Radical Christianity

 Previously posted Nov 2019

British Museum

Europe

Copy D, plate 13

British Museum commentary for this plate: 

"Copy D, plate 13; above, a papal figure with bat's wings sitting on an ornate throne, floating on a cloud, with an open book on his knees; below on each side a winged gowned female figure holding a sceptre; the sceptres pointing downwards and meeting above the text at the bottom of the plate, as though they were an upside-down pair of compasses; 5 lines of verse beginning "Albions Angel rose...". 1794 Europe," 

Europe, Plate 11 [13], (E 64)
"Albions Angel rose upon the Stone of Night.
He saw Urizen on the Atlantic;
And his brazen Book,
That Kings & Priests had copied on Earth
Expanded from North to South."

---

 The immediate followers of Jesus were accused of turning the world upside down. They followed him in challenging all forms of worldly power including death. One can make a good case for the idea that the Christian by definition challenges the powers of the world; that's certainly the meaning of 'radical Christian'.

      

 Blake perceived the legacy that Jesus left behind in two ways. On one hand the church as the mystical body of Christ consists of those who continually challenge the authority or powers of the world. On the other hand the Church as an institution becomes one of the powers of the world. The tension between these two principles probably exists within the breast of anyone seriously interested in Christ.

  In the second century Ignatius of Antioch eloquently embodied that tension with his life. Ignatius died a martyr to the secular power of the Roman Empire. Before that happened, he had spent much of his time as an ecclesiastical authority rooting out dissenters, whom he called heretics; he did this in the course of establishing the institutional authority of what became the Roman Church.

  With Constantine these two streams of authority came together. In 312 A.D. the new emperor declared himself a Christian and assumed control of the Church. He exercised that control through the simple device of naming his most trusted servant as bishop. The Church became an arm of the political power of the empire.

  From that day to this the Church has been primarily one of the powers of the world. The power of the Church has been expressed through ecclesiastical hierarchies and creeds, both imposed upon the rank and file by various coercive techniques essentially identical with those of other worldly powers. This means that the spiritual reality of Christ vis-a-vis the Church is only actualized through the same sort of dissent that Jesus made in the beginning.

  These conclusions of course may be debated, but they represent the basic and lifelong viewpoint underlying the radical protest which was Blake's art.

---

Jerusalem, Plate 52, (E 201)                  
"and many believed what they saw, and
Prophecied of Jesus.
Man must & will have Some Religion; if he has not the 
Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan, & will erect the
Synagogue of Satan. calling the Prince of this World, God; and
destroying all who do not worship Satan under the Name of God. 
Will any one say: Where are those who worship Satan under the
Name of God! Where are they? Listen! Every Religion that Preaches
Vengeance for Sins the Religion of the Enemy & Avenger; and not
the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan
Vengeance for Sins the Religion of the Enemy & Avenger; and not
the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan
Vengeance for Sins the Religion of the Enemy & Avenger; and not
the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, Named by the Divine
Name   Your Religion O Deists: Deism, is the Worship of the God
of this World by the means of what you call Natural Religion and
Natural Philosophy, and of Natural Morality or
Self-Righteousness, the Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart. 
This was the Religion of the Pharisees who murderd Jesus.  Deism
is the same & ends in the same."

Image of God

British Museum

Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

From the Blake Primer

The really exciting thing about 'The Four Zoas' is the long incubation and eventual birth of Blake's new, positive image of God concurrent with the thorough and definite laying to rest of the old one. These realities become vivid once the reader gains sufficient familiarity with the material to see the underlying currents of spiritual movement. If you like poetry, 4Z contains many beautiful lines interspersed throughout the nine Nights amidst long, bleak desert passages describing fallenness. The beautiful passages mark stirrings of the Spirit. (It has great similarity in fact to the style of Isaiah, who wrote the most beautiful parts of the O.T. surrounded by unrelieved darkness.)

Follow the speeches of Enion, the primeval mother of Los and Enitharmon. In Night i her children's increasing depravity and her maternal love lead her down into the abyss of Non-entity, in her case an abyss of consciousness. She becomes a disembodied voice sounding a note of reality over the general fallenness as it progressively develops. Her comments throughout the action preserve the feeling of human oneness that will break forth at the darkest hour. In Enion Blake found a new voice expressing a passionate love that laments but doesn't excoriate, and a faith, evolved through suffering, that the Divine Image will come to redeem. These of course are the most creative themes of the Old Testament, slowly evolving out of its generally primitive theology. Enion's speeches at the conclusion of Nights i, ii, and viii are too long to quote here, but they contain some of the most sublime poetry Blake wrote and portend the emergence of the new God of compassion.

