruction
Of Jerusalem, become her covering, till the time of the End.
O holy Generation! [Image] of regeneration!  
O point of mutual forgiveness between Enemies!
Birthplace of the Lamb of God incomprehensible!
The Dead despise & scorn thee, & cast thee out as accursed:
Seeing the Lamb of God in thy gardens & thy palaces:
Where they desire to place the Abomination of Desolation."