His iron laws one moment,
For he saw that life lived upon death.
“Tears of pious and conventional pity,” Jean Hagstrum comments, “ooze from his compressed lids and drop into his ropy frozen beard.”16
It needs always to be emphasized that Blake’s attack is not just on doctrine as abstract theology, but on doctrine as a mechanism for ratifying injustice. A bitter Song of Experience begins, “Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor,” and in The Four Zoas the thought is repeated when Urizen reads out his policy from his book of brass:
Compel the poor to live upon a crust of bread by soft mild arts,
Smile when they frown, frown when they smile, and when a man looks pale
With labour and abstinence, say he looks healthy and happy,
And when his children sicken let them die, there are enough
Born, even too many, and our earth will be overrun.
No doubt Blake was remembering Thomas Robert Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, as well as a specific issue, a parliamentary debate in 1800 over a bread bill that would have taken action against monopolists who were driving up prices. William Pitt, the prime minister, declared that to interfere with the market in that way would “strike against the freedom of trade” and urged that measures be taken instead “to diminish the consumption.” More largely, this is the hypocrisy of a society that believes it is being generous to—as the cliché has it—“those less fortunate than ourselves.”17
Jehovah and the Elohim
In pondering the symbolism of the divine, Blake made effective use of what contemporary scholars were just beginning to recognize, that the Bible is an amalgam of multiple texts stitched together over many centuries. Groundbreaking scholarship in Germany was being reported in England by a Roman Catholic priest, Alexander Geddes, who argued that the Bible should be analyzed in exactly the same way as other ancient texts, such as the Homeric poems. It would then be obvious that there are two entirely different creation stories in the Book of Genesis. In chapter 1, “God said, Let there be light”; in chapters 2 and 3 a much more human deity creates Adam and Eve, places them in the Garden of Eden, and walks with them there in the cool of the evening. In the first story God is called the Elohim (the noun is plural), and in the second Yahweh or Jehovah. The two versions have therefore become known as the E and J texts.18
A bemused Crabb Robinson recorded this conversation: “‘Whoever believes in Nature,’ said Blake, ‘disbelieves in God—for Nature is the work of the Devil.’ On my obtaining from him the declaration that the Bible was the work of God, I referred to the commencement of Genesis—‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’—but I gained nothing by this, for I was triumphantly told that this God was not Jehovah but the Elohim.”19 That creator is the demiurge, whom the early Gnostic heretics condemned as an antagonist of the true God. But Blake’s system differs from the various Gnostic versions, since for him both Jehovah and Elohim play imaginative roles as progressive avatars of the divine.
It is in this context that Blake developed his symbolism of the Seven Eyes of God, recalling the mysterious “eyes” in Ezekiel’s vision and also a text in Zechariah, “They are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth.” These are not just alternative names for the divine, but sequential stages in purging it from superstitious reverence and fear. Jehovah and Elohim are two of the seven Eyes, and the final Eye is Jesus, the only one willing to sacrifice himself.20
Elohim (or the Elohim) is the subject of Blake’s great color print Elohim Creating Adam (color plate 38). Hovering on massive wings, he is forming Adam out of clay, pressing the head down with one hand and reaching for more clay with the other as an earthworm of mortality wraps around the just-created body. The expression of this creator is staring and distressed—“a haunted and haunting old man,” Hagstrum calls him.21 In Genesis God created man in his own image. In this picture, Adam’s face is indeed similar to Elohim’s, but for Blake the analogy runs in the opposite direction. It is man who has created an alarming deity in his own image, and now feels it pressing down on him like an incubus.