In 4Z Blake elaborated and analyzed the God, Urizen, in the fullest detail; this version contains less heat and more light than we found in Book of Urizen. Urizen symbolizes man's thinking faculty; in the primary myth of the Fall he became estranged from his feelings. This story is told at least six times in 4Z. Blake devoted Night ii to Urizen's creation of a rocky, hard, opaque world of mathematical certainty and calculation. Anyone who has spent time on a college campus has met people highly developed intellectually and infantile emotionally. They lack the capacity to express any value more intense than "very interesting". Many, of course, have denied that value has any meaning. Imagine what kind of world they create, what spiritual climate they live in; there you have Urizen.

He is a God devoid of true feeling; he has feelings, but they're all false. He continually weeps, like the Old Testament God who wept as he punished people. He builds a world of law, devoid of feeling, devoid of compassion, devoid of humanity. His world is based upon fear of the future, and he attempts to secure himself against it at all costs. Fear defines his character and his actions until the very end of the fallen world. In Night viii Urizen is still fighting life and light. He sets out:

Four Zoas, Night viii, Page 102, (E 375)
"...to pervert all the faculties of sense
Into their own destruction, if perhaps he might avert
His own despair even at the cost of everything that breathes."

There you find a preview of the God of the superpowers of our own day. Their fear has become the guiding principle leading them toward the destruction of "everything that breathes".

Urizen's initial downfall comes in Night iii. His emanation (in this case wife), Ahania, has followed Enion, the Earth Mother, into the abyss of consciousness. She tries to share with Urizen a level of truth that he finds so unpleasant that he casts her out, and promptly falls himself like Humpty Dumpty. In Ahania's vision we have a psychologically acute and penetrating description of the incipience of a false God. It ranks with the Bible's eloquent pre-psychological denunciations of idolatry, as found for example in Isaiah 40. Blake re-used this passage in 'Jerusalem', attesting its authenticity even on the illumined side of the Divine Vision:

Jerusalem, Plate 43 [29], (E 191)

"Then Man ascended mourning into the splendors of his palace,
Above him rose a Shadow from his wearied intellect
Of living gold, pure, perfect, holy; in white linen he hover'd,
A sweet entrancing self delusion, a wat'ry vision of Man
Soft exulting in existence, all the Man absorbing.
Man fell upon his face prostrate before the wat'ry shadow,
Saying, O Lord, whence is this change? thou knowest I am nothing ...
Idolatrous to his own Shadow, words of Eternity uttering:
O I am nothing when I enter in judgment with thee.
If thou withdraw thy breath I die and vanish into Hades;
If thou dost lay thine hand upon me, behold I am silent;
If thou withhold thine hand I perish like a fallen leaf.
O I am nothing, and to nothing must return again.
If thou withdraw thy breath, behold I am oblivion."

In this parody of the Prophet Blake shows us a fundamental truth about man's image of the transcendental God. He doesn't deny the reality of a transcendental God as some of his interpreters have concluded. He denies the truth of man's image of the transcendental God, an entirely different matter.

He opposes the ascribing of qualities to the Wholly Other. According to Blake when that is done the result is something less than man. Worshiping this sub-human God the worshiper becomes something less than man himself. He represses a portion of his humanity, which Blake here calls Luvah, and that repressed portion falls upon him and afflicts him with boils from head to toe. The penalty for idolatry is brokenness and suffering, consciousness of sin, guilt, division, finitude, envy, the torments of love and jealousy, the whole bit of man's unfortunate fallen circumstances. It's all caused by the false God that man has chosen. Isaiah understood a part of this; he recognized some of the idols of others but not his own. 

Thomas Altizer, in his book on Blake, rightly took this passage as a critical revelation of the "death of God".

Man worships a shadow of his wearied intellect. No higher God is possible without the wholeness that Christ brings. Worship of a shadow of our wearied intellect leads to all the false and fatal evils that we visit upon one another from simple vanity to war.
...
The progression of Blake's poetry shows the eclipse of Christ through the long struggle of the seventeen nineties. Then he proceeded to introduce the Lamb into 4Z with a group of additional lines at strategic places. These images means relatively little to the secular reader, but cause great joy to the Christian.

The healing of Los, described in Night vii of The Four Zoas, prepares the way for Christ's coming into history. Night viii tells the story of Jesus: the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection of the spiritual body. It's important to remember that in Blake's mental world and in his poetry these are psychic rather than historical events.

Blake had always worshiped the Divine Vision. In his twenty years in the wilderness the Divine Vision dimmed and lost the immediacy which had informed the beautiful poems of Innocence. Kathleen Raine points to a few lines that describe with peculiar luminosity this dimming of the Divine Vision:

Jerusalem, Plate 66, (E 219) 

"And as their eye & ear shrunk, the heavens shrunk away 

The Divine Vision became First a burning flame [Moses], then a column 

Of fire [the Exodus], then an awful fiery wheel [Ezekiel] surrounding earth & heaven: And then a globe of blood wandering distant in all unknown night [false Christianity]"

This describes Blake's personal experience and that of Mankind. But at or after Felpham he recovered the Divine Vision and realized that his name is Jesus.

