Subjective History in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
In 1790, the year William Blake wrote and published The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the world was changing rapidly. The Enlightenment, as Kant put it, had at least allegedly “liberated man from his self-imposed immaturity,” the French and American Revolutions had just upended the power structures of monarchy and empire in two of the world’s most powerful nations, and the twin forces of capitalism and industrialization had already begun their inexorable accumulation. Like so many visionaries in the past, such as the Hebrew prophets during the Babylonian Captivity and John of Patmos in the waning years of Rome, Blake was well aware that he was living in a time of extraordinary change. And like the biblical prophets, he saw the historical forces at work in his time as more than what they “were” in the literal sense, but instead as earthly manifestations of cosmic forces that reach beyond the particularities of time and space. According to Mircea Eliade, “The memory of the collectivity is ahistorical” (Eliade, 44)—that is, as events recede into the past, people as a collective tend to only remember them insofar as they conform to certain shared mythic archetypes that exist outside history. Prophets, then, are those rare individuals who can see ahistorically, not just in recollection of the past, but in perception of the present and anticipation of the future.
And, like the biblical prophets, Blake saw himself as a prophet as well. Although he does not fit neatly into any category, Blake is known primarily as a poet, which is the closest the modern age has to a category that suits him. Shorn of religious associations, the prophet and the poet are identical insofar as they are both in the business of seeing the universal in the particular—it would almost seem that poetry and prophesy are just two different ages’ words for essentially the same craft. Blake, however, saw himself specifically as a prophet, and subtitled a number of his works “A Prophecy.” What differentiated Blake from his contemporaries, making him not just a poet but a prophet as well, was that, blessed as he was with the gift of poetic perception, he was not content simply looking at things. While his contemporaries and successors gazed in awe at daffodils and Grecian urns, Blake was more interested in understanding the nature of this perception itself. The reason was that he felt that other people, with the right sort of guidance, could learn to see like this as well. In fact, he saw the fact that most people cannot see like that as unjust and wrong, and his life’s work was “to correct other men's visions, not into Blake's own, but into forms that emphasized the autonomy of each human imagination” (Bloom, 70).
That “autonomy of each human imagination” is at the heart of what Blake sought to teach. He “totally rejected the scientific paradigm which situates the phenomenal world in space and time” (Raine, 48), instead positing that all that is real comes from the mind, and not the other way around. This amounts to a philosophical paradigm shift of almost inconceivable proportions. Blake was like Copernicus in reverse: just as Copernicus re-imagined the universe so that humanity was no longer at its center, Blake re-imagined the universe so that the individual was at its center. For a person subscribing to the empirical, scientific paradigm, the perceived world is autonomous, and the individual orients himself within it with his senses. According to Blake’s paradigm, though, the individual actually creates the world by perceiving it. The empirical paradigm’s fundamental criteria are the dimensions of space and time, but for Blake even time and space are created by individual consciousness. “Life,” then, “is 'eternal'[,] not through temporal duration but because being itself is not in time and space” (Raine, 49). Blake’s “ahistorical” consciousness, to use Eliade’s term, was a result of this eternality.
Ahistorical consciousness not withstanding, though, Blake was still through and through a man of his time. He was born in 1757, in the age of budding individualism. All across the Western world and in all areas of life people were realizing that they had the power to actively change the world and affect the course of history instead of just passively accepting what was given to them. It was, as we say, the Age of Revolution, and its ultimate ideal was freedom. Blake’s paradigm of individual autonomy was arguably the most revolutionary shift of the age—while other people realized that the individual could change the world, Blake said that the individual creates the world, that there is no world apart from the individual. Morton describes Blake as “a great revolutionary poet interpreting a revolutionary age” (Morton, 10), but without Blake’s paradigm shift the phrase “revolutionary poet” would be an oxymoron. Poets see things in ways that other people cannot, but as long as we subscribe to the epistemology of empiricism, seeing is passive and cannot “do” anything. But with Blake’s epistemology, perception is a creative act. Therefore, the “revolutionary poet” and his “revolutionary age” are inseparable. The political revolutionary fights for his freedom in the halls of government and on the battlefield; the revolutionary poet realizes that he is already free.
