Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Is Wright’s Work Secular?

Jason Whittaker writes of Richard Wright’s Turner Prize winning work, that it “brings with it none of the overt Christian morality attached to Blake’s subject; rather, formal motifs repeat and circulate, creating a vision of the secular sublime”.  However, Wright’s work has been likened to that of Blake, whose work is often steeped in religious reference, so could his work be considered truly secular?

There are difficulties in establishing the meaning of “secular” especially in terms of visual image, and there are monumental challenges around identifying “the sublime” – a notion that has been a preoccupation of many nineteenth century philosophers. As Carroll writes in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, “The sublime has had almost as many interpretations as it has appearances in philosophical literature” and argues that the concept of the sublime is resistant to a singular definition.  Perhaps the absence of religion makes the notion of sublime more problematic? For many, “sublime” has other worldly, pseudo-religious connotations.  Ultimately, despite Whittaker’s claim that Wright has created a vision, there may be other, more relevant artists, who could have been better regarded for creations of sublime secularity.

The Oxford Dictionary describes secular simply as “not connected with religious or spiritual matters”.  But describing something by what it is not can be problematic. An attempt to identify a visual representation of an absence of something is challenging, but an attempt to find its epitome or a sublime, awe-inspiring representation of a missing notion is near impossible.  The dictionary also says that “secular” is contrasted with “sacred” – again this is only a contrast, and is defining only as a negative.  Secularity is not unlike peacefulness – a state which is simply defined as being the absence of violence – what peace looks like has been reduced to signifiers (doves, candles and rainbows).  Secularity doesn’t appear to even have universally recognised symbols –everything that is without overt religious connotation could be judged as being secular.

Secular is also derivative of saeculum in Christian Latin meaning ‘the world” – as opposed to the Church.  If secular is taken as the absence of religion, it is hard to argue that a European artist influenced by Blake, living in a Scottish pseudo-Christian environment, could produce something truly secular in spirit. Wright’s work does not only echo Blake’s, but the pure gold shimmer and scale the piece put me in mind of great Islamic works of the art of the ornament found in mosques and even Catholic churches.

According to some philosophers (notably Nietzsche), other measures of secularity include worldliness, classical tragedy and meaninglessness. The worldliness of this piece is undeniable, not perhaps in its form, but in what happens to it afterwards – it is painted over. Art critic Charlotte Higgins writes, “Wright’s point is that all art is mortal” and quotes Wright as saying, “the fragility of the experience is the hinge for me.”  And although the content may lack a narrative of tragedy and may even be considered overtly biased towards the Apollonian aesthetic of beauty, there is tragedy is in its ultimate destruction – and therefore presents us with a Dionysian balance. In an interview after wining the Turner Prize Wright says, “I like the idea of there being nothing left when I am gone”.

Wright himself has not offered any deep meaning to the marks he makes – but could they be read as meaningless?  It would be strong to insist that Wright’s work is nihilistic – unless the artist stated so himself.  It might be dangerous to simply take Wright’s work as being secular ornament, when the associations with religious and cultural tradition remain strong, in particular the careful attention to pattern in Wright’s work, which echoes an Islamic trend. It is near impossible to read ornament and pattern as neutral – references to the multitude of traditions of pattern – both religious and secular –found in ‘The Grammar of the Ornament’ can be found in Wright’s work.

In a world acknowledged by a number of philosophers as being fraught with nihilism, we are forced to return to the option of filling this void with art and music, as Young indicates “[Art] enables us to enjoy a religious sentiment without the need to subscribe to any conceptual content”, providing a “catacomb where religious habit of mind can continue to exist”. Here perhaps lies the strongest argument for Richard Wright’s work being viewed a vision of secular sublime.

Many visual and non-visual creations by a wealth of artists across the ages are able to respond to the charge of being secular, but as a portrait artist I could not but wonder whether such a vision would contain some representation of the human being, or face.  The human form could be said to be a poignant illustration of the “artistic taming of the horrible” a human portrait may have evoked a true, worldly vision. When promoting earth, individuality and the absence of reason and morale, how can any vision of secular sublime fail to contain a human?

I have recently visited Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac at Musée Rodin and also seen Gustav Klimt’s Three Ages of Woman which was inspired by a Rodin piece – Gates of Hell.  Two works of art containing the human, that could equally be explored as secular visions. Although Rodin may have tried to capture Balzac’s genius in this monument to him, is it a stretch to suggest it held qualities of the secular sublime?  Is the artists religious stance relevant? As a sculpture of a human it is of this world, (although the plinth may betray this) and perhaps speaks of the tragedy in genius – although it does not horrify or compel.  It is perhaps, knowing Rodin’s love of classics that permits him access to this discourse – although also a lover of reason (The Thinker) Rodin was far from nihilistic. There is some argument that science and reason, over religion could be taken as secular.

Klimt’s paintings and drawings were packed full of eroticism, humour and dominant female figures.  Drawing inspiration from Greek classics, Klimt was said to employ a sublime sensitivity and a “decadent aesthetism”.  At the time of his painting he was breaking all religious taboos and his portrayal of the mortal human was both tragic and beautiful.  His work is both compelling and horrifying.

Although my conclusions may feel as ambiguous as the many attempts to define the secular (and the sublime), on balance the assessment is that yes, Wright’s work at least references such a vision.  It has a worldliness to it and a tragedy in it’s unmaking – one could even suggest that it was the painting over of the work, its destruction, which ultimately defined it as sublime.  However, as Wright is able to tell us what his art is about – I conclude that it is far from nihilistic.  I have juxtaposed Wright’s work with that of Rodin and Klimt, which may be unfair and even irrelevant, but demonstrates that Wright’s work may not be the best example of the secular sublime. However Wright’s work and Whittaker’s views certainly offer a useful starting point that allows us to ask – what does a vision of the secular sublime look like?

Tags: art, religion, Turner prize
Posted in Arts and Culture |

James Rovira – Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety

Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety. James Rovira. Continuum, 2010. pp. 184 + ix. £60. ISBN: 978-1-4411-3559-9.

As James Rovira explains in the introduction to his book, despite the widespread dissemination of Søren Kierkegaard’s concepts in the early twentieth century, full-scale applications of those concepts to Blake remain relatively rare. What is surprising about this is that Kierkegaard was an important link between Harold Bloom’s and Northrop Frye’s theories of influence and their work on Blake, yet aside from a small number of essays the only book-length study of Blake and Kierkegaard is Lorraine Clark’s Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic, published in 1991. Rovira suggests that widespread disillusionment with the religious contexts within which Kierkegaard worked is one reason why this philosopher, whose ideas are so fruitful to a study of Blake, has been widely overlooked; in any case, the various transformations that have taken place in discourses around religion in the public sphere in the intervening two decades since the appearance of Clark’s book mean that a re-evaluation of the relation between Blake and Kierkegaard is a timely one. Rovira may be seen to complement Clark in some ways, dealing as he does with texts prior to 1800 rather than after that date, and he concentrates less on the process of dialectic rather than the reasons why, in both Blake and Kierkegaard, acts of creation may generate a sense of anxiety within the self that is not adequately explained by current post-structuralist and deconstructionist theories.

This said, Rovira is somewhat more extensive than Clark in his treatment of both Blake and Kierkegaard. The opening chapter is generally excellent in providing information about the historical contexts in which both figures worked – my one proviso being that sometimes Rovira’s more emphatic statements about similarities between Denmark in the 1830s and 40s and Britain under a constitutional monarchy in the 1760s appear occasionally to make claims that, to me, would apply to many countries in western Europe and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Part of my response, however, is due also to the fact that my own knowledge of Denmark at the time is poor and so, while attempts to provide a link between Blake and Kierkegaard in terms of the socio-political environments within which they both worked reads to me as occasional special pleading, I did enjoy and appreciate greatly Rovira’s treatment of Kierkegaard’s background. This provides some extremely useful insights into how his writings were produced and how they may be read by later generations of readers.

When turning to shared intellectual contexts, any sense of special pleading disappears completely: instead, by tracing Socratic and classical models of human personality, Rovira indicates thoroughly and clearly what Blake and Kierkegaard shared in terms of a philosophical heritage which formed both the points of origin and catalysts for reaction in each of their profoundly religious critiques of what it means to be human. Rovira notes how Kierkegaard came to the Socratic tradition via the German Romantics, a development which means that “[i]rony is not a mere trope in Kierkegaard’s thinking but, at least potentially, an existential stance.” (p.39) Socratic irony allows space for an existential self, and Rovira’s reading of the development of a dialectical author through Kierkegaard’s various philosophical texts is fascinating, emphasising as it does a deep critical and masterly engagement with existential doubt via pseudonymous authors such as Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus. Rovira follows this with a suitably thoughtful examination of Blake’s often complex relation to and use of Plato – sometimes demonstrating affinities to Platonic idealistic thought, as in his letter to Trusler in 1799, at other times ambivalent towards Plato. As Blake’s “world of ideal forms is a visceral one” (p.49), so Rovira suggests it is better to consider him as working in a tradition or genre of “apocalyptic” rather than “Platonic” idealism. This is an obvious enough point in many ways, but important in that Rovira follows it through that too often neglected tradition of religious thought from Augustine and Origen via Erasmus that allows Blake to be critical of the literal and scriptural materialisms of both the Thomas Paines and Bishop Watsons of his day.