Christopher Heppner comments accurately that Elohim’s wings “are attached in a totally non-functional way.” But Blake didn’t invent them; they are imitated from a representation of Boreas, the north wind, on the Tower of the Winds in Athens that had been engraved by his old master James Basire (figure 48). A biblical conception thus merges with a weird and alien pagan one.22
Heppner also observes that this act of creation is very different from the one Michelangelo painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with which Blake was certainly familiar, if only in black and white prints. E. H. Gombrich’s eloquent description of Michelangelo’s version highlights just how great the difference is from Blake’s: “God the Father is wrapped in a wide and majestic mantle blown out by the wind like a sail, suggesting the ease and speed with which he floats through the void. As he stretches out his hand, not even touching Adam’s finger, we almost see the first man waking, as from a profound sleep, and gazing into the fatherly face of his Maker.” Gombrich notes “the ease and power of this gesture of creation.” In Blake’s version it is more like a desperate struggle.23
Like the Ancient of Days, Blake’s Elohim has genuine grandeur. His desire for order is not contemptible, and form is always better than formlessness. The world this demiurge creates is unquestionably preferable to chaos, and in Milton Elohim and Los join together in a positive context:
Such is the world of Los, the labour of six thousand years.
Thus Nature is a vision of the science of the Elohim.
“Science” still had the general meaning that Samuel Johnson defines: “Any art or species of knowledge.”24 That is knowledge in its full imaginative depth, as contrasted with reductive empiricist reasoning. But it is still provisional and limited. The Golgonooza that Los creates is a stopgap defense against chaos, and the Nature created by the Elohim, though likewise far better than chaos, is still the entrapping world of Generation.
48. Boreas, from The Antiquities of Athens
The God of This World
In a set of resolutions that Blake signed in 1789, during his brief attendance at a Swedenborgian congregation—the only church he ever belonged to—fully one-quarter of the Bible was repudiated as not divinely inspired. Long afterward, Blake’s own list of inspired scriptural books in Jerusalem still included only the ones that were approved in 1789. It is easy to understand why the Book of Job is not among them. It begins by describing a supremely admirable person: “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.” Next we find God in conversation with Satan, who suggests that if Job were to lose everything he has, “he will curse thee to thy face.” God accepts the challenge and replies, “Behold, all that he hath is in thy power.” Job’s family and flocks are thereupon destroyed, he is afflicted with plague, and he does indeed curse, shocking his so-called comforters. God then rebukes him from a whirlwind, pointing out that he was not present at the creation of the world and warning that he has no right to complain. Somehow convinced by this response to stop asking questions, Job repents in dust and ashes and is duly rewarded: “The Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.” He gets a new family, fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels.25
In the Hebrew Bible, Satan plays a minor role and is not the mighty antagonist of God that Christian theology turned him into. In the Book of Job he acts as an authorized accuser, rather like a courtroom prosecutor. Blake was familiar with this concept, and he incorporated it in a set of watercolors illustrating the Book of Job that he made for Thomas Butts around 1805. Twenty years later the painter John Linnell commissioned him to turn the Job images into engravings, which were duly published in a magnificent edition. More than three hundred copies were printed, making this late masterpiece the least rare of Blake’
s works.
In an advertisement Linnell noted, “These plates are engraved entirely by Mr. Blake with the graver only (that is without the aid of aqua fortis).” That is to say, he no longer employed the etching technique of using acid, but incised the lines with a burin after an initial drawing was transferred to the plate. The finely traced lines are reminiscent of the work of a predecessor Blake greatly admired, Albrecht Dürer, and an art historian calls these engravings “the best that have been done in England.”26
An exceptionally powerful image is plate 11, Job’s Evil Dreams (figure 49). Job is lying on a bed that looks extremely uncomfortable, viewing with terror three devils in hellfire below. Two of them are grasping his legs firmly (the hands on his right leg must belong to unseen devils on the other side) while another prepares to bind him with a heavy chain. Above, an angry God presses down as Elohim did upon Adam, pointing at the flames with his left (sinister) hand and at a pair of stone tablets with his right. These represent the Ten Commandments, and in the earlier watercolor version Hebrew letters can be made out: “Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt not commit adultery.”27 Jagged lightning of divine wrath lights up the sky.
