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Sunday, December 02, 2012
Sunday, December 02, 2012
Deism, a form of Natural Religion denying the intervention of God in the
affairs of men, pervaded the intellectual life of Blake's age. The deists were the
true spiritual descendants of Bacon, Newton, and Locke as Blake understood
them. Early in the 18th Century Voltaire, much taken with the English deists, had
spread their peculiar faith around the intellectual circles of Europe. Deism
became the fashionable faith of the upper classes in England and on the
continent as well. Many Anglican clergy of that day had strong deistical
leanings. Most historians believe that Washington and his associates were deists
as well as vestrymen, much as recent Mexican presidents have been Masons as
well as Roman Catholics.
Throughout the early and middle 18th Century deism largely belonged to the
gentility. During Blake's lifetime it filtered down to the masses. In America the
deist patricians, our forefathers, used the deist staymaker, Thomas Paine, as an
inflammatory propagandist for their cause. This identification of deists with
political reform explains the ambiguity Blake felt and expressed toward them.
He despised their Natural Religion, but admired their enlightened political views.
He counted Thomas Paine a friend and found his religion relatively
non-threatening and his political views refreshing. It was natural for him to
react defensively against the attack on Paine of Bishop Watson, whom Blake
considered a lackey of the State.
Nevertheless Blake refuted the deist doctrine. One of his earliest theological
statements was his Tractate, "There is No Natural Religion" . He dedicated the
third chapter of 'Jerusalem' to the deists, and in the prose introduction
addressed them very straightforwardly: the deist, he said, is "in the State named
Rahab".
Blake went on to make two primary charges. First, the deist "teaches that
Man is Righteous in his Vegetated Spectre: an Opinion of fatal & accursed
consequence to Man". Blake in contrast maintained that "Man is born a Spectre
or Satan, & is altogether an Evil". Blake's second charge stems from the first:
these "originally righteous" deists promote War and blame it on the spiritually
religious.
Blake deplored the hypocrisy of the philosophes, who did indeed "charge
the poor Monks & religious with being the causes of War, while you acquit and
flatter the Alexanders & Caesars, the Lewises & Fredericks, who alone are its
causes and its actors" (Portion of Jerusalem, Plate 52)
Blake himself had blamed war on the religious, not the poor monk, but the
bishop and archbishop. At a deeper level Blake knew that the man righteous in
his own eyes is the man who kills, while "the Glory of Christianity is to Conquer
by Forgiveness".
Probably the prevalent opinion of the well to do churchly of deistical
inclinations held that religion is a good thing to keep the masses content; they
supported the Church as a primary bulwark of social stability. This attitude more
than anything else motivated Blake's radical anti-churchly stance. He knew it as
a perversion of everything Jesus stood for. In the great "Wheel of Religion" poem
opening the fourth chapter of 'Jerusalem' he gave his final and considered
opinion of the deists' Natural Religion.
Blake and 'Church'
In this conlcuding section we look at Blake's relationships and at the uses he
made of the word 'church' in his poetry.
Blake's Friends
To the best of our knowledge Blake belonged to no organized church. We do
know of two groups which might generically qualify as churches, using the word
in its broadest possible sense. The first gathered around the radical publisher,
Joseph Johnson, Blake's primary employer and the friend of Mary
Wollstonecraft, Joseph Priestly, Richard Price, Thomas Paine and other radical
intellectuals. While the conventional church exists as a primary bulwark of the
status quo, Joseph Johnson's group by and large conceived of Christ as a
revolutionary. Dissenters of a variety of persuasions, they were united by their
awareness of the need for social and political change. They considered this the
primary agenda of any truly spiritual communion.
Blake was in accord with these ideas. The Johnson group nurtured him and
provided the communal support which we generally associate with church
groups. The second group gathered around Blake in his last decade. It was made
up of young artists, some of them devout. They looked to Blake for aesthetic
and spiritual guidance and provided him the communal support that lent grace
to his last years.
After Blake's Moment of Grace around 1800 he might have joined a church
if he could have found one whose primary doctrine was the forgiveness of sins.
But like Milton before him and Lincoln after him he never discovered a church
that met his qualifications.
Anyone who loves Blake and has had a happier experience of the church
could wish for him more in the way of community. Alienated from the
worshiping community by its partial theology and partial practice, he was
confined to his own visions and the nurture he could find at the outer fringes of
the church. In addition he learned from the Christian classics of the ages,
particularly the off beat ones. St. Teresa was a favorite. We know little or nothing of how the Ranter tradition came down to him.
