1. Introduction
In his short biography of William Blake, G.K. Chesterton said that ‘if he had lived a thousand years, or even perhaps a hundred’, Blake would have joined the Catholic Church.Footnote 1 Admittedly, in the same passage, Chesterton says that every human being would either become a Catholic or end up ‘in utter pessimistic skepticism’ if he lived a thousand years.Footnote 2 However, the qualification – ‘even perhaps a hundred’ – indicates that Chesterton thought that Blake’s theology was already well on the way toward Catholicism, even if still quite distant from it: ‘Blake, in his rationalist and highly Protestant age, was frequently reproached for his tenderness towards Catholicism; but it would have surprised him very much to be told that he would join it’.Footnote 3 One might suspect that Chesterton wrote these words merely because he was a believing Catholic who happened to be sympathetic to Blake, and this was the ingenious way that occurred to this ingenious writer to reconcile his allegiance to Catholicism with his sympathy for the poet. However, I contend that an examination of Blake’s theology, idiosyncratic as it might be, shows that Chesterton’s remark is an expression of deep insight. There are many ways in which this affinity between Blake and Catholicism could be explored; it would be an interesting theme for a lengthy book. In this short essay, I will examine one short but well-known and quite extraordinary, book of Blake’s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which was originally not a written or printed book but a series of engraved plates. In particular, I will examine Blake’s depiction of John Milton in this book – and his claim that Milton wrote in ‘fetters’ from which the author himself, he implies, was free. In the concluding remarks, I will return to the question of Blake’s relationship to the Catholic Church.
The paper is divided into three parts. In the first part, I explain why, in this book, Blake presents Milton both as his most important precursor and as an antagonist. In the second and third parts, I elaborate on the epistemological and psychological errors with which Blake diagnosed Milton, focusing in the second on Milton’s epistemological errors and in the third on the faulty psychology of desire which Blake attributes to him.
2. Milton as Blake’s precursor and antagonist
Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a notoriously singular book – a strange mixture of poetry, philosophy, theology, and psychology. Its unconventional form is rooted in the singularity of its author’s intention. With some justification, Blake considered his project in this book to be a highly original one, and he believed that Milton’s Paradise Lost was the only significant attempt before his own to accomplish what his book aimed to accomplish. Needless to say, Blake believed that Milton failed in his attempt. Understanding the reasons for that failure, as Blake saw them, takes us to the heart of Blake’s own self-understanding.
The thought behind Blake’s poetry is more internally coherent than is often recognized. The many sympathetic interpretations of Blake from a broadly humanistic-Marxist perspective tend to patronize their subject by judging him from a standpoint whose center is outside that of his own thought, without attempting to understand his reasons for believing what he believed. Of course, it is possible to appreciate Blake from an extra-Christian perspective, but Blake understood his poetry as a vehicle for his thought, and if one abstracts Blake’s thought from its Christian assumptions, one removes its center of gravity. Just like Kierkegaard’s, Blake’s ‘assault on Christendom’ is not intended as an assault on Christianity.
One striking aspect of Blake’s rhetorical strategy that can make him seem anti-Christian is his use of the terms ‘God’ and ‘Devil’. In some writings, Blake explicitly accuses contemporary Christendom of having so far perverted Christian faith that the ‘God’ who is worshipped is, in effect, an imaginary contrivance antithetical to the true God, such that contemporary Christians can be justly accused of using the name ‘God’ when they are in fact speaking of the Devil or the anti-Christ: ‘The Vision of Christ that thou dost See/Is my Vision’s greatest Enemy’.Footnote 4
But in other writings, including The Marriage, Blake adopts a different technique to make the same point: speaking polemically to an audience that confuse the attributes of God with those of the Devil, in a manner intended first to shock, then to provoke thought, he adopts their language ironically and, speaking of God under the name of ‘the Devil’, presents himself as a partisan of the Devil and declares ‘the Jehovah of the Bible’ to be ‘no other than he who dwells in flaming fire’.Footnote 5 Thus, when Blake softens his critique of Milton by adding that he was a ‘true Poet’ who was therefore ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’, he offers him a backhanded compliment of multifaceted irony.Footnote 6
Underlying Blake’s formal experiments in this book are his reflections on central theological themes, which he does not set forth in the form of explicit reasoning, but which can be discerned as the causes of their manifest literary effects. It is Milton’s understanding of original sin as a phenomenon, the consequences of which are epistemological as well as psychological and the need to develop an experimental poetic technique to heighten the reader’s consciousness of that fact, that led Blake to see in Paradise Lost a failed and incomplete paradigm for his own book. Through original sin, human beings are not only given over to sinful behavior, but also to a false interpretation of themselves and the world, which takes hold from the moment one enters the world as a newborn child.Footnote 7
In traditional Christian doctrine, original sin constitutes both the explanation for the suffering and imperfection of human existence and forms the core of any attempt at theodicy. On the one hand, because God could not be the author of evil or privation, these phenomena must ultimately be a consequence of human beings freely choosing to do evil and disobey God – a fact about the origins of human history that repeats itself anew in every human birth. From this follows the threefold linear Christian view of the individual’s life, as well as human history as a whole: creation, fall, salvation (or damnation). On the other hand, God did not simply create human beings in a condition of salvation from the outset, because the highest good that He offers them, freely chosen union with Him, cannot be given to human beings at the moment of creation but must be chosen by them in created time.