In this paper I will examine The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the work with which “[t]he study of Blake’s thought begins…It is in The Marriage…that we [first] find a fully developed presentation of Blake’s ethic of liberation” (Paley, 8). The notoriously unclassifiable The Marriage is, for lack of a better phrase, a self-help book, a book intended to transform the reader into a “revolutionary poet”—that is, an individual who understands that he creates the world by perceiving it. Because it is an explanation of the world such that individual consciousness is the creator of the world and the agent of history, the theory laid out in The Marriage functions simultaneously as psychology, theology and philosophy of history. In this paper I will explore The Marriage as a philosophy of history. I will begin by summarizing The Marriage and explaining Blake’s theory of “Contraries,” and then use it to analyze the three historical developments of Blake’s time that I mentioned at the beginning: the Enlightenment, capitalism, and the American and French Revolutions. In this way, I will show how, to Blake, these were not three distinct events but rather three manifestations of the same process: a conflict between those who are “revolutionary poets” and those who aren’t.
One piece of historical background I must touch upon to give The Marriage adequate context is Swedish visionary writer Emanuel Swedenborg, who was a major influence upon Blake early on in his life. For most of his life Swedenborg was a mining engineer and a natural philosopher of a decidedly Enlightenment vein. He wrote a series of books attempting to reconcile flesh and spirit in a manner consistent with the Newtonian materialist ethos of his time. Around the age of fifty, though, he began experiencing mystical visions of Heaven and Hell, and spent the rest of his life recording his visions and spiritual insights in books. Central to the philosophy he developed was the “’science of correspondences’, according to which everything outward and visible has an inward and spiritual cause, and for every perceived thing or event there is a spiritual counterpart." (Ferber, 90) Blake was initially taken with Swedenborg, but soon became disenchanted. The Marriage is presented largely as a parody and critique of Swedenborg’s writings, and Blake’s specific objections to them offer good insight into his own radical theology.
The “Heaven” and “Hell” of the title are two modes of perception. Heaven does not realize that it creates the world, believing that it only passively receives images of whatever is “out there.” Hell understands that perception is creation, and delights in the freedom that comes with that realization. Heaven and Hell are the only two modes of perception—there is no totalizing “third” mode that subsumes both. So an individual may only see through one at a time, although they are both always present within him. The phrase “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” means that Heaven and Hell are paradoxically both separate and not separate, both different and the same. To use a term later canonized by Hegel, a philosopher Blake clearly anticipated, Heaven and Hell are related dialectically—they are both inseparable and irreconcilable. Although neither perspective is “complete,” Hell is closer because it contains knowledge of both itself and Heaven. It can look through the lens of Heaven while still remaining aware of who it is, whereas to Heaven, Hell seems distorted and evil. To put it in plain terms, a person who knows that his perception creates the world can use that creative perception to imagine what it would be like to be a person who believes that the world created him. To a person who believes the world created him, the belief that one’s perception creates the world is practically the definition of insanity. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to Heaven and Hell as “angelic perception” and “infernal perception” for the rest of this paper.
Formally, The Marriage has little precedent. It is a seemingly haphazard collection of free-verse, visionary accounts, proverbs, and philosophical polemic, some simply stated and some quite cryptic, all seamlessly interspersed with illustrations. Because has no familiar form, it also offers the reader no implicit instructions on how to approach it. “The experience of reading The Marriage,” writes Michael Ferber in The Poetry of William Blake, is “one of great variety and unpredictability, as if it is essential to our education as a poet-prophet that we be ready to learn from anything and everything that comes along” (Ferber, 89-90). Ferber’s reading suggests that Blake, anticipating modernism a century early, was using unfamiliar form to force the reader to actively create the meaning of the text through interpretation rather than passively receive self-evident meaning. Even in its form, The Marriage already offers us a hint as to the nature of infernal perception—it is similar to hermeneutical reading of a text, insofar as hermeneutical reading involves actively working to uncover the meaning of a text rather than passively receiving it.
