“‘God’s mercy and long-suffering
Are but the sinner to justice to bring.
Thou on the cross for them shalt pray —
And take revenge at the last day.’
Jesus replied, and thunders hurled:
‘I never will pray for the world.
Once I did so when I prayed in the garden;
I wished to take with me a bodily pardon.’”
These few lines, interpolated by way of comfortable exposition, are more likely to increase the offence and perplexity: but assuredly no irreverent brutality of paradox was here in the man’s mind. Even the “divine humanity” of his quasi-Pantheistic worship must give up (he says) the desire of redeeming the unredeemable “world” — the quality subject to law and technical religion. No “bodily pardon” for that, whatever the divine pity may have hoped, while as yet full-grown in love only, not in knowledge — seraphic fire without cherubic light; before, that is, it had perfect insight into the brute nature or sham body of things. That must be put off — changed as a vesture — by the risen and reunited body and soul. What is it that has to be saved? What is it that can be?
“Can that which was of woman born
In the absence of the morn,
While the soul fell into sleep
And (? heard) archangels round it weep,
Shooting out against the light
Fibres of a deadly night,
Reasoning upon its own dark fiction,
In doubt which is self-contradiction,”
can that reason itself into redemption? The absolute body and essential soul, as we have said, are with all their energies, passive and active powers and pleasures, natural properties and liberties, of an imperishable and vital holiness; but their appended qualities, their form and law, their morals and philosophies, their reason and religion, these are perishable and damnable. The “holy reasoning power,” in whose “holiness is closed the abomination of desolation,” must be annihilated. “Rational Truth, root of Evil and Good,” must be plucked up and burnt with fire. You cannot, save in an empirical sense, walk by sight and not by faith: you cannot “walk by faith and not by sight,” for there is no sight except faith. (Compare generally the Gates of Paradise, for illustrations of all these intricate and intense conceptions.) Doubt then, being one of the perishable qualities which depend on externals, is mere impotence and error: now let us hear further: —
“Humility is only doubt
And does the sun and moon blot out,
Roofing over with thorns and stems
The buried soul and all its gems.
This life’s dim window of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye,
That was born in a night, to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in the beams of light.”
Part of this reappears with no less vigour of evangelic assertion in the Auguries of Innocence, but stripped of the repellent haze of mythological form. That poem, full as it is of delicate power and clear sweetness of thought, does not however reproduce in full the emblematic beauty of our last extract: nor does it throw so much light of a fitful flame-like sort upon or over the subtlest profundities of Blake’s faith.
Elsewhere, reverting with fresh spirit to the same charge, he demands (or his spectre for him— “This was spoken by my spectre to Voltaire, Bacon, &c.”): —
“Did Jesus teach doubt? or did he
Give any lessons of philosophy?
Charge visionaries with deceiving?
Or call men wise for not believing?”
Unhappily the respective answers from Verulam and Cirey have not been registered by a too contemptuous prophet; they would have been worth reading.
The dogma of “Christian humility” is totally indigestible to Blake; he batters upon it with the heaviest artillery of his “gospel.”
“Was Jesus humble? or did he
Give any proofs of humility?
Boast of high things with humble tone,
And give with charity a stone?”
Again;
“When the rich learned Pharisee
Came to consult him secretly,
Upon his heart with iron pen
He wrote ‘Ye must be born again.’
He was too proud to take a bribe:
He spoke with authority, not like a Scribe.”
Nor can the love of enemies be accepted literally as an endurable doctrine; for “he who loves his enemies hates his friends,” in the mind of the too ardent and candid poet, who proceeds to insist that the divine teacher “must mean the mere love of civility” (amour de convenance); “and so he must mean concerning humility”: for the willing acceptance of death cannot humiliate, and is therefore no test of “humility” in Blake’s sense; self-sacrifice in effect implies an “honest triumphant pride.” (Here of course the writer drops for a moment the religious view and divine meaning of the Passion, and looks towards Calvary from the simply human side as it appeared to casual bystanders; for here he has only to deal with what he conceives to be errors in the human conception of Christ’s human character. “You the orthodox, and you the reasoners, assert through the mouths of your churches or philosophies that purely human virtues are actually predicable of Christ, and appeal for evidence to his life and death. Well and good; we will, to gain ground for argument with you, forget that the Passion is not, and admit that it is, what you would call a purely human transaction. Are then these virtues predicable of it even as such?”) A good man who incurs risk of death by his goodness, is too “proud” to abjure that goodness and live; here is none of that you call “humility.” Such a man need not have died; “Caiaphas would forgive” if one “died with Christian ease asking pardon” after your “humble” fashion: —
“He had only to say that God was the devil
And the devil was God, like a Christian civil;
Mild Christian regrets to the devil confess
For affronting him thrice in the wilderness;”
and such an one might have become a very Cæsar’s minion, or Cæsar himself. Though of course mainly made up of violent quibbling and perversities of passionate humour, which falls to work in this vehement way upon words as some personal relief (a relief easily conceivable in Blake’s case by any student of his life), all this has also its value in helping us to measure according to what light we may have in us the stronger and weaker, the worse and better, the graver and lighter sides of the man. It belongs evidently to the period when he painted portraits of the dead and transcribed Jerusalem from spiritual dictation. “This,” he lets us know by way of prelude or opening note, “is what Joseph of Arimathæa said to my Fairy,” or natural spiritual part by which he conversed with spirits. Next in his defiant doggrel he calls on “Pliny and Trajan” — heathen learning and heathen power or goodness — to “come before Joseph of Arimathæa” and “listen patient.” “What, are you here?” he asks as if in the direct surprise of vision. (I will not give these roughest notes in the perfection of their pure doggrel. As verse, serious or humorous, they are irreclaimable and intolerable; what empirical value they may have must be wrung out of them with all haste.)