Christian teaching assumes that human beings can undergo two kinds of radical transformation – one in the passage from a human being’s created to a human being’s fallen condition, the other from a human being’s fallen to their saved condition – while remaining human and preserving throughout these changes the image of God in which humanity is created. Thus, Blake has two poems on the theme of the imago Dei, one (in the Songs of Innocence) on humanity’s virtues:
And all must love the human form,
In the heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.Footnote 8
But another (in the Songs of Experience) on man’s vices:
Cruelty has a Human Heart,
And Jealousy a Human Face,
Terror the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy the Human Dress.Footnote 9
Blake means to express the fact that even when a human being’s soul displays vices that no longer directly resemble the divine attributes, they continue to reflect God’s form (thus the first poem is called ‘The Divine Image’, i.e., God’s own image preserved in humanity, and the second is called ‘A Divine Image’, i.e., God’s image uniquely perverted in human vice) – in creating free and fallible humanity, God submits to the fate of His own image being perverted.
Alternative theologies attempt in different ways to resolve the theoretical difficulties stemming from this teaching. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy tread a careful line between the kind of radical Protestantism that would exaggerate the transformative effects of original sin such that fallen humanity no longer resembles God at all, and the opposite kind of radical Protestantism that would exaggerate humanity’s created goodness such that he undergoes no radical ontological alteration as an effect of original sin and thus requires no further basic transformation to reverse its effects and attain salvation – understood now as attainable essentially through his own efforts and with only supplementary help, as it were, from his Creator, a position sometimes referred to as ‘Pelagianism’.
Through his reading of the Bible, Blake discovered his own ‘middle way’, akin to that of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and made it the foundation of an unusual theoretical and literary project. Blake focuses on the ontological-anthropological assumption, implicit in the doctrine of original sin, that the human soul permits of three basic possible conditions – createdness, fallenness, and salvation – each of which is radically different from the others, but not so much to deny that the fundamental nature of the soul as imago Dei remains consistent throughout these transformations. Blake undertakes an inquiry from the perspective of a fallen Christian into the human soul insofar as it remains identical through the three conditions it potentially sustains. For Blake, the doctrine of original sin is the key to true self-knowledge, but also a potential obstacle to self-knowledge, because a false understanding of the effects of original sin can make the believer confuse aspects of the human soul that are unique to one’s fallen condition with those that are essential to humanity’s very being.
Blake’s characterization of Milton and critique of Paradise Lost appear very early in the book, preceded by an account of three ‘errors’ contrasted with three ‘contraries’ presented as ‘true’. This account is introduced by this declaration: ‘All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors’.Footnote 10 Fallen human beings always attempt to understand themselves through the medium of some nomos, belief system, ‘Bible’ or ‘sacred code’, and wherever this attempt occurs, it is accompanied by systematic self-misinterpretation rooted in the effects of original sin. However, the Bible (‘the Jewish & Christian Testaments’, as Blake calls it)Footnote 11 is unique among ‘Bibles’ in that it makes possible not only a deepening, but also a liberation from the epistemological and psychological consequences of original sin. Blake portrays Milton as having recognized this fact and having tried, yet failed, to read the Bible in this way, Paradise Lost being the document of this failure.