This ties very neatly into Rovira’s account of classical models of personality that flourished in both Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s day, which in chapter three are related to the dialectical process in Kierkegaard’s transition from aesthetic to ethical personalities, as well as the movement in Blake from innocence to experience. This dynamic relation within the self, one of the clearest and most fruitful points of contact between both writers, also shares some features with Clark’s work, although Rovira provides a much fuller context for a study of Blake as he emphasises the movement between innocence and experience in Blake’s early works of the late 1780s and early 1790s. Within the third chapter are some particularly effective interpretations of the Songs, The Book of Thel, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion in particular, with Rovira indicating that rather than a standard path of progression from innocence to experience to higher, or organised innocence, we should instead the developmental process as “differentiations within innocence itself that are not usually registered within innocence” (p.71). Kierkegaard’s own model was the development of a bodily-oriented subject in the aesthetic stage, followed by a soul-oriented ethical stage, with a final spirit-oriented religious subject. Coyness – or, indeed, antagonism – among many secular critics about this spirit-oriented, religious subjectivity, tends to mean that those critics tend to ignore the joyous paradox that the self discovers its own eternal sense precisely at the moment that it annihilates self. Rovira is completely right to focus on this religious experience, too often brushed aside, as corresponding to Blake’s sense of visionary consciousness: as such, both Blake and Kierkegaard were able to “confront Enlightenment psychologies that mechanize human beings” (p.92), emphasising instead a break with immanence and environment that enables creation instead of reaction.

These contextual accounts take up more half of the book, and the final two chapters are given over to a reading of the problematic of generation more generally in Blake and Kierkegaard, followed by a detailed consideration of creation anxiety in The [First] Book of Urizen. As Rovira observes, in classical models procreation serves as the foundation for all future acts of creativity (and out of this creation anxiety arising from the attempt to create life and form outside of natural processes). In the first part of chapter 4, Rovira draws fairly extensively on Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety (written under the pseudonym Haufniensis) to help explain some of the dialectical processes at work in Blake’s concept of “Generation”, suggesting that both writers share a common concern with the relations of procreation and the fall of man that were relatively widespread throughout Christian Europe, if rarely dealt with as imaginatively as by these two writers. His summary of Blake’s concept as at work in Visions of the Daughter of Albion is particularly worth repeating:

These are the principle elements of Blake’s critique of fallen generation: it divides the self; it alienates feminine, sensual joy through both male aggression and male introversion; and it alienates both of these from each other, so that male sexuality finds its only expression through the aggressive impulse signified by Bromion. (p.112)

Sexual procreation is the model for all human creativity as understood by Blake and Kierkegaard, but it is the figure of Urizen, argues Rovira in his final chapter, that the full extent of creation anxiety as exhibiting tensions “between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artifice” (p.121) finds its fullest expression. Again, Rovira particularly draws upon The Concept of Anxiety to help explain this demon-creator, but he also makes some interesting asides (for example via gnostic traditions) that also include some particularly telling criticisms of other commentators on Blake: a notable example of this is the tendency of Blake critics to see an attack on the Anglican church as an attack on all Christianity, defined as a somewhat generic “traditional” or “orthodox” Christianity. Rovira is quite correct to draw attention to the vagueness of such dismissals, although his discussion of Blake’s religious beliefs in terms of such things as Gnosticism would have benefited from further consideration of the discovery in recent years by biographical discoveries that place Blake’s mother in a Moravian tradition. Rovira is on more certain ground when dealing with the tensions between science and religion in the Urizen books, and I particularly enjoyed his readings of Urizen as the pre-eminent demonic character in Blake’s poetry (a position usually – though not always – reserved for Orc). Again, Haufniensis/Kierkegaard is the most pertinent text here, explaining the “misrelation to eternity” developed through the concept of spiritlessness, the “neither guilty nor not guilty” that operates as a “talking machine”. Ironically, this is a state without anxiety for the spiritless who may even then appear happy. “As a result,” observes Rovira, in a telling final few pages, “it is political and religious life, spiritlessness ‘is a perfect idol worshipper…’ Revivalists, kings, dictators, populist presidents, and fascists find their political fields ripe for harvest in a culture of spiritlessness.” (p.140)

Rovira’s book is an involved but extremely rewarding book, one that delves fully into the complex and sophisticated dialectical processes involved in Kierkegaard’s thought . There are two minor points where I take slight issue with Blake and Kierkegaard, both of them involving contextual materials. One of these, in terms of Denmark’s social and political history may be entirely due to my own lack of knowledge, though the other, regarding the Moravian contexts of Blake’s religious thought does require discussion in such texts that deal with Blake’s theological concerns. However, what Rovira does with incredible dedication and perspicacity is to trace through a discourse of profound spiritual and religious attention that does not easily sit well with many current frameworks for discussing Blake’s work, largely due to the fact that we tend to over-secularise and simplify the Christian doctrines within which writers such as Blake and Kierkegaard worked. Rovira’s reading of Urizen the “Creator-Monarch”, dictatorial in his act of fallen generation precisely because he refuses to consider the spiritual engagement of creation that is both the source and recompense of anxiety, is masterful while Blake and Kierkegaard as a whole is a carefully thought-through and argued text.

Tags: books, philosophy, religion, theology
Posted in Reviews |

Magnus Ankarsjö – William Blake and Religion

William Blake and Religion: A New Critical View. Magnus Ankarsjö
Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Company, 2009. pp. 163. $39.95. ISBN: 978 0 7864 4559 2.

The second book by Ankarsjö to be published by McFarland, William Blake and Religion shares some themes with his earlier title, William Blake and Gender (2006) in that one of the aims of this book is to take recent discoveries about the religious background of Blake’s family and explore these in relation to his views on sexuality. Most important for  Ankarsjö’s ideas is the work undertaken by Marsha Keith Schuchard in Why Mrs Blake Cried (2006) and various essays by Keri Davies that have uncovered links between Blake’s mother and the Moravian church. The Moravians, a religious group that had its roots in the followers of John Hus in fifteenth century Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic), experienced a religious revival in the eighteenth century under the charismatic leadership of Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf during which period they encouraged greater equality between the sexes in comparison to most religious movements of the time, and established a small but devoted church. In addition to the research of Schuchard and Davies (to which may be added Robert Rix’s re-evaluation of Blake’s relations to the various religious sects of his day in William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity, 2007), the most important figures to William Blake and Religion are David Worrall, who cast fresh light into the activities undertaken by Swedenborgians at the end of the eighteenth century, and Helen Bruder because of her re-evaluation of Blake and gender studies in her extremely influential and important book, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997).

Ankarsjö sets out these foundational figures in his introduction, as well as providing a brief detour via one dead end of Blake studies that occasionally rears its head (though not with academics working in the field), the late E.P. Thompson’s assertion that Blake was a Muggletonian in his 1993 book, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Dealing with Thompson briskly, Ankarsjö’s task is to focus instead on the effect that newly discovered materials relating to Moravianism will have on our understanding of Blake. As such, with particular emphasis on both religion and sexuality, William Blake and Religion is probably one of the first of what is likely to be a growing number of texts that will explore the intersection between Blake and the Moravian Church. In addition, in his first and best chapter, Ankarsjö also pays attention to the continuing influence of Swedenborgianism, the teachings and church established by the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg who claimed constant and visionary experiences of the spiritual world, throughout the 1790s (which many – though by no means all – of Blake scholars assume the artist had turned his back on after publication of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), as well as a more prickly relationship with Unitarianism, which influenced a number of his contemporaries that Blake would have encountered via the circle gathered around the publisher Joseph Johnson. Ankarsjö is clear and convincing when outlining these religious contexts, and makes some extremely interesting and relevant observations, for example in his repetition of Keri Davies’s comment at the Blake 250 conference in 2007 that the position of Moravianism as neither dissenting from, nor wholly within, the mainstream Anglican church means that we shall probably have to revise many oft-repeated (and dearly held) assumptions about the dissenting radicalism of Blake’s background.