The Marriage makes itself known with the following statement: “As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives…Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb” (plate 3). The number thirty-three here has three distinct meanings. Thirty-three years before The Marriage was 1757, which was when Swedenborg had said the Last Judgment, or at least some “spiritual re-assessment or shake-up” (Gaunt, 40) had taken place. Second, “the Eternal Hell reviv[ing]” refers to Christ, who was crucified and resurrected at the age of thirty-three, with Swedenborg announcing the resurrection. By identifying Christ with “the Eternal Hell” Blake means to say that Christ was an embodiment of Hell, a prophet blessed with infernal perception. But the third level of meaning is the key—as it so happened, 1757 was also the year of Blake’s birth, and like the risen Christ he was thirty-three when he wrote The Marriage. So “Swedenborg is thus only an usher of the kingdom, a John the Baptist for—Blake himself!” (Ferber, 95). So with one sentence Blake has aligned Christ with Hell and identified himself with Christ. And since he is the narrator of The Marriage, Blake has established an important fact: the book will be told from the perspective of Hell. It will be the writings of a person with infernal perception on what the world looks like from his point of view.
The infernal Blake then goes on to explain the Contraries, the theoretical heart of The Marriage. As I have mentioned before, Heaven and Hell are both modes of perception, but Blake does not describe them here as such, but instead describes them in more abstract terms, identifying them with traditional religious ideas of Good and Evil, respectively: “Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.” Although Heaven and Hell are primarily modes of perception, then, they are also more than that: if, as The Marriage asserts, the world is created by perception, Heaven and Hell, by virtue of being two modes of perception, are also two whole worlds. Reason and Energy may not be Heaven and Hell as such, but they emerge from Heaven and Hell as their respective guiding principles. It is also important to note that Blake begins this section by saying that “Without Contraries is no progression,” and that Contraries are “necessary to Human existence.” What he is saying, then, is that progression is necessary to human existence, and the contraries facilitate that progression.
The rest of the book is a series of examples of infernal perceptions, in the form of philosophical polemics, accounts of visions, and a series of “Proverbs of Hell.” The Proverbs, all one- or two-line sayings reminiscent in form (if not in content) of their Biblical counterparts. Taken together, they give an overall impression of Hell, and of what it feels like to be in Hell, to look with infernal perception, and they show us how infernal perception, though it has a simple premise, gives rise to a complex multitude of sometimes surprising permutations.
The Marriage can be seen as Blake’s critique of the intellectual climate of his time. One might assume that Blake would approve wholeheartedly of the Enlightenment’s enterprise of making “[t]hought…civilized and free,” and its “refusal to accept blindly the dictates of more credulous times” (Gaunt, 36). And indeed, The Marriage has much in common with the ethos of the Enlightenment, especially its skeptical attitude toward the received doctrines of organized religion. The problem, though, lies in the Enlightenment’s fetishizing of Reason as the ultimate determinant of truth, which means that the Enlightenment is still seeing the world with angelic perception. Nowhere is that more evident than in the Enlightenment’s ethos of empiricism that emerged in England a generation or two before Blake and surely still echoed throughout the island even if its heyday had passed. Empiricism, defined as the reification of the given, is more or less synonymous with angelic perception. European Rationalism, defined as the reification of reason, fares no better.