However, Blake’s critique of Milton is complex. While in one sense Milton failed despite his best intentions, in another one could say that he succeeded despite his best intentions. On the one hand, he had the correct intention (shared by Blake) to read the Bible with the end of uncovering ‘the true Man’ concealed by ‘the body or outward form of Man’,Footnote 12 but he conceived of this intention in an erroneous manner that was itself determined by the misinterpretation of the nature of the soul and human desire, from which his project ought to have liberated him. On the other hand, although (as Blake believes is evident to the discerning reader of Paradise Lost) he did not succeed in consciously liberating himself from the ‘errors’ diagnosed by Blake, he nonetheless unconsciously exposed the true ‘contraries’ that they presuppose, while concealing and thus, in doing so, helped make possible Blake’s own project.
For Blake, then, Milton as a consciously Christian thinker was out of step with Milton as an unconsciously Christian poet: ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’.Footnote 13 On the one hand, for Blake, Milton’s conscious Christianity was in a sense atheism unrecognized as such, to the extent that he did not recognize the naturalistic assumptions and atheistic implications of some of his consciously-held views about God and human desire, which he felt duty-bound by his conventional religious education not to abandon (despite the fact that he was in many respects a bold religious innovator), even when the manifest results of his poetic endeavors ought to have taught him otherwise: ‘In Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the Five Senses, & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!’Footnote 14
At the same time, his implicit ‘atheism’ (i.e., his consciously held ‘Christian’ beliefs, to the extent that their implications were, on Blake’s analysis and unbeknownst to Milton, atheistic) was, in a sense, unconscious Christianity, because his unconscious self, though continually suppressed, nonetheless rebelled against those beliefs. While this rebellion did not succeed in transforming Milton’s self-misinterpretation into conscious self-knowledge, because Milton was ‘a true Poet’, and poets, in Blake’s eyes, only express the truth even when they fail to understand it themselves, his unconscious self nonetheless left its unmistakable traces in Paradise Lost.
Blake even suggests that only those parts of the book that were written by Milton’s, as it were, ‘better’ self have any poetic value. Even while his conscious reason was in the ‘fetters’ of original sin, his deepest unconscious desire, which Blake understands to be the imago Dei suppressed within him, was free of those fetters, a fact that expressed itself in the genius of his poetic depictions of ‘Devils & Hell’ – which – in fact, tell us more about ‘Angels & God’ than the parts ostensibly devoted to these subjects. Blake, then, intends to do consciously what Milton did unconsciously: he will continue to speak of ‘the Devil’, though with an irony that expresses his claim to understand Milton better than Milton understood himself.
Blake’s psychology of Milton is paradigmatic of his general psychology of conscious human desire as corrupted by original sin. As Blake’s pair of ‘Divine Image’ poems also makes clear, for him, unconsciously every human being is ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’, although not everyone is ‘a true Poet’ in the sense of Milton or Blake himself. Blake proposes that, in the fallen world, humanity is alienated from its own desires and enslaved to immediate desires that are, in a paradoxical sense, not its own. The difference between Blake and Milton, as Blake understands it, is parallel to the difference between popular and philosophical poetry in the Platonic sense: the popular poets say many wonderful things without knowing what they mean,Footnote 15 but only the philosophers’ poetry, such as the Platonic dialogues, is self-consciously ministerial to the truth.
Unlike Plato, however, Blake knows the Christian gospel and accepts its claim to provide immediate access to the central truths of Christian faith, such as Jesus’ divinity, to which Blake expresses his assent in a deliberately blunt and vivid manner: ‘Know that after Christ’s death, he became Jehovah’.Footnote 16 According to Blake, men like Voltaire and Rousseau refused to accept the gospel teaching not because of their superior rationality, but because of their prideful belief in their own natural virtue. It is the implications of the gospel teaching that Blake believes are more difficult to access and which ultimately seem to Blake himself to demand his unique project to understand. There is, thus, a certain tension in his thought between religious egalitarianism and intellectual elitism.
It is, however, not quite true to say that Blake believed himself free of Milton’s ‘fetters’. While he did believe himself to have achieved a kind of self-knowledge that Milton lacked, this knowledge was partly knowledge of his own bondage to original sin, to which he remained subject even as he understood its ‘fetters’ and, through this understanding, loosened their grip more than the majority of people ‘in this age’, those he observes walking around London in ‘mind-forg’d manacles’.Footnote 17 The first two Miltonian errors and Blakean contraries concern the epistemological consequences of original sin, namely, the misinterpretation of the nature of one’s soul and body. The third Miltonian error and its Blakean contrary concern the related psychological consequences of original sin, namely, the misinterpretation of one’s desires and the proper response to them. To these three errors and their contraries, I shall now turn.