All of these are elements of the Universal Church upon which
Blake drew and to which he belonged. Blessed with a worshiping fellowship
beyond that of his wife, his lot might have been happier and his witness plainer
to others.
Even so the church is fortunate to have his contribution. Isaiah and
Jeremiah, not to mention Jesus, also suffered alienation from their communities.
At the deepest level none of the four men rejected the church, but rather the
church rejected them. Blake was too deeply attached to the priesthood of the
believer to be able to submit to any spiritual authority politically assigned: Let
every man be "King and Priest in his own house". In the words of Foster Damon
"The Church Universal was the only church that Blake recognized. Its doctrine is
the Everlasting Gospel, its congregation the Brotherhood of Man, its symbol the
Woman in the Wilderness, its architecture Gothic (p.82)."
Posted by Larry at 3:00 AM No comments:
Labels: Church
Friday, November 30, 2012
Friday, November 30, 2012
Blake suffered intensely from the subtle forms of economic oppression and
railed against them. His anger sparked the most searching critique of the
restrictive structures of society and of the psychic attributes associated with
those structures.
Wesley lacked Blake's prophetic mind, but he had a concern for souls that led
his converts first to an elevation of character and soon to an elevation of
economic station. In the simplest natural terms Wesley's converts replaced
drinking and gambling with praying and singing hymns--and became
prosperous, just as the Quakers had done in earlier generations.
Wesley held extremely conservative political views, but unlike most Tories he
loved the poor. He devoted his life to helping them raise their circumstances, all
of course a byproduct of his concern for their souls! While Blake denounced and
railed against the social evils of the day, Wesley picked up one by one the fallen
members of the underclass and instilled in them a means of lifting themselves
up into the middle class.
He taught them for example to "gain all you can, save all you can, give all you
can". The admonition won sufficient adherents to make a tremendous
contribution to the humanitarian movement. Blake wrote about the prisons of
the mind; Wesley systematically visited real prisons his entire life and organized
helping institutions to address the needs of prisoners and to ameliorate their distress.
Wesley had a life changing message and organizational genius as well. Through
his religious message and his Methodist societies he contributed significantly to
the relief of economic distress and oppression. In contrast Blake's message was
virtually incomprehensible to the kinds of people most responsive to Wesley's.
In fact it is incomprehensible to most people today because it requires a level of consciousness impossible for the materially minded.
Wesley and Blake may have been the two greatest men produced by England in
the 18th Century. The work of Wesley and his fellow evangelists had immediate
and far reaching consequences in the life of the world. For example his
preachers exercised a great civilizing influence on the American frontier. The
Methodist Church today represents the best of the American way, theologically
and socially enlightened beyond the generality of the population.
Blake's work in contrast was far ahead of his time. It had no immediate visible
influence, yet it offers the best hope of the future for the English speaking world
to break out of the strait jacket of dead materialism. The present age needs a
spiritual revival as desperately as did Wesley's.
But the Wesleyan style of revival has less to offer the modern mind than it did
to the 18th Century underclass. The Blakean vision has a great deal to offer to
the best minds of this century, the relatively few minds capable of an individual
form of spiritual creativity. The mind of Blake offers the strongest possible
protection against the mindless conformity that threatens the human race.
Although Blake did have a copy of a Wesleyan hymnbook, we lack evidence of
direct first hand experience with a Methodist group. Most certainly he would
have found the discipline distasteful. But Methodism was one of the rare forms
of English religious life that Blake had good words for.
In the prose introduction to Chapter Three of 'Jerusalem' he defended
Methodists and Monks against what he deemed to be the hypocritical attacks
of Voltaire and the other philosophies. He named Wesley and Whitefield as the
two witnesses of Revelation 11.3 , the archetypal image of the rejected and
despised prophet of God (cf Milton 22:61; Erdman 118). He grouped Whitefield
with St. Teresa and other gentle souls "who guide the great Wine press of
Love".
(Erdman 403-4)
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Labels: Church
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Methodists
All historians agree that the most vital spiritual movement in 18th Century
England came with the Methodist Revival. John Wesley, born and nurtured
in the bosom of the Church, reacted against the peurility of the
established way. At the age of 35, after much strugglewith various forms of
religious unreality, he found a newlevel of truth; at Aldersgate "his heart was
strangely warmed".
