Flesh in the Age of Reason (66 page)

Cruelty has a Human Heart,
And Jealousy a Human Face;
Terror the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy the Human Dress.

The true gospel as preached by Christ prizes the innocent spiritual playfulness of the child. Such energies are expressions of the divine made flesh, themes prominent in his
Songs of Innocence
(1789).

Blake the philosopher abhorred the tendency of orthodox
Christian theology, as distorted by Cartesianism, to figure body and soul, flesh and spirit, as polar opposites within a bad–good hierarchy. Masquerading in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, a print series engraved between 1789 and 1793, as ‘the voice of the Devil’, he declares what was evidently his own view:

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

To Blake’s mind such conventional pieties are, properly speaking, not divine truths but travesties of the faith.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
advances counter-commandments, in the guise of a Devil’s charter: the truly divine lies in creative energy, however transgressive of respectable morality. In his provocative transvaluing way, Blake asserts, ventriloquizing through the Devil, that ‘the following Contraries’ are true:

1. 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.

2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

And he asserts in the same work that ‘Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.’ Contraries are opposites in a dynamic, creative tension.

‘Tyger’ exemplifies the philosophy of holy energy:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The beauty of ferocity transcends the prosaic mundane law of peace. ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’, declared Blake, among further ‘Proverbs of Hell’:

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Expect poison from the standing water…

When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!…

Damn braces: Bless relaxes.

Here may be seen the mind of one who had assimilated various mystical writers but above all perhaps also the antinomian tradition, for whom the spirit had superseded the law and so to the pure all things were pure. Blake set out the antinomian concept of Jesus as the supplanter of the Ten Commandments and the law. ‘Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.’

Blake’s denial of the depravity of the flesh and his celebration of ‘Energy [which] is the only life, and is from the Body’ distance him dramatically from the mainstream eighteenth-century desire to refine and discipline the body in the name of higher values (reason, politeness, progress). In endorsing physical desire and pleasure Blake may bear the most superficial resemblance to libertines for whom nothing was real but the (albeit transitory) joys of the flesh, and to utilitarians like Bentham for whom pleasure (whatever its source) was the sole criterion. Indeed, he overtly celebrated sexual fulfilment:

In a wife I would desire
What in whores is always found –
The lineaments of Gratified desire.

Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming hair,
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits of life & beauty there.

But, as is here evident, Blake’s investment in the erotic utterly transcends the libertine or hedonistic; for the artist in him it establishes
the link between sexual energy and a higher aesthetic: ‘Exuberance is Beauty.’ It is of a piece with the creative fires of life.

Blake sanctioned this erotic liberation by giving it a biblical framework. In their backyard in Lambeth, he and his wife Catherine would sit naked, in a re-creation of the paradise garden. ‘At the end of the little garden in Hercules Buildings there was a summer-house,’ recorded Blake’s London patron, Thomas Butts. Calling one day he ‘found Mr. and Mrs. Blake sitting in this summer-house, freed from “those troublesome disguises” which have prevailed since the Fall. “Come in!” cried Blake; “it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!”’ The Blakes had appropriately been reciting passages from
Paradise Lost
, and the garden represented Eden. To the pure, all was still as pure as in Eden.

Above all, Blake proclaimed the true spirituality and holiness of the flesh, as shone forth in such images as
Bright Day
, his rendering of Vitruvian man; we should compare also the image of Christ in ‘Jerusalem’:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

Resurrection for Blake was the reunification of what had been one and whole in paradise but which had become divided, polarized into flesh and spirit, male and female and numerous other dichotomies. Reunification – restoration of the original androgynous oneness of Adam in Eden – was the essential meaning of resurrection, and the earnest of it was the pulse of the spirit within. The recurrent plot of Blake’s prophetic poems, as described at the opening of
The Four Zoas
, concerns ‘a Perfect Unity… of Eden’, figured as a single Primal Man, followed by ‘His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity’. This course of events was a spiral progress from simple innocence up and back to an ‘organized innocence’.
*
Outer man should be the
expression of the inner spiritual person, that complete primal man, undivided as before the divisions of the Fall: the inner and the outer fused. ‘That the Poetic Genius is the true man,’ Blake announced, ‘and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon.’ Blake would have nothing of the mind–body or soul–body antithesis: that was false – indeed, fallen – philosophy. But he did give primacy to the internal or spiritual, as is illustrated by the moral of his poem on the little black boy, quoted in
Chapter 14
:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white.

And this was for the familiar antinomian reason: God was within: ‘All deities reside in the human breast.’