3. Blake against Milton on the epistemology of original sin
The first error reads: ‘That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul’. The contrary reads: ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age’. Blake accepted Berkeley’s doctrine of the exclusive ontological priority of mind or spirit, the reducibility of all reality to mental or spiritual reality.Footnote 18 For Blake, the belief in an independent natural-physical world, of which our body forms a part like any other and which our soul somehow inhabits through the medium of our body, is not just an incorrect philosophical doctrine, but also a necessary error or illusion that permeates human experience ‘in this age’, i.e., in the historical world transformed by original sin.
Although this illusion is constitutive of fallen existence and cannot be completely ‘expunged’ from the experience even of those who have learned that it is false, Blake does believe it possible to expose this illusion: ‘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’.Footnote 19 ‘Hell’ serves in this book as Blake’s term for this life, humanity in its fallen condition, as transfigured in the perspective of the Christian philosopher-poet, who realizes that the independent body is an illusion coeval with original sin and reinforced by all sacred codes, including even the Bible falsely interpreted. Bodily experience ‘in this age’ is, strictly speaking, no less mental or psychical than any other possible human experience, and ‘the five Senses’ are thus ‘inlets of Soul’. Blake alludes to the technique with which he printed his poems on illuminated plates and humorously employs it as a metaphor to refer to the literary technique with which he articulates his attack on dualism and materialism. Thus, we have the first ontological-anthropological truth that cuts not merely across humanity’s individual and collective history but beyond either side (creation and redemption) of it. Blake presents this truth as ‘salutary and medicinal’ for those ‘in Hell’ – he will draw important ethical consequences from it.
The second error reads: ‘That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul’. The contrary reads: ‘Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’.Footnote 20 Blake seems to contradict himself. After reducing the body to ‘a portion of Soul’, he now seems to accord priority to the body. However, precisely because the second contrary follows the first, the meaning of his statement cannot be interpreted with dualistic assumptions in mind. He does not operate with a conception of soul taken unchanged from a dualistic ontology and thus presupposing an independent body against which it would be falsely defined. Although Blake relates the soul to the body as the whole to a part, for that very reason, he believes the soul is inseparable from the body, i.e., the lived, experienced body.
However, the body, as lived and experienced in mortal existence, is necessarily accompanied by the illusion of ontological independence – the lived body is pretheoretically ‘doubled’, as it were, into a lived body to be studied by psychology or phenomenology on the one hand, and a physical body to be studied by natural science on the other. (In this respect, Blake’s assumption is akin to Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the lived Leib, studied by phenomenological psychology, and the material Körper, studied by natural science, although Merleau-Ponty does not mean by this distinction to commit himself to ontological idealism.)Footnote 21 Despite being an illusion, as an illusion, the latter remains a ‘spiritual existence’ or psychic reality.Footnote 22 Although Blake believes it is possible to know the independent body to be an illusion, one cannot shake off the experience of this illusion until the ‘doors of perception’ have been ‘cleansed’ in the next life.Footnote 23
Adorno suggests that, while revealed religions teach the resurrection of the dead because they ‘take the inseparability of the spiritual and the physical seriously’, the ‘occultist’ wants to cut the soul loose from the body, conceiving of salvation as liberation from the body: ‘Not even Descartes drew the line so cleanly’.Footnote 24 In Berkeley, Blake found a way to preserve this important difference between Christianity and ‘occultism’, while avoiding the problematic dualism often thought to be the necessary ontological presupposition of Christianity. For Blake, the body, considered as ‘a portion of Soul’, is neither an illusion nor an independent substance in its own right. Accordingly, with the idealist thesis in mind, the soul can be seen as intrinsically bodily. This introduces Blake’s second ontological-anthropological truth: ‘Energy is the only life and is from the Body’, i.e., the experienced spiritual body.
