Abstract
This paper argues that Blake articulates a subtler conception of the divine than the usual opposition between atheism and theism allows: one having affinities with mystical traditions in the West and East as well as with post-modern ‘a-theologies’. Blake expresses this position through a constructed mythology that persistently subverts our conceptions of an ‘ontological’ God distinct from humanity who occupies the top rung of a hierarchical ladder. Blake’s ‘image’ of the divine is that of a unity in difference of opposed ‘faculties’ represented by mythological/allegorical characters such as Orc, Luvah, Tharmas and Urizen. These characters also represent our own human faculties so that our image of God (the four faculties or ‘Zoas’ in proper balance) is at the same time paradigmatic for understanding ourselves as humans. Indeed, Blake’s theology is radically Christian in the sense that it fuses theology and anthropology into a single account of the divine/humanity of Christ.
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Notes
- 1.
Dawkins (2008), p. 31.
- 2.
Blake read and annotated Berkeley’s Siris and from the tenor of his comments, which for once avoid polemic and sarcasm, he seems to have been reasonably pleased with it. These notes however come from later in Blake’s life and his idealism may well have found its confirmation in Berkeley rather than its point of departure.
- 3.
What for instance does Blake mean by his assertion, made many times in the course of his work, that God is the ‘Poetic Genius’ or the human imagination? Does he mean this reductively, as if he meant that God only exists as we imagine him? Robert Ryan in his essay “Blake and Religion” (2003, p. 163) considers this a possible reading. Of course, if Blake meant something this specific and this reductive one would think his language would make that clearer. That God is a noble figment of our imagination is an easy thing to say and hardly requires the paradoxical discourse that Blake in fact employs. Ryan (2003, p. 163) himself finds elsewhere that Blake’s language implies an ‘ontological gap’ between human imaginings and the life of eternity. For this reason I tend to view Blake in Pantheist or, more accurately, Panentheist terms. Human imagination, our capacity for self-projection in a word or image, is the divine word or imagination in us, that in which we ‘live move and have our being’ rather as a fish moves in the medium of water. Dialectically this entails that any discourse on God would shade into discourse about humankind and vice versa and this fluidity of language, this instability of determinate meaning is just what we find in Blake. On this point a detailed comparison of Blake and Heraclitus would be interesting.
- 4.
Milton, in Blake (1988), 34, 38–39. Blake’s poems were never published in standard print editions till almost the 20th century; as before that they existed in prints taken from copper plates, the first number refers to the plate number and the second refers to the individual lines.
- 5.
- 6.
Book of Urizen, in Blake (1988), 2.
- 7.
The following from Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ (1968, p. 11) is very much in the spirit of Blake: “A virtue must be our own self-invention, our most necessary self-expression and self-defense: any other kind of virtue is merely a danger. Whatever is not a condition of our life harms it: a virtue that is prompted solely by a feeling of respect for the concept of ‘virtue’, as Kant would have it, is harmful”. With all due respect to Blake and Nietzsche this is not, in fact, an accurate critique of Kant. Kant demands respect not for the ‘concept’ of virtue (as Nietzsche mischievously would have it) but for our own self-legislation as practical. This though is for another paper.
- 8.
Book of Urizen, in Blake (1988), 10–11.
- 9.
Book of Urizen, in Blake (1988), 8.
- 10.
Urizen might also be taken as a satire on the subject in modern philosophy; the Cartesian or Lockean ‘ego’ locked in its own self-referential realm and impermeable to an ‘outside’ whether personal or cosmic. Indeed, as Kittel suggests the self-enclosed nullity of Urizen’s consciousness may well be intended to suggest the tabula rasa of empiricism: an empty subject waiting to be filled passively with material impressions. See Kittel (1978), pp. 120–121.
- 11.
Book of Urizen, in Blake (1988), 5.
- 12.
Book of Urizen, in Blake (1988), 4–5.
- 13.
America, in Blake (1988), 1, 10–20.
- 14.
Or perhaps we might say that his spiritual form cannot, by itself, liberate itself from nature. Orc can bring the heavens nearer but cannot grasp them as Blake demonstrates in his great lyric The Mental Traveler where we see the entire cycle only hinted at in the Preludium to America. As Bloom says (1963), p. 119, says: “The fourteen suns indicate Orc’s sexual maturity, but as they also take him half-way through a lunar cycle there is a hint that his impending liberation is condemned to be cyclical, not final. If Orc is reviving organic life, he will at last wane, for organic life is part of the wheel of births and deaths”. Indeed, the Guardian Prince of Albion, rather spitefully, points out this very thing in mocking his serpent-form. See Blake (1988), 9, 19–20.