This chapter is by far and away the best in the book, but some problems emerge when dealing with the next two chapters, “Blake’s Religion” and “Blake’s Sexuality”. Part of the difficulty emerges with the step that sometimes appears to be made once the Moravianism of Blake’s background is recognised: it seems very clear that Blake’s mother was a Moravian, and also that Blake’s parents attended a Moravian church. As such, it is extremely probable that Blake grew up in a household that was infused with Moravian values. However, to follow this to the conclusion that Blake himself was a Moravian, or strongly influenced by Moravian ideas, is much more problematic. Keri Davies is always careful when drawing such conclusions – much more so than Schuchard, in my opinion – but Ankarsjö to me appears to dither and this sometimes creates problems with understanding entirely what the relationship with Moravianism brings. Some sections, for example when dealing with notions of conjugal (or conjugial, in Swedenborg’s phrase) love appear to be very profitable when explaining Blake’s own attitudes towards religion, but the chapter “Blake’s Religion” as a whole ends up somewhat confusing: it is hard, in the end, to pin down what Blake’s religion was. This is due to two reasons, one of which I think is a fault with Ankarsjö approach to his subject, one of which is much more general.

First of all, Ankarsjö tends to cherry-pick texts, looking for ones that may reinforce his approach to Moravianism in particular but also that Blake continued to look towards Swedenborgianism. This, for me, is extremely unsatisfactory because some of Blake’s most profound and extensive documents dealing with religion, such as the late epic Jerusalem or The Everlasting Gospel, offer complexities which could easily deny the more straightforward application of Ankarsjö’s thesis. This leads to the more general point: few other English writers (or, indeed, artists) spent more time than Blake in dealing with the topic of religion and the divine, but any attempt to pin down Blake in terms of a particular sect appears to me doomed to failure because of the idiosyncracies of Blake’s spiritual vision, his fairly consistent refusal to participate in a church (unless, perhaps, it is because as Keri Davies has suggested the Anglican Church was, in the end, broad enough to encompass his vision). I emphasise here the idiosyncracy of Blake’s religious views rather than the Romantic “eccentricity” which Ankarsjö rightly dismisses in his introduction: Blake was a deep and profound thinker on religious topics, not least in that he perceived the fundamental problems of attempting to fix experiences of the divine within human structures, systems against which he always struggled. In the end, my problem with this part of William Blake and Religion results from a degree of confusion as to whether Ankarsjö is proposing what we may call a “strong” theory of Blake and Moravianism, where that religion helps to explain more or less completely the framework of Blake’s belief – the evidence for which I find rather hard to accept; or whether he is working towards a “weak” theory, in which Blake’s Moravian background predisposes him towards a number of tenets and attitudes, for example with regard to ecumenicism and sexual love, which – by contrast – does appear extremely enlightening for me.

Although I found myself somewhat confused as to Ankarsjö’s aims in the chapter on Blake’s religion, a more serious flaw is to be encountered in his chapter on Blake’s sexuality. Before turning to this flaw, it is right to remark on where Ankarsjö’s comments are illuminating, for example in reinforcing the attitudes towards “free love” that were developing both among Blake’s radical associates of the eighteenth century and “conjugal love” that existed in the Moravian Church and Swedenborgianism.William Blake and Religion has much to say that is useful in this regard, although again the tendency to jump between different Blakean texts can be confusing. However, where the flaw exists is that Ankarsjö’s apparent desire to claim Blake as a proto-feminist can be rather unsophisticated and extremely problematic. The repeated assertions by Anne Mellor as to Blake’s intrinsic sexism is a coarse and unhelpful position, one which Helen Bruder in particular has treated to appropriate criticism (and which has also been aided by more work by scholars such as Davies into Blake’s early female collectors). However, Bruder maintains a healthily caustic attitude to Blake’s sexual politics which seems largely to vanish in William Blake and Religion. Ankarsjö’s desire to read white where others read black leads him, in my opinion, into some rather bizarre interpretations.

For example, in a comment that actually appears in the chapter “Blake’s Religion”, Ankarsjö makes the following observation of Blake’s comment in his description of the painting “The Last Judgement” that “There is no such thing in Eternity as a Female Will”:

First, it has to be pointed out that Blake here is strictly following the creation myth from Genesis, which clearly was in line with his increasing interest in the Bible and traditional Christianity at this point in time. In Genesis, as we know, woman was created from a body part of man in order to be his life companion. If we, as Blake, follow the analogy through to the other extreme, as it were, then man and woman are reunited and are as one. Hence, as much as man has no will of his own in eternity, neither has woman. Quite simply, separate and individual wills do not exist. (p.66)

To place Blake’s thought in a biblical tradition is perfectly correct, and it may also be right that Blake did not believe in the existence of separate female or male wills (and Ankarsjö’s remarks on the role of the Spectre in Blake’s writings as a ravenous, separate male will are also appropriate here). However, there remains a problem for me in Blake’s remark that the rush to embrace him as a proto-feminist fails to encompass sufficiently: even if Blake does not believe in a separate male will in eternity, he offers no denunciation of it that is comparable to his denunciation of the female. The rejection of a separate male will remains, unfortunately, implicit throughout too much of his writing, while the renunciation of female will is, equally unfortunately, far too explicit at times. More simply, Blake may not be a sexist, but sometimes his rhetoric comes very close to reinforcing sexist stereotypes; there are blind spots which we should not neglect. As such, like Bruder and Tristanne Connolly, I am less keen to smooth over some of the sexual ambiguities in Blake’s works while accepting, like those critics and Ankarsjö himself that denunciations of “sexist” Blake have been based on rather crude interpretations of the sexual politics of his poetry.

Ankarsjö’s final chapter, on “Blake’s Utopian ‘Colony’” offers an interesting discussion of slavery that owes much to the work of David Worrall. Ankarsjö’s contribution is to offer a critical reading of some of Worrall’s arguments, in particular the almost entirely negative interpretation of the proposed Swedenborgian colony in Sierre Leone in terms of its gender equality, so that Ankarsjö discovers more sympathy to proto-feminist arguments among the Swedenborgians than Worrall does – though in the end he agrees that it was a largely patriarchal exercise. In addition, he offers some significant comments on similar utopian colonies from the time, such as those by Unitarians. Where the chapter is on more shaky ground is in assuming that the conference attended by Blake in 1789, and where a colony in Sierre Leone would have been under discussion, still continues to influence Blake’s work on his final epics, Milton and Jerusalem after 1808; indeed, the chapter ends unsatisfactorily with a rather cursory pointer towards Blake’s attitudes on slavery that would surely have benefited from contextualisation in the evangelical fervour surrounding the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

William Blake and Religion offers some valuable contributions and summaries of contemporary arguments surrounding Blake’s Moravian background. When discussing the interrelation of Moravianism with Swedenborgianism and even Unitarianism, it is clear and eminently useful as a guide. The book is more confused, unfortunately, as to offering an account of Blake’s religion, probably because it strives a little too hard to map out the influence of Moravianism throughout Blake’s work which, in my opinion, tends to distort sometimes what Blake had to say on the subject. In the light of current research it is clear that Blake must have been marked by Moravianism – and yet the implied move to read Blake as a Moravian appears unsatisfactory at times in discussing Blake’s own thoughts on religion and the divine.

Tags: books, publications, religion, sexuality
Posted in Reviews |

Ten things you should know about Jerusalem

Once again Blake’s “Jerusalem” is in the news. While the famous hymn is incredibly popular at weddings in particular, it appears that so many ministers are banning it that the Church of England has issued new guidelines stating that it is neither too nationalistic nor too militaristic. This is one that returns every so often, and for the past couple of decades the Church has had a problem with “Jerusalem” – something that is not entirely surprising considering Blake’s own attitude to organised religion and, unfortunately, the hymn’s occasional but pernicious associations with the far right.