Blake alludes to the resurrection as depicted by St Paul, who speaks of the human body as being ‘sown a physical body’ but ‘raised a spiritual body’.Footnote 25 According to Blake’s ontology, the physical body is the spiritual body in a diseased condition (‘the abyss of the five senses, where a flat-sided steep frowns over the present world’)Footnote 26 brought about through original sin, in which it confusedly experiences itself as though it were doubled in a spatially extended, independent ‘external world’. On Blake’s interpretation, St Paul’s ‘spiritual body’ is thus effectively identical with the soul, St Paul’s ‘physical body’ merely with its mortal condition; thus, in the first contrary, Blake spoke of ‘that call’d Body’,Footnote 27 to be distinguished from the true body that is ‘the only life’. In this sense, ‘the Body’ is effectively identical with the soul; Blake plays with language here just as he does when speaking of ‘God’ and ‘Devils’.
4. Blake against Milton on the psychology of desire
The third error reads: ‘That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies’. The contrary reads: ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’.Footnote 28 Having presented his basic ontological-anthropological thesis in the second error and its contrary, Blake is concerned with extracting its psychological and ethical implications. He is now concerned with establishing the relation within the soul between freedom, desire, and the moral law. Blake believes that life in ‘the present world’ is not a conflict of evil desires (located in the body) with good reason (located in the soul) – a view he assumes would rest on dualistic premises – but a conflict between desire or ‘energy’ and restraint or ‘reason’. Energy is the soul’s action, and ‘reason’, in Blake’s unusual terminology,Footnote 29 is the soul’s weakness, its complacency: ‘Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost’.Footnote 30
Blake means to steer a path between what he sees as two basic errors that seem radically opposed to one another but, in fact, share the same materialistic or dualistic assumptions, fostered by the epistemological effects of original sin. In his own time, Blake saw these errors as represented primarily by conventional Christianity – especially as represented by the established Church of England, and the secular naturalistic Enlightenment.
According to Blake’s understanding of the ‘conventional Christian’ position (to which, according to Blake, Milton ultimately succumbed), the content of the moral law is, as such, altogether indifferent to human desire. Morality, as morality, consists in its categorical objectivity and indifference to desire. One must not expect its demands to be, in any immediate or ultimate sense, a response to human desire. According to the secular naturalistic position, the very idea of a categorical moral law that is anything other than a convention sustained to meet humanity’s essentially egotistic natural desires and needs (whether of those who follow the law or of those who impose the law on others) is superstitious. According to Blake, both of these positions effectively confuse the human soul as it is to be found in our mortal, fallen condition with humanity’s true being and thereby grievously misinterpret the human soul even as it is to be found ‘in this age’ or ‘in the present world’, because knowledge of the human soul requires the capacity to distinguish the permanent and essential characteristics of human beings as human beings (the imago Dei) from the transient and corrupting effects of original sin.
Blake’s point obviously applies to the standpoint of natural egotism, which straightforwardly assumes (to use Averroes’ concise formulation) ‘that there is no happiness or misery in the hereafter and that such a statement is intended only to safeguard people from one another in what pertains to their bodies and physical senses, that it is a stratagem, and that a human being has no end other than sensual existence’.Footnote 31 It is less obvious how the standpoint of categorical moral legalism implicitly understands the essential being of the human according to the attributes of our fallen condition. The conventional Christian version of this legalism affirms, with Blake, that man has an extra-natural origin and end. Blake suggests, however, that by radically divorcing man’s desires from the moral Good, moral legalism opposes an abstract idea of human desire – as whatever somebody happens to be feeling at a given moment – to an equally abstract idea of the objective Good, defined merely by its contingent indifference to the former, as though God’s essence consisted in the fact that He does not always approve of what human beings want for themselves, rather than this fact itself being a consequence of God’s essential nature. Thus, Blake accuses Milton, in succumbing to this error, of effectively identifying God with destiny or fate.
Both of these conceptions (of desire and of the Good) are themselves abstracted from humanity’s fallen condition, in which the immediately desirable is in continual conflict with the moral Good, and use these abstractions to define human desire as such and the moral Good as such. According to Blake, the soul’s true desires, which are constantly repressed and submerged by the passions of the physical body, are necessarily in harmony with the true desires of others and with the will of God. In our mortal, fallen condition, we experience desire both as a division within ourselves and as a division between ourselves and others. Nevertheless, even in humanity’s mortal condition, as imago Dei, it is not wholly alienated from its own desires. For Blake, the Christian moral life is opposed both to the hedonistic calculus (however sophisticated) of the natural egotist and to the inevitably self-deceiving suppression of the moral legalist; it consists in the always fragmentary and inconsistent attempt to distinguish one’s transient desires (whether immediate or lifelong) from one’s true desires, to harmonize them. Blake encourages Christians to view their own thoughts and deeds as he viewed Milton’s poetry, to differing degrees, conscious or unconscious records of their true desires struggling in the fetters of original sin, and to learn from them accordingly.