49. Job’s Evil Dreams
An indication of how little Blake’s work was understood by his contemporaries is Alan Cunningham’s obtuse comment, “The Scripture overawed his imagination, and he was too devout to attempt aught beyond a literal embodying of the majestic scene.”28 In this picture in particular, Cunningham evidently failed to notice two obvious clues. The first is that the serpent of temptation is shown winding around Elohim; in Blake’s view any God who could authorize the torment of a good man must be satanic himself. And the second is that Elohim has a cloven hoof instead of a foot. He is himself the accuser.
A text near the bottom, curving around and finishing vertically, departs from the original in two ways. Blake’s text is: “Oh that my words were printed in a Book that they were graven with an iron pen & lead in the rock for ever For I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand in the latter days upon the Earth and after my skin destroy thou This body yet in my flesh shall I see God whom I shall see for Myself and mine eyes shall behold & not Another tho consumed be my wrought Image.” The King James Version reads: “And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”29 Blake has kept the skin but left out the worms. Just as in his emblem book For Children, the spiritual body is invulnerable to the worms of mortality. “I know that my Redeemer liveth” was traditionally interpreted as a prophecy of Christ.
The other change is more significant. The original text reads, “Mine eyes shall behold and not another, though my reins be consumed within me.” “Reins” were literally the kidneys and metaphorically the emotions. Blake omits them and substitutes “tho consumed be my wrought Image.” The punitive God of the nightmare has indeed been wrought in Job’s own image, which is why they have the same face. This unreal God is a projection of Job’s guilt.30
“Thou only art holy,” the Book of Revelation says of God. “Every thing that lives is holy,” says Blake, in four places. Rudolf Otto, in his classic work The Idea of the Holy, describes God as “wholly other,” the mysterium tremendum “whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb.” From Blake’s point of view this is exactly wrong, a formulation that reflects worship not of the true God but of the false demiurge who is mentioned in the Epistle to the Ephesians. Blake quotes from that epistle, in Greek, at the beginning of The Four Zoas. In English the text reads: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”31
The emblem series For Children had a simple message. That message was that the cycle from birth to death, generation after generation, may seem like an endless loop. But it is not endless, for when the mortal body dies, the spirit is liberated into Eternity. When Blake reissued the emblems with the new title For the Sexes, he added a gnomic concluding poem that complicates the message. Entitled To the Accuser Who Is the God of This World, it accuses conventional religion of complicity with the merely natural world, and with the satanic force that seeks to imprison us there.
Truly my Satan thou art but a dunce,
And dost not know the garment from the man.
Every harlot was a virgin once,
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.
Though thou art worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The son of morn in weary night’s decline,
The lost traveler’s dream under the hill.
The “son of morn” is the fallen archangel Lucifer, whose name means “light-bearer,” as in Isaiah: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!”32 The “lost traveler” alludes to folktales in which fairy enchantment sends a person into helpless sleep. As Blake imagines it, this is the nightmare of Albion, haunted by delusions that will vanish when he awakes.
By the “Accuser,” Blake does not mean the prosecutorial figure in the Book of Job but rather a projection of human anxiety and guilt. Orthodox religion identifies him as a real being and calls him Satan, a cruel antagonist whom God mysteriously allows to go on tormenting us. But just as the God in Job’s Evil Dreams is actually diabolical, so this vengeful Satan is identical to the false deity worshipped by the churches—the judgmental Jehovah and the Jesus who dies to shield us from deserved punishment for our sins. This illusory Accuser may believe that we are his slaves, but that only means that we believe it; he will evaporate as soon as we see him for what he is.