While the nation debates (once again) whether it is suitable for banns or only to be banned, here are ten things about the poem to help you make up your own mind:

1. The stanzas beginning “And did those feet…” were, as is widely known, originally published as part of a Preface to Blake’s epic poem Milton. During his lifetime Blake only printed four copies of this poem – but the Preface only appears in two of the three copies published in 1811 and was omitted in the version from 1818. While it may have become his most famous poem, Blake apparently had other ideas.
2. The feet in question are widely assumed to be those of Christ, drawing on a legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought him to this country. William of Malmesbury, writing in the twelfth century, was the first to suggest that Joseph was sent as an apostle to the British Isles, and this snowballed into the mythology that he had previously brought the young Jesus with him while trading. It is worth pointing out that while Blake (in Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion in particular) does seem to have thought this at the very least a useful starting point for his own mythology, in his lyric he questions rather than states whether Jesus came here.
3. The phrase “Chariot of fire” is taken from 2 Kings 6:17 where God protects Elisha from the Syrians: “And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.” Interestingly, when the King of Israel seeks to destroy the Syrians, Elisha replies: “Thou shalt not smite them: wouldest thou smite those whom thou hast taken captive with thy sword and with thy bow? set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink, and go to their master.” (22)
4. There is a possibility that the “dark Satanic Mills” were inspired by the Albion Flour Mill which employed a steam engine built by James Watt and burnt down in 1791. Milton, however, is full of imagery of mills, as when the Bard who sings the song that opens the epic poem describes how “the Starry Mills of Satan / Are built beneath the Earth” which are used to grind down the souls of Albion’s children.
5. While Sir Hubert Parry famously set Blake’s words to music in 1916, this version is rarely heard. In 1922, Edward Elgar scored Parry’s simpler melody for orchestra, providing it with a much grander and ostentatious sweep and it is this version that is heard at Last Night of the Proms and elsewhere.
6. “Jerusalem” was adopted by the National Association of Women’s Institutes in 1924, having been sung by Suffragettes during the 1920s. In the same year as Parry’s composition, Bertrand Russell, a member of the Fabian Society invoked Blake’s vision when describing opposition to conscription during World War I, leading to its popular acceptance by the Labour Party alongside the Red Flag, a campaign slogan of the 1945 election being that Labour would “build a new Jerusalem”.
7. The hymn seems to have been particularly popular during the 1960s, appearing in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Privilege (1967) and If… (1968), where the tensions between Blake’s revolutionary attitudes and the hymn’s adoption as an anthem of the establishment made it de rigueur as a motif for any director concerned to explore the limitations of a little Englander mindset.
8. At the other end of the political spectrum, the British National Party has made a concerted effort to adopt “Jerusalem” as its own since 2000, when Nick Griffin sang it alongside former members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Friends of the BNP in Arlington, Virginia. After being charged with incitement to racial hatred in 2005, Griffin led BNP supporters in a rendition of the hymn outside a magistrates court in Leeds.
9. The CofE’s current problems with ministers banning “Jerusalem” is nothing new: in 1996 the Church of Scotland elected to have it removed from its hymnals because of the content of Blake’s words, and in the same year Canon Donald Gray, chaplain to the Queen, refused to allow it to be sung at a memorial service in St Margaret’s.
10. In sport, it was adopted as the anthem of the England cricket team after 2004 and is to be used by Team England in the Commonwealth Games from 2010 onwards. Its history as a football song has been somewhat trickier: Fat Les recorded it as the team anthem for the Euro 2000 games, but England’s poor performance and rioting by English fans at Charleroi tarnished its associations.

Tags: Jerusalem, nationalism, politics, religion
Posted in Arts and Culture |

Zoapod 15 – The Devil’s Party: Blake’s Marriage and Milton

Zoapod 15: Of the Devil’s Party – Blake’s Marriage and Milton’s Paradise Lost
Length: 5 min 25 sec.

A reading of Blake’s commentary on Milton’s Paradise Lost in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, explaining the significance of his statement that Milton was “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it”.

This podcast is taken from chapter four of the Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Tags: Milton, politics, religion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Posted in Podcasts |

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Zoamorphosis Essential Introductions

Contents

Chapter 1: The Eternal Hell Revives

Chapter 2: The Form & Style of The Marriage

Chapter 3: Swedenborg & The Marriage

Chapter 4: Without Contraries is No Progression

Selected Reading

Chapter 1: The Eternal Hell Revives

As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is The Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah XXXIV & XXXV Chap:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (E34)

William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published in 1790, is one of the strangest and most remarkable books ever to have been written. Although little noticed during Blake’s lifetime (and discussion of it largely repressed by those who had read it), it has also become one of the most important of his works to writers such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Angela Carter, and Salman Rushdie whose books have been greatly influenced by its astonishing ideas and rhetoric.

The Marriage began as a pamphlet denouncing the system devised by the eighteenth century mystic and scientist, Emanuel Swedenborg, but it quickly developed into a much more radical assault on the conventions of religion, politics and morality, as well as providing ironic critiques of the theology of Milton and the Bible. Blake’s idiosyncratic, unsettling style and his resolution to write in the voice of the devil was also a response to the drama of the French Revolution, a time when the entire world appeared to have been turned upside down, when the conventions and certainties of Europe became less certain.

The Contrary Vision
As we shall see in the next chapter, The Marriage is not entirely a text that is sui generis, but it is certainly one whose format is exceedingly rare, a factor that accounts for its continuing ability to shock and stimulate generations of readers. The editors of the William Blake Trust/Tate Gallery edition of the book offer one of the best summaries of its effect:

The Marriage, provocative, mocking, sexy, pushy, and playful, bristles with… rebellious optimism. Its gumption is never exposed as bravado, and, although it hammers mercilessly on Emanuel Swedenborg and his “angelic” followers, the mockery is never disillusioned but youthfully, cheerfully antagonistic to foolish conventionality. (Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi 116-7)

After the Argument, which introduces one of Blake’s mythological figures, Rintrah, the just man driven from the paradise that he creates by a villain of false humility who prefers to steal the labour of others than disturb his ease, Blake establishes the key motifs of The Marriage in the plate cited at the beginning of this chapter. While the structure of The Marriage has often defied critics – S. Foster Damon called it a “scrap-book of Blake’s philosophy” (Damon 88) and Michael Ferber thought it a “structureless structure” (Ferber 90) – many have understood immediately the intellectual significance of Blake’s satire, exposing conventional folly through a system of dynamic contraries. Contraries – attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate and, of course, heaven and hell – display a significant element in Blake’s thought: one is not simply the negative or absence of the other. As he was to write in Milton a Poem, “Contraries are Positives / A Negation is not a Contrary” (E129). Blake’s contraries share some features with those of other dialectical philosophers, from ancient Heraclitus through to Hegel writing after him, but – on the face of it, at least – he rejects what can be seen in all those writers as a tendency to subordinate one antinomy to another.

For a truly dynamic system, Blake argues that the opposing elements of human experience must engage equally with each other. Blake’s attempt to avoid the hierarchy of one term over another which is typical of the exercise of power is compelling but ultimately fails: if this is the marriage of heaven and hell, then too often, as critics have noted, it is devils who triumph over angels. When Harold Bloom attempted to demonstrate the dialectical progress that he argued was evident in the text, he did so “in a spirit of tentativeness, respecting its innate trickery” (Bloom 501).

Much of this is due to the extremely important nature of Blake’s struggle with notions of good and evil. John Howard saw The Marriage as “Blake’s prophetic testament on evil and the way to escape it” (Howard 61), which is to work by removing orthodox opposition to sensual enjoyment using his “infernal method of printing” which espouses irony, humour and provocation to subvert systems of codified morality. One means by which Blake does this is to deny the existence of evil – at least as it is commonly understood. Sensual enjoyment is not a negation of being in the Augustinian notion of evil but rather its very fulfilment. Yet here arises an important conceptual difficulty for Blake’s own system, for the temptation then is simply to invert the traditional hierarchies of good and evil, heaven and hell – to declare, as Satan does in Paradise Lost, “Evil, be thou my good” – so that frequently the angels appear as little more than privations of his diabolical heroes. It may be such radical subversion was necessary in the revolutionary contexts of 1790, and the importance of striking against his conservative enemies did not provide him with the luxury of that subtlety of the contrary states of the human soul he was later to demonstrate in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Nonetheless, this relative failure to achieve a true marriage does indicate the considerable difficulty that Blake had, not merely to oppose one system to another in a spirit of rebellion but to break free of systems altogether.

Reason and Energy
If the relationship of good and evil is a fundamental moral concern of The Marriage, then the metaphysical origin of conventional dualism also has an important role to play, and this Blake traces to what he considers its source in the split between body and soul, outlined most clearly in plate 4:

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. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True
1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd 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 (E34)

The origins of good and evil lie in religions and the errors of their sacred codes, fundamental to which is the separation of soul and body, the latter being repressed in the service of the former. However, religious folly, which denies the true nature of humanity by denying the body, is also served by philosophy. Since Plato’s division of reason from appetite at least, philosophy had been complicit in the error of dualism and this is an important area in which Blake distinguishes himself from Enlightened anti-religious commentators: Cartesian dualism may have been an extreme version, but to Blake most if not all Enlightenment philosophers had mistakenly deposed a theistic god, only to replace him with deistic reason that was equally effective in repressing the desires and energy of the body, forgetting the origins of intellectual life that lay in those desires.