Many of the apparently antinomian or anti-Christian statements among the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (the sixty-nine aphorisms Blake presents immediately following his critique of Milton) that seem most gratuitously shocking begin to make sense when viewed in this light. Here, one example will have to suffice: ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’.Footnote 32 Taken literally, this would seem to be an uncompromising articulation of the principle of natural egotism, recalling Hume’s notorious claim that it is ‘not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger’.Footnote 33 The obvious moral rejoinder is that murdering an infant is never justified, no matter how strong a craving one might feel for the commission of such an atrocity.
Blake means the statement, however, to compel the reader to think through the dialectic of moral legalism and natural egotism. The soul’s true desire would never motivate one to murder an infant, and the moralist who can only give a ‘strictly moral’ reason, who can give no compelling psychological reason, why one should not murder an innocent child is as lacking in self-knowledge as the natural egotist who cannot think of a reason why he should not do so if he happens to desire this. Blake suggests not so much that Milton is a crude legalist with a mind so ‘fettered’ that he would be unable to formulate a response to such an extreme case, as that his consciously held principles would not allow him to do so consistently. Nonetheless, Blake does not mean to deny that the murder of innocent children is objectively morally wrong. His emphasis on the need for perpetual forgiveness of sins would hardly make sense if there were no moral law to break; despite his rhetoric, he is not an antinomian. Rather, he believes that law and desire are ultimately in harmony with one another, but this fact is concealed from us by the effects of original sin. The studied extremity of his language masks the dialectical caution of his thought.
5. Concluding remarks
We see, then, that Chesterton is correct that Blake was in many respects on the same path as the faithful Catholic. Certainly, Blake was not anti-Catholic in the way in which some Protestants undoubtedly were, such as Luther and Calvin; he did not see acceptance of the Catholic Church as a renunciation of Christ, let alone as adherence to anti-Christ. One can even affirm with Chesterton that, had Blake come to the conclusion that acceptance of Christ required acceptance of the authority of the Catholic Church, he would have converted unhesitatingly – he was certainly not the kind of latitudinarian Christian who only accepts Christ so long as it is possible to understand Him as a moral exemplar or a remarkable instantiation of natural human goodness. There is an interesting and significant absence of Marian spirituality in Blake’s theology, but there is also no suspicion or aggression toward Marian spirituality, or even toward the institution of the papacy.
I will conclude by first enumerating some of the tensions in Blake’s theology that acceptance of the Catholic faith would have compelled him to modify or to overcome, and then indicating some of the ways in which Blake’s theology points toward Catholicism.
Blake’s polemical characterization of conventional Christianity is rather unfair, much like Kierkegaard’s ‘attack on Christendom’. Certainly, Blake, like Kierkegaard, was incensed at nominal adherents of Christianity who did not take their faith seriously and whose complacency may well have led them to abandon Christianity altogether in an even more secular age – such as our own. It would not be accurate to characterize Blake’s polemics against conventional Christianity as driven only or primarily by pride. Nonetheless, there is an element of pride in these polemics, which is related to what Chesterton perceived as Blake’s occasional priggishness: ‘In spite of his imagination, there was even a touch of the prig about him. He was obscene on principle’.Footnote 34 Had Blake, like Kierkegaard, not seen himself as an individual obliged to produce his own theology from the ground up, as it were, standing alone before God (‘I must Create a System’, wrote Blake, ‘or be enslav’d by another Man’s’)Footnote 35, but as a member of a Christian community, there is every reason to think that the resultant humility would have made him less liable to this ‘touch of the prig’. Certainly, in Blake’s sincerely felt love of his fellow human beings, the desire for such community is implicit – and he is not to be blamed that the Church of England on the one hand, and the Swedenborgian and Non-conformist groups of which he was aware on the other, the only Christian communities with which he was intimately familiar, did not fulfill this desire. But Blake was nonetheless a solitary mystic, quite unlike the many medieval and modern Catholic mystics who had no desire to break from the wider Catholic community even as they pursued their own path, and this solitary character, it seems to me, is related to this ‘touch of the prig’.