We may now as well look into a later division of the poem, where Christ is tempted of Satan to obey.
“‘John for disobedience bled;
But you can turn the stones to bread.
God’s high king and God’s high priest
Shall plant their glories in your breast
If Caiaphas you will obey,
If Herod you with bloody prey
Feed with the sacrifice and be
Obedient, fall down, worship me.’
Thunder and lightning broke around
And Jesus’ voice in thunder’s sound;
‘Thus I seize the spiritual prey;
Ye smiters with disease, make way.
I come your King and God to seize;
Is God a smiter with disease?’”
This divine revolt and deliverance of the spiritual human “prey” out of the hands of law and fangs of religion is made matter of accusation against him by the “unredeemable part of the world” of which we spoke — using here as its mouthpiece the “shadowy man” or phantasmal shell of man, which “rolled away” when the times were full “from the limbs of Jesus, to make them his prey”: —
“Crying ‘Crucify this cause of distress
Who don’t keep the secrets of holiness.
All mental powers by diseases we bind:
But he heals the deaf and the dumb and the blind,
Whom God has afflicted for secret ends;
He comforts and heals and calls them friends.’”
But Christ, instead of becoming a prey to it, himself makes his prey of this unclean shadow or ghastly ghost of the bodily life now divided from him — this pestilent nature in bondage to the dæmonic deity, which thought to consume him by dint of death:
“An ever-devouring appetite
Glittering with festering venoms bright;”
puts it off and devours it in three nights; even as now also he feeds upon it to consume it; being made perfect in pride, that he may overcome the body by spiritual and “galling pride:” eat what “never was made for man to eat,” the body of dust and clay, the meal’s meat of the old serpent: as “the white parts or lights” of a plate are “eaten away with aqua-fortis or other acid, leaving prominent” the spiritual “outline” (Life, v. 1, ch. ix., p. 89). This symbol, taken from Blake’s own artistic work of engraving — from the process through which we have with us the Songs and Prophecies — will give with some precision the exact point indicated, and might have been allowed of by himself, as not unacceptable or inapposite.
This final absorption of the destructible body, consumption of “the serpent’s meat,” is but the upshot of a life of divine rebellion and “spiritual war,” not of barren physical qualities and temporal virtues: —
“The God of this world raged in vain;
He bound old Satan in his chain:
Throughout the land he took his course,
And traced diseases to their source:
He cursed the Scribe and Pharisee,
Trampling down hypocrisy.”
His wrath was made as it were a chariot of fire; at the wheels of it was dragged the God of this world, overthrown and howling aloud: —
“Where’er his chariot took its way
Those gates of death let in the day;”
every chain and bar broken down from them, and the staples of the doors loosed; his voice was heard from Zion above the clamour of axle and wheel,
“And in his hand the scourge shone bright;
He scourged the merchant Canaanite
From out the temple of his mind,
And in his body tight does bind
Satan and all his hellish crew;
And thus with wrath he did subdue
The serpent bulk of nature’s dross
Till he had nailed it to the cross.
He put on sin in the Virgin’s womb,
And put it off on the cross and tomb
To be worshipped by the Church of Rome:”
not to speak of other churches. One may notice how to the Pantheist the Catholic’s worship is a worship of sin, even as his own is to the Catholic. “You adore as divine the fallen nature and sinful energies of man:” “you, again, the cast-off body wherein Satan and sin were shut up, that he who assumed it might crucify them.” Sin or false faith or “hypocrisy” was scourged out of the mind into the body, and the separate animal body then delivered over to death with the sins thereof — all the sins of the world garnered up in it to be purged away with fire: and of this body you make your God. The expressed gird at the “Church of Rome” is an interpolation; at first Blake had merely written. “And on the cross he sealed its doom” in place of our two last-quoted lines. Akin to this view of the “body of sin” is his curious heresy of the Conception; reminding one of that Christian sect which would needs worship Judas as the necessary gateway of salvation: for without his sin how could redemption have come about?