Meanwhile, the only power the Accuser has is over our mortal body, and in the later poems Blake regularly calls that body a temporary covering to be left behind. The expression “dost not know the garment from the man” means that the physical body is mistaken for the entirety of a human being. But as early as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake had asserted, “Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age.” In the later poems the body is not even a portion of soul, but rather an entrapping cloak woven on the looms of Vala, Rahab, and Tirzah. At death that garment will be discarded, as Milton divests himself when purged of his selfhood (color plate 20).33
There is a further blind spot in the Accuser’s understanding. Just as Oothoon, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, denied that she was defiled after being raped, so in this poem Innocence remains undefiled at the core of the self: “every harlot was a virgin once.” Cruel experience provokes the harlots in the lyric London to curse bitterly, and they have every right to curse. What they have not become is sinful and wicked, and their true individuality remains unchanged—“Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.” It may be relevant that Blake’s nickname for Catherine was Kate.
The first line of To the Accuser is an ironic adaptation of a conventional statement in Edward Young’s long poem Night Thoughts: “Thy master, Satan, I dare call a dunce.” Young’s meaning was that after rebelling against the Almighty, the fallen angel Satan was a fool to imagine he had any power except what God, for mysterious reasons, chose to permit. Blake’s meaning is that the Prince of Darkness has no real existence at all. In conversation he referred superbly to Satan’s empire as “the empire of nothing.”34
In the picture that accompanies To the Accuser (figure 50), the lost traveler is so sound asleep that a spider has had time to spin a web on his walking stick. As he dreams, a bat-winged Satan emerges from his body—no real being at all, but just a figment in a dream. Startlingly, Satan’s foot doubles as the traveler’s penis. The dream is evidently a nocturnal emission, an expression of the genital sexuality that will no longer be needed in Eternity. Satan’s wings contain a sun, moon, and stars, but a real sunrise is bursting from behind the hill, compelling the spectral god
of this world to take flight.35
50. For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 21
Jesus
After the Songs of Innocence, Jesus all but disappeared from Blake’s poems for nearly a decade, reappearing at last during revision of The Four Zoas. He probably disappeared because Blake saw him as coopted by organized religion, and he probably returned when Blake realized he needed a power greater than ourselves, able to rescue us from our troubled condition. That was when he wrote to Butts, “I am again emerged into the light of day. I still and shall to eternity embrace Christianity, and adore him who is the express image of God.”36
It seems clear that Blake regarded the historical Jesus as a great prophet but not as the unique incarnation of God on earth. Jesus was perhaps endowed with exceptional divine inspiration, but if so he differed from the rest of us in degree, not kind. A rather shocked Crabb Robinson reported: “On my asking in what light he viewed the great question concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ, he said, ‘He is the only God;’ but then he added, ‘And so am I and so are you.’” Strikingly, Robinson adds, “Now he had just before (and that occasioned my question) been speaking of the errors of Jesus Christ.”37
According to orthodox theology, God could not forgive our sins until the innocent Christ permitted himself to be executed on our behalf. “That is a horrible doctrine,” Blake told Robinson; “if another man pay your debt I do not forgive it.” To glorify the Crucifixion, therefore, struck Blake as altogether blasphemous, since he saw it not as a divine sacrifice but as a judicial murder of the historical Jesus. In the “Keys of the Gates” appended to For the Sexes he challenges believers to justify their use of the crucifix:
O Christians Christians! tell me why
You rear it on your altars high!38
A full-page image of the Crucifixion appears in Jerusalem, symbolizing temporary bondage to the natural world (color plate 39). Jesus hangs not from a cross but from a tree that resembles a massive oak, recalling the nature worship of the despised Druids. Yet there are apples hanging from it. Evidently this is no botanically recognizable tree, but a conflation of all the mythic forms of human sacrifice. In Blake’s terms, what Jesus has really done is sacrifice his own selfhood, not in order to propitiate a vengeful God but to purge away the merely “natural” in all of us. Albion (whose name is visible in several copies of this plate) stands adoring Jesus, from whose head pours a radiance far brighter than that of the merely natural sun on the horizon. Albion’s outstretched arms mirror the cruciform pose, and his posture recalls the “dance of death” in the print Albion Rose (color plate 11).39 Jesus is the only God—but so is Albion, and so are we all.
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 23