He spent the rest of his life celebrating the momentous event, and the Name and proclaiming its reality in a hundred ways. It had happened to him, and it would happen to the world.

Letters, To Thomas Butts, Nov 1802, (E 720)

"And now let me finish with assuring you that Tho I have been very unhappy I am so no longer I am again Emerged into the light of Day I still & shall to Eternity Embrace Christianity and Adore him who is the Express image of God but I have traveld thro Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion I have Conquerd and shall still Go on Conquering Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & in the Abysses of the Accuser My 

Enthusiasm is still what it was only Enlarged and confirmd" 

ERDMAN

Wikipedia Commons
America
Plate 12

David V Erdman, in Prophet Against Empire, demonstrated how the contraries reason and energy work together to accomplish what neither could accomplish alone.  The opportunity was there for Urizen to cooperate with the Lord of Day and use the Steeds of Light to bring about an accomadation with the energy of those seeking Liberty. He listened instead, however, to Reason and found that Wrath of the oppressed had seized the reins of government in the Age of Revolution. 

Page 194

“The creeping Urizen is supplied with a long soliloquy in a passage of Night Five of The Four Zoas  which is worth taking up here for the light it casts back upon The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and A Song of Liberty and The Tyger.  The fatal error of the jealous king is that his fixing of the horizon ultimately limits himself more than it does the energy of the people.  Royalty can keep its crimson robes, Orleans warned, only if it stops trying to measure of each man 'the circle that he shall run'. (French Revolution, P 91) Soliloquizing as he crawls in the den or narrow circle of his own ideas, the fallen Urizen of Night Five laments too late his imperial mistakes: his choice of war instead of peace, his failure to accept the opportunity to be an enlightened despot when the "mild & holy voice" of divine freedom said, "O light, spring up & shine" and "gave to me a silver sceptre & crownd me with a golden crown" to 'Go forth & guide' the people. 'I went not forth,' he laments, 'I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath, I called the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark'. (FZ's) Thus George assembled his council in 1774; thus Louis the King of France, prepared his ‘starry hosts’ in 1789 and let the spark of humanity in his bosom be 'quench’d in clouds' by 'the Nobles of France, and dark mists.' Each time, in the event, at Yorktown and again at Valmy, ‘The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away'. We fell.  Too late Urizen is sorry he refused to use his ‘Steeds of Light’.  

The language of the soliloquy is doubly revealing.  On the level of practice it is clear that ‘The stars threw down their spears’ means : the armies of counterrevolution were defeated. On the level of theory it is clear that Reason, when it refuses to assist but attempts to hinder Energy, is overthrown.  Denied the peaceful accommodation of the Steeds of Light, the just man seizes the Tigers of Wrath. Vetoed by a stubborn monarch, the French people became, as the London Times of January 7, 1792, put it, 'loose from all restraints, and, in many instances, more ferocious than wolves and tigers'. As Blake put it in Fayette, the French grew bloodthirsty and would 'not submit to the gibbet & halter.' 

If we take the tiger and horse as symbols of untamed Energy and domesticated Reason then it is obvious which of these contraries is more vital in days of revolution. In Hell is a proverbial that 'the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.'
...

Page 196 

The creator must have smiled at Yorktown and at Valmy, not because his people were warlike, but because they seemed ready to coexist with the Lamb, the wrath of the Tiger having done its work. The question, 'Did he smile his work to see?' is perhaps as rhetorical as the corresponding query of Orleans: 'And can Nobles be bound when the people are free, or God weep when his children are happy?'"

Four Zoas, Night V, Page 64, (E 343)

"But now my land is darkend & my wise men are departed

My songs are turned to cries of Lamentation           
Heard on my Mountains & deep sighs under my palace roofs         
Because the Steeds of Urizen once swifter than the light
Were kept back from my Lord & from his chariot of mercies

O did I keep the horses of the day in silver pastures
O I refusd the Lord of day the horses of his prince
O did I close my treasuries with roofs of solid stone            
And darken all my Palace walls with envyings & hate

O Fool to think that I could hide from his all piercing eyes
The gold & silver & costly stones his holy workmanship
O Fool could I forget the light that filled my bright spheres
Was a reflection of his face who calld me from the deep          

I well remember for I heard the mild & holy voice
Saying O light spring up & shine & I sprang up from the deep  
He gave to me a silver scepter & crownd me with a golden crown
& said Go forth & guide my Son who wanders on the ocean  

I went not forth. I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath       
I calld the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark
The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away
We fell. I siezd thee dark Urthona In my left hand falling

I siezd thee beauteous Luvah thou art faded like a flower"

America, Plate 2, (E 52)

"Silent as despairing love, and strong as jealousy,
The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire;
Round the terrific loins he siez'd the panting struggling womb;
It joy'd: she put aside her clouds & smiled her first-born smile;
As when a black cloud shews its lightnings to the silent deep.   

Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin cry.

I know thee, I have found thee, & I will not let thee go;
Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa;
And thou art fall'n to give me life in regions of dark death.
On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions          
Endur'd by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep:
I see a serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love;
In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru;
I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away.
O what limb rending pains I feel. thy fire & my frost            
Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent;
This is eternal death; and this the torment long foretold."

French Revolution, Page 10(E 294)

"Fear not dreams, fear not visions, nor be you dismay'd with
     sorrows which flee at the morning;
Can the fires of Nobility ever be quench'd, or the stars by a
     stormy night?
Is the body diseas'd when the members are healthful? can the man
     be bound in sorrow
Whose ev'ry func,tion is fill'd with its fiery desire? can the
     soul whose brain and heart
Cast their rivers in equal tides thro' the great Paradise,
     languish because the feet
Hands, head, bosom, and parts of love, follow their high
     breathing joy?
And can Nobles be bound when the people are free, or God weep
     when his children are happy?
Have you never seen Fayette's forehead, or Mirabeau's eyes, or
     the shoulders of Target,
Or Bailly the strong foot of France, or Clermont the terrible
     voice, and your robes
Still retain their own crimson? mine never yet faded, for fire
     delights in its form.
But go, merciless man! enter into the infinite labyrinth of
     another's brain
Ere thou measure the circle that he shall run. Go, thou cold
     recluse,into the fires
Of another's high flaming rich bosom, and return unconsum'd, and
     write laws.
If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories, learn to consider
     all men as thy equals,
Thy brethren, and not as thy foot or thy hand, unless thou first
     fearest to hurt them."

FOUR ZOAS PICTURED

British Museum

Book of Urizen, printed 1794 

Copy D, Plate 14

Library of Congress

Book of Urizen, printed 1818

Copy G, Plate 16 [14]

 

First Posted  October 2009

This rare image of the Four Zoas together appears in the Book of Urizen.

Blake pictured the four Eternals peering down in the unfinished world of Urizen as it divides, falling into the abyss. Most of the copies of this plate display only three of the Zoas. In Blake's characteristic way of allowing imagination to lead him as he created his images, he has added the fourth Zoa Tharmas, to the other three in the late copy.

Blake's characters have different appearances as they are represented at different levels of existence in his myth. Here they are represented at the level of the Eternals; although no physical representation at that spiritual level can be anything more than limited and false.

Nevertheless, we see Urizen on the right, looking down at his own fallen nature as it disintegrates in separation. His beard drags in the water of matter which is created as a result of his fall. Why is he old? Because he is conservatism which must always be replaced by the new and fresh.

Beside Urizen is Los, forever young, who joins Urizen in the descent in order to be the agent of the eventual return. Suggested by the fingers of Los touching the liquid below, as if paint or ink were dripping from his hand, is an intimation of the role of imagination in the regeneration process

Next to the young Los, is another older gentleman, Luvah, who as the emotions, is a level early in physic development. Luvah becomes intimately involved in the struggle to limit the downward fall of Urizen and reverse the division in Albion. At various points Luvah works with or competes with Urizen or Los, but his service is to Jesus.

The Zoa who is missing in most of the images, Tharmas, is pictured as no more than a boy. The contradiction in the character Tharmas is that he is both the 'Parent Power' and the last to be named. Mary Lynn Johnson describes him as "innocence, instinct, the binding force of the human personality, and the body." Perhaps he is closer to the id than is any other of the Zoas, and so closer to the child.

On the engraved plate, words and image work together to involve us in the fall - from the perspective of Eternity.

Book of Urizen, Plate 15 [14], (E 78)                                       

"Thus the Eternal Prophet was divided
Before the death-image of Urizen
For in changeable clouds and darkness
In a winterly night beneath,
The Abyss of Los stretch'd immense:
And now seen, now obscur'd, to the eyes
Of Eternals, the visions remote
Of the dark seperation appear'd.
As glasses discover Worlds
In the endless Abyss of space,      
So the expanding eyes of Immortals
Beheld the dark visions of Los,
And the globe of life blood trembling"

Reconciliation With Jesus

British Museum
Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

Previously posted  April 2019

This is an extract from Chapter Five (GOD) of Ram Horn'd With Gold by Larry Clayton.

 i

Perhaps the most basic feature of Blake's Jesus is the Oneness that he embodied. It's also the most orthodox. Blake was in many ways an unorthodox thinker and theologian, as the preceding pages have shown, but the Oneness of Jesus comes straight out of the New Testament. A wealth of texts demonstrate this; those of the Bible and those of Blake show a profound simultaneity of intention:

The Evangelist John quotes Jesus in his starkest statement of his identity: "I and my Father are One" John 10:30. And later he recorded Jesus' great prayer of intercession for us,

"That they all may be one, as thou Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one is us."