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged &  numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. (E38)

Robert Essick has noted the ways in which politics, science, the Bible, and linguistics collide in Blake’s work during the 1790s (Essick 189), and though this was particularly the case following the publication of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason in 1794, the beginning of the decade saw a surge in biblical exegesis that spread the fruits of Enlightenment criticism. Much of what Blake writes in plate 11 above would not look entirely out of place in David Hume, Voltaire, Pierre Bayle or Constantin Volney, but Blake’s attitude to perception creates an important distinction from such figures: for them, reason operates upon the faculties of sense as a higher order, ordering and categorising sense impressions. However, for Blake the role of energy and imagination as the animating motivation of such systems of categorisation (whereby poets placed cities and countries under mental deities) returns the desires of the body to the highest capabilities of which humanity is capable.

Blake’s final statement, that “All deities reside in the human breast”, can be read as remarkably close to atheism: however, it is more accurate to emphasise that in this and his other works he emphasises again and again the divine nature of humanity. God is a creation of imagination, and Blake appears to have no problem with conceiving of man as the creator of God. Man’s mistake is to apotheosise his reason, abstracting a system of mental deities as separate from the material world and projecting it onto the heavens. Plate 11 explicitly attacks priestcraft, denounced by many Enlightenment philosophers as that scheme by which God was removed to the heavens from where he could still meddle in human affairs. The radical nature of Blake’s critique is that ultimately he sees little difference between such abstraction and that of the philosophers themselves, who removed the divine entirely from the universe and, through Deism, contented themselves with a prime mover which, like Newton’s Pantocrator, established an immutable system of nature that imposed upon the passive perception of mankind. Both priest and philosopher forgot that all divine energy resides in the human breast, not in an abstract out there, whether heaven or the origin of the universe.

Revolutionary Satire
While Blake’s Marriage may have begun life as an anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet, it very quickly transformed into a much more wide-ranging satire as the events of 1790 unfolded. David Erdman was one of the first critics to trace in detail the connection between The Marriage and the events of the French Revolution, although unfortunately the fact that he dates its composition between 1790 and 1793 means that he frequently looks for allusions that are simply not there, seeing the final “Song of Liberty”, for example, as a celebration of “the casting out of French monarchy and the rout… of Brunswick’s starry hosts” at the end of 1792 (Erdman 192).

By contrast, if we view Blake as being inspired into a new way of thinking by the progress of the Revolution in 1789-90, it is possible to understand more profoundly what Eaves, Essick and Viscomi recognise as the optimism of his diabolic support for what was taking place in France. After the meeting of the Three Estates in 1789 and the formation of a new National Assembly at the end of that year, which brought with it the promise of potential republicanism or at the very least constitutional monarchy, the Revolution was largely still in its benevolent phase. Certainly there had been the Great Fear of the Summer of 1789, which betokened the potential tyranny that would come, but the brief fits of violence that occurred, such as the storming of the Bastille, could still be presented as part of the progress of France towards enlightened government. Feudalism had been abolished and in May the Assembly had even renounced any involvement in wars of conquest. With the exception of Edmund Burke, perhaps, few suspected that the Revolution itself would lead directly to despotism, and even he could not have realised just how bloody the Terror would be when it was unleashed in 1793.

As such, Blake’s Marriage is a joyful manifesto, one which celebrates fully the revolutionary fervour that had exploded in France. Announcing himself as being of the devil’s party, he launched into radical visions with an exuberance that rapidly disappeared from his illuminated books as the decade progressed. There is little of that exultation in texts such as The [First] Book of Urizen or The Book of Ahania where the innocence of his diabolism is tempered by the knowledge of revolutionary violence. Peter A. Schock has observed the ways in which the figure and mythology of Satan was used by both radicals and conservatives in the early years of the Revolution. His argument, like that of Erdman, suffers slightly from the current understanding that The Marriage was published in 1790 (thus removing some of the immediate sources that he draws upon), but it is clear that British propaganda against Satanic rebels made Blake increasingly proud of his diabolism – at least until it became no longer safe to display such partisanship publicly (Schock 446).

Richard Cronin notes the difficulty of determining who The Marriage was actually written for, building on Howard’s observation that it could have been the circle around Joseph Johnson, which included Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Priestley. Cronin suggests that Blake had turned against the Swedenborgians when they abandoned the more revolutionary aspects of their founder’s ideals and increasingly declared themselves in favour of the political status quo (Cronin 48-51). Yet the Johnson circle, as Cronin observes, was not itself amenable to the wilder flights of fancy that Blake indulged in and, in Jon Mee’s words, The Marriage does not represent a retreat from conventional Christianity into Deism but rather a move into “radical enthusiasm” that would have been denounced by the rationalists gathered around Johnson’s table (Mee 53).

The Marriage, then, responds with energy and optimism to the events of 1789-1790. Although Blake had originally sought to mock the tenets of a fashionable but still slightly obscure sect in London, he quickly expanded his vision to politics, religion, and literature, easily sweeping in literary giants such as Milton. In tone and style, if not always in content, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is sometimes reminiscent of his earlier satire of the 1780s, the unpublished An Island in the Moon, mixing raucous Augustan comedy with matters of import. As the dawn of Revolution turned into the bloody sunset of the Terror, it was a mood that was largely to disappear from his writing for more than two decades.

Next – The Form & Style of The Marriage

Tags: French Revolution, Milton, politics, religion, Swedenborg, the Bible, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – 3

Chapter 3: Swedenborg & The Marriage

For new readers of The Marriage, the various allusions within the text to Emanuel Swedenborg are usually somewhat opaque and disconcerting. Although Swedenborg’s writings were popular and widely known in the late eighteenth century, they became unfashionable and esoteric during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would not be unfair to comment that most people who have heard of Swedenborg today have done so because of what Blake writes in The Marriage in particular.

Emmanuel Swedenborg
Swedenborg was a remarkable figure in eighteenth century Europe, a man of the Enlightenment and science who also gave rise to a form of mysticism that appealed to many of his contemporaries. Born Emanuel Swedberg at Stockholm, Sweden, in 1688, his father, Jesper Swedberg, was an eminent churchman and later Bishop of Skara. Jesper’s pietist beliefs, particularly on the importance of communication with God rather than through faith alone, as well as the presence of angels and spirits in everyday life, were to have an important effect on his son. After completing university at Uppsala in 1709, Swedenborg travelled through Western Europe before coming to London where he stayed for four years before returning to Sweden in 1715 to work on scientific and engineering projects.

Swedenborg worked as an assessor for the Swedish Board of Mines and published scientific discoveries in his periodical, Daedalus Hyperboreus (The Northern Daedalus). For these, and other services, he was ennobled in 1718 (whereupon the family name was changed from Swedberg to Swedenborg), and in 1724 he was offered the chair of mathematics at Uppsala, a post that he declined.

During the 1730s, Swedenborg turned to religious and philosophical subjects, publishing a series of works that attempted to demonstrate how matter related to spirit and the finite to the infinite, such as De Infinito (On the Infinite). Requesting permission to travel abroad in 1743 to gather source materials for a book on the animal kingdom, he began to experience strange dreams on his journeys and recorded them in a journal, some of those dreams forming the basis of his later visionary works. By 1744, he was convinced that he had to abandon his scientific studies and devote himself to understanding God, publishing The Worship and Love of God in London in 1745. Two years later, he resigned his post at the Board of Mines and devoted himself to biblical studies for ten years, publishing the final volume of his great work, Arcana Cœlestia (Heavenly Secrets) in 1756.

Until his death in 1772, Swedenborg travelled between Stockholm, London and Holland, writing a number of theological works that expounded his new theological system. In The Last Judgment in Retrospect, he claimed that the Last Judgement had begun in 1757 (the year of Blake’s birth) and that it had been a spiritual judgement, God having seen that the churches had lost their true purpose. His last book, Vera Christiana Religio (The True Christian Religion), was completed in 1770, the year after which he suffered a stroke during a visit to London and was buried at the Swedish church in Shadwell. One of his earliest biographers, the Swedenborgian James John Garth Wilkinson (editor of the 1839 edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience), observed of this and other works that “Swedenborg’s philosophy attains its summit in the marriage of scholasticism and common sense, with the sciences, of his age; in the consummation of which marriage his especial genius was exerted and exhausted.” (Wilkinson 67)

The Swedenborgian Church
Swedenborg’s declaration that the traditional church had lost its way inspired some to use his voluminous writings as the foundation for a new church, helped in part by the philosopher’s extensive travels and capacity for befriending many and varied individuals.