“Was Jesus born of a virgin pure
With narrow soul and looks demure?
If he intended to take on sin,
His mother should an harlot (have) been:
Just such a one as Magdalen,
With seven devils in her pen.
Or were Jew virgins still more cursed,
And more sucking devils nursed?”
(This ingenious solution, worthy of any mediæval heresiarch of the wilder sort in a time of leprosy, is also an afterthought. From the sudden anti-Judaic rapture of grotesque faith or humour into which Blake suddenly dips hereabouts, one might imagine he had been lately bitten or stung by some dealer or other such dangerous craftsman of the Hebrew kind; for that any mortal Jew — or for that matter any conceivable Gentile — would have credited him to the amount of a penny sterling, no one will imagine. Let the reader meanwhile endure him a little further, suppressing if he is wise any comment on Blake’s “insanity” or “blasphemous doggrel”; for he should now at least understand that this literal violence of manner, these light or grave audacities of mere form, imply no offensive purpose or significance, except insomuch as offence is inseparable from any strange kind of earnestly heretical belief. Neither is Blake here busied in fetching milk to feed his babes and sucklings. This he could do incomparably well on occasion, with such milk as a nursing-goddess gave to the son of Metaneira; but here he carves meat for men — of a strange quality, tough and crude: but not without savour or sustenance if eaten with the right sauce and prefaced with a proper grace.)
“Or what was it that he took on
That he might bring salvation?
A body subject to be tempted,
From neither pain nor grief exempted,
Or such a body as could not feel
The passions that with sinners deal?
Yes: but they say he never fell.
Ask Caiaphas: for he can tell.”
Here follow as given by Caiaphas the old charges of Sabbath-breach, blasphemy and strange doctrine; given again almost word for word, but with a nobler frame of context, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where, and not here, we will prefer to read them. One charge will be allowed to pass as new coin, having Blake’s image and superscription in lieu of Cæsar’s.
“He turned the devils into swine
That he might tempt the Jews to dine;
Since when, a pig has got a look
That for a Jew may be mistook.
‘Obey your parents’? What says he?
‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?
No earthly parents I confess:
I am doing my Father’s business.’
He scorned earth’s parents, scorned earth’s God,
And mocked the one and the other’s rod;
His seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government,”
and caused his followers to die by the sword of justice as rebels and blasphemers of this world’s God and his law: overturned “the tent of secret sins and its God,” with all the cords of his weaving, prisons of his building and snares of his setting; overthrew the “bloody shrine of war,” the holy place of the God of battles, whose cruel light and fire of wrath was poured forth upon the world till it reached “from star to star”; thus casting down all things of “church and state as by law established,” camps and shrines, temples and prisons,
“Halls of justice, hating vice,
Where the devil combs his lice.”
Upon all these, to the great grief of Caiaphas and the grievous detriment of the God of this world, he sent “not peace but a sword”: lived as a vagrant upon other men’s labour, kept company by preference with publicans and harlots.
“And from the adulteress turned away
God’s righteous law, that lost its prey.”
So we end as we began, at that great practical point of revolt: and finally, with deep fervour of satisfaction, and the sense of a really undeniable achievement, the new evangelist jots down this couplet by way of epilogue:
“I’m sure this Jesus will not do
Either for Englishman or Jew.”
Scarcely, as far as one sees: we may surely allow him that. And yet, having somehow steered right through this chaotic evangel, we may as surely admit that none but a great man with a great gift of belief could have conceived or wrought it out even as roughly as it is here set down. There is more absolute worship implied in it than in most works of art that pass muster as religious; a more perfect power of noble adoration, an intenser faculty of faith and capacity of love, keen as flame and soft as light; a more uncontrollable desire for right and lust after justice, a more inexhaustible grace of pity for all evil and sorrow that is not of itself pitiless, a more deliberate sweetness of mercy towards all that are cast out and trodden under. This “vision of Christ,” though it be to all seeming the “greatest enemy” of other men’s visions, can hardly be regarded as the least significant or beautiful that the religious world has yet been brought into contact with. It is at least not effeminate, not unmerciful, not ignoble, and not incomprehensible: other “visions” have before now been any or all of these. Thus much it is at least; the “vision” of a perfectly brave, tender, subtle and faithful spirit; in which there was no fear and no guile, nothing false and nothing base. Of the technical theology or “spiritualism” each man who cares to try will judge as it may please him; it goes at least high and deep enough to draw down or pluck up matter for absolution or condemnation. It is no part of our affair further to vindicate, to excuse, or to account for the singular gospel here preached.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 319