If any one verse in the Bible most clearly expresses Blake's fundamental faith, that's it. Look at Blake's first mention of Jesus in 4Z:

"Then those in Great Eternity met in the Council of God
...
As One Man all the Universal family; and that One Man
They call Jesus the Christ, and they in him and he in them
Live in Perfect harmony, in Eden the land of life."
(The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 21.1-6; E310)

In the total structure of his theological vision Blake has imaginatively answered thoroughly and completely the prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. According to his vision Jesus, the One, comprises the true nature of you and me when we are healed and whole. Once again nothing could be more biblical.

Long before his encounter with Jesus Blake's myth was thoroughly grounded in the Oneness of Man. Albion was One, the Universe. His division was the Fall, and his return to unity the ultimate good. Thus Blake describes Albion, the Universal Man at the very beginning of 4Z:

Four Zoas, Night I, Page 4, (E 310)
"Daughter of Beulah, Sing,
His fall into Division and his Resurrection to Unity:
His fall into the Generation of decay and death, and his
Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead."

That was the shape of the original myth. After Felpham Jesus became the One and Albion became one of his members--and so did Blake. 'Jerusalem' begins with a plate headed by the stark phrase in Greek, "Jesus only", and Blake reports hearing these words from the Savior:

Jerusalem, Plate 4, (E 146)
"I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One, forgiving all Evil, Not seeking recompense.
Ye are my members...."

And near the end of 'Jerusalem':

Jerusalem, Plate 91, (E 251)
"He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children,
One first, in friendship and love, then a Divine Family, and in midst
Jesus will appear....
But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and every
Particular is a Man, a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus."

Jesus claimed to be one with God and prayed that we might join him in the oneness. Blake's pilgrimage, with his successive visions of God, those he hated as well as those he loved, provides a fascinating example of how a man becomes one with God. To love the true God is to hate all false Gods.

ii

The philosophic garment with which Blake clothed Jesus was his Neo-platonic idealism. The Eternal Jesus whom Blake envisioned and worshiped is radically separated from the Hebrew peasant who lived in the first century. Blake understood that the worship of the historical Jesus had become an insidious form of idolatry, an advanced form of Satanism.

The priest claims the historical Jesus as his exclusive possession and as the ultimate sanction of his particular form of religious tyranny. He uses the figure first to cow and then to exploit his credulous followers. In this way he denies the indwelling Spirit in himself as well as in his flock. Blake's Jesus, in contrast to the priests', exists not in history but in heaven, which is not a far off never, never land, but a psychic reality.

The never, never land is a materialistic illusion. The reality of Jesus is eternal rather than material; preoccupation with the material Blake saw clearly as a rejection or refusal of the eternal. In 4Z Jerusalem, the embodiment of the church, responds materialistically to the death of Jesus: "let us build a Sepulcher and worship Death in fear while yet we live." What a powerful commentary on the response of the Church to the Christ event!

As long as our minds are centered in that particular century, Christ is dead for us. Preoccupied with the corporeal, we fail to discern the (spiritual) body. A few pages later we read that "Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand years". Blake means that we Christians have done this under the influence of the established Church, dominated by the materialistic spirit of the age. While Jerusalem weeps over the corporeal body, like Mary Magdalen at the empty tomb, Jesus in his spiritual body stands beside her waiting to be recognized, but this won't happen until we (Jerusalem) awaken from our obsession with the material:

"And Los and Enitharmon builded Jerusalem, weeping
Over the Sepulcher and over the Crucified body
Which, to their Phantom Eyes, appear'd still in the Sepulcher;
But Jesus stood beside them in the spirit...."
(FZ9-117.1-4; E386)

The Eternal Man, both First and Second Adam, had God (Spirit) for father and Earth (Clay, Matter) for mother. Blake's profound allegiance to this traditional symbolism led to what many have perceived as a savage attack on Jesus' mother. The attack was savage, but the object of Blake's savagery was not Mary herself but the veneration of Mary, which he could only see as a reversion to Nature Worship and the fertility cults. He understood the veneration of Mary as an alternative to the Living Christ, a direct rival in fact of true Christianity.

