In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Blake modifies and elaborates on the metaphysical and epistemological principles set forth in the tractates. Here, however, Blake conveys his philosophy via an abundance of heterogeneous literary forms—from blank verse to Menippean satire to aphoristic proverbs to prose narratives—as well as illuminated designs. Martin K. Nurmi claims that, after the tractates, The Marriage “is the second statement of [Blake’s] philosophical countersystem.” In addition to countering, Blake also adopts from a varied set of philosophical traditions, just as he eclectically absorbed and refashioned a range of literary styles in order to articulate a monist pantheism that departs from several premises of his own earlier tractates.

This chapter focuses on three sets of philosophical “contraries” introduced in The Marriage: soul/body, God/material world and imagination (Poetic Genius)/sensory perception. I focus on how Blake's work, and the philosophical tradition informing it, reveals an interdependence between these ostensible oppositions. Such an interplay is evident in the culmination of No Natural Religion, in which God and man become one, without a negation of either entity. The title of Blake's Marriage then heralds a similar dissolution of dualistic metaphysics—a marriage of contraries—and a proclamation of monism. Kathleen Raine calls The Marriage “a manifesto of the philosophy of Paracelsus and Boehme, of the ‘one thing’ in which contraries are resolved.” While she is not alone in recognizing the monistic aspects of the work, no previous commentators have emphasized the pantheistic nature of this monism.