Soon he followed his fellow Methodist, George Whitefield, to Bristol where
he began field preaching. (This happened some two decades before Blake's
birth.) For the next fifty years Wesley averaged two sermons a day and led
thousands, primarily from the underclass, into a heartfelt experience of grace.
Wesley remained until his death an Anglican priest, but after his heart warming
experience he rapidly lost standing in conventional religious circles, and one by
one the doors of England's churches closed against his enthusiasm. In response
he claimed the world as his parish and proceeded to organize his converts in
Methodist Societies. They became after his death the second largest English
denomination.
Many historians believe that the Methodist Revival prevented a social and
political revolution in England. The Methodists filled the vacuum of spiritual
authority manifested by the dead formalism of the established Church and the
lukewarmness of the ageing dissenting groups.
Blake and Wesley had a great deal in common. Each combined high intelligence
and spiritual vision with an uncompromising temperament. These qualities led
both men to a spiritual struggle continuing into middle life and reaching its
climax in what I have called a Moment of Grace.
Wesley described his as a heart warming experience. Afterward his preaching
led to a similar experience in the lives of thousands. It became in fact the
normative religious experience of the spiritually vital segment of the English
population, both in and out of the established Church. The resemblance to the
experience of George Fox is both obvious and remarkable. (The same could be
said of Paul and Augustine.)
The poem which Blake wrote in October of 1800 to his friend, Butts, certainly
describes what we may call a heartwarming experience. Always an individualist
Blake had too critical a mind to identify himself consciously with the Methodists
(who founded a new denomination),but without question his Moment of Grace
owed much to the Methodist movement.
In the most fundamental spiritual progression of their lives Wesley and Blake
were twins. Uncompromising individuals they both refused the easy spiritual
path of the majority of their fellows and struggled alone until the light came.
Each achieved a breakthrough to an outstanding level of spiritual creativity.
Quite close in background and basic values, the two men were miles apart in
the style of their response. Both of Wesley's grandfathers had been
non-Conforming ministers. His father had returned to the established Church
and served the Anglican parish of Epworth; John helped him with it for several
years. Wesley knew the Church as an insider; he believed in the established
procedures, and remained a part of them. But with his heart warming
experience he won the freedom to break the rules when the Spirit so directed.
Two instances deserve special attention:
First, his irregular preaching was in defiance of the Church's rules; like Luther
he 'could do no other'. Second, when the American Revolution caused a
shortage of Anglican priests in America, Wesley decided that he, as a presbyter,
had authority to ordain ministers for his American societies. This more than
anything else led to the creation of the Methodist Church.
In spite of these infractions Wesley believed in and belonged to the Anglican
Church. He had made free with some of its rules, but he was rigid about the
rules which he imposed upon his converts. And right there of course he and
Blake parted company. Blake just didn't believe in rules; he thought they all
came from the devil. He admired Wesley's spirit and held his rules in contempt.
Blake and Wesley each had an an acute social conscience; they were both
friends of the common man, but in different ways. Wesley wanted to improve
men's lot using religious means. Blake felt that men were victimized by tyranny,
and he wanted it stopped. Neither of them shared the conventional genteel
attitude that the lower classes, ordained by God to their station, should be
encouraged to remain docile and expect their reward in the hereafter. They
believed rather that men have the freedom to rise to whatever level their gifts
and character may allow.
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Labels: Church
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Blake and Quakers
Blake undoubtedly knew something of the power embodied in the Quaker movement. After
The Moment of Grace the Quaker term 'self-annihilation' became a key construct of his
theology. We could relate other Blakean expressions to the Quaker language.
Although Blake preferred to engrave his human forms nude, when he did represent man
clothed, the traditional Quaker garb appeared as a symbol of the good and faithful man.
Study of Blake's works and his biographers has revealed no formal connection with the
Quaker community. Nevertheless many of Blake's values clearly resemble those of the
Friends:
**************************************
The proliferation of radical believers brought forth by the Puritan Revolution included a
group called Ranters, who had descended from the the 16th Century Familists of Holland.
The direct guidance of the Holy Spirit freed the Ranters from most or all legal restraints,
and they were given to extreme statements (and demonstrations!) of their freedom. The
Society of Friends grew out of this fertile soil.