- 15.
America, in Blake (1988), 9, 10–20.
- 16.
Lincoln (2012), p. 81.
- 17.
America, in Blake (1988), 5, 1–7.
- 18.
America, in Blake (1988), 16, 1–10.
- 19.
See Footnote 16.
- 20.
Jerusalem, in Blake (1988), 2, 50, 24–30.
- 21.
For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, in Blake (1988), Prologue.
- 22.
Here I disagree somewhat with G. Harper’s assertion that: “Though more Greek than Christian, Blake’s strong emphasis upon the supreme being as a mere man (“God is no more”) is not characteristic of either Christian or Platonic theology”. See Harper (1961), p. 128. I don’t know why Harper should add the word ‘mere’ here as if for Blake there were anything ‘mere’ about Christ. At any rate Harper makes it clear elsewhere that Blake’s Christ is the logos or ‘place of forms’ postulated in the very first Christian theologies of Justin Martyr and the apologists Tatian and Athenagoras. As he says: “To Blake, Christ is the ‘first intellect’…form of forms…Christ is the ever present reality, the ‘living form … the human imagination, which is the divine body of the lord Jesus’. Many passages in Blake’s later works indicate that there was a clear relationship in his mind between Christ as the all-encompassing form and Plato’s idea of the one and the many” (p. 88). In theological terms then, Christ is fully, archetypically human insofar as he is divine intellect or form of forms.
- 23.
That Blake here annunciates the Christian notion of the incarnation is recognized by Ryan (2003), p. 161. Ryan continues however by noting that: “… Jesus was himself the living God, embodying in his divine humanity the fullness of the God-head” (p. 161). This radical Christological focus, inherited in part from Swedenborg, underlies much that is difficult in Blake’s conception of God for of course he has no answer to the question ‘What is God?’ other than pointing to the divine man Jesus. This gives his theology a monistic, indeed Unitarian cast. At the same time Ryan warns, correctly, that it is perilous to pin Blake down to any doctrinal formulation (p. 165) and, as we shall see below, there are in Blake Trinitarian traces that oppose the radical Christo-monism outlined by Ryan. In general, Blake’s assertions are opposed by counter assertions to which the reader must be alert.
- 24.
See R. J. W Austin’s lucid account of Ibn Arabi’s thought in his introduction to the (very difficult) Bezels of Wisdom. Austin (1980), pp. 25–31.
- 25.
Four Zoas, in Blake (1988), 9–13.
- 26.
Yeats and Ellis (2003), p. 246, make the following observation: “… although the name of God occurs continually in the symbolic books of Blake, there is little philosophic exposition of his nature.” This is not surprising given the ‘symbolic’ nature of Blake’s books but Yeats and Ellis themselves offer a potentially fruitful way of understanding Blake’s scattered comments on this subject. They suggest that Blake’s human fourfold of “reason, emotion, sensation and energy” is a kind of trace of the Trinitarian structure of God which in itself transcends direct representation. Tharmas represents the unity or hidden essence of God while Urizen, Luvah and Urthona represent the procession of that unity into the persons of the Father, Son and Spirit. Doubtless no Orthodox theologian would make of the divine essence a fourth principle alongside the trinity of persons but Yeats and Ellis find Blake’s precedent in the heterodox mystic Jacob Boehme who speaks of the divine ‘mirror’ as the essence manifested in the Trinity of persons. See Yeats and Ellis (2003), pp. 246–250. Insofar as Tharmas represents the unified feeling of the fourfold prior to its division into specific faculties he may stand as a fair candidate for Boehme’s ‘mirror’. Whatever is the case I think we can go no further than this intriguing suggestion given Blake’s reticence on the topic.
- 27.
Here though we come across a fundamental divide between Blake and the mystical tradition. Blake has a definite animus against any conception of the divine as infinite, or incomprehensible or formless. This is because of his obstinate focus on the humanity of the word which represents for him the perfection of bounded form. Darkness in religion as in painting blurred the glory of the divine image which Blake conceived as a positive revelation of beauty. We might view Blake’s Biblicism in a similar light: it is a verbal and visual artefact that embodies the “Great Code of Art”.
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Wills, B. (2020). Blake’s Dialectical Theism. In: Bunikowski, D., Puppo, A. (eds) Why Religion? Towards a Critical Philosophy of Law, Peace and God. Law and Religion in a Global Context, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35484-8_12
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