The Marriage contains several passages that could apply directly to the problematic aspects of Enlightenment thought. For the likes of Locke and his empiricist milieu, Blake offered this zinger of a proverb: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” The implication, of course, is that the fool thinks he and the wise man are seeing the same tree. Another proverb might seem to agree with the Enlightenment, but in reality only does superficially: “Where man is not, nature is barren.” A particularly obtuse reader might read this as a call to dominate nature, might interpret “barren” as “disordered,” and that it was the duty of man to tame the wilds of nature and turn the chaos into order. What Blake means, though, is that man is the creative principle of the world, and that nature only exists insofar as it is perceived by man. Later, in one of his philosophical polemics, he writes explicitly that “I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.” The real brilliance of this critique of the Enlightenment is how it nullifies the central philosophical debate of the era, the debate between empiricism and rationalism, by subsuming both into one and the same delusion. In other words, he accomplished with a few pithy phrases and some watercolors what it took Kant thousands of turgid pages to laboriously demonstrate.
So this is Blake’s explanation for how the Enlightenment is manifestation of the conflict between Heaven and Hell—it isn’t. The conflict between empiricism and rationalism is not a conflict at all. And, more importantly, neither is the conflict between the Enlightenment as a whole and the old order it was supposedly overturning. Blake identifies them all with Heaven—ultimately, they are all the same. The Enlightenment was “an age of completeness” (Gaunt, 11), and therein lay the problem—all these systems were orderly and internally consistent. In that respect the Christian era and the Enlightenment were identical. Blake had the same objection to Swedenborg: His belief in “’spiritual equilibrium’ between good and evil” (Erdman, 178) amounts, in keeping with his roots in science, to a complete, ordered whole, which contains no dynamic element. For him, good and evil were “correspondents,” meaning they “subsume one another; they become…a unity of mutual absorption” (Bloom, 73)—in other words, as evil is nothing more than the negation of good, they cancel each other out. Blake’s Contraries, as we have seen, are irreconcilable yet inseparable, a dialectic. And every real conflict is a manifestation of the conflict between them—all others, like empiricism vs. rationalism and so on, are illusions. Incidentally, the idea of a philosophical system based around a dialectic is still to this day inconceivable to most Anglo-American analytic philosophers.
Another development of Blake’s time that The Marriage spoke to was the emergence of capitalism and industry. Going hand in hand with the critique of the Enlightenment, The Marriage has a few lines critiquing the whole enterprise of quantification, upon which capitalism rests. “The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure” speaks to the illusory nature of the quantification of time and the falsity of the capitalist credo “time is money.” A more revealing proverb is “Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.” In other words, numerical measurements are necessary when resources are scarce. And that is precisely the way in which capitalism betrays itself to be a product of Heaven: it is only through angelic perception that there is such a thing as scarcity; Hell, being infinite, has no need for any systems of measurement. And scarcity, as all economists know, is the driving force of a capitalist economy.
Not only is capitalism clearly a product of Heaven, but it is also a sort of grotesque mirror image of Hell, substituting for creativity productivity. A few of the proverbs of Hell seem like they could almost be referring to some aspect of capitalism. For instance, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and “The cistern contains: the fountain overflows” both have to do with excess, which could be interpreted as “profit.” Capitalism is pursuit of profit, which is excess—it means that you accumulated in excess of what you invested. And a capitalist will have money flowing in like a fountain. But the second proverb lets us know that we’re thinking about it wrong. Profit is an accumulation, not an overflowing. A fountain does not accumulate—indeed, it always has the same amount of water, only that water is constantly overflowing. A third proverb lets us know perfectly well that we are not talking about capitalism: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” Capitalism is the process of constant accumulation—there can never be enough.
So capitalism, we see now, is indeed a twisted reflection of the infernal perception. For the man of Hell, or Devil, the purpose of existing is to delight in the act of creation. Creation arises spontaneously from Energy. The point is not the object created, which has no existence outside the perception of the creator, but the process of creation itself. Creation is infinitely overflowing like the fountain in the proverb. Capitalism, however, entails not creation but production. Production is what creation looks like with angelic perception. Those who produce do so out of external compulsion, the point of production is not the process but the product, and product is judged not on quality but on quantity. So, we see, Blake also anticipated Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism in just a few lines. Moreover, he did it affirmatively—Marx spent his life writing about what was wrong with capitalism. Blake, instead of explicitly negating capitalism, implicitly negated it by explicitly affirming what, in Marx’s terms, we could call praxis—the unity of theory and practice in the subjective realm that allows a classless society to emerge. Capitalism is like the Enlightenment because it is a system that appears as though it were bringing power and agency to the individual, when in reality it is yet another version of whatever it was that came before.