This background helps one to understand the psychic meaning of the "Visions of Elohim Jehovah" concerning Joseph and Mary found on Plate 61 of 'Jerusalem'. Too lengthy to quote here, it gives the clearest picture of Blake's feelings about the corporeal ancestry of Christ. A brief but cogent statement of the same thing appears in 'The Everlasting Gospel':

iii

As soon as people attempt to frame Christianity within rules and fit it into a prescribed law and order, it stops being Christianity. There is a general failure to understand that Christians are handed over to the Holy Ghost.... Where God's Spirit is, there freedom must be; there Moses must keep silent, all laws withdraw, and let no one be so bold as to prescribe law, rules, order, goals, and measures to the Holy Ghost, nor attempt to reach, govern, and lead those who belong to him.

All his life Blake had an implacable hatred of law, which he equated with coercion or hindering of others; to him that was the only sin. Consequently Blake's Jesus was a thorough going antinomian. Perhaps his most extreme expression of this occurs in MHH, written before his conversion:

Marriage of Heaven & Hell, Plate 21, (E 43)
"If Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to
love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has
given his sanction to the law of the ten
commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so
mock the sabbath's God? murder those who were
murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the
woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others
to support him? bear false witness when he omitted
making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray'd
for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off
the dust of their feet against such as refused to
lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without
breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all
virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules."

That's the proud, tongue in cheek, announcement of a young man not yet marked by the suffering of life. As he matured, his language became more moderate, but his attitude remained substantially the same. Blake hates the law, and his Jesus forgives the lawbreaker. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Law is an expression of authority. Life presents to us two kinds of authority: spiritual authority or God and political authority, his worldly shadow. Blake consumed his early years in rebellion against the shadow. Then at age 43 he met God and was able to submit to and affirm the true authority.

Some means of coercion characterizes all forms of political authority; ecclesiastical authority is no exception. Blake temperamentally renounced all forms of political authority; he felt that they were satanic, based on coercion and fear and earthly power. Political authority is the authority of this world, and he had no use for it.

In contrast, spiritual authority as Blake experienced it, is the exercise of the purest form of love with an absence of any sort of constraint. The release from constraint by the active goodwill calls forth the Divine Image from the dark sepulcher or cave of corporeal life. Blake had uniquely experienced this spiritual authority as a child; he rediscovered it in the experience which he understood as Self-annihilation or Forgiveness.

Henceforth for him this was the basic and intimate character and quality of Jesus. This was the good news. In 'Milton' the old antinomian made his commitment to the law of self giving love, referring to it as the "Universal Dictate". A free Blakean translation of John 3.16 with a touch of Philippians 2 added might read: God so forgave the world that he annihilated his transcendent Deity and united himself through a corporeal sepulcher with sinful, materialistic man to lift us up to Eternity. Here is the ultimate of spiritual authority, and those who meet Jesus begin to exercise it in the way that he did.

Although Blake did not often use the conventional Christian symbolism of the cross, after his conversion he did believe from the depths that by dying for one another we live eternally:

"Jesus said: "Wouldest 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."
(Jerusalem, 96.23ff; E256)

Freedom from materialism and from the law are the philosophic and moral coloring which Blake gave to his portrait of Jesus the One. In this way he accommodated his new vision of God to his existing value structure.

iv

But the fourth feature of Jesus came into Blake's consciousness as a new experience. It came from Beyond. That is to say it was not an inward expression of Blake's psyche; it came like the Son of God who had joined the three friends in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. It wasn't something he thought of; it was something that happened to him.

It was the experience of forgiveness and self-annihilation, which are two sides of the same coin. No one forgives until he has found the grace to annihilate at least momentarily the law bound accusing spectre which is his Selfhood. And this is only possible as an act of the Imagination, which is eternal, which is Christ. Whenever you successfully annihilate your old self to the point of truly forgiving another, the eternal Christ is alive and at work in your soul. In fact it is he who does it. He is in you, and you are in him; that's eternal life.

Reduced to its barest essential that's what Jesus finally came to mean for Blake. The only unique thing about the man of Nazareth was that he taught forgiveness of one's enemies. In this sense he incarnated God. God is love, is forgiveness. "If Morality was Christianity, Socrates was the Saviour." Unlike Socrates Jesus was a man in whom God dwelt through his vision and his acts of forgiveness.

The significance of the resurrection lies in the coming to life of Forgiveness, Jesus, in you and me. In this way we defeat death.

Textual note for Everlasting Gospel, (E 875)
"There is not one Moral Virtue that Jesus Inculcated but Plato
and Cicero did Inculcate before him; what then did Christ
Inculcate? Forgiveness of Sins. This alone is the Gospel,
and this is the Life and Immortality brought to light by Jesus,
Even the Covenant of Jehovah, which is This: If you forgive
one another your Trespasses, so shall Jehovah forgive you,
That he himself may dwell among you; but if you Avenge, you
Murder the Divine Image, and he cannot dwell among you; because
you Murder him he arises again, and you deny that he is Arisen,
and are blind to Spirit."