In the 17th Century George Fox, an idealistic young man, explored the wide variety of
religious options present in the Commonwealth. From a strictly scriptural view point he
found something lacking in each of them. For example Jesus had insisted that there should
be no preeminence among the faithful ("Call no man father"). Fox found an unchristian
preeminence in every religious group which he observed.
After several years of spiritual travail Fox came into an experience of grace. Thereafter he
enjoyed the direct and continuous presence of the Holy Spirit guiding his words and actions;
he recognized no other control. The ultimate anti- authoritarian, Fox began going to what he
called the steeple houses, where he proceeded to denounce the preeminent in each of
them. Naturally he won a lot of trouble for his pains. He saw the inside of many jails (like
Paul had done), but he started something that's still going on. Modern Quakers still try to be
the church together without preeminence. Fox and his friends refused to doff their hats and
discarded all titles of honor in favor of the familiar 'thee'. Both of these postures were
solid blows aimed at the demise of hierarchical society in favor of the brotherhood of man.
Through the centuries the idea of the inner light in a man's heart has caused various
excesses, but Fox's heart was good and the Holy Spirit led him to gather numbers of people
around the most admirable moral and social values. The strong anti-authoritarianism of the
Friends incurred wrath and persecution from many directions; still they multiplied,
witnessing to their spiritual power. By the late 18th Century they had become numerous,
prosperous and respectable, and no doubt more conformed to the world than Fox's
generation had been.
The Friends were anti-sacramentarian; they did not practice Baptism or Holy Communion,
the two Protestant sacraments. In 'A Vision of the Last Judgment' Blake put an apostle on
each side of Jesus representing respectively Baptism and the Lord's Supper, but he
proceeded to define them as follows: "All Life consists of these Two, Throwing off Error and
Knaves from our company continually, & Receivng Truth or Wise men into our company
continually."
He also said "The outward Ceremony is Antichrist." And in the famous lines of "My Spectre"
he identified the bread and wine with forgiving and being forgiven, without which we can
only commune unworthily.
As already noted Fox and his disciples had no use for priests. Blake used priests
repeatedly as objects of derision. In his "French Revolution" for example the archbishop
attempts to speak but finds that he can only hiss. In 'America' Blake has the "Priests in
rustling scales Rush into reptile coverts". Other examples could be given to show that Blake
generally thought of priests as serpents though he did not apply this evaluation to the poor
and powerless priests of the people.
The Quakers have always been noted for their refusal to participate in war. Blake's similar
perspective on war is treated elsewhere. Throughout the 18th Century the Quakers
vigorously opposed the slave trade, which had become a profitable element of England's
commercial life. Unlike much of the establishment they had enough integrity to see clearly
the spiritual implications of human bondage. They formed the first abolitionist society in
England and disowned any Friend involved in the slave trade. John Woolman, perhaps the
outstanding Quaker of the century, devoted his life to achieving the abolition of slavery.
Blake was no Woolman, but one of his earliest prophetic works, 'Visions of the Daughters of
Albion', is among other things a spirited outcry against slavery.
The Quaker oriented reader who becomes familiar with Blake will find other significant
correspondences. (Look at the Pendle Hill document Woolman and Blake.) Of all the
religious groups in existence today the Quakers in their theology most nearly approximate
the thought forms and theology of William Blake. Borrowing a phrase from Northrup Frye
the Quakers and Blake both understood "the central form of Christianity as a vision rather
than as a doctrine or ritual".
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Labels: Church
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Thursday, November 22, 2012
The Contemporary Scene
Shortly after the publication of Paine's Age of Reason with its deist
critique of the Bible, a certain Bishop Watson replied with an
"An Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters addressed to Thomas
Paine". George III commented that he wasn't aware the Bible needed
an apology. Blake noted in his Annotations to Watson's Apology "that
Paine has not attacked Christianity; Watson has defended Antichrist".
On the back of the title page Blake wrote: "To defend the Bible in this
year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule
without control".
The Beast and the Whore, two of the more flamboyant images of
Revelation, in Blake's vernacular symbolized respectively the State
and the Church.
A State Church
England has always had a State Church. Although many fat books
have been written about it, the English Reformation primarily
signified Henry VIII's declaration of independence from the papacy.
Through the Middle Ages religious and temporal authority had
existed side by side in continuous alliance and usually with a
minimum of tension. At the high point of papal authority in 1077 a
Holy Roman Emperor waited for three days in the snow outside the
door until Pope Gregory VII saw fit to receive him. The Pope
considered the kings and princes of Europe his spiritual children.