In an entry in his Spiritual Diary for August 27, 1748, Swedenborg had declared that he would have “five sorts of readers”: the first type would be those who would reject his writings entirely, the second who would take interest in them as curiosities, the third who would accept them intellectually but not be influenced by his ideas, the fourth who would change some of their behaviour in accordance with his teachings, and the fifth who would “receive them with joy, and reduce them to practice” (cited in Trobridge 90). Certainly some, such as the Bishop of Gothenberg, rejected Swedenborgianism (as it was to become) outright, but others such as the early followers C. F. Nordensköld and Thomas Hartley considered Swedenborg’s system the right and proper spiritual path to follow.

During his lifetime, however, he made few converts, in part because of his unwillingness to proselytise, and where he did attract followers this was not without difficulties: among his most prominent Swedish disciples, Gabriel Beyer and Johan Rosén, professors at Gothenberg University, were persecuted after accepting his doctrines in the 1760s. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, however, his influence gradually spread throughout Europe, although it was in England that he found most acceptance and made most disciples (Trobridge 94). John Clowes, Rector of St Johns, Manchester, translated Swedenborg’s works into English and by the 1780s a small group of enthusiasts, including William Cookworthy and William Spence, ensured that his works received a wider audience.

Because of their isolation, Swedenborg’s followers formed societies to share their knowledge and principles. Nordensköld established the Exegetic-Philanthropic Society in Sweden after Swedenborg’s death (although this was broken up in 1789), and in London Robert Hindmarsh invited sympathetic readers to form a “Theosophical Society” in the mid 1780s. This society included a number of Blake’s friends and fellow engravers among its number, such as John Flaxman and William Sharp, and by the end of the decade some members of this group went on to form the “New Church”, or “New Jerusalem Church”. Although small in terms of membership, Swedenborgianism continued to spread throughout the English speaking world in the nineteenth century, aided by Clowes’s establishment of the Swedenborg Society in 1810 to propagate his ideas and works, and in America by the work of the missionary John Chapman, more popularly known as Johnny Appleseed.

Blake and Swedenborg
Blake began reading Swedenborg’s works in the 1780s, including Heaven and Hell (1784) and Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788). As such, he would have probably received a general invitation sent out in December 1788 to sympathetic readers inviting them to a conference, the purpose of which was to establish a new church based on Swedenborg’s teachings. At the meeting in a public house on 13 April, 1789, the Blakes were asked to sign the following paper:

We whose Names are hereunto subscribed, do each of us approve of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, believing that the Doctrines contained therein are genuine Truths, revealed from Heaven, and that the New Jerusalem Church ought to be established, distinct and separate from the Old Church. (Cited in Bentley 50)

A manifesto of 32 resolutions, including the rejection of the notion of the Trinity and a separation from the ‘Old Church’, was accepted unanimously, and Bentley suggests that although Blake must have agreed to these resolutions at the time his attitude quickly became ambiguous, then openly hostile. He never attended the New Church itself, and within a year he was satirising Swedenborgianism.

Yet The Marriage itself, while Blake’s most sustained commentary on Swedenborg’s teaching, is not his final word on the subject. In Milton a Poem, he describes Swedenborg as “strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches!” (23.50, E117), while in the 1809 solo exhibition he cited the Swedish mystic favourably as inspiration for one of his paintings, ‘The spiritual Preceptor, an experiment Picture’. As such, although Blake quickly came to recognise in Swedenborgianism a return to the doctrinal bondage of the Old Church under a new name, he seems to have held at least some of Swedenborg’s ideas in higher regard for much of his life.

Furthermore, as David Worrall has pointed out, the initial conference attended by Blake brought him into contact with radical figures who were to work with the Swedenborgian Carl Bernhard Wadström on his project to establish a new colony in Sierra Leone. For Worrall, the colonial aspects of this project, particularly with regard to certain applications of conjugal relationships, were an important influence on The Book of Thel, and Thel’s “rejection of her co-option into such a community” is “implicitly, a rejection of the entire colonization project” (17). Yet even though Blake was critical of Wadström’s ‘conjugal empire’ of concubinage, where women were expected to engage in sexual consummation but were denied a franchise, his participation in the New Jerusalem Church conference meant that he met with activists engaged against the slave trade.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell offers Blake’s most extensive commentary on Swedenborgianism, written shortly after he had joined the New Jerusalem Church. As we have already seen, Viscomi (1997) argues that plates 21-4 of The Marriage were originally composed as a separate pamphlet aimed at the New Church before it developed into a much more ambitious project:

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:
Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books
A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conciev’d himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches& exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious. & himself the single One on earth that ever broke a net.
Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.
And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.
Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.
Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s. and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number.
But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine. (Plates 21-2, E42-3)

Although this extended passage is scathing in its condemnation of Swedenborg, particularly in denying any originality to a vision that fails to break the old boundaries of the “religious”, Viscomi in another essay (1999) shows that Blake was still working through many Swedenborgian principles – such as attitudes to anti-clericalism and the role of revelation – more sympathetically than may first appear.

According to Robert Rix, the general appeal of Swedenborg at the end of the eighteenth century was his apparent ability to explain occult material “scientifically”, which was quickly formed by some of his followers into a social gospel combining radical Christianity and politics (Rix 47). While Blake soon took issue with Swedenborg’s analytical approach, as well as finding that elements of the Christianity and politics of him and his followers were not radical enough, it is important to note, as Rix observes, that he adapted as well as attacked Swedenborgianism.

Next – Without Contraries is No Progression

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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – 4

Chapter 4: Without Contraries is No Progression

During the 1790s, the Enlightenment critique of religion was to advance rapidly into outright hostility. Critical ideas that had been the preserve of an elite of educated philosophers or the rich echelons of society were taken up in very different forms by a wider section of society.

The Bible of Hell
As has been noted, a considerable amount of The Marriage echoes some of the classical Enlightenment critique of religion that could be discovered in Hume, Voltaire and Bayle. For example, in his The Natural History of Religion (1757), David Hume offered the following account of the origins of polytheism that appears to share some similarities with Blake’s version of the beginnings of religion which we have already encountered in chapter 1:

…if, leaving the works of nature, we trace the footsteps of invisible power in the various and contrary events of human life, we are necessarily led into polytheism and to the acknowledgement of several limited and imperfect deities. Storms and tempests ruin what is nourished by the sun. The sun destroys what is fostered by the moisture of dews and rains. War may be favourable to a nation, whom the inclemency of the seasons afflicts with famine. Sickness and famine may depopulate a kingdom, amidst the most profuse plenty… In short, the conduct of events, or what we call the plan of a particular providence, is so full of variety and uncertainty, that, if we suppose it immediately ordered by any intelligent beings, we must acknowledge a contrariety in their designs and intentions, a constant combat of opposite powers, and a repentance or change of intention in the same power, from impotence or levity. Each nation has its titular deity. Each element is subject to its invisible power or agent. The province of each god is separate from that of another. (Hume 6)

The resemblances between Hume’s and Blake’s texts are that both look for the human rather than superhuman origins of religion (at least – explicitly – in polytheism), and Hume’s combative vision of the natural world appears to share features with Blake’s universe of contraries. The differences, however, are more profound: for Hume, the beginnings of religion are fear, war, famine and privation – faced with uncontrollable nature mankind takes refuge in the whims and caprices of human projections, a position that was espoused as one of the three principles of history by Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova (New Science 1725). While Blake does not spell out the motivating desire that leads to religion in plate 11 of The Marriage, by placing its origins in the words of poets immediately he conveys a very different source for religious sentiment than fear, for it is priests not poets who “choose systems of worship from poetic tales” (E38) and so corrupt the original impulse. Likewise, the contrarian nature of Blake’s angels and devils is not that of domination and extermination through war, the subordination of one opposite to another, but argument and intellectual fight whereby angels may become devils (and, presumably, though it must be admitted Blake offers no concrete examples of this in The Marriage, devils transform into angels).

While Blake, like the philosophes, has no truck with conventional organised religion, he does not strike camp with the philosophers. In his first experiments in illuminated printing, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion, he had critiqued the use of reason as sufficient to explain religion, choosing instead imagination as its source: “Conclusion, If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.” (E3) To depend on reason alone, as Hume and others had done, is to submit to the dull round in which mankind must ultimately acquiesce to a Deism in which the original creator (or creators) is resigned to rule according to either the iron laws of necessitarianism or fear. While Blake maintained this position throughout his life, he could, however, understand the significance of contemporary attacks on superstition and priestcraft. In his annotations to Robert Watson, Bishop of Landaff’s An Apology for the Bible (1797), written in response to Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794-5), Blake observes that “It is an easy matter for a Bishop to triumph over Paines attack but it is not so easy for one who loves the Bible” (E611), indicating that while Paine’s Deism troubled him greatly he also recognised the need for such revolutionary attacks on organised religion.