For Blake, the Hartleyan or Priestleyan notion that man consists merely of matter was as false as the belief that the mind is a passive receptacle. Personal experience confuted such claims. He himself had visions. ‘I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what Ought to be Told,’ he informed Thomas Butts: ‘that I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly.’ He believed in the prophetic power of dreams and in the holiness of the imagination (we might say ‘creativity’ or, as he called it, ‘the Human Eternal Body in Every Man’). ‘I know that This World Is a World of imagination & Vision,’ he wrote to his friend Thomas Trusler:

I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun.… Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees.

The senses were the active antennae of the soul rather than, as for Locke, pinholes through which data impacted upon a passive mind.

It was in respect of imagination that Blake took issue with his
bête noire
Sir Joshua Reynolds, representative both of the commercial artistic establishment, which Blake despised, and of conventional
humanistic views about artistic values and the artist. Reynolds upheld tradition, traditional judgements, public taste, a view of art as formal craft and recognized skill. Blake dismissed all this as mere conventionality: ‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art.’ This mattered to Blake, as he believed in the sublime mission of the arts: ‘The Arts & Sciences are the Destruction of Tyrannies or Bad Governments.… The Foundation of Empire is Art & Science. Remove them or Degrade them, & the Empire is No More. Empire follows Art & Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose.’ Reynolds, in Blake’s view, wanted to reduce art to ‘rules’. He demurred: ‘Genius begins where rules end.’ Like Burke, Reynolds mocked ‘Inspiration and Vision’.

Indeed, Blake had visions as such. ‘Thirteen years ago,’ he told the poet William Hayley, ‘I lost a brother & with his spirit I converse daily & hourly in the Spirit & See him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination. I hear his advice & even now write from his Dictate.…I am the companion of Angels.’ Perhaps he was also being literal when he wrote as follows: ‘“What”’, it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty”.’ Addressing this visionary faculty, he explained, ‘I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it.’

Blake recorded conversations with the Archangel Gabriel. He had been reading Edward Young’s
Night Thoughts
, which he had agreed to illustrate, and came across the passage in which the poet asked ‘Who can paint an angel?’ Closing the book, he spoke aloud:

  
BLAKE
: Aye! Who can paint an angel?

  
VOICE
: Michael Angelo could.

Looking round the room, he saw nothing ‘save a greater light than usual’.

  
BLAKE
: And how do
you
know?

  
VOICE
: I
know
, for I sat to him: I am the arch-angel Gabriel.

  
BLAKE
: Oho! You are, are you? I must have better assurance than that of a wandering voice; you may be an evil spirit – there are such in the land.

  
VOICE
: You shall have good assurance. Can an evil spirit do this?

Seeking the source of the voice, he became aware of a shining shape, with bright wings, radiating light:

As I looked, the shape dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe. An angel of evil could not have
done that
– it was the arch-angel Gabriel.

Such elements in Blake have, of course, been called delusional, and his putative clinical state has long attracted attention. But it is much more pertinent to treat his views as the natural outcome of certain mystical Christian responses to the empiricist Enlightenment philosophy of self.

In some ways, Blake was himself an example of enlightened individualistic anti-rationalism. Yet he tirelessly combated all such reductionist tendencies and espoused a primitive faith which gave pride of place to imagination as the emanation of the divine. He was also to the fore in those emergent aesthetic tendencies which translated what had once been primarily religious and transcendental into the artistic. He became the prototype for the wayward, wilful genius, entering into an ambiguous dance with the power or poison of the irrational.

Blake rejected the traditional self of Christian Platonic humanism, as philosophized by Cartesian dualism. Such views sanctioned alienation and oppression. But his rejection of these traditions did not follow the scientific path of the Enlightenment – quite the opposite. Blake saw Bacon, Locke and Newton as the problem not the solution: their philosophy could end up with nothing but a partial and straitjacketing model of natural man. Blake would have none of such reductionism. He longed to reunite body and soul, nature and spirit. The inner unity of man had to be recovered – through rethinking conventions, through transvaluation, through the holiness of art –
and that primarily meant through the untrammelled imagination. Whereas almost all the other thinkers discussed so far in this book expressed fears about the imagination – it would create phantoms, it would cocoon the individual from society – Blake was ardent. Imagination was ‘the Human Eternal Body in Every Man’ or ‘the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever’.

Not least, living at the dawn of the Romantic age, Blake asserted the sanctity of the individual. God was within, man was a visionary and to the pure all things were pure.

I am no Platonist.

I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves. I am not aware of any one thought or action worthy of being called good to myself or others, which is not to be attributed to the Good Goddess, Fortune!

So, we’ll go no more a roving
     So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
     And the moon be still as bright.