Henry VIII was a child who grew up. When the Pope denied him
permission to put away his wife in favor of a later romantic interest,
Henry declared himself in effect the pope of the English Church and
gave himself the necessary dispensation. That was the major event
of the English Reformation; thereafter the ultimate authority of the
Church of England resided with the Crown.
By Blake's standards a State Church is the ultimate abomination.
He was aware that in the second century at least one Emperor had
attempted to enforce the worship of his person as God throughout
the Roman Empire, resulting in considerable persecution of those
Jews and Christians who refused. Much of the New Testament
addressed the problem. In 312 A.D. Constantine took over the
Church and made it an arm of the State. That's the way Blake saw it
in the 18th Century.
In America we take for granted the separation of Church and State
as a constitutional principle. This limits the sort of power that
corrupted Henry VIII. In England many people feel comfortable with
a State Church, but traditions of freedom have limited its power. A
large proportion of the population exist in religious groups outside of
the State Church, and probably an even larger proportion have no
significant religious attachment.
Even in Blake's day the tradition of dissent was an accepted part of
the established order. True, the State Church operated Oxford and
Cambridge for its own purposes, primarily preparing clergymen. But
dissenting academies had arisen to provide a form of education in
many ways superior to that of the established universities,
especially in the new areas of science and industry. Dissenters
largely carried out the Industrial Revolution.
The 17th Century had witnessed an explosion of dissent in which
the head of State and Church had lost his own head. But the
Restoration in 1660 reinstated the former arrangements. The
Commonwealth struggle had led to a general disgust with religious
controversy. Enthusiasm came to be despised and feared by clergy
and laity alike. Conventional 18th Century religion had little to do
with the feelings. It was rather an intellectual and political matter.
One of Blake's four zoas, Urizen aptly portrays the God of the
majority of Anglicans during Blake's age. The State Church existed
as a facade or symbol of order and authority, but with limited power,
temporal or spiritual.
The State Church, like the Jewish Sanhedrin, represented a
minority of the people, the conservative establishment types, the
squirearchy, the people who for centuries had controlled society.
Frequently the landowner's younger son became the priest, though
his character may have been dissolute. Politics dictated clerical
appointments. Pluralism was common, the same man being
appointed to a number of church positions. He would hire a curate
to look after each parish's affairs, often at a tenth of the income
which the parish provided him.
The bishops served primarily as political officials; they spent most of
their time in London sitting in the House of Lords, where they
generally provided a faithful voting block for the Crown. Tithes were
the law of the land and enforced much as the income tax is today,
much of the proceeds going to the clergy. It was a convenient
arrangement, but it could not last; there was too much dissent, too
much growth, too much creativity. Change was overtaking all
England's institutions, and the Church was no exception. The
religious changes had been quietly gathering force for centuries.
Side by side with Henry VIII's Reformation had existed a grass
roots movement which we may call the Radical Reformation. It was
made up of less worldly types than Henry, people who took their
religion more seriously. One such group departed England in 1619
aboard the Mayflower. Their descendants became the Established
Church in New England and spun off dissents from their dissent,
like that of Roger Williams.
William Penn brought shiploads of other irregulars to found a new
colony. The Pilgrims, the Baptists, the Quakers of necessity learned
to coexist--with one another, with other Eurpoean religious groups,
and with the Cavaliers of Virginia, who were solidly Anglican. All
cooperated in throwing off the yoke of the mother country. In this
melting pot religious groups learned to compete in an ecclesiastical
form of free enterprise. It represented quite an improvement over
the religious wars that had decimated Europe in previous centuries.
The same fluid climate existed in the mother country. Every group
that immigrated contained members who remained behind and
found a place in English society. The State Church, with its large
and unwieldy ecclesiastical bureaucracy, existed alongside an
infrastructure of non-Conformist groups. What these groups lacked
in political clout they made up for in creativity, character, industry,
and commercial acumen. Each group has a fascinating story. In the
next post we look at two of them which had a specific relationship to
the mind of William Blake.
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Labels: Church
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Links to Online Blake
Links to Online Blake
The links provide the best Blake online:
1. The Primer is Larry Clayton's online book with a comprehensive description of Blake's work especially emphasizing his spiritual dimension.
4. The Blake Archive allows you to read the text and view the pictures of all of his illuminated works.
5. Concordance to Complete Works
6. Erdman: The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake Our page numbers are referenced to this volume.
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