I did not mention too much about industry because, being a tool of capitalism, it is subsumed into capitalism for our purposes. There is one extremely poignant proverb, though, that I think could be read as a critique specifically of industry, and specifically the standardization of commodities that was just beginning to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century: “To create a little flower is the labour of ages.” This beautiful proverb expresses the impotence of industry—no factory can make a flower; a flower, just like the self-aware consciousness of infernal perception, can only develop organically.
The final historical development I will analyze are the American and French Revolutions. The American Revolution was an especially important influence upon Blake because it happened during his formative years. It was especially significant because “the issue was not one of land or money but whether a group of men and women should be free” (Gaunt, 72). Back in England, and especially among Blake’s milieu in London, the war was unpopular, and people were largely sympathetic to the American cause. The American Revolution, unlike the previous two examples, shows every evidence of being genuinely a conflict between Heaven and Hell—a nation fighting for the privilege of embodying the transcendent subject of its own moment. There are no specific references in the text to the American Revolution, but the whole text is suffused with the idea of revolution in general, from the self-determining nature of infernal perception right down to the very reversal of traditional conceptions of “Heaven” and “Hell” that the work as a whole implies.
Blake, though, ever his usual unpredictable self, foresaw the problems of this fledgling form of government, democracy. He expressed his concern with one more Hell-like proverb right at the end of the book: “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.” In other words, it is oppressive that both groups of people should be subject to the same laws. The meaning of this statement is ambiguous: it seems unlike him to be so concerned with laws and oppression, both of which have their source in angelic vision. Perhaps it is merely saying this: Heaven and Hell cannot coexist in peace, and to try to make them is oppression.
So, was Blake a prophet? It’s difficult to think of the word “prophet” in secular terms—a prophet, we tend to think, is a person who receives messages from God. But, I think Blake, a modern prophet, could help us. A prophet, then, is someone for whom the true reality is not what he receives from the outside world, but what he brings to the outside world. A prophet is someone for whom perception—indeed, being itself—is an active, creative process. At the beginning of this paper I said that a prophet was someone who could see the present in terms of mythic archetypes, but that explains very little. I would say instead that a prophet is a person who understands how meaning, even though it is created by subjective reality, is nonetheless truer that whatever happens to be “out there.” A prophet is someone who understands that to interpret the world is to change it.
If that is how we define “prophet,” then secular prophecy has blossomed in the modern age. We could say continental philosophy became prophecy when Karl Marx wrote his famous one line that changed everything: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” This latter day Proverb of Hell really reveals itself as a call to prophecy, though, when we realize that interpretation and change are one and the same. Philosophy is passive; prophecy is active. The philosopher looks at the given world and tries to understand it with his reason; the prophet looks at the perfect world in his imagination, then looks at the given world and says “What can I do to help make this world look more like the one in my head?” Another aspect of prophecy that some more obtuse people think of as important is that prophets are people who can predict the future. As we’ve seen, though, that’s true as well—in one 27 page book we can see the roots of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Freud, and countless others. And he wasn’t even a philosopher—he was a poet.
Having defined “prophet” in secular terms, if we go back and look at the Biblical prophets in those terms, we see the same type of person, if you just say substitute “God” for “transcendent subject” or whatever rationalized term you want to use to talk about infernal perception. Isaiah, in one of Blake’s imaginary conversations, said that he didn’t actually “see” god; rather, his “senses discover'd the infinite in every thing “ I suppose, then, that that’s what a prophet is—someone who sees things in ways that most people don’t, and wants other people to see that way too.
WORKS CITED
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