Related to this, the belief that an ordained priest has the power, given to him by God and not possessed by Catholic laymen, to consecrate bread and wine and thereby transform them into the blood and body of Christ would have compelled Blake to recognize his ordinariness as a lay Christian, which did not contradict the many respects in which he was clearly an exceptional individual. Furthermore, the regular reception of the sacraments would also have compelled Blake to acknowledge that, although his emphasis on spiritual realities is quite appropriate for Christianity, as is his insistence that the body itself can be holy, ontological idealism as proposed by Berkeley is not the key that unlocks the enigmas of the Fall. Rather, the materiality of the corporeal world is a precondition for the miracle of the Eucharist and the reception of Communion. This is not to say that the idealism of Blake (or Berkeley) is the delusion of a crank. On the contrary, as Berkeley shows and Blake could see,Footnote 36 it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to give a rational account of the material world as an independent reality that renders it altogether transparent to our intellect in its fallen condition; even St Thomas did not claim to do this. But the very opacity of the corporeal world to the human mind’s philosophical grasp can help the Christian cultivate the virtue of humility.
It must also be said that Blake’s rhetorical innovations, while often exhilarating, can be misleading and dangerous. Interpretations of Blake as a knowingly anti-Christian thinker are, I have tried to show, based on a misreading that dissipates if one comes to understand him better. But it is a misreading for which Blake himself is partly responsible. While submission to the Church of England would have broken his spirit and undone his genius, submission to the Church of Rome, and sincere desire not to give scandal to those whose faith was weaker than his or whose intellect was less subtle, would have cultivated his humility – a virtue of the heart Blake already claimed separates Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau from the true Christian. Related to this, there is a tension, which I touched on above, between religious egalitarianism and intellectual elitism in Blake’s thought. Samuel Johnson’s claim that the Bible is an extremely difficult book that requires extensive commentary and analysis to understand, of which the common people are not capable, elicited Blake’s fury: ‘Christ & his Apostles were Illiterate Men; Caiphas, Pilate & Herod were Learned… The Beauty of the Bible is that the most Ignorant & Simple Minds Understand it Best’.Footnote 37 But can one say that Blake’s own writings, such as The Marriage itself, or his late epics, or even his more immediately accessible Songs of Innocence and Experience, are not highly complex works with many layers of meaning, and even possess in many cases opaque and rebarbative surfaces? The Catholic Church makes room both for sophisticated intellectualism and for simple piety without their being in principle opposed, even as they remain different; had Blake converted, he would have become aware of the tension between them which permeates his writing, and at the same time become able to reconcile it with ease.
Nonetheless, Chesterton is correct that Blake’s theology has much in common with the Catholic faith. Catholicism is sometimes understood as a middle way between the extremes into which Protestantism is liable to fall, dancing with graceful and precise steps over the abysses of various heresies. Without the magisterium to guide him, and with only various fragments of sacred tradition to nourish him, Blake established his own interpretation of the Bible, which managed to avoid both ‘Pelagian’ self-confidence in humanity’s own virtue and Calvinist pessimism about humanity’s total postlapsarian depravity through a profound and subtle reflection on the epistemological and psychological effects of original sin. Although Blake’s emphasis on knowledge and desire could have led him to a Socratic–Platonic position incompatible with Christianity, he avoids this trap, and maintains the Pauline, commonsensical and Aristotelian position that it is possible to know the good yet act wrongly – ‘to do the thing I hate’, to fall prey to akrasia – although Blake is not a person one would associate either with common sense or with Aristotle (‘it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics’).Footnote 38 However, the arresting concision of the early Marriage and Songs could not sustain Blake for his entire life. On these foundations, he began to build an increasingly prolix and self-referential system, which was interesting but uneven. Pope Benedict XVI (when he was still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) noted, ‘Protestant Christianity is… inclined to fear, in the Catholic version thereof, a lapse from the gospel. If the Catholic Church sees a “too little” in the Protestant churches, they, for their part, find a “too much” in the Catholic Church’.Footnote 39 But Chesterton remarks, ‘Blake had succeeded in inventing in the course of about ten years as tangled and interdependent a system of theology as the Catholic Church has accumulated in two thousand’.Footnote 40 Blake never managed to regain the striking character of the poetry he composed in the 1790s when he was just beginning his creative life.
Research for this article was supported by MSCA Fellowships CZ – Charles University (CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0008115).
Open access