Blake was to decide that, according to E. P. Thompson, Paine had not understood the Everlasting Gospel but was correct in his assault on moral law (Thompson 60), but his radical sympathies with Paine are indicated by an observation near the beginning of his copy of An Apology for the Bible: “I have been commanded from Hell not to print this as it is what our Enemies wish” (E611). What is more radical than Paine, and which continues to make The Marriage such a remarkable text, is that not only does not Blake remark himself as aware of being of the devil’s party but recruits the fount of Christianity to the same cause:

Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire. who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud. and the Devil utterd these words.
The worship of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius. and loving the greatest men best, those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.
The Angel hearing this became almost blue but mastering himself he grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling, and then replied,
Thou Idolater, is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law of ten commandments and are not all other men fools, sinners, & nothings?
The Devil answer’d; bray a fool in a morter with wheat. yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him: if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murderd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules.
When he had so spoken: I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah.
Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well (E43-4)

As philosophers and priests looked for the origins of religion in fear and reason, Blake’s source was very different Jesus Christ was the “greatest man” because he “acted from impulse: not from rules”. In his later works, particularly Milton and Jerusalem, Blake linked deistic Natural Religion and pious Moral Law as twin pillars of repression, the gods of this world as it were; as Christ opposes such worldly deities which comprise our mind-forg’d manacles, then the only option for both Blake (and Christ) to ally with the devil and produce the “Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no” (E44).

Of the Devils party
While much of The Marriage was written as a counter-argument to Swedenborg, for the majority of readers it is Blake’s argument with Milton that has proved to be more stimulating and controversial, taking on as he does one of the greatest poets in the English canon.

On Plates 5 and 6, Blake provides a summary of his response to Paradise Lost which has become one of the most famous readings ever to have been made of the poem, even more remarkably so considering its brevity:

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 restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah.
And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties
It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out. but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss
This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he, who dwells in flaming fire.
Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.
But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!
Note. 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 Devils party without knowing it (E34-5)

Here Paradise Lost provides a specific textual example of the more philosophical statement that precedes it: as the narrator has inverted the relationship between energy and reason to explain the error of biblical codes, so this diabolical reader (the section is titled “The voice of the Devil”) now performs a similar reversal of the typicall reception of Milton’s account of the war in heaven, ascribing the role of heroic messiah to Satan and concluding with his famous assertion that Milton was “of the Devils party without knowing it.”

Readings of Milton by the Romantics generally, and Blake in particular, have been well-discussed, providing for Blake a role model for the sublime and religious verse (see, for example, Newlyn, Wittreich and Dunbar). At the time of writing The Marriage, it is not necessarily the case that Blake’s knowledge of Milton extended much further than Paradise Lost, although he draws on images from the ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity in Europe A Prophecy. A more extensive demonstration of his knowledge, however, is clear after 1800, not only in his composition of Milton a Poem but also the series of illustrations to Milton’s works undertaken for a number of clients and covering a very wide range. In this he was almost certainly stimulated by William Hayley who was working on completing Cowper’s edition of Milton while Blake was at Felpham (having written a Life of Milton in the early 1790s). Of these illustrated works, Dunbar remarks that they show how “Blake’s relationship with Milton never became a slavish, one-sided affair” but was instead “a lively, stimulating, intimate, intense, and provocative kinship of mind and spirit” (Dunbar 1).

It is important to note that Blake’s comments on Milton in The Marriage do not represent his whole opinion of the poet, which indicated much greater complexity in the nineteenth century. Not that he necessarily became less critical of the epic poet: if, as Lucy Newlyn points out, Milton is more important in Blake’s works after the return from Felpham then his concerns have also deepened, for he saw that “the classicist had won out over the Hebrew prophet” (Newlyn 260), impairing Milton’s poetic craft and corrupting it to the services of war.

While being aware, then, that Blake’s response to Milton is much more complex than the few lines from The Marriage cited previously would indicate, there is a pugnacious attitude that runs through all his references to the poet. Although being much more receptive to Milton’s revolutionary credentials than many writers of the eighteenth century, Blake has little time for the hagiography that had attended the epic creator of Paradise Lost. The irony of the rebuke to one who could only write at liberty when writing of the devil’s party should not be forgotten (after all, this is not Blake’s voice, but that of the devil); it is also quite clear from Milton a Poem that Blake does not regard Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. However, the remark in The Marriage draws attention to the unconscious energies of Milton’s work and seems especially perceptive insofar as it draws attention to the repressed features of the poet’s life: the pamphleteer of political liberty could also serve a republican dictatorship, the theological freethinker ended with a vision of God as predestinarian tyrant, and the biblical prophet was seduced by the possibilities of neoclassical militarism.

The Song of Liberty
Ultimately, Blake does not simply invert the marriage of heaven and hell simply to place Satan in the role of Messiah. The whole of The Marriage is a satirical rebuke to Milton’s pomposity and autocracy that deploys a playful energy to indulge the unconscious desires that Milton dares not indulge and so – ironically – renders more dangerous in their repressed perversity: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”, as one of the Proverbs of Hell has it.

It is this sense of play that remains with the reader long after the conundrums of Swedenborgianism, or the subtleties of arguments with Milton have been settled. The ideas of The Marriage are astonishing, and Swinburne was surely right to number this book among the most profound produced in English literature, but those ideas ferment and proliferate because presented the boldest, liveliest and most vivacious style possible. Blake ends his satire with “A Song of Liberty”, heralding in his prophetic voice the power of revolutionary forces unleashed in France, searching for the day when “Empire is no more!” Although that declaration was premature, the line with which The Marriage concludes demonstrates just how far his vision was able to see beyond what would become factional power struggles within the French National Assembly and between the nations of Europe: “Everything that lives is Holy” (E45).

Next – Selected Reading

Tags: Milton, Paradise Lost, religion, the Bible, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Posted in Files |

City of Imagination: Kathleen Raine

Today is the anniversary of the death of Kathleen Raine, poet and Blake scholar, who won a number of prizes for her works (including a CBE in 2000) and continued to write a significant number of books until just before her death, a revised version of her Collected Poems appearing in 2000.

Raine (1908-2003) was raised in Northumberland, an experience related in the first volume of her Autobiographies, Farewell Happy Fields, and Ilford, Essex, before going onto study at Girton College, Cambridge. Her experience there was not entirely happy and, with a series of failed marriages and unrequited love affairs, she returned to the paganism of her childhood, for which the models were W. B. Yeats, Edwin Muir and William Blake. In 1980 she founded the journal Temenos, followed later by the Temenos Academy in 1990, focusing on the role of spirituality. At the time of her death, she was living in London.

The influence of Blake is most obvious in Raine’s critical work, notably the two-volume study, Blake and Tradition (1968), but also shorter studies and essays including Golgonooza, City of Imagination (1991), but Blake was also important to Raine’s creative work. For example in the second volume of her autobiography, The Land Unknown (1975) she described how Bertha Yeats confirmed her view of Blake as “a supreme teacher within an age-old tradition as that to which Yeats had also come” (Autobiographies 257-8).

This view of Blake as an esoteric, even occult, teacher was very much in evidence in Blake and Tradition, which traced a hidden tradition from the mythical work of Hermes Trismegistus through the works of Plato and the Enneads of Plotinus to the English Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor and hence to Blake. She was also one of the first critics to credit Blake’s development of Songs of Innocence to the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft and, in poems such as ‘Book of Hours’ or the journal Temenos, demonstrated repeatedly her particular debt to Yeats and Blake.

Tags: books, Kathleen Raine, philosophy, religion
Posted in Arts and Culture |

The Blake-Feyerabend Hypothesis

The Blake-Feyerabend Hypothesis. Timb D. Hoswell
HoWa: House of Waho/Lulu, 2009. pp. 102. $15.95. ISBN: 978 1 60489 042 6.

It is fascinating to see how Blake gets embroiled in mini-cyclones of controversy (particularly considering his obscurity during his own lifetime). The Blake-Feyerabend Hypothesis has been attracting a great deal of attention online, primarily due to Creationists latching onto it as an ultimate refutation of Darwinism. As Hoswell, currently researching a PhD at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney, remarks in his preface to the book, this promotion of The Blake-Feyerabend Hypothesis as some simple anti-Darwinian text completely misses the point of his study, which does not seek to invalidate either biology as a science or evolution as a scientific theory, but rather to explore the “epistemic problem” facing scientists who seek “either to discover or create a sound foundation for knowledge.” This book, as Hoswell states in his conclusion, is merely the first step in considering the obstacles set in the way of those who wish to ascribe to imagination a role in structuring our knowledge of the world around us, and a revised edition is now available from Lulu.com.