Textual note for Everlasting Gospel, (E 875)

   "If Moral Virtue was Christianity
     Christs Pretensions were all Vanity
     And Caiphas & Pilate Men
     Praise Worthy & the Lions Den
     And not the Sheepfold Allegories
     Of God & Heaven & their Glories 
     The Moral Christian is the Cause 
     Of the Unbeliever & his Laws 
     Take Jesus & Jehovahs Name.
     For what is Antichrist but those
     Who against Sinners Heaven close
     With Iron bars in Virtuous State
     And Rhadamanthus at the Gate...

     It was when Jesus said to Me
     Thy Sins are all forgiven thee
     The Christian trumpets loud proclaim
     Thro all the World in Jesus name
     Mutual forgiveness of each Vice
     And oped the Gates of Paradise
     The Moral Virtues in Great fear
     Formed the Cross & Nails & Spear
     And the Accuser standing by
     Cried out Crucify Crucify
     Our Moral Virtues neer can be
     Nor Warlike pomp & Majesty
     For Moral Virtues all begin
     In the Accusations of Sin
     And all the Heroic Virtues End 
     In destroying the Sinners Friend" 

 End of Chapter Five of Ram Horn'd With Gold. 

FALLEN ANGELS

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

Fallen Angels

The owners of this picture, the Harvard Art Museums, give it the date 1793 which is four years before the date on the title page of The Four Zoas. It is probable that Blake began composing The Four Zoas years before the date on the Title Page. Therefore, judging from this image, it seems that a conception of falling angels or zoas was in the mind of Blake long before he began to put words to paper. 

Four Zoas, Night V, Page 64, (E 344)

"O Fool could I forget the light that filled my bright spheres
Was a reflection of his face who calld me from the deep          

I well remember for I heard the mild & holy voice
Saying O light spring up & shine & I sprang up from the deep 
He gave to me a silver scepter & crownd me with a golden crown
& said Go forth & guide my Son who wanders on the ocean      

I went not forth. I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath       
I calld the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark
The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away
We fell. I siezd thee dark Urthona In my left hand falling

I siezd thee beauteous Luvah thou art faded like a flower
And like a lilly is thy wife Vala witherd by winds               
When thou didst bear the golden cup at the immortal tables
Thy children smote their fiery wings crownd with the gold of heaven
PAGE 65 
Thy pure feet stepd on the steps divine. too pure for other feet
And thy fair locks shadowd thine eyes from the divine effulgence
Then thou didst keep with Strong Urthona the living gates of heaven
But now thou art bound down with him even to the gates of hell"  

Milton's Paradise Lost was illustrated by Blake for Thomas Butts in 1808. Following Milton's narration, Blake pictured on his seventh illustration, rebel angels being expelled from heaven. Prominent in Milton's tale is the idea that the angels who refused obedience to the Almighty were forced from heaven. Later after God created Adam and Eve, Satan entered Eden and tempted 'the mother of mankind' to eat the forbidden fruit. The fall of Adam and Eve led to mankind living in a fallen world which Blake described in detail.

Wikipedia Commons

Illustrations to Paradise Lost

Rout of the Rebel Angels

Paradise Lost, Book I

"The infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equaled the most high,
If he opposed; and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God
Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms."

Book VI, 

853

1. Yet half his strength he put not forth, but checked
   His thunder in mid volley; for he meant
   Not to destroy, but root them out of Heaven:
   The overthrown he raised, and as a herd
   Of goats or timorous flock together thronged
   Drove them before him thunder-struck, pursued
   With terrors, and with furies, to the bounds
   And crystal wall of Heaven; which, opening wide,
   Rolled inward, and a spacious gap disclosed
   Into the wasteful deep: The monstrous sight
   Struck them with horror backward, but far worse
   Urged them behind: Headlong themselves they threw
   Down from the verge of Heaven; eternal wrath
   Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.
   866

   ---

      Paradise Regained, The Third Temptation

Fitzwilliam Museum

Paradise Regained

Christ Placed on the Pinnacle of the Temple

We see Blake's portrayal of the Fall of Satan in the Illustrations to Milton's Paradise Regained. This work is dated 1816-20. Milton described the passage which occurs  in Matthew 4:

[5] Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,
[6] And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
[7] Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

Paradise Regained, Book 4

"There stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright
Will ask thee skill; I to thy Fathers house
Have brought thee, and highest plac't, highest is best,
Now shew thy Progeny; if not to stand,
Cast thy self down; safely if Son of God: [ 555 ]
For it is written, He will give command
Concerning thee to his Angels, in thir hands
They shall up lift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.

To whom thus Jesus: also it is written, [ 560 ]
Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood.
But Satan smitten with amazement fell"

---

   Throughout his career Blake was interested in showing how there was a fall through which entities who had enjoyed the company of God in the divine milieu, lost their heavenly status. Blake felt compelled to make it clear to mankind that he lives in a fallen state. Without such a consciousness there is no possibility of reestablishing with God a spiritual connection which restores the oneness.

JERUSALEM MARATHORN

Yale Center for British Art

Jerusalem

Plate 2

 

 Blake's epic poem Jerusalem delights the senses, stimulates the mind, and enriches the spirit. A group of scholars and students challenged themselves to read straight though the poem taking the parts of various characters. The reading was reported on by Suzanne Skyler in Blake/ An Illustrated Quaterly.

The event was not performed for an audience or recorded for posterity. However there have been recordings made of readings of Jerusalem which are available on youTube. This version is presented by LibriVox .

The Jerusalem Marathon
The Abbey at Sutton Courtenay, 6-7 November 2004

By Susanne Sklar
Queen's College, Oxford

WAR IN HEAVEN

National Gallery of Art

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, c. 1805

Revelation12

[1] And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
[2] And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
[3] And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
[4] And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
[5] And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.
[6] And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.
[7] And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
[8] And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
[9] And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
[10] And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.
[11] And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.
[12] Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.
[13] And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child.
[14] And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.

BODY & SOUL

Wikimedia Commons

Illustrations to Robert Blair's The Grave

Christ Descending into the Grave 

Genesis 2

[7] And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Given to man are two means or 'doors' of perception; his physical senses and his spiritual senses. The doors though which his body perceives are eyes, ears, nose, tongue and touch. Through intuition, imagination, intimation, and revelation the spirit receives and disseminates spiritual truth. Since physical sensation is of the body it dies with bodily death. The spiritual senses, like the Soul, are eternal and continue to operate in the Eternal World. Blake, like the Apostle Paul, recognized the Spiritual Body.

Because we live in two worlds - the Eternal World and the physical world - we receive messages from both sources. However through our senses we have become more accustomed to the physical world of time and space. But our Spiritual Senses are accessible to our bodies as well as our Spirits. Blake could say that "notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged", because the body and soul are interconnected serving one another and being served by the other. The Apostle Paul and William Blake agree that at death, the Physical Body is left behind in the physical world and it is replaced by a spiritual body as the spirit leaves time for Eternity. 

First Corinthians 15

[41] There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.
[42] So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption:
[43] It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power:
[44] It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

Philippians 18-21 [Phillips Translation]

For there are many, of whom I have told you before and tell you again now, even with tears, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ. These men are heading for utter destruction - their god is their own appetite, their pride is in what they should be ashamed of, and this world is the limit of their horizon. But we are citizens of Heaven; our outlook goes beyond this world to the hopeful expectation of the saviour who will come from Heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will re-make these wretched bodies of ours to resemble his own glorious body, by that power of his which makes him the master of everything that is.

---

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14, (E 39)

 "For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to 
leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole 
creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy whereas
it now  appears finite & corrupt.
   This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
   But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his
soul, is to  be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the
infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and
medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the
infinite which was hid.
   If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear  to man as it is: infinite.
   For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro'
narrow chinks of his cavern."

Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Plate 52, (E 30)

"Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay
And me to Mortal Life betray:
The Death of Jesus set me free, 
Then what have I to do with thee?

[text on illustration: It is Raised a Spiritual Body]"

Four Zoas, Night viii, Page 104, (E 378)

"Los said to Enitbarmon Pitying I saw
Pitying the Lamb of God Descended thro Jerusalems gates
To put off Mystery time after time & as a Man
Is born on Earth so was he born of Fair Jerusalem
In mysterys woven mantle & in the Robes of Luvah 

He stood in fair Jerusalem to awake up into Eden
The fallen Man but first to Give his vegetated body  
To be cut off & separated that the Spiritual body may be Reveald"

Four Zoas, Night vii, PAGE 84,(E 359) 
"The Spectre said. Thou lovely Vision this delightful Tree
Is given us for a Shelter from the tempests of Void & Solid
Till once again the morn of ages shall renew upon us
To reunite in those mild fields of happy Eternity
Where thou & I in undivided Essence walkd about     
Imbodied. thou my garden of delight & I the spirit in the garden
Mutual there we dwelt in one anothers joy revolving
Days of Eternity with Tharmas mild & Luvah sweet melodious
Upon our waters. This thou well rememberest listen I will tell
What thou forgettest. They in us & we in them alternate Livd 
Drinking the joys of Universal Manhood."

Annotations to Berkeley, (E 663)

"They [Plato and Aristotle] so considerd God as abstracted or distinct from the
Imaginative World but Jesus as also Abraham & David considerd God 
as a Man in the Spiritual or Imaginative Vision
Jesus considerd Imagination to be the Real Man & says I will
not leave you Orphanned and I will manifest myself to you he
says also the Spiritual Body or Angel as little Children always
behold the Face of the Heavenly Father"