An epistemological critique of science is not itself particularly unique, of course: constructivism, for example, has a complex history since Jean Piaget emphasised the development of scientific knowledge out of peer interactions from the late 1920s onwards, and Thomas Kuhn’s term “paradigm shift” has been immensely popular (if also frequently misunderstood and contentious) since its introduction in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. These theorists and many others have emphasised the non-objective elements of scientific knowledge, although the sensible critiques of empiricism and positivism are not concerned to support the foundations of Creationist belief any more than Hoswell’s book. What is particularly interesting about this particular text is the serious evaluation of Blake as a philosopher rather than simply poet or artist dealing with our ideas of the foundations of knowledge, and where The Blake-Feyerabend Hypothesis demonstrates its originality is by considering the intrinsic role that imagination has to play in all processes of knowledge, linking the insights provided by Blake with those of the anarchist philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend. Of course, it is possible to find some similar insights in critics from Northrop Frye onwards, but these tend to gloss over Blake’s most explicit philosophical texts, the tractates There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One, published in 1788.

In his preface, Hoswell discourages viewing his work as an example of so-called “post-atheism”, but instead begins the book proper with what he characterises as the problem for much scientific epistemology, referred to here as both “the Cartesian Quandary” and “the Darwinian Paradox” (with refutations offered in the form of predicate/propositional calculus in the appendices). The first draws on the assumption by Enlightenment philosophers that if God had provided us with reason to understand creation, yet that understanding indicates the absence of God, what foundation is there for our knowledge? If we are simply animals like any other (Darwin’s premise), then belief is adaptive and there is no ground for believing in the truth of evolution: all our knowledge may be faulty, without any fundamental certainties. Descartes attempted to square the circle through a reformulation of the ontological argument, positing a necessary existence of God (if my idea of God is perfect but he does not exist, then he is not perfect – therefore God, defined as perfection, must exist), an argument that never escapes its own circularity and, as Kant pointed out, depended on the assumption that existence is more perfect than non-existence. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, while offering various (and somewhat cursory) rejections of this and other arguments for the existence of God, offers a metaphor of the crane ratcheting up levels of complexity to explain his view of how human consciousness can emerge without recourse to a higher, supernatural power. Dawkins’ own quandary (as well as the fact that his own metaphor relies too much on the old fallacy of the argument from analogy) is that the very Darwinism of his evolutionary biology that insists the watchmaker is blind cannot provide epistemological proof for those beliefs, and it is this faith of science in its own truth that Hoswell correctly identifies as the root of the problem. Interestingly, Hoswell distinguishes the position of the scientist concerned to find a foundation of truth for his ideas from that of what he refers to as the “engineer”, who by contrast is “interested in the principle of use… A large-scale theory of the cosmos is pointless for him unless it contains information he can use to design and build things from.” (18) For the engineer, knowledge is neither necessarily transcendent or immanent: he or she does not need to work out “what reality is” but simply to find the way in which it is contingent to the matter in hand, what Hoswell calls “engineer’s reality” in his conclusion. Dawkins’ crane frequently sticks, has to rely on metaphysical speculations such as multiverses to find the origins of his proof that God is a delusion: from the engineer’s point of view, who cares where the crane came from so long as it works?

Strictly speaking, God could actually be dispensed with but the fault of the Cartesian Quandary would remain, as evidenced by a tendency of positivist science to hypostasise an essential condition – such as the laws of nature – as the underlying reality that will offer proof of the crane’s origins. To repeat, as Hoswell does throughout the book, this is not to say that science does not work – that it is not effective – but to emphasise the epistemological problems of proof which science frequently recognises as problems but then forgets when it seeks to explain its models and theories as explaining how reality is and falls into a reductive positivism. When criticising Hume’s prejudice against fiction and imagination, Hoswell refers to Wittgenstein’s humorous four-dimensional cube as an example of how new knowledge may be created that does not reference the world around us: the reason why this is important is that theories of logical positivism were influenced by Wittgenstein’s early work on codifying language – a position rejected by Wittgenstein’s later anti-systematic language games.

One of my particular pleasures when reading this book is the close attention paid by Hoswell to Blake’s There is No Natural Religion and (to a lesser extent) All Religions Are One, which he uses as one element in his demolition of the Humean prejudice against fiction and imagination. If knowledge can only be synthesised by reason from sense impressions, then how can we account for the accumulation of knowledge that cannot be perceived directly (such as x-rays or sub-atomic particles)? Hume – in a statement from The Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding that, as Hoswell points out, is much more restrictive than Locke’s account for the accumulation of knowledge – argues that imagination “cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses” (cited 19). Moreover, “Every idea is copied from some preceding impression or sentiment; and where we cannot find any impression, we may be certain that there is no idea.” (Cited 22) As Blake pithily observes in proposition III from series A of There is No Natural Religion, “From a perception of only 3 senses or 3 elements none could deduce a fourth or fifth”. Blake’s innovation, argues Hoswell, is to begin from the observation that what we perceive in this world is not merely sensory: “On the most primary level of sense data, man doesn’t see electromagnetic radiation reflected from the visible light spectrum forming patterns in the ocular lens, he sees actual objects. He doesn’t just receive sound waves he hears noise.” (29) Perception goes beyond empirical experience and the reason why Blake’s epistemology is so important is because by making imagination the starting point for the act of perception (a point that is not dissimilar to Coleridge’s distinction of the primary and secondary imagination in the Biographia Literaria) he provides a means of explaining how new knowledge may emerge.

From here, Hoswell proceeds to the second Humean prejudice, the assumption that empirical observation has access to antecedents in the real world that form the basis of our ideas through sense impressions, an assumption that forms the basis of the attempt, via August Comte, John Stuart Mill and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, to provide a coherent, reductive theory for verifying knowledge. One refutation derives from Hume’s contemporary, Thomas Reid, whose emphasis on the sensus communis (common sense) as a means of framing perception emphasised the active nature of imagination in organising sense impressions. As Hoswell observes, rather than assuming “that the coherence of experience is the result of the unity of the empirical world antecedent to our impressions” (57), the theoretical and conceptual contexts in which we operate are required for us to make sense of the world around us (he gives the example of attempts to understand and describe cellular structures before Schleiden and Schwann provided a formal, coherent theory that allowed us to “know” what we were looking at, a similar point underlying Foucault’s understanding of how the archive conceptualises and organises knowledge). Because Blake understands the fundamental importance of the disunity of languages (citing plate 11 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake discusses the origins of religion in the stories of poets), he is able to ascribe an active and positive role to imagination in that process of conceptualising reality rather than being limited to the passive reception of antecedent impressions. As Blake wrote in his conclusion to Series B of There is No Natural Religion:

If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ration of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again… He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. (Cited 28)

The Blake-Feyerabend Hypothesis returned me Blake’s early tractates. I must be honest that my tendency is to skip these before settling down to the “real” matter of Blake’s career as author of the illuminated books from Songs of Innocence onwards, but as manifestos of his philosophical position they represent a sort of ground-clearing before putting into practice poetic and artistic principles. The attention paid by critics to these tractates tends to receive less attention than the other illuminated books, though Donald Ault’s Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton and Stuart Peterfreund’s William Blake in a Newtonian World cover some similar ground in terms of dealing with non-empiricist approaches to knowledge. Probably the most important text in this field is Wayne Glausser’s Locke and Blake: A Conversation Across the Eighteenth Century (1998), which begins by warning of the tendency to caricature Blake’s view of Locke as a “convenient foil”. Hoswell does not caricature Locke but instead recognises that the search for a fundamental reality – one, ironically, that is pre-empirical although amenable to the senses – is the rationalist “God” that lies at the root of Descartes’ Quandary. The Blake-Feyerabend Hypothesis is not without flaws – some of which Hoswell himself draws attention to. Thus the link between Blake and Feyerabend is more implied at many points than explicitly argued, and the author indicates that this is really the work of a future project. Also, the pre-publication manuscript I was sent for review includes a number of typos that I hope were edited out before publication (if not, he needs a good editor). Despite these criticisms – and perhaps the more fundamental one that acknowledging imagination as a foundation of knowledge does not necessarily help us with discriminating knowledge drawn from imagination, a subject dealt with in a different way in Kant’s Critique of Judgement and acknowledged by the author in his final conclusion – Hoswell makes a strong case for Blake’s search for the infinite rather than truth as a source of human creativity and thus removes “the chief obstacle impeding anyone wishing to build an epistemological foundation based on imagination.” (79)

Tags: All Religions are One, anarchism, philosophy, religion, science, There is No Natural Religion
Posted in Reviews |